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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Bars of Iron, by Ethel May Dell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Bars of Iron
+
+Author: Ethel May Dell
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2003  [eBook #10509]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BARS OF IRON***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
+Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+The Bars of Iron
+
+By Ethel M. Dell
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY BROTHER REGINALD WITH MY LOVE
+
+
+
+
+"He hath broken the gates of brass:
+And smitten the bars of iron in sunder."
+Psalm cvii., 16.
+
+"I saw heaven opened."
+Revelation xix., II.
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE GATES OF BRASS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+       I.  A JUG OF WATER
+
+      II.  CONCERNING FOOLS
+
+     III.  DISCIPLINE
+
+      IV.  THE MOTHER'S HELP
+
+       V.  LIFE ON A CHAIN
+
+      VI.  THE RACE
+
+     VII.  A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+    VIII.  A TALK BY THE FIRE
+
+      IX.  THE TICKET OF LEAVE
+
+       X.  SPORT
+
+      XI.  THE STAR OF HOPE
+
+     XII.  A PAIR OF GLOVES
+
+    XIII.  THE VISION
+
+     XIV.  A MAN'S CONFIDENCE
+
+      XV.  THE SCHEME
+
+     XVI.  THE WARNING
+
+    XVII.  THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+   XVIII.  HORNS AND HOOFS
+
+     XIX.  THE DAY OF TROUBLE
+
+      XX.  THE STRAIGHT TRUTH
+
+     XXI.  THE ENCHANTED LAND
+
+    XXII.  THE COMING OF A FRIEND
+
+   XXIII.  A FRIEND'S COUNSEL
+
+    XXIV.  THE PROMISE
+
+     XXV.  DROSS
+
+    XXVI.  SUBSTANCE
+
+   XXVII.  SHADOW
+
+  XXVIII.  THE EVESHAM DEVIL
+
+    XXIX.  A WATCH IN THE NIGHT
+
+     XXX.  THE CONFLICT
+
+    XXXI.  THE RETURN
+
+   XXXII.  THE DECISION
+
+  XXXIII.  THE LAST DEBT
+
+   XXXIV.  THE MESSAGE
+
+    XXXV.  THE DARK HOUR
+
+   XXXVI.  THE SUMMONS
+
+  XXXVII.  "LA GRANDE PASSION"
+
+ XXXVIII.  THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+
+       I.  DEAD SEA FRUIT
+
+      II.  THAT WHICH IS HOLY
+
+     III.  THE FIRST GUEST
+
+      IV.  THE PRISONER IN THE DUNGEON
+
+       V.  THE SWORD FALLS
+
+      VI.  THE MASK
+
+     VII.  THE GATES OF HELL
+
+    VIII.  A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+      IX.  THE GREAT GULF
+
+       X.  SANCTUARY
+
+      XI.  THE FALLING NIGHT
+
+     XII.  THE DREAM
+
+    XIII.  THE HAND OF THE SCULPTOR
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE OPEN HEAVEN
+
+
+       I.  THE VERDICT
+
+      II.  THE TIDE COMES BACK
+
+     III.  THE GAME
+
+      IV.  THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
+
+       V.  THE DESERT ROAD
+
+      VI.  THE ENCOUNTER
+
+     VII.  THE PLACE OF REPENTANCE
+
+    VIII.  THE RELEASE OF THE PRISONER
+
+      IX.  HOLY GROUND
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+The Bars of Iron
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+"Fight? I'll fight you with pleasure, but I shall probably kill you if I
+do. Do you want to be killed?" Brief and contemptuous the question fell.
+The speaker was a mere lad. He could not have been more than nineteen.
+But he held himself with the superb British assurance that has its root
+in the British public school and which, once planted, in certain soils is
+wholly ineradicable.
+
+The man he faced was considerably his superior in height and build. He
+also was British, but he had none of the other's careless ease of
+bearing. He stood like an angry bull, with glaring, bloodshot eyes.
+
+He swore a terrific oath in answer to the scornful enquiry. "I'll break
+every bone in your body!" he vowed. "You little, sneering bantam, I'll
+smash your face in! I'll thrash you to a pulp!"
+
+The other threw up his head and laughed. He was sublimely unafraid. But
+his dark eyes shone red as he flung back the challenge. "All right, you
+drunken bully! Try!" he said.
+
+They stood in the garish light of a Queensland bar, surrounded by an
+eager, gaping crowd of farmers, boundary-riders, sheep-shearers, who had
+come down to this township on the coast on business or pleasure at the
+end of the shearing season.
+
+None of them knew how the young Englishman came to be among them. He
+seemed to have entered the drinking-saloon without any very definite
+object in view, unless he had been spurred thither by a spirit of
+adventure. And having entered, a boyish interest in the motley crowd,
+which was evidently new to him, had induced him to remain. He had sat in
+a corner, keenly observant but wholly unobtrusive, for the greater part
+of an hour, till in fact the attention of the great bully now confronting
+him had by some ill-chance been turned in his direction.
+
+The man was three parts drunk, and for some reason, not very
+comprehensible, he had chosen to resent the presence of this
+clean-limbed, clean-featured English lad. Possibly he recognized in him a
+type which for its very cleanness he abhorred. Possibly his sodden brain
+was stirred by an envy which the Colonials round him were powerless to
+excite. For he also was British-born. And he still bore traces, albeit
+they were not very apparent at that moment, of the breed from which he
+had sprung.
+
+Whatever the cause of his animosity, he had given it full and ready vent.
+A few coarse expressions aimed in the direction of the young stranger had
+done their work. The boy had risen to go, with disgust written openly
+upon his face, and instantly the action had been seized upon by the older
+man as a cause for offence.
+
+He had not found his victim slow to respond. In fact his challenge had
+been flung back with an alacrity that had somewhat astonished the
+bystanders and rendered interference a matter of some difficulty.
+
+But one of them did at this juncture make his voice heard in a word of
+admonition to the half-tipsy aggressor.
+
+"You had better mind what you do, Samson. There will be a row if that
+young chap gets hurt."
+
+"Yes, he'd better get out of it," said one or two.
+
+But the young chap in question turned on them with a flash of his white
+teeth. "Don't you worry yourselves!" he said. "If he wants to
+fight--let him!"
+
+They muttered uneasily in answer. It was plain that Samson's
+bull-strength was no allegory to them. But the boy's confidence
+remained quite unimpaired. He faced his adversary with the lust of
+battle in his eyes.
+
+"Come on, you slacker!" he said. "I like a good fight. Don't keep
+me waiting!"
+
+The bystanders began to laugh, and the man they called Samson turned
+purple with rage. He flung round furiously. "There's a yard at the back,"
+he cried. "We'll settle it there. I'll teach you to use your spurs on me,
+my young game-cock!"
+
+"Come on then!" said the stranger. "P'r'aps I shall teach you something
+too! You'll probably be killed, as I said before; but if you'll take the
+risk I have no objection."
+
+Again the onlookers raised a laugh. They pressed round to see the face of
+the English boy who was so supremely unafraid. It was a very handsome
+face, but it was not wholly English. The eyes were too dark and too
+passionate, the straight brows too black, the features too finely
+regular. The mouth was mobile, and wayward as a woman's, but the chin
+might have been modelled in stone--a fighting chin, aggressive,
+indomitable. There was something of the ancient Roman about the whole
+cast of his face which, combined with that high British bearing, made him
+undeniably remarkable. Those who looked at him once generally turned to
+look again.
+
+One of the spectators--a burly Australian farmer--pushed forward from the
+throng and touched his arm. "Look here, my son!" he said in an undertone.
+"You've no business here, and no call to fight whatever. Clear out of
+it--quick! Savvy? I'll cover your tracks."
+
+The boy drew himself up with a haughty movement. Plainly for the moment
+he resented the advice. But the next very suddenly he smiled.
+
+"Thanks! Don't trouble! I can hold my own and a bit over. There's no
+great difficulty in downing a drunken brute like that."
+
+"Don't you be too cock-sure!" the farmer warned him. "He's a heavy
+weight, and he's licked bigger men than you when he's been in just the
+state he's in now."
+
+But the English boy only laughed, and turned to follow his adversary.
+
+Every man present pressed after him. A well-sustained fight, though an
+event of no uncommon occurrence, was a form of entertainment that never
+failed to attract. They crowded out to the back premises in a body,
+unhindered by any in authority.
+
+A dingy backyard behind the house furnished ground for the fray. Here the
+spectators gathered in a ring around an arc of light thrown by a
+stable-lamp over the door, and the man they called Samson proceeded with
+savage energy to strip to the waist.
+
+The young stranger's face grew a shade more disdainful as he noted the
+action. He himself removed coat, waistcoat, and collar, all of which
+he handed to the farmer who had offered to assist him in making good
+his escape.
+
+"Just look after these for a minute!" he said.
+
+"You're a cool hand," said the other man admiringly. "I'll see you don't
+get bullied anyhow."
+
+The young man nodded his thanks. He looked down at his hands and slowly
+clenched and opened them again.
+
+"Oh, I shan't be bullied," he said, in a tone of grim conviction.
+
+And then the fight began.
+
+It was obvious from the outset that it could not be a very prolonged one.
+Samson attacked with furious zest. He evidently expected to find his
+opponent very speedily at his mercy, and he made no attempt to husband
+his strength. But his blows went wide. The English lad avoided them with
+an agility that kept him practically unscathed. Had he been a hard
+hitter, he might have got in several blows himself, but he only landed
+one or two. His face was set and white as a marble mask in which only the
+eyes lived--eyes that watched with darting intensity for the chance to
+close. And when that chance came he took it so suddenly and so
+unexpectedly that not one of the hard-breathing, silent crowd around him
+saw exactly how he gained his hold. One moment he was avoiding a
+smashing, right-handed blow; the next he had his adversary locked in a
+grip of iron, the while he bent and strained for the mastery.
+
+From then onwards an element that was terrible became apparent in the
+conflict. From a simple fisticuff it developed into a deadly struggle
+between skilled strength and strength that was merely brutal. Silently,
+with heaving, convulsive movements, the two struggling figures swayed to
+and fro. One of Samson's arms was imprisoned in that unyielding clutch.
+The other rained blows upon his adversary's head and shoulders that
+produced no further effect than if they had been bestowed upon cast-iron.
+
+The grip of the boy's arms only grew tighter and tighter with snake-like
+force, while a dreadful smile came into the young face and became stamped
+there, engraved in rigid lines. His lower lip was caught between his
+teeth, and a thin stream of blood ran from it over the smooth, clean-cut
+chin. It was the only sign he gave that he was putting forth the whole of
+his strength.
+
+A murmur of surprise that had in it a note of uneasiness began to run
+through the ring of onlookers. They had seen many a fight before, but
+never a fight like this. Samson's face had gone from red to purple. His
+eyes had begun to start. Quite plainly he also was taken by surprise.
+Desperately, with a streaming forehead, he changed his tactics. He had
+no skill. Until that day he had relied upon superior strength and weight
+to bring him victorious through every casual fray; and it had never
+before failed him. But that merciless, suffocating hold compelled him to
+abandon offensive measures to effect his escape. He stopped his wild and
+futile hammering and with his one free hand he grasped the back of his
+opponent's neck.
+
+The move was practically inevitable, but its effect was such as only one
+anticipated. That one was his adversary, who slowly bent under his weight
+as though overcome thereby, shifting his grip lower and lower till it
+almost looked as if he were about to collapse altogether. But just as the
+breaking-point seemed to be reached there came a change. He gathered
+himself together and with gigantic exertion began to straighten his bent
+muscles. Slowly but irresistibly he heaved his enemy upwards. There came
+a moment of desperate, confused struggle; and then, as the man lost his
+balance at last, he relaxed his grip quite suddenly, flinging him
+headlong over his shoulder.
+
+It was a clean throw, contrived with masterly assurance, the result of
+deliberate and trained calculation. The bully pitched upon his head on
+the rough stones of the yard, and turned a complete somersault with the
+violence of his fall.
+
+A shout of amazement went up from the spectators. This end of the
+struggle was totally unexpected.
+
+The successful combatant remained standing with the sweat pouring from
+his face and the blood still running down his chin. He stretched out his
+arms with a slow, mechanical movement as if to test the condition of his
+muscles after the tremendous strain he had put upon them. Then, still as
+it were mechanically, he felt the torn collar-band of his shirt, with
+speculative fingers. Finally he whizzed round on the heels and stared at
+the huddled form of his fallen foe.
+
+A shabby little man with thick, sandy eyebrows had gone to his
+assistance, but he lay quite motionless in a twisted, ungainly attitude.
+The flare of the lamp was reflected in his glassy, upturned eyes. Dumbly
+his conqueror stood staring down at him. He seemed to stand above them
+all in that his moment of dreadful victory.
+
+He spoke at length, and through his voice there ran a curious tremor as
+of a man a little giddy, a little dazed by immense and appalling height.
+
+"I thought I could do it!" he said. "I--thought I could!"
+
+It was his moment of triumph, of irresistible elation. The devil in him
+had fought--and conquered.
+
+It swayed him--and passed. He was left white to the lips and suddenly,
+terribly, afraid.
+
+"What have I done to him?" he asked, and the tremor was gone from his
+voice; it was level, dead level. "I haven't killed him really, have I?"
+
+No one answered him. They were crowding round the fallen man, stooping
+over him with awe-struck whispering, straightening the crumpled, inert
+limbs, trying to place the heavy frame in a natural posture.
+
+The boy pressed forward to look, but abruptly his supporter caught him by
+the shoulder and pulled him back.
+
+"No, no!" he said in a sharp undertone. "You're no good here. Get out of
+it! Put on your clothes and--go!"
+
+He spoke urgently. The boy stared at him, suffering the compelling hand.
+All the fight had gone completely out of him. He was passive with the
+paralysis of a great horror.
+
+The farmer helped him into his clothes, and himself removed the
+blood-stain from the lad's dazed face. "Don't be a fool!" he urged. "Pull
+yourself together and clear out! This thing was an accident. I'll
+engineer it."
+
+"Accident!" The boy straightened himself sharply with the movement of
+one brought roughly to his senses. "I suppose the throw broke his neck,"
+he said. "But it was no accident. I did it on purpose. I told him I
+should probably kill him, but he would have it." He turned and squarely
+faced the other. "I don't know what I ought to do," he said, speaking
+more collectedly. "But I'm certainly not going to bolt."
+
+The farmer nodded with brief comprehension. He had the steady eyes of a
+man accustomed to the wide spaces of the earth. "That's all right," he
+said, and took him firmly by the arm. "You come with me. My name is
+Crowther. We'll have a talk outside. There's more room there. You've got
+to listen to reason. Come!"
+
+He almost dragged the boy away with the words. No one intercepted or
+spoke a word to delay them. Together they passed back through the empty
+drinking-saloon--the boy with his colourless face and set lips, the man
+with his resolute, far-seeing eyes--and so into the dim roadway beyond.
+
+They left the lights of the reeking bar behind. The spacious night closed
+in upon them.
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE GATES OF BRASS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A JUG OF WATER
+
+
+It was certainly not Caesar's fault. Caesar was as well-meaning a
+Dalmatian as ever scampered in the wake of a cantering horse. And if Mike
+in his headlong Irish fashion chose to regard the scamper as a gross
+personal insult, that was surely not a matter for which he could
+reasonably be held responsible. And yet it was upon the luckless Caesar
+that the wrath of the gods descended as a consequence of Mike's
+wrong-headed deductions.
+
+It began with a rush and a snarl from the Vicarage gate and it had
+developed into a set and deadly battle almost before either of the
+combatants had fully realized the other.
+
+The rider drew rein, yelling furiously; but his yells were about as
+effectual as the wail of an infant. Neither animal was so much as aware
+of his existence in those moments of delirious warfare. They were locked
+already in that silent, swaying grip which every fighting dog with any
+knowledge of the great game seeks to establish, to break which mere
+humans may put forth their utmost strength in vain.
+
+The struggle was a desperate and a bloody one, and it speedily became
+apparent to the rider that he would have to dismount if he intended to
+put an end to it.
+
+Fiercely he flung himself off his horse and threw the reins over the
+Vicarage gate-post. Then, riding-crop in hand, he approached the swaying
+fighting animals. It was like a ghastly wrestling-match. Both were on
+their feet, struggling to and fro, each with jaws hard gripped upon the
+other's neck, each silent save for his spasmodic efforts to breathe.
+
+"Stop it, damn you!" shouted the rider, slashing at them with the zeal of
+unrestrained fury. "Caesar, you infernal brute, stop it, will you? I'll
+kill you if you don't!"
+
+But Caesar was deaf to all threats and quite unconscious of the fact that
+his master and not his enemy was responsible for the flail-like strokes
+of the whirling lash. They shifted from beneath it instinctively, but
+they fought deliriously on.
+
+And at that the man with the whip completely lost his self-control. He
+set to work to thrash and thrash the fighting animals till one or other
+of them--or himself--should become exhausted.
+
+It developed into a horrible competition organized and conducted by the
+man's blind fury, and in what fashion it would have ended it would be
+hard to say. But, luckily for all three, there came at length an
+interruption. Someone--a woman--came swiftly out of the Vicarage garden
+carrying a bedroom jug. She advanced without a pause upon the seething,
+infuriated group.
+
+"It's no good beating them," she said, in a voice which, though somewhat
+hurried, was one of clear command. "Get out of the way, and be ready to
+catch your dog when they come apart!"
+
+The man glanced round for an instant, his face white with passion. "I'll
+kill the brutes!" he declared.
+
+"Indeed you won't," she returned promptly. "Stand away now or you will be
+drenched!"
+
+As she spoke she raised her jug above the struggling animals. Her face
+also shone white in the wintry dusk, but her actions denoted unwavering
+resolution.
+
+"Now!" she said; and, since he would not move, she flung the icy water
+without compunction over the dogs and him also.
+
+"Damnation!" he cried violently. But she broke in upon him. "Quick!
+Quick! Now's the time! Grab your dog! I'll catch Mike!"
+
+The urgency of the order compelled compliance. Almost in spite of himself
+he stooped to obey. And so it came to pass that five seconds later,
+Caesar was being mercilessly thrashed by his enraged master, while the
+real culprit was being dragged, cursing breathlessly, from the scene.
+
+It was a brutal thrashing and wholly undeserved. Caesar, awaking to the
+horror of it, howled his anguish; but no amount of protest on his part
+made the smallest impression upon the wielder of the whip. It continued
+to descend upon his writhing body with crashing force till he rolled upon
+the ground in agony.
+
+Even then the punishment would not have ceased, but for a second
+interruption. It was the woman from the Vicarage garden again; but she
+burst upon the scene this time with something of the effect of an
+avalanche. She literally whirled between the man and his victim. She
+caught his upraised arm.
+
+"Oh, you brute!" she cried. "You brute!"
+
+He stiffened in her hold. They stood face to face. Caesar crept whining
+and shivering to the side of the road.
+
+Slowly the man's arm fell to his side, still caught in that quivering
+grasp. He spoke in a voice that struggled boyishly between resentment and
+shame. "The dog's my own."
+
+Her hold relaxed. "Even a dog has his rights," she said. "Give me that
+whip, please!"
+
+He looked at her oddly in the growing darkness. She was trembling as she
+stood, but she held her ground.
+
+"Please!" she repeated with resolution.
+
+With an abrupt movement he put the weapon into her hand. "Are you going
+to give me a taste?" he asked.
+
+She uttered a queer little gasping laugh. "No. I--I'm not that sort.
+But--it's horrible to see a man lose control of himself. And to thrash a
+dog--like that!"
+
+She turned sharply from him and went to the Dalmatian who crouched
+quaking on the path. He wagged an ingratiating tail at her approach. It
+was evident that in her hand the whip had no terrors for him. He crept
+fawning to her feet.
+
+She stooped over him, fondling his head. "Oh, poor boy! Poor boy!" she
+said.
+
+The dog's master came and stood beside her. "He'll be all right," he
+said, in a tone of half-surly apology.
+
+"I'm afraid Mike has bitten him," she said. "See!" displaying a long,
+dark streak on Caesar's neck.
+
+"He'll be all right," repeated Caesar's master. "I hope your dog is none
+the worse."
+
+"No, I don't think so," she said. "But don't you think we ought to
+bathe this?"
+
+"I'll take him home," he said. "They'll see to him at the stables."
+
+She stood up, a slim, erect figure, the whip still firmly grasped in her
+hand. "You won't thrash him any more, will you?" she said.
+
+He gave a short laugh. "No, you have cooled me down quite effectually.
+I'm much obliged to you for interfering. And I'm sorry I used language,
+but as the circumstances were exceptional, I hope you will make
+allowances."
+
+His tone was boyish still, but all the resentment had gone out of it.
+There was a touch of arrogance in his bearing which was obviously natural
+to him, but his apology was none the less sincere.
+
+The slim figure on the path made a slight movement of dismay. "But you
+must be drenched to the skin!" she said. "I was forgetting. Won't you
+come in and get dry?"
+
+He hunched his shoulders expressively. "No, thanks. It was my own fault,
+as you kindly omit to mention. I must be getting back to the Abbey. My
+grandfather is expecting me. He fidgets if I'm late."
+
+He raised a hand to his cap, and would have turned away, but she made a
+swift gesture of surprise, which arrested him. "Oh, you are young Mr.
+Evesham!--I beg your pardon--you are Mr. Evesham! I thought I must have
+seen you before!"
+
+He stopped with a laugh. "I am commonly called 'Master Piers' in this
+neighbourhood. They won't let me grow up. Rather a shame, what? I'm
+nearly twenty-five, and the head-keeper still refers to me in private as
+'that dratted boy.'"
+
+She laughed for the first time. Possibly he had angled for that laugh.
+"Yes, it is a shame!" she agreed. "But then Sir Beverley is rather old,
+isn't he? No doubt it's the comparison that does it."
+
+"He isn't old," said Piers Evesham in sharp contradiction. "He's only
+seventy-four. That's not old for an Evesham. He'll go for another twenty
+years. There's a saying in our family that if we don't die violently, we
+never die at all." He pulled himself up abruptly. "I've given you my name
+and history. Won't you tell me yours?"
+
+She hesitated momentarily. "I am only the mother's help at the Vicarage,"
+she said then.
+
+"By Jove! I don't envy you." He looked at her with frank interest
+notwithstanding. "I suppose you do it for a living," he remarked.
+"Personally, I'd sooner sweep a crossing than live in the same house with
+that mouthing parson."
+
+"Hush!" she said, but her lips smiled as she said it, a small smile that
+would not be denied. "I must go in now. Here you are!" She gave him back
+his whip. "Good-bye! Get home quick--and change!"
+
+He turned half-reluctantly; then paused. "You might tell me your name
+anyway," he said.
+
+She had begun to move away, light-footed, swift as a bird. She
+also paused.
+
+"My name is Denys," she said.
+
+He put his hand to his cap again. "Miss Denys?"
+
+"No. Mrs. Denys. Good-bye!"
+
+She was gone. He heard the light feet running up the wet gravel drive and
+then the quick opening of a door. It closed again immediately, with
+decision, and he stood alone in the wintry dusk.
+
+Caesar crept to him and grovelled abjectly in the mud. The young man
+stood motionless, staring at the Vicarage gates, a slight frown between
+his brows. He was not tall, but he had the free pose of an athlete and
+the bearing of a prince.
+
+Suddenly he glanced down at his cringing companion and broke into a
+laugh. "Get up, Caesar, you fool! And think yourself lucky that you've
+got any sound bones left! You'd have been reduced to a jelly by this time
+if I'd had my way."
+
+He bent with careless good-nature, and patted the miscreant; then turned
+towards his horse.
+
+"Poor old Pompey! A shame to keep you standing! All that brute's fault."
+He swung himself into the saddle. "By Jove, though, she's got some
+pluck!" he said. "I like a woman with pluck!"
+
+He touched his animal with the spur, and in a moment they were speeding
+through the gathering dark at a brisk canter. Pompey was as anxious to
+get home as was his master, and he needed no second urging. He scarcely
+waited to get within the gates of the Park before he gathered himself
+together and went like the wind. His rider lay forward in the saddle
+and yelled encouragement like a wild Indian. Caesar raced behind them
+like a hare.
+
+The mad trio went like a flash past old Marshall the head-keeper who
+stood gun on shoulder at the gate of his lodge and looked after them with
+stern disapproval.
+
+"Drat the boy! What's he want to ride hell-for-leather like that for?" he
+grumbled. "He'll go and kill himself one of these days as his father did
+before him."
+
+It was just twenty-five years since Piers' father had been carried dead
+into Marshall's cottage, and Marshall had stumped up the long avenue to
+bear the news to Sir Beverley. Piers was about the same age now as that
+other Piers had been, and Marshall had no mind to take part in a similar
+tragedy. It had been a bitter task, that of telling Sir Beverley that his
+only son was dead; but to have borne him ill tidings of his grandson
+would have been infinitely harder. For Sir Beverley had never loved his
+son through the whole of his brief, tempestuous life; but his grandson
+was the very core of his existence, as everyone knew, despite his
+strenuous efforts to disguise the fact.
+
+No, emphatically Marshall had not the faintest desire to have to inform
+the old man that harm had befallen Master Piers, and his frown deepened
+as he trudged up his little garden and heard the yelling voice and
+galloping hoofs grow faint in the distance.
+
+"The boy is madder even than his father was," he muttered darkly. "Bad
+stock! Bad stock!"
+
+He shook his head over the words, and went within. He was the only man
+left on the estate who could remember the beautiful young Italian bride
+whom Sir Beverley had once upon a time brought to reign there. It had
+been a short, short reign, and no one spoke of it now,--least of all the
+old, bent man who ruled like a feudal lord at Rodding Abbey, and of whom
+even the redoubtable Marshall himself stood in awe.
+
+But Marshall remembered her well, and it was upon that dazzling memory
+that his thoughts dwelt when he gave utterance to his mysterious verdict.
+For was not Master Piers the living image of her? Had he not the same
+imperial bearing and regal turn of the head? Did not the Evesham blood
+run the hotter in his veins for that passionate Southern strain that
+mingled with it?
+
+Marshall sometimes wondered how Sir Beverley with his harsh intolerance
+brooked the living likeness of the boy to the woman in whose bitter
+memory he hated all women. It was scarcely possible that he blinded
+himself to it. It was too vividly apparent for that. "A perpetual
+eyesore," Marshall termed it in private. But then there was no accounting
+for the ways of folk in high places. Marshall did not pretend to
+understand them. He was, in his own grumpy fashion, sincerely attached to
+his master, and he never presumed to criticize his doings. He only
+wondered at them.
+
+As for Master Piers, he had been an unmitigated nuisance to him
+personally ever since he had learned to walk alone. Marshall had always
+disapproved of him, and he hated Victor, the French valet, who had
+brought him up from his cradle. Yet deep in his surly old heart there
+lurked a certain grudging affection for him notwithstanding. The boy
+had a winning way with him, and but for his hatred of Victor, who was
+soft and womanish, but extremely tenacious, Marshall would have liked
+to have had a hand in his upbringing. As it was, he could only look on
+from afar and condemn the vagaries of "that dratted boy," prophesying
+disaster whenever he saw him and hoping that Sir Beverley might not
+live to see it. Certainly it seemed as if Piers bore a charmed life,
+for, like his father before him, he risked it practically every day.
+With sublime self-confidence, he laughed at caution, ever choosing the
+shortest cut, whatever it might entail; and it was remarkably seldom
+that he came to grief.
+
+As he clattered into the stable-yard on that dark November evening,
+his face was sparkling with excitement as though he had drunk strong
+wine. The animal he rode was covered with foam, and danced a springy
+war-dance on the stones. Caesar trotted in behind them with tail erect
+and a large smile of satisfaction on his spotty face despite the gory
+streak upon his neck.
+
+"Confound it! I'm late!" said Piers, throwing his leg over his horse's
+neck. "It's all that brute's fault. Look at him grinning! Better wash him
+one of you! He can't come in in that state." He slipped to the ground and
+stamped his sodden feet. "I'm not much better off myself. What a beastly
+night, to be sure!"
+
+"Yes, you're wet, sir!" remarked the groom at Pompey's head. "Had a
+tumble, sir?"
+
+"No. Had a jug of water thrown over me," laughed Piers. "Caesar will tell
+you all about it. He's been sniggering all the way home." He snapped his
+fingers in the dog's complacent face. "By Jove!" he said to him, "I
+couldn't grin like that if I'd had the thrashing you've had. And I
+couldn't kiss the hand that did it either. You're a gentleman, Caesar,
+and I humbly apologize. Look after him, Phipps! He's been a bit mauled.
+Good-night! Good-night, Pompey lad! You've carried me well." He patted
+the horse's foam-flecked neck, and turned away.
+
+As he left the stable-yard, he was whistling light-heartedly, and Phipps
+glanced at a colleague with a slight flicker of one eyelid.
+
+"Wonder who chucked that jug of water!" he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CONCERNING FOOLS
+
+
+In the huge, oak-panelled hall of the Abbey, Sir Beverley Evesham
+sat alone.
+
+A splendid fire of logs blazed before him on the open hearth, and the
+light from a great chandelier beat mercilessly down upon him. His hair
+was thick still and silvery white. He had the shoulders of a strong man,
+albeit they were slightly bowed. His face, clean-shaven, aristocratic,
+was the colour of old ivory. The thin lips were quite bloodless. They had
+a downward, bitter curve, as though they often sneered at life. The eyes
+were keen as a bird's, stone-grey under overhanging black brows.
+
+He held a newspaper in one bony hand, but he was not apparently reading,
+for his eyes were fixed. The shining suits of armour standing like
+sentinels on each side of the fireplace were not more rigid than he.
+
+There came a slight sound from the other end of the hall, and instantly
+and very sharply Sir Beverley turned his head.
+
+"Piers!"
+
+Cheerily Piers' voice made answer. He shut the door behind him and came
+forward as he spoke. "Here I am, sir! I'm sorry I'm late. You shouldn't
+have waited. You never ought to wait. I'm never in at the right time."
+
+"Confound you, why aren't you then?" burst forth Sir Beverley. "It's easy
+to say you're sorry, isn't it?"
+
+"Not always," said Piers.
+
+He came to the old man, bent down over him, slid a boyish arm around
+the bent shoulders. "Don't be waxy!" he coaxed. "I couldn't help it
+this time."
+
+"Get away, do!" said Sir Beverley, jerking himself irritably from him. "I
+detest being pawed about, as you very well know. In Heaven's name, have
+your tea, if you want it! I shan't touch any. It's past my time."
+
+"Oh, rot!" said Piers. "If you don't, I shan't."
+
+"Yes, you will." Sir Beverley pointed an imperious hand towards a table
+on the other side of the fire. "Go and get it and don't be a fool!"
+
+"I'm not a fool," said Piers.
+
+"Yes, you are--a damn fool!" Sir Beverley returned to his newspaper with
+the words. "And you'll never be anything else!" he growled into the
+silence that succeeded them.
+
+Piers clattered the tea-things and said nothing. There was no resentment
+visible upon his sensitive, olive face, however. He looked perfectly
+contented. He turned round after a few seconds with a cup of steaming tea
+in his hand. He crossed the hearth and set it on the table at Sir
+Beverley's elbow.
+
+"That's just as you like it, sir," he urged. "Have it--just to
+please me!"
+
+"Take it away!" said Sir Beverley, without raising his eyes.
+
+"It's only ten minutes late after all," said Piers, with all meekness. "I
+wish you hadn't waited, though it was jolly decent of you. You weren't
+anxious of course? You know I always turn up some time."
+
+"Anxious!" echoed Sir Beverley. "About a cub like you! You flatter
+yourself, my good Piers."
+
+Piers laughed a little and stooped over the blaze. Sir Beverley read on
+for a few moments, then very suddenly and not without violence crumpled
+his paper and flung it on the ground.
+
+"Of all the infernal, ridiculous twaddle!" he exclaimed. "Now what the
+devil have you done to yourself? Been taking a water-jump?"
+
+Piers turned round. "No, sir. It's nothing. I shouldn't have come in in
+this state, only it was late, and I thought I'd better report myself."
+
+"Nothing!" repeated Sir Beverley. "Why, you're drenched to the skin! Go
+and change! Go and change! Don't stop to argue! Do you hear me, sir? Go
+and change!"
+
+He shouted the last words, and Piers flung round on his heel with a hint
+of impatience.
+
+"And behave yourself!" Sir Beverley threw after him. "If you think I'll
+stand any impertinence from you, you were never more mistaken in your
+life. Be off with you, you cheeky young hound! Don't let me see you again
+till you're fit to be seen!"
+
+Piers departed without a backward look. His lips were slightly compressed
+as he went up the stairs, but before he reached his own room they were
+softly whistling.
+
+Victor, the valet, who was busily employed in laying out his evening
+clothes, received him with hands upraised in horror.
+
+_"Ah, mais, Monsieur Pierre_, how you are wet!"
+
+"Yes, I want a bath," said Piers. "Get it quick! I must be down again in
+ten minutes. So scurry, Victor, my lad!"
+
+Victor was a cheery little rotundity of five-and-fifty. He had had the
+care of Piers ever since the first fortnight of that young man's
+existence, and he worshipped him with a whole-hearted devotion that was
+in its way sublime. In his eyes Piers could do no wrong. He was in fact
+dearer to him than his own flesh and blood.
+
+He prepared the bath with deft celerity, and hastened back to assist in
+removing his young master's boots. He exclaimed dramatically upon their
+soaked condition, but Piers was in too great a hurry to give any details
+regarding the cause of his plight. He whirled into the bathroom at
+express speed, and was out again almost before Victor had had time to
+collect his drenched garments.
+
+Ten minutes after his departure he returned to the hall, the gay
+whistle still on his lips, and trod a careless measure to its tune as
+he advanced.
+
+Sir Beverley got up stiffly from his knees on the hearth-rug and turned a
+scowling face. "Well, are you decent now?"
+
+"Quite," said Piers. He smiled as he said it, a boyish disarming smile.
+"Have you had your tea, sir? Oh, I say what a brick you are! I didn't
+expect that."
+
+His eyes, travelling downwards, had caught sight of a cup pushed close to
+the blaze, and a plate of crumpets beside it.
+
+"Or deserve it," said Sir Beverley grimly.
+
+Piers turned impulsively and took him by the shoulders. "You're a dear
+old chap!" he said. "Thanks awfully!"
+
+Against its will the hard old mouth relaxed. "There, boy, there! What an
+infant you are! Sit down and have it for goodness' sake! It'll be
+dinner-time before you've done."
+
+"You've had yours?" said Piers.
+
+"Oh, yes--yes!" Irritation made itself heard again in Sir Beverley's
+voice; he freed himself from his grandson's hold, though not urgently.
+"I'm not so keen on your precious tea," he said, seating himself again.
+"It's only young milksops like you that have made it fashionable. When I
+was young--"
+
+"Hullo!" broke in Piers. He had picked up the cup of tea and was sniffing
+it suspiciously. "You've been doctoring this!" he said.
+
+"You drink it!" ordered Sir Beverley peremptorily. "I'm not going to
+have you laid up with rheumatic fever if I know it. Drink it, Piers! Do
+you hear?"
+
+Piers looked for a moment as if he were on the verge of rebellion, then
+abruptly he raised the cup to his lips and drained it. He set it down
+with a shudder of distaste.
+
+"You might have let me have it separately," he remarked. "Tea and brandy
+don't blend well. I shall sleep like a hog after this. Besides, I
+shouldn't have had rheumatic fever. It's not my way. Anything in the
+paper to-night?"
+
+"Yes," said Sir Beverley disgustedly. "There's that prize-fight
+business."
+
+"What's that?" Piers looked up with quick interest.
+
+"Surely you saw it!" returned Sir Beverley. "That fellow
+Adderley--killed his man in a wrestling-match. A good many people said
+it was done by a foul."
+
+"Adderley!" repeated Piers. "I know him. He gave me some quite useful
+tips once. What happened? It's the first I've heard of it."
+
+"Well, he's a murderer," said Sir Beverley. "And he deserves to be
+hanged. He killed his man,--whether by a foul or not I can't say; but
+anyway he meant to kill him. It's obvious on the face of it. But they
+chose to bring it in manslaughter, and he's only got five years; while
+some brainless fool must needs write an article a column and a half long
+to protest against the disgraceful practice of permitting wrestling or
+boxing matches, which are a survival of the Dark Ages and a perpetual
+menace to our civilization! A survival of your grandmother! A nice set of
+nincompoops the race will develop into if such fools as that get their
+way! We're soft enough as it is, Heaven knows. Why couldn't they hang the
+scoundrel as he deserved? That's the surest way of putting an end to
+savagery. But to stop the sport altogether! It would be tomfoolery!"
+
+Piers picked up the paper from the floor and smoothed it out. He
+proceeded to study it with drawn brows, and Sir Beverley sat and
+watched him with that in his stone-grey eyes which no one was ever
+allowed to see.
+
+"Eat your crumpets, boy!" he said at last.
+
+"What?" Piers glanced up momentarily. "Oh, all right, sir, in a minute.
+This is rather an interesting case, what? You see, Adderley was a
+friend of mine."
+
+"When did you meet him?" demanded Sir Beverley.
+
+"I knew him in my school-days. He spent a whole term in the
+neighbourhood. It was just before I left for my year of travel. I got to
+know him rather well. He gave me several hints on wrestling."
+
+"Did he teach you how to break your opponent's neck?" asked Sir
+Beverley drily.
+
+Piers made a slight, scarcely perceptible movement of one hand. It
+clenched upon the paper he held. "They were--worth knowing," he said,
+with his eyes upon the sheet. "But I should have thought he was too old a
+hand himself to get into trouble."
+
+Sir Beverley grunted. Piers read on. At the end of a lengthy pause he
+laid the paper aside. "I'm beastly rude," he remarked. "Have a crumpet!"
+
+"Eat 'em yourself!" said Sir Beverley. "I hate 'em!"
+
+Piers picked up the plate and began to eat. He stared at the blaze as he
+did so, obviously lost in thought.
+
+"Don't dream!" said Sir Beverley sharply.
+
+He turned his eyes upon his grandfather's face--those soft Italian eyes
+of his so suggestive of hidden fire. "I wasn't--dreaming," he said
+slowly. "I wonder why you think Adderley ought to be hanged."
+
+"Because he's a murderer," snapped Sir Beverley.
+
+"Yes; but--" said Piers, and became silent as though he were following
+out some train of thought.
+
+"Go on, boy! Finish!" commanded Sir Beverley. "I detest a sentence left
+in the middle."
+
+"I was only thinking," said Piers deliberately, "that hanging in my
+opinion is much the easier sentence of the two. I should ask to be hanged
+if I were Adderley."
+
+"Would you indeed?" Sir Beverley sounded supremely contemptuous.
+
+But Piers did not seem to notice. "Besides, there are so many
+murderers in the world," he said, "though it's only the few who get
+punished. I'm sorry for the few myself. Its damned bad luck, human
+nature being what it is."
+
+"You don't know what you're talking about," said Sir Beverley.
+
+"All right; let's talk about something else," said Piers. "Caesar had a
+glorious mill with that Irish terrier brute at the Vicarage this
+afternoon. I couldn't separate 'em, so I just joined in. We'd have been
+at it now if we had been left to our own devices." He broke into his
+sudden boyish laugh. "But a kind lady came out of the Vicarage garden and
+flung the contents of a bedroom jug over the three of us. Rather plucky
+of her, what? I'm afraid I wasn't over-complimentary at the moment, but
+I've had time since to appreciate her tact and presence of mind. I'm
+going over to thank her to-morrow."
+
+"Who was it?" growled Sir Beverley suspiciously. "Not that little white
+owl, Mrs. Lorimer?"
+
+"Mrs. Lorimer! Great Scott, no! She'd have squealed and run to the
+Reverend Stephen for protection. No, this was a woman, not an owl. Her
+name is Denys--Mrs. Denys she was careful to inform me. They've started a
+mother's help at the Vicarage. None too soon I should say. Who wouldn't
+be a mother's help in that establishment?"
+
+Sir Beverley uttered a dry laugh. "Daresay she knows how to feather her
+own nest. Most of 'em do."
+
+"She knows how to keep her head in an emergency, anyhow," remarked Piers.
+
+"Feline instinct," jeered Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers looked across with a laugh in his dark eyes. "And feline pluck,
+sir," he maintained.
+
+Sir Beverley scowled at him. He could never brook an argument. "Oh, get
+away, Piers!" he said. "You talk like a fool."
+
+Piers turned his whole attention to devouring crumpets, and there fell a
+lengthy silence. He rose finally to set down his empty plate and help
+himself to some more tea.
+
+"That stuff is poisonous by now," said Sir Beverley.
+
+"It won't poison me," said Piers.
+
+He drank it, and returned to the hearth-rug. "I suppose I may smoke?" he
+said, with a touch of restraint.
+
+Sir Beverley was lying back in his chair, gazing straight up at him.
+Suddenly he reached out a trembling hand.
+
+"You're a good boy, Piers," he said. "You may do any damn thing you
+like."
+
+Piers' eyes kindled in swift response. He gripped the extended
+hand. "You're a brick, sir!" he said. "Look here! Come along to
+the billiard-room and have a hundred up! It'll give you an
+appetite for dinner."
+
+He hoisted the old man out of his chair before he could begin to protest.
+They stood together before the great fire, and Sir Beverley straightened
+his stiff limbs. He was half a head taller than his grandson.
+
+"What a fellow it is!" he said half laughing. "Why can't you sit still
+and be quiet? Don't you want to read the paper? I've done with it."
+
+"So have I," said Piers. He swept it up with one hand as he spoke and
+tossed it recklessly on to the blaze. "Come along, sir! We haven't
+much time."
+
+"Now what did you do that for?" demanded Sir Beverley, pausing. "Do you
+want to set the house on fire? What did you do it for, Piers?"
+
+"Because I was a fool," said Piers with sudden, curious vehemence. "A
+damn fool sir, if you want to know. But it's done now. Let it burn!"
+
+The paper flared fiercely and crumbled to ashes. Sir Beverley suffered
+himself to be drawn away.
+
+"You're a queer fellow, Piers," he said. "But, taking 'em altogether, I
+should say there are a good many bigger fools in the world than you."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Piers.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+DISCIPLINE
+
+
+"Mrs. Denys, may I come in?" Jeanie Lorimer's small, delicate face peeped
+round the door. "I've brought my French exercise to do," she said
+half-apologetically. "I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind."
+
+"Of course come in, dear child! I like to have you." The mother's help
+paused in her rapid stitching to look up with a smile at the pretty,
+brown-haired child. "Come close to the light!" she said. "I hope it isn't
+a very long one; is it?"
+
+"It is--rather," Jeanie sighed a sharp, involuntary sigh. "I ought to
+have done it sooner, but I was busy with the little ones. Is that
+Gracie's frock you're mending? What an awful tear!" She came and stood by
+Mrs. Denys's side, speaking in a low, rather monotonous voice. A heavy
+strand of her hair fell over the work as she bent to look; she tossed it
+back with another sigh. "Gracie is such a tomboy," she said. "It's a
+pity, isn't it?"
+
+"My dear, you're tired," said Mrs. Denys gently. She put a motherly arm
+about the slim body that leaned against her, looking up into the pale
+young face with eyes of kindly criticism.
+
+"A little tired," said Jeanie.
+
+"I shouldn't do that exercise to-night if I were you," said Mrs. Denys.
+"You will find it easier in the morning. Lie down on the sofa here and
+have a little rest till supper time!"
+
+"Oh no, I mustn't," said Jeanie. "Father will never let any of us go to
+bed till the day's work is done."
+
+"But surely, when you're really tired--" began Mrs. Denys.
+
+But Jeanie shook her head. "No; thank you very much, I must do it. Olive
+did hers long ago."
+
+"Where is Olive?" asked Mrs. Denys.
+
+"She's reading a story-book downstairs. We may always read when we've
+finished our lessons." Again came that short, unconscious sigh. Jeanie
+went to the table and sat down. "Mother is rather upset to-night," she
+said, as she turned the leaves of her book. "Ronald and Julian have been
+smoking, and she is so afraid that Father will find out. I hope he
+won't--for her sake. But if they don't eat any supper, he is sure to
+notice. He flogged Julian two nights running the last time because he
+told a lie about it."
+
+A quick remark rose to her listener's lips, but it was suppressed
+unuttered. Mrs. Denys began to stitch very rapidly with her face bent
+over her work. It was a very charming face, with level grey eyes, wide
+apart, and a mouth of great sweetness. There was a fugitive dimple on one
+side of it that gave her a girlish appearance when she smiled. But she
+was not a girl. There was about her an air of quiet confidence as of one
+who knew something of the world and its ways. She was young still, and it
+was yet in her to be ardent; but she had none of the giddy restlessness
+of youth. Avery Denys was a woman who had left her girlhood wholly behind
+her. Her enthusiasms and her impulses were kindled at a steadier flame
+than the flickering torch of youth. There was no romance left in her
+life, but yet was she without bitterness. She had known suffering and
+faced it unblanching. The only mark it had left upon her was that air of
+womanly knowledge that clothed her like a garment even in her lightest
+moods. Of a quick understanding and yet quicker sympathy, she had
+learned to hold her emotions in check, and the natural gaiety of her hid
+much that was too sacred to be carelessly displayed. She had a ready
+sense of humour that had buoyed her up through many a storm, and the
+brave heart behind it never flinched from disaster. As her father had
+said of her in the long-ago days of happiness and prosperity, she took
+her hedges straight.
+
+For several minutes after Jeanie's weary little confidence, she worked
+in silence; then suddenly, with needle poised, she looked across at
+the child.
+
+Jeanie's head was bent over her exercise-book. Her hair lay in a heavy
+mass all about her shoulders. There was a worried frown between her
+brows. Slowly her hand travelled across the page, paused, wrote a word or
+two, paused again.
+
+Suddenly from the room above them there came the shrill shriek of a
+violin. It wailed itself into silence, and then broke forth again in a
+series of long drawn-out whines. Jeanie sighed.
+
+Avery laid down her work with quiet decision, and went to her side. "What
+is worrying you, dear?" she asked gently. "I'm not a great French
+scholar, but I think I may be able to help."
+
+"Thank you," said Jeanie, in her voice of tired courtesy. "You mustn't
+help me. No one must."
+
+"I can find the words you don't know in the dictionary," said Avery.
+
+"No, thank you," said Jeanie. "Father doesn't like us to have help of
+any kind."
+
+There were deep shadows about the eyes she raised to Avery's face, but
+they smiled quite bravely, with all unconscious wistfulness.
+
+Avery laid a tender hand upon the brown head and drew it to rest against
+her. "Poor little thing!" she said compassionately.
+
+"But I'm not little really, you know," said Jeanie, closing her eyes for
+a few stolen moments. "I'm thirteen in March. And they're all younger
+than me except Ronnie and Julian."
+
+Avery bent with a swift, maternal movement and kissed the blue-veined
+forehead. Jeanie opened her eyes in slight surprise. Quite plainly she
+was not accustomed to sudden caresses.
+
+"I'm glad we've got you, Mrs. Denys," she said, with her quiet air of
+childish dignity. "You are a great help to us."
+
+She turned back to her French exercise with the words, and Avery, after a
+moment's thought, turned to the door. She heard again the child's sigh of
+weariness as she closed it behind her.
+
+The wails of the violin were very audible in the passage outside. She
+shivered at the atrocious sounds. From a further distance there came the
+screams of an indignant baby and the strident shouts of two small boys
+who were racing to and fro in an uncarpeted room at the top of the house.
+But after that one shiver Avery Denys had no further attention to bestow
+upon any of these things. She went with her quick, light tread down to
+the square hall which gave a suggestion of comfort to the Vicarage which
+not one of its rooms endorsed.
+
+Without an instant's hesitation she knocked upon the first door she came
+to. A voice within gave her permission to enter, and she did so.
+
+The Reverend Stephen Lorimer turned from his writing-table with a face of
+dignified severity to receive her, but at sight of her his expression
+changed somewhat.
+
+"Ah, Mrs. Denys! You, is it? Pray come in!" he said urbanely. "Is there
+any way in which I can be of service to you?"
+
+His eyes were dark and very small, so small that they nearly disappeared
+when he smiled. But for this slight defect, Mr. Lorimer would have been a
+handsome man. He rose as Avery approached and placed a chair for her with
+elaborate courtesy.
+
+"Thank you," she said. "I only ran in for a moment--just to tell you
+that little Jeanie is so tired to-night. She has had no time for her
+lessons all the afternoon because she has been helping with the little
+ones in the nursery. She insists upon doing her French exercise, but I am
+sure you would not wish her to do it if you knew how worn out the child
+is. May I tell her to leave it for to-night?"
+
+She spoke quickly and very earnestly, with clear eyes raised to Mr.
+Lorimer's face. She watched his smile fade and his eyes reappear as she
+made her appeal.
+
+He did not reply to it for some seconds, and a sharp doubt went through
+her. She raised her brows in mute interrogation.
+
+"Yes, my dear Mrs. Denys," he said, in response to her unspoken query, "I
+see that you appreciate the fact that there are at least two points of
+view to every proposition. You tell me that Jeanie was occupied in the
+nursery during that period of the day which should legitimately have been
+set aside for the assimilation of learning. I presume her presence there
+was voluntary?"
+
+"Oh, quite." There was a hint of sharpness in Avery's rejoinder. "She
+went out of the goodness of her heart because Nurse had been up
+practically all night with Baby and needed a rest and I was obliged to go
+into Wardenhurst for Mrs. Lorimer. So Jeanie took charge of Bertie and
+David, and Gracie and Pat went with me."
+
+Mr. Lorimer waved a protesting hand. "Pray spare yourself and me all
+these details, Mrs. Denys! I am glad to know that Jeanne has been useful
+to you, but at the same time she has no right to offer duty upon the
+altar of kindness. You will acknowledge that to obey is better than
+sacrifice. As a matter of principle, I fear I cannot remit any of her
+task, and I trust that on the next occasion she will remember to set
+duty first."
+
+A hot flush had risen in Avery's face and her eyes sparkled, but she
+restrained herself. There was no indignation in her voice as she said:
+"Mr. Lorimer, believe me, that child will never shirk her duty. She is
+far too conscientious. It is really for the sake of her health that I
+came to beg you to let her off that French exercise. I am sure she is not
+strong. Perhaps I did wrong to let her be in the nursery this afternoon,
+though I scarcely know how else we could have managed. But that is my
+fault, not hers. I take full responsibility for that."
+
+Mr. Lorimer began to smile again. "That is very generous of you," he
+said. "But, as a matter of justice, I doubt if the whole burden of it
+should fall to your share. You presumably were unaware that Jeanne's
+afternoon should have been devoted to her studies. She cannot plead a
+like ignorance. Therefore, while dismissing the petition, I hold you
+absolved from any blame in the matter. Pray do not distress yourself
+any further!"
+
+"I certainly thought it was a half-holiday," Avery admitted. "But I am
+distressed--very greatly distressed--on the child's account. She is not
+fit for work to-night."
+
+Mr. Lorimer made an airy gesture expressive of semi-humorous regret.
+"Discipline, my dear Mrs. Denys, must be maintained at all costs--even
+among the members of your charming sex. As a matter of fact, I am waiting
+to administer punishment to one of my sons at the present moment for an
+act of disobedience."
+
+He glanced towards the writing-table on which lay a cane, and again the
+quick blood mounted in Avery's face.
+
+"Oh, don't you think you are a little hard on your children?" she said;
+and then impulsively, "No; forgive me! I ought not to put it like that.
+But do you find it answers to be so strict? Does it make them any more
+obedient?"
+
+He raised his shoulders slightly; his eyes gleamed momentarily ere they
+vanished into his smile. He shook his head at her with tolerant irony. "I
+fear your heart runs away with you, Mrs. Denys, and I must not suffer
+myself to listen to you. I have my duty--my very distinct duty--to
+perform, and I must not shirk it. As to the results, they are in other
+Hands than mine."
+
+There came a low knock at the door as he finished speaking, and he turned
+at once to answer it.
+
+"Come in!"
+
+The door opened, and a very small, very nervous boy crept round it. A
+quick exclamation rose to Avery's lips before she could suppress it. Mr.
+Lorimer looked at her interrogatively.
+
+"I was only surprised to see Pat," she explained. "He has been with
+me all the afternoon. I hardly thought he could have had time to get
+into trouble."
+
+"Come here, Patrick!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Patrick advanced. He looked neither at Avery nor his father, but kept his
+eyes rigidly downcast. His freckled face had a half-frightened,
+half-sullen expression. He halted before Mr. Lorimer who took him by the
+shoulder, and turned him round towards Avery.
+
+"Tell Mrs. Denys what you did!" he said.
+
+Pat shot a single glance upwards, and made laconic reply. "I undid Mike."
+
+"Oh, dear!" exclaimed Avery in great distress. "I'm afraid that was
+my fault."
+
+"Yours, Mrs. Denys?" Mr. Lorimer's eyes became visible as two brilliant
+pin-points turned searchingly upon her face.
+
+"Yes, mine!" she reiterated. "Mike was whining on his chain, and I said I
+thought it was cruel to keep a dog tied up. I suppose I ought to have
+kept my thoughts to myself," she said with a pathetic little smile. "Do
+please forgive us both this time!"
+
+Mr. Lorimer ignored the appeal. "And do you know what happened in
+consequence of his being liberated?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, I do." Ruefully she made answer. "He fought Mr. Evesham's dog and I
+helped to pull him off."
+
+"You, Mrs. Denys!"
+
+"Yes, I." She nodded. "There wasn't much damage done, anyhow to Mike. I
+am very, very sorry, Mr. Lorimer. But really Pat is not to blame for
+this. Won't you--please--"
+
+She stopped, for very decidedly Mr. Lorimer interrupted her. "I am afraid
+I cannot agree with you, Mrs. Denys. You may have spoken unadvisedly, but
+Patrick was aware that in releasing the dog he was acting in direct
+opposition to my orders. Therefore he must bear his own punishment. I
+must beg that for the future you will endeavour to be a little more
+discreet in your observations. Patrick, open the door for Mrs. Denys!"
+
+It was a definite dismissal--perhaps the most definite that Avery had
+ever had in her life. A fury of resentment possessed her, but feeling her
+self-control to be tottering, she dared not give it vent. She turned in
+quivering silence and departed.
+
+As she went out of the room, she perceived that Pat had begun to cry.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MOTHER'S HELP
+
+
+"It's always the same," moaned Mrs. Lorimer. "My poor children! They're
+never out of trouble." Avery stood still. She had fled to the
+drawing-room to recover herself, only to find the lady of the house lying
+in tears upon the sofa there. Mrs. Lorimer was very small and pathetic.
+She had lost all her health long before in the bearing and nurturing of
+her children. Once upon a time she must have possessed the delicate
+prettiness that characterized her eldest daughter Jeanie, but it had
+faded long since. She was worn out now, a tired, drab little woman, with
+no strength left to stand against adversity. The only consolation in her
+life was her love for her husband. Him she worshipped, not wholly
+blindly, but with a devotion that never faltered. A kind word from him
+was capable of exalting her to a state of rapture that was only
+out-matched by the despair engendered by his displeasure. There was so
+much of sorrow mingled with her love for her children that they could
+scarcely have been regarded as a joy. In fact Avery often thought to
+herself how much happier she would have been without them.
+
+"Do sit down, Mrs. Denys!" she begged nervously, as Avery remained
+motionless in the middle of the room. "Stay with me for a little, won't
+you? I can never bear to be alone when any of the children are being
+punished. I sometimes think Pat is the worst of all. He is so highly
+strung, and he loses his head. And Stephen doesn't quite understand
+him, and he is so terribly severe when they rebel. And did you know
+that Ronald and Julian had been smoking again on the way back from
+school? They look so dreadfully ill, both of them. I know their father
+will find out."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer's whispered words went into soft weeping. She hid her face
+in the cushion.
+
+A curious little spasm went through Avery, and for a few mad seconds she
+wanted to burst into heartless laughter. She conquered the impulse with a
+desperate effort though it left her feeling slightly hysterical.
+
+She moved across to the forlorn little woman and stooped over her.
+
+"Don't cry, dear Mrs. Lorimer!" she urged. "It doesn't do any
+good. Perhaps Ronald and Julian are better by now. Shall we go
+upstairs and see?"
+
+The principle was a wrong one and she knew it, but for the life of her
+she could not have resisted the temptation at that moment. She had an
+unholy desire to get the better of the Reverend Stephen which would not
+be denied.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer checked her tears. "You're very kind," she murmured shakily.
+
+She dried her eyes and sat up. "Do you think it would be wrong to give
+them a spoonful of brandy?" she asked wistfully.
+
+But Avery's principles were proof against this at least. "Yes, I do," she
+said. "But we can manage quite well without it. Let us go, shall we, and
+see what can be done?"
+
+"I'm afraid I'm very wicked," sighed Mrs. Lorimer. "I'm very thankful to
+have you with us, dear. I don't know what I should do without you."
+
+Avery's pretty mouth took an unfamiliar curve of grimness for a moment,
+but she banished it at once. She slipped a sustaining hand through Mrs.
+Lorimer's arm.
+
+"Thank you for saying so, though, you know, I've only been with you a
+fortnight, and I don't feel that I have done very much to deserve such
+high praise."
+
+"I don't think time has much to do with friendship," said Mrs. Lorimer,
+looking at her with genuine affection in her faded blue eyes. "Do you
+know I became engaged to my husband before I had known him a fortnight?"
+
+But this was a subject upon which Avery found it difficult to express any
+sympathy, and she gently changed it. "You are looking very tired. Don't
+you think you could lie down for a little in your bedroom before supper?"
+
+"I must see the poor boys first," protested Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"Yes, of course. We will go straight up, shall we?"
+
+She led her to the door with the words, and they went out together into
+the hall. As they emerged, a sudden burst of stormy crying came from the
+study. Pat was literally howling at the top of his voice.
+
+His mother stopped and wrung her hands. "Oh, what is to be done? He
+always cries like that. He used to as a baby--the only one of them who
+did. Mrs. Denys, what shall I do? I don't think I can bear it."
+
+Avery drew her on towards the stairs. "My dear, come away!" she said
+practically. "You can't do anything. Interference will only make matters
+worse. Let us go right up to the boys' room! Pat is sure to come up
+directly."
+
+They went to the boys' room. It was a large attic in which the three
+elder boys slept. Ronald and Julian, aged fifteen and fourteen
+respectively, were both lying prostrate on their beds.
+
+Julian uttered a forced laugh at the sight of his mother's face. "My dear
+Mater, for Heaven's sake don't come fussing round here! We've been
+smoking some filthy cigars--little beastly Brown dared us to--and there's
+been the devil to pay. I can't get up. My tummy won't let me."
+
+"Oh, Julian, why do you do it?" said Mrs. Lorimer, in great distress.
+"You know what your father said the last time."
+
+She bent over him. Julian was her favourite of them all. But he turned
+his face sharply to avoid her kiss.
+
+"Don't, Mater! I don't feel up to it. I can't jaw either. I believe those
+dashed cigars were poisoned. Hullo, Ronald, are you quieting down yet?"
+
+"Shut up!" growled Ronald.
+
+His brother laughed again sardonically. "Stick to it, my hearty! There's
+a swishing in store for us. The mater always gives the show away."
+
+"Julian!" It was Avery's voice; she spoke with quick decision. "You've
+got exactly an hour--you and Ronald--to pull yourselves together. Don't
+lie here any longer! Get up and go out! Go for a hard walk! No, of course
+you don't feel like it. But it will do you good. You want to get that
+horrible stuff out of your lungs. Quick! Go now--while you can!"
+
+"But I can't!" declared Julian.
+
+"Yes, you can,--you must! You too, Ronald! Where are your coats? Pop them
+on and make a dash for it! You'll come back better. Perhaps you will get
+out of the swishing after all."
+
+Julian turned his head and looked at her by the light of the flaring,
+unshaded gas-jet. "By Jove!" he said. "You're rather a brick, Mrs.
+Denys."
+
+"Don't stop to talk!" she commanded. "Just get up and do as I say. Go
+down the back stairs, mind! I'll let you in again in time to get ready
+for supper."
+
+Julian turned to his brother. "What do you say to it, Ron?"
+
+"Can't be done," groaned Ronald.
+
+"Oh yes, it can." Sheer determination sounded in Avery's response. "Get
+up, both of you! If it makes you ill, it can't be helped. You will
+neither of you get any better lying here. Come, Ronald!" She went to him
+briskly. "Get up! I'll help you. There! That's the way. Splendid! Now
+keep it up! don't let yourself go again! You will feel quite different
+when you get out into the open air."
+
+By words and actions she urged them, Mrs. Lorimer standing pathetically
+by, till finally, fired by her energy, the two miscreants actually
+managed to make their escape without mishap.
+
+She ran downstairs to see them go, returning in time to receive the
+wailing Pat who had been sent to bed in a state verging on hysterics.
+Neither she nor his mother could calm him for some time, and when at
+length he was somewhat comforted one of the younger boys fell down in an
+adjacent room and began to cry lustily.
+
+Avery went to the rescue, earnestly entreating Mrs. Lorimer to go down to
+her room and rest. She was able to soothe the sufferer and leave him to
+the care of the nurse, and she then followed Mrs. Lorimer whom she found
+bathing her eyes and trying not to cry.
+
+So piteous a spectacle was she that Avery found further formality an
+absolute impossibility. She put her arm round the little woman and begged
+her not to fret.
+
+"No, I know it's wrong," whispered Mrs. Lorimer, yielding like a child
+to the kindly support. "But I can't help it sometimes. You see, I'm not
+very strong--just now." She hesitated and glanced at Avery with a
+guilty air. "I--I haven't told him yet," she said in a lower whisper
+still. "Of course I shall have to soon; but--I'm afraid you will think
+me very deceitful--I like to choose a favourable time, when the
+children are not worrying him quite so much. I don't want to--to vex
+him more than I need."
+
+"My dear!" Avery said compassionately. And she added as she had added to
+the daughter half an hour before, "Poor little thing!"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer gave a feeble laugh, lifting her face. "You are a sweet
+girl, Avery. I may call you that? I do hope the work won't be too much
+for you. You mustn't let me lean on you too hard."
+
+"You shall lean just as hard as you like," Avery said, and, bending,
+kissed the tired face. "I am here to be a help to you, you know. Yes, do
+call me Avery! I'm quite alone in the world, and it makes it feel like
+home. Now you really must lie down till supper. And you are not to worry
+about anything. I am sure the boys will come back much better. There! Is
+that comfortable?"
+
+"Quite, dear, thank you. You mustn't think about me any more. Good-bye!
+Thank you for all your goodness to me!" Mrs. Lorimer clung to her hand
+for a moment. "I was always prejudiced against mothers' helps before,"
+she said ingenuously. "But I find you an immense comfort--an immense
+comfort. You will try and stay, won't you, if you possibly can?"
+
+"Yes," Avery promised. "I will certainly stay--if it rests with me."
+
+Her lips were very firmly closed as she went out of the room and her grey
+eyes extremely bright. It had been a strenuous half-hour.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+LIFE ON A CHAIN
+
+
+"Oh, I say, are you going out?" said Piers. "I was just coming to
+call on you."
+
+"On me?" Avery looked at him with brows raised in surprised
+interrogation.
+
+He made her a graceful bow, nearly sweeping the path outside the Vicarage
+gate with his cap. "Even so, madam! On you! But as I perceive you are not
+at home to callers, may I be permitted to turn and walk beside you?"
+
+As he suited the action to the words, it seemed superfluous to grant the
+permission, and Avery did not do so.
+
+"I am only going to run quickly down to the post," she said, with a
+glance at some letters she carried.
+
+He might have offered to post them for her, but such a course did not
+apparently occur to him. Instead he said: "I'll race you if you like."
+
+Avery refrained from smiling, conscious of a gay glance flung in her
+direction.
+
+"I see you prefer to walk circumspectly," said Piers. "Well, I can do
+that too. How is Mike? Why isn't he with you?"
+
+"Mike is quite well, thank you," said Avery. "And he is kept chained up."
+
+"What an infernal shame!" burst from Piers. "I'd sooner shoot a dog than
+keep him on a chain."
+
+"So would I!" said Avery impulsively.
+
+The words were out before she could check them. It was a subject upon
+which she found it impossible to maintain her reticence.
+
+Piers grinned triumphantly and thrust out a boyish hand. "Shake!" he
+said. "We are in sympathy!"
+
+But Avery only shook her head at him, refusing to be drawn.
+"People--plenty of nice people--have no idea of the utter cruelty of it,"
+she said. "They think that if a dog has never known liberty, he is
+incapable of desiring it. They don't know, they don't realize, the
+bitterness of life on a chain."
+
+"Don't know and don't care!" declared Piers. "They deserve to be chained
+up themselves. One day on a chain would teach your nice people quite a
+lot. But no one cultivates feeling in this valley of dry bones. It isn't
+the thing nowadays. Let a dog whine his heart out on a chain! Who cares?
+There's no room for sentimental scruples of that sort. Can't you see the
+Reverend Stephen smile at the bare idea of extending a little of his
+precious Christian pity to a dog?" He broke off with a laugh that rang
+defiantly. "Now it's your turn!" he said.
+
+"My turn?" Avery glanced at his dark, handsome face with a touch of
+curiosity.
+
+He met her eyes with his own as if he would beat them back. "Aren't you
+generous enough to remind me that but for your timely interference I
+should have beaten my own dog to death only yesterday? You were almost
+ready to flog me for it at the time."
+
+"Oh, that!" Avery said, looking away again. "Yes, of course I might
+remind you of that if I wanted to be personal; but, you see,--I don't."
+
+"Why not!" said Piers stubbornly. "You were personal enough yesterday."
+
+The dimple, for which Avery was certainly not responsible, appeared
+suddenly near her mouth. "I am afraid I lost my temper yesterday," she
+said.
+
+"How wrong of you!" said Piers. "I hope you confessed to the
+Reverend Stephen."
+
+She glanced at him again and became grave. "No, I didn't confess to
+anyone. But I think it's a pity ever to lose one's temper. It involves a
+waste of power."
+
+"Does it?" said Piers.
+
+"Yes." She nodded with conviction. "We need all the strength we can
+muster for other things. How is your dog to-day?"
+
+Piers ignored the question. "What other things?" he demanded.
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Go on!" said Piers imperiously.
+
+Avery complied half-reluctantly. "I meant--mainly--the burdens of life.
+We can't afford to weaken ourselves by any loss of self-control. The man
+who keeps his temper is immeasurably stronger than the man who loses it."
+
+Piers was frowning; his dark eyes looked almost black. Suddenly he turned
+upon her. "Mrs. Denys, I have a strong suspicion that your temper is a
+sweet one. If so, you're no judge of these things. Why didn't you leather
+me with my own whip yesterday? You had me at your mercy."
+
+Avery smiled. Plainly he was set upon a personal encounter, and she could
+not avoid it. "Well, frankly, Mr. Evesham," she said, "I was never nearer
+to striking anyone in my life."
+
+"Then why did you forbear? You weren't afraid to souse me with
+cold water."
+
+"Oh no," she said. "I wasn't afraid."
+
+"I believe you were," maintained Piers. "You're afraid to speak your mind
+to me now anyway."
+
+She laughed a little. "No, I'm not. I really can't explain myself to you.
+I think you forget that we are practically strangers."
+
+"You talk as if I had been guilty of familiarity," said Piers.
+
+"No, no! I didn't mean that," Avery coloured suddenly, and the soft glow
+made her wonderfully fair to see. "You know quite well I didn't mean
+it," she said.
+
+"It's good of you to say so," said Piers. "But I really didn't know. I
+thought you had decided that I was a suitable subject for snubbing. I'm
+not a bit. I'm so accustomed to it that I don't care a--" he paused with
+a glance of quizzical daring, and, as she managed to look severe, amended
+the sentence--"that I am practically indifferent to it. Mrs. Denys, I
+wish you had struck me yesterday."
+
+"Really?" said Avery.
+
+"Yes, really. I should then have had the pleasure of forgiving you.
+It's a pleasure I don't often get. You see, I'm usually the one that's
+in the wrong."
+
+She looked at him then with quick interest; she could not help it. But
+the dark eyes triumphed over her so shamelessly that she veiled it on
+the instant.
+
+Piers laughed. "Mrs. Denys, may I ask a directly personal question?"
+
+"I don't know why you should," said Avery.
+
+They were nearing the pillar-box at the end of the Vicarage lane, and she
+was firmly determined that at that box their ways should separate.
+
+"I know you think I'm bold and bad," said Piers. "Some kind friend has
+probably told you so. But I'm not. I've been brought up badly, that's
+all. I think you might bear with me. I'm quite willing to be bullied."
+There was actual pathos in the declaration.
+
+Again the fleeting dimple hovered near Avery's mouth. "Please don't take
+my opinion for granted in that way!" she said. "I have hardly had time to
+form one yet."
+
+"Then I may ask my question?" said Piers.
+
+She turned steady grey eyes upon him. "Yes; you may."
+
+Piers' face was perfectly serious. "Are you really married?" he asked.
+
+The level brows went up a little. "I have been a widow for six years,"
+said Avery very quietly.
+
+He stared at her in surprise unfeigned. "Six years!"
+
+She replied in the same quiet voice. "I lost my husband when I was
+twenty-two."
+
+"Great Heavens above!" ejaculated Piers. "But you're not--not--I say,
+forgive me, I must say it--you can't be as old as that!"
+
+"I am twenty-nine," said Avery faintly smiling.
+
+They had reached the letter-box. She dropped in her letters one by one.
+Piers stood confounded, looking on.
+
+Suddenly he spoke. "And you've been doing this mothers'-helping business
+for six years?"
+
+"Oh no!" she said.
+
+She turned round from the box and faced him. The red winter sunset glowed
+softly upon her. Her grey eyes looked straight into it.
+
+"No!" she said again. "I had my little girl to take care of for the first
+six months. You see, she was born blind, soon after her father's death,
+and she needed all the care I could give her."
+
+Piers made a sharp movement--a gesture that was almost passionate; but he
+said nothing.
+
+Avery withdrew her eyes from the sunset, and looked at him. "She died,"
+she said, "and that left me with nothing to do. I have no near
+relations. So I just had to set to work to find something to occupy me.
+I went into a children's hospital for training, and spent some years
+there. Then when that came to an end, I took a holiday; but I found I
+wanted children. So I cast about me, and finally answered Mr. Lorimer's
+advertisement and came here." She began to smile. "At least I have
+plenty of children now."
+
+"Oh, I say!" broke in Piers. "What a perfectly horrible life you've had!
+You don't mean to say you're happy, what?"
+
+Avery laughed. "I'm much too busy to think about it. And now I really
+must run back. I've promised to take charge of the babies this afternoon.
+Good-bye!" She held out her hand to him with frank friendliness, as if
+she divined the sympathy he did not utter.
+
+He gripped it hard for a moment. "Thanks awfully for being so decent as
+to tell me!" he said, looking back at her with eyes as frank as her own.
+"I'm going on down to the home farm. Good-bye!"
+
+He raised his cap, and abruptly strode away. And in the moment of his
+going Avery found she liked him better than she had liked him
+throughout the interview, for she knew quite well that he went only in
+deference to her wish.
+
+She turned to retrace her steps, feeling puzzled. There was something
+curiously attractive about the young man's personality, something that
+appealed to her, yet that she felt disposed to resist. That air of the
+ancient Roman was wonderfully compelling, too compelling for her taste,
+but then his boyishness counteracted it to a very great degree. There was
+a hint of sweetness running through his arrogance against which she was
+not proof. Audacious he might be, but it was a winning species of
+audacity that probably no woman could condemn. She thought to herself as
+she returned to her charges that she had never seen a face so faultlessly
+patrician and yet so vividly alive. And following that thought came
+another that dwelt longer in her mind. Deprived of its animation, it
+would not have been a happy face.
+
+Avery wondered why.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE RACE
+
+
+"Hooray! No more horrid sums for a whole month!" Gracie Lorimer's
+arithmetic-book soared to the ceiling and came down with a bang while
+Gracie herself pivoted, not ungracefully, on her toes till sheer
+giddiness and exhaustion put an end to her rhapsody. Then she staggered
+to Avery who was darning the family stockings by the window and flung
+ecstatic arms about her neck.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Denys, aren't you glad it's holidays?" she gasped. "We'll give
+you such a lovely time!"
+
+"I'm sure you will, dear," said Avery. "But do mind the needle!"
+
+She kissed the brilliant childish face that was pressed to hers. She and
+Gracie were close friends. Gracie was eleven, and the prettiest madcap of
+them all. It was a perpetual marvel to Avery that the child managed to be
+so happy, for she was continually in trouble. But she seemed to possess a
+cheery knack of throwing off adversity. She was essentially gay of heart.
+
+"Do put away those stupid old stockings and come out with us!" she
+begged, still hanging over Avery. "Don't you hate darning? I do. We had
+to do our own before you came. I was very naughty one day last summer. I
+went out and played in the garden instead of mending my stockings, and
+Father found out." Gracie cast up her eyes dramatically. "He sent me in
+to do them, and went off to one of his old parish parties; and I just
+sneaked out as soon as his back was turned and went on with the game. But
+there was no luck that day. He came back to fetch something and caught
+me. And then--just imagine!" Again Gracie was dramatic, though this time
+unconsciously. "He sent me to bed and--what do you think? When he came
+home to tea, he--whipped me!"
+
+Avery threaded her needle with care. She said nothing.
+
+"I think it was rather a shame," went on Gracie unconcernedly. "Because
+he never whips Jeanie or Olive. But then, he can make them cry without,
+and he can't make me. I 'spect that's what made him do it, don't you?"
+
+"I don't know, dear," said Avery rather shortly.
+
+Gracie peered round into her face. "Mrs. Denys, you don't like Father, do
+you?" she said.
+
+"My dear, that's not a nice question to ask," said Avery, with her eyes
+on her work.
+
+"I don't know why not," said Gracie. "I don't like him myself, and he
+knows I don't. He'd whip me again if he got the chance, but I'm too jolly
+careful now. I was pleased that you got Ronnie and Julian off the other
+day. He never suspected, did he? I thought I should have burst during
+prayers. It was so funny."
+
+"My dear!" protested Avery.
+
+"Yes, I know," said Gracie. "But you aren't really shocked, dear, kind
+Mrs. Denys! You know you aren't. I can see your sweet little dimple.
+No, I can't! Yes, I can! I do love your dimple. It goes in and out
+like the sun."
+
+Avery leaned back abruptly in her chair. "Oh, foolish one!" she said, and
+gathered the child to her with a warmth to which the ardent Gracie was
+swift to respond.
+
+"And you are coming out with us, aren't you? Because it's so lovely and
+cold. I want to go up on that big hill in Rodding Park, and run and run
+and run till I just can't run any longer. Ronnie and Julian are coming
+too. And Jeanie and Olive and Pat. We ought to begin and collect holly
+for the church decorations. You'll be able to help this year, won't you?
+Miss Whalley always bosses things. Have you met Miss Whalley yet? She's
+quite the funniest person in Rodding. She was the daughter of the last
+Vicar, and she has never forgotten it. So odd of her! As if there were
+anything in it! I often wish I weren't a parson's daughter. I'd much
+rather belong to someone who had to go up to town every day. There would
+be much more fun for everybody then."
+
+Avery was laying her mending together. She supposed she ought to check
+the child's chatter, but felt too much in sympathy with her to do so. "I
+really don't know if I ought to come," she said. "But it is certainly too
+fine an afternoon for you to waste indoors. Where are the boys?"
+
+"Oh, they're messing about somewhere in the garden. You see, they've got
+to keep out of sight or Father will set them to work to roll the lawn. He
+always does that sort of thing. He calls it 'turning our youthful
+energies to good account.'" Very suddenly and wickedly Gracie mimicked the
+pastoral tones. "But the boys call it 'nigger-driving,'" she added, "and
+I think the boys are right. When I'm grown up, I'll never, never, never
+make my children do horrid things like that. They shall have--oh, such a
+good time!"
+
+There was unconscious pathos in the declaration. Avery looked at the
+bright face very tenderly.
+
+"I wonder what you'll do with them when they're naughty, Gracie," she
+said.
+
+"I shall never whip them," said Gracie decidedly. "I think whipping is a
+horrid punishment. It makes you hate everybody. I think I shan't punish
+them at all, Mrs. Denys. I shall just tell them how wrong they've been,
+and that they are never to do it again. And I'm sure they won't," she
+added, with confidence. "They'll love me too much."
+
+She slipped her arm round Avery's waist as she rose. "Do you know I would
+dreadfully like to call you Aunt Avery?" she said. "I said so to Jeanie,
+and Jeanie wants to too. Do you mind?"
+
+"Mind!" said Avery. "I shall love it."
+
+"Oh, thank you--awfully!" Gracie kissed her fervently. "I'll run and tell
+Jeanie. She will be pleased."
+
+She skipped from the room, and Avery went to prepare for the walk. "Poor
+little souls!" she murmured to herself. "How I wish they were mine!"
+
+They mustered only five when they started--the three girls, Pat, and
+Avery herself; but ere they had reached the end of the lane the two elder
+boys leapt the Vicarage wall with a whoop of triumph and joined them. The
+party became at once uproariously gay. Everyone talked at the same time,
+even Jeanie becoming animated. Avery rejoiced to see the pretty face
+flushed and merry. She had begun to feel twinges of anxiety about Jeanie
+lately. But she was able to banish them at least for to-day, for Jeanie
+ran and chattered with the rest. In fact, Olive was the only one who
+showed any disposition to walk sedately. It had to be remembered that
+Olive was the clever one of the family. She more closely resembled her
+father than any of the others, and Avery firmly believed her to be the
+only member of the family that Mr. Lorimer really loved. She was a
+cold-hearted, sarcastic child, extremely self-contained, giving nothing
+and receiving nothing in return. It was impossible to become intimate
+with her. Avery had given up the attempt almost at the outset, realizing
+that it was not in Olive's nature to be intimate with anyone. They were
+always exceedingly polite to each other, but beyond that their
+acquaintance made no progress. Olive lived in a world of books, and the
+practical side of life scarcely touched her, and most certainly never
+appealed to her sympathy. "She will be her father over again," Mrs.
+Lorimer would declare, with pathetic pride. "So dignified, so handsome,
+and so clever!"
+
+And Avery agreed, not without reserve, that she certainly resembled him
+to a marked degree.
+
+She was by far the most sober member of the party that entered Rodding
+Park that afternoon. Avery, inspired by the merriment around her, was in
+a frankly frivolous mood. She was fast friends with the two elder boys,
+who had voted her a brick on the night that she had intervened to
+deliver them from the just retribution for their misdeeds. They had
+conceived an immense admiration for her which placed her in a highly
+privileged position.
+
+"If Mrs. Denys says so, it is so," was Ronald's fiat, and she knew that
+such influence as he possessed with his brothers and sisters was always
+at her disposal.
+
+She liked Ronald. The boy was a gentleman. Though slow, he was solid; and
+she suspected that he possessed more depth of character than the more
+brilliant Julian. Julian was crafty; there was no denying it. She was
+sure that he would get on in the world. But of Ronald's future she was
+not so sure. It seemed to her that he might plod on for ever without
+reaching his goal. He kept near her throughout that riotous scamper
+through the bare, wind-swept Park, making it plain that he regarded
+himself as her lieutenant whether she required his services or not. As a
+matter of fact, she did not require them, but she was glad to have him
+there and she keenly appreciated the gentlemanly consideration with which
+he helped her over every stile.
+
+They reached the high hill of Gracie's desire, and rapidly climbed it.
+The sun had passed over to the far west and had already begun to dip ere
+they reached the summit.
+
+"Now we'll all stand in a row and race down," announced Gracie, when
+they reached the top. "Aunt Avery will start us. We'll run as far as that
+big oak-tree on the edge of the wood. Now line up, everybody!"
+
+"I'm not going to do anything so silly," said Olive decidedly. "Mrs.
+Denys and I will follow quietly."
+
+"Oh no!" laughed Avery. "You can do the starting, my dear, and I will
+race with the others."
+
+Olive looked at her, faintly contemptuous. "Oh, of course if you prefer
+it--" she said.
+
+"I do indeed!" Avery assured her. "But I think the two big boys and I
+ought to be handicapped. Jeanie and Gracie and Pat must go ten paces
+in front."
+
+"I am bigger than Gracie and Pat," said Jeanie. "I think I ought to
+go midway."
+
+"Of course," agreed Ronald. "And, Aunt Avery, you must go with her. You
+can't start level with Julian and me."
+
+Avery laughed at the amendment and fell in with it. They adjusted
+themselves for the trial of speed, while Olive stationed herself on a
+mole-hill to give the signal.
+
+The valley below them was in deep shadow. The last of the sunlight lay
+upon the hilltop. It shone dazzlingly in Avery's eyes as the race began.
+
+There had been a sprinkling of snow the day before, and the grass was
+crisp and rough. She felt it crush under her feet with a keen sense of
+enjoyment. Instinctively she put all her buoyant strength into the run.
+She left Jeanie behind, overtook and passed the two younger children, and
+raced like a hare down the slope. Keenly the wind whistled past her, and
+she rejoiced to feel its clean purity rush into her lungs. She was for
+the moment absurdly, rapturously happy,--a child amongst children.
+
+The sun went out of sight, and the darkness of the valley swallowed her.
+She sped on, fleet-footed, flushed and laughing, moving as if on wings.
+
+She neared the dark line of wood, and saw the stark, outstretched
+branches of the oak that was her goal. In the same instant she caught
+sight of a man's figure standing beneath it, apparently waiting for her.
+
+He had evidently just come out of the wood. He carried a gun on his
+shoulder, but the freedom of his pose was so striking that she likened
+him on the instant to a Roman gladiator.
+
+She could not stop herself at once though she checked her speed, and when
+she finally managed to come to a stand, she was close to him.
+
+He stepped forward to meet her with a royal air of welcome. "How nice of
+you to come and call on me!" he said.
+
+His dark eyes shone mischievously as they greeted her, and she was too
+flushed and dishevelled to stand upon ceremony. Pantingly she threw back
+her gay reply.
+
+"This is the children's happy hunting ground, not mine, I suppose, if the
+truth were told, we are trespassing."
+
+He made her his sweeping bow. "There is not a corner of this estate that
+is not utterly and for ever at your service."
+
+He turned as the two elder boys came racing up, and she saw the
+half-mocking light go out of his eyes as they glanced up the hill.
+"Hullo!" he said. "There's one of them come to grief."
+
+Sharply she turned also. Pat and Gracie were having a spirited race down
+the lower slope of the hill. Olive had begun to descend from the top with
+becoming dignity. And midway, poor Jeanie crouched in a forlorn little
+heap with her hands tightly covering her face.
+
+"The child's hurt!" exclaimed Avery.
+
+She started to run back, but in a moment Piers sprang past her, crying,
+"All right. Don't run! Take it easy!"
+
+He himself went like the wind. She watched him with subconscious
+admiration. He was so superbly lithe and strong.
+
+She saw him reach Jeanie and kneel down beside her. There was no
+hesitation about him. He was evidently deeply concerned. He slipped a
+persuasive arm about the child's huddled form.
+
+When Avery reached them, Jeanie's head in its blue woollen cap was
+pillowed against him and she was telling him sobbingly of her trouble.
+
+"I--I caught my foot. I don't know--how I did it. It twisted right
+round--and oh, it does hurt, I--I--I can't help--being silly!"
+
+"All right, kiddie, all right!" said Piers. "It was one of those
+confounded rabbit-holes. There! You'll be better in a minute. Got a
+handkerchief, what? Oh, never mind! Take mine!"
+
+He pulled it out and dried her eyes as tenderly as if he had been a
+woman; then raised his head abruptly and spoke to Avery.
+
+"I expect it's a sprain. I'd better get her boot off and see, what?"
+
+"No, we had better take her home first," said Avery with quick decision.
+
+"All right," said Piers at once. "I'll carry her. I daresay she isn't
+very heavy. I say, little girl, you mustn't cry." He patted her shoulder
+kindly. "It hurts horribly, I know. These things always do. But you're
+going to show me how plucky you can be. Women are always braver than men,
+aren't they, Mrs. Denys?"
+
+Thus admonished, Jeanie lifted her face and made a valiant effort to
+regain her self-command. But she clasped her two hands very tightly upon
+Piers' arm so that he could not move to lift her.
+
+"I'll be brave in a minute," she promised him tremulously. "You won't
+mind waiting--just a minute?"
+
+"Two, if you like," said Piers.
+
+Avery was stooping over the injured foot. Jeanie was propped sideways,
+half-lying against Piers' knee.
+
+"Don't touch it, please, Aunt Avery!" she whispered.
+
+The other children had drawn round in an interested group. "It looks like
+a fracture to me," observed Olive in her precise voice.
+
+Piers flashed her a withering glance. "Mighty lot you know about it!" he
+retorted rudely.
+
+Pat sniggered. He was not fond of his second sister. But his mirth was
+checked by the impulsive Gracie who pushed him aside with a brief,
+"Don't be a pig!"
+
+Olive retired into the background with her nose in the air, looking so
+absurdly like her father that a gleam of humour shot through even Piers'
+sternness. He suppressed it and turned to the two elder boys.
+
+"Which of you is to be trusted to carry a loaded gun?"
+
+"I am," said Julian.
+
+"No--Ronald," said Avery very firmly.
+
+Julian stuck out his tongue at her, and was instantly pummeled therefor
+by the zealous Gracie.
+
+"Ronald," said Piers. "Mind how you pick it up, and don't point it at
+anyone! Carry it on your shoulder! That's the way. Go slow with it! Now
+you walk in front and take it down to the lodge!"
+
+He issued his orders with the air of a commanding-officer, and having
+issued them turned again with renewed gentleness to the child who lay
+against his arm.
+
+"Now, little girl, shall we make a move? I'm afraid postponing it won't
+make it any better. I'll carry you awfully carefully."
+
+"Thank you," whispered Jeanie.
+
+He stooped over her. "Put your arm round my neck! That'll be a help. Mrs.
+Denys, can you steady her foot while I get up?"
+
+Avery bent to do so. He moved with infinite care; but even so the strain
+upon the foot was inevitable. Jeanie gave a sharp cry, and sank helpless
+in his arms.
+
+He began to speak encouragingly but broke off in the middle, feeling the
+child's head lie limp upon his shoulder.
+
+"Afraid it's serious," he said to Avery. "We will get her down to the
+lodge and send for a doctor."
+
+"By Jove! She's fainted!" remarked Julian. "It's a jolly bad sprain."
+
+"It's not a sprain at all," said Olive loftily.
+
+And much as she would have liked to disagree, Avery knew that she
+was right.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+
+Mrs. Marshall at the lodge was a hard-featured old woman whose god was
+cleanliness. Perhaps it was hardly to be expected of her that she should
+throw open her door to the whole party. Piers, with his limp burden, and
+Avery she had to admit, but after the latter's entrance she sternly
+blocked the way.
+
+"There's no room for any more," she declared with finality. "You'd best
+run along home."
+
+And with that she shut the door upon them and followed her unwelcome
+visitors into her spotless parlour.
+
+"What's the matter with the young lady?" she enquired sourly.
+
+Avery answered her in her quick, friendly way. "She has had a fall, poor
+little thing, and hurt her foot--I'm afraid, badly. It's so good of you
+to let us bring her in here. Won't you spread a cloth to keep her boots
+off your clean chintz?"
+
+The suggestion was what Piers described later as "a lucky hit." It melted
+old Mrs. Marshall on the instant. She hastened to comply with it, and saw
+Jeanie laid down upon her sofa with comparative resignation.
+
+"She do look mortal bad, to be sure," she remarked.
+
+"Can't you find some brandy?" said Piers.
+
+"I think she will come to, now," Avery said. "Yes, look! Her eyes
+are opening."
+
+She was right. Jeanie's eyes opened very wide and fixed themselves
+enquiringly upon Piers' face. There was something in them, a species of
+dumb appeal, that went straight to his heart. He moved impulsively, and
+knelt beside her.
+
+Jeanie's hand came confidingly forth to him. "I did try to be brave," she
+whispered.
+
+Piers' hand closed instantly and warmly upon hers. "That's all right,
+little girl," he said kindly. "Pain pretty bad, eh?"
+
+"Yes," murmured Jeanie.
+
+"Ah, well, don't move!" he said. "We'll get your boot off and then you'll
+feel better."
+
+"Oh, don't trouble, please!" said Jeanie politely.
+
+She held his hand very tightly, and he divined that the prospect of the
+boot's removal caused her considerable apprehension.
+
+He looked round to consult Avery on the subject, but found that she had
+slipped out of the room. He heard her in the porch speaking to the
+children, and in a few seconds she was back again.
+
+"Don't let us keep you!" she said to Piers. "I can stay with Jeanie now.
+I have sent the children home, all but Ronald and Julian who have gone to
+fetch Dr. Tudor."
+
+Piers looked at Jeanie, and Jeanie looked at Piers. Her hand was still
+fast locked in his.
+
+"Shall I go?" said Piers.
+
+Jeanie's blue eyes were very wistful. "I would like you to stay," she
+said shyly, "if you don't mind."
+
+"If Mrs. Denys doesn't mind?" suggested Piers.
+
+To which Avery responded. "Thank you. Please stay!"
+
+She said it for Jeanie's sake, since it was evident that the child was
+sustaining herself on the man's strength, but the look Piers flashed her
+made her a little doubtful as to the wisdom of her action. She realized
+that it might not be easy to keep him at arm's length after this.
+
+Piers turned back to Jeanie. "Very well, I'll stay," he said, "anyhow
+till Tudor comes along. Let's see! You're the eldest girl, aren't you? I
+ought to know you by name, but somehow my memory won't run to it."
+
+He could not as a matter of fact remember that he had ever spoken to any
+of the young Lorimers before, though by sight he was well acquainted
+with them.
+
+Jeanie, in whose eyes he had ever shone as a knight of romance, murmured
+courteously that no one ever remembered them all by name.
+
+"Well, I shall remember you anyhow," said Piers. "Queenie is it?"
+
+"No,--Jeanie."
+
+"I shall call you Queenie," he said. "It sounds more imposing. Now won't
+you let me just slit off that boot? I can do it without hurting you."
+
+"Slit it!" said Jeanie, shocked.
+
+"We shan't get it off without," said Piers. "What do you think about it,
+Mrs. Denys?"
+
+"I will unfasten the lace first," Avery said.
+
+This she proceeded to do while Piers occupied Jeanie's attention with a
+success which a less dominant personality could scarcely have achieved.
+
+But when it came to removing the boot he went to Avery's assistance. It
+was no easy matter but they accomplished it between them, Piers
+ruthlessly cutting the leather away from the injured ankle which by that
+time was badly swollen. They propped it on a cushion, and made her as
+comfortable as circumstances would allow.
+
+"Can't that old woman make you some tea?" Piers said then, beginning to
+chafe at the prospect of an indefinite period of inaction.
+
+"I think she is boiling her kettle now," Avery answered.
+
+Piers grunted. He fidgeted to the window and back, and then, finding
+Jeanie's eyes still mutely watching him, he pulled up a chair to her side
+and took the slender hand again into his own.
+
+Avery turned her attention to coaxing the fire to burn, and presently
+went out to Mrs. Marshall in her kitchen to offer her services there. She
+was graciously permitted to cut some bread and butter while the old woman
+prepared a tray.
+
+"I suppose it was Master Piers' fault," the latter remarked with
+severity. "He's always up to some mischief or other."
+
+Avery hastened to assure her that upon this occasion Piers was absolutely
+blameless and had been of the utmost assistance to them.
+
+"I'm very glad to hear it," said Mrs. Marshall. "He's a feckless young
+gentleman, and I often think as he's like to bring the old master's hairs
+with sorrow to the grave. Sir Beverley do set such store by him, always
+did from the day he brought him back from his dead mother in Paris, along
+with that French valet who carried him like as if he'd been a parcel of
+goods. He's been brought up by men from his cradle, miss, and it hasn't
+done him any good. But there! Sir Beverley is that set against all
+womenkind there's no moving him."
+
+Mrs. Marshall was beginning to expand--a mark of high favour which she
+bestowed only upon the few.
+
+Avery listened with respect, comfortably aware that by this simple means
+she was creating a good impression. She was anxious to win the old dame
+to a benevolent frame of mind if possible, since to be thrown upon
+unwilling hospitality was the last thing she desired.
+
+It was characteristic of her that she achieved her purpose. When she
+returned to the parlour in Mrs. Marshall's wake, she had completely won
+her hostess's heart, a fact which Piers remarked on the instant.
+
+"There's magic in you," he said to Avery, as she gave him his cup of
+tea.
+
+"I prefer to call it common sense," she answered.
+
+She turned her attention at once to Jeanie, coaxing her to drink the tea
+though her utmost persuasion could not induce her to eat anything. She
+was evidently suffering a good deal of pain, but she begged them not to
+trouble about her. "Please have your tea, Aunt Avery! I shall be quite
+all right."
+
+"Yes, Aunt Avery must certainly have some tea," said Piers with
+determination, and he refused to touch his own until she had done so.
+
+It was a relief to all three of them when the doctor's dogcart was heard
+on the drive. Avery rose at once and went to receive him.
+
+Piers stretched a kindly arm behind the cushion that supported Jeanie's
+head. "Do you really want me to stay with you, little girl?" he asked.
+
+Jeanie was very white, but she looked at him bravely. "Do you
+mind?" she said.
+
+His dark eyes smiled encouragement. "No, of course I don't mind if I can
+be of any use to you. Tudor will probably want to kick me out, but if you
+have the smallest desire to keep me, I'll stay."
+
+"You are kind," said Jeanie very earnestly. "I think it will help me to
+be brave if I may hold your hand. You have such a strong hand."
+
+"It is entirely at your service," said Piers.
+
+He turned in his chair at the doctor's entrance, without rising. His
+attitude was decidedly dogged. He looked as if he anticipated a struggle.
+
+Dr. Tudor came in behind Avery. He was a man of forty, curt of speech and
+short of temper, with eyes that gleamed shrewdly behind gold pince-nez.
+He gave Piers a look that was conspicuously lacking in cordiality.
+
+"Hullo!" he said. "You here!"
+
+"Yes, I'm here," said Piers.
+
+The doctor's eyes passed him and went straight to the white face of the
+child on the sofa. He advanced and bent over her.
+
+"So you've had an accident, eh?" he said.
+
+"Yes," whispered Jeanie, pressing a little closer to Piers.
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"I think it was a rabbit-hole," said Jeanie not very lucidly.
+
+"Caught your foot and fell, I suppose?" said the doctor. "Was that all?
+Did you do any walking after it?"
+
+"Oh no!" said Jeanie, with a shudder. "Mr. Evesham carried me."
+
+"I see." He was holding her wrist between his fingers. Very suddenly he
+looked at Piers again. "I can't have you here," he said.
+
+"Can't you?" said Piers. He threw back his head with an aggressive
+movement, but said no more.
+
+"Please let him stay!" said Jeanie beseechingly.
+
+The doctor frowned.
+
+In a low voice Avery intervened. "I told him he might--for the
+child's sake."
+
+Dr. Tudor turned his hawk eyes upon her. "Who are you, may I ask?"
+
+Piers' free hand clenched, and a sudden hot flush rose to his forehead.
+But Avery made answer before he could speak.
+
+"I am the mother's help at the Vicarage. My name is Denys--Mrs. Denys.
+And Jeanie is in my care. Now, will you look at the injury?"
+
+She smiled a little as she said it, but the decision of her speech was
+past disputing. Dr. Tudor regarded her piercingly for a moment or two,
+then without a word turned aside.
+
+The tension went out of Piers' attitude; he held Jeanie comfortingly
+close.
+
+At the end of a brief examination the doctor spoke. "Yes. A simple
+fracture. I can soon put that to rights. You can help me, Mrs. Denys."
+
+He went to work at once, giving occasional curt directions to Avery,
+while Jeanie clung convulsively to Piers, her face buried in his coat,
+and fought for self-control.
+
+It was a very plucky fight, for the ordeal was a severe one; and when it
+was over the poor child broke down completely in spite of all her efforts
+and wept upon Piers' shoulder. He soothed and consoled her with the
+utmost kindness. It had been something of an ordeal for him also, and
+with relief he turned his attention to comforting her.
+
+She soon grew calmer and apologized humbly for her weakness. "I don't
+think I could have borne it without you," she told him, with
+tremulous sincerity. "But I'm so dreadfully sorry to have given you
+all this trouble."
+
+"That's all right," Piers assured her. "I'm glad you found me of use."
+
+He dried her tears for the second time that afternoon, and then, with a
+somewhat obvious effort at civility, addressed the doctor.
+
+"I suppose it will be all right to move her now? Can we take her home in
+the landaulette?"
+
+Curtly the doctor made answer. "Very well indeed, I should say, if we
+lift her carefully and keep the foot straight. I'll drive you to the
+Abbey if you like. I'm going up to see your grandfather."
+
+"I don't know why you should," said Piers quickly. "There's nothing the
+matter with him."
+
+Dr. Tudor made no reply. "Are you coming?" he asked.
+
+"No, thanks." There was latent triumph in Piers' response. "If you are
+going up, you can give the order for the landaulette, and tell my
+grandfather I am staying to see Miss Lorimer safely home."
+
+Dr. Tudor grunted and turned away, frowning.
+
+"Well, so long!" he said to Jeanie. "I'll look in on my way back, and
+lend a hand with moving you. But you will be all right now if you do as
+you're told."
+
+"Thank you," said Jeanie meekly.
+
+He went out with Avery, and the door closed behind them.
+
+Jeanie stole a glance at Piers who was looking decidedly grim.
+
+"Yes," he said in answer. "I detest him, and he knows it."
+
+Jeanie looked a little startled. "Oh, do you?" she said.
+
+"Don't you?" said Piers.
+
+"I--I really don't know. Isn't it--isn't it wrong to detest anyone!"
+faltered Jeanie.
+
+"Wrong!" said Piers. He frowned momentarily, then as suddenly he smiled.
+He bent very abruptly and kissed her on the forehead. "Yes, of course
+it's wrong," he said, "for the people who keep consciences."
+
+"Oh, but--" Jeanie remonstrated, and then something in his face stopped
+her. She flushed and murmured in confusion, "Thank you for!--for
+kissing me!"
+
+"Don't mention it!" said Piers, with a laugh.
+
+"I should like to kiss you if I may," said Jeanie. "You have been so
+very kind."
+
+He bent his face to hers and received the kiss. "You're a nice little
+girl," he said, and there was an odd note of feeling in the words for all
+their lightness that made Jeanie aware that in some fashion he was moved.
+
+"I don't think he is quite--quite happy, do you?" she said to Avery that
+night when the worst of her troubles were over, and she was safely back
+at the Vicarage.
+
+And Avery answered thoughtfully, "Perhaps--not quite."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A TALK BY THE FIRE
+
+
+The Reverend Stephen Lorimer was writing his sermon for the last Sunday
+in Advent. His theme was eternal punishment and one which he considered
+worthy of his utmost eloquence. There was nothing mythical or allegorical
+in that subject in the opinion of the Reverend Stephen. He believed in it
+most firmly, and the belief afforded him the keenest satisfaction. It was
+a nerve-shaking sermon. Had it been of a secular nature, it might almost
+have been described as inhuman, so obviously was it designed to render
+his hearers afraid to go home in the dark. But since it was not secular,
+it took the form of a fine piece of inspiration which, from Mr. Lorimer's
+point of view at least, could scarcely fail to make the most stubborn
+heart in his congregation tremble. He pictured himself delivering his
+splendid rhetoric with a grand and noble severity as impressive as the
+words he had to utter, reading appreciation--possibly unwilling
+appreciation--and dawning uneasiness on the upturned faces of his
+listeners.
+
+Mr. Lorimer did not love his flock; his religion did not take that
+form. And the flock very naturally as a whole had scant affection for
+Mr. Lorimer. The flock knew, or shrewdly suspected, that his eloquence
+was mere sound--not always even musical--and as a consequence its
+power was somewhat thrown away. His command of words was practically
+limitless, but words could not carry him to the hearts of his
+congregation, and he had no other means at his disposal. For this of
+course he blamed the congregation, which certainly had no right to wink
+and snigger when he passed.
+
+This Advent sermon however was a masterpiece, and as Mr. Lorimer lovingly
+fingered the pages of his manuscript he told himself that it could not
+fail to make an impression upon the most hardened sinner.
+
+A low knock at the door disturbed these pleasant thoughts and he frowned.
+There was an unwritten law at the Vicarage that save for the most urgent
+of reasons he should never be interrupted at this hour.
+
+Softly the door opened. Humbly his wife peeped in.
+
+"Are you very busy, Stephen?"
+
+His frown melted away. Here at least was one whose appreciation was never
+lacking. "Well, my dear Adelaide, I think I may truthfully say that the
+stress of my business is fairly over. You may come in."
+
+She crept in, mouse-like, and a distant burst of music wafted in with
+her, causing her to turn and quickly close the door.
+
+"Have you finished your sermon, dear? Can we have a little talk?" she
+asked him nervously.
+
+He stretched out a large white hand to her without rising. "Yes. I do not
+think much remains to be said. We have as it were regarded the matter
+from every point of view. I do not think there will be many consciences
+unaroused when I have enunciated my final warning."
+
+"You have such a striking delivery," murmured Mrs. Lorimer, clasping the
+firm white hand between both her own.
+
+Mr. Lorimer's eyes vanished in an unctuous smile. "Thou idle
+flatterer!" he said.
+
+"No, indeed, dear," his wife protested. "I think you are always
+impressive, especially at the end of your sermons. That pause you make
+before you turn your face to the altar--it seems to me so effective--so,
+if one may say it, dramatic."
+
+"To what request is this the prelude?" enquired Mr. Lorimer, emerging
+from his smile.
+
+She laughed a little nervous laugh. Her thin face was flushed. "Shall we
+sit by the fire, Stephen, as we used to that first happy winter--do you
+remember?--after we were married?"
+
+"Dear me!" said Mr. Lorimer. "This sounds like a plunge into sentiment."
+
+Nevertheless he rose with a tolerant twinkle and seated himself in the
+large easy-chair before the fire. It was the only really comfortable
+chair in the room. He kept it for his moments of reflection.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer sat down at his feet on the fender-curb, her tiny hand still
+clinging to his. "This is a real treat," she said, laying her head
+against his knee with a gesture oddly girlish. "It isn't often, is it,
+that we have it all to ourselves?"
+
+"What is it you have to say to me?" he enquired.
+
+She drew his hand down gently over her shoulder, and held it against her
+cheek. There fell a brief silence, then she said with a slight effort:
+"Your idea of a mother's help has worked wonderfully, Stephen. As you
+know, I was averse to it at first but I am so glad you insisted. Dear
+Avery is a greater comfort to me than I can possibly tell you."
+
+"Avery!" repeated the Reverend Stephen, with brows elevated. "I presume
+you are talking of Mrs. Denys?"
+
+"Yes, dear. I call her Avery. I feel her to be almost one of ourselves."
+There was just a hint of apology in Mrs. Lorimer's voice. "She has
+been--and is--so very kind to me," she said. "I really don't know what
+the children and I would do without her."
+
+"I am glad to hear she is kind," said Mr. Lorimer, with a touch
+of acidity.
+
+"My dearest, she is quite our equal in position," murmured Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"That may be, my dear Adelaide." The acidity developed into a note of
+displeasure. "In a sense doubtless we are all equal. But in spite of
+that, extremes of intimacy are often inadvisable. I do not think you are
+altogether discreet in making a bosom friend of a woman in Mrs. Denys's
+position. A very good woman, I grant you. But familiarity with her is
+altogether unsuitable. From my own experience of her I am convinced that
+she would very soon presume upon it."
+
+He paused. Mrs. Lorimer said nothing. She was sitting motionless with her
+soft eyes on the fire.
+
+Mr. Lorimer looked down at the brown head at his knee with growing
+severity. "You will, therefore, Adelaide, in deference to my wish--if for
+no other reason--discontinue this use of Mrs. Denys's Christian name."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer's lips moved, but they said nothing.
+
+"Adelaide!" He spoke with cold surprise.
+
+Instantly her fingers tightened upon his with a grip that was almost
+passionate. She raised her head, and looked up at him with earnest,
+pleading eyes. "I am sorry, Stephen--dear Stephen--but I have already
+given my friendship to--to Mrs. Denys. She has been--she is--like a
+sister to me. So you see, I can't possibly take it away again. You would
+not wish it if you knew."
+
+"If I knew!" repeated Mr. Lorimer, in a peculiar tone.
+
+She turned her face from him again, but he leaned slowly forward in his
+chair and taking her chin between his finger and thumb turned it
+deliberately back again.
+
+She shrank a little, but she did not resist him. He looked searchingly
+into her eyes. The lids flickered nervously under his gaze, but he did
+not relax his scrutiny.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+Her lips quivered. She said nothing.
+
+But her silence was enough. He released her abruptly and dropped back in
+his chair without another word.
+
+She sank down trembling against his knee, and there followed a most
+painful pause. Through the stillness there crept again the faint
+strains of distant music. Someone was playing the Soldiers' March out
+of _Faust_ on the old cracked schoolroom piano, which was rising nobly
+to the occasion.
+
+Mr. Lorimer moved at length and turned his head. "Who is that playing?"
+
+"Piers Evesham," whispered Mrs. Lorimer. She was weeping softly and dared
+not stir lest he should discover the fact.
+
+There was a deep, vertical line between Mr. Lorimer's brows. "And what
+may Piers Evesham be doing here?" he enquired.
+
+"He comes often--to see Jeanie," murmured his wife deprecatingly.
+
+He laughed unpleasantly. "A vast honour for Jeanie!"
+
+Two tears fell from Mrs. Lorimer's eyes. She began to feel furtively for
+her handkerchief.
+
+"And Dr. Lennox Tudor,"--he pronounced the name with elaborate care,--"he
+comes--often--for the same reason, I presume?"
+
+"He--he came to see me yesterday," faltered Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"Indeed!" The word was as water dropped from an icicle.
+
+She dabbed her eyes and bravely turned and faced him. "Stephen dear, I am
+very sorry. I didn't want to vex you unnecessarily. I hoped against
+hope--" She broke off, and knelt up before him, clasping his hand tightly
+against her breast. "Stephen--dearest, you said--when our firstborn
+came--that he was--God's gift."
+
+"Well?" Again that one, uncompromising word. The vertical line deepened
+between her husband's brows. His eyes looked coldly back at her.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer caught her breath on a little sob. "Will not this little
+one--be just as much so?" she whispered.
+
+He began to draw his hand away from her. "My dear Adelaide, we will not
+be foolishly sentimental. What must be, must. I am afraid I must ask you
+to run away now as I have yet to put the finishing touches to my sermon.
+Perhaps you will kindly request young Evesham on my behalf to make a
+little less noise."
+
+He deliberately put her from him, and prepared to rise. But Mrs. Lorimer
+suddenly and very unexpectedly rose first. She stood before him, slightly
+bending, her hands on his broad shoulders.
+
+"Will you kiss me, Stephen?" she said.
+
+He lifted a grim, reluctant face. She stooped, slipping her arms about
+his neck. "My own dear husband!" she whispered.
+
+He endured her embrace for a couple of seconds; then, "That will do,
+Adelaide," he said with decision. "You must not let yourself get
+emotional. Dear me! It is getting late. I am afraid I really must ask you
+to leave me."
+
+Her arms fell. She drew back, dispirited. "Forgive me,--oh, forgive me!"
+she murmured miserably.
+
+He turned back to his writing-table, still frowning. "I was not aware
+that I had anything to forgive," he said. "But if you think so,--" he
+shrugged his shoulders, beginning already to turn the pages of his
+masterpiece--"my forgiveness is yours. I wonder if you would care to
+divert your thoughts from what I am sure you will admit to be a purely
+selfish channel by listening to a portion of this Advent sermon."
+
+"What is it about?" asked Mrs. Lorimer, hesitating.
+
+"My theme," said the Reverend Stephen, "is the awful doom that awaits
+the unrepentant sinner."
+
+There was a moment's silence, and then Mrs. Lorimer did an extraordinary
+thing. She turned from him and walked to the door.
+
+"Thank you very much, Stephen," she said, and she spoke with decision
+albeit her voice was not wholly steady. "But I don't feel that that kind
+of diversion would do me much good. I think I shall run up to the nursery
+and see Baby Phil have his bath."
+
+She was gone; but so noiselessly that Mr. Lorimer, turning in his chair
+to rebuke her frivolity, found himself addressing the closed door.
+
+He turned back again with a heavy sigh. There seemed to be some
+disturbing element at work. Time had been when she had deemed it her
+dearest privilege to sit and listen to his sermons. He could not
+understand her refusal of an offer that ought to have delighted her. He
+hoped that her heart was not becoming hardened.
+
+Could he have seen her ascending the stairs at that moment with the tears
+running down her face, he might have realized that that fear at least was
+groundless.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE TICKET OF LEAVE
+
+
+Seated at the schoolroom piano, Piers was thoroughly in his element. He
+had a marvellous gift for making music, and his audience listened
+spell-bound. His own love for it amounted to a passion, inherited, so it
+was said, from his Italian grandmother. He threw his whole soul into the
+instrument under his hands, and played as one inspired.
+
+Jeanie, from her sofa, drank in the music with shining eyes. She had
+never heard anything to compare with it before, and it stirred her to
+the depths.
+
+It stirred Avery also, but in a different way. The personality of the
+player forced itself upon her with a curious insistence, and she had an
+odd feeling that he did it by deliberate intention. Every chord he struck
+seemed to speak to her directly, compelling her attention, dominating her
+will. He was playing to her alone, and, though she chose to ignore the
+fact, she was none the less aware of it. By his music he enthralled her,
+making her see the things he saw, making her feel the fiery unrest that
+throbbed in every beat of his heart.
+
+Gracie, standing beside him, watching with fascinated eyes the strong
+hands that charmed from the old piano such music as probably it had never
+before uttered, was enthralled also, but only in a superficial sense. She
+was keenly interested in the play of his fingers, which seemed to her
+quite wonderful, as indeed it was.
+
+He took no more notice of her admiring gaze than if she had been a fly,
+pouring out his magic flood of music with eyes fixed straight before him
+and lips that were sometimes hard and sometimes tender. He might have
+been a man in a trance.
+
+And then very suddenly the spell was broken. For no apparent reason, he
+fell headlong from his heights and burst into a merry little jig that set
+Gracie dancing like an elf.
+
+He became aware of her then, threw her a laugh, quickened to a mad
+tarantella that nearly whirled her off her feet, finally ended with a
+crashing chord, and whizzed round on the music-stool in time to catch her
+as she fell gasping against him.
+
+"What a featherweight you are!" he laughed. "You'll dance the Thames on
+fire some day. Giddy, what?"
+
+Gracie lay in his arms in a collapsed condition. "You--you made me do
+it!" she panted.
+
+"To be sure!" said Piers. "I'm a wizard. Didn't you know? I can make
+anybody do anything." There was a ring of triumph in his voice.
+
+Jeanie drew a deep breath and nodded from her sofa. "It's called
+hyp--hyp--Aunt Avery, what is the word?"
+
+"Aunt Avery doesn't know," said Piers. "And why Aunt Avery, I wonder?
+You'll be calling me Uncle Piers next."
+
+Both children laughed. "I have a special name for you," Jeanie said.
+
+But Piers was not attending. He cast a daring glance across the room at
+Avery who was darning stockings under the lamp.
+
+"Do they call you Aunt Avery because you are so old?" he enquired, as
+Avery did not respond to it.
+
+She smiled a little. "I expect so," she said.
+
+"Oh no!" said Jeanie politely. "Only because we are children and she is
+grown up."
+
+Piers, with Gracie still lounging comfortably on his knee, bowed to her.
+"I thank your majesty. I appeal to you as queen of this establishment; am
+I--as a grown-up--entitled to drop the title of Aunt when addressing the
+gracious lady in question?"
+
+Again he glanced towards Avery, but she did not raise her eyes. She
+worked on, still with that faint, enigmatical smile about her lips.
+
+Jeanie looked slightly dubious. "I don't think you could ever call her
+Aunt, could you?" she said.
+
+Piers turned upon the music-stool, and with one of Gracie's fingers began
+to pick out an impromptu tune that somehow had a saucy ring.
+
+"I like that," said Gracie, enchanted.
+
+He laughed. "Yes, it's pretty, isn't it? It's--Avery without the Aunt."
+
+He began to elaborate the tune, accompanying it with his left hand, to
+Gracie's huge delight, "Here we come into a minor key," he said, speaking
+obviously and exclusively to Gracie; "this is Avery when she is cross and
+inclined to be down on a fellow. And here we begin to get a little
+excited and breathless; this is Avery in a tantrum, getting angrier and
+angrier every moment." He hammered out his impertinent little melody with
+fevered energy, protest from Gracie notwithstanding. "No, you've never
+seen her in a tantrum of course. Thank your lucky stars you haven't! It's
+an awful sight, take my word for it! She calls you a brute and nearly
+knocks you down with a horsewhip." The music became very descriptive at
+this point; then gradually returned to the original refrain, somewhat
+amplified and embellished. "This is Avery in her everyday mood--sweet and
+kind and reasonable,--the Avery we all know and love--with just a hint
+of what the French call _'diablerie'_ to make her--_tout-à-fait
+adorable_."
+
+He cast his eyes up at the ceiling, and then, releasing Gracie's hand,
+brought his impromptu to a close with a few soft chords.
+
+"Here endeth the Avery Symphony!" he declared, swinging round again on
+the music-stool. "I could show you another Avery, but she is not on view
+to everybody. It's quite possible that she has never seen herself yet."
+
+He got up with the words, tweaked Gracie's hair, caressed Jeanie's, and
+strolled across to the fire beside which Avery sat with her work.
+
+"It's awfully kind of you to tolerate me like this," he said.
+
+"Isn't it?" said Avery, without raising her eyes.
+
+He looked down at her, an odd gleam in his own that came and went like a
+leaping flame.
+
+"You suffer fools gladly, don't you?" he said, a queer inflection that
+was half a challenge in his voice.
+
+She frowned very slightly above her stocking. "Not particularly," she
+said.
+
+"You bear with them then?" Piers tone was insistent.
+
+She paused as though considering her reply. "I generally try to avoid
+them," she said finally.
+
+"You keep aloof--and darn stockings," suggested Piers.
+
+"And listen to your music," said Avery.
+
+"Do you like my music?" He shot the question at her imperiously.
+
+Avery nodded.
+
+"Really? You do really?" There was boyish eagerness about him now. He
+leaned towards her, his brown face aglow.
+
+She nodded again. "Do you ever--write music?"
+
+"No," said Piers.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+He answered with a curious touch of bitterness. "No one would understand
+it if I did."
+
+"But what a mistake!" she said.
+
+"Is it? Why?" His voice sounded stubborn.
+
+She looked suddenly straight up at him and spoke with impulsive warmth.
+"Because it is quite beside the point. It wouldn't matter to anyone but
+yourself whether people understood it or not. Of course popularity is
+pleasant. Everyone likes it. But do you suppose the really big people
+think at all about the world's opinion when they are at work? They just
+give of their best because nothing less would satisfy them, but they
+don't do it because they want to be appreciated by the crowd. Genius
+always gets above the crowd. It's only those who can't rise above their
+critics who really care what the critics say."
+
+She stopped. Her face was flushed, her eyes kindling; but she lowered
+them very suddenly and returned to her work. For the fitful gleam in
+Piers' eyes had leaped in response to a blaze so hot, so ardent, that she
+could not meet it unflinching.
+
+She was oddly grateful to him when he passed her brief confusion by as
+though he had not seen it. "So I'm a genius, am I?" he said, and laughed
+a careless laugh. "Are you listening, Queen of my heart? Aunt Avery says
+I'm a genius."
+
+He moved to Jeanie's sofa, and sat down on the edge of it. Her hand stole
+instantly into his.
+
+"Yes, of course," she said, in her soft, tired voice. "That's what I
+meant when I was trying to remember that other word--the word that
+begins 'hyp.'"
+
+"Hypnotism," said Avery very quietly.
+
+Piers laughed again. "It's a word you don't understand, my Queen of all
+good fairies. It's only the naughty fairies--the will-o'-the-wisps and
+the hobgoblins--that know anything about it. It's a wicked spell
+concocted by the King of Evil himself, and it's only under that spell
+that his prisoners ever see the light. It's the one ticket of leave from
+the dungeons, and they must either use it or die in the dark."
+
+Jeanie was listening with a puzzled frown, but Gracie's imagination was
+instantly fired.
+
+"Do go on!" she said eagerly. "I know what a ticket of leave is. Nurse's
+uncle had one. It means you have to go back after a certain time,
+doesn't it?"
+
+"Exactly," said Piers grimly. "When the ticket expires."
+
+"But I don't see," began Jeanie. Her face was flushed and a little
+distressed. "How can hypnotism be like--like a ticket of leave?"
+
+"I told you you wouldn't understand," said Piers. "You see you've got to
+realize what hypnotism is before you can know what it's like. It's really
+the art of imposing one's will upon someone else's, of making that other
+person see things as you want them to see them--not as they really are.
+It's the power of deception carried to a superlative degree. And when
+that power is exhausted, the ticket may be said to have expired--and the
+prisoner returns to the dungeon. Sometimes he takes the other person with
+him. Sometimes he goes alone."
+
+He stopped abruptly as a hand rapped smartly on the door.
+
+Avery looked up again from her work. "Come in!" she said.
+
+"It's the doctor!" whispered Gracie to Piers. "Bother him!"
+
+Piers laughed with his lower lip between his teeth, and Lennox Tudor
+opened the door and paused upon the threshold.
+
+Avery rose to receive him, but his look passed her almost instantly and
+rested frowningly upon Piers.
+
+"Enter the Lord High Executioner!" said Piers flippantly. "Well? Who is
+the latest victim? And what have you come here for?"
+
+The doctor came in. He shook hands with Avery, and turned at once to
+Piers.
+
+"I have come to see my patient," he said aggressively.
+
+"Have you?" said Piers. "So have I." He stood up, squaring his broad
+shoulders. "And I'm coming again--by special invitation." His dark eyes
+flung a gibe with the words.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Evesham!" said Avery somewhat pointedly.
+
+He turned sharply, and took her extended hand with elaborate courtesy.
+
+"Good-bye,--Mrs. Denys!" he said.
+
+"I'll come down and see you off," cried Gracie, attaching herself to
+his free arm.
+
+"Ah! Wait a bit!" said Piers. "I haven't said good-bye to the Queen of
+the fairies yet."
+
+He dropped upon one knee by Jeanie's sofa. Her arm slid round his neck.
+
+"When will you come again?" she whispered.
+
+"When do you hold your next court?" he whispered back.
+
+She smiled, her pale face close to his. "I love to see you--always," she
+said. "Come just any time!"
+
+"Shall I?" said Piers.
+
+He was looking straight into the tired, blue eyes, and his own were soft
+with a tenderness that must have charmed any child to utter confidence.
+She lifted her lips to his. "As often as ever you can," she murmured.
+
+He kissed her. "I will. Good-night, my Queen!"
+
+"Good-night," she answered softly, "dear Sir Galahad!"
+
+Avery had a glimpse of Piers' face as he went away, and she wondered
+momentarily at the look it wore.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SPORT
+
+
+It was the day before Christmas Eve, and Avery had been shopping.
+
+She and Mrs. Lorimer were preparing a Christmas Tree for the children, a
+secret to which only Jeanie had been admitted. The tree itself was
+already procured and hidden away in a corner of the fruit cupboard--to
+which special sanctum Mrs. Lorimer and Avery alone had access. But the
+numerous gifts and ornaments which they had been manufacturing for weeks
+were safely stored in a corner of Avery's own room. It was to complete
+this store that Avery had been down into Rodding that afternoon, and she
+was returning laden and somewhat wearied.
+
+The red light of a cloudy winter sunset lay behind her. Ahead of her, now
+veiled, now splendidly revealed, there hung a marvellous, glimmering
+star. A little weight of sadness was dragging at her heart, but she would
+not give it place or so much as acknowledge its presence. She hummed a
+carol as she went, stepping lightly through the muddy fields.
+
+The frost had given place to an unseasonable warmth, and there had been
+some heavy rain earlier in the day. It was threatening to rain again. In
+fact, as she mounted her second stile, the first drops of what promised
+to be a sharp shower began to fall. She cast a hasty glance around for
+shelter, and spied some twenty yards away against the hedge a hut which
+had probably been erected for the use of some shepherd. Swiftly she made
+for it, reaching it just as the shower became a downpour.
+
+There was neither door nor window to the place, but an ancient shutter
+which had evidently done duty for the former was lodged against the wall
+immediately inside.
+
+She had to stoop to enter, and but for the pelting rain she might have
+hesitated to do so; for the darkness within was complete. But once in,
+she turned her face back to the dying light of the sunset and saw that
+the rain would not last.
+
+At the same moment she heard a curious sound behind her, a panting,
+coughing sound as of some creature in distress, and something stirred in
+the furthest corner. Sharply she turned, and out of the darkness two wild
+green eyes glared up at her.
+
+Avery's heart gave a great jerk. Instinctively she drew back. Her first
+impulse was to turn and flee, but something--something which at the
+moment she could not define--prompted her to remain. The frantic terror
+of those eyes appealed to that in her which was greater than her own
+personal fear.
+
+She paused therefore, and in the pause there came to her ears a swelling
+tumult that arose from the ridge of an eminence a couple of fields away.
+Right well Avery knew that sound. In the far-off days of her early
+girlhood it had quickened her pulses many a time. It was enough even now
+to set every nerve throbbing with a tense excitement.
+
+She turned her face once more to the open, and as she did so she heard
+again in the hut behind her that agonized sound, half-cough, half-whine,
+of an animal exhausted and in the extremity of mortal fear.
+
+It was enough for Avery. She grasped the situation on the instant, and
+on the instant she acted. She felt as if a helpless and tortured being
+had cried to her for deliverance, and all that was great in her
+responded to the cry.
+
+She seized the crazy shutter that was propped against the wall, put forth
+her strength, and lifted it out into the open. It was no easy matter to
+set it securely against the low doorway. She wondered afterwards how she
+did it; at the time she tore her gloves to ribbons with the exertion, but
+yet was scarcely aware of making any.
+
+When the pack swept across the grass in a single yelling, heaving mass,
+she was ready. She leaned against the improvised door with arms
+outstretched and resolutely faced the swarming, piebald multitude.
+
+In a moment the hounds were upon her. She was waist-deep in them. They
+leapt almost to her shoulders in their madness, smothering her with mud
+and slobber. For a second or two the red eyes and gaping jaws made even
+Avery's brave heart quail. But she stood her ground, ordering them back
+with breathless insistence. They must have thought her a maniac, she
+reflected afterwards. At the time she fully expected to be torn in
+pieces, and was actually surprised when they suddenly parted and swept
+round the hut, encircling it with deep-mouthed baying.
+
+The huntsman, arriving on the scene, found her white-faced but still
+determined, still firmly propping the shutter in place with the weight of
+her body. He called the hounds to order with hoarse oaths and furious
+crackings of the whip, and as he did so the rest of the field began to
+arrive, a laughing, trampling crowd of sportsmen who dropped into
+staring, astounded silence as they reached the scene.
+
+And then the huntsman addressed Avery with sardonic affability.
+
+"P'r'aps now, miss, you'd be good enough to step aside and let the 'ounds
+attend to business."
+
+But Avery, with eyes that blazed in her pale face, made scathing answer.
+
+"You shan't kill the poor brute like a rat in a trap. He deserves better
+than that. You had your chance of killing in the open, and you failed. It
+isn't sport to kill in the dark."
+
+"We'll soon have 'im out," said the huntsman grimly.
+
+She shook her head. Her hands, in the ripped gloves, were clenched and
+quivering.
+
+The huntsman slashed and swore at one of the hounds to relieve his
+feelings, and looked for inspiration to the growing crowd of riders.
+
+One of them, the M.F.H., Colonel Rose of Wardenhurst, pushed his horse
+forward. He raised his hat with extreme courtliness.
+
+"Madam," he said, "while appreciating your courage, allow me to point out
+that that fox is now the legal property of the Hunt, and you have no
+right whatever to deprive us of it."
+
+His daughter Ina, a slim girl of twenty, was at his elbow. She jogged it
+impatiently. "He'll remain our property whether we kill or not, Dad. Let
+him live to run again!"
+
+"What?" cried a voice in the rear. "Let a woman interfere? Great Heavens
+above, Barchard! Have you gone mad?"
+
+Barchard the huntsman glanced round uneasily as an old man on a powerful
+white horse forced his way to the front. His grey eyes glowered down at
+Avery as though he would slay her. The trampling hoofs came within a yard
+of her. But if he thought to make her desert her post by that means, he
+was mistaken. She stood there, actually waiting to be hustled by the
+fretting animal, and yielding not an inch.
+
+"Stand aside!" thundered Sir Beverley. "Confound you! Stand aside!"
+
+But Avery never stirred. She faced him panting but unflinching. The foam
+of his hunter splashed her, the mud from the stamping hoofs struck
+upwards on her face; but still she stood to defend the defenceless thing
+behind her.
+
+She often wondered afterwards what Sir Beverley would have done had he
+been left to settle the matter in his own way. She was horribly afraid,
+but she certainly would never have yielded to aught but brute force.
+
+But at this juncture there came a sudden diversion. Another voice made
+itself heard in furious protest. Another horse was spurred forward; and
+Piers, white to the lips, with eyes of awful flame, leaned from his
+saddle and with his left hand caught Sir Beverley's bridle, dragging his
+animal back.
+
+What he said Avery did not hear; it was spoken under his breath. But she
+saw a terrible look flash like an evil spirit into Sir Beverley's face.
+She saw his right arm go up, and heard his riding-crop descend with a
+sound like a pistol-shot upon Piers' shoulders.
+
+It was a horrible sight and one which she was never to forget. Both
+horses began to leap madly, the one Sir Beverley rode finally rearing and
+being pulled down again by Piers who hung on to the bridle like grim
+death, his head bent, his shoulders wholly exposed to those crashing
+merciless blows.
+
+They reeled away at length through the crowd, which scattered in dismay
+to let them pass, but for many seconds it seemed to Avery that the
+awful struggle went on in the dusk as Piers dragged his grandfather
+from the spot.
+
+A great weakness had begun to assail her. Her knees were quivering under
+her. She wondered what the next move would be, and felt utterly powerless
+to put forth any further effort. And then she heard Ina Rose's clear
+young voice.
+
+"Barchard, take the hounds back to kennels! I'm sure we've all had enough
+for one day."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said a man in the crowd.
+
+And Ina laughed. "Thank you, Dick! Come along, Dad! Leave the horrid old
+fox alone! Don't you think we ought to go and separate Sir Beverley and
+Piers? What an old pepper-pot he is!"
+
+"Piers isn't much better," remarked the man she had called Dick. His
+proper appellation was Richard Guyes, but his friends never stood on
+ceremony with him.
+
+The girl laughed again inconsequently. She was spoken of by some as the
+spoilt beauty of the county. "Oh, Piers is stuffed tight with gunpowder
+as everybody knows. He explodes at a touch. Get along, Barchard! What are
+you waiting for? I told you to take the hounds home."
+
+Barchard looked at the Colonel.
+
+"I suppose you'd better," the latter said. He threw a glance of
+displeasure at Avery. "It's a most unheard of affair altogether, but I
+admit there's not much to be said for a kill in cold blood. Yes, take
+'em home!"
+
+Barchard made a savage cut at two of the hounds who were scratching and
+whimpering at a tiny chink in the boarding, and with surly threats
+collected the pack and moved off.
+
+The rest of the field melted away into the deepening dusk. Ina and Dick
+Guyes were among the last to go. They moved off side by side.
+
+"It'll be the laugh of the county," the man said, "but, egad, I like
+her pluck."
+
+And in answer the girl laughed again, a careless, merry laugh. "Yes, I
+wonder who she is. A friend of Piers' apparently. Did you see what a
+stiff fury he was in?"
+
+"It was a fairly stiff flogging," remarked Guyes. "Ye gods! I wonder how
+he stood it."
+
+"Oh, Piers can stand anything," said Ina unconcernedly. "He's as strong
+as an ox."
+
+The voices dwindled and died in the distance. The dusk deepened. A sense
+of utter forlornness, utter weariness, came upon Avery. The struggle was
+over, and she had emerged triumphant; but it did not seem to matter. She
+could think only of those awful blows raining down upon the defenceless
+shoulders of the boy who had championed her. And, leaning there in the
+drizzling wet, she covered her face with her hands and wept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE STAR OF HOPE
+
+
+There came the swift drumming of galloping hoofs, the check and pause of
+a leap, and then close at hand the thud of those same hoofs landing on
+the near side of the hedge. The rider slithered to the ground, patted the
+animal's neck, and turned forthwith towards the hut. Avery heard nought
+of his coming. She was crying like a weak, unnerved woman, draggled and
+mud-spattered, unspeakably distressed. It was so seldom that she gave way
+that perhaps the failure of her self-control was the more absolute when
+it came. She had been tried beyond her strength. Body and mind were alike
+exhausted.
+
+But when strong arms suddenly encircled her and she found herself drawn
+close to a man's breast, quick and instinctive came the impulse to
+resist. She drew back from him with a sharp exclamation.
+
+"It's only me," said Piers. "Surely you don't mind me!"
+
+It was naively expressed, so naively that she assayed to laugh in the
+midst of her woe. "Oh, how you startled me!" was all she found to say.
+
+"But surely you knew I was coming back!" he said.
+
+The dogged note was in his voice. It embarrassed her subtly. Seeing his
+face through the deepening gloom, it seemed to her to be set in stern,
+unyielding lines.
+
+She collected her scattered forces, and gently put his arms away from
+her. "It was very kind of you, Mr. Evesham," she said. "But please
+remember that I'm not Jeanie!"
+
+He made an impulsive movement of impatience. "I never pretended you
+were," he said gruffly. "But you were crying, weren't you? Why were
+you crying?"
+
+His tone was almost aggressive. He seemed to be angry, but whether with
+her, himself, or a third person, Avery could not determine.
+
+She decided that the situation demanded firmness, and proceeded to treat
+it accordingly.
+
+"I was very foolish to cry," she said. "I have quite recovered now, so
+please forget it! It was very kind of you to take my part a little while
+ago--especially as you couldn't have been really in sympathy with me.
+Thank you very much!"
+
+Again he made that gesture of imperious impatience. "Oh, don't be so
+beastly formal! I can't stand it. If it had been any other man
+threatening you, I believe I should have killed him!"
+
+He spoke with concentrated passion, but Avery was resolved not to be
+tragic. She was striving to get back to wholesome commonplace.
+
+"What a good thing it wasn't!" she said. "I shouldn't have cared to have
+been responsible for that. I had quite enough to answer for as it was. I
+hope you will make peace with your grandfather as soon as possible."
+
+Piers laughed a savage laugh. "He broke his whip over me. Do you think
+I'm going to make peace with him for that?"
+
+"Oh, Piers!" she exclaimed in distress.
+
+It was out before she could check it--that involuntary use of his
+Christian name for which it seemed to her afterwards he had been
+deliberately lying in wait.
+
+He did not take immediate advantage of her slip, but she knew that he
+noticed it, registered it as it were for future reference.
+
+"No," he said moodily, after a pause. "I don't think the debt is on my
+side this time. He had the satisfaction of flogging me with the whole
+Hunt looking on." There was sullen resentment in his tone, and then very
+suddenly to Avery's amazement he began to laugh. "It was worth it anyway,
+so we won't cavil about the price. How much longer are you going to
+bottle up that unfortunate brute? Don't you think it's time he went home
+to his wife?"
+
+Avery moved away from the shutter against which she had stood so long. "I
+couldn't let him be killed," she said. "You won't understand, of course.
+But I simply couldn't."
+
+"Why shouldn't I understand?" said Piers. "You threw that in my teeth
+before. I don't know why."
+
+His tone baffled her. She could not tell whether he spoke in jest or
+earnest. She refrained from answering him, and in the silence that
+followed he lifted the shutter away from the hut entrance and looked
+inside. Avery's basket of purchases lay at his feet. He picked it up.
+"Come along! He's crouched up in the corner, and his eyes look as if he
+thought all the devils in hell were after him. Odd as it may seem to you,
+I can understand his feelings--and yours. Let's go, and leave him to
+escape in peace!"
+
+He took her arm as naturally as though he had a right, and led her
+away. Her basket was in his other hand in which he carried his
+riding-whip also. He whistled over his shoulder to his horse who
+followed him like a dog.
+
+The rain was gradually ceasing, but the clouds had wholly closed upon the
+sunset. Avery did not want to walk in silence, but somehow she could not
+help it. His hold upon her arm was as light as a feather, but she could
+not help that either for the moment. She walked as one beneath a spell.
+
+And before them the clouds slowly parted, and again there shone that
+single, magic star, dazzingly pure against the darkness.
+
+"Do you see that?" said Piers suddenly.
+
+She assented almost under her breath.
+
+For a moment she was conscious of the tightening of his hand at her
+elbow. "It's the Star of Hope, Avery," he whispered. "Yours--and mine."
+He stopped with the words. "Don't say anything!" he said hurriedly.
+"Pretend you didn't hear, if--if you wish you hadn't. Goodbye!"
+
+He thrust her basket into her hand, and turned from her.
+
+A moment he stood as if to give her the opportunity of detaining him
+if she so desired, and then as she made no sign he went to his horse
+who waited a couple of yards away, mounted, and without word or salute
+rode away.
+
+Avery drew a deep, deep breath and walked on. There was a curious
+sensation at her heart--almost a trapped feeling--such as she had never
+before experienced. Again deeply she drew her breath, as if to rid
+herself of some oppression. Life was difficult--life was difficult!
+
+But presently, as she walked, the sense of oppression lessened. She
+even faintly smiled to herself. What an odd, passionate youth he was!
+It was impossible to be angry with him; better far not to take him
+seriously at all.
+
+She recalled old Mrs. Marshall's dour remarks concerning him;--"brought
+up by men from his cradle," brought up, moreover, by that terrible old
+Sir Beverley on the one hand and an irresponsible French valet on the
+other. She caught herself wishing that she had had the upbringing of him,
+and smiled again. There was a great deal of sweetness in his nature; of
+that she was sure, and because of it she found she could forgive his
+waywardness, reflecting that he had probably been mismanaged from his
+earliest infancy.
+
+At this point she reached the high-road, and heard the wheels of a
+dog-cart behind her. She recognized the quick, hard trot of the doctor's
+cob, and paused at the side of the road to let him pass. But the doctor's
+eyes behind their glasses were keen as a hawk's. He recognized her, the
+deepening dusk notwithstanding, while he was still some yards from her,
+and pulled in his horse to a walk.
+
+"Jump up!" he said. "I'm going your way."
+
+He reached down a hand to her, and Avery mounted beside him. "How lucky
+for me!" she said.
+
+"Tired, eh?" he questioned.
+
+She laughed a little. "Oh no, not really. But it's nice to get a lift.
+Were you coming to see Jeanie?"
+
+"Yes," said Tudor briefly.
+
+She glanced at him, caught by something in his tone. "Dr. Tudor," she
+said, after a moment's hesitation, "are you--altogether--satisfied
+about her?"
+
+Tudor was looking at his horse's ears; for some reason he was holding the
+animal in to a walk. "I am quite satisfied with regard to the fracture,"
+he said. "She will soon be on her legs again."
+
+His words were deliberately wary. Avery felt a little tremor of
+apprehension go through her.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't consider her very strong," she said uneasily.
+
+He did not at once reply. She had a feeling that he was debating within
+himself as to the advisability of replying at all. And then quite
+suddenly he turned his head and spoke. "Mrs. Denys, you are accustomed to
+hearing other people's burdens, so I may as well tell you the truth. I
+can't say--because I don't know--if there is anything radically wrong
+with that little girl; but she has no stamina whatever. If she had to
+contend with anything serious, things would go very badly with her. In
+any case--" he paused.
+
+"Yes?" said Avery.
+
+Tudor had become wary again. "Perhaps I have said enough," he said.
+
+"I don't know why you should hesitate to speak quite openly," she
+rejoined steadily. "As you say, I am a bearer of burdens. And I don't
+think I am easily frightened."
+
+"I am sure you are not," he said. "If I may be allowed to say so, I think
+you are essentially a woman to be relied on. If I did not think so, I
+certainly should not have spoken as I have done."
+
+"Then will you tell me what it is that you fear for her?" Avery said.
+
+He was looking straight at her through the gloom, but she could not see
+his eyes behind their glasses. "Well," he said somewhat brusquely at
+length, "to be quite honest, I fear--mind you, I only fear--some trouble,
+possibly merely some delicacy, of the lungs. Without a careful
+examination I cannot speak definitely. But I think there is little room
+for doubt that the tendency is there."
+
+"I see," Avery said. She was silent a moment; then, "You have not
+considered it advisable to say this to her father?" she said.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "Would it make any difference?"
+
+Avery was silent.
+
+He went on with gathering force. "I went to him once, Mrs. Denys,--once
+only--about his wife's health. I told him in plain language that she
+needed every care, every consideration, that without these she would
+probably lose all her grip on life and become a confirmed invalid with
+shattered nerves. I was very explicit. I told him the straight,
+unvarnished truth. I didn't like my job, but I felt it must be done. And
+he--good man--laughed in my face, begged me to croak no more, and assured
+me that he was fully capable of managing all his affairs, including his
+wife and family, in his own way. He was touring in Switzerland when the
+last child was born."
+
+"Hound!" said Avery, in a low voice.
+
+Tudor uttered a brief laugh, and abruptly quitted the subject. "That
+little girl needs very careful watching, Mrs. Denys. She should never be
+allowed to overtire herself, mentally or physically. And if she should
+develop any untoward symptom, for Heaven's sake don't hesitate to send
+for me! I shan't blame you for being too careful."
+
+"I understand," Avery said.
+
+He flicked his horse's ears, and the animal broke into a trot.
+
+When Tudor spoke again, it was upon a totally different matter. His voice
+was slightly aggressive as he said: "That Evesham boy seems to be for
+ever turning up at the Vicarage now. He's an ill-mannered cub. I wonder
+you encourage him."
+
+"Do I encourage him?" Avery asked.
+
+He made a movement of irritation. "He would scarcely be such a constant
+visitor if you didn't."
+
+Avery smiled faintly and not very humorously in the darkness. "It is
+Jeanie he comes to see," she observed.
+
+"Oh, obviously." Tudor's retort was so ironical as to be almost rude.
+
+She received it in silence, and after a moment he made a half-grudging
+amendment.
+
+"He never showed any interest in Jeanie before, you know. I don't think
+she is the sole attraction."
+
+"No?" said Avery.
+
+Her response was perfectly courteous, but so vague that it sounded to
+Lennox Tudor as if she were thinking of something else. He clenched his
+hand hard upon the handle of his whip.
+
+"People tolerate him for the sake of his position," he said bitterly.
+"But to my mind he is insufferable. His father was a scapegrace, as
+everyone knows. His mother was a circus girl. And his grandmother--an
+Italian--was divorced by Sir Beverley before they had been married
+two years."
+
+"Oh!" Avery emerged from her vagueness and turned towards him. "Lady
+Evesham was Italian, was she? That accounts for his appearance, doesn't
+it? That air of the old Roman patrician about him; you must have
+noticed it?"
+
+"He's handsome enough," admitted Tudor.
+
+"Oh, very handsome," said Avery. "I should say that for that type his
+face was almost faultless. I wondered where he got it from. Sir Beverley
+is patrician too, but in a different way." She stopped to bow to a tall,
+gaunt lady at the side of the road. "That is Miss Whalley. Didn't you see
+her? I expect she has just come from the Vicarage. She was going to
+discuss the scheme for the Christmas decorations with the Vicar."
+
+"She's good at scheming," growled Tudor.
+
+Avery became silent again. At the Vicarage gates however very suddenly
+and sweetly she spoke. "Dr. Tudor, forgive me,--but isn't it rather a
+pity to let oneself get intolerant? It does spoil life so."
+
+He looked at her. "There's not much in my life that could spoil," he
+said gloomily.
+
+She laughed a little, but not derisively. "But there's always something,
+isn't there? Have you no sense of humour?"
+
+He pulled up at the Vicarage gates. "I have a sense of the ridiculous,"
+he said bluntly. "And I detest it in the person of Miss Whalley."
+
+"I believe you detest a good many people," Avery said, as she descended.
+
+He laughed himself at that. "But I am capable of appreciating the few,"
+he said. "Mind the step! And don't trouble to wait for me! I've got to
+tie this animal up."
+
+He stopped to do so, and Avery opened the gate and walked slowly
+up the path.
+
+At the porch she paused to await him, and turned her face for a moment to
+the darkening sky. But the Star of Hope was veiled.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A PAIR OF GLOVES
+
+
+"Piers! Where the devil are you, Piers?"
+
+There was loud exasperation in the query as Sir Beverley halted in the
+doorway of his grandson's bedroom.
+
+There was a moment's pause; then Victor the valet came quickly forward.
+
+"But, _Monsieur Pierre_, he bathe himself," he explained, with beady eyes
+running over the gaunt old figure in the entrance.
+
+Sir Beverley growled at him inarticulately and turned away.
+
+A moment later he was beating a rousing tattoo on the bathroom-door.
+"Piers! Let me in! Do you hear? Let me in!"
+
+The vigorous splashing within came to a sudden stop. "That you, sir?"
+called Piers.
+
+"Of course it's me!" shouted back Sir Beverley, shaking the door
+with fierce impatience. "Damn it, let me in! I'll force the door if
+you don't."
+
+"No, don't, sir; don't! I'm coming!"
+
+There came the sound of a splashing leap, and bare feet raced across the
+bathroom floor. The door was wrenched from Sir Beverley's grasp, and
+flung open. Piers, quite naked, stood back and bowed him in with
+elaborate ceremony.
+
+Sir Beverley entered and glared at him.
+
+Piers shut the door and took a flying jump back into the bath. The room
+was dense with steam.
+
+"You don't mind if I go on with my wash, do you?" he said. "I shall be
+late for dinner if I don't."
+
+"What in thunder do you want to boil yourself like this for?" demanded
+Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers, seated with his hands clasped round his knees, looked up with the
+smile of an infant. "It suits my constitution, sir," he said. "I freeze
+myself in the morning and boil myself at night--always. By that means I
+am rendered impervious to all atmospheric changes of temperature."
+
+"You're a fool, Piers," said Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers laughed, a gay, indifferent laugh. "That all?" he said lightly.
+
+"No, it isn't all." Sir Beverley's voice had a curious forced ring,
+almost as if he were stern in spite of himself. "I came to ask--and I
+mean to know--" He broke off. "What the devil have you done to your
+shoulders?"
+
+Piers' hands unlocked as if at the touch of a spring. He slipped down
+backwards into the bath and lay with the water lapping round his black
+head. His eyes, black also, and very straight and resolute, looked up at
+Sir Beverley.
+
+"Look here, sir; if there's anything you want to know I'll tell you after
+dinner. I thought--possibly--you'd come to shake hands, or I shouldn't
+have been in such a hurry to let you in. As it is,--"
+
+"Confound you, Piers!" broke in Sir Beverley. "Don't preach to me! Sit up
+again! Do you hear? Sit up, and let me look at you!"
+
+But Piers made no movement to comply. "No, sir; thanks all the same. I
+don't want to be looked at. Do you mind going now? I'm going to splash."
+
+His tone was deliberately jaunty, but it held undoubted determination.
+He kept his eyes unswervingly on his grandfather's face.
+
+Sir Beverley stood his ground, however, his black brows fiercely drawn.
+"Get up, Piers!" he ordered, his tone no longer blustering, but curtly
+peremptory. "Get up, do you hear?" he added with a gleam of humour. "You
+may as well give in at once, you young mule. You'll have to in the end."
+
+"Shall I?" said Piers.
+
+And then suddenly his own sense of humour was kindled again, and he
+uttered his boyish laugh.
+
+"We won't quarrel about it, what?" he said, and stretched a wet hand
+upwards. "Let's consider the incident closed! There's nothing whatever to
+be fashed about."
+
+Sir Beverley's thin lips twitched a little. He pulled at the hand, and
+slowly Piers yielded. The water dripped from his shoulders. They gleamed
+in the strong light like a piece of faultless statuary, godlike, superbly
+strong. But it was upon no splendour of form that Sir Beverley's
+attention was focussed.
+
+He spoke after a moment, an odd note of contrition in his voice. "I
+didn't mean to mark you like that, boy. It was your own doing of course.
+You shouldn't have interfered with me. Still--"
+
+"Oh, rats!" said Piers, beginning to splash. "What's a whacking more or
+less when you're used to 'em?"
+
+His dark eyes laughed their impudent dismissal to the old man. It was
+very evident that he desired to put an end to the matter, and after a
+moment Sir Beverley grunted and withdrew.
+
+He had not asked what he wanted to know; somehow it had not been
+possible. He had desired to put his question in a whirl of righteous
+indignation, but in some fashion Piers had disarmed him and it had
+remained unuttered.
+
+The very sight of the straight, young figure had quenched the fire of
+his wrath. Confound the boy! Did he think he could insult him as he had
+insulted him only that afternoon and then twist him round his little
+finger? He would have it out with him presently. He would have the truth
+and no compromise, if he had to wring it out of him. He would--Again the
+vision of those strong young shoulders, with red stripes crossing their
+gleaming white surface, rose before Sir Beverley. He swore a strangled
+oath. No, he hadn't meant to punish the boy to that extent, his infernal
+impudence notwithstanding. It wasn't the first time he had thrashed him,
+and, egad, it mightn't be the last. But he hadn't meant to administer
+quite such a punishment as that. It was decent of the young rascal not to
+sulk after it, though he wasn't altogether sure that he approved of the
+light fashion with which Piers had elected to treat the whole episode. It
+looked as if he had not wholly taken to heart the lesson Sir Beverley had
+intended to convey, and if that were the case--again Sir Beverley swore
+deep in his soul--he was fully equal to repeating it, ay, and again
+repeating it, until the youngster came to heel. He never had endured any
+nonsense from Piers, and, by Gad, he never would!
+
+With these reflections he stumped downstairs, and seated himself on the
+black, oaken settle in the hall to await the boy's advent.
+
+The fire blazed cheerily, flinging ruddy gleams upon the shining suits of
+armour, roaring up the chimney in a sheet of flame. Sir Beverley sat
+facing the stairs, the grim lines hardened to implacability about his
+mouth, his eyes fixed in a stare that had in it something brutal. He was
+seeing again that slim, straight figure of womanhood standing in his
+path, with arms outstretched, and white, determined face upraised,
+barring the way.
+
+"Curse her!" he growled. "Curse 'em all!"
+
+The vision grew before his gaze of hate; and now she was no longer
+standing between him and a mere, defenceless animal. But there, on his
+own stairs, erect and fearless, she withstood him, while behind her,
+descending with a laugh on his lips and worship in his eyes, came Piers.
+
+The stone-grey eyes became suffused; for a few, whirling moments of
+bewilderment and fury, they saw all things red. Then, gradually, the mist
+cleared, and the old man dropped back in a lounging posture with an ugly
+sound in his throat that was like a snarl. Doubtless that was her game;
+doubtless--doubtless! He had always known that a day would come when
+something of the kind would happen. Piers was young, wealthy,
+handsome,--a catch for any woman; but--fiercely he swore it--he should
+fall a prey to no schemer. When he married--as marry eventually he
+must--he should make an alliance of which any man might be proud. The
+Evesham blood should mix with none but the highest. In Piers he would see
+the father's false step counteracted. He thanked Heaven that he had never
+been able to detect in the boy any trace of the piece of cheap prettiness
+that had given him birth. He might have been his own son, son of the
+woman who had been the rapture and the ruin of his life. There were times
+when Sir Beverley almost wished he had been, albeit in the bitterness of
+his soul he had never had any love for the child she had borne him.
+
+He had never wanted to love Piers either, but somehow the matter had not
+rested with him. From the arms of Victor, Piers had always yearned to his
+grandfather, wailing lustily till he found himself held to the hard old
+heart that had nought but harshness and intolerance for all the world
+beside. He had as it were taken that unwilling heart by storm, claiming
+it as his right before he was out of his cradle. And later the attachment
+between them had grown and thriven, for Piers had never relinquished the
+ground he had won in babyhood. By sheer arrogance of possession he had
+held his own till the impetuous ardour of his affection and the utter
+fearlessness on which it was founded had made of him the cherished idol
+of the heart which had tried to shut him out. Sir Beverley gloried in the
+boy though he still flattered himself that no one suspected the fact, and
+still believed that his rule was a rule of stern discipline under which
+Piers might chafe but against which he would never openly revolt.
+
+He could not remember a single occasion upon which he had not been able
+to master Piers, possibly after a fierce struggle but always with
+absolute completeness in the end. And there was so much of sweetness in
+the youngster's nature that, unruly though he might be, he never nurtured
+a grievance. He would fight for his own way to the last of his strength,
+but when beaten he always yielded with a good grace. To his grandfather
+alone he could submit without any visible wound to his pride. Who could
+help glorying in a boy like that?
+
+David the butler, a man of infinite respectability, came softly into the
+hall and approached his master.
+
+"Are you ready for dinner, Sir Beverley?"
+
+"No," snapped Sir Beverley. "Can't you see Master Piers isn't here?"
+
+"Very good, sir," murmured David, and retired decorously, fading into
+the background without the faintest sound, while Caesar the Dalmatian
+who had entered with him lay sedately down in well-bred silence at Sir
+Beverley's feet.
+
+There fell a pause, while Sir Beverley's eyes returned to the wide oak
+staircase, watching it ceaselessly, with vulture-like intentness. Then
+after the passage of minutes, there came the sound of feet that literally
+scampered along the corridor above, and in a moment, with meteor-like
+suddenness, Piers flashed into view.
+
+He seemed to descend the stairs without touching them, and was greeted
+at the foot by Caesar, who leapt to meet him with wide-mouthed delight.
+
+"Hullo, you scamp, hullo!" laughed Piers, responding to the dog's
+caresses with a careless hand. "Out of the way with you! I'm late."
+
+"As usual," observed Sir Beverley, leaning slowly forward, still with his
+eyes unblinkingly fixed upon his grandson's merry face. "Come here, boy!"
+
+Piers came to him unabashed.
+
+Sir Beverley got heavily to his feet and took him by the shoulder. "Who
+is that woman, Piers?" he said, regarding him piercingly.
+
+Piers' forehead was instantly drawn by a quick frown. He stood passive,
+but there was a suggestion of resistance about him notwithstanding.
+
+"Whom do you mean, sir?" he said. "What woman?"
+
+"You know very well who I mean," snarled Sir Beverley. "Come, I'll have
+none of your damn' nonsense. Never have stood it and never will. Who was
+that white-faced cat that got in my way this afternoon and helped you to
+a thrashing? Eh, Piers? Who was she, I say? Who was she?"
+
+Piers made a sharp involuntary movement of the hands, and as swiftly
+restrained himself. He looked his grandfather full in the face.
+
+"Ask me after dinner, sir," he said, speaking with something of an
+effort, "and I'll tell you all I know."
+
+"You'll tell me now!" declared Sir Beverley, shaking the shoulder he
+gripped with savage impatience.
+
+But Piers put up a quick hand and stopped him. "No, sir, not now. Come
+and dine first! I've no mind to go dinnerless to bed. Come, sir, don't
+badger me!" He smiled suddenly and very winningly into the stern grey
+eyes. "There's all the evening before us, and I shan't shirk."
+
+He drew the bony old hand away from his shoulder, and pulled it
+through his arm.
+
+"I suppose you think you're irresistible," grumbled Sir Beverley. "I
+don't know why I put up with you; on my soul, I don't, you impudent
+young dog!"
+
+Piers laughed. "Let's do one thing at a time anyway, and I'm ravenous for
+dinner. So must you be. Come along! Let's trot in and have it!"
+
+He had his way. Sir Beverley went with him, though half against his will.
+They entered the dining-room still linked together, and a woman's face
+smiled down upon them from a picture-frame on the wall with a smile
+half-sad, half-mocking--such a smile as even at that moment curved Piers'
+lips, belying the reckless gaiety of his eyes.
+
+They dined in complete amicability. Piers had plenty to say at all times,
+and he showed himself completely at his ease. He was the only person in
+the world who ever was so in Sir Beverley's presence. He even now and
+then succeeded in provoking a sardonic laugh from his grandfather. His
+own laughter was boyishly spontaneous.
+
+But at the end of the meal, when wine was placed upon the table, he
+suddenly ceased his careless chatter, and leaned forward with his dark
+eyes full upon Sir Beverley's face.
+
+"Now, sir, you want to know the name of the girl who wasn't afraid of you
+this afternoon, I mentioned her to you once before. Her name is Avery
+Denys. She is a widow; and she calls herself the mother's help at the
+Vicarage."
+
+He gave his information with absolute steadiness. His voice was
+wholly free from emotion of any sort, but it rang a trifle stern, and
+his mouth--that sensitive, clean-cut mouth of his--had the grimness
+of an iron resolution about it. Sir Beverley looked at him frowningly
+over his wine.
+
+"The woman who threw a pail of water over you once, eh?" he said, after
+a moment. "I suppose she has become a very special friend in
+consequence."
+
+"I doubt if she would call herself so," said Piers.
+
+The old man's mouth took a bitter, downward curve. "You see, you're
+rather young," he observed.
+
+Piers' eyes fell away from his abruptly. "Yes, I know," he said, in a
+tone that seemed to hide more than it expressed.
+
+Sir Beverley continued to stare at him, but he did not lift his eyes
+again. They were fixed steadily upon the ruby light that shone in the
+wine in front of him.
+
+The silence lengthened and became oppressive. Sir Beverley still watched
+Piers' intent face. His lips moved soundlessly, while behind his silence
+the storm of his wrath gathered.
+
+What did the boy mean by treating him like this? Did he think he would
+endure to be set aside thus deliberately as one whose words had no
+weight? Did he think--confound him!--did he think that he had reached
+his dotage?
+
+A sudden oath escaped him; he banged a furious fist upon the table. He
+would make himself heard at least.
+
+In the same instant quite unexpectedly Piers leaped to his feet with
+uplifted hand. "What's that?"
+
+"What do you mean?" thundered Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers' hand descended, gripping his arm. "That, sir, that! Don't
+you hear?"
+
+Voice and gesture compelled. Sir Beverley stopped dead, arrested in full
+career by his grandson's insistence, and listened with pent breath, as
+Piers was listening.
+
+For a moment or two he heard nothing, then, close outside the window,
+there arose the sound of children's voices. They were singing a hymn, but
+not in the customary untuneful yell of the village school. The voices
+were clear and sweet and true, and the words came distinct and pure to
+the two men standing at the table.
+
+"He comes, the prisoners to release
+In Satan's bondage held,
+The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+Piers' hand tightened all-unconsciously upon Sir Beverley's arm. His face
+was very white. In his eyes there shone a curious hunger--such a look as
+might have gleamed in the eyes of the prisoners behind the gates.
+
+Again came the words, triumphantly repeated:
+
+"The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+And an odd sound that was almost a sob broke from Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley looked at him sharply; but in the same moment he drew
+back, relinquishing his hold, and stepped lightly across the room to
+the window.
+
+There was a decided pause before the next verse. Piers stood with his
+face to the blind, making no movement. At last, tentatively, like the
+song of a very shy angel, a single boy's voice took up the melody.
+
+"He comes, the broken heart to bind,
+The bleeding soul to cure,
+And with the treasures of His grace
+To bless the humble poor."
+
+Sir Beverley sat down again at the table. Half mechanically his eyes
+turned to the pictured face on the wall, the face that smiled so
+enigmatically. Not once in a year did his eyes turn that way. To-night he
+regarded it with half-ironical interest. He had no pity to spare for
+broken hearts. He did not believe in them. No man could have endured more
+than he had had to endure. He had been dragged through hell itself. But
+it had hardened, not broken his heart. Save in one respect he knew that
+he could never be made to suffer any more. Save for that charred
+remnant, there was nothing left for the flame to consume.
+
+And so through all the bitter years he had borne that smiling face upon
+his wall, cynically indifferent to the beauty which had been the rapture
+and the agony of his life,--a man released from the place of his torment
+because his capacity for suffering was almost gone.
+
+Again there were two children's voices singing, and that of the shy angel
+gathered confidence. With a species of scoffing humour Sir Beverley's
+stony eyes travelled to the window. They rested upon his boy standing
+there with bent head--a mute, waiting figure with a curious touch of
+pathos in its pose. Sir Beverley's sudden frown drew his forehead. What
+ailed the youngster? Why did he stand as if the whole world were resting
+on his shoulders?
+
+He made an impatient movement. "For Heaven's sake," he said testily,
+"tell those squalling children to go!"
+
+Piers did not stir. "In a moment, sir!" he said.
+
+And so, clear through the night air, the last verse came unhindered
+to an end.
+
+"Our glad hosannas, Prince of peace,
+Thy welcome shall proclaim;
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name.
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name."
+
+Piers threw up his head with a sudden, spasmodic movement as of a
+drowning man. And then without pause he snatched up the blind and flung
+the window wide.
+
+"Hi, you kiddies! Where are you? Don't run away! Gracie, is that you?"
+
+There was a brief silence, then chirpily came the answer. "Pat did the
+solo; but he's gone. He would have gone sooner--when we saw your shadow
+on the blind--only I held him so that he couldn't."
+
+Piers broke into a laugh. "Well, come in now you are here! You're not
+afraid anyhow, what?"
+
+"Oh no!" laughed Gracie. "I'm not a bit afraid. But I'm supposed to be in
+bed; and if Father finds out I'm not--" She paused with her customary
+sense of the dramatic.
+
+"Well?" laughed Piers. "What'll happen then?"
+
+"I shall cop it," said Gracie elegantly.
+
+Nevertheless she came to him, and stood on the grass outside the window.
+The lamplight from within shone on her upturned face with its saucy,
+confiding smile. Her head was uncovered and gleamed golden in the
+radiance. She was wearing a very ancient fur cloak belonging to her
+mother, and she glowed like a rose in the sombre drapery.
+
+Piers stooped to her with hands invitingly outstretched. "Come along,
+Pixie! We shan't eat you, and I'll take you home on my shoulder
+afterwards and see you don't get copped."
+
+She uttered a delighted little laugh, and went upwards into his hold like
+a scrap of floating thistledown.
+
+He lifted her high in his arms, crossed the room with her, and set her
+down before the old man who still sat at the table, sardonically
+watching. "Miss Gracie Lorimer!" he said.
+
+"Hullo, child!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+Gracie looked at him with sparkling, adventurous eyes. As she had told
+Piers, she was not a bit afraid. After the briefest pause she held out
+her hand with charming _insouciance_.
+
+"How do you do?" she said.
+
+Sir Beverley slowly took the hand, and pulled her towards him, gazing at
+her from under his black brows with a piercing scrutiny that would have
+terrified a more timid child.
+
+Timidity however was not one of Gracie's weaknesses. She gave him a
+friendly smile, and waited without the smallest sign of uneasiness for
+him to speak.
+
+"What have you come here for?" he demanded gruffly at length.
+
+"I'll tell you," said Gracie readily. She went close to him, confidingly
+close, looking straight into the formidable grey eyes. "You see, it was
+my idea. Pat didn't want to come, but I made him."
+
+"Forward young minx!" commented Sir Beverley.
+
+Gracie laughed at the compliment.
+
+Piers, smoking his cigarette behind her, stood ready to take her part,
+but quite obviously she was fully equal to the occasion.
+
+"Yes, I know," she agreed, with disarming amiability. "But it wouldn't
+have mattered a bit if you hadn't found out who it was. You won't tell
+anyone, will you?"
+
+"Why not?" demanded Sir Beverley.
+
+Gracie pulled down her red lips, and cast up her dancing eyes. "There'd
+be such a scandal," she said.
+
+Piers broke into an involuntary laugh, and Sir Beverley's thin lips
+twitched in a reluctant smile.
+
+"You're a saucy little baggage!" he observed. "Well, get on! Let's hear
+what you've come for! Cadging money, I'll be bound."
+
+Gracie nodded in eager confirmation of this suggestion. "That's just it!"
+she said. "And that's where the scandal would come in if you told. You
+see, poor children can go round squalling carols to their hearts' content
+for pennies, but children like us who want pennies just as much haven't
+any way of getting them. We mayn't carry hand-bags, or open
+carriage-doors, or turn cart-wheels, or--or do anything to earn a living.
+It's hard luck, you know."
+
+"Beastly shame!" said Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley scowled at him. "You needn't stick your oar in. Go and
+shut the window, do you hear? Now, child, let's have the truth, so far
+as any female is capable of speaking it! You've come here for pennies,
+you say. Don't you know that's a form of begging? And begging is
+breaking the law."
+
+"I often do that," said Gracie, quite undismayed. "So would you, if you
+were me. I expect you did too when you were young."
+
+"I!" Sir Beverley uttered a harsh laugh, and released the child's hand.
+"So you break the law, do you?" he said. "How often?"
+
+Gracie's laugh followed his like a silvery echo. "I shan't tell you 'cos
+you're a magistrate. But we weren't really begging, Pat and I. At least
+it wasn't for ourselves."
+
+"Oh, of course not!" said Sir Beverley.
+
+She looked at him with her clear eyes, unconscious of irony. "No. We
+wanted to buy a pair of gloves for someone for Christmas. And nice
+gloves cost such a lot, don't they? And we hadn't got more than
+tenpence-halfpenny among us. So I said I'd think of a plan to get more.
+And--that was the plan," ended Gracie, with her sweetest smile.
+
+"I see," said Sir Beverley, with his eyes still fixed immovably upon her.
+"And what made you come here?"
+
+"Oh, we came here just because of Piers," said Gracie, without hesitation.
+"You see, he's a great friend of ours."
+
+"Is he?" said Sir Beverley. "And so you think you'll get what you can out
+of him, eh?"
+
+"Sir!" said Piers sharply.
+
+"Be quiet, Piers!" ordered his grandfather testily. "Who spoke to you?
+Well, madam, continue! How much do you consider him good for?"
+
+Piers pulled a coin impetuously from his pocket and slapped it down on
+the table in front of Gracie. "There you are, Pixie!" he said. "I'm good
+for that."
+
+Gracie stared at the coin with widening eyes, not offering to touch it.
+
+"Oh, Piers!" she said, with a long indrawn breath. "It's a whole
+sovereign! Oh no!"
+
+He laughed a reckless laugh, while over her head his eyes challenged his
+grandfather's. "That's all right, Piccaninny," he said lightly. "Put it
+in your pocket! And I'll come round with the car to-morrow and run you
+into Wardenhurst to buy those gloves."
+
+But Gracie shook her head. "Gloves don't cost all that," she said
+practically. "And besides, you won't have any left for yourself. Fancy
+giving away a whole sovereign at a time!" She addressed Sir Beverley. "It
+seems almost a tempting of Providence, doesn't it!"
+
+"The deed of a fool!" said Sir Beverley.
+
+But Piers, with a sudden hardening of the jaw, stooped over Gracie. "Take
+it!" he said. "I wish it."
+
+She looked up at him. "No, Piers; I mustn't really. It's ever so nice of
+you." She rubbed her golden head against his shoulder caressingly.
+"Please don't be cross! I do thank you--awfully. But I don't want it.
+Really, I don't."
+
+"Rot!" said Piers. "Do as I tell you! Take it!"
+
+Gracie turned to Sir Beverley. "I can't, can I? Tell him I can't!"
+
+But Piers was not to be thwarted. With a sudden dive he seized the coin
+and without ceremony swept Gracie's hair from her shoulders and dropped
+it down the back of her neck.
+
+"There!" he said, slipping his hands over her arms and holding her while
+she squealed and writhed. "It's quite beyond reach. You can't in decency
+return it now. It's no good wriggling. You won't get it up again unless
+you stand on your head."
+
+"You're horrid--horrid!" protested Gracie; but she reached back and
+kissed him notwithstanding. "Thank you ever so much. I hope I shan't lose
+it. But I don't know what I shall do with it all. It's quite dreadful to
+think of. Please don't be cross with him!" she said to Sir Beverley.
+"It's--awfully--kind."
+
+Sir Beverley smiled sardonically. "And whom are the gloves for? Some
+other kind youth?"
+
+"Oh no!" she laughed. "Only Aunt Avery. She tore hers all to bits this
+afternoon. I expect it was over a dog fight or something, but she
+wouldn't tell us what. They were nice gloves too. She isn't a bit rich,
+but she always wears nice gloves."
+
+"Being a woman!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+"Don't you like women?" asked Gracie sympathetically. "I like men best
+too as a rule. But Aunt Avery is so very sweet. No one could help loving
+her, could they, Piers?"
+
+"Have an orange!" said Piers, pulling the dish towards him.
+
+"Oh, thank you, I mustn't stop," Gracie turned to Sir Beverley and lifted
+her bright face. "Good-bye! Thank you for being so kind."
+
+There was no irony in her thanks, and even he could scarcely refuse the
+friendly offer of her lips. He stooped and grimly received her farewell
+salute on his cheek.
+
+Piers loaded her with as many oranges as she could carry, and they
+finally departed through the great hall which Gracie surveyed with eyes
+of reverent admiration.
+
+"It's as big as a church," she said, in an awed whisper.
+
+Sir Beverley followed them to the front-door, and saw them out into the
+night. Gracie waved an ardent farewell from her perch on Piers' shoulder,
+and he heard the merry childish laugh more than once after they had
+passed from sight.
+
+The night air was chilly, and he turned inwards at length with an
+inarticulate growl, and shut the door.
+
+Heavily he tramped across to the old carved settle before the fire, and
+dropped down upon it, his whole bearing expressive of utter weariness.
+
+David came in with stealthy footfall and softly replenished the fire.
+
+"Shall I bring the coffee, Sir Beverley?" he asked him.
+
+"No," said Sir Beverley. "I'll ring."
+
+And David effaced himself without sound.
+
+Half an hour passed, and Sir Beverley still sat there motionless as a
+statue, with thin lips drawn in a single bitter line, and eyes that gazed
+aloofly at the fire. The silence was intense. The hall seemed desolate
+as a vault. Over in a corner a grandfather's clock ticked the seconds
+away--slowly, monotonously, as though very weary of its task.
+
+Suddenly in the distance there came a faint sound, the opening of a door;
+and a breath of night-air, pure and cold, blew in across the stillness.
+In a moment there followed a light, elastic step, and Piers came into
+view at the other end of the hall. He moved swiftly as though he trod
+air. His head was thrown back, his face rapt and intent as though he saw
+a vision. He did not see the lonely figure sitting there before the
+hearth, but turned aside ere he neared it and entered an unlighted room,
+shutting himself gently in.
+
+Again the silence descended, but only for a few seconds. Then softly it
+was dispelled, as through it there stole the tender, passionate-sweet
+harmonies of a Chopin nocturne.
+
+At the first note Sir Beverley started, almost winced as at the sudden
+piercing of a nerve. Then as the music continued, he leaned rigidly back
+again and became as still as before.
+
+Very softly the music thrilled through the silence. It might have come
+from somewhere very far away. There was something almost unearthly about
+it, a depth and a mystery that seemed to spread as it were invisible
+wings, filling the place with dim echoes of the Divine.
+
+It died away at last into a silence like the hush of prayer. And then the
+still figure of the old man before the fire became suddenly vitalized. He
+sat up abruptly and seized with impatience a small hand-bell from the
+table beside him.
+
+David made his discreet appearance with the coffee almost at the
+first tinkle.
+
+"Coffee!" his master flung at him. "And fetch Master Piers!"
+
+David set down the tray at his master's elbow, and turned to obey the
+second behest. But the door of the drawing-room opened ere he reached
+it, and Piers came out. His dark eyes were shining. He whistled softly
+as he came.
+
+David stood respectfully on one side, and Piers passed him like a man in
+a dream. He came to his grandfather, and threw himself on to the settle
+by his side in silence.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Beverley. "You took that chattering monkey back,
+I suppose?"
+
+Piers started and seemed to awake. "Oh yes, I got her safely home. We had
+to dodge the Reverend Stephen. But it was all right. She and the boy got
+in without being caught."
+
+He stirred his coffee thoughtfully, and fell silent again.
+
+"You'd better go to bed," said Sir Beverley abruptly.
+
+Piers looked up, meeting the hard grey eyes with the memory of his dream
+still lingering in his own.
+
+Slowly the dream melted. He began to smile. "I think I'd better," he
+said. "I'm infernally sleepy, and it's getting late." He drank off his
+coffee and rose. "You must be pretty tired yourself, sir," he remarked.
+"Time you trotted to bed too."
+
+He moved round to the back of the settle and paused, looking down at the
+thick white hair with a curious expression of hesitancy in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, go on! Go on!" said Sir Beverley irritably. "What are you
+waiting for?"
+
+Piers stooped impulsively in response, his hand on the old man's
+shoulder, and kissed him on the forehead.
+
+"Good-night, sir!" he said softly.
+
+The action was purely boyish. It pleaded for tolerance. Sir Beverley
+jerked his head impatiently, but he did not repulse him.
+
+"There! Be off with you!" he said. "Go to bed and behave yourself!
+Good-night, you scamp! Good-night!"
+
+And Piers went from him lightfooted, a smile upon his lips. He knew that
+his tacit overture for peace had been accepted for the time at least.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE VISION
+
+
+It was growing very dark in the little church, almost too dark to see the
+carving of the choir-stalls, and Avery gave a short sigh of weariness.
+
+She had so nearly finished her task that she had sent the children in to
+prepare for tea, declaring that she would follow them in five minutes,
+and then just at the last a whole mass of ivy and holly, upon which the
+boys had been at work, had slipped and strewn the chancel-floor. She was
+the only one left in the church, and it behooved her to remove the
+litter. It had been a hard day, and she was frankly tired of the very
+sight and smell of the evergreens.
+
+There was no help for it, however. The chancel must be made tidy before
+she could go, and she went to the cupboard under the belfry for the
+dustpan and brush which the sexton's wife kept there. She found a candle
+also, and thus armed she returned to the scene of her labours at the
+other end of the dim little church. She tried to put her customary energy
+into the task, but it would not rise to the occasion, and after a few
+strenuous seconds she paused to rest.
+
+It was very still and peaceful, and she was glad of the solitude. All day
+long she had felt the need of it; and all day long it had been denied
+her. She had been decorating under Miss Whalley's superintendence, and
+the task had been no light one. Save for the fact that she had gone in
+Mrs. Lorimer's stead, she had scarcely undertaken it. For Miss Whalley
+was as exacting as though the church were her own private property. She
+deferred to the Vicar alone, and he was more than willing to leave the
+matter in her hands. "My capable assistant" was his pet name for this
+formidable member of his flock, and very conscientiously did Miss Whalley
+maintain her calling. She would have preferred to direct Mrs. Lorimer
+rather than the mother's help, but since the latter had firmly determined
+to take the former's place, she had accepted her with condescension and
+allotted to her all the hardest work.
+
+Avery had laboured uncomplainingly in her quiet, methodical fashion, but
+now that the stress was over and Miss Whalley safely installed in the
+Vicarage drawing-room for tea, she found it impossible not to relax
+somewhat, and to make the most of those few exquisite moments of
+sanctuary.
+
+She was very far from expecting any invasion of her solitude, and when
+after a moment or two she went on with her sweeping she had no suspicion
+of another presence in the dark building. She had set herself resolutely
+to finish her task, and so energetic was she that she heard no sound of
+feet along the aisle behind her.
+
+Some unaccountable impulse induced her to pause at length and still
+kneeling, brush in hand, to throw a backward glance along the nave. Then
+it was that she saw a man's figure standing on the chancel-steps, and so
+unexpected was the apparition that her weary nerves leapt with violence
+out of all proportion to the event, and she sprang to her feet with a
+startled cry that echoed weirdly through the empty place. Then with a
+rush of self-ridicule she recognized Piers Evesham. "Oh, it is you!" she
+said. "How stupid of me!"
+
+He came straight to her with an air of determination that would brook no
+opposition and took the brush out of her hand. "That's not your job," he
+said. "You go and sit down!"
+
+She stared at him in silence, trying to still the wild agitation that his
+unlooked-for coming had raised in her. He was wearing a heavy motor-coat,
+but he divested himself of this, and without further parley bent himself
+to the task of which he had deprived her.
+
+Avery sat down somewhat limply on the pulpit-stairs and watched him. He
+was very thorough and far brisker than she could have been. In a very few
+minutes the litter was all collected, and Piers turned round and looked
+back at her across the dim chancel.
+
+"Feeling better?" he said.
+
+She did not answer him. "What made you come in like that?" she asked.
+
+He replied to the question with absolute simplicity. "I've just brought
+Gracie home again. She asked me to tea in the schoolroom, but you weren't
+there, and they said I should find you here, so I came to fetch you."
+
+He moved slowly across and stood before her, looking down into her tired
+eyes with an odd species of relentlessness in his own.
+
+"It's an infernal shame that you should work so hard!" he said, with
+sudden resentment. "You're looking fagged to death."
+
+Avery smiled a little. "I like hard work," she said.
+
+"Not such as this!" said Piers. "It isn't fit for you. Why can't the lazy
+hound do it himself?"
+
+Her smile passed. "Hush, Piers!" she said. "Not here!"
+
+He glanced towards the altar, and she thought a shade of reverence came
+into his face for a moment. But he turned to her again immediately with
+his flashing, boyish smile.
+
+"Well, it isn't good for you to overwork, you know, Avery. I hate to
+think of it. And you have no one to take care of you and see you don't."
+
+Avery got up slowly. Her own face was severe in the candlelight, but
+before she could speak he went lightly on.
+
+"Would you like me to play you something before we go? Or are you too
+tired to blow? It's rather a shame to suggest it. But it's such a grand
+opportunity."
+
+Avery turned at once to the organ with a feeling of relief. As usual she
+found it very hard to rebuke him as he deserved.
+
+"Yes, I will blow for you," she said. "But it must be something short,
+for we ought to be going."
+
+She sat down and began to blow.
+
+Piers took his place at once at the organ. It was characteristic of him
+that he never paused for inspiration. His fingers moved over the keys as
+it were by instinct, and in a few moments Avery forgot that she was tired
+and dispirited with the bearing of many burdens, forgot all the problems
+and difficulties of life, forgot even her charges at the Vicarage and the
+waiting schoolroom tea, and sat wrapt as it were in a golden mist of
+delight, watching the slow spreading of a dawn such as she had never seen
+even in her dreams. What he played she knew not, and yet the music was
+not wholly unfamiliar to her. It waked within her soul harmonies that
+vibrated in throbbing response. He spoke to her in a language that she
+knew. And as the magic moments passed, the wonderful dawn so grew and
+deepened that it seemed to her that all pain, all sorrow, had fallen
+utterly away, and she stood on the threshold of a new world.
+
+Wider and wider spread the glory. There came to her an overwhelming sense
+of greatness about to be revealed. She became strung to a pitch of
+expectancy that was almost anguish, while the music swelled and swelled
+like the distant coming of a vast procession as yet unseen. She stood as
+it were on a mountain-top before the closed gates of heaven, waiting for
+the moment of revelation.
+
+It came. Just when she felt that she could bear no more, just when the
+wild beating of her heart seemed as if it would choke her, the music
+changed, became suddenly all-conquering, a paean of triumph, and the
+gates swung back before her eager eyes.
+
+In spirit she entered the Holy Place, and the same hand that had admitted
+her lifted for her the last great Veil. For one moment of unutterable
+rapture such as no poor palpitating mortal body could endure for long,
+the vision was her own. She saw Heaven opened....
+
+And then the Veil descended, and the Gates closed. She came down from the
+mountain-top, leaving the golden dawn very far behind her. She opened her
+eyes in darkness and silence.
+
+Someone was bending over her. She felt warm hands about her own. She
+heard a voice, sudden and imploring, close to her.
+
+"Avery! Avery darling! For God's sake, dear, speak to me! What is it?
+Are you ill?"
+
+"Ill!" she said, bewildered.
+
+His hands gripped hers impetuously. "You gave me such a fright," he said.
+"I thought you'd fainted. Did you faint?"
+
+"Of course not!" she said slowly. "I never faint. Why did you stop
+playing?"
+
+"I didn't," said Piers. "At least, you stopped first."
+
+"Oh, did I forget to blow?" she said. "I'm sorry."
+
+She knew that she ought not to suffer that close clasp of his, but
+somehow for the moment she was powerless to resist it. She sat quite
+still, gazing out before her with a curious sense of powerlessness.
+
+"You're tired out," said Piers softly. "It was a shame to keep you here.
+I'm awfully sorry, dear."
+
+She stirred at that, beginning to seek for freedom. "Don't, Piers!" she
+said. "It--it isn't right of you. It isn't fair."
+
+He knelt swiftly down before her. His voice came quick and passionate in
+answer. "It can't be wrong to love you," he said. "And you will never be
+any the worse for my love. Let me love you, Avery! Let me love you!"
+
+The words rushed out tempestuously. His forehead was bowed upon her
+hands. He became silent, and through the silence she heard his breathing,
+hard and difficult,--the breathing of a man who faces stupendous odds.
+
+With an effort she summoned her strength. Yet she could not speak harshly
+to him, for her heart went out in pity. "No, you mustn't, Piers," she
+said. "You mustn't indeed. I am years older than you are, and it is
+utterly unsuitable. You must forget it. You must indeed. There! Let us be
+friends! I like you well enough for that."
+
+He uttered a laugh that sounded as though it covered a groan. "Yes,
+you're awfully good to me," he said. "But you're not--in one
+sense--anything approaching my age, and pray Heaven you never will be!"
+
+He raised his head and looked at her. "And you're not angry with me?" he
+said, half wistfully.
+
+No, she was not angry. She could not even pretend to be. "But please be
+sensible!" she begged. "I know it was partly my fault. If I hadn't been
+so tired, it wouldn't have happened."
+
+He got to his feet, still holding her hands. "No; you're not to blame
+yourself," he said. "What has happened was bound to happen, right from
+the very beginning. But I'm sorry if it has upset you. There is no reason
+why it should that I can see. You are better now?"
+
+He helped her gently to rise. They stood face to face in the dim
+candlelight, and his eyes looked into hers with such friendly concern
+that again she had it not in her heart to be other than kind.
+
+"I am quite well," she assured him. "Please forget my foolishness! Tell
+me what it was you played just now!"
+
+"That last thing?" he said. "Surely you know that! It was Handel's
+_Largo_."
+
+She started. "Of course! I remember now! But--I've never heard it played
+like that before."
+
+A very strange smile crossed his face. "No one but you would have
+understood," he said. "I wanted you to hear it--like that."
+
+She withdrew her hands from his. Something in his words sent a curious
+feeling that was almost dread through her heart.
+
+"I don't--quite--know what you mean," she said.
+
+"Don't you?" said Piers, and in his voice there rang a note of
+recklessness. "It's a difficult thing to put into words, isn't it? I just
+wanted you to see the Open Heaven as I have seen it--and as I shall never
+see it again."
+
+"Piers!" she said.
+
+He answered her almost fiercely. "No, you won't understand. Of course you
+can't understand. You will never stand hammering at the bars, breaking
+your heart in the dark. Wasn't that the sort of picture our kindly parson
+drew for us on Sunday? It's a pretty theme--the tortures of the damned!"
+
+"My dear Piers!" Avery spoke quickly and vehemently. "Surely you have too
+much sense to take such a discourse as that seriously! I longed to tell
+the children not to listen. It is wicked--wicked--to try to spread
+spiritual terror in people's hearts, and to call it the teaching of
+religion. It is no more like religion than a penny-terrible is like life.
+It is a cruel and fantastic distortion of the truth."
+
+She paused. Piers was listening to her with that odd hunger in his eyes
+that had looked out of them the night before.
+
+"You don't believe in hell then?" he said quietly, after a moment.
+
+"As a place of future torment--no!" she said. "The only real hell is here
+on earth--here in our hearts when we fall away from God. Hell is the
+state of sin and all that goes with it--the fiery hell of the spirit. It
+is here and now. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine a God of Love
+devising hideous tortures hereafter, for the punishment of the pigmies
+who had offended Him? Tortures that were never to do them any good, but
+just to keep them in misery for ever and ever? It is unthinkable--it's
+almost ludicrous. What is the good of suffering except to purify? That we
+can understand and thank God for. But the other--oh, the other is sheer
+imagery, more mythical than Jonah and the whale. It just doesn't go."
+Again she paused, then very frankly held out her hand to him. "But I like
+your picture of the Open Heaven, Piers," she said. "Show it me again some
+day--when I'm not as tired and stupid as I am to-day."
+
+He bent over her hand with a gesture that betrayed the foreign blood in
+him, and his lips, hot and passionate, pressed her cold fingers. He did
+not utter a word. Only when he stood up again he looked at her with eyes
+that burned with the deep fires of manhood, and suddenly all-unbidden
+the woman's heart in her quivered in response. She bent her head and
+turned away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A MAN'S CONFIDENCE
+
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss Aunt Avery under the mistletoe?" asked Gracie.
+
+"No," said Piers. "Aunt Avery may kiss me if she likes." He looked at
+Avery with his sudden, boyish laugh. "But I know she doesn't like, so
+that's an end of the matter."
+
+"How do you know?" persisted Gracie. "She's very fond of kissing. And
+anyone may kiss under the mistletoe."
+
+"That quite does away with the charm of it in my opinion," declared
+Piers. "I don't appreciate things when you can get 'em cheap."
+
+He moved over to Jeanie's sofa and sat down on the edge. Her soft eyes
+smiled a welcome, the little thin hand slipped into his.
+
+"I've been wishing for you all day long," she said.
+
+He leaned towards her. "Have you, my fairy queen? Well, I'm here at
+last."
+
+Avery, from the head of the schoolroom table, looked across at them with
+a feeling of fulness at her heart. She never liked Piers so well as when
+she saw him in company with her little favourite. His gentleness and
+chivalry made of him a very perfect knight.
+
+"Yes," said Jeanie, giving his hand a little squeeze. "We're going to
+have our Christmas Tree to-night, and Dr. Tudor is coming. You don't like
+him, I know. But he's really quite a nice man."
+
+She spoke the last words pleadingly, in response to a slight frown
+between Piers' brows.
+
+"Oh, is he?" said Piers, without enthusiasm.
+
+"He's been very kind," said Jeanie in a tone of apology.
+
+"He'd better be anything else--to you!" said Piers, with a smile that was
+somewhat grim.
+
+Jeanie's fingers caressed his again propitiatingly. "Do let's all be nice
+to each other just for to-night!" she said.
+
+Piers' smile became tender again. "As your gracious majesty decrees!" he
+said. "Where is the ceremony to be held?"
+
+"Up in the nursery. We've had the little ones in here all day, while
+Mother and Nurse have been getting it ready. I haven't seen it yet."
+
+"Can't we creep up when no one's looking and have a private view?"
+suggested Piers.
+
+Jeanie beamed at the idea. "I would like to, for I've been in the secret
+from the very beginning. But you must finish your tea first. We'll go
+when the crackers begin."
+
+As the pulling of crackers was the signal for every child at the table to
+make as much noise as possible, it was not difficult to effect their
+retreat without exciting general attention. Avery alone noted their
+departure and smiled at Jeanie's flushed face as the child nodded
+farewell to her over Piers' shoulder.
+
+"You do carry me so beautifully," Jeanie confided to him as he mounted
+the stairs to the top of the house. "I love the feel of your arms. They
+are so strong and kind. You're sure I'm not too heavy?"
+
+"I could carry a dozen of you," said Piers.
+
+They found the nursery brilliantly lighted and lavishly adorned with
+festoons of coloured paper.
+
+"Aunt Avery and I did most of that," said Jeanie proudly.
+
+Piers bore her round the room, admiring every detail, finally depositing
+her in a big arm-chair close to the tall screen that hid the Christmas
+Tree. Jeanie's leg was mending rapidly, and gave her little trouble now.
+She lay back contentedly, with shining eyes upon her cavalier.
+
+"It was very nice of you to be so kind to Gracie last night," she said.
+"She told me all about it to-day. Of course she ought not to have done
+it. I hope--I hope Sir Beverley wasn't angry about it."
+
+Piers laughed a little. "Oh no! He got over it. Was Gracie scared?"
+
+"Not really. She said she thought he wasn't quite pleased with you. I do
+hope he didn't think it was your fault."
+
+"My shoulders are fairly broad," said Piers.
+
+"Yes, but it wouldn't be right," maintained Jeanie. "I think I ought to
+write to him and explain."
+
+"No, no!" said Piers. "You leave the old chap alone. He
+understands--quite as much as he wants to understand."
+
+There was a note of bitterness in his voice which Jeanie was quick to
+discern. She reached up a sympathetic hand to his. "Dear Sir Galahad!"
+she said softly.
+
+Piers looked down at her for a few moments in silence. And then, very
+suddenly, moved by the utter devotion that looked back at him from her
+eyes, he went down on his knees beside her and held her to his heart.
+
+"It's a beast of a world, Jeanie," he said.
+
+"Is it?" whispered Jeanie, with his hand pressed tight against her cheek.
+
+There was silence between them for a little space; then she lifted her
+face to his, to murmur in a motherly tone, "I expect you're tired."
+
+"Tired!" said Piers with gloomy vehemence. "Yes, I am tired--sick to
+death of everything. I'm like a dog on a chain. I can see what I want,
+but it's always just out of my reach."
+
+Jeanie's hand came up and softly stroked his face. "I wish I could get
+it for you," she said.
+
+"Bless you, sweetheart!" said Piers. "You don't so much as know what it
+is, do you?"
+
+"Yes, I do," said Jeanie. She leaned her head back against his shoulder,
+looking up into his face with all her child's soul shining in her eyes.
+"It's--Aunt Avery; isn't it?"
+
+"How did you know?" said Piers.
+
+"I don't know," said Jeanie. "It just--came to me--that day in the
+schoolroom when you talked about the ticket of leave. You were unhappy
+that day, weren't you?"
+
+"Yes," said Piers. He added after a moment, "You see, I'm not good
+enough for her."
+
+"Not good enough!" Jeanie's face became incredulous and a little
+distressed. "I'm sure--she--doesn't think that," she said.
+
+"She doesn't know me properly," said Piers. "Nor do you. If you did,
+you'd be shocked,--you'd be horrified."
+
+He spoke recklessly, almost defiantly; but Jeanie only stretched up a
+thin arm and wound it about his neck. "Never!" she told him softly.
+"No, never!"
+
+He held her to him; but he would not be silenced. "I assure you, I'm no
+saint," he said. "I feel more like a devil sometimes. I've done bad
+things, Jeanie, I can't tell you how bad. It would only hurt you."
+
+The words ran out impulsively. His breathing came quick and short; his
+hold was tense. In that moment the child's pure spirit recognized that
+the image had crumbled in her shrine, but the brave heart of her did
+not flinch. Very tenderly she veiled the ruin. The element of worship
+had vanished in that single instant of revelation; but her love
+remained, and it shone out to him like a beacon as he knelt there in
+abasement by her side.
+
+"But you're sorry," she whispered. "You would undo the bad things if
+you could."
+
+"God knows I would!" he said.
+
+"Perhaps He will undo them for you," she murmured softly. "Have you
+asked Him?"
+
+"There are some things that can't be undone," groaned Piers. "It would be
+too big a job even for Him."
+
+"Nothing is that," said Jeanie with conviction. "If we are sorry and if
+we pray, some day He will undo all the bad we've ever done."
+
+"I haven't prayed for six years," said Piers. "Things went wrong with me.
+I felt as if I were under a curse. And I gave it up."
+
+"Oh, Piers!" she said, holding him closer. "How miserable you must
+have been!"
+
+"I've been in hell!" he said with bitter vehemence. "And the gates tight
+shut! Not that I was ever very great in the spiritual lines," he added
+more calmly. "But I used to think God took a friendly interest in my
+affairs till--till I went down into hell and the gates shut on me; and
+then--" he spoke grimly--"I knew He didn't care a rap."
+
+"But, dear, He does care!" said Jeanie very earnestly.
+
+"He doesn't!" said Piers moodily. "He can't!"
+
+"Piers, He does!" She raised her head and looked him straight in the
+eyes. "Everyone feels like that sometimes," she said. "But Aunt Avery
+says it's only because we are too little to understand. Won't you begin
+and pray again? It does make a difference even though we can't see it."
+
+"I can't," said Piers. And then with swift compunction he kissed her
+face of disappointment. "Never mind, my queen! Don't you bother your
+little head about me! I shall rub along all right even if I don't come
+out on top."
+
+"But I want you to be happy," said Jeanie. "I wish I could help you,
+Piers,--dear Piers."
+
+"You do help me," said Piers.
+
+There came the sound of voices on the stairs, and he got up.
+
+Jeanie looked up at him wistfully. "I shall try," she said. "I shall
+try--hard."
+
+He patted her head and turned away.
+
+Mr. Lorimer and Miss Whalley entered the room. The former raised his
+brows momentarily at the sight of Piers, but he greeted him with much
+geniality.
+
+"I am quite delighted to welcome you to the children's Christmas party,"
+he declared, with Piers' hand held impressively in his. "And how is your
+grandfather, my dear lad?"
+
+Piers contracted instinctively. "He is quite well, thanks," he said. "I
+haven't come to stay. I only looked in for a moment."
+
+He glanced towards Miss Whalley whom he had never met before. The Vicar
+smilingly introduced him. "This is the Squire's grandson and heir, Miss
+Whalley. Doubtless you know him by sight as well as by repute--the
+keenest sportsman in the county, eh, my young friend?" His eyes
+disappeared with the words as if pulled inwards by a string.
+
+"I don't know," said Piers, becoming extremely blunt and British. "I'm
+certainly keen, but so are dozens of others." He bowed to Miss Whalley
+with stiff courtesy. "Pleased to meet you," he said formally.
+
+Miss Whalley acknowledged the compliment with a severe air of
+incredulity. She had never approved of Piers since a certain Sunday
+morning ten years before when she had caught him shooting at the
+choir-boys with a catapult, during the litany, over the top of the
+squire's large square pew.
+
+She had reported the crime to the Vicar, and the Vicar had lodged a
+formal complaint with Sir Beverley, who had soundly caned the delinquent
+in his presence, and given him half a sovereign as soon as the clerical
+back had been turned for taking the punishment like a man.
+
+But in Miss Whalley's eyes Piers had from that moment ceased to be
+regarded as one of the elect, and his curt reception of the good Vicar's
+patronage did not further elevate him in her esteem. She made as brief a
+response to the introduction as politeness demanded, and crossed the room
+to Jeanie.
+
+"I must be off," said Piers. "I've stayed longer than I intended
+already."
+
+"Pray do not hurry!" urged Mr. Lorimer. "The festivities are but just
+beginning."
+
+But Piers was insistent, and even Jeanie's wistful eyes could not detain
+him. He waved her a careless farewell, and extricated himself as quickly
+as possible from surroundings that had become uncongenial.
+
+Descending the stairs somewhat precipitately, he nearly ran into Avery
+ascending with a troop of children, and stopped to say good-bye.
+
+"You're not going!" cried Gracie, with keen disappointment.
+
+"Yes, I am. I can't stop. It's later than I thought. See you to-morrow!"
+said Piers.
+
+He held Avery's hand again in his, and for one fleeting second his eyes
+looked into hers. Then lightly he pressed her fingers and passed on
+without further words.
+
+On the first landing he encountered Mrs. Lorimer. She smiled upon him
+kindly. "Oh, Piers, is it you?" she said. "Have you been having tea in
+the schoolroom?"
+
+He admitted that he had.
+
+"And must you really go?" she said. "I'm sorry for that. Come again,
+won't you?"
+
+Her tone was full of gentle friendliness, and Piers was touched. "It's
+awfully good of you to ask me," he said.
+
+"I like to see you here," she answered simply. "And I am so grateful to
+you for your kindness to my little Jeanie."
+
+"Oh, please don't!" said Piers. "I assure you it's quite the other way
+round. I shall certainly come again since you are good enough to ask me."
+
+He smiled with boyish gallantry into the wistful, faded face, carried her
+fingers lightly to his lips, and passed on.
+
+"Such a nice boy!" Mrs. Lorimer murmured to herself as she went up to
+the nursery.
+
+"Poor little soul!" was Piers' inward comment as he ran down to the hall.
+
+Here he paused, finding himself face to face with Lennox Tudor who was
+taking off his coat preparatory to ascending.
+
+The doctor nodded to him without cordiality. Neither of them ever
+pretended to take any pleasure in the other's society.
+
+"Are you just going?" he asked. "Your grandfather is wanting you."
+
+"Who says so?" said Piers aggressively.
+
+"I say so." Curtly Tudor made answer, meeting Piers' quick frown with one
+equally decided.
+
+Piers stood still in front of him. "Have you just come from the Abbey?"
+he demanded.
+
+"I have." Tudor's tone was non-committal. He stood facing Piers,
+waiting to pass.
+
+"What are you always going there for?" burst forth Piers, with heat. "He
+doesn't want you--never follows your advice, and does excellently well
+without it."
+
+"Really!" said Tudor. He uttered a short, sarcastic laugh, albeit his
+thick brows met closely above his glasses. "Well, you ought to
+know--being such a devoted and attentive grandson."
+
+Piers' hands clenched at the words. He looked suddenly dangerous. "What
+in thunder do you mean?" he demanded.
+
+Tudor was nothing loth to enlighten him. He was plainly angry himself.
+"I mean," he said, "if you must have it, that the time you spend
+philandering here would be better employed in looking after the old man,
+who has spent a good deal over you and gets precious little interest out
+of the investment."
+
+"Confound you!" exclaimed Piers violently. "Who the devil are you to talk
+to me like this? Do you think I'm going to put up with it, what? If so,
+you're damned well mistaken. You leave me alone--and my grandfather too;
+do you hear? If you don't--" He broke off, breathing short and hard.
+
+But Tudor remained unimpressed. He looked at Piers as one might
+look at an animal raging behind bars. "Well?" he said. "Pray
+finish! If I don't--"
+
+Piers' face was very pale. His eyes blazed out of it, red and
+threatening. "If you don't--I'll murder you!" he said.
+
+And at that he stopped short and suddenly wheeled round as he caught the
+swish of a dress on the stairs. He looked up into Avery's face as she
+came swiftly down, and the blood rose in a deep, dark wave to his
+forehead. He made no attempt to cover or excuse his passionate outburst,
+which it was perfectly obvious she must have heard. He merely made way
+for her, his hands still hard clenched, his eyes immovably upon her.
+
+Avery passed him with scarcely a glance, but her voice as she addressed
+Lennox Tudor sounded a trifle austere. "I heard you speaking," she said,
+"and ran down to fetch you upstairs. Will you come up at once, please?
+The ceremony is just beginning."
+
+Tudor held out a steady hand, "Very kind of you, Mrs. Denys," he said.
+"Will you lead the way?" And then for a moment he turned from her to
+Piers. "If you have anything further to say to me, Evesham, I shall be
+quite ready to give you a hearing on a more suitable occasion."
+
+"I have nothing further to say," said Piers, still with his eyes
+upon Avery.
+
+She would not look at him. With deliberate intention, she ignored his
+look. "Come, doctor!" she said.
+
+They mounted the stairs together, Piers still standing motionless, still
+mutely watching. There was no temper nor anger in his face. Simply he
+stood and waited. And, as if that silent gaze drew her, even against her
+will, suddenly at the top she turned. Her own sweet smile flashed into
+her face. She threw a friendly glance down to him.
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Evesham!" she called softly. "A happy Christmas to you!"
+
+And as if that were what he had been waiting for, Piers bowed very low in
+answer and at once turned away.
+
+His face as he went out into the night wore a very curious expression. It
+was not grim, nor ashamed, nor triumphant, and yet there was in it a
+suggestion of all three moods.
+
+He reached his car, standing as he had left it in the deserted lane, and
+stooped to start the engine. Then, as it throbbed in answer, he
+straightened himself, and very suddenly he laughed. But it was not a
+happy laugh; and in a moment more he shot away into the dark as though
+pursued by fiends. If he had gained his end, if he had in any fashion
+achieved his desire, it was plain that it did not give him any great
+satisfaction. He went like a fury through the night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SCHEME
+
+
+"Look here, boy!" Very suddenly, almost fiercely, Sir Beverley addressed
+his grandson that evening as they sat together over dessert. "I've had
+enough of this infernal English climate. I'm going away."
+
+Piers was peeling a walnut. He did not raise his eyes or make the
+faintest sign of surprise. Steadily his fingers continued their task. His
+lips hardened a little, that was all.
+
+"Do you hear?" rapped out Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers bent his head. "What about the hunting?" he said.
+
+"Damn the hunting!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers was silent a moment. Then: "I suggested it to you myself, didn't
+I?" he said deliberately, "six weeks ago. And you wouldn't hear of it."
+
+"Confound your impertinence!" began Sir Beverley. But abruptly Piers
+raised his eyes, and he stopped. "What do you mean?" he said, in a
+calmer tone.
+
+Very steadily Piers met his look. "That's a question I should like to
+ask, sir," he said. "Why do you want to go abroad? Aren't you well?"
+
+"I am perfectly well," declared Sir Beverley, who furiously resented any
+enquiry as to his health. "Can't a man take it into his head that he'd
+like a change from this beastly damp hole of a country without being at
+death's door, I should like to know?"
+
+"You generally have a reason for what you do, sir," observed Piers.
+
+"Of course I have a reason," flung back Sir Beverley.
+
+A faint smile touched the corners of Piers' mouth. "But I am not to know
+what it is, what?" he asked.
+
+Sir Beverley glared at him. There were times when he was possessed by an
+uneasy suspicion that the boy was growing up into a manhood that
+threatened to overthrow his control. He had a feeling that Piers'
+submission to his authority had become a matter of choice rather than of
+necessity. He had inherited his Italian grandmother's fortune,
+moreover,--a sore point with Sir Beverley who would have repudiated every
+penny had it been left at his disposal--and was therefore independent.
+
+"I've given you a reason. What more do you want?" he growled.
+
+Piers looked straight at him for a few seconds longer; then broke into
+his sudden boyish laugh. "All right, sir. When shall we start?" he said.
+
+Sir Beverley stared. "What the devil are you laughing at?" he demanded.
+
+Piers had returned to the peeling of his walnut. "Nothing, sir," he
+said airily. "At least, nothing more important than your reason for
+going abroad."
+
+"Damn your impudence!" said Sir Beverley, and then for some reason he too
+began to smile. "That's settled then. We'll go to Monte Carlo, eh, Piers?
+You'll like that."
+
+"Do you think I am to be trusted at Monte Carlo?" said Piers.
+
+"I let you go round the world by yourself while you were still an infant,
+so I almost think I can trust you at Monte Carlo under my own eye,"
+returned Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers was silent. The smile had left his lips. He frowned slightly
+over his task.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Beverley, suddenly and sharply.
+
+"Well, sir?" Piers raised his brows without looking up.
+
+The old man brought down an impatient fist on the table. "Why can't you
+say what you think?" he demanded angrily. "You sit there with your mouth
+shut as if--as if--" His eyes went suddenly to the woman's face on the
+wall with the red lips that smiled half-sadly, half-mockingly, and the
+eyes that perpetually followed him but never smiled at all. "Confound
+you, Piers!" he said. "I sometimes think that voyage round the world did
+you more harm than good."
+
+"Why, sir?" said Piers quickly.
+
+Sir Beverley's look left the smiling, baffling face upon the wall and
+sought his grandson's. "You were so mad to be off the bearing-rein,
+weren't you?" he said. "So keen to feel your own feet? I thought it would
+make a man of you, but I was a fool to do it. I'd better have kept you on
+the rein after all."
+
+"I should have run away if you had," said Piers. He poured himself
+out a glass of wine and raised it to his lips. He looked at Sir Beverley
+above it with a smile half-sad, half-mocking, and eyes that veiled his
+soul. "I should have gone to the devil if you had, sir," he said,
+"and--probably--I shouldn't have come back." He drank slowly, his eyes
+still upon Sir Beverley's face.
+
+When he set the glass down again he was openly laughing. "Besides, you
+horsewhipped me for something or other, do you remember? It hurts to be
+horsewhipped at nineteen."
+
+Sir Beverley growled at him inarticulately.
+
+"Yes, I know," said Piers, "But it doesn't affect me so much now. I'm
+past the sensitive age." He ate his walnut, drained his glass, and rose.
+
+"You--puppy!" said Sir Beverley, looking up at him.
+
+Piers came to his side. He suddenly knelt down and pulled the old man's
+arm round his shoulders. "I say, I'm going to enjoy that trip," he said
+boyishly. "Let's get away before the New Year!"
+
+Sir Beverley suffered the action with no further protest than a frown.
+"You weren't so mighty anxious when I first suggested it," he grumbled.
+
+Piers laughed. "Can't a man change his mind? I'm keen enough now."
+
+"What do you want to go for?" Sir Beverley looked at him suspiciously.
+
+But Piers' frank return of his look told him nothing. "I love the South
+as you know," he said.
+
+"Damn it, yes!" said Sir Beverley irritably. He could never endure any
+mention of the Southern blood in Piers.
+
+"And--" Piers' brown fingers grew suddenly tight upon the bony hand he
+had drawn over his shoulder--"I like going away with you."
+
+"Oh, stow it, Piers!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+"The truth, sir!" protested Piers, with eyes that suddenly danced. "It
+does me good to be with you. It keeps me young."
+
+"Young!" ejaculated Sir Beverley. "You--infant!"
+
+Piers broke into a laugh. He looked a mere boy when he gave himself up to
+merriment. "And it'll do you good too," he said, "to get away from that
+beastly doctor who is always hanging around. I long to give him the boot
+whenever I see him."
+
+"You don't like each other, eh?" Sir Beverley's smile was sardonic.
+
+"We loathe and detest each other," said Piers. All the boyishness went
+out of his face with the words; he looked suddenly grim, and in that
+moment the likeness between them was very marked. "I presume this change
+of air scheme was his suggestion," he said abruptly.
+
+"And if it was?" said Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers threw back his head and laughed again through clenched teeth. "For
+which piece of consideration he has my sincere gratitude," he said. He
+pressed his grandfather's hand again and rose. "So it's to be Monte
+Carlo, is it? Well, the sooner the better for me. I'll tell Victor to
+look up the trains. We can't get away to-morrow or the next day. But we
+ought to be able to manage the day after."
+
+He strolled across to the fire, and stood there with his back to the
+room, whistling below his breath.
+
+Sir Beverley regarded him frowningly. There was no denying the fact, he
+did not understand Piers. He had expected a strenuous opposition to his
+scheme. He had been prepared to do battle with the boy. But Piers had
+refused the conflict. What was the fellow's game, he asked himself? Why
+this prompt compliance with his wishes? He was not to be deceived into
+the belief that he wanted to go. The attraction was too great for that.
+Unless indeed--he looked across at the bent black head in sudden
+doubt--was it possible that the boy had met with a check in the least
+likely direction of all? Could it be that the woman's plans did not
+include him after all?
+
+No! No! That was out of the question. He knew women. A hard laugh rose to
+his lips. If she had put a check upon Piers' advances it was not with the
+ultimate purpose of stopping him. She knew what she was about too well
+for that, confound her!
+
+He stared at Piers who had wheeled suddenly from the fire at the sound of
+the laugh. "Well?" he said irritably. "Well? What's the matter now?"
+
+The eyes that countered his were hard, with just a hint of defiance. "You
+laughed, sir," said Piers curtly.
+
+"Well, what of it?" threw back Sir Beverley. "You're deuced suspicious. I
+wasn't laughing at you."
+
+"I know that," said Piers. He spoke deliberately, as one choosing his
+words. His face was stern. "I don't want to know the joke if it's
+private. But I should like to know how long you want to be away."
+
+"How long? How the devil can I tell?" growled Sir Beverley. "Till I've
+had enough of it, I suppose."
+
+"Does it depend on that only?" said Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley pushed back his chair with fierce impatience. "Oh, leave me
+alone, boy, do! I'll let you know when it's time to come home again."
+
+Piers came towards him. He halted with the light from the lamp full on
+his resolute face. "If you are going to wait on Tudor's convenience," he
+said, "you'll wait--longer than I shall."
+
+"What the devil do you mean?" thundered Sir Beverley.
+
+But again Piers turned aside from open conflict. He put a quiet hand
+through his grandfather's arm.
+
+"Come along, sir! We'll smoke in the hall," he said. "I think you
+understand me. If you don't--" he paused and smiled his sudden, winning
+smile into the old man's wrathful eyes--"I'll explain more fully when the
+time comes."
+
+"Confound you, Piers!" was Sir Beverley's only answer.
+
+Yet he left the room with the boy's arm linked in his. And the woman's
+face on the wall smiled behind them--the smile of a witch, mysterious,
+derisive, aloof, yet touched with that same magic with which Piers had
+learned even in his infancy to charm away the evil spirit that lurked in
+his grandfather's soul.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE WARNING
+
+
+"Going away to-morrow, are you?" said Ina Rose, in her cool young voice.
+"I hope you'll enjoy it."
+
+"Thanks!" said Piers. "No doubt I shall."
+
+He spoke with his eyes on the dainty lace fan he had taken from her.
+
+Ina frankly studied his face. She had always found Piers Evesham
+interesting.
+
+"I should be wild if I were in your place," she remarked, after a moment.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and his brown face slightly smiled. "Because
+of the hunting?" he said, and turned his eyes upon her fresh, girlish
+face. "But there's always next year, what?"
+
+"Good gracious!" said Ina. "You talk as if you were older than your
+grandfather. It wouldn't comfort me in the least to think of next
+season's hunting. And I don't believe it does you either. You are only
+putting it on."
+
+"All right!" said Piers. His eyes dwelt upon her with a species of
+mocking homage that yet in a fashion subtly flattered. He always knew how
+to please Ina Rose, though not always did he take the trouble. "Let us
+say--for the sake of argument--that I am quite inconsolable. It doesn't
+matter to anyone, does it?"
+
+"I don't know why you should say that," said Ina. "It ought to
+matter--anyhow to your grandfather. Why don't you make him go by
+himself?"
+
+Piers laughed a careless laugh, still boldly watching her. "That wouldn't
+be very dutiful of me, would it?" he said.
+
+"I suppose you're not afraid of him?" said Ina, who knew not the meaning
+of the word.
+
+"Why should you suppose that?" said Piers.
+
+She met his look in momentary surprise. "To judge by the way you behaved
+the other day, I should say you were not."
+
+Piers frowned. "Which day?"
+
+Ina explained without embarrassment. "The day that girl held up the whole
+Hunt in Holland's meadow. My word, Piers, how furious the old man was!
+Does he often behave like that?"
+
+Piers still frowned. His fingers were working restlessly at the ivory
+sticks of her fan. "If you mean, does he often thrash me with a
+horsewhip, no, he doesn't," he said shortly. "And he wouldn't have done
+it then if I'd had a hand to spare. I'm glad you enjoyed the spectacle.
+Hope you were all edified."
+
+"You needn't be waxy," said Ina calmly. "I assure you, you never showed
+to greater advantage. I hope your lady friend was duly grateful to her
+deliverer. I rather liked her pluck, Piers. Who is she?"
+
+There was a sudden crack between Piers' fingers. He looked down hastily,
+and in a moment displayed three broken ivory fan-sticks to the girl
+beside him. "I'm horribly sorry, Ina," he said.
+
+Ina looked at the damage, and from it to his face of contrition. "You did
+it on purpose," she said.
+
+"I did not," said Piers.
+
+"You're very rude," she rejoined.
+
+"No, I'm not," he protested. "I'm sorry. I hope you didn't value it for
+any particular reason. I'll send you another from Paris."
+
+She spurned the broken thing with a careless gesture. "Not you! You'd be
+afraid to."
+
+Piers' brows went up. "Afraid?"
+
+"Of your grandfather," she said, with a derisive smile. "If he caught you
+sending anything to me--or to the lady of the meadow--" she paused
+eloquently.
+
+Piers looked grim. "Of course I shall send you a fan if you'll
+accept it."
+
+"How nice of you!" said Ina. "Wouldn't you like to send something for
+her in the same parcel? I'll deliver it for you--if you'll tell me the
+lady's address."
+
+Her eyes sparkled mischievously as she made the suggestion. Piers frowned
+yet a moment longer, then laughed back with abrupt friendliness.
+
+"Thanks awfully! But I won't trouble you. It's decent of you not to be
+angry over this. I'll get you a ripping one to make up."
+
+Ina nodded. "That'll be quite amusing. Everyone will think that you're
+really in earnest at last. Poor Dick will be furious when he knows."
+
+"You'll probably console him pretty soon," returned Piers.
+
+"Think so?" Ina's eyes narrowed a little; she looked at Piers
+speculatively. "That's what you want to believe, is it?"
+
+"I? Of course not!" Piers laughed again. "I never wished any girl
+engaged yet."
+
+"Save one," suggested Ina, and an odd little gleam hovered behind
+her lashes with the words. "Why won't you tell me her name? You
+might as well."
+
+"Why?" said Piers.
+
+"I shall find it out in any case," she assured him. "I know already that
+she dwells under the Vicar's virtuous roof, and that the worthy Dr. Tudor
+finds it necessary to drop in every day. I suppose she is the
+nurse-cook-housekeeper of that establishment."
+
+"I say, how clever of you!" said Piers.
+
+The girl laughed carelessly. "Isn't it? I've studied her in church--and
+you too, my cavalier. I don't believe you have ever attended so regularly
+before, have you? Did she ever tell you her age?"
+
+"Never," said Piers.
+
+"I wonder," said Ina coolly. And then rather suddenly she rose. "Piers,
+if I'm a prying cat, you're a hard-mouthed mule! There! Why can't you
+admit that you're in love with her?"
+
+Piers faced her with no sign of surprise. "Why don't you tell me that
+you're in love with Guyes?" he said.
+
+"Because it wouldn't be true!" She flung back her answer with a laugh
+that sounded unaccountably bitter. "I have yet to meet the man who is
+worth the trouble."
+
+"Oh, really!" said Piers. "Don't flatter us more than you need! I'm sorry
+for Guyes myself. If he weren't so keen on you, it's my belief you'd like
+him better."
+
+"Oh no, I shouldn't!" Ina spoke with a touch of scorn. "I shouldn't like
+him either less or more, whatever he did. I couldn't. But of course he's
+extremely eligible, isn't he?"
+
+"Does that count with you?" said Piers curiously.
+
+She looked at him. "It doesn't with you of course?" she said.
+
+"Not in the least," he returned with emphasis.
+
+She laughed again, and pushed the remnants of her fan with her foot. "It
+wouldn't. You're so charmingly young and romantic. Well, mind the doctor
+doesn't cut you out in your absence! He would be a much more suitable
+_parti_ for her, you know, both as to age and station. Shall we go back
+to the ball-room now? I am engaged to Dick for the next dance. I mustn't
+cut him in his own house."
+
+It was an annual affair but quite informal--this Boxing Night dance at
+the Guyes'. Dick himself called it a survival of his schoolboy days, and
+it was always referred to in the neighbourhood as "Dick's Christmas
+party." He and his mother would no more have dreamed of discontinuing the
+festivity than of foregoing their Christmas dinner, and the Roses of
+Wardenhurst were invariably invited and as invariably attended it. Piers
+was not so constant a guest. Dick had thrown him an open invitation on
+the hunting-field a day or two before, and Piers, having nothing better
+to do, had decided to present himself.
+
+He liked dancing, and was easily the best dancer among the men. He also
+liked Ina Rose, or at least she had always thought so, till that night.
+They were friends of the hunting-field rather than of the drawing-room,
+but they always drifted together wherever they met. Sir Beverley had
+never troubled himself about the intimacy. The girl belonged to the
+county, and if not quite the brilliant match for Piers that he would have
+chosen, she came at least of good old English stock. He knew and liked
+her father, and he would not have made any very strenuous opposition to
+an alliance between the two. The girl was well bred and heiress to the
+Colonel's estate. She would have added considerably to Piers' importance
+as a landowner, and she knew already how to hold up her head in society.
+Also, she led a wholesome, outdoor existence, and was not the sort of
+girl to play with a man's honour.
+
+No, on the whole Sir Beverley had no serious objection to the prospect of
+a marriage between them, save that he had no desire to see Piers married
+for another five years at feast. But Ina could very well afford to wait
+five years for such a prize as Piers. Meanwhile, if they cared to get
+engaged--it would keep the boy out of mischief, and there would be no
+harm in it.
+
+So had run Sir Beverley's thoughts prior to the appearance of the
+mother's help at the Vicarage. But she--the woman with the resolute mouth
+and grey, steadfast eyes--had upset all his calculations. It had not
+needed Lennox Tudor's hint to put him on his guard. He had known whither
+the boy's wayward fancy was tending before that. The scene in the
+hunting-field had been sufficient revelation for him, and had lent
+strength to his arm and fury to his indignation.
+
+Piers' decision to spend his last night in England at a dance had been a
+surprise to him, but then the boy had puzzled him a good many times of
+late. He had even asked himself once or twice if it had been his
+deliberate intention to do so. But since it was absolutely certain that
+the schemer at the Vicarage would not be present at Dick Guyes' party,
+Sir Beverley did not see any urgent necessity for keeping his grandson at
+his side. He even hoped that Piers would enjoy himself though he deemed
+him a fool to go.
+
+And, to judge from appearances, Piers was enjoying himself. Having parted
+from Ina, he claimed for his partner his hostess,--a pretty, graceful
+woman who danced under protest, but so exquisitely that he would hardly
+be persuaded to give her up when the dance was over.
+
+He scarcely left the ball-room for the rest of the evening, and when the
+party broke up he was among the last to leave. Dick ingenuously thanked
+him for helping to make the affair a success. He was not feeling
+particularly happy himself, since Ina had consistently snubbed him
+throughout; but he did not hold Piers in any way responsible for her
+attitude. Dick's outlook on life was supremely simple. He never attempted
+to comprehend the ways of women, being serenely content to regard them as
+beyond his comprehension. He hoped and believed that one day Ina would be
+kind to him, but he was quite prepared to wait an indefinite time for
+that day to dawn. He took all rebuffs with resignation, and could
+generally muster a smile soon after.
+
+He smiled tranquilly upon Piers at parting and congratulated him upon the
+prospect of missing the worst of the winter. To which Piers threw back a
+laugh as he drove away in his little two-seater, coupled with the
+careless assurance that he meant to make the most of his time, whatever
+the weather.
+
+"Lucky dog!" said Guyes, as he watched him disappear down the drive.
+
+But if he had seen the expression that succeeded Piers' laugh, he might
+have suppressed the remark. For Piers' face, as he raced alone through
+the darkness, was the set, grim face of a man who carries a deadly
+purpose in his soul. He had laughed and danced throughout the evening,
+but in his first moment of solitude the devil he had kept at bay had
+entered into full possession.
+
+To the rush and throb of his engine, he heard over and over the gibing,
+malicious words of a girl's sore heart: "Mind the doctor doesn't cut you
+out in your absence!"
+
+Obviously then this affair was the common talk of the neighbourhood since
+news of it had even penetrated to Wardenhurst. People were openly
+watching the rivalry between Lennox Tudor and himself, watching and
+speculating as to the result. And he, about to be ignominiously removed
+from the conflict by his grandfather, at Tudor's suggestion, had become
+the laughing-stock of the place. Piers' teeth nearly met in his lower
+lip. Let them laugh! And let them chatter! He would give them ample food
+for amusement and gossip before he left.
+
+He had yielded to his grandfather's desire because instinct had told him
+that his absence just at that stage of his wooing would be more
+beneficial than his presence. He was shrewd enough to realize that the
+hot blood in him was driving him too fast, urging him to a pace which
+might irreparably damage his cause. For that reason alone, he was ready
+to curb his fierce impetuosity. But to leave a free field for Lennox
+Tudor was not a part of his plan. He had scarcely begun to regard the man
+in the light of a serious rival, although fully aware of the fact that
+Tudor was doing his utmost to remove him from his path. But if Ina
+thought him so, he had probably underestimated the danger.
+
+He had always detested Tudor very thoroughly. Piers never did anything by
+halves, and the doctor's undisguised criticism of him never failed to
+arouse his fiercest resentment. That Tudor disliked him in return was a
+fact that could scarcely escape the notice of the most careless observer.
+The two were plainly antipathetic, and were scarcely civil to one another
+even in public.
+
+But that night Piers' antagonism flared to a deadly hatred. The
+smouldering fire had leaped to a fierce blaze. Two nights before he had
+smothered it with the exultant conviction that Tudor's chances with Avery
+were practically non-existent. He had known with absolute certainty that
+he was not the type of man to attract her. But to-night his mood had
+changed. Whether Tudor's chances had improved or not, he scarcely stopped
+to question, but that other people regarded them as possibly greater than
+his own was a fact that sent the mad blood to his head. He tore back
+through the winter night like a man possessed, with Ina Rose's scoffing
+warning beating a devil's tattoo in his brain.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+
+The surgery-bell pealed imperiously, and Tudor looked up from his book.
+It was his custom to read far into the night, for he was a poor sleeper
+and preferred a cosy fireside to his bed. But that night he was even
+later than usual. Glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece, he saw that
+it was a quarter to two. With a shrug of the shoulders expressive rather
+of weariness than indifference, he rose to answer the bell.
+
+It pealed again before he reached the door, and the doctor frowned. He
+was never very tolerant of impatience. He unfastened the bolts without
+haste. The case might be urgent, but a steady hand and cool nerve were
+usually even more essential than speed in his opinion. He opened the door
+therefore with a certain deliberation, and faced the sharp night air with
+grim resignation. "Well? Who is it? Come in!"
+
+He expected to see some village messenger, and the sight of Piers,
+stern-faced, with the fur collar of his motor-coat turned up to his ears,
+was a complete surprise.
+
+"Hullo!" he said, staring at him. "Anything wrong?"
+
+Piers stared back with eyes of burning hostility. "I want a word with
+you," he announced curtly. "Will you come out, or shall I come in?"
+
+"You'd better come in," said Tudor, suppressing a shiver, "unless I'm
+wanted up at the Abbey."
+
+"You're not," said Piers.
+
+He stepped into the passage, and impetuously stripped off his heavy
+coat. Tudor shut the door, and turned round. He surveyed his visitor's
+evening-dress with a touch of contempt. He himself was clad in an
+ancient smoking-jacket, much frayed at the cuffs; and his
+carpet-slippers were so trodden down at the heel that he could only just
+manage to shuffle along in them.
+
+"Go into the consulting-room!" he said. "There's a light there."
+
+Piers strode in, and waited for him. Seen by the light of the gas that
+burned there, his face was pale and set in lines of iron determination.
+His eyes shone out of it like the eyes of an infuriated wild beast.
+
+"Do you know what I've come for?" he said, as Tudor shambled into the
+room.
+
+Tudor looked him over briefly and comprehensively. "No, I don't," he
+said. "I hoped I'd seen the last of you."
+
+His words were as brief as his look. It was obvious that he had no
+intention of wasting time in mere courtesy.
+
+Piers' lips tightened at his tone. He looked full and straight at the
+baffling glasses that hid the other man's contemptuous eyes.
+
+"I've come for a reckoning with you," he said.
+
+"Really?" said Tudor. He glanced again at the clock. "Rather an unusual
+hour, isn't it?"
+
+Piers passed the question by. He was chafing on his feet like a caged
+animal. Abruptly he came to the point.
+
+"I told you the other day that I wouldn't put up with any interference
+from you. I didn't know then how far your interference had gone. I do
+know now. This scheme to get me out of the country was of your
+contrivance."
+
+Fiercely he flung the words. He was quivering with passionate
+indignation. But the effect on Tudor was scarcely perceptible. He only
+looked a little colder, a little more satirical, than was his wont.
+
+"Well?" he said. "What of it?"
+
+Piers showed his teeth momentarily. His hands were hard gripped behind
+him, as though he restrained himself by main force from open violence.
+
+"You don't deny it?" he said.
+
+"Why should I?" Tudor's thin lips displayed a faint sneer. "I certainly
+advised your grandfather to go away, and I think the advice was sound."
+
+"It was--from your point of view." A tremor of fierce humour ran through
+Piers' speech. "But plans--even clever ones--don't always turn out as
+they should. This one for instance--what do you think you are going to
+gain by it?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Tudor stood by the table facing Piers, his attitude
+one of supreme indifference. He seemed scarcely to feel the stormy
+atmosphere that pulsated almost visibly around the younger man. His eyes
+behind their glasses were cold and shrewd, wholly emotionless.
+
+Piers paused an instant to grip his self-control the harder, for every
+word he uttered seemed to make his hold the more precarious.
+
+"I'll tell you what I mean," he said, his voice low and savagely
+distinct. "I mean that what you've done--all this sneaking and scheming
+to get me out of your way--isn't going to serve your purpose. I mean that
+you shall swear to me here and now to give up the game during my absence,
+or take the consequences. It is entirely due to you that I am going,
+but--by Heaven--you shall reap no advantage from it!"
+
+His voice rose a little, and the menace of it became more apparent. He
+bent slightly towards the man he threatened. His eyes blazed red and
+dangerous. Tudor stood his ground, but it was impossible any longer to
+ignore Piers' open fury. It was like the blast of a hurricane hurled
+full against him. He made a slight gesture of remonstrance.
+
+"My good fellow, all this excitement is utterly uncalled for. The advice
+I gave your grandfather would, I am convinced, have been given by any
+other medical man in the country. If you are not satisfied with it, you
+had better get him to have another opinion. As to taking advantage of
+your absence, I really don't know what you mean, and I think if you are
+wise you won't stop to explain. It's getting late and if you don't value
+your night's rest, I can't do without mine. Also, I think when the
+morning comes, you'll be ashamed of this foolery."
+
+He spoke with studied coldness. He knew the value of a firm front when
+facing odds. But he did not know the fiery soul of the man before him,
+or realize that contempt poured upon outraged pride is as spirit poured
+upon flame.
+
+He saw the devil in Piers' eyes too late to change his tactics. Almost in
+the same moment the last shred of Piers' self-control vanished like smoke
+in a gale. He uttered a fearful oath and sprang upon Tudor like an animal
+freed from a leash.
+
+The struggle that followed was furious if brief. Tudor's temper, once
+thoroughly roused, was as fierce as any man's, and though his knowledge
+of the science of fighting was wholly elementary, he made a desperate
+resistance. It lasted for possibly thirty seconds, and then he found
+himself flung violently backwards across the table and pinned there, with
+Piers' hands gripping his throat, and Piers' eyes, grim and murderous,
+glaring down into his own.
+
+"Be still!" ordered Piers, his voice no more than a whisper. "Or I'll
+kill you--by Heaven, I will!"
+
+Tudor was utterly powerless in that relentless grip. His heart was
+pumping with great hammer-strokes; his breathing came laboured between
+those merciless hands. His own hands were closed upon the iron wrists,
+but their hold was weakening moment by moment, he knew their grasp to be
+wholly ineffectual. He obeyed the order because he lacked the strength to
+do otherwise.
+
+Piers slowly slackened his grip. "Now," he said, speaking between lips
+that scarcely seemed to move, "you will make me that promise."
+
+"What--promise?" Gaspingly Tudor uttered the question, yet something of
+the habitual sneer which he always kept for Piers distorted his mouth as
+he spoke. He was not an easy man to beat, despite his physical
+limitations.
+
+Sternly and implacably Piers answered him. "You will swear--by all you
+hold sacred--to take no advantage whatever of me while I am away. You had
+a special purpose in view when you planned to get me out of the way. You
+will swear to give up that purpose, till I come back."
+
+"I?" said Tudor.
+
+Just the one word flung upwards at his conqueror, but carrying with it a
+defiance so complete that even Piers was for the moment taken by
+surprise! Then, the devil urging him, he tightened his grip again.
+"Either that," he said, "or--"
+
+He left the sentence unfinished. His hands completed the threat. He had
+passed the bounds of civilization, and his savagery whirled him like a
+fiery torrent through the gaping jaws of hell. The maddening flames were
+all around him, the shrieking of demons was in his ears, driving him on
+to destruction. He went, blinded by passion, goaded by the intolerable
+stabs of jealousy. In those moments he was conscious of nothing save a
+wild delirium of anger against the man who, beaten, yet resisted him, yet
+threw him his disdainful refusal to surrender even in the face of
+overwhelming defeat.
+
+But the brief respite had given Tudor a transient renewal of strength.
+Ere that terrible grip could wholly lock again, he made another frantic
+effort to free himself. Spasmodic as it was, and wholly unconsidered, yet
+it had the advantage of being unexpected. Piers shifted his hold, and in
+that instant Tudor found and gripped the edge of the table. Sharply, with
+desperate strength, he dragged himself sideways, and before his adversary
+could prevent it he was over the edge. He fell heavily, dragging Piers
+with him, struck his head with violence against the table-leg, and
+crumpled with the blow like an empty sack.
+
+Piers found himself gripping a limp, inanimate object, and with a sudden
+sense of overpowering horror he desisted. He stumbled up, staggering
+slightly, and drew a long, hard breath. His heart was racing like a
+runaway engine. All the blood in his body seemed to be concentrated
+there. Almost mechanically he waited for it to slow down. And, as he
+waited, the madness of that wild rush through hell fell away from him.
+The demons that had driven him passed into distance. He was left standing
+in a place of desolation, utterly and terribly alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A trickle of cold water ran down Tudor's chin. He put up a hesitating,
+groping hand, and opened his eyes.
+
+He was lying in the arm-chair before the fire in which he had spent the
+evening. The light danced before him in blurred flashes.
+
+"Hullo!" he muttered thickly. "I've been asleep."
+
+He remained passive for a few moments, trying, not very successfully, to
+collect his scattered senses. Then, with an effort that seemed curiously
+laboured, he slowly sat up. Instinctively, his eyes went to the clock
+above him, but the hands of it seemed to be swinging round and round. He
+stared at it bewildered.
+
+But when he tried to rise and investigate the mystery, the whole room
+began to spin, and he sank back with a feeling of intense sickness.
+
+It was then that he became aware of another presence. Someone came from
+behind him and, stooping, held a tumbler to his lips. He looked up
+vaguely, and as in a dream he saw the face of Piers Evesham.
+
+But it was Piers as he had never before seen him, white-lipped, unnerved,
+shaking. The hand that held the glass trembled almost beyond control.
+
+"What's the matter?" questioned Tudor in hazy wonder. "Have you been
+boozing, or have I?"
+
+And then, his perceptions growing stronger, he took the glass from the
+quivering hand and slowly drank.
+
+The draught steadied him. He looked up with more assurance, and saw
+Piers, still with that deathly look on his face, leaning against the
+mantelpiece for support.
+
+"What on earth's the matter?" said Tudor sharply.
+
+He felt for his glasses, found them dangling over his shoulder, and put
+them on. One of them was cracked across, an illuminating fact which
+accounted for much. He looked keenly at Piers for several quiet seconds.
+
+At length with a shade of humour he spoke. "Here endeth the first lesson!
+You'd make a better show if you had a drink also. I'm sorry there's only
+one glass. You see, I wasn't expecting any friends to-night."
+
+Piers started a little and straightened himself; but his face remained
+bloodless, and there was a curiously stunned look in his eyes. He did not
+attempt to utter a word.
+
+Tudor drained his glass, sat a moment or two longer, then got up. There
+were brandy and water on his writing-table. He poured out a stiff dose,
+and turned to Piers with authority.
+
+"Pull yourself together, Evesham! I should have thought you'd made a
+big enough fool of yourself for one night. Drink this! Don't spill it
+now! And don't sit down on the fire, for I don't feel equal to
+pulling you off!"
+
+His manner was briskly professional, the manner he usually reserved for
+the hysterical portion of his patients. He was still feeling decidedly
+shaky himself, but Piers' collapse was an admirable restorative. He stood
+by, vigilant and resolute, while the brandy did its work.
+
+Piers drank in silence, not looking at him. All the arrogance had gone
+out of him. He looked broken and unmanned.
+
+"Better?" asked Tudor at length.
+
+He nodded mutely, and set down the glass.
+
+Tudor surveyed him questioningly. "What happened to you?" he asked
+finally.
+
+"Nothing!" Piers found his voice at last, it was low and shamed. "Nothing
+whatever! You--you--my God!--I thought you were dead, that's all."
+
+"That all?" said Tudor. He put his hand up to his temple. There was a
+fair-sized lump there already, and it was swelling rapidly.
+
+Piers nodded again. The deathly pallor had gone from his face, but he
+still avoided Tudor's eyes. He spoke again, below his breath, as if more
+to himself than to Tudor.
+
+"You looked so horribly like--like--a man I once--saw killed."
+
+"If you are wise, you will go home to bed," said Tudor gruffly.
+
+Piers flashed a swift look at him. He stood hesitating. "You're not
+really hurt?" he questioned, after a moment.
+
+"Thank you," said Tudor drily, "I am not."
+
+He made no movement of reconciliation. Perhaps it was hardly to be
+expected of him. Piers made none either. He turned away in silence.
+
+The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour. Two o'clock! Tudor looked
+at it with a wry smile. It had been a lively quarter of an hour.
+
+The surgery-door banged upon Piers' departure. He heard his feet move
+heavily to the gate, and the dull clang of the latter closing behind him.
+Then, after a protracted pause, there came the sound of his motor.
+
+As this throbbed away into distance Tudor smiled again grimly,
+ironically. "Yes, you young ruffian," he said. "It's given your nerves a
+nasty jolt, and serves you jolly well right! I never saw any fellow in
+such a mortal funk before, and--from your somewhat rash remark--I gather
+that it's not the first lesson after all. I wonder when--and how--you
+killed that other man."
+
+He was still speculating as he turned out the light and went to his room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+HORNS AND HOOFS
+
+
+It was the Reverend Stephen Lorimer's custom to have all letters that
+arrived by the morning post placed beside his breakfast plate to be
+sorted by him at the end of family prayers,--a custom which Gracie freely
+criticized in the sanctuary of the schoolroom, and which her mother in
+earlier days had gently and quite ineffectually tried to stop. It was
+always a somewhat lengthy proceeding as it entailed a careful scrutiny of
+each envelope, especially in the case of letters not addressed to the
+Reverend Stephen. He was well acquainted with the handwriting of all his
+wife's correspondents, and was generally ready with some shrewd guess as
+to their motives for writing. They were usually submitted to him for
+perusal as soon as she had read them herself, a habit formed by Mrs.
+Lorimer when she discovered that he looked upon her correspondence as his
+own property and deeply resented any inclination on her part to keep it
+to herself.
+
+Avery's arrival had brought an additional interest to the morning budget.
+Her letters were invariably examined with bland curiosity and handed on
+to her with comments appropriate to their appearance. Occasionally
+envelopes with an Australian postmark reached her, and these always
+excited especial notice. The brief spell of Avery's married life had been
+spent in a corner of New South Wales. In the early part of their
+acquaintance, Mr. Lorimer had sought to draw her out on the subject of
+her experiences during this period, but he had found her reticent. And so
+whenever a letter came addressed in the strong, masculine hand of her
+Australian correspondent, some urbane remark was invariably made, while
+his small daughter Gracie swelled with indignation at the further
+end of the table.
+
+"Two epistles for Mrs. Denys!" he announced, as he turned over the
+morning's mail at the breakfast-table two days after Christmas. "Ah, I
+thought our Australian friend would be calling attention to himself ere
+the festive season had quite departed. He writes from Adelaide on this
+occasion. That indicates a move if I mistake not. His usual
+_pied-a-terre_ has been Brisbane hitherto, has it not?"
+
+His little dark eyes interrogated Avery for a moment before they vanished
+inwards with disconcerting completeness.
+
+Avery stiffened instinctively. She was well aware that Mr. Lorimer did
+not like her, but the fact held no disturbing element. To her mind the
+dislike of the man was preferable to his favour and after all she saw but
+little of him.
+
+She went on therefore with her occupation of cutting bread and butter for
+the children with no sign of annoyance save that slight, scarcely
+perceptible stiffening of the neck which only Gracie saw.
+
+"I hope you are kind to your faithful correspondent," smiled Mr. Lorimer,
+still holding the letter between his finger and thumb. "He evidently
+regards your friendship as a pearl of price, and doubtless he is
+well-advised to do so."
+
+Here he opened his eyes again, and sent a barbed glance at Avery's
+unresponsive face.
+
+"Friendship is a beautiful thing, is it not?" he said.
+
+"It is," said Avery, deftly cutting her fifth slice.
+
+The Reverend Stephen proceeded with clerical fervour to embellish his
+subject, for no especial reason save the pleasure of listening to his own
+eloquence--a pleasure which never palled. "It partakes of that divine
+quality of charity so sadly lacking in many of us, and sheds golden beams
+of sunshine in the humblest earthly home. It has been aptly called the
+true earnest of eternity."
+
+"Really!" said Avery.
+
+"An exquisite thought, is it not?" said the Vicar. "Grace, my child, for
+the one-and-twentieth time I must beg of you not to swing your legs when
+sitting at table."
+
+"I wasn't," said Gracie.
+
+Her father's brows were elevated in surprise. His eyes as a consequence
+were opened rather wider than usual, revealing an unmistakably
+malignant gleam.
+
+"That is not the way in which a Christian child should receive
+admonition," he said. "If you were not swinging your legs, you were
+fidgeting in a fashion which you very well know to be unmannerly. Do not
+let me have to complain of your behaviour again!"
+
+Gracie's cheeks were crimson, her violet eyes blazing with resentment;
+and Avery, dreading an outburst, laid a gentle restraining hand upon her
+shoulder for an instant.
+
+The action was well-meant, but its results were unfortunate. Gracie
+impulsively seized and kissed the hand with enthusiasm. "All right, Avery
+dear," she said with pointed docility.
+
+Mr. Lorimer's brows rose a little higher, but being momentarily at a loss
+for a suitable comment he contented himself with a return to Avery's
+correspondence.
+
+"The other letter," he said, "bears the well-known crest of the Evesham
+family. Ah, Mrs. Denys!" he shook his head at her. "Now, what does
+that portend?"
+
+"What is the crest?" asked Avery, briskly cutting another slice.
+
+"The devil," said Gracie.
+
+"My dear!" remonstrated Mrs. Lorimer, with a nervous glance towards
+her husband.
+
+The Reverend Stephen was smiling, but in a fashion she did not quite
+like. He addressed Avery.
+
+"The Evesham crest, Mrs. Denys, is a gentleman with horns and hoofs and
+under him the one expressive word, _'Cave.'_ Excellent advice, is it not?
+I think we should do well to follow it." He turned the envelope over, and
+studied the address. "What a curious style of writing the young man has,
+unrestrained to a degree! This looks as if it had been written in a
+desperate mood. Mrs. Denys, Mrs. Denys, what have you been doing?"
+
+He began to laugh, but stopped abruptly as Julian, who was seated near
+him, with a sudden, clumsy movement, upset a stream of cocoa across the
+breakfast-table. This created an instant diversion. Mr. Lorimer turned
+upon him vindictively, and soundly smacked his head, Mrs. Lorimer covered
+her face and wept, and Avery, with Gracie close behind, hurried to remedy
+the disaster.
+
+Ranald came to help her in his quiet, gentlemanly way, dabbing up the
+thick brown stream with his table-napkin. Pat slipped round to his
+mother and hugged her hard. And Olive, the only unmoved member of the
+party, looked on with contemptuous eyes the while she continued her
+breakfast. Jeanie still breakfasted upstairs in the schoolroom, and so
+missed the _fracas_.
+
+"The place is a pig-sty!" declared Mr. Lorimer, roused out of all
+complacence and casting dainty phraseology to the winds. "And you,
+sir,"--he addressed his second son,--"wholly unfit for civilized
+society. Go upstairs, and--if you have any appetite left after this
+disgusting exhibition--satisfy it in the nursery!"
+
+Julian, crimson but wholly unashamed, flung up his head defiantly and
+walked to the door.
+
+"Stop!" commanded Mr. Lorimer, ere he reached it.
+
+Julian stopped.
+
+His father looked him up and down with gradually returning composure.
+"You will not go to the nursery," he said. "You will go to the study and
+there suffer the penalty for insolence."
+
+"Stephen!" broke from Mrs. Lorimer in anguished protest.
+
+"A beastly shame!" cried Gracie vehemently, flinging discretion to the
+winds; she adored her brother Julian. "He never spoke a single word!"
+
+"Go, Julian!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Julian went, banging the door vigorously behind him.
+
+Then, amid an awful silence, the Vicar turned his scrutiny upon his
+small daughter.
+
+Gracie stood up under it with all the courage at her disposal, but she
+was white to the lips before that dreadful gaze passed from her to Avery.
+
+"Mrs. Denys," said Mr. Lorimer, in tones of icy courtesy, "will you
+oblige me by taking that child upstairs, undressing her, and putting her
+to bed? She will remain there until I come."
+
+Avery, her task accomplished, turned and faced him. She was as white as
+Gracie, but there was a steadfast light in her eyes that showed her
+wholly unafraid.
+
+"Mr. Lorimer," she said, "with your permission I will deal with
+Gracie. She has done wrong, I know. By-and-bye, she will be sorry and
+tell you so."
+
+Mr. Lorimer smiled sarcastically. "An apology, my dear Mrs. Denys, does
+not condone the offence. It is wholly against my principles to spare the
+rod when it is so richly merited, and I shall not do so on this occasion.
+Will you kindly do as I have requested?"
+
+It was final, and Avery knew it. Mrs. Lorimer knew it also, and burst
+into hysterical crying.
+
+Avery turned swiftly. "Go upstairs, dear!" she said to Gracie, and Gracie
+went like an arrow.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer started to her feet. "Stephen! Stephen!" she cried
+imploringly.
+
+But her husband turned a deaf ear. With a contemptuous gesture he tossed
+Avery's letters upon the table and stalked from the room.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer uttered a wild cry of despair, and fell back fainting in
+her chair.
+
+For the next quarter of an hour Avery was fully occupied in restoring
+her, again assisted by Ronald. When she came to herself, it was only to
+shed anguished tears on Avery's shoulder and repeat over and over again
+that she could not bear it, she could not bear it.
+
+Avery was of the same opinion, but she did not say so. She strove
+instead with the utmost tenderness to persuade her to drink some tea.
+But even when she had succeeded in this, Mrs. Lorimer continued to be so
+exhausted and upset that at last, growing uneasy, Avery despatched
+Ronald for the doctor.
+
+She sent Olive for the children's nurse and took counsel with her as to
+getting her mistress back to bed. But Nurse instantly discouraged this
+suggestion.
+
+"For the Lord's sake, ma'am, don't take her upstairs!" she said. "The
+master's up there with Miss Gracie, and he's whipping the poor lamb
+something cruel. He made me undress her first."
+
+"Oh, I cannot have that!" exclaimed Avery. "Stay here a minute, Nurse,
+while I go up!"
+
+She rushed upstairs in furious anger to the room in which the three
+little girls slept. The door was locked, but the sounds within were
+unmistakable. Gracie was plainly receiving severe punishment from her
+irate parent. Her agonized crying tore Avery's heart.
+
+She threw herself at the door and battered at it with her fists. "Mr.
+Lorimer!" she called. "Mr. Lorimer, let me in!"
+
+There was no response. Possibly she was not even heard, for the dreadful
+crying continued and, mingled with it, the swish of the slender little
+riding-switch which in the earlier, less harassed days of his married
+life the Reverend Stephen had kept for the horse he rode, and which now
+he kept for his children.
+
+They were terrible moments for Avery that she spent outside that locked
+door, listening impotently to a child's piteous cries for mercy from one
+who knew it not. But they came to an end at last. Gracie's distress sank
+into anguished sobs, and Avery knew that the punishment was over. Mr.
+Lorimer had satisfied both his sense of duty and his malice.
+
+She heard him speak in cold, cutting tones. "I have punished you more
+severely than I had ever expected to find necessary, and I hope that the
+lesson will be sufficient. But I warn you, Grace, most solemnly that I
+shall watch your behaviour very closely for the future, and if I detect
+in you the smallest indication of the insolence and defiance for which I
+have inflicted this punishment upon you to-day I shall repeat the
+punishment fourfold. No! Not another word!" as Gracie made some
+inarticulate utterance. "Or you will compel me to repeat it to-night!"
+
+And with that, he walked quietly to the door and unlocked it.
+
+Avery had ceased to beat upon it; she met him white and stiff in
+the doorway.
+
+"I have just sent for the doctor," she said. "Mrs. Lorimer has been
+taken ill."
+
+She passed him at once with the words, not looking at him, for she could
+not trust herself. Straight to Gracie, huddled on the floor in her
+night-dress, she went, and lifted the child bodily to her bed.
+
+Gracie clung to her, sobbing passionately. Mr. Lorimer lingered in
+the doorway.
+
+"Will you go, please?" said Avery, tight-lipped and rigid, the child
+clasped to her throbbing heart.
+
+It was a definite command, spoken in a tone that almost compelled
+compliance, and Mr. Lorimer lingered no more.
+
+Then for one long minute Avery sat and rocked the poor little tortured
+body in her arms.
+
+At length, through Gracie's sobs, she spoke. "Gracie darling, I'm going
+to ask you to do something big for me."
+
+"Yes?" sobbed Gracie, clinging tightly round her neck.
+
+"Leave off crying!" Avery said. "Please leave off crying, darling, and be
+your own brave self!"
+
+"I can't," cried Gracie.
+
+"But do try, darling!" Avery urged her softly. "Because, you see, I can't
+leave you like this, and your poor little mother wants me so badly. She
+is ill, Gracie, and I ought to go to her, but I can't while you are
+crying so."
+
+Thus adjured, Gracie made gallant efforts to check herself. But her
+spirit was temporarily quite broken. She stood passively with the tears
+running down her face while Avery hastily dressed her again and set her
+rumpled hair to rights. Then again for a few seconds they held each other
+very tightly.
+
+"Bless you, my own brave darling!" Avery whispered.
+
+To which Gracie made tearful reply: "Whatever should we do without you,
+dear--dear Avery?"
+
+"And you won't cry any more?" pleaded Avery, who was nearer to tears
+herself than she dared have owned.
+
+"No," said Gracie valiantly.
+
+She began to dry her eyes with vigour--a hopeful sign; and after pressing
+upon Avery another damp kiss was even able to muster a smile.
+
+"Now you can do something to help me," said Avery. "Give yourself five
+minutes--here's my watch to go by!" She slipped it off her own wrist and
+on to Gracie's. "Then run up to the nursery and see after the children
+while Nurse is downstairs! And drink a cup of milk, dearie! Mind you do,
+for you've had nothing yet."
+
+"I shall love to wear your watch," murmured Gracie, beginning to be
+comforted.
+
+"I know you'll take care of it," Avery said, with a loving hand on the
+child's hair. "Now you'll be all right, will you? I can leave you without
+worrying?"
+
+Gracie gave her face a final polish, and nodded. Spent and sore though she
+was, her spirit was beginning to revive. "Is Mother really ill?" she
+asked, as Avery turned to go.
+
+"I don't know, dear. I'm rather anxious about her," said Avery.
+
+"It's all Father's fault," said Gracie.
+
+Avery was silent. She could not contradict the statement.
+
+As she reached the door, Gracie spoke again, but more to herself than to
+Avery. "I hope--when he dies--he'll go to hell and stay there for ever
+and ever and ever!"
+
+"Oh, Gracie!" Avery stopped, genuinely shocked. "How wrong!" she said.
+
+Gracie nodded several times. "Yes, I know it's wrong, but I don't care.
+And I hope he'll die to-morrow."
+
+"Hush! Hush!" Avery said.
+
+Whereat Gracie broke into a propitiatory smile. "The things I wish for
+never happen," she said.
+
+And Avery departed, wondering if this statement deserved to be treated in
+the light of an amendment.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE DAY OF TROUBLE
+
+
+Lennox Tudor spent hours at the Vicarage that day in close attendance
+upon Mrs. Lorimer in company with Avery who scarcely left her side.
+Terrible hours they were, during which they battled strenuously to keep
+the poor, quivering life in her weary body.
+
+"There is no reason why she shouldn't pull round," Tudor assured Avery.
+
+But yet throughout the day she hovered on the verge of collapse.
+
+By night the worst danger was over, but intense weakness remained. She
+lay white and still, taking notice of nothing. Only once, when Avery was
+giving her nourishment, did she rouse herself to speak.
+
+"Beg my husband not to be vexed with me!" she whispered. "Tell him there
+won't be another little one after all! He'll be glad to know that."
+
+And Avery, cut to the heart, promised to deliver the message.
+
+A little later she stole away, leaving the children's nurse in charge,
+and slipped up to the schoolroom for some tea. Tudor had gone to see
+another patient, but had promised to return as soon as possible.
+
+The children were all gathered round the table at which Olive very
+capably presided. Gracie, looking wan and subdued, sat on the end of
+Jeanie's sofa; but she sprang to meet Avery the moment she appeared.
+
+Avery sat down, holding the child's hand in hers. She glanced round the
+table as she did so.
+
+"Where is Julian?"
+
+"Upstairs," said Ronald briefly. "In disgrace."
+
+Avery felt her heart contract with a sick sense of further trouble in the
+air. "Has he been there all day?" she asked. Ronald nodded. "And another
+flogging to-night if he doesn't apologize. He says he'll die first."
+
+"So would I," breathed Gracie.
+
+At this juncture the door swung open with stately precision, and Mr.
+Lorimer entered. Everyone rose, according to established custom, with the
+exceptions of Avery and Jeanie. Gracie's fingers tightened convulsively
+upon Avery's hand, and she turned as white as the table-cloth.
+
+Mr. Lorimer, however, looked over her head as if she did not exist, and
+addressed Avery.
+
+"Mrs. Denys, be so good as to spare me two minutes in the study!" he said
+with extreme formality.
+
+"Certainly," Avery made quiet reply. "I will come to you before I go back
+to Mrs. Lorimer."
+
+He raised his brows slightly, as if he had expected a more prompt
+compliance with his request. And then his eyes fell upon Gracie, clinging
+fast to Avery's hand.
+
+"Grace," he said, in his clear, definite tones, "come here!"
+
+The child gave a great start and shrank against Avery's shoulder. "Oh
+no!" she whispered. "No!"
+
+"Come here!" repeated Mr. Lorimer.
+
+He extended his hand, but Gracie only shrank further away. She was
+trembling violently, so violently that Avery felt impelled to pass a
+sustaining arm around her.
+
+"Come, my child!" said the Vicar, the majestic composure of his features
+gradually yielding to a look of dawning severity.
+
+"Go, dear!" whispered Avery.
+
+"I don't want to," gasped Gracie.
+
+"I shall not punish you," her father said, "unless I find you disobedient
+or still unrepentant."
+
+"Darling, go!" Avery urged softly into her ear. "It'll be all right now."
+
+But Gracie, shaking from head to foot and scarcely able to stand, only
+clung to her the faster, and in a moment she began agitatedly to cry.
+
+Mr. Lorimer's hand fell to his side. "Still unrepentant, I fear," he
+said.
+
+Avery, with the child gathered closely to her, looked across at him with
+wide, accusing eyes.
+
+"She is frightened and upset," she said. "It is not fair to judge her in
+this condition."
+
+Mr. Lorimer's eyes gleamed back malignantly. He made her an icy bow. "In
+that case, Mrs. Denys," he said, "she had better go to bed and stay there
+until her condition has improved."
+
+Avery compressed her lips tightly, and made no rejoinder.
+
+The Reverend Stephen compressed his, and after a definite pause of most
+unpleasant tension, he uttered a deep sigh and withdrew.
+
+"I know he means to do it again!" sobbed Gracie. "I know he does!"
+
+"He shall not!" said Avery.
+
+And with the words she put the child from her, rose, and with great
+determination walked out of the room.
+
+Mr. Lorimer had scarcely settled himself in what he called his "chair of
+ease" in the study when her low knock reached him, and she entered. Her
+grey eyes were no longer angry, but very resolute. She closed the door
+softly, and came straight to the fire.
+
+"Mr. Lorimer," she said, her voice pitched very low, "I want you to be
+patient with me just for a minute. Will you?"
+
+Mr. Lorimer sighed again. "I am yearning for the refreshment of a little
+solitary meditation, Mrs. Denys," he said.
+
+"I shall not keep you," Avery rejoined steadily. She stood before him,
+very pale but wholly composed. "What I have to say can be said in a very
+few seconds. First, with regard to Gracie; the child is so upset that I
+think any further punishment would make her downright ill."
+
+"Pooh, my dear Mrs. Denys!" said the Reverend Stephen.
+
+Avery paused a moment. "Will you try to listen to me with an open
+mind?" she said.
+
+"I am listening," said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+"I know she was naughty this morning," Avery continued. "I am not trying
+to defend her behaviour. But her punishment was a very severe one, and it
+has so terrified her that at present she can think of nothing else. Give
+her time to be sorry! Please give her time!"
+
+Mr. Lorimer glanced at the clock. "She has already had nine hours," he
+observed. "I shall give her three more."
+
+"And then?" said Avery.
+
+His eyes travelled up to her troubled face. "And if by then," he said
+deliberately, "she has not come to me to express her penitence, I shall
+be reluctantly compelled to repeat the punishment."
+
+"You will drive the child out of her senses if you do!" Avery exclaimed.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "My dear Mrs. Denys, permit me to remind you
+that I have had considerable experience in the upbringing of children."
+
+"And they are all afraid of you," Avery said.
+
+He smiled. "In my opinion a little wholesome awe is salutary. No, Mrs.
+Denys, I cannot listen any further to your persuasion. In fact I fear
+that in Grace's case I have so far erred on the side of laxness. She has
+become very wild and uncontrolled, and--she must be tamed."
+
+He closed his lips upon the word, and despair entered Avery's heart. She
+gripped her self-control with all her might, realizing that the moment
+she lost it, her strength would be gone.
+
+With a great effort she turned from the subject. "I have a message for
+you from Mrs. Lorimer," she said, after a moment, and proceeded to
+deliver it in a low, steady voice, her eyes upon the fire.
+
+The man in the chair heard it without the movement of a muscle of his
+face. "I will endeavour to look in upon her presently," was all the
+reply he made.
+
+Avery turned to go, but he stopped her with a gesture.
+
+"Mrs. Denys," he said smoothly, "you forget, I think, that I also had
+something to say."
+
+Avery paused. She had forgotten.
+
+He turned his eyes deliberately up to hers, as he leaned back in his
+chair. "I am sorry to have to tell you," he said, "that in consequence of
+your unfortunate zeal in encouraging the children in insubordination, I
+can no longer look upon you as in any sense a help in my household. I
+therefore desire that you will take a month's notice from now. If I can
+fill your place sooner, I shall dispense with your services earlier."
+
+Calmly, dispassionately, he uttered the words. Avery stood quite still to
+hear them. And through her like a stab there ran the thought of the poor
+little woman upstairs. The pain of it was almost unbearable. She caught
+her breath involuntarily.
+
+But the next moment she was herself again. She bowed without a word, and
+turned to go.
+
+She had nearly reached the door ere she discovered that it stood open,
+and that Lennox Tudor was on the threshold, more grimly strong than she
+had ever before realized him to be.
+
+He stood back for her to pass, holding the door for her without speaking.
+And in silence Avery departed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE STRAIGHT TRUTH
+
+
+"Ah, my worthy physician, enter, enter!" was Mr. Lorimer's bland
+greeting. "What news of the patient?"
+
+Tudor tramped up to the hearth, looking very square and resolute. "I've
+come from the schoolroom," he said, "where I went to take a look at
+Jeanie. But I found Gracie required more of my attention than she did.
+Are you absolutely mad, I wonder, to inflict corporal punishment upon a
+highly-strung child like that? Let me tell you this! You'll turn her into
+a senseless idiot if you persist! The child is nearly crazed with terror
+as it is. I've told them to put her to bed, and I'm going up to give her
+a soothing draught directly."
+
+Mr. Lorimer rose with dignity. "You somewhat magnify your office,
+doctor," he said.
+
+"No, I don't!" said Tudor rudely. "I do what I must. And I warn you that
+child is wrought up to a highly dangerous pitch of excitement. You don't
+want her to have brain-fever, I suppose?"
+
+"Pooh!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Tudor stamped a furious foot, and let himself go. He had no scruples
+about losing his temper at that moment. He poured forth his indignation
+in a perfect tornado of righteous anger.
+
+"That's all you have to say, is it? You--a man of God, so-called--killing
+your wife by inches and not caring a damn what suffering you cause! I
+tell you, she has been at death's door all day, thanks to your infernal
+behaviour. She may die yet, and you will be directly responsible. You've
+crushed her systematically, body and soul. As to the children, if you
+touch that little girl again--or any of 'em--I'll haul you before the
+Bench for cruelty. Do you hear that?"
+
+Mr. Lorimer, who had been waving a protesting hand throughout this
+vigorous denunciation, here interposed a lofty: "Sir! You
+forget yourself!"
+
+"Not I!" flung back Tudor. "I know very well what I'm about. I spoke to
+you once before about your wife, and you wouldn't listen. But--by
+Heaven--you shall listen this time, and hear the straight truth for once.
+Her life has been a perpetual martyrdom for years. You've tortured her
+through the children as cruelly as any victim was ever tortured on the
+rack. But it's got to stop now. I don't deal in empty threats. What I've
+said I shall stick to. You may be the Vicar of the parish, but you're
+under the same law as the poorest of 'em. And if anything more of this
+kind happens, you shall feel the law. And a pretty scandal it'll make."
+
+He paused a moment, but Mr. Lorimer stood in frozen silence; and almost
+immediately he plunged on.
+
+"Now as regards Mrs. Denys; I heard you give her notice just now. That
+must be taken back--if she will consent to stay. For Mrs. Lorimer
+literally can't do without her yet. Mrs. Lorimer will be an invalid for
+some time to come, if not for good and all. And who is going to take
+charge of the house if you kick out the only capable person it contains?
+Who is going to look after your precious comfort, not to mention that of
+your wife and children? I tell you Mrs. Denys is absolutely indispensable
+to you all for the present. If you part with her, you part with every
+shred of ease and domestic peace you have. And you will have to keep a
+properly qualified nurse to look after your wife. And it isn't every
+nurse that is a blessing in the home, I can assure you."
+
+He stopped again; and finding Mr. Lorimer still somewhat dazed by this
+sudden attack, he turned and began to pace the room to give him time
+to recover.
+
+There followed a prolonged silence. Then at last, with a deep sigh, the
+Vicar dropped down again in his chair.
+
+"My good doctor," he said, "I am convinced that your motives are good
+though your language be somewhat lacking in restraint. I am sorely
+perplexed; let me admit it! Mrs. Denys is, I believe, a thoroughly
+efficient housekeeper, but--" he paused impressively--"her presence is a
+disturbing element with which I would gladly dispense. She is continually
+inventing some pretext for presenting herself at the study-door.
+Moreover, she is extremely injudicious with the children, and I am bound
+to think of their spiritual welfare before their mere bodily needs."
+
+He was evidently anxious to avoid an open rupture, so perhaps it was as
+well that he did not see the look on Tudor's face as he listened to
+this harangue.
+
+"Why don't you pack them off to school?" said Tudor, sticking to the
+point with commendable resolution. "Peace in the house is absolutely
+essential to Mrs. Lorimer. All the elder ones would be better out of
+it--with the exception of Jeanie."
+
+"And why with the exception of Jeanie, may I ask?" There was a touch of
+asperity in Mr. Lorimer's voice. He had been badly browbeaten, and--for
+some reason--he had had to submit. But he was in no docile mood
+thereafter.
+
+Tudor heard the note of resentment in his tone, and came back to the
+hearth. "I have been awaiting a suitable opportunity to talk to you about
+Jeanie," he said.
+
+"What next? What next?" said Mr. Lorimer fretfully.
+
+Tudor proceeded to tell him, his tone deliberately unsympathetic. "She
+needs most careful treatment, most vigilant watching. There is a weakness
+of the lungs which might develop at any time. Mrs. Denys understands her
+and can take care of her. But she is in no state to be entrusted to
+strangers."
+
+"Why was this not mentioned to me before?" said Mr. Lorimer querulously.
+"Though the head of the house, I am always the last to be told of
+anything of importance. I suppose you are sure of what you say?"
+
+"Quite sure," said Tudor, "though I should be absolutely willing for you
+to have another opinion at any time. As to not telling you, I have always
+found it difficult to get you to listen, and, as a rule, I have no time
+to waste on persuasion." He looked at the clock. "I ought to be going
+now. You will consider what I have said about sending the other children
+away to school? You'll find it's the only thing to do."
+
+Mr. Lorimer sighed again with deep melancholy.
+
+Tudor squared his shoulders aggressively. "And with your permission I'll
+tell Mrs. Denys that you have reconsidered the matter and hope she will
+remain for a time at least, if she can see her way to do so."
+
+He paused very definitely for a reply to this. Mr. Lorimer's mouth was
+drawn down at the corners, but he looked into the fire with the aloofness
+of a mind not occupied with mundane things.
+
+Tudor faced him and waited with grim resolution; but several seconds
+passed ere his attitude seemed to become apparent to the abstracted
+Vicar. Then with extreme deliberation his eyelids were raised.
+
+"Excuse me, doctor! My thoughts were for the moment elsewhere. Yes, you
+have my permission to tell her that. And--I agree with you. It seems
+advisable to remove the elder children from her influence without delay.
+I shall therefore take steps to do so."
+
+Tudor nodded with a shrug of the shoulders. It did not matter to him in
+what garb his advice was dressed, so long as it was followed.
+
+"Very well," he said. "I am now going to settle Gracie, and I shall tell
+her you have issued a free pardon all round, and no more will be said to
+anyone. I was told one of the boys was in hot water too, but you can let
+him off for once. You're much more likely to make him ashamed of himself
+that way."
+
+Mr. Lorimer resumed his contemplation of the fire without speaking.
+
+Tudor turned to go. He was fairly satisfied that he had established peace
+for the time being, and he was not ill-pleased with his success.
+
+He told himself as he departed that he had discovered how to deal with
+the Reverend Stephen. It had never occurred to him to attempt such
+treatment before.
+
+To Avery later he gave but few details of the interview, but she could
+not fail to see his grim elation and smiled at it.
+
+"I am to stay then, am I?" she said.
+
+"If you will graciously consent to do so," said Tudor, with his
+brief smile.
+
+"I couldn't do anything else," she said.
+
+"I'm glad of that," he said abruptly, "for my own sake."
+
+And with that very suddenly he turned the subject.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE ENCHANTED LAND
+
+
+At ten o'clock that night, Avery went round to bid each child good-night.
+She found Gracie sleeping peacefully with her bed pushed close to
+Jeanie's. The latter was awake and whispered a greeting. On the other
+side of the room Olive slept the sleep of the just. Avery did not pause
+by her bed, but went straight to Jeanie, who held her hand for a little
+and then gently begged her to go to bed herself.
+
+"You must be so tired," she said.
+
+Avery could not deny the fact. But she had arranged to sleep in Mrs.
+Lorimer's room, so she could not look forward to a night without care.
+She did not tell Jeanie this, however, but presently kissed her tenderly
+and stole away.
+
+She visited the younger boys, and found them all asleep; then slipped up
+to the attic in which the elder lads slept.
+
+She heard their voices as she reached the closed door. She knocked softly
+therefore, and in a moment heard one of them leap to open it.
+
+It was Ronald, clad in pyjamas but unfailingly courteous, who invited
+her to enter.
+
+"I knew it must be you, Mrs. Denys. Come in! Very pleased to see you.
+Wait a second while I light a candle!"
+
+He did so, and revealed Julian sitting up in bed with sullen defiance
+writ large upon his face. But he smiled at sight of her, and patted the
+side of his bed invitingly.
+
+"Don't sit on the chair! It's untrustworthy. It's awfully decent of you
+to look us up like this,--that is, if you haven't come to preach."
+
+"I haven't," said Avery, accepting the invitation since she felt too
+weary to stand.
+
+Julian nodded approval. "That's right. I knew you were too much of a
+brick. I'm awaiting my next swishing for upsetting my cup at breakfast in
+your defence, so I hardly think I deserve any pi-jaw from you, do I?"
+
+"Oh, I'm not at all pi, I assure you," Avery said. "And if it was done
+for my sake, I'm quite grateful, though I wish you hadn't."
+
+Julian grinned at her, and she proceeded.
+
+"I don't think you need wait any longer for the swishing. Your father has
+decided, I understand, not to carry the matter any further."
+
+Julian opened his eyes wide. "What? You've been at him, have you?"
+
+Avery smiled even while she sighed.
+
+"Oh, I'm no good, Julian. I only make things worse when I interfere. No,
+it's not due to me. But, all the same, I hope and believe the trouble has
+blown over for the present. Do--do try and keep the peace in the future!"
+
+Her weariness sounded in her voice; it quivered in spite of her.
+
+Julian placed a quick, clammy hand on hers and squeezed it
+affectionately.
+
+"Anything to oblige!" he promised generously. "Here Ron! Shy over those
+letters! She wants something to cheer her up."
+
+"Letters!" Avery looked round sharply. "I had forgotten my
+letters!" she said.
+
+"Here they are!" Ronald came forward and placed them in her hand. "I
+picked 'em up this morning, and then when you sent me off for the doc, I
+forgot all about 'em. I'm sorry. I only came across them when I was
+undressing, and you were busy in the mater's room, so I thought I'd keep
+them safe till to-morrow. I hope they are not important," he added.
+
+"I don't suppose so," said Avery; yet her heart jerked oddly as she
+slipped them into her dress. "Thank you for taking care of them. I must
+be going now. You are going to be good?"
+
+She looked at Julian, who, still feeling generous, thrust a rough, boyish
+arm about her neck and kissed her.
+
+"You're a trump!" he said. "There! Good-night! I'll be as meek as Moses
+in the morning."
+
+It was a definite promise, and Avery felt relieved. She took leave of
+Ronald more ceremoniously. His scrupulous politeness demanded it. And
+then with feet that felt strangely light, considering her fatigue, she
+ran softly down again to Mrs. Lorimer's room.
+
+In the dressing-room adjoining, she opened and read her letters. One of
+them--the one with the Australian stamp, characteristically brief but
+kind--was to tell her that the writer, a friend of some standing, was
+coming to England, and hoped to see her again ere long.
+
+The other, bearing the sinister Evesham crest, lay on the table unopened
+till she was undressed and ready to join Mrs. Lorimer. Then--for the
+first time in all that weary day of turmoil--Avery stole a few moments
+of luxury.
+
+She sat down and opened Piers' letter.
+
+It began impetuously, without preliminary. "I wonder whether you have any
+idea what it costs to clear out without a word of farewell. Perhaps you
+are even thinking that I've forgotten. Or perhaps it matters so little to
+you that you haven't thought at all. I know you won't tell me, so it's
+not much good speculating. But lest you should misunderstand in any way,
+I want to explain that I haven't been fit to come near you since we
+parted on Christmas Eve. You were angry with me then, weren't you? Avery
+in a temper! Do you remember how it went? At least you meant to be, but
+somehow you didn't get up the steam. You wished me a happy Christmas
+instead, and I ought to have had one in consequence. But I didn't. I
+played the giddy goat off and on all day long, and my grandfather--dear
+old chap--thought what a merry infant I was. But--you've heard of the
+worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched? The Reverend
+Stephen has taken care of that. Do you remember his 'penny-terrible' of a
+Sunday or two ago? You were very angry about it, Avery. I love you when
+you're angry. And how he dilated on the gates of brass and the bars of
+iron and the outer darkness etc, etc, till we all went home and shivered
+in our beds! Well, that's the sort of place I spent my Christmas in, and
+I wanted to come to you and Jeanie and be made happy, but--I couldn't. I
+was too fast in prison. I felt too murderous. I hunted all the next day
+to try and get more wholesome. But it was no good. I was seeing red all
+the time. And at night something happened that touched me off like an
+exploded train of gunpowder. Has Tudor told you about it yet? Doubtless
+he will. I tried to murder him, and succeeded in cracking his eye-glass.
+Banal, wasn't it? And I have an uneasy feeling that he came out top-dog
+after all, confound him!
+
+"Avery, whomever else you have no use for, I know you're not in love with
+him, and in my saner moments I realize that you never could be. But I
+wasn't sane just then. I love you so! I love you so! It's good to be able
+to get it right out before you have time to stop me. For I worship you,
+Avery, my darling! You don't realize it. How should you? You think it is
+just the passing fancy of a boy. A boy--ye gods!
+
+"I think of you hour by hour. You are always close in your own secret
+place in my heart. I hold you in my arms when no one else is near. I
+kiss your forehead, your eyes, your hair. No, not your lips, dear, even
+in fancy. I have never in my maddest dreams kissed your lips. But I ache
+and crave and long for them, though--till you give me leave--I dare not
+even pretend that they are mine. Will you ever give me leave? You say No
+now. Yet I think you will, Avery. I think you will. I have known ever
+since that first moment when you held me back from flaying poor old
+Caesar that I have met my Fate, and because I know it I'm trying--for
+your sweet sake--to make myself a better man. It's beastly uphill work,
+and that episode with Tudor has pulled me back. Confound him! By the way
+though, it's done me good in one sense, for I find I don't detest him
+quite so hideously as I did. The man has his points.
+
+"And now Avery,--dear Avery, will you forgive me for writing all this? I
+know you won't write to me, but I send my address in case! And I shall
+watch every mail day after day, night after night, for the letter that
+will never come.
+
+"Pathetic picture, isn't it? Good-bye!
+
+"PIERS.
+
+"My love to the Queen of all good fairies, and tell Pixie that I hope the
+gloves fitted."
+
+Avery's lips parted in a smile; a soft flush overspread her face. That
+costly gift from the children--she had guessed from the beginning
+whence it came.
+
+And then slowly, even with reverence, she folded the letter up, and rose.
+Her smile became a little tremulous. It had been a day of many troubles,
+and she was very tired. The boy's adoration was strangely sweet to her
+wearied senses. She felt subtly softened and tender towards him.
+
+No, it must not be! It could not be! He must forget her. She would write
+to-morrow and tell him so. Yet for that one night the charm held her.
+She viewed from afar an enchanted land--a land of sunshine and singing
+birds--a land where it was always spring. It was a country she had seen
+before, but only in her dreams. Her feet had never wandered there. The
+path she had followed had not led to it. Perhaps it was all a mirage.
+Perhaps there was no path.
+
+Yet in her dreams she crossed the boundary, and entered the
+forbidden land.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE COMING OF A FRIEND
+
+
+"Eternal sunshine!" said Piers, with a grimace at the deep, deep blue
+of the slumbering water that stretched below him to the horizon. "And
+at night eternal moonshine. Romantic but monotonous. I wonder if the
+post is in."
+
+He cast an irresolute glance up the path behind him, but decided to
+remain where he was. He had looked so many times in vain.
+
+There were a good many people in the hotel, but he was not feeling
+sociable. The night before he had dropped a considerable sum at the
+Casino, but it had not greatly interested him. Regretfully he had come to
+the conclusion that gambling in that form did not attract him. The greedy
+crowd that pushed and strove in the heated rooms, he regarded as
+downright revolting. He himself had been robbed with astonishing audacity
+by a lady with painted eyes who had snatched his only winnings before he
+could reach them. It was a small episode, and he had let it pass, but it
+had not rendered the tables more attractive. He had in fact left them in
+utter disgust.
+
+Altogether he was feeling decidedly out of tune with his surroundings
+that morning, and the beauty of the scene irritated rather than soothed
+him. In the garden a short distance from him, a voluble French party were
+chattering with great animation and a good deal of cackling laughter. He
+wondered what on earth they found to amuse them so persistently. He also
+wondered if a swim in that faultless blue would do anything to improve
+his temper, and decided with another wry grimace that it was hardly worth
+while to try.
+
+It was at this point that there fell a step on the winding path below him
+that led down amongst shrubs to the sea. The top of a Panama hat caught
+Piers' attention. He watched it idly as it ascended, speculating without
+much interest as to the face beneath it. It mounted with the utmost
+steadiness, neither hastening nor lingering. There was something about
+its unvarying progress that struck Piers as British. His interest
+increased at once. He suddenly discovered that he wanted someone British
+to talk to, forgetting the fact that he had fled but ten minutes before
+from the boring society of an Anglo-Indian colonel.
+
+The man in the Panama came nearer. Piers from above began to have a
+glimpse of a tweed coat and a strong brown hand that swung in time to the
+steady stride. The path curved immediately below him, and the last few
+yards of it led directly to the spot on which he stood. As the stranger
+rounded the curve he came into full view.
+
+He was a big man, broadly built and powerful. His whole personality was
+suggestive of squareness. And yet to Piers' critical eyes he did not look
+wholly British. His gait was that of a man accustomed to long hours in
+the saddle. Under the turned-down Panama the square, determined chin
+showed massively. It was a chin that obviously required constant shaving.
+
+Quietly the man drew near. He did not see Piers under his lowered
+hat-brim till he was within a few feet of him. Then, becoming suddenly
+aware of him, he raised his eyes. A moment later, his hand went up in a
+brief, friendly salute.
+
+Piers' hand made instant response. "Splendid morning!" he began to
+say--and stopped with the words half-uttered. The blood surged up to his
+forehead in a great wave. "Good Heavens!" he said instead.
+
+The other man paused. He did not look at Piers very narrowly, but merely
+glanced towards him and then turned his eyes towards the wonderful,
+far-stretching blue below them.
+
+"Yes, splendid," he said quietly. "Worth remembering--a scene
+like this."
+
+His tone was absolutely impersonal. He stood beside Piers for a moment or
+two, gazing forth into the infinite distance; then with a slight gesture
+of leave-taking he turned as if to continue his progress.
+
+In that instant, however, Piers recovered himself sufficiently to speak.
+His face was still deeply flushed, but his voice was steady enough as he
+turned fully and addressed the new-comer.
+
+"Don't you know me? We have met before."
+
+The other man stopped at once. He held out his hand. "Yes, of course I
+know you--knew you the moment I set eyes on you. But I wasn't sure that
+you would care to be recognized by me."
+
+"What on earth do you take me for?" said Piers bluntly.
+
+He gripped the hand hard, looking straight into the calm eyes with a
+curious sense of being sustained thereby. "I believe," he said, with an
+odd impulse of impetuosity, "that you are the one man in the world that I
+couldn't be other than pleased to see."
+
+The elder man smiled. "That's very kind of you," he said.
+
+He had the slow speech of one accustomed to solitude. He kept Piers' hand
+in his in a warm, firm grip. "I have often thought about you," he said.
+"You know, I never heard your name."
+
+"My name is Evesham," said Piers, with the quick, gracious manner
+habitual to him. "Piers Evesham."
+
+"Thank you. Mine is Edmund Crowther. Odd that we should meet like this!"
+
+"A piece of luck I didn't expect!" said Piers boyishly. "Have you only
+just arrived?"
+
+"I came here last night from Marseilles." Crowther's eyes rested on the
+smiling face with its proud, patrician features with the look of a man
+examining a perfect bronze. "It's very kind of you to welcome me like
+this," he said. "I was feeling a stranger in a strange land as I came up
+that path."
+
+"I've been watching you," said Piers. "I liked the business-like way you
+tackled it. It was British."
+
+Crowther smiled. "I suppose it has become second nature with me to put
+business first," he said.
+
+"Wish I could say the same," said Piers; and then, with his hand on
+the other man's arm: "Come and have a drink! You are staying for some
+time, I hope?"
+
+"No, not for long," said Crowther. "It was yielding to temptation to come
+here at all."
+
+"Are you alone?" asked Piers.
+
+"Quite alone."
+
+"Then there's no occasion to hurry," said Piers. "You stay here for a
+bit, and kill time with me."
+
+"I never kill time," said Crowther deliberately. "It's too scarce a
+commodity."
+
+"It is when you're happy," said Piers.
+
+Crowther looked at him with a question in his eyes that he did not put
+into words, and in answer to which Piers laughed a reckless laugh.
+
+They were walking side by side up the hotel-garden, and each successive
+group of visitors that they passed turned to stare. For both men were in
+a fashion remarkable. The massive strength of the elder with his square,
+dogged face and purposeful stride; the lithe, muscular power of the
+younger with his superb carriage and haughty nobility of feature, formed
+a contrast as complete as it was arresting.
+
+They ascended the steps that led up to the terrace, and here Piers
+paused. "You sit down here while I go and order drinks! Here's a
+comfortable seat, and here's an English paper!"
+
+He thrust it into Crowther's hand and departed with a careless whistle on
+his lips. But Crowther did not look at the paper. His eyes followed Piers
+as long as he was in sight, and then with that look in them as of one who
+watches from afar turned contemplatively towards the sea. After a little
+he took his hat off and suffered the morning-breeze to blow across his
+forehead. He had the serene brow of a child, though the hair above it was
+broadly streaked with grey.
+
+He was still sitting thus when there came the sound of jerky footsteps on
+the terrace behind him and an irascible voice addressed him with scarcely
+concealed impatience.
+
+"Excuse me! I saw you talking to my grandson just now. Do you know where
+the young fool is gone to?"
+
+Crowther turned in his solid, imperturbable fashion, looked at the
+speaker, and got to his feet.
+
+"I can," he said, with a smile. "He has gone to procure drinks in my
+honour. He and I are--old friends."
+
+"Oh!" said Sir Beverley, and looked him up and down in a fashion which
+another man might have found offensive. "And who may you be?"
+
+"My name is Crowther," said the other with simplicity.
+
+Sir Beverley grunted. "That doesn't tell me much. Never heard of
+you before."
+
+"I daresay not." Crowther was quite unmoved; there was even a hint of
+humour in his tone. "Your grandson is probably a man of many friends."
+
+"Why should you say that?" demanded Sir Beverley suspiciously.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" said Crowther.
+
+Sir Beverley hesitated a moment, then abruptly complied with the
+suggestion. Crowther followed his example, and they faced one another
+across the little table.
+
+"I say it," said Crowther, "because that is the sort of lad I take
+him to be."
+
+Sir Beverley grunted again. "And when and where did you make his
+acquaintance?" he enquired, with a stern, unsparing scrutiny of the calm
+face opposite.
+
+"We met in Australia," said Crowther. "It must be six years or more ago."
+
+"Australia's a big place," observed Sir Beverley.
+
+Crowther's slow smile appeared. "Yes, sir, it is. It's so mighty big that
+it makes all the other places of the world seem small. Have you ever been
+in Queensland--ever seen a sheep-farm?"
+
+"No, I've never been in Queensland," snapped Sir Beverley. "But as to
+sheep-farms, I've got one of my own."
+
+"How many acres?" asked Crowther.
+
+"Oh, don't ask me! Piers will tell you. Piers knows. Where the devil is
+the boy? Why doesn't he come?"
+
+"Here, sir, here!" cried Piers, coming up behind him. "I see you have
+made the acquaintance of my friend. Crowther, let me present you to my
+grandfather, Sir Beverley Evesham! I've just been to look for you," he
+added to the latter. "But Victor told me you had gone out, and then I
+spied you out of the window."
+
+"I told you I was coming out, didn't I?" growled Sir Beverley. "So this
+is a friend of yours, is it? How is it I've never heard of him before?"
+
+"We lost sight of each other," explained Piers, pulling forward a chair
+between them and dropping into it. "But that state of affairs is not
+going to happen again. How long are you over for, Crowther?"
+
+"Possibly a year, possibly more." Again Crowther's eyes were upon him,
+critical but kindly.
+
+"Going to spend your time in England?" asked Piers.
+
+Crowther nodded. "Most of it, yes."
+
+"Good!" said Piers with satisfaction. "We shall see plenty of you then."
+
+"But I am going to be busy," said Crowther, with a smile.
+
+"Of course you are. You can come down and teach me how to make the Home
+Farm a success," laughed Piers.
+
+"I shall be very pleased to try," said Crowther, "though," he turned
+towards Sir Beverley, "I expect you, sir, know as much on that subject as
+either of us."
+
+Sir Beverley's eyes were upon him with searching directness. He seemed to
+be trying to discover a reason for his boy's obvious pleasure in his
+unexpected meeting with this man who must have been nearly twice his age.
+
+"I've never done much in the farming line," he said briefly, in answer to
+Crowther's observation. "It's been more of a pastime with me than
+anything else. It's the same with Piers here. He's only putting in time
+with it till the constituency falls vacant."
+
+"I see," said Crowther, adding with his quiet smile: "There seems to be
+plenty of time anyhow in the old country, whatever else she may be
+short of."
+
+Piers laughed as he lifted his glass. "Time for everything but work,
+Crowther. She has developed beastly loose morals in her old age. Some day
+there'll come a nasty bust up, and she may pull herself together and do
+things again, or she may go to pieces. I wonder which."
+
+"I don't," said Crowther.
+
+"You don't?" Piers paused, glass in hand, looking at him expectantly.
+
+"No, I don't." Crowther also raised his glass; he looked Piers straight
+in the eyes. "Here's to the boys of England, Piers!" he said. "They'll
+see to it that she comes through."
+
+Sir Beverley also drank, but with a distasteful air. "You've a higher
+opinion of the young fools than I have," he remarked.
+
+"I've made a study of the breed, sir," said Crowther.
+
+The conversation drifted to indifferent matters, but Piers' interest
+remained keen. It seemed that all his vitality had reawakened at the
+coming of this slow-speaking man who had looked so long upon the wide
+spaces of the earth that his vision seemed scarcely adaptable to lesser
+things. There was that in his personality that caught Piers' fancy
+irresistibly. Perhaps it was his utter calmness, his unvarying, rock-like
+strength. Perhaps it was just the good fellowship that looked out of the
+steady eyes and sounded in every tone of the leisurely voice. Whatever
+the cause, his presence had made a vast difference to Piers. His boredom
+had completely vanished. He even forgot to wonder if there were a letter
+lying waiting for him inside the hotel.
+
+Crowther excused himself at length and rose to take his leave, whereupon
+Sir Beverley very abruptly, and to his grandson's surprise and
+gratification, invited him to dine with them that night. Piers at once
+seconded the invitation, and Crowther without haste or hesitation
+accepted it.
+
+Then, square and purposeful, he went away.
+
+"A white man!" murmured Piers half to himself.
+
+"One who knows his own mind anyhow," remarked Sir Beverley drily.
+
+He did not ask Piers for the history of their friendship, and Piers,
+remembering this later, wondered a little at the omission.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A FRIEND'S COUNSEL
+
+
+When Piers went to dress that night he found two letters laid discreetly
+upon his table, awaiting perusal.
+
+Victor, busily engaged in laying out his clothes, cast a wicked eye back
+over his shoulder as his young master pounced upon them, then with a
+shrug resumed his task, smiling to himself the while.
+
+Both letters were addressed in womanly handwriting, but Piers went
+unerringly to the one he most desired to read. His hands shook a little
+as he opened it, but he caught sight of his Christian name at the head of
+it and breathed a sigh of relief.
+
+"Dear Piers,"--so in clear, decided writing the message ran,--"I have
+wondered many times if I ought to be angry as well as sorry over that
+letter of yours. It was audacious, wasn't it? Only I know so well that
+you did not mean to hurt me when you wrote it. But, Piers, what I said
+before, you compel me to say again. This thing must stop. You say you are
+not a boy, so I shall not treat you as such. But indeed you must take my
+word for it when I tell you that I shall never marry again.
+
+"I want to be quite honest with you, so you mustn't think that my two
+years of married life were by any means idyllic. They were not. The man I
+married was a failure, but I loved him, and because I loved him I
+followed him to the world's end. We were engaged two years before we
+married. My father disapproved; but when he died I was left lonely, so I
+followed Eric, whom I had not seen for eighteen months, to Australia. We
+were married in Sydney. He had work at that time in a shipping-office,
+but he did not manage to keep it. I did not know why at first. I was
+young, and I had always led a sheltered life. Then one night I found that
+he had been drinking, and after that I understood--many things. I think I
+know what you will say of him when you read this. It looks so crude
+written. But, Piers, he was not a bad man. He had this one fatal
+weakness, but he loved me, and he was good to me nearly always."
+
+Piers' teeth closed suddenly and fiercely on his lower lip at this point;
+but he read on grimly with no other sign of indignation.
+
+"Do you remember how I took upon myself once to warn you against losing
+your self-control?" The handwriting was not quite so steady here; the
+letters looked hurried, as if some agitation had possessed the writer. "I
+felt I had to do it, for I had seen a man's life completely wrecked
+through it. I know he was one of the many that go under every day, but
+the tragedy was so near me. I have never quite been able to shake off the
+dreadful memories of it. He was to all outward appearance a strong-willed
+man, but that habit was stronger, though he fought and fought against it.
+When he failed, he seemed to lose everything,--self-respect,
+self-control, strength of purpose,--everything. But when the demon left
+him, he always repented so bitterly, so bitterly. I had a little money,
+enough to live on. He used to urge me to leave him, to go back to
+England, and live in peace. As if I could have done such a thing! And so
+we struggled on, making a desperately hard fight for it, till one awful
+night when he came home in raving delirium. I can't describe that to
+you. I don't want you to know what it was like. I nursed him through it,
+but it was terrible. He did not always know what he was doing. At times
+he was violent."
+
+A drop of blood suddenly ran down Piers' chin; he pulled out his
+handkerchief sharply and wiped it away, still reading on.
+
+"He got over it, but it broke him. He knew--we both knew--that things
+were hopeless. We tried for a time to shut our eyes to the fact, but it
+remained. And then one day very suddenly he roused himself and told me
+that he had heard of a job up-country and was going to it. I could not
+stop him. I could not even go with him. And so--for the first time since
+our marriage--we parted. He promised to come back to me for the birth of
+our child. But before that happened he was dead, killed in a drunken
+brawl. It was just what I had always feared--the tragedy that overhung us
+from the beginning. Piers, that's all. I've told it very badly. But I
+felt you must know how my romance died; and how impossible it is that I
+should ever have another. It didn't break my heart. It wasn't sudden
+enough for that. And now that he is gone, I can see it is best. But the
+manner of his going--that was the dreadful part. I told you about my baby
+girl, how she was born blind, and how five years ago she died.
+
+"So now you know my little tragic history from beginning to end. There is
+no accounting for love. We follow our instincts, I suppose. But it leads
+us sometimes along paths that we could never bear to travel twice. Is
+there any pain, I wonder, like the pain of disillusionment, of seeing the
+beloved idol lying in the dust? This is a selfish point of view, I know;
+but I want you to realize that you have made a mistake. Dear Piers, I am
+very, very sorry it has happened. No, not angry at all; somehow I can't
+be angry. It's such a difficult world to live in, and there are so many
+influences at work. But you must forget this wish of yours
+indeed--indeed. I am too old, too experienced, too worldly-wise, too
+prosaic for you in every way. You must marry a girl who has never loved
+before. You must have the first and best of a woman's heart. You must
+have 'The True Romance.'
+
+"That, Piers, will always be the wish and prayer of
+
+"Your loving friend,
+
+"AVERY."
+
+Piers' hands were steady enough now. There was something slow and
+fatalistic in the way they folded the letter. He looked up from it at
+length with dark eyes that gazed unwaveringly before him, as though they
+saw a vision.
+
+"You will be late, _Monsieur Pierre_," suggested Victor softly at
+his elbow.
+
+"What?" Piers turned those dreaming eyes upon him, and suddenly he
+laughed and stretched his arms wide as one awaking. The steadfast look
+went out of his eyes; they danced with gaiety. "Hullo, you old joker!
+Well, let's dress then and be quick about it!"
+
+During the process it flashed upon Piers that all mention of Tudor had
+been avoided in the letter he had just read. He frowned momentarily at
+the thought. Had she deliberately avoided the subject? And if so--but on
+the instant his brow cleared again. No, she had written too frankly for
+that. She had not mentioned the matter simply because she regarded it as
+unimportant. The great question lay between herself and him alone. Of
+that he was wholly certain. He smiled again at the thought. No, he was
+not afraid of Tudor.
+
+"_Monsieur_ is well pleased," murmured Victor, with a flash of his round
+black eyes.
+
+"Quite well pleased, _mon vieux!_" laughed back Piers
+
+"_C'est bien_!" said Victor, regarding him with the indulgent smile that
+he had bestowed upon him in babyhood. "And _Monsieur_ does not want his
+other letter? But no--no!"
+
+His voice was openly quizzical; he dodged a laughing backhander from
+Piers with a neat gesture of apology. It had not escaped his notice
+that the letter Piers had read had disappeared unobtrusively into an
+inner pocket.
+
+"Who's the other letter from?" said Piers, glancing at it perfunctorily.
+"Oh, I know. No one of importance. She'll keep till after dinner."
+
+Ina Rose would not have felt flattered had she heard the statement. The
+fan Piers had promised to send her had duly arrived from Paris with a
+brief--very brief--note from him, requesting her acceptance of it. She
+had written in reply a letter which she had been at some pains to
+compose, graciously accepting the gift and suggesting that an account of
+any adventures that befell him would be received by her with interest.
+She added that, a spell of frost having put an end to the hunting, life
+at Wardenhurst had become extremely flat, and she had begun to envy Piers
+in his exile. Her father was talking of going to Mentone for a few weeks,
+and wanted her to accompany him. But she was not sure that she would care
+for it. What did Piers think?
+
+When Piers did eventually read the letter, he smiled at this point,--a
+smile that was not altogether good to see. He was just going out to the
+Casino with Crowther. The latter had gone to fetch a coat, and he had
+occupied the few moments of waiting with Ina's letter.
+
+He was still smiling over the open page when Crowther joined him; but he
+folded the letter at once, and they went out together.
+
+"Have you had any luck at the tables?" Crowther asked.
+
+"None," said Piers. "At least I won, eventually, but Fate, in the form of
+a powdered and bedizened female snatched the proceeds before I got the
+chance. A bad omen, what?"
+
+"I hope not," said Crowther.
+
+There was a touch of savagery in Piers' laugh. "It won't happen again,
+anyhow," he said.
+
+They entered the Casino with its brilliant rooms and pushing crowds. The
+place was thronged. As they entered, a woman with a face of evil beauty,
+pressed close to Piers and spoke a word or two in French. But he looked
+at her and through her with royal disdain, and so passed her by.
+
+They made their way to the table at which Piers had tried his luck the
+previous night, waited for and finally secured a place.
+
+"You take it!" said Crowther. "I believe in your luck."
+
+Piers laughed. He staked five francs on the figure five and lost, doubled
+his stakes and lost again, trebled them and lost again.
+
+"This is getting serious," said Crowther.
+
+But still Piers laughed. "Damn it!" he said. "I will win to-night!"
+
+"Try another figure!" said Crowther.
+
+But Piers refused. He laid down twenty-five francs, and with that he won.
+It was the turning-point. From that moment it seemed he could not do
+wrong. Stake after stake he won, either with his own money, or
+Crowther's; and finally left the table in triumph with full pockets.
+
+A good many watched him enviously as he went. He refused to try his luck
+elsewhere, but went arrogantly away with his hand through Crowther's arm.
+
+"He'll come back to-morrow," observed a shrewd American. "And the next
+day, and the next. He's just the sort that helps to keep this
+establishment going. They'll pick him clean."
+
+But he was wrong. Though elated by victory, Piers was not drawn by the
+gambling vice. The thing amused him, but it did not greatly attract. He
+was by no means dazzled by the spoils he carried away.
+
+They went out to the gardens, and called for liqueurs. The woman who had
+spoken to Piers yet hovered about the doors. She cursed him through her
+painted lips as he passed, but he went by her like a prince, haughtily
+aloof, contemptuously regardless.
+
+They sat down in a comparatively quiet corner, whence they could watch
+the ever-shifting picture without being disturbed. A very peculiar mood
+possessed Piers. He was restless and uneasy in spite of his high spirits.
+For no definite reason he wanted to keep on the move. In deference to
+Crowther's wish, he controlled the desire, but it was an obvious effort.
+
+He seemed to find difficulty also in attending to Crowther's quiet
+remarks, and after a while Crowther ceased to make them. He finished his
+liqueur and sat smoking with his eyes on the dark, sensitive face that
+watched the passing crowd so indifferently, yet so persistently.
+
+Piers noticed his silence at last, and looked at him enquiringly.
+"Shall we go?"
+
+Crowther leaned slowly towards him. The place was public, but their
+privacy was complete.
+
+"Piers," he said, "may I take the privilege of an old friend?"
+
+"You may take anything you like so far as I am concerned," said Piers
+impetuously.
+
+Crowther smiled a little. "Thank you. Then I will go ahead. Are you
+engaged to be married?"
+
+"What?" said Piers. He looked momentarily startled; then laughed across
+the table with a freedom that was wholly unaffected. "Am I engaged, did
+you say? No, I'm not. But I'm going to be married for all that."
+
+"Ah!" said Crowther. "I thought I knew the signs."
+
+He rose with the words, and instantly Piers sprang up also. "Yes, let's
+go! I can't breathe here. Come down to the shore for a breath of air, and
+I'll tell you all about it!"
+
+He linked his arm again in Crowther's, obviously glad to be gone; but
+when they had left the glittering place behind them, he still talked
+inconsequently about a thousand things till in his calm fashion Crowther
+turned him back.
+
+"I don't want you to tell me anything personal," he said, "save one
+thing. This girl whom you hope to marry--I gather you are pretty
+sure of her?"
+
+Piers threw back his head with a gesture that defied the world. "I am
+quite sure of her," he said; and a moment later, with impulsive
+confidence: "She has just taken the trouble to write at length and tell
+me why she can't have me."
+
+"Ah?" Crowther's tone held curiosity as well as kindly sympathy. "A
+sound reason?"
+
+"No reason at all," flung back Piers, still with his face to the stars.
+"She knows that as well as I do. I tell you, Crowther, I know the way to
+that woman's heart, and I could find it blindfold. She is mine already."
+
+"And doesn't know it?" suggested Crowther.
+
+"Yes, she does in her heart of hearts,--or soon will. I shall send her a
+post-card to-morrow and sum up the situation."
+
+"On a post-card?"
+
+Crowther sounded puzzled, and Piers broke into a laugh and descended to
+earth.
+
+"Yes, in one expressive word--'Rats!' No one else will understand it, but
+she will."
+
+"A little abrupt!" commented Crowther.
+
+"Yes, I'm going to be abrupt now," said Piers with imperial confidence.
+"I'm going to storm the position."
+
+"And you are sure you will carry it?"
+
+"Quite sure." Piers' voice held not the faintest shade of doubt.
+
+"I hope you will, lad," said Crowther kindly. "And--that being the
+case--may I say what I set out to say?"
+
+"Oh, go ahead!" said Piers.
+
+"It's only this," said Crowther, in his slow, quiet way. "Only a word of
+advice, sonny, which I shouldn't give if I didn't know that your life's
+happiness hangs on your taking it. You're young, but there's a locked
+door in your past. Open that door just once before you marry the woman
+you love, and show her what is behind it! It'll give her a shock maybe.
+But it'll be better for you both in the end. Don't let there be any
+locked doors between you and your wife! You're too young for that. And if
+she's the right sort, it won't make a pin's difference to her love. Women
+are like that, thank God!"
+
+He spoke with the utmost earnestness. He was evidently keenly anxious to
+gain his point. But his words went into utter silence. Ere they were
+fully spoken Piers' hand was withdrawn from his arm. His careless,
+swinging stride became a heavy, slackening tramp, and at last he halted
+altogether. They stood side by side in silence with their faces to the
+moon-silvered water. And there fell a long, long pause, as though the
+whole world stopped and listened.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE PROMISE
+
+
+After all, it was Crowther who broke that tragic silence; perhaps because
+he could bear it no longer. The path on which they stood was deserted. He
+laid a very steady hand upon Piers' shoulder with a compassionate glance
+at the stony young face which a few minutes before had been so full of
+abounding life.
+
+"It comes hard to you, eh, lad?" he said.
+
+Piers stirred, almost made as if he would toss the friendly hand away;
+but in the end he suffered it, though he would not meet Crowther's eyes.
+
+"You owe it to her," urged Crowther gently. "Tell her, lad! She's bound
+to be up against it sooner or later if you don't."
+
+"Yes," Piers said. "I know."
+
+He spoke heavily; all the youth seemed to have gone out of him. After a
+moment, as Crowther waited he turned with a gesture of hopelessness and
+faced him. "I'm like a dog on a chain," he said. "I drag this way and
+that, and eat my heart out for freedom. But it's all no use. I've got to
+live and die on it." He clenched his hands in sudden passionate
+rebellion. "But I'm damned if I'm going to tell anybody! It's hell enough
+without that!"
+
+Crowther's hand closed slowly and very steadily on his shoulder. "It's
+just hell that I want to save you from, sonny," he said. "It may seem the
+hardest part to you now, but if you shirk it you'll go further in still.
+I know very well what I'm saying. And it's just because you're man enough
+to feel this thing and not a brute beast to forget it, that it's hurt you
+so infernally all these years. But it'll hurt you worse, lad, it'll wring
+your very soul, if you keep it a secret between you and the woman you
+love. It's a big temptation, but--if I know you--you're going to stand up
+to it. She'll think the better of you for it in the end. But it'll be a
+shadow over both your lives if you don't. And there are some things that
+even a woman might find it hard to forgive."
+
+He stopped. Piers' eyes were hard and fixed. He scarcely looked as if he
+heard. From below them there arose the murmur of the moonlit sea. Close
+at hand the trees in a garden stirred mysteriously as though they moved
+in their sleep. But Piers made neither sound nor movement. He stood like
+an image of stone.
+
+Again the silence began to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a
+desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to
+be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with
+unswerving patience for the result.
+
+Piers spoke at last, and there was a queer note of humour in his
+voice,--humour that was tragic. "So I've got to go back again, have I?
+Back to my valley of dry bones! There's no climbing the heights for me,
+Crowther, never will be. Somehow or other, I am always tumbled back."
+
+"You're wrong," Crowther said, with quiet decision. "It's the only way
+out. Take it like a man, and you'll win through! Shirk it and--well,
+sonny, no shirker ever yet got anything worth having out of life. You
+know that as well as I do."
+
+Piers straightened himself with a brief laugh. "Yes, I know that much.
+But--I sometimes ask myself if I'm any better than a shirker. Life is
+such a beastly farce so far as I am concerned. I never do anything.
+There's never anything to do."
+
+"Oh, rats!" said Crowther, and smiled. "There are not many fellows who do
+half as much. If to-day is a fair sample of your life, I'm damned if it's
+an easy one."
+
+"I'm used to it," said Piers quickly. "You know, I'm awfully fond of my
+grandfather--always have been. We suit each other marvellously well--in
+some ways." He paused a moment, then, with an effort, "I never told him
+either, Crowther. I never told a soul."
+
+"No," Crowther said. "I don't see any reason that you should. But the
+woman you marry--she is different. If you take her into your inner life
+at all, she is bound to come upon it sooner or later. You must see it,
+lad. You know it in your heart."
+
+"And you think she will marry me when she knows I'm a--murderer?" Piers
+uttered the word through clenched teeth. He had the haggard look of a man
+who has endured long suffering.
+
+There was deep compassion in Crowther's eyes as he watched him. "I don't
+think--being a woman--she will put it in that way," he said, "not, that
+is, if she loves you."
+
+"How else could she put it?" demanded Piers harshly. "Is there any other
+way of putting it? I killed the man intentionally. I told you so at the
+time. The fellow who taught me the trick warned me that it would almost
+certainly be fatal to a heavy man taken unawares. Why, he himself is now
+doing five years' penal servitude for the very same thing. Oh, I'm not a
+humbug, Crowther. I bolted from the consequences. You made me bolt. But
+I've often wished to heaven since that I'd stayed and faced it out. It
+would have been easier in the end, God knows."
+
+"My dear fellow," Crowther said, "you will never convince me of that as
+long as you live. There was nothing to gain by your staying and all to
+lose. Consequences there were bound to be--and always are. But there was
+no good purpose to be served by wrecking your life. You were only a boy,
+and the luck was against you. I couldn't have stood by and seen you
+dragged under."
+
+Piers groaned. "I sometimes wish I was dead!" he said.
+
+"My dear chap, what's the good of that?" Crowther slipped his hand from
+his shoulder to his arm, and drew him quietly forward. "You've suffered
+infernally, but it's made a man of you. Don't forget that! It's the
+Sculptor and the Clay, lad. He knows how best to fashion a good thing. It
+isn't for the clay to cry out."
+
+"Is that your point of view?" Piers spoke with reckless bitterness. "It
+isn't mine."
+
+"You'll come to it," said Crowther gently.
+
+They walked on for a space in silence, till turning they began to ascend
+the winding path that led up to the hotel,--the path which Piers had
+watched Crowther ascend that morning.
+
+Side by side they mounted, till half-way up Crowther checked their
+progress. "Piers," he said, "I'm grateful to you for enduring my
+interference in this matter."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Piers, "I owe you that much anyhow."
+
+"You owe me nothing," said Crowther emphatically. "What I did for you, I
+did for myself. I've rather a weakness--it's a very ordinary one too--for
+trying to manage other people's concerns. And there's something so fine
+about you that I can't bear to stand aside and see you mess up your own.
+So, sonny,--for my satisfaction,--will you promise me not to take a wrong
+turning over this?"
+
+He spoke very earnestly, with a pleading that could not give offence.
+Piers' face softened almost in spite of him. "You're an awfully good
+chap," he said.
+
+"Promise me, lad!" pleaded Crowther, still holding his arm in a friendly
+grasp; then as Piers hesitated: "You know, I'm an older man than you
+are. I can see further. You'll be making your own hell if you don't."
+
+"But why should I promise?" said Piers uneasily.
+
+"Because I know you will keep a promise--even against your own judgment."
+Simply, with absolute conviction, Crowther made reply. "I shan't feel
+happy about you--unless you promise."
+
+Piers smiled a little, but the lines about his mouth were grim. "Oh, all
+right," he said, after a moment, "I promise;--for I think you are right,
+Crowther. I think too that I should probably have to tell her--whether I
+wanted to or not. She's that sort--the sort that none but a skunk could
+deceive. But--" his voice altered suddenly; he turned brooding eyes upon
+the sleeping sea--"I wonder if she will forgive me," he said.
+"I--wonder."
+
+"Does she love you?" said Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes flashed round at him. "I can make her love me," he said.
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"I am sure."
+
+"Then, my son, she'll forgive you. And if you want to play a straight
+game, tell her soon!" said Crowther.
+
+And Piers, with all the light gone out of his eyes, answered soberly,
+"I will."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+DROSS
+
+
+In the morning they hired horses and went towards the mountains. The day
+was cloudless, but Sir Beverley would not be persuaded to accompany them.
+
+"I'm not in the mood for exertion," he said to Piers. "Besides, I detest
+hired animals, always did. I shall spend an intellectual morning
+listening to the band."
+
+"Hope you won't be bored, sir," said Piers.
+
+"Your going or coming wouldn't affect that one way or another," responded
+Sir Beverley.
+
+Whereat Piers laughed and went his way.
+
+He was curiously light-hearted again that morning. The soft Southern air
+with its many perfumes exhilarated him like wine. The scent of the
+orange-groves rose as incense to the sun.
+
+The animal he rode danced a skittish side-step from time to time. It was
+impossible to go with sober mien.
+
+"It's a good land," said Crowther.
+
+"Flowing with milk and honey," laughed Piers, with his eyes on the
+olive-clothed slopes. "But there's no country like one's own, what?"
+
+"No country like England, you mean," said Crowther.
+
+"Of course I do, but I was too polite to say so."
+
+"You needn't be polite to me," said Crowther with his slow smile. "And
+England happens to be my country. I am as British--" he glanced at Piers'
+dark face--"perhaps even a little more so--than you are."
+
+"I plead guilty to an Italian grandmother," said Piers. "But you--I
+thought you were Colonial."
+
+"I am British born and bred," said Crowther.
+
+"You?" Piers looked at him in surprise. "You don't belong to
+Australia then?"
+
+"Only by adoption. I was the son of an English parson. I was destined for
+the Church myself for the first twenty years of my life." Crowther was
+still smiling, but his eyes had left Piers; they scanned the horizon
+contemplatively.
+
+"Great Scott!" said Piers. "Lucky escape for you, what?"
+
+"I didn't think so at the time," Crowther spoke thoughtfully, sitting
+motionless in his saddle and gazing straight before him. "You see, I was
+keen on the religious life. I was narrow in my views--I was astonishingly
+narrow; but I was keen."
+
+"Ye gods!" said Piers.
+
+He looked at the square, strong figure incredulously. Somehow he could
+not associate Crowther with any but a vigorous, outdoor existence.
+
+"You would never have stuck to it," he said, after a moment. "You'd have
+loathed the life."
+
+"I don't think so," said Crowther, in his deliberate way, "though I admit
+I probably shouldn't have expanded much. It wasn't easy to give it up at
+the time."
+
+"What made you do it?" asked Piers.
+
+"Necessity. When my father died, my mother was left with a large family
+and quite destitute. I was the eldest, and a sheep-farming uncle--a
+brother of hers--offered me a wage sufficient to keep her going if I
+would give up the Church and join him. I was already studying. I could
+have pushed through on my own; but I couldn't have supported her. So I
+had to go. That was the beginning of my Colonial life. It was
+five-and-twenty years ago, and I've never been Home since."
+
+He turned his horse quietly round to continue the ascent. The road was
+steep. They went slowly side by side.
+
+Crowther went on in a grave, detached way, as though he were telling the
+story of another man's life. "I kicked hard at going, but I've lived to
+be thankful that I went. I had to rough it, and it did me good. It was
+just that I wanted. There's never much fun for a stranger in a strange
+land, sonny, and it took me some time to shake down. In fact just for a
+while I thought I couldn't stand it. The loneliness out there on those
+acres and acres of grass-land was so awful; for I was city-bred. I'd
+never been in the desert, never been out of the sound of church-bells."
+He began to smile again. "I'd even got a sort of feeling that God wasn't
+to be found outside civilization," he said. "I think we get
+ultra-civilized in our ideas sometimes. And the emptiness was almost
+overpowering. It was like being shut down behind bars of iron with
+occasional glimpses of hell to enliven the monotony. That was when one
+went to the townships, and saw life. They didn't tempt me at first. I
+was too narrow even for that. But the loneliness went on eating and
+eating into me till I got so desperate in the end I was ready to snatch
+at any diversion." He paused a moment, and into his steady eyes there
+came a shadow that made them very human. "I went to hell," he said. "I
+waded up to the neck in mire. I gave myself up to it body and soul. I
+wallowed. And all the while it revolted me, though it was so sickeningly
+easy and attractive. I loathed myself, but I went on with it. It seemed
+anyhow one degree better than that awful homesickness. And then one day,
+right in the middle of it all, I had a sort of dream. Or perhaps it
+wasn't any more a dream than Jacob had in the desert. But I felt as if
+I'd been called, and I just had to get up and go. I expect most people
+know the sensation, for after all the Kingdom of Heaven is within us;
+but it made a bigger impression on me at the time than anything in my
+experience. So I went back into the wilderness and waited. Old chap, I
+didn't wait in vain."
+
+He suddenly turned his head, and his eyes rested upon Piers with the
+serenity of a man at peace with his own soul. "That's about all my
+story," he said with simplicity. "I got the strength for the job, and so
+carried it through. When my uncle died, I was left in command, and I've
+stuck to it ever since. But I took a partner a few years back, and now
+I've handed over the whole thing to him and I'm going Home at last to my
+old mother."
+
+"Going to settle in England?" asked Piers.
+
+Crowther shook his head. "Not now, lad. I couldn't. There's too much to
+be done. No; I'm going to fulfil my old ambitions if I can. I'm going to
+get myself ordained. After that--"
+
+He paused, for Piers had turned to stare at him in open amazement. "You!"
+he ejaculated.
+
+Crowther's smile came over his face like a spreading light. "You don't
+think much of parsons, I gather, sonny," he said.
+
+Piers broke into his sudden laugh. "Not as a tribe, I admit. I can't
+stand any man who makes an ass of himself, whatever his profession. But
+of course I don't mean to assert that all parsons answer to that
+description. I've met a few I liked."
+
+Crowther's smile developed into a laugh. "Then you won't deprive me of
+the pleasure of your friendship if I become one?"
+
+"My dear chap," said Piers forcibly, "if you became the biggest
+blackguard in creation, you would remain my friend."
+
+It was regally spoken, but the speaker was plainly so unconscious of
+arrogance that Crowther's hand came out to him and lay for a moment on
+his arm. "I gathered that, sonny," he said gently.
+
+Piers' eyes flashed sympathy. "And what are you going to do then? You say
+you're not going to settle in England?"
+
+"I am not," said Crowther, and again he was looking out ahead of him with
+eyes that spanned the far distance. "No; I'm going back again to the old
+haunts. There's a thundering lot to do there. It's more than a one-man
+job. But, please God, I'll do what I can. I know I can do a little. It's
+a hell of a place, sonny. You saw the outside edge of it yourself."
+
+Piers nodded without speaking. It had been in a sense his baptism of
+fire.
+
+"It's the new chums I want to get hold of," Crowther said. "They get
+drawn in so devilishly easily. They're like children, many of 'em, trying
+to walk on quicksands. They're bound to go in, bound to go under, and a
+big percentage never come up again. It's the children I want to help. I
+hate to think of fresh, clean lives being thrown on to the dust-heap.
+It's so futile,--such a crying waste."
+
+"If anyone can do it, you can," said Piers.
+
+"Ah! I wonder. It won't be easy, but I know their temptations so awfully
+well. I've seen scores go under, I've been under myself. And that makes a
+lot of difference."
+
+"Life is infernally difficult for most of us," said Piers.
+
+They rode in silence for awhile, and then he changed the subject.
+
+It was not till they returned that Crowther announced his intention of
+leaving on the following day.
+
+"I've no time for slacking," he said. "I didn't come Home to slack. And
+there's the mother waiting for me."
+
+"Oh, man," Piers said suddenly, "how I wish I had a mother!"
+
+And then half-ashamed, he turned and went in search of his grandfather.
+
+Again that evening Crowther accepted Sir Beverley's invitation to dine at
+their table. The old man seemed to regard Piers' friend with a kind of
+suspicious interest. He asked few questions but he watched him narrowly.
+
+"If you and the boy want to go to the Casino again, don't mind me!" he
+said, at the end of dinner.
+
+"We don't, sir," said Piers promptly. "Can't we sit out on the terrace
+all together and smoke?"
+
+"I don't go beyond the lounge," said Sir Beverley, with decision.
+
+"All right, we'll sit in the lounge," said Piers.
+
+His grandfather frowned at him. "Don't be a fool, Piers! Can't you see
+you're not wanted?" He thrust out an abrupt hand to Crowther. "Good-night
+to you! I shall probably retire before you come in."
+
+"He is leaving first thing in the morning," said Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley's frown was transferred to Crowther. He looked at him
+piercingly. "Leaving, are you? Going to England, eh? I suppose we shall
+meet again then?"
+
+"I hope so," said Crowther.
+
+Sir Beverley grunted. "Do you? Well, we shan't be moving yet. But--if
+you care to look us up at Rodding Abbey when we do get back--you can;
+eh, Piers?"
+
+"I tell him, he must, sir," said Piers.
+
+"You are very kind," said Crowther. "Good-bye sir! And thank you!"
+
+He and Piers went out together, and walked to and fro in the garden above
+the sea. The orchestra played fitfully in the hotel behind them, and now
+and then there came the sounds of careless voices and wandering feet.
+They themselves talked but little. Piers was in a dreamy mood, and his
+companion was plainly deep in thought.
+
+He spoke at length out of a long silence. "Did your grandfather say
+Rodding Abbey just now?"
+
+"Yes," said Piers, waking up.
+
+"It's near a place called Wardenhurst?" pursued Crowther.
+
+"Yes," said Piers again. "Ever been there?"
+
+"No," Crowther spoke slowly, as though considering his words. "Someone I
+know lives there, that's all."
+
+"Someone you know?" Piers stood still. He looked at Crowther sharply
+through the dimness.
+
+"I don't suppose you have ever met her, lad," said Crowther quietly.
+"From what I know of society in the old country you wouldn't move in the
+same circle. But as I have promised myself to visit her, it seems better
+to mention the fact."
+
+"Why shouldn't you mention it? What is her name?" Piers spoke quickly, in
+the imperious fashion habitual to him when not quite at his ease.
+
+Crowther hesitated. He seemed to be debating some point with himself.
+
+At length, "Her name," he said slowly, "is Denys."
+
+Piers made a sudden movement that passed unexplained. There fell a few
+moments of silence. Then, in a voice even more measured than
+Crowther's, he spoke.
+
+"As it happens, I have met her. Tell me what you know about her,--if you
+don't mind."
+
+Again Crowther hesitated.
+
+"Go on," said Piers.
+
+They were facing one another in the darkness. The end of Piers' cigar had
+ceased to glow. He did not seem to be breathing. But in the tense moments
+that followed his words there came to Crowther the hard, quick beating of
+his heart like the thud of a racing engine far away.
+
+Instinctively he put out a hand. "Piers, old chap,--" he said.
+
+"Go on!" Piers said again.
+
+He gripped both hand and wrist with nervous fingers, holding them almost
+as though he would force from him the information he desired.
+
+Crowther waited no longer, for he knew in that moment that he stood in
+the presence of a soul in torment. "You'll have to know it," he said,
+"though why these things happen, God alone knows. Sonny, she is the widow
+of the man whose death you caused."
+
+The words were spoken, and after them came silence--such a silence as
+could be felt. Once the hands that gripped Crowther's seemed about to
+slacken, and then in a moment they tightened again as the hands of a
+drowning man clinging to a spar.
+
+Crowther attempted nothing in the way of sympathy or consolation. He
+merely stood ready. But it was evident that he did not need to be told
+of the tragedy that had suddenly fallen upon Piers' life. His attitude
+said as much.
+
+Very, very slowly at last, as if not wholly sure of his balance, Piers
+let him go. He took out his cigar with a mechanical movement and
+looked at it; then abruptly returned it to his lips and drew it
+fiercely back to life.
+
+Then, through a cloud of smoke, he spoke. "Crowther, I made you a promise
+yesterday."
+
+"You did," said Crowther gravely.
+
+Piers threw him a quick look. "Oh, you needn't be afraid," he said. "I'm
+not going to cry off. It's not my way. But--I want you to make me a
+promise in return."
+
+"What is it, sonny?" There was just a hint of anxiety in Crowther's tone.
+
+Piers made a reckless, half-defiant movement of the head. "It is that you
+will never--whatever the circumstances--speak of this thing again to
+anyone--not even to me."
+
+"You think it necessary to ask that of me?" said Crowther.
+
+"No, I don't!" Impulsively Piers made answer. "I believe I'm a cur to
+ask it. But this thing has dogged me so persistently that I feel like an
+animal being run to earth. For my peace of mind, Crowther;--because I'm a
+coward if you like--give me your word on it!"
+
+He laid a hand not wholly steady upon Crowther's shoulder, and impelled
+him forward. His voice was low and agitated.
+
+"Forgive me, old chap!" he urged. "And understand, if you can. It's all
+you can do to help."
+
+"My dear lad, of course I do!" Instant and reassuring came Crowther's
+reply. "If you want my promise, you have it. The business is yours, not
+mine. I shall never interfere."
+
+"Thank you--thanks awfully!" Piers said.
+
+He drew a great breath. His hand went through Crowther's arm.
+
+"That gives me time to think," he said. "What an infernal tangle this
+beastly world is! I suppose you think there's a reason for everything?"
+
+"You've heard of gold being tried in the fire," said Crowther.
+
+Piers broke into his sudden laugh. "I'm not gold, my dear chap, but the
+tinniest dross that ever was made. Shall we go and have a drink, what?
+This sort of thing always makes me thirsty."
+
+It was characteristically abrupt. It ended the matter in a trice. They
+went together to the hotel _buffet_, and there Piers quenched his thirst.
+It was while there that Crowther became aware that his mood had wholly
+changed. He laughed and joked with the bright-eyed French girl who waited
+upon them, and seemed loth to depart. Silently, but with a growing
+anxiety, Crowther watched him. There was certainly nothing forced about
+his gaiety. It was wildly, recklessly spontaneous; but there was about it
+a fevered quality that set Crowther almost instinctively on his guard.
+He did not know, and he had no means of gauging, exactly how deeply the
+iron had pierced. But that some sort of wound had been inflicted he could
+not doubt. It might be merely a superficial one, but he feared that it
+was something more than that. There was a queer, intangible species of
+mockery in Piers' attitude, as though he set the whole world at defiance.
+
+And yet he did not look like a man who had been stunned by an unexpected,
+sledge-hammer blow of Fate. He was keenly, fiercely alive to his
+surroundings. He seemed to be gibing rather at a blow that had glanced
+aside. Uneasily Crowther wondered.
+
+It was he who finally suggested a move. It was growing late.
+
+"So it is!" said Piers. "You ought to be turning in if you really mean to
+make an early start."
+
+He stood still in the hall and held out his hand. "Good-night, old chap!
+I'm not going up at present."
+
+"You'd better," said Crowther.
+
+"No, I can't. I couldn't possibly turn in yet." He thrust his hand upon
+Crowther. "Good-night! I shall see you in the morning."
+
+Crowther took the hand. The hall was deserted. They stood together under
+a swinging lamp, and by its flaring light Crowther sought to read his
+companion's face.
+
+For a moment or two Piers refused to meet his look, then with sudden
+stubbornness he raised his eyes and stared back. They shone as black and
+hard as ebony.
+
+"Good-night!" he said again.
+
+Crowther's level brows were slightly drawn. His hand, square and strong,
+closed upon Piers' and held it.
+
+For a few seconds he did not speak; then: "I don't know that I feel like
+turning in yet either, sonny," he said deliberately.
+
+Piers made a swift movement of impatience. His eyes seemed to grow
+brighter, more grimly hard.
+
+"I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me in any case," he said. "I'm going
+up to see if my grandfather has all he wants."
+
+It was defiantly spoken. He turned with the words, almost wresting his
+hand free, and strode away towards the lift.
+
+Reaching it, some sense of compunction seemed to touch him for he looked
+back over his shoulder with an abrupt gesture of farewell.
+
+Crowther made no answering sign. He stood gravely watching. But, as
+the lift shot upwards, he turned aside and began squarely to ascend
+the stairs.
+
+When Piers came out of his room ten minutes later with a coat over his
+arm he came face to face with him in the corridor. There was a certain
+grimness apparent about Crowther also by that time. He offered no
+explanation of his presence, although quite obviously he was waiting.
+
+Piers stood still. There was a dangerous glitter in his eyes that came
+and went. "Look here, Crowther!" he said. "It's no manner of use your
+attempting this game with me. I'm going out, and--whether you like it or
+not, I don't care a damn--I'm going alone."
+
+"Where are you going?" said Crowther.
+
+"To the Casino," Piers flung the words with a gleam of clenched teeth.
+
+Crowther looked at him straight and hard. "What for?" he asked.
+
+"What do people generally go for?" Piers prepared to move on as he
+uttered the question.
+
+But Crowther deliberately blocked his way. "No, Piers," he said quietly.
+"You're not going to-night."
+
+The blood rose in a great wave to Piers' forehead. His eyes shone
+suddenly red. "Do you think you're going to stop me?" he said.
+
+"For to-night, sonny--yes." Quite decidedly Crowther made reply.
+"To-morrow you will be your own master. But to-night--well, you've had a
+bit of a knock out; you're off your balance. Don't go to-night!"
+
+He spoke with earnest appeal, but he still blocked the passage squarely,
+stoutly, immovably.
+
+The hot flush died out of Piers' face; he went slowly white. But the
+blaze of wrath in his eyes leaped higher. For the moment he looked
+scarcely sane.
+
+"If you don't clear out of my path, I shall throw you!" he said, speaking
+very quietly, but with a terrible distinctness that made misunderstanding
+impossible.
+
+Crowther, level-browed and determined, remained where he was. "I don't
+think you will," he said.
+
+"Don't you?" A faint smile of derision twisted Piers' lips. He gathered
+up the coat he carried, and threw it across his shoulder.
+
+Crowther watched him with eyes that never varied. "Piers!" he said.
+
+"Well?" Piers looked at him, still with that slight, grim smile.
+
+Crowther stood like a rock. "I will let you pass, sonny, if you can tell
+me--on your word of honour as a gentleman--that the tables are all you
+have in your mind."
+
+Piers tossed back his head with the action of an angry beast. "What the
+devil has that to do with you?"
+
+"Everything," said Crowther.
+
+He moved at last, quietly, massively, and took Piers by the shoulders.
+"My son," he said, "I know where you are going. I've been there myself.
+But in God's name, lad, don't--don't go! There are some stains that never
+come out though one would give all one had to be rid of them."
+
+"Let me go!" said Piers.
+
+He was breathing quickly; his eyes gazed fiercely into the elder man's
+face. He made no violent movement, but his whole body was tensely strung
+to resist.
+
+Crowther's hands tightened upon him. "Not to-night!" he said.
+
+"Yes, now!" Something of electricity ran through Piers; there came as it
+were the ripple of muscles contracting for a spring. Yet still he stood
+motionless, menacing but inactive.
+
+"I will not!" Sudden and hard Crowther's answer came; his hold became a
+grip. By sheer unexpectedness of action, he forced Piers back against the
+door behind him.
+
+It gave inwards, and they stumbled into the darkness of the bedroom.
+
+"You fool!" said Piers. "You fool!"
+
+Yet he gave ground, scarcely resisting, and coming up against the bed sat
+down upon it suddenly as if spent.
+
+There fell a brief silence, a tense, hard-breathing pause. Then Piers
+reached up and freed himself.
+
+"Oh, go away, Crowther!" he said. "You're a kind old ass, but I don't
+want you. And you needn't spend the night in the corridor either. See?
+Just go to bed like a Christian and let me do the same!"
+
+The struggle was over; so suddenly, so amazingly, that Crowther stood
+dumbfounded. He had girded himself to wrestle with a giant, but there was
+nothing formidable about the boy who sat on the edge of his bed and
+laughed at him with easy ridicule.
+
+"Why don't you switch on the light," he jeered, "and have a good look
+round for the devil? He was here a minute ago. What? Don't you believe in
+devils? That's heresy. All good parsons--" He got up suddenly and went to
+the switch. In a second the room was flooded with light. He returned to
+Crowther with the full flare on his face, and the only expression it wore
+was one of careless friendliness. He held out his hand. "Good-night,
+dear old fellow! Say your prayers and go to bed! And you needn't have any
+more nightmares on my account. I'm going to turn in myself directly."
+
+There was no mistaking his sincerity, or the completeness of his
+surrender. Crowther could but take the extended hand, and, in silent
+astonishment, treat the incident as closed.
+
+He even wondered as he went away if he had not possibly exaggerated the
+whole matter, though at the heart of him he knew that this was only what
+Piers himself desired him to believe. He could not but feel convinced,
+however, that the danger was past for the time at least. In his own
+inimitable fashion Piers had succeeded in reassuring him. He was fully
+satisfied that the boy would keep his word, for his faith in him was
+absolute. But he felt the victory that was his to be a baffling one. He
+had conquered merely because Piers of his own volition had ceased to
+resist. He did not understand that sudden submission. Like Sir Beverley,
+he was puzzled by it. There was about it a mysterious quality that eluded
+his understanding. He would have given a good deal for a glimpse of the
+motive that lay behind.
+
+But he had to go without it. Piers was in no expansive mood. Perhaps he
+might have found it difficult to explain himself even had he so desired.
+
+Whatever the motive that had urged him, it urged him no longer, or it had
+been diverted into a side-channel. For almost as soon as he was alone, he
+threw himself down and scribbled a careless line to Ina Rose, advising
+her to accompany her father to Mentone, and adding that he believed she
+would not be bored there.
+
+When he had despatched Victor with the letter, he flung his window wide
+and leaned out of it with his eyes wide opened on the darkness, and on
+his lips that smile that was not good to see.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+SUBSTANCE
+
+
+It was a blustering spring day, and Avery, caught in a sudden storm of
+driving sleet, stood up against the railings of the doctor's house,
+sheltering as best she might. She was holding her umbrella well in the
+teeth of the gale, and trying to protect an armful of purchases as well.
+
+She was alone, Gracie, the black sheep, having been sent to school at the
+close of the Christmas holidays, and Jeanie being confined to the house
+with a severe cold. Olive, having become more and more her father's
+constant companion, disdained shopping expeditions. The two elder boys
+and Pat were all at a neighbouring school as weekly boarders, and though
+she missed them Avery had it not in her heart to regret the arrangement.
+The Vicarage might at times seem dreary, but it had become undeniably an
+abode of peace.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer was gradually recovering her strength, and Avery's care now
+centred more upon Jeanie than her mother. Though the child had recovered
+from her accident, she had not been really well all the winter, and the
+cold spring seemed to tax her strength to the uttermost. Tudor still
+dropped in at intervals, but he said little, and his manner did not
+encourage Avery to question him. Privately she was growing anxious about
+Jeanie, and she wished that he would be more communicative. He had
+absolutely forbidden book-work, a fiat to which Mr. Lorimer had yielded
+under protest.
+
+"The child will grow up a positive dunce," he had declared.
+
+To which Tudor had brusquely rejoined, "What of it?"
+
+But his word was law so far as Jeanie was concerned, and Mr. Lorimer had
+relinquished the point with the sigh of one submitting to the inevitable.
+He did not like Lennox Tudor, but for some reason he always avoided an
+open disagreement with him.
+
+It was of Jeanie that Avery was thinking as she stood there huddled
+against the railings while the sleet beat a fierce tattoo on her levelled
+umbrella and streamed from it in rivers on to the ground. She even
+debated with herself if it seemed advisable to turn and enter the
+doctor's dwelling, and try to get him to speak frankly of the matter as
+he had spoken once before.
+
+She dismissed the idea, however, reflecting that he would most
+probably be out, and she was on the point of collecting her forces to
+make a rush for another sheltered spot further on when the front door
+opened unexpectedly behind her, and Tudor himself came forth
+bareheaded into the rain.
+
+"What are you doing there, Mrs. Denys?" he said. "Why don't you
+come inside?"
+
+He opened the gate for her, and took her parcels without waiting for a
+reply. And Avery, still with her umbrella poised against the blast,
+smiled her thanks and passed in.
+
+The hair grew far back on Tudor's forehead, it was in fact becoming
+scanty on the top of his head; and the raindrops glistened upon it as he
+entered behind Avery. He wiped them away, and then took off his glasses
+and wiped them also.
+
+"Come into the dining-room!" he said. "You are just in time to join
+me at tea."
+
+"You're very kind," Avery said. "But I ought to hurry back the moment the
+rain lessens."
+
+"It won't lessen yet," said Tudor. "Take off your mackintosh, won't you?
+I expect your feet are wet. There's a fire to dry them by."
+
+Certainly the storm showed no signs of abating. The sky was growing
+darker every instant. Avery slipped the streaming mackintosh from her
+shoulders and entered the room into which he had invited her.
+
+The blaze on the hearth was cheering after the icy gale without. She went
+to it, stretching her numbed hands to the warmth.
+
+Tudor pushed forward a chair. "I believe you are chilled to the
+bone," he said.
+
+She laughed at that. "Oh no, indeed I am not! But it is a cold wind,
+isn't it? Have you finished your work for to-day?"
+
+Tudor foraged in a cupboard for an extra cup and saucer. "No. I've got to
+go out again later. I've just come back from Miss Whalley's. She's got a
+touch of jaundice."
+
+"Oh, poor thing!" said Avery.
+
+"Yes; poor thing!" echoed Tudor grimly. "She is very sorry for herself, I
+can assure you; but as full of gossip as ever." He paused.
+
+Avery, with her face to the fire, laughed a little. "Anything new?"
+
+"Miss Whalley," said Tudor deliberately, "always gets hold of something
+new. Never noticed that?"
+
+"Wouldn't you like me to pour out?" suggested Avery.
+
+"No. You keep your feet on the fender. Do you want to hear the latest
+tittle-tattle--or not?"
+
+There was a wary gleam behind Tudor's glasses; but Avery did not turn her
+eyes from the fire. A curious little feeling of uneasiness possessed her,
+a sensation that scarcely amounted to dread yet which quickened the
+beating of her heart in a fashion that she found vaguely disconcerting.
+
+"Don't tell me anything ugly!" she said gently, still not looking at
+him.
+
+Tudor uttered a short laugh. "There's nothing especially venomous about
+it that I can see." He lifted the teapot and began to pour. "Have you
+heard from young Evesham lately?"
+
+The question was casually uttered; but Avery's hands made a slight
+involuntary movement over the fire towards which she leaned.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+At the same moment the cup that Tudor was filling overflowed, and he
+whispered something under his breath and set down the tea-pot.
+
+Avery turned towards him instinctively, to see him dabbing the table with
+his handkerchief.
+
+"It's almost too dark to see what one is doing," he said.
+
+"It is," she assented gravely, and turned back quietly to the fire, not
+offering to assist. A soft veil of reserve seemed to have descended
+upon her. She did not speak again until he had remedied the disaster
+and brought her some tea. Then, with absolute composure, she raised her
+eyes to his.
+
+"You were going to tell me something about Piers Evesham," she said.
+
+His eyes looked back into hers with a certain steeliness, as though they
+sought to penetrate her reserve.
+
+"I was," he said, after a moment, "though I don't suppose it will
+interest you very greatly. I had it from Miss Whalley, but I was not told
+the source of her information. Rumour says that the young man is engaged
+to Miss Ina Rose of Wardenhurst."
+
+"Oh, really?" said Avery. She took the cup he offered her with a hand
+that was perfectly steady, though she was conscious of the fact that her
+face was pale. "They are abroad, I think?"
+
+"Yes, in the Riviera." Tudor's eyes fell away from hers abruptly. "At
+least they have been. Someone said they were coming home." He stooped to
+put wood on the fire, and there fell a silence.
+
+Avery spoke after a moment. "No doubt he will be happier married."
+
+"I wonder," said Tudor. "I should say myself that he has the sort of
+temperament that is never satisfied. He's too restless for that. I don't
+think Miss Ina Rose is greatly to be envied."
+
+"Unless she loves him," said Avery. She spoke almost under her breath,
+her eyes upon the fire. Tudor, standing beside her with his elbow on
+the mantelpiece, was still conscious of that filmy veil of reserve
+floating between them. It chafed him, but it was too intangible a thing
+to tear aside.
+
+He waited therefore in silence, watching her face, the tender lines of
+her mouth, the sweet curves that in childhood must have made a perfect
+picture of happiness.
+
+She raised her eyes at length. "Dr. Tudor!"
+
+And then she realized his scrutiny, and a soft flush rose and overspread
+her pale face. She lifted her straight brows questioningly.
+
+And all in a moment Tudor found himself speaking,--not of his own
+volition, not the words he had meant to speak, but nervously,
+stammeringly, giving utterance to the thoughts that suddenly welled over
+from his soul. "I've been wanting to speak for ages. I couldn't get it
+out. But it's no good keeping it in, is it? I don't get any nearer that
+way. I don't want to vex you, make you feel uncomfortable. No one knows
+better than I that I haven't much to offer. But I can give you a home
+and--and all my love, if you will have it. It may seem a small thing to
+you, but it's bigger than the calf-love of an infant like young Evesham.
+I know he dared to let his fancy stray your way, and you see now what it
+was worth. But mine--mine isn't fancy."
+
+And there he stopped; for Avery had risen and was facing him in the
+firelight with eyes of troubled entreaty.
+
+"Oh, please," she said, "please don't go on!"
+
+He stood upright with a jerk. The distress on her face restored his
+normal self-command more quickly than any words. Half-mechanically he
+reached out and took her tea-cup, setting it down on the mantelpiece
+before her.
+
+"Don't be upset!" he said. "I didn't mean to upset you. I shan't go on,
+if it is against your wish."
+
+"It is," said Avery. She spoke tremulously, locking her hands fast
+together. "It must be my own fault," she said, "I'm dreadfully sorry. I
+hoped you weren't--really in earnest."
+
+He smiled at that with a touch of cynicism. "Did you think I was amusing
+myself--or you? Sit down again, won't you? There is no occasion whatever
+for you to be distressed. I assure you that you are in no way to blame."
+
+"I am dreadfully sorry," Avery repeated.
+
+"That's nice of you. I had scarcely dared to flatter myself that you
+would be--glad. So you see, you have really nothing to reproach yourself
+with. I am no worse off than I was before."
+
+She put out her hand to him with a quick, confiding gesture. "You are
+very kind to put it in that way. I value your friendship so much, so very
+much. Yes, and I value your love too. It's not a small thing to me. Only,
+you know--you know--" she faltered a little--"I've been married before,
+and--though I loved my husband--my married life was a tragedy. Oh yes, he
+loved me too. It wasn't that sort of misery. It was--it was drink."
+
+"Poor girl!" said Tudor.
+
+He spoke with unwonted gentleness, and he held her hand with the utmost
+kindness. There was nothing of the rejected lover in his attitude. He
+was man enough to give her his first sympathy.
+
+Avery's lips were quivering. She went on with a visible effort. "He died
+a violent death. He was killed in a quarrel with another man. I was told
+it was an accident, but it didn't seem like that to me. And--it had an
+effect on me. It made me hard--made me bitter."
+
+"You, Avery!" Tudor's voice was gravely incredulous.
+
+She turned her face to the fire, and he saw on her lashes the gleam of
+tears. "I've never told anyone that; but it's the truth. It seemed to me
+that life was cruel, mainly because of men's vices. And women were
+created only to go under. It was a horrid sort of feeling to have, but it
+has never wholly left me. I don't think I could ever face marriage a
+second time."
+
+"Oh yes, you could," said Tudor, quietly, "if you loved the man."
+
+She shook her head. "I am too old to fall in love. I have somehow
+missed the romance of life. I know what it is, but it will never come
+to me now."
+
+"And you won't marry without?" he said.
+
+"No."
+
+There fell a pause; then, still with the utmost quietness, he
+relinquished her hand. "I think you are right," he said. "Marriage
+without love on both sides is a ship without ballast. Yet, I can't help
+thinking that you are mistaken in your idea that you have lost the
+capacity for that form of love. You may know what it is. Most women do.
+But I wonder if you have ever really felt it."
+
+"Not to the full," Avery answered, her voice very low. "Then I was too
+young. Mine was just a child's rapture and it was simply extinguished
+when I came to know the kind of burden I had to bear. It all faded so
+quickly, and the reality was so terribly grim. Now--now I look on the
+world with experienced eyes. I am too old."
+
+"You think experience destroys romance?" said Tudor.
+
+She looked at him. "Don't you?"
+
+"No," he said. "If it did, I do not think you would be afraid to marry
+me. Don't think I am trying to persuade you! I am not. But are you sure
+that in refusing me you are not sacrificing substance to shadow?"
+
+"I don't quite understand you," she said.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders slightly. "I can't be more explicit. No doubt
+you will follow your own instincts. But allow me to say that I don't
+think you are the sort of woman to go through life unmated; and though I
+may not be romantic, I am sound. I think I could give you a certain
+measure of happiness. But the choice is yours. I can only bow to your
+decision."
+
+There was a certain dignity in his speech that gave it weight. Avery
+listened in silence, and into silence the words passed.
+
+Several seconds slipped away, then without effort Tudor came back to
+everyday things. "Sit down, won't you? Your tea is getting cold."
+
+Avery sat down, and he handed it to her, and after a moment turned aside
+to the table.
+
+"As a matter of fact," he said, "I have just come back from the
+Vicarage."
+
+"Oh, have you?" Avery looked round quickly. "You went to see Jeanie?"
+
+"Yes." Tudor spoke gravely. "I also saw the Vicar. I told him the child
+must go away. That cough of hers is tearing her to pieces. She ought to
+go to the South Coast. I told him so."
+
+"Oh! What did he say?" Avery spoke with eagerness. She had been longing
+to suggest that very proposal for some time past.
+
+Tudor smiled into his cup. "He said it was a total impossibility. That
+was the starting-point. At the finish it was practically decided that
+you should take her away next week."
+
+"I!" said Avery.
+
+"Yes, you. Mrs. Lorimer will manage all right now. The nurse can look
+after her and the little ones without assistance. And the second
+girl--Olive isn't it?--can look after the Reverend Stephen. It's all
+arranged in fact, unless it fails to meet with your approval, in which
+case of course the whole business must be reconsidered."
+
+"But of course I approve," Avery said. "I would do anything that lay in
+my power. But I don't quite like the idea of leaving Mrs. Lorimer."
+
+"She will be all right," Tudor asserted again. "She wouldn't be happy
+away from her precious husband, and she would sooner have you looking
+after Jeanie than anyone. She told me so."
+
+"She always thinks of others first," said Avery.
+
+"So does someone else I know," rejoined Tudor. "It's just a habit
+some women have,--not always a good habit from some points of view.
+We may regard it as settled then, may we? You really have no
+objections to raise?"
+
+"None," said Avery. "I think the idea is excellent. I have been feeling
+troubled about Jeanie nearly all the winter. This last cold has worn her
+out terribly."
+
+Tudor nodded. "Yes."
+
+He drank his tea thoughtfully, and then spoke again. "I sounded her this
+afternoon. The left lung is not in a healthy condition. She will need all
+the attention you can give her if she is going to throw off the mischief.
+It has not gone very far at present, but--to be frank with you--I am very
+far from satisfied that she can muster the strength." He got up and began
+to pace the room. "I have not said this plainly to anyone else. I don't
+want to frighten Mrs. Lorimer before I need. The poor soul has enough to
+bear without this added. Possibly the change will work wonders. Possibly
+she will pull round. Children have marvellous recuperative powers. But I
+have seen this sort of thing a good many times before, and--" he came
+back to the hearth--"it doesn't make me happy."
+
+"I am glad you have told me," Avery said.
+
+"I had to tell you. I believe you more than half suspected it." Tudor
+spoke restlessly; his thoughts were evidently not of his companion at
+that moment. "There are of course a good many points in her favour. She
+is a good, obedient child with a placid temperament. And the summer is
+before us. We shall have to work hard this summer, Mrs. Denys." He smiled
+at her abruptly. "It is like building a sea-wall when the tide is out.
+We've got to make it as strong as possible before the tide comes back."
+
+"You may rely on me to do my very best," Avery said earnestly.
+
+He nodded. "Thank you. I know I may. I always do. Hence my confidence in
+you. May I give you some more tea?"
+
+He quitted the subject as suddenly as he had embarked upon it. There was
+something very friendly in his treatment of her. She knew with
+unquestioning intuition that for the future he would keep strictly within
+the bounds of friendship unless he had her permission to pass beyond
+them. And it was this knowledge that emboldened her at parting to say,
+with her hand in his: "You are very, very good to me. I would like to
+thank you if I could."
+
+He pressed her hand with the kindness of an old friend. "No, don't thank
+me!" he said, smiling at her in a way that somehow went to her heart. "I
+shall always be at your service. But I'd rather you took it as a matter
+of course. I feel more comfortable that way."
+
+Avery left him at length and trudged home through the mud with a curious
+feeling of uncertainty in her soul. It was as though she had been
+vouchsafed a far glimpse of destiny which had been too fleeting for her
+comprehension.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+SHADOW
+
+
+The preparations that must inevitably precede a departure for an
+indefinite length of time kept Avery from dwelling overmuch on what had
+passed on that gusty afternoon when she had taken shelter in the
+doctor's house.
+
+Whether or not she believed the rumour concerning Piers she scarcely
+asked herself. For some reason into which she did not enter she was
+firmly resolved to exclude him from her mind, and she welcomed the many
+occupations that kept her thoughts engrossed. No word from him had
+reached her since that daring letter written nearly three months
+before, just after his departure. It seemed that he had accepted her
+answer just as she had meant him to accept it, and that he had nothing
+more to say. So at least she viewed the matter, not suffering any
+inward question to arise.
+
+She saw Lennox Tudor several times before the last day arrived. He did
+not seek her out. It simply came about in the ordinary course of things.
+He was plainly determined that neither in public nor private should there
+be any secret sense of embarrassment between them. And for this also she
+was grateful, liking him for his blunt consideration for her better than
+she had ever liked him before.
+
+It was on the evening of the day preceding her departure with Jeanie that
+she ran down in the dusk to the post at the end of the lane with a
+letter. Her Australian friend had written to propose a visit, and she had
+been obliged to put him off.
+
+There was a bitter wind blowing, but she hastened along hatless, with a
+cloak thrown round her shoulders. Past the church with its sheltering
+yew-trees she ran, intent only upon executing her errand in as short a
+time as possible.
+
+Her hair blew loose about her face, and before she reached her goal she
+was ashamed of her untidiness, but it was not worth while to return for a
+hat, and she pressed on with a girl's impetuosity, hoping that she would
+meet no one.
+
+The hope was not to be fulfilled. She reached the box and deposited her
+letter therein, but as she turned from doing so, there came the fall of a
+horse's hoofs along the road at the end of the lane.
+
+She caught the sound, and was pierced by a sudden, quite unaccountable
+suspicion. Swiftly she gathered her cloak more securely about her, and
+hastened away.
+
+Instantly it seemed to her that the hoof-beats quickened. The lane was
+steep, and she realized in a moment that if the rider turned up in her
+wake, she must very speedily be overtaken. She slackened her pace
+therefore, and walked on more quietly, straining her ears to listen, not
+venturing to look back.
+
+Round the corner came the advancing animal at a brisk trot. She had
+known in her heart that it would be so. She had known from the first
+moment of hearing those hoof-beats, that Fate, strong and relentless,
+was on her track.
+
+How she had known it she could not have said, but the wild clamour of her
+heart stifled any reasoning that she might have tried to form. Her breath
+came and went like the breath of a hunted creature. She could not hurry
+because of the trembling of her knees. Every instinct was urging her to
+flee, but she lacked the strength. She drew instead nearer to the wall,
+hoping against hope that in the gathering darkness he would pass her by.
+
+Nearer and nearer came the hammering hoofs. She could hear the horse's
+sharp breathing, the creak of leather. And then suddenly she found she
+could go no further. She stopped and leaned against the wall.
+
+She saw the animal pulled suddenly in, and knew that she was caught. With
+a great effort she lifted a smiling face, and simulated surprise.
+
+"You! How do you do?"
+
+"You knew it was me," said Piers rather curtly.
+
+He dropped from the saddle with the easy grace that always marked his
+movements, and came to her, leaving the animal free.
+
+"Why were you running away from me?" he said. "Did you want to cut me?"
+
+He must have felt the trembling of her hand, for all in a moment his
+manner changed. His fingers closed upon hers with warm assurance. He
+suddenly laughed into her face.
+
+"Don't answer either of those questions!" he said. "Didn't you expect
+to see me? We came home yesterday, thank the gods! I'm deadly sick of
+being away."
+
+"Haven't you enjoyed yourself?" Avery managed to ask.
+
+He laughed again somewhat grimly. "I wasn't out for enjoyment. I've
+been--amusing myself more or less. But that's not the same thing, is it?
+I should have drowned myself if I'd stayed out there much longer."
+
+"Don't talk nonsense!" said Avery.
+
+She spoke with a touch of sharpness. Her agitation had passed leaving her
+vexed with herself and with him.
+
+He received the admonition with a grimace. "Have you heard about my
+engagement yet?" he enquired irrelevantly, after a moment.
+
+Avery looked at him very steadily through the falling dusk. She had a
+feeling that he was trying to hoodwink her by some means not wholly
+praiseworthy.
+
+"Are you engaged?" she asked him, point-blank.
+
+He made a careless gesture. "Everybody says so."
+
+"Are you engaged?" Avery repeated with resolution.
+
+She freed her hand as she uttered the question the second time. She was
+standing up very straight against the churchyard wall sternly determined
+to check all trifling.
+
+Piers straightened himself also. From the pride of his attitude she
+thought that he was about to take offence, but his voice held none as he
+made reply.
+
+"I am not."
+
+She felt as if some constriction at her heart, of which till that moment
+she had scarcely been aware, had suddenly slackened. She drew a long,
+deep breath.
+
+"Sorry, what?" suggested Piers.
+
+He began to tap a careless tattoo with his whip on the toe of his boot.
+He did not appear to be regarding her very closely. Yet she did not feel
+at her ease. That sudden sense as of strain relaxed had left her
+curiously unsteady.
+
+She ignored his question and asked another. "Why is everybody saying that
+you are engaged?"
+
+He lifted his shoulders. "Because everybody is more or less of a
+gossiping fool, I should say. Still," he threw up his head with a laugh,
+"notions of that sort have their uses. My grandfather for instance is
+firmly of the opinion that I have come home to be married. I didn't
+undeceive him."
+
+"You let him believe--what wasn't true?" said Avery slowly.
+
+He looked straight at her, with his head flung back. "I did. It suited my
+purpose. I wanted to get home. He thought it was because the Roses had
+returned to Wardenhurst. I let him think so. It certainly was deadly
+without them."
+
+It was then that Avery turned and began quietly to walk on up the hill.
+He linked his arm in Pompey's bridle, and walked beside her.
+
+She spoke after a few moments with something of constraint. "And how have
+you been--amusing yourself?"
+
+"I?" Carelessly he made reply. "I have been playing around with Ina Rose
+chiefly--to save us both from boredom."
+
+There sounded a faint jeering note behind the carelessness of his voice.
+Avery quickened her pace almost unconsciously.
+
+"It's all right," said Piers. "There's been no damage done."
+
+"You don't know that," said Avery, without looking at him.
+
+"Yes, I do. She'll marry Dick Guyes. I told her she would the night
+before they left, and she didn't say she wouldn't. He's a much better
+chap than I am, you know," said Piers, with an odd touch of sincerity.
+"And he's head over ears in love with her into the bargain."
+
+"Are you trying to excuse yourself?" said Avery.
+
+He laughed. "What for? For not marrying Ina Rose? I assure you I never
+meant to marry her."
+
+"For trifling with her." Avery's voice was hard, but he affected not
+to notice.
+
+"A game's a game," he said lightly.
+
+Avery stopped very suddenly and faced round upon him. "That sort of
+game," she said, and her voice throbbed with the intensity of her
+indignation, "is monstrous--is contemptible--a game that none but
+blackguards ever stoop to play!"
+
+Piers stood still. "Great Scott!" he said softly.
+
+Avery swept on. Once roused, she was ruthless in her arraignment.
+
+"Men--some men--find it amusing to go through life breaking women's
+hearts just for the sport of the thing. They regard it as a pastime, in
+the same light as fox-hunting or cards or racing. And when the game is
+over, they laugh among themselves and say what fools women are. And so
+they may be, and so they are, many of them. But is it honourable, is it
+manly, to take advantage of their weakness? I never thought you were that
+sort. I thought you were at least honest."
+
+"Did you?" said Piers.
+
+He was holding himself very straight and stiff, just as he had held
+himself on that day in the winter when she had so indignantly intervened
+to save his dog from his ungovernable fury. But he did not seem to resent
+her attack, and in spite of herself Avery's own resentment began to wane.
+She suddenly remembered that her very protest was an admission of
+intimacy of which he would not scruple to avail himself if it suited his
+purpose, and with this thought in her mind she paused in confusion.
+
+"Won't you finish?" said Piers.
+
+She turned to leave him. "That's all I have to say."
+
+He put out a restraining hand. "Then may I say something?"
+
+The request was so humbly uttered that she could not refuse it. She
+remained where she was.
+
+"I should like you to know," said Piers, "that I have never given
+Miss Rose or any other girl with whom I have flirted the faintest
+shadow of a reason for believing that I was in earnest. That is the
+truth--on my honour."
+
+"I wonder if--they--would say the same," said Avery.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "No one ever before accused me of being a
+lady-killer. As to your other charge against me, it was not I who
+deceived my grandfather. It was he who deceived himself."
+
+"Isn't that a distinction without a difference?" said Avery, in a
+low voice.
+
+She was beginning to wish that she had not spoken with such vehemence.
+After all, what were his delinquencies to her? She almost expected him to
+ask the question; but he did not.
+
+"Do you mind explaining?" he said.
+
+With an effort she made response. "You can't say it was honourable to let
+your grandfather come home in the belief that you wanted to become
+engaged to Miss Rose."
+
+"Have I said so?" said Piers.
+
+Avery paused. She had a sudden feeling of uncertainty as if he had kicked
+away a foothold upon which she had rashly attempted to rest.
+
+"You admit that it was not?" she said.
+
+He smiled a little. "I admit that it was not strictly honest, but I
+didn't see much harm in it. In any case it was high time we came home,
+and it gave him the impetus to move."
+
+"And when are you going to tell him the truth?" said Avery.
+
+Piers was silent.
+
+Looking at him through the dusk, she was aware of a change in his
+demeanour, though as to its nature she was slightly doubtful.
+
+"And if I don't tell him?" said Piers at length.
+
+"You will," she said quickly.
+
+"I don't know why I should." Piers' voice was dogged. "He'll know fast
+enough--when she gets engaged to Guyes."
+
+"Know that you have played a double game," said Avery.
+
+"Well?" he said. "And if he does?"
+
+"I think you will be sorry--then," she said.
+
+Somehow she could not be angry any longer. He had accepted her rebuke in
+so docile a spirit. She did not wholly understand his attitude. Yet it
+softened her.
+
+"Why should I be sorry?" said Piers.
+
+She answered him quickly and impulsively. "Because it isn't your nature
+to deceive. You are too honest at heart to do it and be happy."
+
+"Happy!" said Piers, an odd note of emotion in his voice. "Do you suppose
+I'm ever that--or ever likely to be?"
+
+She recoiled a little from the suppressed vehemence of his tone, but
+almost instantly he put out his hand again to her with a gesture of
+boyish persuasion.
+
+"Don't rag me, Avery! I've had a filthy time lately. And when I saw you
+cut and run at sight of me--I just couldn't stand it. I've been wanting
+to answer your letter, but I couldn't."
+
+"But why should you?" Avery broke in gently. "My letter was the answer
+to yours."
+
+She gave him her hand, because she could not help it.
+
+He held it in a hungry clasp. "I know--I know," he said rather
+incoherently. "It--it was very decent of you not to be angry. I believe I
+let myself go rather--what? Thanks awfully for being so sweet about it!"
+
+"My dear boy," Avery said, "you thank me for nothing! The matter is past.
+Don't let us re-open it!"
+
+She spoke with unconscious appeal. His hand squeezed hers in instant
+response. "All right. We won't. And look here,--if you want me to tell my
+grandfather that he has been building his castle in the air,--it'll mean
+a row of course, but--I'll do it."
+
+"Will you?" said Avery.
+
+He nodded. "Yes--as you wish it. And may I come to tea with Jeanie
+to-morrow?"
+
+His dark eyes smiled suddenly into hers as he dropped her hand. She had a
+momentary feeling of uncertainty as she met them--a sense of doubt that
+disquieted her strangely. It was as if he had softly closed a door
+against her somewhere in his soul.
+
+With a curious embarrassment she answered him. "Jeanie has not been well
+all the winter. Dr. Tudor has ordered a change, and we are going--she and
+I--to Stanbury Cliffs to-morrow."
+
+"Are you though?" He opened his eyes. "Just you and she, eh? What a
+cosy party!"
+
+"The other children will probably join us for the Easter holidays," Avery
+said. "It's a nice place, they say. Do you know it?"
+
+"I should think I do. Victor and I used to go there regularly when I was
+a kid. It was there I learnt to swim."
+
+"Who is Victor?" asked Avery, beginning to walk on up the hill.
+
+"Victor? Oh, he's my French nurse--the best chap who ever walked. We are
+great pals," laughed Piers. "And so you're off to-morrow, are you? Hope
+you'll have a good time. Give my love to the kiddie! She isn't really
+ill, what?"
+
+"Dr. Tudor is not satisfied about her," Avery said.
+
+"Oh, Tudor!" Piers spoke with instant disparagement. "I don't suppose
+he's any good. What does he say anyway?"
+
+"He is afraid of lung trouble," Avery said. "But we hope the change is
+going to do wonders for her. Do you know, I think I must run in now? I
+have several little jobs still to get through this evening."
+
+Piers stopped at once. "Good-bye!" he said. "I'm glad I saw you. Take
+care of yourself, Avery! And the next time you see me coming--don't
+run away!"
+
+He set his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up into the saddle.
+Pompey immediately began to execute an elaborate dance in the roadway,
+rendering further conversation out of the question. Piers waved his cap
+in careless adieu, and turned the animal round. In another moment he was
+tearing down the lane at a gallop, and Avery was left looking after him
+still with that curious sense of doubt lying cold at her heart.
+
+The sight of a black, clerical figure emerging from the churchyard caused
+her to turn swiftly and pursue her way to the Vicarage gate. But the
+sounds of those galloping hoofs still wrought within her as she went.
+They beat upon her spirit with a sense of swift-moving Destiny.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE EVESHAM DEVIL
+
+
+"Confound the boy!" said Sir Beverley.
+
+He rose up from the black oak settle in the hall with a jerky movement of
+irritation, and tramped to the front-door.
+
+It had been one of those strange soft days that sometimes come in the
+midst of blustering March storms, and though the sun had long gone down
+the warmth still lingered. It might have been an evening in May.
+
+He opened the great door with an impatient hand. What on earth was the
+boy doing? Had he gone love-making to Wardenhurst? A grim smile touched
+the old man's grim lips as this thought occurred to him. That he was not
+wasting his time nearer home he was fairly convinced; for only that
+morning he had heard from Lennox Tudor that the mother's help at the
+Vicarage, over whom in the winter Piers had been inclined to make a fool
+of himself, had taken one of the children away for a change. It seemed
+more than probable by this time that Piers' wandering fancy had wholly
+ceased to stray in her direction, but the news of her absence had caused
+Sir Beverley undoubted satisfaction. He hoped his boy would not encounter
+that impertinent, scheming woman again until he was safely engaged to Ina
+Rose. That this engagement was imminent Sir Beverley was fully convinced.
+His only wonder was that it had not taken place sooner. The two had been
+thrown together almost daily during the sojourn of Colonel Rose and his
+daughter at Mentone, and they had always seemed to enjoy each other's
+society. Of course Sir Beverley did not like the girl. He actively
+disliked the whole female species. But she belonged to the county, and
+she seemed moreover to be a normal healthy young woman who would be the
+mother of normal healthy children. And this was the sort of wife Piers
+wanted. For Piers--drat the boy!--was not normal. He inherited a good
+deal of his Italian grandmother's temperament as well as her beauty. And
+life was not likely to be a very easy matter for him in consequence.
+
+But an ordinary young English wife of his own rank would be a step in
+the right direction. So reasoned Sir Beverley, who had taken that fatal
+step in the wrong one in his youth and had never recovered the ground
+thus lost.
+
+Standing there at the open door, he dwelt upon his boy's future with a
+kind of grim pleasure that was not unmixed with heartache. He and his
+wife would have to go and live at the Dower House of course. No feminine
+truck at the Abbey for him! But the lad should continue to manage the
+estate with him. That would bring them in contact every day. He couldn't
+do without that much. The evenings would be lonely enough. He pictured
+the long silent dinners with a weary frown. How infernally lonely the
+Abbey could be!
+
+The steady tick of the clock in the corner forced itself upon his notice.
+He swore at it under his breath, and went out upon the steps.
+
+At the same instant a view-halloo from the dark avenue greeted him, and
+in spite of himself his face softened.
+
+"Hullo, you rascal!" he shouted back. "What the devil are you up to?"
+
+Piers came running up, light-footed and alert. "I've been unlucky,"
+he explained. "Had two punctures. I left the car at the garage and
+came on as quickly as I could. I say, I'm awfully sorry. I've been
+with Dick Guyes."
+
+Sir Beverley growled inarticulately, and turned inwards. So he had not
+been to the Roses' after all!
+
+"Get along with you!" he said. "And dress as fast as you can!"
+
+And Piers bounded past him and went up the stairs in three great leaps.
+He seemed to have grown younger during the few days that had elapsed
+since their return, more ardent, more keenly alive. The English spring
+seemed to exhilarate him; but for the first time Sir Beverley began to
+have his doubts as to the reason for his evident pleasure in returning.
+What on earth had he been to see Guyes for? Guyes of all people--who was
+well-known as one of Miss Ina's most devoted adorers!
+
+It was evident that the news he desired to hear would not be imparted to
+him that night, and Sir Beverley considered himself somewhat aggrieved in
+consequence. He was decidedly short with Piers when he reappeared--a fact
+which in no way disturbed his grandson's equanimity. He talked cheery
+commonplaces throughout dinner without effort, regardless of Sir
+Beverley's discouraging attitude, and it was not till dessert was placed
+upon the table that he allowed his conversational energies to flag.
+
+Then indeed, as David finally and ceremoniously withdrew, did he suddenly
+seem to awake to the fact that conversation was no longer a vital
+necessity, and forthwith dropped into an abrupt, uncompromising silence.
+
+It lasted for a space of minutes during which neither of them stirred or
+uttered a syllable, becoming at length ominous as the electric stillness
+before the storm.
+
+They came through it characteristically, Sir Beverley staring fixedly
+before him under the frown that was seldom wholly absent from his face;
+Piers, steady-eyed and intent, keenly watching the futile agonies of a
+night-moth among the candles. There was about him a massive, statuesque
+look in vivid contrast to the pulsing vitality of a few minutes before.
+
+It was Sir Beverley who broke the silence at last with a species of
+inarticulate snarl peculiarly his own. Piers' dark eyes were instantly
+upon him, but he said nothing, merely waiting for the words to which this
+sound was the preface.
+
+Sir Beverley's brow was thunderous. He looked back at Piers with a
+piercing grim regard.
+
+"Well?" he said. "What fool idea have you got in your brain now? I
+suppose I've got to hear it sooner or later."
+
+It was not a conciliatory speech, yet Piers received it with no visible
+resentment. "I don't know that I want to say anything very special," he
+said, after a moment's thought.
+
+"Oh, don't you?" growled Sir Beverley. "Then what are you thinking about?
+Tell me that!"
+
+Piers leaned back in his chair. "I was thinking about Dick Guyes," he
+said. "He is dining at the Roses' to-night."
+
+"Oh!" said Sir Beverley shortly.
+
+A faint smile came at the corners of Piers' mouth. "He wants to propose
+to Ina for about the hundred and ninetieth time," he said, "but doesn't
+know if he can screw himself up to it. I told him not to be such a shy
+ass. She is only waiting for him to speak."
+
+"Eh?" said Sir Beverley.
+
+A queer little dancing gleam leaped up in Piers' eyes--the gleam that
+had invariably heralded some piece of especial devilry in the days of
+his boyhood.
+
+"I told him she was his for the asking, sir," he said coolly, "and
+promised not to flirt with her any more till they were safely married."
+
+"Damn you!" exclaimed Sir Beverley violently and without warning.
+
+He had a glass of wine in front of him, and with the words his fingers
+gripped the stem. In another second he would have hurled the liquid full
+in Piers' face; but Piers was too quick for him. Quick as lightning, his
+own hand shot out across the corner of the table and grasped the old
+man's wrist.
+
+"No, sir! No!" he said sternly.
+
+They glared into each other's eyes, and Sir Beverley uttered a
+furious oath; but after the first instinctive effort to free himself
+he did no more.
+
+At the end of possibly thirty seconds Piers took his hand away. He pushed
+back his chair in the same movement and rose.
+
+"Shall we talk in the library?" he said. "This room is hot."
+
+Sir Beverley raised the wine-glass to his lips with a hand that shook,
+and drained it deliberately.
+
+"Yes," he said then, "We will--talk in the library."
+
+He got up with an agility that he seldom displayed, and turned to the
+door. As he went he glanced up suddenly at the softly mocking face on the
+wall, and a sharp spasm contracted his harsh features. But he scarcely
+paused. Without further words he left the room; and Piers followed, light
+of tread, behind him.
+
+The study windows stood wide open to the night. Piers crossed the room
+and quietly closed them. Then, without haste and without hesitation, he
+came to the table and stopped before it.
+
+"I never intended to marry Ina Rose," he said. "I was only amusing
+myself--and her."
+
+"The devil you were!" ejaculated Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers went on with the utmost steadiness. "We are not in the least
+suited to one another, and we have the sense to realize it. The next time
+Guyes asks her, I believe she will have him."
+
+"Sense!" roared Sir Beverley. "Do you dare to talk to me of sense,
+you--you blind fool? Mighty lot of sense you can boast of! And what the
+devil does it matter whether you suit one another--as you call it--or
+not, so long as you keep the whip-hand? You'll tell me next that you're
+not--in love with her, I suppose?"
+
+The bitterness of the last words seemed to shake him from head to foot.
+He looked at Piers with the memory of a past torment in his eyes. And
+because of it Piers turned away his own.
+
+"It's quite true, sir," he said, in a low voice. "I am not--in love with
+her. I never have been."
+
+Sir Beverley's fist crashed down upon the table. "Love!" he thundered.
+"Love! Do you want to make me sick? I tell you, sir, I would sooner see
+you in your coffin than married to a woman with whom you imagined
+yourself in love. Oh, I know what you have in your mind. I've known for a
+long time. You're caught in the toils of that stiff-necked, scheming Judy
+at the Vicarage, who--"
+
+"Sir!" blazed forth Piers.
+
+He leaned across the table with a face gone suddenly white, and struck
+his own fist upon the polished oak with a passionate force that compelled
+attention.
+
+Sir Beverley ceased his tirade in momentary astonishment. Such violence
+from Piers was unusual.
+
+Instantly Piers went on speaking, his voice quick and low, quivering with
+the agitation that he had no time to subdue. "I won't hear another word
+on that subject! You hear me, sir? Not one word! It is sacred, and as
+such I will have it treated."
+
+But the check upon Sir Beverley was but brief, and the flame of his
+anger burned all the more fiercely in consequence of it. He broke in upon
+those few desperate words of Piers' with redoubled fury.
+
+"You will have this, and you won't have that! Confound you! What the
+devil do you mean? Are you master in this house, or am I?"
+
+"I am master where my own actions are concerned," threw back Piers. "And
+what I do--what I decide to do--is my affair alone."
+
+Swiftly he uttered the words. His breathing came quick and short as the
+breathing of a man hard pressed. He seemed to be holding back every
+straining nerve with a blind force that was physical rather than mental.
+
+He drew himself suddenly erect as he spoke. He had flung down the
+gauntlet of his independence at last, and with clenched hands he waited
+for the answer to his challenge.
+
+It came upon him like a whirlwind. Sir Beverley uttered an oath that fell
+with the violence of a blow, and after it a tornado of furious speech
+against which it was futile to attempt to raise any protest. He could
+only stand as it were at bay, like an animal protecting its own,
+fiery-veined, quivering, yet holding back from the spring.
+
+Not for any insult to himself would he quit that attitude. He was
+striving desperately to keep his self-control. He had been within an ace
+of losing it, as the blood that oozed over his closed fist testified;
+but, for the sake of that manhood which he was seeking to assert, he made
+a Titanic effort to command himself.
+
+And Sir Beverley, feeling the dumb strength that opposed him, resenting
+the forbearance with which he was confronted, infuriated by the
+unexpected force of the boy's resistance, turned with a snarl to seize
+and desecrate that which he had been warned was holy.
+
+"As for this designing woman, I tell you, she is not for you,--not, that
+is, in any honourable sense. If you choose to make a fool of her, that's
+your affair. I suppose you'll sow the usual crop of wild oats before
+you've done. But as to marrying her--"
+
+"By God, sir!" broke in Piers passionately. "Do you imagine that I
+propose to do anything else?"
+
+The words came from him like a cry wrung from a man in torture, and as he
+uttered them the last of his self-control slipped from his grasp. With a
+face gone suddenly devilish, he strode round the table and stood before
+his grandfather, furiously threatening.
+
+"I have warned you!" he said, and his voice was low, sunk almost to a
+whisper. "You can say what you like of me. I'm used to it. But--if you
+speak evil of her--I'll treat you as I would any other blackguard who
+dared to insult her. And now that we are on the subject, I will tell you
+this. If I do not marry this woman whom I love--I swear that I will
+never marry at all! That is my final word!"
+
+He hurled the last sentence in Sir Beverley's face, and with it he would
+have swung round upon his heel; but something in that face detained him.
+
+Sir Beverley's eyes were shining with an icy, intolerable sparkle. His
+thin lips were drawn in the dreadful semblance of a smile. He was
+half-a-head taller than Piers, and he seemed to tower above him in that
+moment of conflict.
+
+"Wait a minute!" he said. "Wait a minute!"
+
+His right hand was feeling along the leathern surface of the
+writing-table, but neither his eyes nor Piers' followed the movement.
+They held each other in a fixed, unalterable glare.
+
+There followed several moments of complete and terrible silence--a
+silence more fraught with violence than any speech.
+
+Then, with a slight jerk, Sir Beverley leaned towards Piers. "So," he
+said, "you defy me, do you?"
+
+His voice was as grim as his look. A sudden, odd sense of fear went
+through Piers. Sharply the thought ran through his mind that the same
+Evesham devil possessed them both. It was as if he had caught a glimpse
+of the monster gibing at his elbow, goading him, goading them, both.
+
+He made a sharp, involuntary movement; he almost flinched from those
+pitiless, stony eyes.
+
+"Ha!" Sir Beverley uttered a brief and very bitter laugh. "You've begun
+to think better of it, eh?"
+
+"No, sir." Curtly Piers made answer, speaking because he must. "I meant
+what I said, and I shall stick to it. But it wasn't for the sake of
+defying you that I said it. I have a better reason than that."
+
+He was still quivering with anger, yet because of that gibing devil at
+his elbow he strove to speak temperately, strove to hold back the raging
+flood of fierce resentment that threatened to overwhelm him.
+
+As for Sir Beverley, he had never attempted to control himself in moments
+such as these, and he did not attempt to do so now. Before Piers' words
+were fairly uttered, he had raised his right hand and in it a stout,
+two-foot ruler that he had taken from the writing-table.
+
+"Take that then, you young dog!" he shouted, and struck Piers furiously,
+as he stood. "And that! And that!"
+
+The third blow never fell. It was caught in mid-air by Piers who, with
+eyes that literally flamed in his white face, sprang straight at his
+grandfather, and closed with him.
+
+There was a brief--a very brief--struggle, then a gasping oath from Sir
+Beverley as the ruler was torn from his grasp. The next moment he was
+free and tottering blindly. Piers, with an awful smile, swung the weapon
+back as if he would strike him down with it. Then, as Sir Beverley
+clutched instinctively at the nearest chair for support, he flung
+savagely round on his heel, altering his purpose. There followed the loud
+crack of rending wood as he broke the ruler passionately across his knee,
+putting forth all his strength, and the clatter of the falling fragments
+as he hurled them violently from him.
+
+And then in a silence more dreadful than any speech, he strode to the
+door and went out, crashing it furiously shut behind him.
+
+Sir Beverley, grown piteously feeble, sank down in the chair, and
+remained there huddled and gasping for many dragging minutes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+A WATCH IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+He came at last out of what had almost been a stupor of inertia, sat
+slowly up, turned his brooding eyes upon the door through which Piers had
+passed. A tremor of anger crossed his face, and was gone. A grim smile
+took its place. He still panted spasmodically; but he found his voice.
+
+"Egad!" he said. "The fellow's as strong as a young bear. He's
+hugged--all the wind--out of my vitals."
+
+He struggled to his feet, straightening his knees with difficulty, one
+hand pressed hard to his labouring heart.
+
+"Egad!" he gasped again. "He's getting out of hand--the cub! But he'll
+come to heel,--he'll come to heel! I know the rascal!"
+
+He stumbled to the bell and rang it.
+
+David appeared with a promptitude that seemed to indicate a certain
+uneasiness.
+
+"Coffee!" growled his master. "And liqueur!"
+
+David departed at as high a rate of speed as decorum would permit.
+
+During his absence Sir Beverley set himself rigidly to recover his normal
+demeanour. The encounter had shaken him, shaken him badly; but he was not
+the man to yield to physical weakness. He fought it with angry
+determination.
+
+Before David's reappearance he had succeeded in controlling his gasping
+breath, though the hand with which he helped himself shook very
+perceptibly.
+
+There were two cups on the tray. David lingered.
+
+"You can go," said Sir Beverley.
+
+David cocked one eyebrow in deferential enquiry. "Master Piers in the
+garden, sir?" he ventured. "Shall I find him?"
+
+"No!" snapped Sir Beverley.
+
+"Very good, sir." David turned regretfully to the door. "Shall I keep the
+coffee hot, Sir Beverley?" he asked, as he reached it, with what was
+almost a pleading note in his voice.
+
+Sir Beverley's frown became as menacing as a thunder-cloud. "No!"
+he shouted.
+
+David nodded in melancholy submission and withdrew.
+
+Sir Beverley sat down heavily in his chair and slowly drank his coffee.
+Finally he put aside the empty cup and sat staring at the closed door,
+his brows drawn heavily together.
+
+How had the young beggar dared to defy him so? He must have been getting
+out of hand for some time by imperceptible degrees. He had always vowed
+to himself that he would not spoil the boy. Had that resolution of his
+become gradually relaxed? His frown grew heavier. He had never before
+contemplated the possibility that Piers might some day become an
+individual force utterly beyond his control.
+
+His eye fell upon a fragment of the broken ruler lying under the table
+and again grimly he smiled.
+
+"Confound the scamp! He's got some muscle," he murmured.
+
+Again his look went to the door. Why didn't the young fool come back and
+apologize? How much longer did he mean to keep him waiting?
+
+The minutes dragged away, and the silence of emptiness gathered and
+brooded in the great room and about the master of the house who sat
+within it, with bent head, waiting.
+
+It was close upon ten o'clock when at length he rose and irritably
+rang the bell.
+
+"See if you can find Master Piers!" he said to David. "He can't be far
+away. Look in the drawing-room! Look in the garden! Tell him I want him!"
+
+David withdrew upon the errand, and again the oppressive silence drew
+close. For a long interval Sir Beverley sat quite motionless, still
+staring at the door as though he expected Piers to enter at any moment.
+But when at length it opened, it was only to admit David once more.
+
+"I'm sorry to say I can't find Master Piers anywhere in the house or
+garden, Sir Beverley," he said, looking straight before him and blinking
+vacantly at the lamp. "I'm inclined to believe, sir, that he must have
+gone into the park."
+
+Sir Beverley snarled inarticulately and dismissed him.
+
+During the hour that followed, he did not move from his chair, and
+scarcely changed his position. But at last, as the stable-clock was
+tolling eleven, he rose stiffly and walked to the window. It was
+fastened; he dragged at the catch with impatient fingers.
+
+His face was haggard and grey as he finally thrust up the sash, and
+leaned out with his hands on the sill.
+
+The night was very still all about him. It might have been a night in
+June. Only very far away a faint breeze was stirring, whispering
+furtively in the bare boughs of the elm trees that bordered the park.
+Overhead the stars shone dimly behind a floating veil of mist, and
+from the garden sleeping at his feet there arose a faint, fugitive
+scent of violets.
+
+The old man's face contracted as at some sudden sense of pain as that
+scent reached his nostrils. His mouth twitched with a curious tremor,
+and he covered it with his hand as though he feared some silent
+watcher in that sleeping world might see and mock his weakness. That
+violet-bed beneath the window had been planted fifty years before at
+the whim of a woman.
+
+"We must have a great many violets," she had said. "They are sweeter than
+all the roses in the world. Next year I must have handfuls and handfuls
+of sweetness."
+
+And the next year the violets had bloomed in the chosen corner, but her
+hands had not gathered them. And they had offered their magic ever since,
+year after year--even as they offered it tonight--to a heart that was too
+old and too broken to care.
+
+Fifty years before, Sir Beverley had stood at that same window waiting
+and listening in the spring twilight for the beloved footfall of the
+woman who was never again to enter his house. They had had a
+disagreement, he had spoken harshly, he had been foolishly, absurdly
+jealous; for her wonderful beauty, her quick, foreign charm drew all the
+world. But, returning from a long ride that had lasted all day, he had
+entered with the desire to make amends, to win her sweet and gracious
+forgiveness. She had forgiven him before. She had laughed with a sweet,
+elusive mockery and passed the matter by as of no importance. It had
+seemed a foregone conclusion that she would forgive him again, would
+reassure him, and set his mind at rest. But he had come back to an empty
+house--every door gaping wide and the beloved presence gone.
+
+So he had waited for her, expecting her every moment, refusing to believe
+the truth that nevertheless had forced itself upon him at the last. So
+now he waited for her grandson--the boy with her beauty, her quick and
+generous charm, her passionate, emotional nature--to come back to him.
+And yet again he waited in vain.
+
+Piers had gone forth in fierce anger, driven by that devil that had
+descended to him through generations of stiff-necked ancestors; and for
+the first time in all his hot young life he had not returned repentant.
+
+"I treated him like a dog, egad," murmured Sir Beverley into the
+shielding hand. "But he'll come back. He always comes back, the scamp."
+
+But the minutes crawled by, the night-wind rustled and passed; and still
+Piers did not come.
+
+It was hard on midnight when Sir Beverley suddenly raised both hands to
+his mouth and sent a shrill, peculiar whistle through them across the
+quiet garden. It had been his special call for Piers in his childhood.
+Even as he sent it out into the darkness, he seemed to see the sturdy,
+eager little figure that had never failed to answer that summons with
+delight racing headlong towards him over the dim, dewy lawn.
+
+But to-night it brought no answer though he repeated it again and yet
+again; and as twelve o'clock struck heavily upon the stillness he turned
+from the window and groaned aloud. The boy had gone, gone for good, as he
+might have known he would go. He had driven him forth with blows and
+bitter words, and it was out of his power to bring him back again.
+
+Slowly he crossed the room and rang the bell. He was very cold, and he
+shivered as he moved.
+
+It was Victor who answered the summons, Victor with round, vindictive
+eyes that openly accused him for a moment, and then softened inexplicably
+and looked elsewhere.
+
+"You ask me for _Monsieur Pierre_?" he said, spreading out his hands,
+"_Mais--_"
+
+"I didn't ask for anything," growled Sir Beverley. "I rang the bell to
+tell you and all the other fools to lock up and go to bed."
+
+"But--me!" ejaculated Victor, rolling his eyes upwards in astonishment.
+
+"Yes, you! Where's the sense of your sitting up? Master Piers knows how
+to undress himself by this time, I suppose?"
+
+Sir Beverley scowled at him aggressively, but Victor did not even see the
+scowl. Like a hen with one chick, and that gone astray, he could think of
+naught beside.
+
+"_Mais Monsieur Pierre_ is not here! Where then is _Monsieur Pierre?_" he
+questioned in distress.
+
+"How the devil should I know?" snarled Sir Beverley. "Stop your chatter
+and be off with you! Shut the window first, and then go and tell David to
+lock up! I shan't want anything more to-night."
+
+Victor shrugged his shoulders in mute protest, and went to the window.
+Here he paused, looking forth with eyes of eager searching till recalled
+to his duty by a growl of impatience from his master. Then with a
+celerity remarkable in one of his years and rotundity, he quickly popped
+in his head and closed the window.
+
+"Leave the blind!" ordered Sir Beverley. "And the catch too! There! Now
+go! _Allez-vous-en!_? Don't let me see you again to-night!"
+
+Victor threw a single shrewd glance at the drawn face, and trotted with a
+woman's nimbleness to the door. Here he paused, executed a stiff bow;
+then wheeled and departed. The door closed noiselessly behind him, and
+again Sir Beverley was left alone.
+
+He dragged a chair to the window, and sat down to watch.
+
+Doubtless the boy would return when he had walked off his indignation. He
+would be sure to see the light in the study, and he would come to him for
+admittance. He himself would receive him with a gruff word or two of
+admonition and the whole affair should be dismissed. Grimly he pictured
+the scene to himself as, ignoring the anxiety that was growing within
+him, he settled himself to his lonely vigil.
+
+Slowly the night dragged on. A couple of owls were hooting to one another
+across the garden, and far away a dog barked at intervals. Old Sir
+Beverley never stirred in his chair. His limbs were rigid, his eyes fixed
+and watchful. But his face was grey--grey and stricken and incredibly
+old. He had the look of a man who carried a burden too heavy to be borne.
+
+One after another he heard the hours strike, but his position never
+altered, his eyes never varied, his face remained as though carved in
+granite--a graven image of despair. Unspeakable weariness was in his
+pose, and yet he did not relax or yield a hair's breadth to the body's
+importunity. He suffered too bitterly in the spirit that night to be
+aware of physical necessity.
+
+Slowly the long hours passed. The night began to wane. A faint grey
+glimmer, scarcely perceptible, came down from a mist-veiled sky. The wind
+that had sunk to stillness came softly back and wandered to and fro as
+though to rouse the sleeping world. Behind the mist the stars went out,
+and from the rookery in the park a hoarse voice suddenly proclaimed the
+coming day.
+
+The grey light grew. In the garden ghostly shapes arose, phantoms of the
+dawn that gradually resolved into familiar forms of tree and shrub. From
+the rookery there swelled a din of many raucous voices. The dog in the
+distance began to bark again with feverish zest, and from the stables
+came Caesar's cheery answering yell.
+
+The mist drifted away from the face of the sky. A brightness was growing
+there. Stiffly, painfully, Sir Beverley struggled up from his chair,
+stood steadying himself--a figure tragic and forlorn--with his hands
+against the wood of the window-frame, then with a groaning effort thrust
+up the sash.
+
+Violets! Violets! The haunting scent of them rose to greet him. The air
+was full of their magic fragrance. For a second he was aware of it; he
+almost winced. And then in a moment he had forgotten. He stood there
+motionless--a desolate old man, bowed and shrunken and grey--staring
+blindly out before him, unconscious of all things save the despair that
+had settled in his heart.
+
+The night had passed and his boy had not returned.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE CONFLICT
+
+
+Stanbury Cliffs was no more than a little fishing-town at the foot of the
+sandy cliff--a sheltered nest of a place in which the sound of the waves
+was heard all day long, but which no bitter wind could reach. The peace
+of it was balm to Avery's spirit. She revelled in its quiet.
+
+Jeanie loved it too. She delighted in the freedom and the warmth, and
+almost from the day of their arrival her health began to improve.
+
+They had their quarters in what was little more than a two-storey
+cottage belonging to one of the fishermen, and there was only a tiny
+garden bright with marigolds between them and the shore. Day after day
+they went through the little wicket gate down a slope of loose sand to
+the golden beach where they spent the sunny hours in perfect happiness.
+The waves that came into the bay were never very rough, though they
+sometimes heard them raging outside with a fury that filled the whole
+world with its roaring. Jeanie called it "the desired haven," and
+confided to Avery that she was happier than she had ever been in her
+life before.
+
+Avery was happy too, but with a difference; for she knew in her secret
+heart that the days of her tranquillity were numbered. She knew with a
+woman's sure instinct that the interval of peace would be but brief,
+that with or without her will she must soon be drawn back again into
+the storm and stress of life. And knowing it, she waited, strengthening
+her defences day by day, counting each day as a respite while she
+devoted herself to the child and rejoiced to see the change so quickly
+wrought in her. Tudor's simile of the building of a sea-wall often
+recurred to her. She told herself that the foundation thereof should be
+as secure as human care could make it, so that when the tide came back
+it should stand the strain.
+
+The Vicar would have been shocked beyond words by the life of complete
+indulgence led by his small daughter. She breakfasted in bed every day,
+served by Avery who was firm as to the amount of nourishment taken but
+comfortably lax on all other points. When the meal was over, Avery
+generally went marketing while Jeanie dressed, and they then went to the
+shore. If there were no marketing to be done, Avery would go down to the
+beach alone and wait for her there. There was a sheltered corner that
+they both loved where, protected by towering rocks, they spent many a
+happy hour. It was just out of reach of the sea, exposed to the sun and
+sheltered from the wind--an ideal spot; and here they brought letters,
+books, or needlework, and were busy or idle according to their moods.
+
+Jeanie was often idle. She used to lie in the soft sand and dream, with
+her eyes on the far horizon; but of what she dreamed she said no word
+even to Avery. But she was always happy. Her smile was always ready, the
+lines of her mouth were always set in perfect content. She seemed to have
+all she desired at all times. They did not often stray from the shore,
+for she was easily tired; but they used to roam along it and search the
+crevices of the scattered rocks which held all manner of treasures. They
+spent the time in complete accord. It was too good to last, Avery told
+herself. The way had become too easy.
+
+It was on a morning about a week after their arrival that she went down
+at an early hour to their favourite haunt. There had been rain in the
+night, and a brisk west wind was blowing; but she knew that in that
+sheltered spot they would be protected, and Jeanie was pledged to join
+her there as soon as she was ready. The tide was coming in, and the sun
+shone amidst scudding white clouds. It was a morning on which to be happy
+for no other reason than lightness of heart; and Avery, with her work-bag
+on her arm, sang softly to herself as she went.
+
+As usual she met no one. It was a secluded part of the shore. The little
+town was out of sight on the other side of a rocky promontory, and the
+place was lonely to desolation.
+
+But Avery did not feel the loneliness. She had had a letter only that
+morning from Crowther, the friend of those far-off Australian days, and
+he expressed a hope of being able to pay her a flying visit at Stanbury
+Cliffs before settling down to work in grim earnest for the
+accomplishment of his life's desire. She would have welcomed Edmund
+Crowther at any time. He was the sort of friend whose coming could never
+bring anything but delight.
+
+She wondered as she walked along which day he would choose. She was
+rather glad that he had not fixed a definite date. It was good to feel
+that any day might bring him.
+
+Nearing her destination she became aware of light feet running on the
+firm sand behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, but the sun shone
+full in her eyes, and she only managed to discern vaguely a man's figure
+drawing near. He could not be pursuing her, she decided, and resumed her
+walk and her thoughts of Crowther--the friend who had stood by her at a
+time when she had been practically friendless.
+
+But the running feet came nearer and nearer. She suddenly realized that
+they meant to overtake her, and with the knowledge the old quick dread
+pierced her heart. She wheeled abruptly round and stood still.
+
+He was there, not a dozen yards from her. He hailed her as she turned.
+
+She clenched her hands with sudden determination and went to meet him.
+
+"Piers!" she said, and in her voice reproach and severity were
+oddly mingled.
+
+But Piers was unabashed. He ran swiftly up to her, and caught her
+hands into his with an impetuous rush of words. "Here you are at last!
+I've been waiting for you for hours. But I was in the water when you
+first appeared, and I hadn't any towels, or I should have caught you
+up before."
+
+He was laughing as he spoke, but it seemed to Avery that there was
+something not quite normal about him. His black hair lay in a wet plaster
+on his forehead, and below it his eyes glittered oddly, as if he were
+putting some force upon himself.
+
+"How in the world did you get here?" she said.
+
+He laughed again between his teeth. "I tell you, I've been here for
+hours. I came last night. But I couldn't knock you up at two in the
+morning. So I had to wait. How are you and Jeanie getting on?"
+
+Avery gravely withdrew her hands, and turned to pursue her way towards
+her rocky resting-place. "Jeanie is better," she said, in a voice that
+did not encourage any further solicitude on either Jeanie's behalf or
+her own.
+
+Piers marched beside her, a certain doggedness in his gait. The laughter
+had died out of his face. He looked pale and stern, and fully as
+determined as she.
+
+"Why didn't you tell us to expect you?" Avery asked at last.
+
+"Were you not expecting me?" he returned, and his voice had the sharpness
+of a challenge.
+
+She looked at him steadily for a moment or two, meeting eyes that flung
+back her scrutiny with grim defiance.
+
+"Of course I was not expecting you," she said.
+
+"And yet you were not--altogether--surprised to see me," he rejoined, a
+faint jeering echo in his voice.
+
+Avery walked on till she reached her sheltered corner. Then she laid her
+work-bag down in the accustomed place, and very resolutely turned and
+faced him.
+
+"Tell me why you have come!" she said.
+
+He gazed at her for a moment fiercely from under his black brows; then
+suddenly and disconcertingly he seized her by the wrists.
+
+"I'll tell you," he said, speaking rapidly, with feverish utterance.
+"I've come because--before Heaven--I can't keep away. Avery, listen to
+me! Yes, you must listen. I've come because I must, because you are all
+the world to me and I want you unutterably. I don't believe--I can't
+believe--that I am nothing to you. You can't with honesty tell me so. I
+love you with all my soul, with all there is of me, good and bad.
+Avery--Avery, say you love me too!"
+
+Just for an instant the arrogance went out of his voice, and it sank to
+pleading. But Avery stood mute before him, very pale, desperately calm.
+She made not the faintest attempt to free herself, but her hands were
+hard clenched. There was nothing passive in her attitude.
+
+He was aware of strong resistance, but it only goaded him to further
+effort. He lifted the clenched hands and held them tight against his
+heart.
+
+"You needn't try to cast me off," he said, "for I simply won't go. I know
+you care. You wouldn't have taken the trouble to write that letter if you
+didn't. And so listen! I've come now to marry you. We can go up to town
+to-day,--Jeanie too, if you like. And to-morrow--to-morrow we will be
+married by special licence. I've thought it all out. You can't refuse. I
+have money of my own--plenty of money. And you belong to me already.
+It's no good trying to deny it any more. You are my mate--my mate; and I
+won't try to live without you any longer!"
+
+Wildly the words rushed out, spending themselves as it were upon utter
+silence. Avery's hands were no longer clenched. They lay open against his
+breast, and the mad beating of his heart thrilled through and through her
+as she stood.
+
+He bent towards her eagerly, passionately. His hands reached out to clasp
+her; yet he paused. "Avery! Avery!" he whispered very urgently.
+
+Her eyes were raised to his, grey and steady and fearless. Not by the
+smallest gesture did she seek to escape him. She suffered the hands upon
+her shoulders. She suffered the fiery passion of his gaze.
+
+Only at last very clearly, very resolutely, she spoke. "Piers--no!"
+
+His face was close to hers, glowing and vital and tensely determined. "I
+say 'Yes,'" he said, with brief decision.
+
+Avery was silent. His hands were drawing her, and still she did not
+resist; but in those moments of silent inactivity she was stronger than
+he. Her personality was at grips with his, and if she gained no ground at
+least she held her own.
+
+"Avery!" he said suddenly and sharply. "What's the matter with you? Why
+don't you speak?"
+
+"I am waiting," she said.
+
+"Waiting!" he echoed. "Waiting for what?"
+
+"Waiting for you to come to yourself, Piers," she made steadfast answer.
+
+He laughed at that, a quick, insolent laugh. "Do you think I don't know
+what I'm doing, then?"
+
+"I am quite sure," she answered, "that when you know, you will be more
+ashamed than any honourable man should ever have reason to be."
+
+He winced at the words. She saw the hot blood surge in a great wave to
+his forehead, and she quailed inwardly though outwardly she made no sign.
+His grip was growing every instant more compelling. She knew that he was
+bracing himself for one great effort that should batter down the strength
+that withstood him. His lips were so close to hers that she could feel
+his breath, quick and hot, upon her face. And still she made no struggle
+for freedom, knowing instinctively that the instant her self-control
+yielded, the battle was lost.
+
+Slowly the burning flush died away under her eyes. His face changed, grew
+subtly harder, less passionate. "So," he said, with an odd quietness,
+"I'm not to kiss you. It would be dishonourable, what?"
+
+She made unflinching reply. "It would be despicable and you know it--to
+kiss any woman against her will."
+
+"Would it be against your will?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, it would." Firmly she answered him, yet a quiver of agitation went
+through her. She felt her resolution begin to waver.
+
+But in that moment something in Piers seemed to give way also. He cried
+out to her as if in sudden, intolerable pain. "Avery! Avery! Are you made
+of stone? Can't you see that this is life or death to me?"
+
+She answered him instantly; it was almost as if she had been waiting for
+that cry of his. "Yes, but you must get the better of it. You can if you
+will. It is unworthy of you. You are trying to take what is not yours.
+You have made a mistake, and you are wronging yourself and me."
+
+"What?" he exclaimed. "You don't love me then!"
+
+He flung his arms wide upon the words, with a gesture of the most utter
+despair, and turned from her. A moment he stood swaying, as if bereft of
+all his strength; and then with abrupt effort he began to move away. He
+stumbled blindly, heavily, as he went, and the crying of the wheeling
+sea-gulls came plaintively through a silence that could be felt.
+
+But ere that silence paralysed her, Avery spoke, raising her voice, for
+the urgency was great.
+
+"Piers, stop!"
+
+He stopped instantly, but he did not turn, merely stood tensely waiting.
+
+She collected herself and went after him. She laid a hand that trembled
+on his arm.
+
+"Don't leave me like this!" she said.
+
+Slowly he turned his head and looked at her, and the misery of that look
+went straight to her heart. All the woman's compassion in her throbbed up
+to the surface. She found herself speaking with a tenderness which a
+moment before no power on earth would have drawn from her.
+
+"Piers, something is wrong; something has happened. Won't you tell me
+what it is?"
+
+"I can't," he said.
+
+His lower lip quivered unexpectedly and she saw his teeth bite savagely
+upon it. "I'd better go," he said.
+
+But her hand still held his arm. "No; wait!" she said. "You can't go like
+this. Piers, what is the matter with you? Tell me!"
+
+He hesitated. She saw that his self-control was tottering. Abruptly at
+length he spoke. "I can't. I'm not master of myself. I--I--" He broke off
+short and became silent.
+
+"I knew you weren't," she said, and then, acting upon an impulse which
+she knew instinctively that she would never regret, she gave him her
+other hand also. "Let us forget all this!" she said.
+
+It was generously spoken, so generously that it could not fail to take
+effect. He looked at her in momentary surprise, began to speak, stopped,
+and with a choked, unintelligible utterance took her two hands with the
+utmost reverence into his own, and bowed his forehead upon them. The
+utter abandonment of the action revealed to her in that moment how
+completely he had made her the dominating influence of his life.
+
+"Shall we sit down and talk?" she said gently.
+
+She could not be other than gentle with him. The appeal of his
+weakness was greater than any display of strength. She could not but
+respond to it.
+
+He set her free and dropped down heavily upon a rock, leaning his head in
+his hands.
+
+She waited a few moments beside him; then, as he remained silent, she
+bent towards him.
+
+"Piers, what is it?"
+
+With a sharp movement he straightened himself, and turned his face
+to the sea.
+
+"I'm a fool," he said, speaking with an odd, unsteady vehemence. "Fact
+is, I've been out all night on this beastly shore. I've walked miles. And
+I suppose I'm tired."
+
+He made the confession with a shamefaced laugh, still looking away to
+the horizon.
+
+"All night!" Avery repeated in astonishment. "But, Piers!"
+
+He nodded several times, emphatically. "And those infernal sea-birds have
+been squawking along with those thrice-accursed crows ever since
+day-break. I'd like to wring their ugly necks, every jack one of 'em!"
+
+Avery laughed in spite of herself. "We all feel peevish sometimes," she
+said, as one of the offenders sailed over-head with a melancholy cry.
+"But haven't you had any breakfast? You must be starving."
+
+"I am!" said Piers. "I feel like a wolf. But you needn't be afraid to sit
+down. I shan't gobble you up this time."
+
+She heard the boyish appeal in his voice and almost unconsciously she
+yielded to it. She sat down on the rock beside him, but he instantly
+slipped from it and stretched himself in a dog-like attitude at her feet.
+
+His chin was propped in his hands, his face turned to the white sand on
+which he lay. She looked down at his black head with more than compassion
+in her eyes. It was horribly difficult to snub this boy-lover of hers.
+
+She sat and waited silently for him to speak.
+
+He dropped one hand at length and began to dig his brown fingers into the
+powdery sand with irritable energy; but a minute or more passed before
+very grumpily he spoke.
+
+"I've had a row with my grandfather. We both of us behaved like wild
+beasts. In the end, he thought he was going to give me a caning, and that
+was more than I could stand. I smashed his ruler for him and bolted. I
+should have struck him with it if I hadn't. And after that, I cleared out
+and came here. And I'm not going back."
+
+So with blunt defiance he made the announcement, and as he did so, it
+came to Avery suddenly and quite convincingly that she had been the
+cause of the quarrel. A shock of dismay went through her. She had not
+anticipated this. She felt that the suspicion must be verified or
+refuted at once.
+
+"Piers," she said quickly, "why did you quarrel with your grandfather?
+Was it because of your affair with Miss Rose?"
+
+"I never had an affair with Miss Rose," said Piers rather sullenly. He
+dug up a small stone, and flung it with vindictive force at the face of
+the cliff. "Ask her, if you don't believe me!"
+
+He paused a moment, then went on in a dogged note: "I told him--of a
+certain intention of mine. He tackled me about it first, was absolutely
+intolerable. I just couldn't hold myself in. And then somehow we got
+violent. It was his fault. Anyway, he began it."
+
+"You haven't told me--yet--what you quarrelled about," said Avery, with a
+sinking heart.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders without looking at her. "It doesn't matter,
+does it?"
+
+She made answer with a certain firmness. "Yes, I think it does."
+
+"Well, then,"--abruptly he raised himself and faced round, his dark eyes
+raised to hers,--"I told him, Avery, that if I couldn't marry the woman I
+loved, I would never marry at all."
+
+There was no sullenness about him now, only steadfast purpose. He looked
+her full in the face as he said it, and she quivered a little before the
+mastery of his look.
+
+He laid a hand upon her knee as she sat above him in sore perplexity.
+"Would you have me do anything else?" he said.
+
+She answered him with a conscious effort. "I want you to love--and
+marry--the right woman."
+
+He uttered a queer, unsteady laugh and leaned his head against her. "Oh,
+my dear," he said, "there is no other woman but you in all the world."
+
+Something fiery that was almost like a dart of pain went through Avery at
+his words. She moved instinctively, but it was not in shrinking. After a
+moment she laid her hand upon his.
+
+"Piers," she said, "I can't bear hurting you."
+
+"You wouldn't hurt a fly," said Piers.
+
+She smiled faintly. "Not if I could help it. But that doesn't prove that
+I am fond of flies. And now, Piers, I am going to ask a very big thing of
+you. I wonder if you will do it."
+
+"I wonder," said Piers.
+
+He had not moved at her touch, yet she felt his fingers close tensely
+as they lay upon her knee, and she guessed that he was still striving to
+control the inner tumult that had so nearly overwhelmed him a few
+minutes before.
+
+"I know it is a big thing," she said. "Yet--for my sake if you like--I
+want you to do it."
+
+"I will do anything for your sake," he made passionate answer.
+
+"Thank you," she said gently. "Then, Piers, I want you--please--to go
+back to Sir Beverley at once, and make it up."
+
+He withdrew his hand sharply from hers, and sat up, turning his back upon
+her. "No!" he said harshly. "No!"
+
+"Please, Piers!" she said very earnestly.
+
+He locked his arms round his knees and sat in silence, staring moodily
+out to sea.
+
+"Please, Piers!" she said again, and lightly touched his shoulder with
+her fingers.
+
+He hunched the shoulder away from her with a gesture of boyish
+impatience, and then abruptly, as if realizing what he had done, he
+turned back to her, caught the hand, and pressed it to his lips.
+
+"I'm a brute, dear. Forgive me! Of course--if you wish it--I'll go back.
+But as to making it up, well--" he gulped once or twice--"it doesn't rest
+only with me, you know."
+
+"Oh, Piers," she said, "you are all he has. He couldn't be hard to you!"
+
+Piers smiled a wry smile, and said nothing.
+
+"Besides," she went on gently, "there is really nothing for you to
+quarrel about,--that is, if I am the cause of the trouble. It is
+perfectly natural that your grandfather should wish you to make a
+suitable marriage, perfectly natural that he should not want you to run
+after the wrong woman. You can tell him, Piers, that I absolutely see his
+point of view, but that so far as I am concerned, he need not be
+anxious. It is not my intention to marry again."
+
+"All right," said Piers.
+
+He gave her hand a little shake and released it. For a second--only a
+second--she caught a sparkle in his eyes that seemed to her almost like
+a gleam of mockery. And then with characteristic suddenness he sprang
+to his feet.
+
+"Well, I'd better be going," he said in a voice that was perfectly normal
+and free from agitation. "I can't stop to see the kiddie this time. I'm
+glad she's going on all right. I wonder when you'll be back again."
+
+"Not at present, I think," said Avery, trying not to be disconcerted by
+his abruptness.
+
+He looked down at her whimsically. "You're a good sort, Avery," he said.
+"I won't be so violent next time."
+
+"There mustn't be a next time," she said quickly. "Please Piers, that
+must be quite understood!"
+
+"All right," he said again. "I understand."
+
+And with that very suddenly he left her, so suddenly that she sat
+motionless on her rock and stared after him, not believing that he was
+really taking his leave.
+
+He did not turn his head, however, and very soon he passed round the
+jutting headland, and was gone from her sight. Only when that
+happened did she draw a long, long breath and realize how much of her
+strength had been spent to gain what after all appeared to be but a
+very barren victory.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE RETURN
+
+
+"_Ah! C'est Monsieur Pierre enfin!_" Eagerly Victor greeted the
+appearance of his young master. He looked as if he would have liked to
+embrace him.
+
+Piers' attitude, however, did not encourage any display of tenderness.
+He flung himself gloomily down into a chair and regarded the man with
+sombre eyes.
+
+"Where's Sir Beverley?" he said.
+
+Victor spread forth expressive hands. _"Mais_, Sir Beverley, he sit up
+all the night attending you, _mon petit monsieur. Et moi_, I sit up also.
+_Mais Monsieur Pierre! Monsieur Pierre!"_
+
+He began to shake his head at Piers in fond reproof, but Piers paid no
+attention.
+
+"Sat up all night, what?" he said. "Then where is he now? In bed?"
+
+There was a deep line between his black brows; all the gaiety and sparkle
+had gone from his eyes. He looked tired out.
+
+It was close upon the luncheon-hour, and he had tramped up from the
+station. There were refreshments in front of him, but he bluntly refused
+to touch them.
+
+"Why can't you speak, man?" he said irritably. "Tell me where he is!"
+
+"He has gone for his ride as usual," Victor said, speaking through pursed
+lips. "But he is very, very feeble to-day, _Monsieur Pierre_. We beg him
+not to go. But what would you? He is the master. We could not stop him.
+But he sit in his saddle--like this."
+
+Victor's gesture descriptive of the bent, stricken figure that had ridden
+forth that morning was painfully true to life.
+
+Piers sprang to his feet. "And he isn't back yet? Where on earth can he
+be? Which way did he go?"
+
+Victor raised his shoulders. "He go down the drive--as always. _Après
+cela, je ne sais pas._"
+
+"Confusion!" ejaculated Piers, and was gone.
+
+He had returned by a short cut across the park, but now he tore down
+the long avenue, running like a trained athlete, head up and elbows in,
+possessed by the single purpose of reaching the lodge in as brief a
+time as possible. They would know at the lodge which way his
+grandfather had gone.
+
+He found Marshall just turning in at his gate for the midday meal, and
+hailed him without ceremony.
+
+The old man stopped and surveyed him with sour disapproval. The news of
+Piers' abrupt disappearance on the previous night had spread.
+
+No, Marshall could give him no news as to the master's whereabouts; he
+had been out all the morning.
+
+"Well, find Mrs. Marshall!" ordered Piers impatiently. "She'll know
+something. She must have opened the gate."
+
+Mrs. Marshall, summoned by a surly yell from her husband, stood in the
+door-way, thin-lipped and austere, and announced briefly that Sir
+Beverley had gone down towards the Vicarage; she didn't know no more
+than that.
+
+It was enough for Piers. He was gone again like a bird on the wing. The
+couple at the lodge looked after him with a species of unwilling
+admiration. His very arrogance fed their pride in him, disapprove
+though they might of his wild, foreign ways. Whatever the mixture in
+his veins, the old master's blood ran there, and they would always be
+loyal to that.
+
+That run to the Vicarage taxed even Piers' powers. The steep hill at the
+end made him aware that his strength had its limits, and he was forced to
+pause for breath when he reached the top. He leaned against the Vicarage
+gate-post with the memory of that winter evening in his mind when Avery
+had come swift-footed to the rescue, and had cooled his fury with a
+bucket of cold water.
+
+A step in the garden made him straighten himself abruptly. He turned to
+see a tall, black-coated figure emerge. The Reverend Stephen Lorimer came
+up with dignity and greeted him.
+
+"Were you about to enter my humble abode?" he enquired.
+
+"Is my grandfather here?" asked Piers.
+
+Mr. Lorimer smiled benignly. He liked to imagine himself upon terms of
+intimacy with Sir Beverley though the latter did very little to
+justify the idea.
+
+"Well, no," he said, "I have not had the pleasure of seeing him here
+to-day. Did he express the intention of paying me a visit?"
+
+"No, sir, no!" said Piers impatiently. "I only thought it possible,
+that's all. Good-bye!"
+
+He swung round and departed, leaving the worthy Vicar looking after him
+with a shrewd and not over-friendly smile at the corners of his eyes.
+
+Beyond the Vicarage the road wound round again to the park, and Piers
+followed it. It led to a gate that opened upon a riding which was a
+favourite stretch for a gallop with both Sir Beverley and himself.
+Through this he passed, no longer running, but striding over the springy,
+turf between the budding beech saplings at a pace that soon took him into
+the heart of the woodland.
+
+Pressing on, he came at length to a cross-riding, and here on boggy
+ground he discovered recent hoof-marks. There were a good many of them,
+and he was puzzled for a time as to the direction they had taken. The
+animal seemed to have wandered to and fro. But he found a continuous
+track at length and followed it.
+
+It led to an old summer-house perched on a slope that overlooked the
+scene of Jeanie's accident in the winter. A cold wind drove down upon him
+as he ascended. The sky was grey with scurrying clouds. The bare downs
+looked indescribably desolate.
+
+Piers hastened along with set teeth. The dread he would not acknowledge
+hung like a numbing weight upon him. Somehow, inexplicably, he knew that
+he was nearing the end of his quest.
+
+The long moan of the wind was the only sound to be heard. It seemed to
+fill the world. No voice of bird or beast came from near or far. He
+seemed to travel through a vast emptiness--the only living thing astir.
+
+He reached the thatched summer-house at last, noted with a curious
+detachment that it was beginning to look dilapidated, wondered if he
+would find it after all deserted, and the next moment was nearly
+overwhelmed by a huge grey body that hurled itself upon him from the
+interior of the little arbour.
+
+It was Caesar the great Dalmatian who greeted him thus effusively, and
+Piers realized in an instant that the dog had some news to impart. He
+pushed him aside with a brief word of welcome and entered the
+ivy-grown place.
+
+"Hullo!" gasped a voice with painful utterance. "Hullo!"
+
+And in a moment he discerned Sir Beverley crouched in a corner,
+grey-faced, his riding-whip still clutched in his hand.
+
+Impetuously he went to him, stooped above him. "What on earth has
+happened, sir? You haven't been thrown?" he queried anxiously.
+
+"Thrown! I!" Sir Beverley's voice cracked derisively. "No! I got off--to
+have a look at the place,--and the brute jibbed--and gave me the slip."
+
+The words came with difficult jerks, his breathing was short and
+laboured. Piers, bending over him, saw a spasm of pain contract the grey
+face that nevertheless looked so indomitably into his.
+
+"He'll go back to stables," growled Sir Beverley. "It's a way colts
+have--when they've had their fling. What have you come back for, eh?
+Thought I couldn't do without you?"
+
+There was a stony glint in his eyes as he asked the question. His thin
+lips curved sardonically.
+
+Piers, still with anxiety lying cold at his heart, had no place left for
+resentment. He made swift and winning answer. "I've been a brute, sir.
+I've come back to ask your forgiveness."
+
+The sardonic lips parted. "Instead of--a hiding--eh?" gasped Sir
+Beverley.
+
+Piers drew back momentarily; but the grey, drawn face compelled his
+pity. He stifled his wrath unborn. "I'll take that first, sir," he
+said steadily.
+
+Sir Beverley's frown deepened, but his breathing was growing less
+oppressed. He suddenly collected his energies and spoke with his usual
+irascibility.
+
+"Oh, don't try any of your damned heroics on me, sir! Apologize like a
+gentleman--if you can! If not--if not--" He broke off panting, his lips
+still forming words that he lacked the strength to utter.
+
+Piers sat down beside him on the crazy bench. "I will do anything you
+wish, sir," he said. "I'm horribly sorry for the way I've treated you.
+I'm ready to make any amends in my power."
+
+"Oh, get away!" growled out Sir Beverley. But with the words his hand
+came gropingly forth and fastened in a hard grip on Piers' arm. "You
+talk like a Sunday-school book," he said. "What the devil did you do
+it for, eh?"
+
+It was roughly spoken, but Piers was quick to recognize the spirit behind
+the words. He clapped his own hand upon his grandfather's, and was
+shocked afresh at its icy coldness.
+
+"I say, do let's go" he said. "We can't talk here. It's downright madness
+to sit in this draughty hole. Come along, sir!" He thrust a vigorous arm
+about the old man and hoisted him to his feet.
+
+"Oh, you're mighty strong!" gasped Sir Beverley. "Strong enough--to kick
+over--the traces, eh?"
+
+"Never again, sir," said Piers with decision.
+
+Whereat Sir Beverley looked at him searchingly, and gibed no more.
+
+They went out together on to the open wind-swept hillside, Piers still
+strongly supporting him, for he stumbled painfully. It was a difficult
+progress for them both, and haste was altogether out of the question.
+
+Sir Beverley revived somewhat as they went, but more than once he had to
+pause to get his breath. His weakness was a revelation to Piers though he
+sought to reassure himself with the reflection that it was the natural
+outcome of his night's vigil; and moment by moment his compunction grew.
+
+They were no more than a mile from the Abbey, but it took them the
+greater part of two hours to accomplish the distance, and at the end
+of it Sir Beverley was hanging upon Piers in a state that bordered
+upon collapse.
+
+His animal had just returned riderless, and considerable consternation
+prevailed. Victor, who was on the watch, rushed to meet them with
+characteristic nimbleness, and he and Piers between them carried Sir
+Beverley in, and laid him down before the great hall fire.
+
+But though so exhausted as to be scarcely conscious, he still clung fast
+to Piers, not suffering him to stir from side; and there Piers remained,
+chafing the cold hands administering brandy, while Victor, invaluable in
+an emergency, procured pillows, blankets, hot-water bottles, everything
+that his fertile brain could suggest to restore the failing strength.
+
+Again, though slowly, Sir Beverley rallied, recovered his faculties, came
+back to full understanding. "Had anything to eat?" he rapped out so
+suddenly that Piers, kneeling beside him, jumped with astonishment.
+
+"I, sir? No, I'm not hungry," he said. "You're feeling better, what? Can
+I get you something?"
+
+"Oh, don't be a damn' fool!" said Sir Beverley. "Tell 'em to fetch
+some lunch!"
+
+It was the turning-point. From that moment he began to recover in a
+fashion that amazed Piers, cast aside blankets and pillows, sternly
+forbade Piers to summon the doctor, and sat up before the fire with a
+grim refusal to be coddled any longer.
+
+They lunched together in the warmth of the blazing logs, and Sir Beverley
+became so normal in his attitude that Piers began at last to feel
+reassured.
+
+He did not broach the matter that lay between them, knowing well that his
+grandfather's temperament was not such as to leave it long in abeyance;
+and they smoked together in peace after the meal as though the strife of
+the previous evening had never been.
+
+But the memory of it overhung them both, and finally at the end of a
+lengthy silence Sir Beverley turned his stone-grey eyes upon his grandson
+and spoke.
+
+"Well? What have you to say for yourself?"
+
+Piers came out of a reverie and looked up with a faint rueful smile.
+"Nothing, sir," he said.
+
+"Nothing? What do you mean by that?" Sir Beverley's voice was sharp. "You
+go away like a raving lunatic, and stay away all night, and then come
+back with nothing to say. What have you been up to? Tell me that!"
+
+Piers leaned slowly forward, took up the poker and gently pushed it
+into the fire. "She won't have me," he said, with his eyes upon the
+leaping flames.
+
+"What?" exclaimed Sir Beverley. "You've been after that hussy again?"
+
+Piers' brows drew together in a thick, ominous line; but he merely nodded
+and said, "Yes."
+
+"The devil you have!" ejaculated Sir Beverley. "And she refused you?"
+
+"She did." Again very softly Piers poked at the blazing logs, his eyes
+fixed and intent. "It served me right--in a way," he said, speaking
+meditatively, almost as if to himself. "I was a hound--to ask her.
+But--somehow--I was driven. However," he drove the poker in a little
+further, "it's all the same now as she's refused me. That's why," he
+turned his eyes suddenly upon Sir Beverley, "there's nothing to be said."
+
+There was no defiance in his look, but it held something of a baffling
+quality. It was almost as if in some fashion he were conscious of relief.
+
+Sir Beverley stared at him, angry and incredulous. "Refused you! What the
+devil for? Wanted my consent, I suppose? Thought I held the
+purse-strings, eh?"
+
+"Oh no," said Piers, again faintly smiling, "she didn't care a damn about
+that. She knows I am not dependent upon you. But--she has no use for me,
+that's all."
+
+"No use for you!" Sir Beverley's voice rose. "What the--what the devil
+does she want then, I should like to know?"
+
+"She doesn't want anyone," said Piers. "At least she thinks she doesn't.
+You see, she's been married before."
+
+There was a species of irony in his voice that yet was without
+bitterness. He turned back to his aimless stirring of the fire, and there
+fell a silence between them.
+
+But Sir Beverley's eyes were fixed upon his grandson's face in a close,
+unsparing scrutiny. "So you thought you might as well come back," he
+said at last.
+
+"She made me," said Piers, without looking round.
+
+"Made you!"
+
+Again Piers nodded. "I was to tell you from her that she quite
+understands your attitude; but that you needn't be anxious, as she has no
+intention of marrying again."
+
+"Confound her impudence!" ejaculated Sir Beverley.
+
+"Oh no!" Piers' voice sounded too tired to be indignant. "I don't think
+you can accuse her of that. There has never been any flirtation between
+us. It wasn't her fault. I--made a fool of myself. It just happened in
+the ordinary course of things."
+
+He ceased to speak, laid down the poker without sound, and sat with
+clasped hands, staring blindly before him.
+
+Again there fell a silence. The clock in the corner ticked on with
+melancholy regularity, the logs hissed and spluttered viciously; but
+the two men sat in utter stillness, both bowed as if beneath a
+pressing burden.
+
+One of them moved at last, stretched out a bony, trembling hand, laid it
+on the other's shoulder.
+
+"Piers boy," Sir Beverley said, with slow articulation, "believe me,
+there's not a woman on this earth worth grizzling about. They're liars
+and impostors, every one."
+
+Piers started a little, then with a very boyish movement, he laid his
+cheek against the old bent fingers. "My dear sir," he said, "but you're a
+woman-hater!"
+
+"I know," said Sir Beverley, still in that heavy, fateful fashion. "And I
+have reason. I tell you, boy,--and I know,--you would be better off in
+your coffin than linked to a woman you seriously cared for. It's hell on
+earth--hell on earth!"
+
+"Or paradise," muttered Piers.
+
+"A fool's paradise, boy; a paradise that turns to dust and ashes." Sir
+Beverley's voice quivered suddenly. He withdrew his hand to fumble in an
+inner pocket. In a moment he stretched it forth again with a key lying
+on the palm.
+
+"Take that!" he said. "Open that bureau thing behind you! Look in the
+left-hand drawer! There's something there for you to see."
+
+Piers obeyed him. There was that in Sir Beverley's manner that silenced
+all questioning. He pulled out the drawer and looked in. It contained one
+thing only--a revolver.
+
+Sir Beverley went on speaking, calmly, dispassionately, wholly
+impersonally. "It's loaded--has been loaded for fifty years. But I never
+used it. And that not because my own particular hell wasn't hot enough,
+but just because I wouldn't have it said that I'd ever loved any
+she-devil enough to let her be my ruin. There were times enough when I
+nearly did it. I've sat all night with the thing in my hand. But I hung
+on for that reason, till at last the fire burnt out, and I didn't care.
+Every woman is the same to me now. I know now--and you've got to know it
+too--that woman is only fit to be the servant, not the mistress, of
+man,--and a damn treacherous servant at that. She was made for man's
+use, and if he is fool enough to let her get the upper hand, then Heaven
+help him, for he certainly won't be in a position to help himself!"
+
+He stopped abruptly, and in the silence Piers shut and relocked
+the drawer. He dropped the key into his own pocket, and came back
+to the fire.
+
+Sir Beverley looked up at him with something of an effort. "Boy," he
+said, "you've got to marry some day, I know. You've got to have
+children. But--you're young, you know. There's plenty of time before
+you. You might wait a bit--just a bit--till I'm out of the way. I won't
+keep you long; and I won't beat you often either--if you'll condescend
+to stay with me."
+
+He smiled with the words, his own grim ironical smile; but the pathos of
+it cut straight to Piers' heart. He went down on his knees beside the old
+man and thrust his arm about the shrunken shoulders.
+
+"I'll never leave you again, sir," he vowed earnestly. "I've been a
+heartless brute, and I'm most infernally sorry. As to marrying,
+well--there's no more question of that for me. I couldn't marry Ina Rose.
+You understand that?"
+
+"Never liked the chit," growled Sir Beverley. "Only thought she'd answer
+your purpose better than some. For you've got to get an heir, boy;
+remember that! You're the only Evesham left."
+
+"Oh, damn!" said Piers very wearily. "What does it matter?"
+
+Sir Beverley looked at him from under his thick brows piercingly but
+without condemnation. "It's up to you, Piers," he said.
+
+"Is it?" said Piers, with a groan. "Well, let's leave it at that for the
+present! Sure you've forgiven me?"
+
+Sir Beverley's grim face relaxed again. He put his arm round Piers and
+held him hard for a moment.
+
+Then: "Oh, drat it, Piers!" he said testily. "Get away, do! And behave
+yourself for the future!"
+
+Whereat Piers laughed, a short, unsteady laugh, and went back to
+his chair.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE DECISION
+
+
+"The matter is settled," said the Reverend Stephen Lorimer, in the tones
+of icy decision with which his wife was but too tragically familiar. "I
+engaged Mrs. Denys to be a help to you, not exclusively to Jeanie. The
+child is quite well enough to return home, and I do not feel myself
+justified in incurring any further expense now that her health is quite
+sufficiently restored."
+
+"But the children were all counting on going to Stanbury Cliffs for the
+Easter holidays," protested Mrs. Lorimer almost tearfully. "We cannot
+disappoint them, Stephen!" Mr. Lorimer's lips closed very firmly for a
+few seconds. Then, "The change home will be quite sufficient for them,"
+he said. "I have given the matter my full consideration, my dear
+Adelaide, and no argument of yours will now move me. Mrs. Denys and
+Jeanie have been away for a month, and they must now return. It is your
+turn for a change, and as soon as Eastertide is over I intend to take you
+away with me for ten days or so and leave Mrs. Denys in charge of--the
+bear-garden, as I fear it but too truly resembles. You are quite unfit
+for the noise and racket of the holidays. And I myself have been feeling
+lately the need of a little--shall I call it recreation?" Mr. Lorimer
+smiled self-indulgently over the term. He liked to play with words. "I
+presume you have no vital objection to accompanying me?"
+
+"Oh, of course not. I should like it above all things," Mrs. Lorimer
+hastened to assure him, "if it were not for Jeanie. I don't like the
+thought of bringing her home just when her visit is beginning to do her
+so much good."
+
+"She cannot remain away for ever," said Mr. Lorimer. "Moreover, her
+delicacy must have been considerably exaggerated, or such a sudden
+improvement could scarcely have taken place. At all events, so it appears
+to me. She must therefore return home and spend the holidays in wholesome
+amusements with the other children; and when they are over, I really must
+turn my serious attention to her education which has been so sadly
+neglected since Christmas. Mrs. Denys is doubtless a very excellent woman
+in her way, but she is not, I fear, one to whom I could safely entrust
+the intellectual development of a child of Jeanie's age." He paused,
+looking up with complacent enquiry at his wife's troubled face. "And now
+what scruples are stirring in the mind of my spouse?" he asked, with
+playful affection.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer did not smile in answer. Her worried little face only
+drew into more anxious lines. "Stephen," she said, "I do wish you
+would consult Dr. Tudor before you quite decide to have Jeanie home
+at present."
+
+The Vicar's mouth turned down, and he looked for a moment so extremely
+unpleasant that Mrs. Lorimer quailed. Then, "My dear," he said
+deliberately, "when I decide upon a specific course of action, I carry it
+through invariably. If I were not convinced that what I am about to do
+were right, I should not do it. Pray let me hear no more upon the
+subject! And remember, Adelaide, it is my express command that you do not
+approach Dr. Tudor in this matter. He is a most interfering person, and
+would welcome any excuse to obtain a footing in this house again. But now
+that I have at length succeeded in shaking him off, I intend to keep him
+at a distance for the future. And he is not to be called in--understand
+this very clearly, if you please--except in a case of extreme urgency.
+This is a distinct order, Adelaide, and I shall be severely displeased if
+you fail to observe it. And now," he resumed his lighter manner again as
+he rose from his chair, "I must hie me to the parish room where my good
+Miss Whalley is awaiting me."
+
+He stretched forth a firm, kind hand and patted his wife's shoulder.
+
+"We must see what we can do to bring a little colour into those pale
+cheeks," he said. "A fortnight in the Cornish Riviera perhaps. Or we
+might take a peep at Shakespeare's country. But we shall see, we
+shall see! I will write to Mrs. Denys and acquaint her with my
+decision this evening."
+
+He was gone, leaving Mrs. Lorimer to pace up and down his study in futile
+distress of mind. Only that morning a letter from Avery had reached her,
+telling her of Jeanie's continued progress, and urging her to come and
+take her place for a little while. It was such a change as her tired soul
+craved, but she had not dared to tell her husband so. And now, it seemed,
+Jeanie's good time also was to be terminated.
+
+There was no doubt about it. Rodding did not suit the child. She was
+never well at home. The Vicarage was shut in by trees, a damp, unhealthy
+place. And Dr. Tudor had told her in plain terms that Jeanie lacked the
+strength to make any headway there. She was like a wilting plant in that
+atmosphere. She could not thrive in it. Dry warmth was what she needed,
+and it had made all the difference to her. Avery's letter had been full
+of hope. She referred to Dr. Tudor's simile of the building of a
+sea-wall. "We are strengthening it every day," she wrote. "In a few more
+weeks it ought to be proof against any ordinary tide."
+
+A few more weeks! Mrs. Lorimer wrung her hands. Stephen did not know,
+did not realize; and she was powerless to convince him. Avery would not
+convince him either. He tolerated only Avery because she was so useful.
+
+She knew exactly the sort of letter he would write, desiring their
+return; and Avery, for all her quiet strength, would have to submit. Oh,
+it was cruel--cruel!
+
+The tears were coursing down her cheeks when the door opened unexpectedly
+and Olive entered. She paused at sight of her mother, looking at her with
+just the Vicar's air of chill enquiry.
+
+"Is anything the matter?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer turned hastily to the window and began to dry her eyes.
+
+Olive went to a bookshelf and stood before it. After a moment she took
+out a book and deliberately turned the leaves. Her attitude was plainly
+repressive.
+
+Finally she returned the book to the shelf and turned. "Why are you
+crying, Mother?"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer leaned her head against the window-frame with a heavy sigh.
+"I am very miserable, Olive," she said, a catch in her voice.
+
+"No one need be that," observed Olive. "Father says that misery is a sign
+of mental weakness."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer was silent.
+
+"Don't you think you had better leave off crying and find something to
+do?" suggested her daughter in her cool, young voice.
+
+Still Mrs. Lorimer neither moved nor spoke.
+
+Olive came a step nearer. There was obvious distaste on her face. "I
+wish you would try to be a little brighter--for Father's sake," she
+said. "I don't think you treat him very kindly."
+
+It was evident that she spoke from a sense of duty. Mrs. Lorimer
+straightened herself with another weary sigh.
+
+"Run along, my dear!" she said. "I am sure you are busy."
+
+Olive turned, half-vexed and half-relieved, and walked to the door. Her
+mother watched her wistfully. It was in her mind to call her back, fold
+her in her arms, and appeal for sympathy. But the severity of the child's
+pose was too suggestive of the Vicar's unbending attitude towards
+feminine weakness, and she restrained the impulse, knowing that she would
+appeal in vain. There was infinitely more comfort to be found in the
+society of Baby Phil, and, smiling wanly at the thought, she went up to
+the nursery in search of it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+THE LAST DEBT
+
+
+There was no combating the Vicar's decision. Avery realized that fact
+from the outset even before Mrs. Lorimer's agitated note upon the subject
+reached her. The fiat had gone forth, and submission was the only course.
+
+Jeanie received the news without a murmur. "I don't mind really," she
+said. "It's very nice here, but then it's nice at home too when you are
+there. And then there is Piers too."
+
+Yes, there was Piers,--another consideration that filled Avery with
+uneasiness. No word from Piers had reached her since that early morning
+on the shore, but his silence did not reassure her. She had half expected
+a boyish letter of apology, some friendly reassurance, some word at least
+of his return to Rodding Abbey. But she had heard nothing. She did not so
+much as know if he had returned or not.
+
+Neither had she heard from her friend Edmund Crowther. With a sense of
+keen disappointment she wrote to his home in the North to tell him of the
+change in her plans. She could not ask him to the Vicarage, and it seemed
+that she might not meet him after all.
+
+She also sent a hurried note to Lennox Tudor, but they had only three
+days in which to terminate their visit, and she received no reply. Later,
+she heard that Tudor had been away for those days and did not open the
+note until the actual day of their return.
+
+The other children were expected home from school during the week before
+Easter, and Mr. Lorimer desired that Avery should be at the Vicarage to
+prepare for them. So, early in the week, they returned.
+
+It seemed that Spring had come at last. The hedges were all bursting into
+tenderest green, and all the world looked young.
+
+"The primroses will be out in the Park woods," said Jeanie. "We will go
+and gather heaps and heaps."
+
+"Are you allowed to go wherever you like there?" asked Avery, thinking
+of the game.
+
+"Oh no," said Jeanie thoughtfully. "But we always do. Mr. Marshall chases
+us sometimes, but we always get away."
+
+She smiled at the thought, and Avery frankly rejoiced to see her
+enthusiasm for the wicked game of trespassing in the Squire's preserves.
+She did not know that the amusement had been strictly prohibited by the
+Vicar, and it did not occur to Jeanie to tell her. None of the children
+had ever paid any attention to the prohibition. There were some rules
+that no one could keep.
+
+The return of the rest of the family kept the days that succeeded their
+return extremely lively. Jeanie was in higher spirits than Avery had
+ever seen her. She seemed more childish, more eager for fun, as though
+some of the zest of life had got into her veins at last. Her mother
+ascribed the change to Avery's influence, and was pathetic in her
+gratitude, though Avery disclaimed all credit declaring that the sea-air
+had wrought the wonder.
+
+When Lennox Tudor saw her, he looked at Avery with an odd smile behind
+his glasses. "You've built the wall," he said.
+
+They had met by the churchyard gate, and Jeanie and Pat were having a
+hopping race down the hill. Avery looked after them with a touch of
+wistfulness. "But I wish she could have been away longer."
+
+Tudor frowned. "Yes. Why on earth not? The Reverend Stephen again, I
+suppose. I wish I had had your letter sooner, though as a matter of fact
+I'm not in favour just now, and my interference would probably weigh in
+the wrong balance. Keep the child out as much as possible! It's the only
+way. She has made good progress. There is no reason at present why she
+should go back again."
+
+No, there was no reason; yet Avery's heart misgave her. She wished she
+might have had longer for the building of that wall. Good Friday was more
+or less a day of penance in the Vicar's family. It began with lengthy
+prayers in the dining-room, so lengthy that Avery feared that Mrs.
+Lorimer would faint ere they came to an end. Then after a rigorously
+silent breakfast the children were assembled in the study to be
+questioned upon the Church Catechism--a species of discipline peculiarly
+abhorrent to them all by reason of the Vicar's sarcastic comments upon
+their ignorance.
+
+At the end of this dreary exercise they were dismissed to prepare for
+church where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright
+revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers--as many prayers as the Vicar
+could get in, rendered in an emotionless monotone with small regard for
+sense and none whatever for feeling. The whole thing was drab and
+unattractive to the utmost limit, and Avery rose at length from her
+knees with a feeling of having been deliberately cheated of a thing she
+valued. She left the church in an unwonted spirit of exasperation, which
+lasted throughout the midday meal, which was as oppressively silent as
+breakfast had been.
+
+The open relief with which the children trooped away to the schoolroom
+found a warm echo in her heart. She even almost smiled in sympathy when
+Julian breathed a deep thanksgiving that that show was over for one
+more year.
+
+Neither Piers nor his grandfather had been in the church, and their
+absence did not surprise her. She did not feel that she herself could
+ever face such a service again. The memory of Piers at the organ came to
+her as she dressed to accompany the children upon their primrosing
+expedition, and a sudden passionate longing followed it to hear that
+music again. She was feeling starved in her soul that day.
+
+But when they reached the green solitudes of the park woodlands the
+bitterness began to pass away. It was all so beautiful; the mossy riding
+up which they turned was so springy underfoot, and the singing of a
+thousand birds made endless music whichever way they wandered.
+
+"It's better than church, isn't it?" said Jeanie softly, pressing close
+to her. And Avery smiled in answer. It was balm to the spirit.
+
+The Squire's preserves were enclosed in wire netting, and over this they
+climbed into their primrose paradise. Several partridges rose from the
+children's feet, and whirred noisily away, to the huge delight of the
+boys but to Avery's considerable dismay. However, Marshall was evidently
+not within earshot, and they settled down to the serious business of
+filling their baskets for the church decorations without interference.
+
+The primroses grew thickly in a wonderful carpet that spread in all
+directions, sloping down to a glade where gurgled a brown stream. Down
+this glade Avery directed her party, keeping a somewhat anxious eye upon
+Gracie and the three boys who were in the wildest spirits after the
+severe strain of the morning. She and Jeanie picked rapidly and
+methodically. Olive had decided not to accompany the expedition. She did
+not care for primrosing, she told Avery, and her father had promised to
+read the Testament in Greek with her later in the afternoon, an
+intellectual exercise which she plainly regarded as extremely
+meritorious.
+
+Her absence troubled no one; in fact Julian, having over-heard her
+excuse, remarked rudely that if she was going to put on side, they were
+better off without her; and Avery secretly agreed with him.
+
+So in cheery accord they went their careless way through the preserves,
+scaring the birds and filling their baskets with great industry. They had
+reached the end of the glade and were contemplating fording the brook
+when like a bolt from the blue discovery came upon them. A sound, like
+the blare of an angry bull, assailed them--a furious inarticulate sound
+that speedily resolved into words.
+
+"What the devil are you mischievous brats doing there?"
+
+The whole party jumped violently at the suddenness of the attack. Avery's
+heart gave a most unpleasant jerk. She knew that voice.
+
+Swiftly she turned in the direction whence it came, and saw again the
+huge white horse of the trampling hoofs that had once before been urged
+against her.
+
+He was stamping and fretting on the other side of the stream, the banks
+of which were so steep as almost to form a chasm, and from his back the
+terrible old Squire hurled the vials of his wrath.
+
+Ronald drew near to Avery, while Jeanie slipped a nervous hand into hers.
+Julian, however, turned a defiant face. "It's all right. He can't get at
+us," he said audibly.
+
+At which remark Gracie laughed a little hysterically, and Pat made
+a grimace.
+
+Perhaps it was this last that chiefly infuriated the Squire, for he
+literally bellowed with rage, snatched his animal back with a merciless
+hand, and then with whip and spur set him full at the stream.
+
+It was a dangerous leap, for the ground on both banks was yielding and
+slippery. Avery stood transfixed to watch the result.
+
+The horse made a great effort to obey his master's behests. It almost
+seemed as if he were furious too, Avery thought, as he pounded forward to
+clear the obstacle. His leap was superb, clearing the stream by a good
+six feet, but as he landed among the primroses disaster overtook him. It
+must have been a rabbit-hole, Avery reflected later; for he blundered as
+he touched the ground, plunged forward, and fell headlong.
+
+There followed a few moments of sickening confusion during which the
+horrified spectators had time to realize that Sir Beverley was pinned
+under the kicking animal; then with a savage effort the great brute
+rolled over and struggled to his feet.
+
+With a promptitude that spoke well for his nerve, Julian sprang forward
+and caught the dangling bridle. The creature tried to jib back upon his
+prostrate master, but he dragged him forward and held him fast.
+
+Old Sir Beverley lay prone on the ground, in an awful stillness, with his
+white face turned to the sky. His eyes were fast shut, his arms flung
+wide, one hand still grasping the whip which he had wielded so fiercely a
+few seconds before.
+
+"Is he dead?" whispered Jeanie, clinging close to Avery.
+
+Avery gently released herself and moved forward. "No, dear, no! He--he is
+only stunned."
+
+She knelt beside Sir Beverley, overcoming a horrible sensation of
+sickness as she did so. The whole catastrophe had been of so sudden and
+so violent a nature that she felt almost stunned herself.
+
+She slipped an arm under the old man's head, and it hung upon her like a
+leaden weight.
+
+"Oh, Avery, how dreadful!" exclaimed Gracie, aghast.
+
+"Take my handkerchief!" said Avery quickly. "Run down and soak it in the
+stream! Mind how you go! It's very steep."
+
+Gracie went like the wind.
+
+Avery began with fingers that shook in spite of her utmost resolution,
+to try to loosen Sir Beverley's collar.
+
+"Let me!" said Ronald, gently.
+
+She glanced up gratefully and relinquished the task to him. Ronald was
+neat in all his ways.
+
+The return of Gracie with the wet handkerchief gave her something to do,
+and she tenderly moistened the stark, white face. But the children's
+fears were crowding thick in her own heart. That awful inertness looked
+so terribly like death.
+
+And then suddenly the grim lips parted and a quivering sigh passed
+through them.
+
+The next moment abruptly the grey eyes opened and gazed full at Avery
+with a wide, glassy stare.
+
+"What the--what the--" stammered Sir Beverley, and broke off with a
+hard gasp.
+
+Avery sought to raise him higher, but his weight was too much for her
+even with Ronald assisting.
+
+"Find my--flask!" jerked out Sir Beverley, with panting breath.
+
+Ronald began to search in his pockets and finally drew it forth. He
+opened it and gave it to Avery who held it to the twitching lips.
+
+Sir Beverley drank and closed his eyes. "I shall be--better soon," he
+said, in a choked whisper.
+
+Avery waited, supporting him as strongly as she could, listening to the
+short laboured breathing with deep foreboding.
+
+"Couldn't I run down to the Abbey for help?" suggested Julian, who had
+succeeded at length in tying the chafing animal to a tree.
+
+Avery considered. "I don't know. How far is it?"
+
+"Not more than a mile. P'r'aps I should find Piers there. I'm sure I'd
+better go," the boy urged, with his eyes on the deathly face.
+
+And after a moment Avery agreed with him. "Yes, I think perhaps you'd
+better. Gracie and Pat might go for Dr. Tudor meanwhile. I do hope you
+will find Piers. Tell him to bring two men, and something that they can
+carry him on. Jeanie dear, you run home to your mother and tell her how
+it is that we shall be late for tea. You won't startle her, I know."
+
+They fell in with her desires at once. There was not one of them who
+would not have done anything for her. And so they scattered, departing
+upon their several missions, leaving Ronald only to share her vigil by
+the old Squire's side.
+
+For a long time after their departure, there was no change in Sir
+Beverley's state. He lay propped against Avery's arm and Ronald's knee
+breathing quickly, with painful effort, through his parted lips. He kept
+his eyes closed, but they knew that he was conscious by the heavy frown
+that drew his forehead. Once Avery offered him more brandy, but he
+refused it impatiently, and she desisted.
+
+The deathly pallor had, however, begun to give place to a more natural
+hue, and as the minutes passed his breathing gradually grew less
+distressed. Once more his eyes opened, and he stared into Avery's face.
+
+"Help me--to sit up!" he commanded.
+
+They did their best, he struggling with piteously feeble efforts to
+help himself. Finally he managed to drag himself to a leaning position
+on one elbow, though for several seconds thereafter his gasping was
+terrible to hear.
+
+Avery saw his lips move several times before any sound came from them. At
+length, "Send--that boy--away!" he gasped out.
+
+Avery and Ronald looked at each other, and the boy got to his feet with
+an undecided air.
+
+"Do you hear? Go!" rapped out Sir Beverley.
+
+"Shall I, Avery?" whispered Ronald.
+
+She nodded. "Yes, just a little way! I'll call you if I want you."
+
+And half-reluctantly Ronald obeyed.
+
+"Has he gone?" asked Sir Beverley.
+
+"Yes." Avery remained on her knees beside him. He looked as if he might
+collapse at any moment.
+
+For awhile he lay struggling for breath with his face towards the ground;
+then very suddenly his strength seemed to return. He raised his head and
+regarded her piercingly.
+
+"You," he said curtly, "are the young woman who refused to marry my
+grandson."
+
+The words were so totally unexpected that Avery literally gasped with
+astonishment. To be taken to task on this subject was an ordeal for which
+she was wholly unprepared.
+
+"Well?" he said irritably. "That is so, I believe? You did refuse to
+marry him?"
+
+"Yes," Avery admitted, feeling the hot colour flood her face under the
+merciless scrutiny of the stone-grey eyes.
+
+"But--but--"
+
+"Well?" he said again, still more irritably. "But what?"
+
+"Oh, need we discuss it?" she said appealingly. "I would so much
+rather not."
+
+"I desire to discuss it," said Sir Beverley autocratically. "I desire
+to know--what objection you have to my grandson. Many women, let me
+tell you, of far higher social standing than yourself would jump at
+such a chance. But you--you take upon yourself to refuse it. I desire
+to know why."
+
+He spoke with a stubbornness that overbore all bodily weakness. He would
+be a tyrant to his last breath.
+
+But Avery could not bring herself to answer him. She felt as if he were
+trying to force his way into a place which regarded as peculiarly sacred,
+from which in some fashion she owed it to Piers as well as to herself to
+bar him out.
+
+"I am sorry," she said gently after a moment, "but I am afraid that is
+just what I can't tell you."
+
+She saw Sir Beverley's chin thrust out at just the indomitable angle with
+which Piers had made her familiar, and she realized that he had no
+intention of abandoning his point.
+
+"You told him, I suppose?" he demanded gruffly.
+
+A faint sense of amusement arose within her, her anxiety notwithstanding.
+It struck her as ludicrous that she should be browbeaten on this point.
+
+She made answer with more assurance. "I told him that the idea was
+unsuitable, out of the question, that he ought to marry a girl of his own
+age and station--not a middle-aged widow like me."
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed Sir Beverley impatiently. "You belong to the same
+generation, don't you? What more do you want?"
+
+If he had slapped her face, Avery would scarcely have felt more amazed,
+She gazed at him in silence, wondering if she could have heard aright.
+
+Sir Beverley frowned upon her fiercely, the iron will of him scorning and
+surmounting his physical weakness.
+
+"You've got nothing against the boy, I suppose?" he pursued, with the
+evident determination to get at the truth despite all opposition. "He has
+never given you any cause for complaint? He's behaved himself like a
+gentleman, hey?"
+
+"Oh, of course, of course!" Avery said in distress. "It's not that!"
+
+Sir Beverley frowned still more heavily. "Then--what the devil is it?"
+he demanded. "Don't you like him well enough? Aren't you--in love with
+him?" His lips curled ironically over the words; they sounded
+inexpressibly bitter.
+
+Avery's eyes fell before his pitiless stare. She began with fingers that
+trembled to pluck the primroses that grew in a large tuft close to her,
+saying no word.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Beverley, with growing impatience.
+
+She kept her eyes lowered, for she felt she could not meet his look as
+she made reluctant answer. "No, it is not either. In fact, if I were a
+girl--I had not been married before--I think I should say Yes.
+But--but--" she paused, searching for words, striving to restrain a
+rising agitation, "as it is, I don't think it would be quite fair to him.
+I don't know if I could make him happy. I am not young enough, fresh
+enough, gay enough. I can't offer him a girl's first love, and that is
+what he ought to have. I so want him to have the best. I so want him to
+be happy."
+
+The words were out with a rush, almost before she was aware of uttering
+them, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears, tears that caught her off
+her guard, so that she had neither time nor strength to check them. She
+turned quickly from him, fighting for self-control.
+
+Sir Beverley uttered a grunt that might have denoted either surprise or
+disgust, and there followed a silence that she found peculiarly
+difficult to bear.
+
+"So," he said at last, in a tone that was strictly devoid of feeling,
+"you care for him too much to marry him? Is that it?"
+
+It sounded preposterous, but she was still too near tears for any sense
+of humour to penetrate her distress. She felt as if he had remorselessly
+wrested from her and dragged to light a treasure upon which she herself
+had scarcely dared to look. She continued feverishly to pluck the pale
+flowers that grew all about them, her eyes fixed upon her task.
+
+With a growling effort, Sir Beverley raised himself, thrust forward a
+quivering hand and gripped hers.
+
+Startled, she turned towards him, meeting not hostility but a certain
+grim kindliness in the hard old eyes.
+
+"Will you honour me with your attention for a moment?" he asked, with
+ironical courtesy.
+
+"I am attending," she answered meekly.
+
+"Then," he said, dropping all pretence at courtesy without further
+ceremony, "permit me to say that if you don't marry my grandson, you'll
+be a bigger fool than I take you for. And in my opinion, a sober-minded
+woman like you who will see to his comfort and be faithful to him is more
+likely to make him happy than any of your headlong, flighty girls."
+
+He stopped; but he did not relinquish his hold upon her. There was
+to Avery something oddly pathetic in the close grasp of those
+unsteady fingers. It was as if they made an appeal which he would
+have scorned to utter.
+
+"You really wish me to marry him?" she said.
+
+He snarled at her like a surly dog. "Wish it? I! Good Heavens above, if
+I had my way I'd never let him marry at all! But unfortunately
+circumstances demand it; and the boy himself--the boy himself, well--"
+his voice softened imperceptibly, rasped on a note of tenderness, "he
+wants looking after; he's young, you know. He'll be all alone very
+soon, and--it isn't considered good for a man to live alone--not a young
+man anyway."
+
+He broke off, still looking hard at Avery from under his drawn white
+brows as if daring her to dispute the matter.
+
+But she said nothing, and after a moment he resumed more equably: "That's
+all I have to say on the subject. I wish you to understand that for the
+boy's sake--and for other considerations--I have withdrawn my opposition.
+You can marry him--as soon as you like."
+
+He sank down again on his elbow, and she saw a look of exhaustion on his
+face. His head drooped forward on his chest, and, watching him, she
+realized that he was an old, old man and very tired of life.
+
+Suddenly he jerked his head up again and met her pitying eyes.
+
+"I'm done, yes," he said grimly, as if in response to her unspoken
+thought. "But I've paid my debts--all of 'em, including this last." His
+voice began to fail, but he forced it on, speaking spasmodically, with
+increasing difficulty. "You sent my boy back to me--the other
+day--against his will. Now I--make you a present of him--in return.
+There's good stuff in the lad,--nothing shabby about him. If you care for
+him at all--you ought to be able to hold him--make him happy.
+Anyway--anyway--you might try!"
+
+The appeal in the last words, whispered though they were, was
+undisguised; and swiftly, impulsively, almost before she knew what she
+was doing, Avery responded to it.
+
+"Oh, I will try!" she said very earnestly. "I will indeed!"
+
+He looked at her fixedly for a moment with eyes of deep searching that
+she never forgot, and then his head dropped forward heavily.
+
+"You--have--said it!" he said, and sank unconscious upon the ground.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+
+"My good Mrs. Denys, it is quite fruitless for you to argue the matter.
+Nothing you can say can alter the fact that you took the children
+trespassing in the Rodding Park preserves against my most stringent
+commands, and this deplorable accident to the Squire is the direct
+outcome of the most flagrant insubordination. I have borne a good deal
+from you, but this I cannot overlook. You will therefore take a month's
+notice from to-day, and as it is quite impossible for me to reconsider
+my decision in this respect it would be wasted effort on your part to
+lodge any appeal against it. As for the children, I shall deal with them
+in my own way."
+
+The Vicar's thin lips closed upon the words with the severity of an
+irrevocable resolution. Avery heard him with a sense of wild rebellion at
+her heart to which she knew she must not give rein. She stood before him,
+a defenceless culprit brought up for punishment.
+
+It was difficult to be dignified under such circumstances, but she
+did her best.
+
+"I am extremely sorry that I took the children into the preserves," she
+said. "But I accept the full responsibility for having done so. They were
+not greatly to blame in the matter."
+
+"Upon that point," observed Mr. Lorimer, "I am the best judge. The
+children will be punished as severely as I deem necessary. Meantime, you
+quite understand, do you not, that your duties here must terminate a
+month from now? I am only sorry that I allowed myself to be persuaded to
+reconsider my decision on the last occasion. For more than one reason I
+think it is to be regretted. However,--" he completed the sentence with a
+heavy sigh and said no more.
+
+It was evident that he desired to close the interview, yet Avery
+lingered. She could not go with the children's fate still in the balance.
+
+He looked at her interrogatively with raised brows.
+
+"You will not surely punish the children very severely?" she said.
+
+He waved a hand of cool dismissal. "I shall do whatever seems to me right
+and advisable," he said.
+
+It came to Avery that interference on this subject would do more harm
+than good, and she turned to go. At the door his voice arrested her.
+"This day month then, Mrs. Denys!"
+
+She bent her head in silent acquiescence, and went out.
+
+In the passage Gracie awaited her and wound eager arms about her.
+
+"Was he very horrid to you, Avery darling? What did he say?"
+
+Avery went with her to the schoolroom where the other offenders were
+assembled. It seemed to her almost cruel to attempt to suppress the
+truth, but their reception of it went to her heart. Jeanie--the placid,
+sweet-tempered Jeanie--wept tears of such anguished distress that she
+feared she would make herself ill. Gracie was too angry to weep. She
+wanted to go straight to the study and beard the lion in his den, and
+only Avery's most strenuous opposition restrained her. And into the midst
+of their tribulation came Mrs. Lorimer to mingle her tears with theirs.
+
+"What I shall do without you, Avery, I can't think," was the burden of
+her lament.
+
+Avery couldn't think either, for she knew better even than Mrs. Lorimer
+herself how much the latter had come to lean upon her.
+
+She had to turn her energies to comforting her disconsolate companions,
+but this task was still unaccomplished when the door opened and the Vicar
+stalked in upon them.
+
+He observed his wife's presence with cold displeasure, and at once
+proceeded to dismiss her.
+
+"I desire your presence in the study for a few moments, Adelaide. Perhaps
+you will be kind enough to precede me thither."
+
+He held the door open for her with elaborate ceremony, and Mrs. Lorimer
+had no choice but to obey. She departed with a scared effort to check her
+tears under the stern disapproval of his look.
+
+He closed the door upon her and advanced to the table, gazing round upon
+them with judicial severity.
+
+"I am here," he announced, "to pass sentence."
+
+Jeanie, crying softly in her corner, made desperate attempts to
+control herself under the awful look that was at this point
+concentrated upon her.
+
+After a pause the Vicar proceeded, with a spiteful glance at Avery. "It
+is my intention to impose a holiday-task of sufficient magnitude to keep
+you all out of mischief during the rest of the holidays. You will
+therefore commit to memory various different portions of Milton's
+_Paradise Lost_ which I shall select, and which must be repeated to me in
+their entirety without mistake on my return from my own hard-earned
+holiday. And let me give you all fair warning," he raised his voice and
+looked round again, regarding poor Jeanie with marked austerity, "that if
+any one of you is not word-perfect in his or her task by the day of my
+return--boy or girl I care not, the offence is the same--he or she will
+receive a sound caning and the task will be returned."
+
+Thus he delivered himself, and turned to go; but paused at the door to
+add, "Also, Mrs. Denys, will you be good enough to remember that it is
+against my express command that either you or any of the children should
+enter any part of Rodding Park during my absence. I desire that to be
+clearly understood."
+
+"It is understood," said Avery in a low voice.
+
+"That is well," said the Reverend Stephen, and walked majestically
+from the room.
+
+A few seconds of awed silence followed his departure; then to Avery's
+horror Gracie snatched off one of her shoes and flung it violently at the
+door that he had closed behind him. Luckily for Gracie, her father was at
+the foot of the stairs before this episode took place and beyond earshot
+also of the furious storm of tears that followed it, with which even
+Avery found it difficult to cope.
+
+It had been a tragic day throughout, and she was thankful when at length
+it drew to a close.
+
+But when night came at last, and she lay down in the darkness, she found
+herself much too full of thought for sleep. Till then, she had not had
+time to review the day's happenings, but they crowded upon her as she
+lay, driving away all possibility of repose.
+
+What was she going to do? Over and over again she asked herself the
+question, bringing herself as it were each time to contemplate afresh the
+obstacle that had arisen in her path. Had she really promised to marry
+Piers? The Squire evidently thought she had. The memory of those last
+words of his came back to her again and again. He had been very much in
+earnest, very anxious to provide for his boy's future, desperately afraid
+of leaving him alone. How would he view his impetuous action, she
+wondered, on the morrow? Had he not even now possibly begun to repent?
+Would he really desire her to take him literally?
+
+And Piers,--what of Piers? A sudden, warm thrill ran through her. She
+glowed from head to foot. She had not seen Piers since that morning by
+the sea. She had a feeling that he was purposely avoiding her, and yet
+deep in the secret heart of her she knew that what she had rejected over
+and over again was still irrevocably her own. He would come back to her.
+She knew he would come back. And again that strange warmth filled her
+veins. The memory of him just then was like a burst of sunshine after a
+day of storm.
+
+He had not been at home when Julian had taken the news of the Squire's
+accident to the Abbey, and only menservants had come to the rescue. She
+had accompanied them part of the way back, but Tudor had overtaken them
+in the drive, and she and the boys had turned back. Sir Beverley had been
+exhausted and but half-conscious, and he had not uttered another word to
+her. She wished Dr. Tudor had looked in on his way home, and then
+wondered if the Squire's condition were such as to necessitate his
+spending the night at the Abbey. He had once told her that Sir Beverley
+suffered from a weakness of the heart which might develop seriously at
+any time; but though himself fully aware of the fact, the old man had
+never permitted Piers to be told. She had deemed it unfair to Piers, but
+it was no matter for interference. A great longing to know what was
+happening possessed her. Surely--surely Mr. Lorimer would send up in the
+morning to enquire!
+
+Her thoughts took another turn. She had been given definite notice to go.
+In her efforts to console Mrs. Lorimer, and the children, she had
+scarcely herself realized all that it would imply. She began to picture
+the parting, and a quiver of pain went through her. How they had all
+grown about her heart! How would she bear to say good-bye to her little
+delicate Jeanie? And how would the child fare without her? She hardly
+dared to think.
+
+And then again that blinding ray of sunshine burst riotously through her
+clouds. If the impossible happened, if she ever married Piers--for the
+first time she deliberately faced and contemplated the thought--would she
+not be at least within reach if trouble came? A little thrill of spiteful
+humour ran through her at this point. She was quite sure that under such
+circumstances she would not be refused admittance to the Vicar's home. As
+Piers' wife, its doors would always be open to her.
+
+As Piers' wife! She found herself repeating the words, repeating and
+repeating them till their strangeness began to give place to a certain
+familiarity. Was it after all true, as he had once so vehemently
+asserted, that they were meant for each other, belonged to each other,
+that the fate of each was bound in that of the other? What if she were a
+woman grown? What if her years outnumbered his? Had he not waked in her
+such music as her soul had never known before? Had he not opened for her
+the gates of the forbidden land? And was there after all, any actual
+reason that she should refuse to enter? That land where the sun shone
+always and the flowers bloomed without fading! That land where it was
+always spring!
+
+There came in her soul a sudden swift ecstasy that was like the singing
+of many birds in the dawning, thrilling her through and through. She rose
+from her bed as though in answer to a call, and went to her open window.
+
+There before her, silver against the darkness, there shone a single star.
+The throbbing splendour of it seemed to pierce her. She held her breath
+as one waiting for a message.
+
+And, as she stood waiting, through her heart, softly, triumphantly, the
+message came, spoken in the voice she had come to hear through all
+other voices.
+
+"It is the Star of Hope, Avery; yours--and mine."
+
+But even as she watched with all her spirit a-quiver with the wonder of
+it, the vision passed; the star was veiled.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE DARK HOUR
+
+
+Avery was very early at the church on the following morning, and had
+begun the work of decorating even before Miss Whalley appeared on the
+scene. It was a day of showers and fleeting gleams of sunshine, and the
+interior of the little building flashed from gloom to brilliance, and
+from brilliance back to gloom with fitful frequency.
+
+Daffodils and primroses were littered all around Avery, and a certain
+subdued pleasure was hers as she decked the place with the spring
+flowers. She was quite alone, for by the Vicar's inflexible decree all
+the elder children, with the exception of Olive, were confined to the
+schoolroom for the morning with their respective tasks.
+
+The magnitude of these tasks had struck dismay to Avery's heart. She did
+not privately believe that any one of them could ever be accomplished in
+the prescribed time. But the day of reckoning was not yet, and she put it
+resolutely from her mind. It was useless to forestall trouble, and her
+own burden of toil that day demanded all her energies.
+
+The advent of Miss Whalley, thin and acid, put an end to all enjoyment
+thereof. She bestowed a cool greeting upon Avery, and came at once to her
+side to criticize her decoration of the font. Miss Whalley always assumed
+the direction of affairs on these occasions, and she regarded Avery's
+assistance in the place of Mrs. Lorimer's weak efforts in something of
+the light of an intrusion.
+
+Avery stood and listened to her suggestions with grave forbearance. She
+never disputed anything with Miss Whalley, which may have been in part
+the reason for the latter's somewhat suspicious attitude towards her.
+
+They were still standing before the font while Miss Whalley unfolded her
+scheme when there came the sound of feet in the porch, and Lennox Tudor
+put his head in.
+
+His eyes fell at once upon Avery. He hesitated a moment then entered.
+
+She turned eagerly to meet him. "Oh, how is the Squire this morning? Have
+you been up to the Abbey yet?"
+
+"The Squire!" echoed Miss Whalley. "Is he ill? I was not aware of it."
+
+Avery's eyes were fixed on Tudor's face, and all in a moment she realized
+that he had been up all night.
+
+He did not seem to notice Miss Whalley, but spoke to Avery, and to her
+alone. "I have just come back from the Abbey. The Squire died about an
+hour ago."
+
+"The Squire!" said Miss Whalley again, in staccato tones.
+
+Avery said nothing, but she turned suddenly white, so white that Tudor
+was moved to compunction.
+
+"I shouldn't have blurted it out like that. Sit down! The poor old chap
+never rallied really. He had a little talk with Piers half-an-hour or so
+before he went. But it was only the last flicker of the candle. We
+couldn't save him."
+
+He bent down over her. "Don't look like that! It wasn't your fault. It
+was bound to come. I've foreseen it for some little time. I told him it
+was madness to go out riding as he did; but he wouldn't listen to me.
+Avery, I say! Avery!" His voice sank to an undertone.
+
+She forced her stiff lips to smile faintly in answer to the concern it
+held. With an effort she commanded herself.
+
+"What of Piers?" she said.
+
+He stood up again with a sharp gesture, and turned from her to answer
+Miss Whalley's eager questions.
+
+"Surely it is very sudden!" the latter was saying. "How did it happen?
+Will there be an inquest?"
+
+"There will not," said Tudor curtly. "I have been attending the Squire,
+for some time, and I knew that sooner or later this would happen. The
+Vicar is not here?" He turned to Avery. "I promised to look in on him on
+my way back. Shall I find him at the Vicarage?"
+
+He was gone almost before she could answer, and Avery was left on the
+seat by the door, staring before her with a wildly throbbing heart, still
+asking herself with a curious insistence, "What of Piers? What of Piers?"
+
+Miss Whalley surveyed her with marked disapproval. She considered it
+great presumption on Avery's part to be upset by such a matter, and her
+attitude said as much as she walked with a stately air down the church
+and commenced her own self-appointed task of decorating the pulpit.
+
+Avery did not stir for several seconds; and when she did it was to go to
+the open door and stand there looking out into the spring sunshine. She
+felt strangely incapable of grasping what had happened. She could not
+realize that that dominant personality that had striven with her only
+yesterday--only yesterday--had passed utterly away in a few hours. It
+seemed incredible, beyond the bounds of possibility. Again and again Sir
+Beverley's speech and look returned to her. How emphatic he had been,
+how resolutely determined to attain his end! He had discharged his
+obligation, as he had said. He had paid his last debt. And in the
+payment of it he had laid upon her a burden which she had felt compelled
+to accept.
+
+Would it prove too much for her, she wondered? Had she yet again taken a
+false step that could never be retraced? Again the thought of Piers went
+through her, piercing her like a sword. Piers alone! Piers in trouble!
+She wished that Dr. Tudor had answered her question even though she
+regretted having asked it. How would he bear his solitude, she wondered
+with an aching heart; and a sudden great longing arose within her to go
+and comfort him, as she alone possessed the power to comfort. All
+selfish considerations departed with the thought. She realized
+poignantly all that Sir Beverley had visualized when he had told her
+that very soon his boy would be all alone. She knew fully why he had
+pressed upon her the task of helping Piers through his dark hour. He had
+known--as she also knew--how sore would be his need of help. And as
+this came home to her, her strength--that strength which was the patient
+building of all the years of her womanhood--came back to her, and she
+felt renewed and unafraid.
+
+She returned to her work with a steadfastness of purpose that even
+Miss Whalley viewed with distant admiration; working throughout the
+morning while the minute bell tolled overhead, rendering honour to the
+departed Squire.
+
+When she left at length to return to the Vicarage for the midday meal,
+her portion was done.
+
+But it was not till night came again that she found time to write the few
+brief words that she had been revolving in her mind all day long.
+
+"DEAR PIERS,
+
+"I am thinking of you constantly, and longing to help you in your
+trouble. Let me know if there is anything whatever that I can do, and I
+shall be ready at any time.
+
+"With love from Avery."
+
+Her face glowed softly over the writing of the note. She slipped out and
+posted it before she went to bed.
+
+He would get it in the morning, and he would be comforted. For he would
+understand. She was sure that he would understand.
+
+Of herself all through that second wakeful night she did not think at
+all, and so no doubts rose to torment her. She lay in a species of tired
+wonder. She was keeping her promise to the dead man, and in the keeping
+of it there was peace.
+
+The great square Abbey pew at the top of the church was empty
+throughout Easter Sunday. A heavy gloom reigned at the Vicarage. Avery
+and the children were in dire disgrace, and Mrs. Lorimer spent most of
+the day in tears. She could not agree with the Vicar that they were
+directly responsible for the Squire's death. Dr. Tudor had been very
+emphatic in assuring them that what had happened had been the
+inevitable outcome of a disease of long standing. But this assurance
+did not in any way modify the Vicar's attitude, and he decided that the
+five children should spend their time in solitary confinement until
+after the day fixed for the funeral.
+
+This was to be Easter Tuesday, and he himself had arranged to depart the
+day after--an event to which the entire household, with the single
+exception of Olive, looked forward with the greatest eagerness.
+
+No message came from Piers that night, and Avery wondered a little, but
+without uneasiness. He must have so very much to think of and do at such
+a time, she reflected. He would scarcely even have begun to feel the
+dreadful loneliness.
+
+But when the next day passed, and still no answer came, a vague anxiety
+awoke within her. Surely her message had reached him! Surely he must have
+read it! The Piers she knew would have dashed off some species of reply
+at once. How was it he delayed?
+
+The day of the funeral came, and the Easter flowers were all taken away.
+The Vicarage blinds were drawn, the bell tolled again, and Jeanie,
+weighed down with a dreadful sense of wickedness, lay face downwards on
+the schoolroom sofa and wept and wept.
+
+Avery was very anxious about her. The disgrace and punishment of the
+past few days had told upon her. She was sick with trouble and
+depression, and Avery could find no means of comforting her. She had
+meant herself to slip out and to go to the funeral for Piers' sake, but
+she felt she could not leave the child. So she sat with her in the
+darkened room, listening to her broken sobbing, aware that in the
+solitude of her room Gracie was crying too, and longing passionately to
+gather together all five of the luckless offenders and deliver them from
+their land of bondage.
+
+But there was to be no deliverance that day, nor any lightening of the
+burden. The funeral over, the Vicar returned and sent for each child
+separately to the study for prayer and admonition. Jeanie was the last to
+face this ordeal and before it was half over Avery was sent for also to
+find her lying on the study sofa in a dead faint.
+
+Avery's indignation was intense, but she could not give it vent. Even the
+Vicar was a little anxious, and when Avery's efforts succeeded at length
+in restoring her, he reprimanded Jeanie severely and reduced her once
+more to tears of uncontrollable distress.
+
+The long, dreary day came to an end at last, and the thought of a happier
+morrow comforted them all. But Avery, though she slept that night, was
+troubled by a dream that came to her over and over again throughout the
+long hours. She seemed to see Piers, as he had once described himself, a
+prisoner behind bars; and ever as she looked upon him he strove with
+gigantic efforts that were wholly vain, to force the bars asunder and
+come to her. She could not help him, could not even hear his voice. But
+the agony of his eyes haunted her--haunted her. She awoke at last in
+anguish of spirit, and slept no more.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+THE SUMMONS
+
+
+With the morning came a general feeling of relief. The Vicar was almost
+jocose, and Mrs. Lorimer made timid attempts to be mirthful though the
+parting with her children sorely tried her fortitude.
+
+The boys' spirits were subdued, but they burst forth uproariously as soon
+as the station-cab was well outside the gate. Ronald and Julian cheered
+themselves hoarse, and Pat scuttled off to the back of the house to
+release Mike from his chain to participate in the great rejoicing.
+
+There was no disguising the fact that everyone was pleased--everyone
+except Olive who went away to her father's study which had been left
+in her especial charge, and locked herself in for a morning of
+undisturbed reading.
+
+Avery could not feel joyful. The thought of Piers was still with her
+continually. She had heard so little of him--merely that he had followed
+his grandfather to the grave supported by the old family solicitor from
+Wardenhurst, Lennox Tudor, and a miscellaneous throng of neighbours; that
+he had borne himself without faltering, and had gone back to his solitude
+with no visible sign of suffering. Only indirectly had she heard this,
+and she yearned to know more.
+
+She knew that like herself he was practically devoid of relatives,--the
+last of his race,--a figure of splendid isolation that would appeal to
+many. She knew that as a wealthy and unmarried baronet, he would be
+greatly sought after and courted; made much of by the whole county, and
+half London as well. He was so handsome, so romantic, so altogether
+eligible in every way. Was it for this that he had left that note of
+hers unanswered? Did he think that now that his horizon had widened the
+nearer haven was hardly worth attaining? Above all, if he decided to
+take that which she had so spontaneously offered, would it satisfy him?
+Would he be content therewith? Had she not done better to have waited
+till he came again to ask of her that which she had till the day of his
+bereavement withheld?
+
+It was useless to torture herself with such questionings. Because of her
+promise to the dead, she had acted, and she could now but await the
+result of her action. If he never answered,--well, she would understand.
+
+So passed yet another day of silence.
+
+She was busy with the household accounts that night which Mrs. Lorimer in
+her woe had left in some confusion, and they kept her occupied till long
+after the children had gone to bed, so late indeed that the servants also
+had retired and she was left alone in the dining-room to wrestle with her
+difficulties.
+
+She found it next to impossible to straighten out the muddle, and she
+came at length reluctantly to the conclusion that it was beyond her
+powers. Wondering what the Reverend Stephen would have said to such a
+crime, she abstracted a few shillings from her own purse and fraudulently
+made up the deficit that had vexed Mrs. Lorimer's soul.
+
+"I can write and tell her now that it has come right," she murmured to
+herself, as she rose from the table.
+
+It was close upon eleven o'clock. The house was shuttered and silent. The
+stillness was intense; when suddenly, as she was in the act of lighting a
+candle, the electric bell pinged through the quiet of the night.
+
+She started and listened. The thought of Piers sprang instinctively to
+her mind. Could it be he? But surely even Piers would not come to her at
+this hour! It must be some parishioner in need of help.
+
+She turned to answer the summons, but ere she reached the hall it was
+repeated twice, with nervous insistence. She hastened to withdraw the
+bolts and open the door.
+
+At once a voice accosted her, and a sharp pang of disappointment or
+anxiety, she knew not which, went through her.
+
+"Mrs. Denys, is she here?" it said. "May I speak with her?"
+
+It was the unmistakable speech of a Frenchman. By the light of the
+hall-lamp, Avery saw the plump, anxious face and little pointed moustache
+of the speaker. He entered uninvited and stood before her.
+
+"Ah! But you are Mrs. Denys!" he exclaimed with relief. "_Madame_, I beg
+that you will pardon me! I am come to you in distress the most profound.
+You will listen to me, yes?"
+
+He regarded her with quick black eyes that both confided and besought.
+Avery's heart was beating in great throbs, she felt strangely breathless
+and uncertain of herself.
+
+"Where do you come from?" she said. "Who are you?"
+
+But she knew the answer before it came. "I am Victor, _madame_,--Victor
+Lagarde. I am the valet of _Monsieur Pierre_ almost since he was born. He
+calls me his _bonne_!" A brief smile touched his worried countenance and
+was gone. "And now I am come to you, _madame_,--not by his desire. _Mais
+non_, he does not know even that I am here. But because he is in great,
+great misery, and I cannot console him. I have not the power. And he is
+all alone--all alone. And I fear--I fear--" He broke off with eloquent
+hands outspread. Avery saw the tears standing in his eyes.
+
+She closed the door softly. "What is it?" she said. "Tell me what
+you fear!"
+
+He looked at her, mastering his emotion with difficulty.
+"_Madame, Monsieur Pierre_ has sentiments the most profound. He
+feel--_passionnément_. He try to hide his sentiments from me. But me--I
+know. He sit alone in the great hall and look--and look. He sleep--never
+at all. He will not even go to bed. And in the great hall is an
+_escritoire_, and in it a drawer." Victor's voice sank mysteriously.
+"To-night--when he think he is alone--he open that drawer, and I see
+inside. It hold a revolver, _madame_. And he look at it, touch it, and
+then shake his head. But I am so afraid--so afraid. So--_enfin_--in my
+trouble I come to you. You have the influence with him, is it not so? You
+have--the power to console. _Madame--chère madame_--will you not come
+and speak with him for five little minutes? Just to encourage him,
+_madame_, in his sadness; for he is all alone!"
+
+The tears ran down Victor's troubled face as he made his earnest appeal.
+He mopped them openly, making no secret of his distress which was too
+pathetic to be ludicrous.
+
+Avery looked at him in dismay. She knew not what to say or do; and even
+as she stood irresolute the hall-clock struck eleven through the silence
+of the house.
+
+Victor watched her anxiously. "_Madame_ is married," he insinuated. "She
+can please herself, no? And _Monsieur Pierre_--"
+
+"Wait a minute, please!" she interrupted gently. "I want to think."
+
+She went to the unlatched door and stood with her face to the night. She
+felt as if a call had come to her, but somehow--for no selfish
+reason--she hesitated to answer. Some unknown influence held her back.
+
+Victor came softly up and stood close to her. "_Madame_," he said in a
+whisper, "I tell you a secret--I, Victor, who have known _Monsieur
+Pierre_ from his infancy. He loves you, _madame_. He loves you much.
+_C'est la grande passion_ which comes only once in a life--only once."
+
+The low words went through her, seeming to sink into her very heart. She
+made a slight, involuntary gesture as of wincing. There was something in
+them that was almost more than she could bear.
+
+She stood motionless with the chill night air blowing in upon her, trying
+to collect her thoughts, trying to bring herself to face and consider the
+matter before she made her decision. But it was useless. Those last words
+had awaked within her a greater force than she could control. From the
+moment of their utterance she was driven irresistibly, the decision was
+no longer her own.
+
+Piers was alone. Piers loved her--wanted her. His soul cried to hers
+through the darkness. She saw him again as in her dream wrestling with
+those cruel iron bars, striving with vain agony to reach her. And all
+doubt went from her like a cloud.
+
+She turned to Victor with grey eyes shining and resolute. "Let us
+go!" she said.
+
+She took a cloak from a peg in the hall, lowered the light, took the key
+from the lock, and passed out into the dark.
+
+Victor followed her closely, softly latching the door behind him. He had
+known from the outset that the English _madame_ would not be able to
+resist his appeal. Was not _Monsieur Pierre_ as handsome and as desirable
+as though he had been a prince of the blood? He walked a pace behind her,
+saying no word, fully satisfied with the success of his mission.
+
+Avery went with swift unerring feet; yet it seemed to her afterwards as
+if she had moved in a dream, for only the vaguest impression of that
+journey through the night remained with her. It was dark, but the
+darkness did not hinder her. She went as if drawn irresistibly--even
+against her will. At the back of her mind hovered the consciousness that
+she was doing a rash thing, but the woman's heart in it was too deeply
+stirred to care for minor considerations. The picture of Piers in his
+lonely hall hung ever before her, drawing her on.
+
+He had not sent for her. She knew now that he would not send. Yet she
+went to him on winged feet. For she knew that his need of her was great.
+
+There was no star in the sky and the night wind moaned in the trees as
+they went up the long chestnut avenue to the Abbey. The loneliness was
+great. It folded them in on every hand. It seemed to hang like a pall
+about the great dim building massed against the sky, as though the whole
+place lay beneath a spell of mourning.
+
+Emerging from the deep shadow of the trees, she paused for the first time
+in uncertainty. Victor pressed forward instantly to her side.
+
+"We will enter by the library, _madame_. See, I will show you the way.
+From there to the great hall, it is only a few steps. And you will find
+him there. I leave you alone to find him."
+
+He led her across a dew-drenched lawn and up a flight of steps to the
+door of a conservatory which gave inwards at his touch.
+
+Obedient to his gesture, Avery entered. Her heart was beating hard and
+fast. She was conscious of a wild misgiving which had not assailed her
+during all the journey thither. What if he did not want her after all?
+What if her coming were unwelcome?
+
+Silently Victor piloted her, and she could not choose but follow, though
+she felt sick with the sudden apprehension that had sprung to life as she
+left the sleeping world outside. She seemed to be leaving her freedom,
+all she valued, behind her as she entered this shadowy prison. And all
+for what? Her quivering heart could find no answer.
+
+There was a heavy scent of hothouse flowers in the air. She almost
+gasped for breath in the exotic fragrance of the unseen blossoms. A
+strong impulse possessed her to turn and flee by the way she had come.
+
+"_Madame!_" It was Victor's voice, low and entreating. He had opened an
+inner door, and stood waiting for her.
+
+Had he seen her wavering resolution, she wondered? Was he trying to
+hasten her ere it should wholly evaporate--to close the way of escape
+ere she could avail herself of it? Or was he anxious solely on Piers'
+account--lest after all she might arrive too late?
+
+She could not determine, but the urgency of his whisper moved her. She
+passed him and entered the room beyond.
+
+It was dimly lighted by a single shaded electric lamp that illumined a
+writing-table. She saw that it was the ancient library of the Abbey, a
+wonderful apartment which she knew to contain an almost priceless
+collection of old parchments. It was lined with bookshelves and had the
+musty smell inseparable from aged bindings.
+
+Victor motioned her silently to a door at the further end, but before
+either of them could reach it there came a sudden footfall on the other
+side, the handle turned sharply, and it opened.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Victor, and fell back as one caught red-handed in a
+crime.
+
+Avery stood quite motionless with her heart beating up against her
+throat, and a tragic sense of trespass overwhelming her. She could not
+find a single word to say, so sudden and so terrible was the ordeal. She
+could only wait in silence.
+
+Piers stood still as one transfixed, with eyes that blazed sleepless out
+of a drawn, pale face; then at length with a single snap of the fingers
+imperiously he dismissed Victor by the still open door.
+
+It closed discreetly upon the Frenchman's exit, and then only did Piers
+move forward; he came to Avery, drew her to a chair, knelt mutely down
+before her, and bowed his head upon her lap.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+"LA GRANDE PASSION"
+
+
+She spoke to him at last, half-frightened by his silence, yet by his
+attitude wholly reassured. For he wanted her still, of that no doubt
+remained. His hands were clasped behind her. He could have held her in
+his arms; but he did not. He only knelt there at her feet in utter
+silence, his black head pillowed on her hands.
+
+"Piers!" she said. "Piers! Let me help you!"
+
+He groaned in answer, and she felt a great shiver run through him. She
+knew intuitively that he was battling for self-control and dared not for
+the moment show his face.
+
+"You--can't," he said at last.
+
+"But I think I can," she urged gently. "It isn't so very long ago that
+you wanted me."
+
+"I was an infernal blackguard to tell you so!" he made answer.
+
+And then suddenly his arms tightened about her, and he held her fast.
+"That you--you, Avery,--should come to me--like this!" he said.
+
+She freed one of her hands and laid it on his bent head. "Shall I tell
+you what made me come, Piers?"
+
+He shook his head in silence, but there was passion in the holding
+of his arms.
+
+For a space he continued to hold her so, speaking no word, and through
+his silence there came to her the quick, fierce beat of his heart. Then
+at length very suddenly, almost with violence, he flung his arms wide
+and started to his feet.
+
+"Avery," he said, "you were a saint to come to me like this. I shan't
+forget it ever. But there's nothing--nothing you can do, except leave me
+to my own devices. It's only just at first, you know, that the loneliness
+seems so--awful." His voice shook unexpectedly; he swung round away from
+her and walked to the end of the room.
+
+He came back almost immediately and stood before her. "Victor was a
+criminal fool to bring you here. He meant well though. He always does.
+That note of yours--I ought to have answered it. I was just coming in
+here to do so. I shouldn't have kept you waiting so long, but
+somehow--somehow--" Again, in spite of him, his voice quivered. He turned
+sharply and walked to the fireplace, leaned his arms upon it, and stood
+so, his back to her, his head bent.
+
+"It was so awfully good of you," he went on after a moment. "You always
+have been--awfully good. My grandfather realized that, you know. I think
+he told you so, didn't he? He wasn't really sorry that I wouldn't marry
+Ina Rose. By the way, she is engaged to Dick Guyes already, so there was
+not much damage done in that direction. I told you it was nothing but a
+game, didn't I? You didn't quite believe me, what?"
+
+It came to her that he was talking to gain time, that he was trying to
+muster strength to give the lie to the passion that had throbbed in the
+holding of his arms, that for some reason he deemed it incumbent upon him
+to mask his feelings and hide from her the misery that had driven Victor
+in search of her.
+
+She rose quietly and moved across the room till she stood beside him.
+"Piers," she said, "tell me what is wrong!"
+
+He stiffened at her approach, straightened himself, faced her.
+"Avery," he said, "do you know, dear, it would be better if you went
+straight back again? I hate to say it. It was so dear of you,
+so--so--great of you to come. But--no, there's nothing wrong,--nothing
+that is, that hasn't been wrong for ages. Fact is, I'm not fit to
+speak to you, never have been; far less make love to you. And I was a
+cur and a brute to do it. I've had a bit of a shake-up lately. It's
+made me feel my responsibilities, see things as they are. I've got an
+awful lot to see to just now. I'm going to work mighty hard. I mustn't
+think of--other things."
+
+He stopped. He was looking at her, looking at her, with the red fire of
+passion kindling in his eyes, a gleam so fierce and so insistent that she
+was forced to lower her own. It was as if his soul cried out to her all
+that he restrained his lips from uttering.
+
+He saw her instinctive avoidance of his gaze, and turned away from her,
+leaning again upon the mantelpiece as if spent.
+
+"I can't help it, Avery. I'm so dog-tired, and I can't sleep. I'm
+horribly sorry, but I'm nothing but a brute-beast to-night.
+Really--really--you had better go."
+
+There was desperation in his voice. He bowed his head upon his arms, and
+she saw that his hands were clenched.
+
+But she could not leave him so. That inner urging that had impelled her
+thither warned her to remain, even against her own judgment, even against
+her will. The memory of Victor's fears came back to her. She could not
+turn and go.
+
+"My dear boy," she said, speaking very gently, "do you think I don't know
+that you are miserable, lonely, wretched? That is why I am here!"
+
+"God knows how lonely!" he whispered.
+
+Her heart stirred within her at the desolation of the words. "Nearly all
+of us go through it some time," she said gently. "And if there isn't a
+friend to stand by, it's very hard to bear. That is the part I want to
+play--if you will let me. Won't you treat me as a friend?"
+
+But Piers neither moved nor spoke. With his head still upon his arms he
+stood silent.
+
+She drew nearer to him. "Piers, I think I understand. I think you are a
+little afraid of going too far, of--of--" her voice faltered a little in
+spite of her--"of hurting my feelings. Is that it? Because,--my
+dear,--you needn't be afraid any longer. If you really think I can make
+you happy, I am willing--quite willing--to try."
+
+The words were spoken, and with them she offered all she had, freely,
+generously, with a quick love that was greater possibly than even she
+realized.
+
+She was standing close to him waiting for him to turn and clasp her in
+his arms, as he had so nearly clasped her once against her will. But
+seconds passed and he did not move, and a cold foreboding began to knock
+at her heart lest after all--lest after all--his love for her had waned.
+
+He stirred at last, just as she was on the point of turning from him,
+stretched out a groping hand that found and drew her to his side. But
+still he did not look at her or so much as raise his head.
+
+He spoke after a moment in a choked voice that seemed to be wrung from
+him by sheer physical torture. "Avery, don't--don't tempt me.
+I--daren't!"
+
+The anguish of the words went through her, banishing all thought of
+anything else. Very suddenly she knew that he was fighting a desperate
+battle for her sake, that he was striving with all the strength that was
+in him to set her happiness before his own. And something that was
+greater than pity entered into her with the knowledge, something so great
+as to be all-possessing, compelling her to instant action.
+
+She slipped her arm about his bent shoulders with a gesture of infinite
+tenderness. "Piers--dear boy, what is it?" she said softly. "Is there
+some trouble in your past--something you can't bear to speak of?
+Remember, I am not a girl, I may understand--some things--better than
+you think."
+
+She felt his hold upon her tighten almost convulsively, but for a while
+he made no answer.
+
+Then at length slowly he raised his head and looked at her. "Do
+you--really--think the past matters?" he said.
+
+She met his eyes with their misery and their longing, and a tremor of
+uncertainty went through her.
+
+"Tell me, Avery!" he insisted. "If you felt yourself able to get away
+from old burdens, and if--if there was no earthly reason why they should
+hamper your future--" He broke off, and again his arm tightened. "It's
+damnable that they should!" he muttered savagely.
+
+"My dear, I don't know how to answer you," she said. "Are--you afraid to
+be open with me? Do you think I shouldn't understand?"
+
+His eyes fell abruptly. "I am quite sure," he said, "that it would be
+easier for me to give you up." And with that he suddenly set her free and
+stood up before her straight and stiff. "Let me see you home!" he said.
+
+They faced one another in the dimness, and Avery marked afresh the
+weariness of his face. He looked like a man who had come through many
+days and nights of suffering.
+
+He glanced up as she did not speak. "Shall we go?" he said.
+
+But Avery stood hesitating, asking herself if this could indeed be the
+end, if the impulse that had drawn her thither had been after all a
+mistaken one, or if even yet it might not carry her further than she had
+ever thought to go.
+
+He turned towards the conservatory door by which she had entered, and
+quietly opened it. A soft wind blew through to her, laden with the scent
+of the wet earth and a thousand opening buds. It seemed to carry the
+promise of eternal hope on unseen wings straight to her heart.
+
+Slowly she followed him across the room, reached him, passed through into
+the scented darkness. A few steps more and she would have been in the
+open air, but she was uncertain of the way. The place was too dim for her
+to see it. She paused for him to guide her.
+
+The door closed behind her; she heard it softly swing on its hinges, and
+then came his light footfall close to her.
+
+"Straight on!" he said, and his voice sounded oddly cold and constrained.
+"There are three steps at the end. Be careful how you go! Perhaps you
+would rather wait while I fetch a light."
+
+His tone hurt her subtly, wounding her more deeply than she had realized
+that he had it in his power to wound.
+
+She moved forward blindly with a strangled sensation at her throat and a
+rush of hot tears in her eyes. She had never dreamed that Piers--the
+warm-hearted, the eager--had it in him to treat her so.
+
+The instinct to escape awoke within her. She quickened her steps and
+reached the further door. Before her lay the open night, immense and
+quiet and very dark. She pressed forward, hoping he would not follow,
+longing only for solitude and silence.
+
+But in her agitation she forgot his warning, forgot to tread warily, and
+missed her footing on the steps. She slipped with a sharp exclamation and
+went down, catching vainly at the door-post to save herself.
+
+Piers exclaimed also, and sprang forward. His arms were about her before
+she reached the ground. He lifted her bodily ere she could recover her
+balance; and suddenly she knew that with the touch of her the fire of his
+passion had burst into scorching flame--knew herself powerless--a woman
+in the hold of her captor.
+
+For he held her so fast that she gasped for breath, and with her head
+pressed back against his shoulder, he kissed her on the lips, fiercely,
+violently, hungrily--kissed her eyes, her hair, and again her lips,
+sealing them closely with his own, making protest impossible. Neither
+could she resist him, for he held her gathered up against his heart,
+bearing her whole weight with a strength that mocked her weakness,
+compelling her to lie at his mercy while the wild storm of his passion
+swept on its way.
+
+She was as one caught in the molten stream of a volcano, and
+carried by the fiery current that seethed all about her, consuming
+her with its heat.
+
+Once when his lips left hers she tried to whisper his name, to call him
+back from his madness; but her voice was gone. She could only gasp and
+gasp till with an odd, half-savage laugh he silenced her again with those
+burning kisses that made her feel that he had stormed his way to the last
+and inner sanctuary of her soul, depriving her even of the right to
+dispute his overwhelming possession.
+
+Later it seemed to her that she must have been near to fainting, for
+though she knew that he bore her inwards from the open door she could not
+so much as raise a hand in protest. She was utterly spent and almost
+beyond caring, so complete had been his conquest. When he set her on her
+feet she tottered, clinging to him nervelessly for support.
+
+He kept his arm about her, but his hold was no longer insistent. She was
+aware of his passion still; it seemed to play around her like a lambent
+flame; but the first fierce flare was past. He spoke to her at last in a
+voice that was low but not without the arrogance of the conqueror.
+
+"Are you very angry with me, I wonder?"
+
+She did not answer him, for still she could not.
+
+He went on, a vein of recklessness running through his speech. "It won't
+make any difference if you are. Do you understand? I've tried to let you
+go, but I can't. I must have you or die."
+
+He paused a moment, and it seemed as if the tornado of his passion were
+sweeping back again; but, curiously, he checked it.
+
+"That's how it is with me, Avery," he said. "The fates have played a
+ghastly joke on me, but you are mine in spite of it. You came to tell me
+so; didn't you?"
+
+Was there a note of pleading in his voice? She fancied so; but still she
+could not speak in answer. She leaned against him with every pulse
+throbbing. She dared not turn her face to his.
+
+"Are you afraid of me, Avery?" he said, and this time surely she heard a
+faint echo of that boyish humour that had first won her. "Because it's
+all right, dear," he told her softly. "I've got myself in hand now. You
+know, I couldn't hold you in my arms just then and not--not kiss you. You
+don't hate me for it, do you? You--understand?"
+
+Yes, she understood. Yet she felt as if he had raised a barrier between
+them which nothing could ever take away. She tried to ignore it, but
+could not. The glaring fact that he had not cared how much or how little
+she had desired those savage kisses of his had begun already to torment
+her, and she knew that she would carry the scorching memory of those
+moments with her for the rest of her life.
+
+She drew herself slowly from him. "I am going now," she said.
+
+He put out a hand that trembled and laid it on her shoulder. "If I will
+let you go, Avery!" he said, and she was again aware of the leaping of
+the flame that had scarcely died down but a moment before.
+
+She straightened herself and resolutely faced him. "I am going,
+Piers," she said.
+
+His hand tightened sharply. He caught his breath for a few tense seconds.
+Then very slowly his hold relaxed; his hand fell. "You will let me see
+you back," he said, and she knew by his voice that he was putting strong
+force upon himself.
+
+She turned. "No. I will go alone."
+
+He did not move. "Please, Avery!" he said.
+
+Her heart gave a quick throb at the low-spoken words. She paused almost
+involuntarily, realizing with a great rush of thankfulness that he would
+not stir a step to follow unless she gave him leave.
+
+For an instant she stood irresolute. Then: "Come if you wish!" she said.
+
+She heard him move, and herself passed on, descending the steps into the
+dewy garden with again that odd feeling of unreality, almost as if she
+walked in a dream.
+
+He came behind her, silent as a shadow, and not till she deliberately
+waited for him did he overtake and walk beside her.
+
+No words passed between them as they went. They seemed to move through a
+world of shadows,--a spell-bound, waiting world. And gradually, as if a
+soothing hand had been laid upon her, Avery felt the wild tumult at her
+heart subside. She remembered that he had refrained himself almost at her
+first word, and slowly her confidence came back. He had appealed to her
+to understand, and she could not let his appeal go wholly unanswered.
+
+As they passed at length through the gate that led into the Vicarage
+lane, she spoke. "Piers, I am not angry."
+
+"Aren't you?" he said, and by the eager relief of his voice she knew that
+her silence had been hard to bear.
+
+She put out a hand to him as they walked. "But, Piers, that--is not the
+way to make me love you."
+
+"I know--I know," he said quickly; and then haltingly: "I've been--so
+beastly lonely, Avery. Make allowances for me--forgive me!"
+
+He had not taken her hand; she slipped it into his. "I do," she said
+simply. She felt his fingers close tensely, but in a moment they opened
+again and set her free.
+
+He did not utter another word, merely walked on beside her till they
+reached the Vicarage gate. She thought he would have left her there, but
+he did not. They went up the drive together to the porch.
+
+From his kennel at the side of the house Mike barked a sharp challenge
+that turned into an unmistakable note of welcome as they drew near. Avery
+silenced him with a reassuring word.
+
+She found the key, and in the darkness of the porch she began to fumble
+for the lock.
+
+Piers stooped. "Let me!"
+
+She gave him the key, and as she stood up again she noted the brightness
+of the fanlight over the floor. She thought that she had lowered the
+light at leaving; she had certainly intended to do so.
+
+Very softly Piers opened the door. It swung noiselessly back upon its
+hinges, and the full light smote upon them.
+
+In the same instant a slim, white figure came calmly forward through the
+hall and stopped beneath the lamp.
+
+Olive Lorimer, pale, severe, with fixed, accusing eyes, stood
+confronting them.
+
+"Mrs. Denys!" she said, in accents of frozen surprise.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
+
+
+The encounter was so amazing, so utterly unlooked for, that Avery had a
+moment of downright consternation. The child's whole air and expression
+were so exactly reminiscent of her father that she almost felt as if she
+stood before the Vicar himself--a culprit caught in a guilty act.
+
+She looked at Olive without words, and Olive looked straight back at her
+with that withering look of the righteous condemning the ungodly which so
+often regarded a dumb but rebellious congregation through the Vicar's
+stern eyes.
+
+Piers, however, was not fashioned upon timid lines, and he stepped into
+the hall without the faintest sign of embarrassment.
+
+"Hullo, little girl!" he said. "Why aren't you in bed?"
+
+The accusing eyes turned upon him. Olive seemed to swell with
+indignation. "I was in bed long ago," she made answer, still in those
+frozen tones. "May I ask what you are doing here, Mr. Evesham?"
+
+"I?" said Piers jauntily. "Now what do you suppose?"
+
+"I cannot imagine," the child said.
+
+"Not really?" said Piers. "Well, perhaps when you are a little older
+your imagination will develop. In the meantime, if you are a wise
+little girl, you will run back to bed and leave your elders to settle
+their own affairs."
+
+Olive drew herself up with dignity. "It is not my intention to go so
+long as you are in the house," she said with great distinctness.
+
+"Indeed!" said Piers. "And why not?"
+
+He spoke with the utmost quietness, but Avery caught the faintest tremor
+in his voice that warned her that Olive was treading dangerous ground.
+
+She hastened to intervene. "But of course you are going now," she said to
+him. "It is bedtime for us all. Good-night! And thank you for walking
+home with me!"
+
+Her own tone was perfectly normal. She turned to him with outstretched
+hand, but he put it gently aside.
+
+"One minute!" he said. "I should like an answer to my question first. Why
+are you so determined to see me out of the house?"
+
+He looked straight at Olive as he spoke, no longer careless of mien, but
+implacable as granite.
+
+Olive, however, was wholly undismayed. She was the only one of the
+Vicar's children who had never had cause to feel a twinge of fear. "You
+had better ask yourself that question," she said, in her cool young
+treble. "You probably know the answer better than I do."
+
+Piers' expression changed. For a single instant he looked furious, but he
+mastered himself almost immediately. "It's a lucky thing for you that you
+are not my little girl," he observed grimly. "If you were, you should
+have the slapping of your life to-night. As it is,--well, you have asked
+me for an explanation of my presence here, and you shall have one. I am
+here in the capacity of escort to Mrs. Denys. Have you any fault to find
+with that?"
+
+Olive returned his look steadily with her cold grey eyes while she
+considered his words. She seemed momentarily at a loss for an answer, but
+Piers' first remarks were scarcely of a character to secure goodwill or
+allay suspicion. She rapidly made up her mind.
+
+"I shall tell Miss Whalley in the morning," she said. "My father said I
+was to go to her if anything went wrong." She added, with a malevolent
+glance towards Avery, "I suppose you know that Mrs. Denys is under notice
+to leave at the end of her month?"
+
+Piers glanced at Avery too--a glance of swift interrogation. She nodded
+very slightly in answer.
+
+He looked again at Olive with eyes that gleamed in a fashion that few
+could have met without quailing.
+
+"Is she indeed?" he said. "I venture to predict that she will leave
+before then. If you are anxious to impart news to Miss Whalley, you may
+tell her also that Mrs. Denys is going to be my wife, and that the
+marriage will take place--" he looked at Avery again and all the hardness
+went out of his face--"just as soon as she will permit."
+
+Dead silence followed the announcement. Avery's face was pale, but there
+was a faint smile at her lips. She met Piers' look without a tremor. She
+even drew slightly nearer to him; and he, instantly responding, slipped a
+swift hand through her arm.
+
+Olive, sternly judicial, stood regarding them in silence, for perhaps a
+score of seconds. And then, still undismayed, she withdrew her forces in
+good order from the field.
+
+"In that case," she said, with the air of one closing a discussion,
+"there is nothing further to be said. I suppose Mrs. Denys wishes to
+be Lady Evesham. My father told me she was an adventuress. I see he
+was right."
+
+She went away with this parting shot, stepping high and holding her
+head poised loftily--an absurd parody of the Vicar in his most
+clerical moments.
+
+Avery gave a little hysterical gasp of laughter as she passed out of
+sight.
+
+Piers' arm was about her in a moment. He held her against his heart.
+"What a charming child, what?" he murmured.
+
+She hid her face on his shoulder. "I think myself she was in the right,"
+she said, still half laughing. "Piers, you must go."
+
+"In a moment. Let me hear from your own dear lips first that you are
+not--not angry?" He spoke the words softly into her ear. There was only
+tenderness in the holding of his arms.
+
+"I am not," she whispered back.
+
+"Nor sorry?" urged Piers.
+
+She turned her face a little towards him. "No, dear, not a bit
+sorry; glad!"
+
+He held her more closely but with reverence. "Avery, you don't--love
+me, do you?"
+
+"Of course I do!" she said.
+
+"There can't be any 'of course' about it," he declared almost fiercely.
+"I've been a positive brute to you. Avery--Avery, I'll never be a brute
+to you again."
+
+And there he stopped, for her arms were suddenly about his neck, her lips
+raised in utter surrender to his.
+
+"Oh, Piers," she said in a voice that thrilled him through and through,
+"do you think I would have less of your love--even if it hurts me? It is
+the greatest thing that has ever come into my life."
+
+He held her head between his hands and looked into her eyes of perfect
+trust. "Avery! Avery!" he said.
+
+"I mean it!" she told him earnestly. "I have been drawing nearer to you
+all the while--in spite of myself--though I tried so hard to hold back.
+Piers, my past life is a dream, and this--this is the awaking. You asked
+me--a long while ago--if the past mattered. I couldn't answer you then. I
+was still half-asleep. But now--now you have worked the miracle--my heart
+is awake, dear, and I will answer you. The past is nothing to you or me.
+It matters--not--one--jot!"
+
+Her words throbbed into the silence of his kiss. He held her long and
+closely. Once--twice--he tried to speak to her and failed. In the end he
+gave himself up mutely to the rapture of her arms. But his own wild
+passion had sunk below the surface. He sought no more than she offered.
+
+"Say good-bye to me now!" she whispered at length; and he kissed her
+again closely, lingeringly, and let her go.
+
+She stood in the doorway as he passed into the night, and his last sight
+of her was thus, silhouetted against the darkness, a tall, gracious
+figure, bending forward to discern him in the dimness.
+
+He went back to his lonely home, back to the echoing emptiness, the
+listening dark. He entered again the great hall where Sir Beverley had
+been wont to sit and wait for him.
+
+Victor was on the watch. He glided apologetically forward with shining,
+observant eyes upon his young master's weary face.
+
+"_Monsieur Pierre_!" he said insinuatingly.
+
+Piers looked at him heavily. "Well?"
+
+"I have put some refreshment for you in the dining-room. It is
+more--more comfortable," said Victor, gently indicating the open
+door. "Will you not--when you have eaten--go to bed, _mon cher, et
+peut-être dormir_?"
+
+Very wistfully the little man proffered his suggestion. His eyes followed
+Piers' movements with the dumb worship of an animal.
+
+"Oh yes, I'll go to bed," said Piers.
+
+He turned towards the dining-room and entered. There was no elation in
+his step; rather he walked as a man who carries a heavy burden, and
+Victor marked the fact with eyes of keen anxiety.
+
+He followed him in and poured out a glass of wine, setting it before him
+with a professional adroitness that did not conceal his solicitude.
+
+Piers picked up the glass almost mechanically, and in doing so caught
+sight of some letters lying on the table.
+
+"Oh, damn!" he said wearily. "How many more?"
+
+There were bundles of them on the study writing-table. They poured in by
+every post.
+
+Victor groaned commiseratingly. "I will take them away, yes?" he
+suggested. "You will read them in the morning--when you have slept."
+
+"Yes, take 'em away!" said Piers. "Stay a minute! What's that top one?
+I'll look at that."
+
+He took up the envelope. It was addressed in a man's square, firm writing
+to "Piers Evesham, Esq., Rodding Abbey."
+
+"Someone who doesn't know," murmured Piers, and slit it open with a sense
+of relief. Some of the letters of condolence that he had received had
+been as salt rubbed into a wound.
+
+He took out the letter and glanced at the signature: "Edmund Crowther!"
+
+Suddenly a veil seemed to be drawn across his eyes. He looked up with a
+sharp, startled movement, and through a floating mist he saw his
+grandmother's baffling smile from the canvas on the wall. The blood was
+singing in his ears. He clenched his hands involuntarily. Crowther! He
+had forgotten Crowther! And Crowther knew--how much?
+
+But he had Crowther's promise of secrecy, so--after all--what had he to
+fear? Nothing--nothing! Yet he felt as if a devil were laughing somewhere
+in the room. They had caught him, they had caught him, there at the very
+gates of deliverance. They were dragging him back to his place of
+torment. He could hear the clanking of the chains which he had so nearly
+burst asunder, could feel them coiling cold about his heart. For he also
+was bound by a promise, the keeping of which meant utter destruction to
+all he held good in life.
+
+And not that alone. It meant the rending in pieces of that which was
+holy, the trampling into the earth of that sacred gift which had only
+now been bestowed upon him. It meant the breaking of a woman's
+heart--that of the only woman in the world, the woman he worshipped, body
+and soul, the woman who in spite of herself had come to love him also.
+
+He flung up his arms with a wild gesture. The torment was more than he
+could bear.
+
+"No!" he cried. "No!" And it was as if he cried out of the midst of a
+burning, fiery furnace. "I'm damned--I'm damned if I will!"
+
+_"Monsieur Pierre! Monsieur Pierre!"_ It was Victor's voice beside him,
+full of anxious remonstrance.
+
+He looked round with dazed eyes. His arms fell to his sides. "All right,
+my good Victor; I'm not mad," he said. "Don't be scared! Did you ever
+hear of a chap called Damocles? He's an ancestor of mine, and history has
+a funny fashion of repeating itself. But there'll be a difference this
+time all the same. He couldn't eat his dinner for fear of a naked sword
+falling on his head. But I'm going to eat mine--whatever happens; and
+enjoy it too."
+
+He raised his glass aloft with a reckless laugh. His eyes sought those of
+the woman on the wall with a sparkle of bitter humour. He made her a
+brief, defiant bow.
+
+"And you, madam, may look on--and smile!" he said.
+
+He drank the wine without tasting it and swung round to depart. And
+again, as he went, it seemed to him that somewhere near at hand--possibly
+in his own soul--a devil laughed and gibed.
+
+Yet when he lay down at length, he slept for many hours in dreamless,
+absolute repose--as a voyager who after long buffeting with wind and tide
+has come at last into the quiet haven of his desire.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DEAD SEA FRUIT
+
+
+"I doubt if the County will call," said Miss Whalley, "unless the fact
+that Sir Piers is to stand for the division weighs with them. And Colonel
+Rose's patronage may prove an added inducement. He probably knows that
+the young man has simply married this Mrs. Denys out of pique, since his
+own charming daughter would have none of him. I must say that personally
+I am not surprised that Miss Rose should prefer marriage with a man of
+such sterling worth as Mr. Guyes. Sir Piers may be extremely handsome and
+fascinating; but no man with those eyes could possibly make a good
+husband. I hear it is to be a very grand affair indeed, dear Mrs.
+Lorimer,--far preferable in my opinion to the hole-in-a-corner sort of
+ceremony that took place this morning."
+
+"They both of them wished it to be as quiet as possible," murmured Mrs.
+Lorimer. "She being a widow and he--poor lad!--in such deep mourning."
+
+"Indecent haste, I call it," pronounced Miss Whalley severely, "with the
+earth still fresh on his poor dear grandfather's grave! A May wedding
+too! Most unsuitable!"
+
+"He said he was so lonely," pleaded Mrs. Lorimer gently. "And after all
+it was what his grandfather wished,--so he told me."
+
+Miss Whalley gave a high-bred species of snort. "My dear Mrs. Lorimer,
+that young man would tell you anything. Why, his grandfather was an
+inveterate woman-hater, as all the world knows."
+
+"I know," agreed Mrs. Lorimer. "That was really what made it so
+remarkable. I assure you, Miss Whalley,--Piers came to me only last night
+and told me with tears in his eyes--that just at the last poor Sir
+Beverley said to him: 'I believe you've pitched on the right woman after
+all, lad. Anyway, she cares for you--more than ordinary. Marry her as
+quick as you can--and my blessing on you both!' They were almost the last
+words he spoke," said Mrs. Lorimer, wiping her own eyes. "I thought it
+was so dear of Piers to tell me."
+
+"No doubt," sniffed Miss Whalley. "He is naturally anxious to secure
+your goodwill. But I wonder very much what point of view the dear Vicar
+takes of the matter. If I mistake not, he took Mrs. Denys's measure some
+time ago."
+
+"Did he?" said Mrs. Lorimer vaguely.
+
+Miss Whalley looked annoyed. The Vicar's wife obviously lacked sufficient
+backbone to quarrel on the subject. She was wont to say that she detested
+invertebrate women.
+
+"I think the Vicar was not altogether surprised," Mrs. Lorimer went on,
+in her gentle, conversational way. "You see, Piers had been somewhat
+assiduous for some time. I myself, however, did not fancy that dear Avery
+wished to encourage him."
+
+"Pooh!" said Miss Whalley. "It was the chance of her life."
+
+A faint flush rose in Mrs. Lorimer's face. "She is a dear girl," she
+said. "I don't know what I shall do without her."
+
+"The children are getting older now," said Miss Whalley. "Jeanie ought to
+be able to take her place to a very great extent."
+
+"My little Jeanie is not strong," murmured Mrs. Lorimer. "She does what
+she can, but her lessons tire her so. She never has much energy left,
+poor child. She has not managed to finish her holiday-task yet, and it
+occupies all her spare time. I told the Vicar that I really did not think
+she was equal to it. But--" the sentence went into a heavy sigh, and
+further words failed.
+
+"The Vicar is always very judicious with his children," observed
+Miss Whalley.
+
+"He does not err on the side of mercy," said his wife pathetically. "And
+he does not seem to realize that Jeanie lacks the vitality of the
+others,--though how they ever got through their tasks I can't imagine. It
+must have been dear Avery's doing. She is a genius with children. They
+all managed it but poor Jeanie. How ever we shall get on without her I
+cannot think."
+
+"But she was under notice to go, I am told," observed Miss Whalley.
+
+"Yes,--yes, I know. But I had hoped that the Vicar might relent. You see,
+she has been invaluable to us in so many ways. However, I hope when she
+comes back that we shall see a great deal of her. She is so good to the
+children and they adore her."
+
+"I doubt if she will have much time to bestow upon them if the County
+really do decide to accept her," remarked Miss Whalley. "You forget that
+she is now Lady Evesham, my dear Mrs. Lorimer, and little likely to
+remember old friends now that she has attained the summit of her
+ambition."
+
+"I don't think Avery would forget us if she became a royal princess,"
+said Mrs. Lorimer, with a confidence that Miss Whalley found peculiarly
+irritating.
+
+"Ah well, we shall see, we shall see!" she said. "I for one shall be
+extremely surprised if she elects to remain on the same intimate footing.
+From mother's help at the Vicarage to Lady Evesham of Rodding Abbey is a
+considerable leap, and she will be scarcely human if it does not turn
+her head."
+
+But Mrs. Lorimer merely smiled and said no more. She knew how little
+Avery was drawn by pomp and circumstance, but she would not vaunt her
+knowledge before one so obviously incapable of understanding. In silence
+she let the subject pass.
+
+"And where is the honeymoon to be spent?" enquired Miss Whalley, who was
+there to glean information and did not mean to go empty away.
+
+But Mrs. Lorimer shook her head. "Even I don't know that. Piers had a
+whim to go just where they fancied. They will call for letters at certain
+post-offices on certain days; but he did not want to feel bound to stay
+at any particular place. Where they are at the present moment or where
+they will spend to-night, I have not the faintest idea. Nobody knows!"
+
+"How extremely odd!" sniffed Miss Whalley. "But young Evesham always was
+so ill-balanced and eccentric. Is it true that Dr. Tudor went to the
+wedding this morning?"
+
+"Quite true," said Mrs. Lorimer. "I thought it was so kind of him. He
+arrived a little late. Avery did not know he was there until it was over.
+But he came forward then and shook hands with them both and wished them
+happiness. He and young Mr. Guyes, who supported Piers, were the only two
+present besides the Eveshams' family solicitor from Wardenhurst and
+ourselves. I gave the dear girl away," said Mrs. Lorimer with gentle
+pride. "And my dear husband conducted the service so impressively."
+
+"I am sure he would," said Miss Whalley. "But I think it was unfortunate
+that so much secrecy was observed. People are so apt to talk
+uncharitably. It was really most indiscreet."
+
+Could she have heard the remark which Piers was making at that identical
+moment to his bride, she would have understood one of the main reasons
+for his indiscretion.
+
+They were sitting in the deep, deep heart of a wood--an enchanted wood
+that was heavy with the spring fragrance of the mountain-ash,--and Piers,
+the while he peeled a stick with the deftness of boyhood, observed with
+much complacence: "Well, we've done that old Whalley chatterbox out of a
+treat anyway. Of all the old parish gossips, that woman is the worst. I
+never pass her house without seeing her peer over her blind. She always
+looks at me with a suspicious, disapproving eye. It's rather a shame, you
+know," he wound up pathetically, "for she has only once in her life found
+me out, and that was a dozen years ago."
+
+Avery laughed a little. "I don't think she approves of any men except
+the clergy."
+
+"Oh yes, she clings like a leech to the skirts of the Church," said Piers
+irreverently. "There are plenty of her sort about--wherever there are
+parsons, in fact. Of course it's the parsons' fault. If they didn't
+encourage 'em they wouldn't be there."
+
+"I don't know that," said Avery, with a smile. "I think you're a little
+hard on parsons."
+
+"Do you? Well, I don't know many. The Reverend Stephen is enough for me.
+I fight shy of all the rest."
+
+"My dear, how very narrow of you!" said Avery.
+
+He turned to her boyishly. "Don't tell me you want to be a female curate
+like the Whalley! I couldn't bear it!"
+
+"I haven't the smallest leaning in that direction," Avery assured him.
+"But at the same time, one of my greatest friends is about to enter the
+Church, and I do want you to meet and like him."
+
+A sudden silence followed her words. Piers resumed the peeling of his
+stick with minute attention. "I am sure to like him if you do," he
+remarked, after a moment.
+
+She touched his arm lightly. "Thank you, dear. He is an Australian, and
+the very greatest-hearted man I ever met. He stood by me in a time of
+great trouble. I don't know what I should have done without him. I hope
+he won't feel hurt, but I haven't even told him of my marriage yet."
+
+"We have been married just ten hours," observed Piers, still intent
+upon his task.
+
+She laughed again. "Yes, but it is ten days since we became engaged, and
+I owe him a letter into the bargain. He wanted to arrange to meet me in
+town one day; but he is still too busy to fix a date. He is studying
+very hard."
+
+"What's his name?" said Piers.
+
+"Crowther--Edmund Crowther. He has been a farmer for years in
+Queensland." Avery, paused a moment. "It was he who broke the news to me
+of my husband's death," she said, in a low voice. "I told you about
+that, Piers."
+
+"You did," said Piers.
+
+His tone was deliberately repressive, and a little quiver of
+disappointment went through Avery. She became silent, and the magic
+of the woods closed softly in upon them. Evening was drawing on, and
+the long, golden rays of sunshine lay like a benediction over the
+quiet earth.
+
+The silence between them grew and expanded into something of a barrier.
+From her seat on a fallen tree Avery gazed out before her. She could not
+see Piers' face which was bent above the stick which he had begun to
+whittle with his knife. He was sitting on the ground at her feet, and
+only his black head was visible to her.
+
+Suddenly, almost fiercely, he spoke. "I know Edmund Crowther."
+
+Avery's eyes came down to him in astonishment. "You know him!"
+
+"Yes, I know him." He worked furiously at his stick without looking up.
+His words came in quick jerks, as if for some reason he wanted to get
+them spoken without delay. "I met him years ago. He did me a good
+turn--helped me out of a tight corner. A few weeks ago--when I was at
+Monte Carlo with my grandfather--I met him again. He told me then that
+he knew you. Of course it was a rum coincidence. Heaven only knows what
+makes these things happen. You needn't write to him, I will."
+
+He ceased to speak, and suddenly Avery saw that his hands were
+trembling--trembling violently as the hands of a man with an ague. She
+watched them silently, wondering at his agitation, till Piers, becoming
+aware of her scrutiny, abruptly flung aside the stick upon which he had
+been expending so much care and leaped to his feet with a laugh that
+sounded oddly strained to her ears.
+
+"Come along!" he said. "If we sit here talking like Darby and Joan much
+longer, we shall forget that it's actually our wedding-day."
+
+Avery looked up at him without rising, a queer sense of foreboding at
+her heart. "Then Edmund Crowther is a friend of yours," she said. "A
+close friend?"
+
+He stood above her, and she saw a very strange look in his eyes--almost a
+desperate look.
+
+"Quite a close friend," he said in answer. "But he won't be if you waste
+any more thought on him for many days to come. I want your thoughts all
+for myself."
+
+Again he laughed, holding out his hands to her with a gesture that
+compelled rather than invited. She yielded to his insistence, but with
+a curious, hurt feeling as of one repulsed. It was as if he had closed
+a door in her face, not violently or in any sense rudely, yet with
+such evident intention that she had almost heard the click of the key
+in the lock.
+
+Hand in hand they went through the enchanted wood; and for ever after,
+the scent of mountain-ash blossom was to Avery a bitter-sweet memory of
+that which should have been wholly sweet.
+
+As for Piers, she did not know what was in his mind, though she was
+aware for a time of a lack of spontaneity behind his tenderness which
+disquieted her vaguely. She felt as if a shadow had fallen upon him,
+veiling his inner soul from her sight.
+
+Yet when they sat together in the magic quiet of the spring night in a
+garden that had surely been planted for lovers the cloud lifted, and she
+saw him again in all the ardour of his love for her. For he poured it
+out to her there in the silence, eagerly, burningly,--the worship that
+had opened to her the gate of that paradise which she had never more
+hoped to tread.
+
+She put her doubts and fears away from her, she answered to his call. He
+had awaked the woman's heart in her, and she gave freely, impulsively,
+not measuring her gift. If she could not offer him a girl's first
+rapture, she could bestow that which was infinitely greater--the deep,
+strong love of a woman who had suffered and knew how to endure.
+
+They sat in the dewy garden till in the distant woods the nightingales
+began their passion-steeped music, and then--because the ecstasy of the
+night was almost more than she could bear--Avery softly freed herself
+from her husband's arm and rose.
+
+"Going?" he asked quickly.
+
+He remained seated holding her hand fast locked in his. She looked down
+into his upraised face, conscious that her own was in shadow and that she
+need not try to hide the tears that had risen inexplicably to her eyes.
+
+"Yes, dear," she answered, with an effort at lightness. "You haven't had
+a smoke since dinner. I am going to leave you to have one now."
+
+But he still held her, as if he could not let her go.
+
+She bent to him after a moment with that sweet impulsiveness of hers that
+so greatly charmed all who loved her. "What is it, Piers? Don't you want
+me to go?"
+
+He caught her other hand in his and held them both against his lips.
+
+"Want you to go!" he muttered almost inarticulately; and then suddenly he
+raised his face again to hers. "Avery--Avery, promise me--swear to
+me--that, whatever happens, you will never leave me!"
+
+"But, my dearest, haven't I already sworn--only today?" she said,
+surprised by his vehemence and his request. "Of course I shall never
+leave you. My place is by your side."
+
+"I know! I know!" he said. "But it isn't enough. I want you to promise me
+personally, so that--I shall always feel--quite sure of you. You see,
+Avery," his words came with difficulty, his upturned face seemed to
+beseech her, "I'm not--the sort of impossible, chivalrous knight that
+Jeanie thinks me. I'm horribly bad. I sometimes think I've got a devil
+inside me. And I've done things--I've done things--" His voice shook
+suddenly; he ended abruptly, with heaving breath. "Before I ever met you,
+I--wronged you."
+
+He would have let her go then, but it was her hands that held. She
+stooped lower to him, divinely tender, her love seeming to spread all
+about him like wings, folding him in.
+
+"My dear," she said softly, "whatever there is of bad in you,--remember,
+the best is mine!"
+
+He caught at the words. "The best--the best! You shall always have that,
+Avery. But, my darling,--you understand--you do understand--how utterly
+unworthy that best is of you? You must understand that before--before--"
+
+Again his voice went into silence; but she saw his eyes glow suddenly,
+hotly, in the gloom, and her heart gave a quick hard throb that caught
+her breath and held it for the moment suspended, waiting.
+
+He went on after a second, mastering himself with obvious effort. "What
+I am trying to say is this. It's easier--or at least not impossible--to
+forfeit what you've never had. But afterwards--afterwards--" His hands
+closed tightly upon hers again; his voice sounded half-choked. "Avery,
+I--couldn't let you go--afterwards," he said.
+
+"But, my own Piers," she whispered, "haven't you said that there is no
+reason--no earthly reason--"
+
+He broke in upon her almost fiercely. "There is no reason--none
+whatever--I swear it! You said yourself that the past was nothing to you.
+You meant it, Avery. Say you meant it!"
+
+"But of course I meant it!" she told him. "Only, Piers, there is no
+secret chamber in my life that you may not enter. Perhaps some day, dear,
+when you come to realize that I am older than Jeanie, you will open all
+your doors to me!"
+
+There was pleading in her voice, notwithstanding its note of banter; but
+she did not stay to plead. With the whispered words she stooped and
+softly kissed him. Then ere he could detain her longer she gently
+released herself and was gone.
+
+He saw her light figure flit ghost-like across the dim stretch of grass
+and vanish into the shadows. And he started to his feet as if he would
+follow or call her back. But he did neither. He only stood swaying on his
+feet with a face of straining impotence--as of a prisoner wrestling
+vainly with his iron bars--until she had gone wholly from his sight. And
+then with a stifled groan he dropped down again into his chair and
+covered his face.
+
+He had paid a heavy price to enter the garden of his desire; but
+already he had begun to realize that the fruit he gathered there was
+Dead Sea Fruit.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THAT WHICH IS HOLY
+
+
+No bells had rung at the young Squire's wedding. It had been conducted
+with a privacy which Miss Whalley described as "almost indecent." But
+there was no privacy about his return, and Miss Whalley was shocked
+afresh at the brazen heartlessness of it after his recent bereavement.
+For Sir Piers and his wife motored home at the end of July through a
+village decked with flags and bunting and under a triumphant arch that
+made Piers' little two-seater seem absurdly insignificant; while the
+bells in the church-tower clanged the noisiest welcome they could
+compass, and Gracie--home for the holidays--mustered the school-children
+to cheer their hardest as the happy couple passed the schoolhouse gate.
+
+Avery would fain have stopped to greet the child, but Piers would not be
+persuaded.
+
+"No, no! To-morrow!" he said. "The honeymoon isn't over till after
+to-night."
+
+So they waved and were gone, at a speed which made Miss Whalley wonder
+what the local police could be about.
+
+Once past the lodge-gates and Marshall's half-grudging, half-pleased
+smile of welcome, the speed was doubled. Piers went like the wind, till
+Avery breathlessly cried to him to stop.
+
+"You'll kill us both before we get there!" she protested. In answer to
+which Piers moderated the pace, remarking as he did so, "But you would
+like to die by my side, what?"
+
+Victor was on the steps to receive them, Victor dancing with impatience
+and delight. For his young master's prolonged honeymoon had represented
+ten weeks of desolation to him.
+
+Old David was also present, inconspicuous and dignified, waiting to pour
+out tea for the travellers.
+
+And Caesar the Dalmatian who had mourned with Victor for his absent deity
+now leapt upon him in one great rush of ecstatic welcome that nearly bore
+him backwards.
+
+It was a riotous home-coming, for Piers was in boisterous spirits. They
+had travelled far that day, but he was in a mood of such restless energy
+that he seemed incapable of feeling fatigue.
+
+Avery on her part was thoroughly weary, but she would not tell him so,
+and they spent the whole evening in wandering about house and gardens,
+discussing the advisability of various alterations and improvements. In
+the end Piers awoke suddenly to the fact that she was looking utterly
+exhausted, and with swift compunction piloted her to her room.
+
+"What a fool I am!" he declared. "You must be dead beat. Why didn't you
+say you wanted to rest?"
+
+"I didn't, dear," she answered simply. "I wanted to be with you."
+
+He caught her hand to his lips. "You are happy with me then?"
+
+She uttered a little laugh that said more than words. "My own boy, you
+give me all that the most exacting woman could possibly desire and then
+ask me that!"
+
+He laughed too, his arm close about her. "I would give you the world if I
+had it. Avery, I hate to think we've come home--that the honeymoon is
+over--and the old beastly burdens waiting to be shouldered--" He laid his
+forehead against her neck with a gesture that made her fancy he did not
+wish her to see his face for the moment. "P'r'aps I'm a heartless brute,
+but I never missed the old chap all the time I was away," he whispered.
+"It's like being dragged under the scourge again--just when the old scars
+were beginning to heal--to come back to this empty barrack."
+
+She slid a quick arm round his neck, all the woman's heart in her
+responding to the cry from his.
+
+"The place is full of him," Piers went on; "I meet him at every corner.
+I see him in his old place on the settle in the hall, where he used to
+wait for me, and--and row me every night for being late." He gave a
+broken laugh. "Avery, if it weren't for you, I--I believe I should
+shoot myself."
+
+"Come and sit down!" said Avery gently. She drew him to a couch, and
+they sat down locked together.
+
+During all the ten weeks of their absence he had scarcely even mentioned
+his grandfather. He had been gay and inconsequent, or fiercely passionate
+in his devotion to her. But of his loss he had never spoken, and vaguely
+she had known that he had shut it out of his life with that other grim
+shadow that dwelt behind the locked door she might not open. She had not
+deemed him heartless, but she had regretted that deliberate shirking of
+his grief. She had known that sooner or later he would have to endure the
+scourging of which he spoke and that it would not grow the lighter with
+postponement.
+
+And now as she held him against her heart, she was in a sense relieved
+that it had come at last, thankful to be there with him while he stripped
+himself of all subterfuge and faced his sorrow.
+
+He could not speak much as he sat there clasped in her arms. One or two
+attempts he made, and then broke down against her breast. But no words
+were needed. Her arms were all he desired for consolation, and if they
+waked in him the old wild remorse, he stifled it ere it could take full
+possession.
+
+Finally, when the first bitterness had passed, they sat and talked
+together, and he found relief in telling her of the life he had lived in
+close companionship with the old man.
+
+"We quarrelled a dozen times," he said. "But somehow we could neither of
+us keep it up. I don't know why. We were violent enough at times. There's
+an Evesham devil somewhere in our ancestry, and he has a trick of
+cropping up still in moments of excitement. You've met him more than
+once. He's a formidable monster, what?"
+
+"I am not afraid of him," said Avery, with her cheek against his
+black head.
+
+He gave a shaky laugh. "You'd fling a bucket of water over Satan himself!
+I love you for not being afraid. But I don't know how you manage it, and
+that's a fact. Darling, I'm a selfish brute to wear you out like this.
+Send me away when you can't stand any more of me!"
+
+"Would you go?" she said, softly stroking his cheek.
+
+He caught her hand again and kissed it hotly, devouringly, in answer.
+"But I mustn't wear you out," he said, a moment later, with an odd
+wistfulness. "You mustn't let me, Avery."
+
+She drew her hand gently away from the clinging of his lips. "No, I
+won't let you," she said, in a tone he did not understand.
+
+He clasped her to him. "It's because I worship you so," he whispered
+passionately. "There is no one else in the world but you. I adore you! I
+adore you!"
+
+She closed her eyes from the fiery worship that looked forth from his.
+"Piers," she said, "wait, dear, wait!"
+
+"Why should I wait?" he demanded almost fiercely.
+
+"Because I ask you. Because--just now--to be loved like that is more than
+I can bear. Will you--can you--kiss me only, once, and go?"
+
+He held her in his arms. He gazed long and burningly upon her. In
+the end he stopped and with reverence he kissed her. "I am going,
+Avery," he said.
+
+She opened her eyes to him. "God bless you, my own Piers!" she murmured
+softly, and laid her cheek for a moment against his sleeve ere he took
+his arm away.
+
+As for Piers, he went from her as if he feared to trespass, and her heart
+smote her a little as she watched him go. But she would not call him
+back. She went instead to one of the great bay windows and leaned against
+the framework, gazing out. He was very good to her in all things, but
+there were times when she felt solitude to be an absolute necessity. His
+vitality, his fevered desire for her, wore upon her nerves. His attitude
+towards her was not wholly natural. It held something of a menace to her
+peace which disquieted her vaguely. She had a feeling that though she
+knew herself to be all he wanted in the world, yet she did not succeed in
+fully satisfying him. He seemed to be perpetually craving for something
+further, as though somewhere deep within him there burned a fiery thirst
+that nothing could ever slake. Her lightest touch seemed to awake it, and
+there were moments when his unfettered passion made her afraid.
+
+Not for worlds would she have had him know it. Her love for him was too
+deep to let her shrink; and she knew that only by that love did she
+maintain her ascendancy, appealing to his higher nature as only true love
+can appeal. But the perpetual strain of it told upon her, and that night
+she felt tired in body and soul.
+
+The great bedroom behind her with its dark hangings and oak furniture
+seemed dreary and unhome-like. She viewed the ancient and immense
+four-poster with misgiving and wondered if Queen Elizabeth had ever
+slept in it.
+
+After a time she investigated Piers' room beyond, and found it less
+imposing though curiously stiff and wholly lacking in ordinary
+cheery comfort. Later she discovered the reason for this grim
+severity of arrangement. No woman's touch had softened it for close
+upon half a century.
+
+She went back to her own room and dressed. Piers had wanted her to have a
+maid, but she had refused until other changes should be made in the
+establishment. There seemed so much to alter that she felt bewildered. A
+household of elderly menservants presented a problem with which she knew
+she would find it difficult to deal.
+
+She put the matter gently before Piers that night, but he dismissed it
+as trivial.
+
+"You can't turn 'em off of course," he said. "But you can have a dozen
+women to adjust the balance if you want 'em."
+
+Avery did not, but she was too tired to argue the point. She let the
+subject slide.
+
+They dined together in the oak-panelled dining-room where Piers had so
+often sat with his grandfather. The table seemed to stretch away
+inimitably into shadows, and Avery felt like a Lilliputian. From the wall
+directly facing her the last Lady Evesham smiled upon her--her baffling,
+mirthless smile that seemed to cover naught but heartache. She found
+herself looking up again and again to meet those eyes of mocking
+comprehension; and the memory of what Lennox Tudor had once told her
+recurred to her. This was Piers' Italian grandmother whose patrician
+beauty had descended to him through her scapegrace son.
+
+"Are you looking at that woman with the smile?" said Piers abruptly.
+
+She turned to him. "You are so like her, Piers. But I wouldn't like you
+to have a smile like that. There is something tragic behind it."
+
+"We are a tragic family," said Piers sombrely. "As for her, she ruined
+her own life and my grandfather's too. She might have been happy enough
+with him if she had tried."
+
+"Oh, Piers, I wonder!" Avery said, with a feeling that that smile
+revealed more to her than to him.
+
+"I say she might," Piers reiterated, with a touch of impatience. "He
+thought the world of her, just as--just as--" he smiled at her
+suddenly--"I do of you. He never knew that she wasn't satisfied until one
+fine day she left him. She married again--afterwards, and then died. He
+never got over it."
+
+But still Avery had a vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been
+Sir Beverley's bride. "I expect they never really understood each
+other," she said.
+
+Piers' dark eyes gleamed. "Do you know what I would have done if I had
+been in his place?" he said. "I would have gone after her and brought her
+back--even if I'd killed her afterwards."
+
+His voice vibrated on a deep note of savagery. He poured out a glass of
+wine with a hand that shook.
+
+Avery said nothing, but through the silence she was conscious of the hard
+throbbing of her heart. There was something implacable, something almost
+cruel, about Piers at that moment. She felt as if he had bruised her
+without knowing it.
+
+And then in his sudden, bewildering way he left his chair and came to
+her, stooped boyishly over her. "My darling, you're so awfully pale
+to-night. Have some wine--to please me!"
+
+She leaned her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes. "I am
+a little tired, dear; but I don't want any wine. I shall be all right in
+the morning."
+
+He laid his cheek against her forehead. "I want you to drink a toast with
+me. Won't you?"
+
+"We won't drink to each other," she protested, faintly smiling. "It's
+too like drinking to ourselves."
+
+"That's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me," he declared. "But we
+won't toast ourselves. We'll drink to the future, Avery, and--" he
+lowered his voice--"and all it contains. What?"
+
+Her eyes opened quickly, but she did not move. "Why do you say that?"
+
+"What?" he said again very softly.
+
+She was silent.
+
+He reached a hand for his own glass. "Drink with me, sweetheart!" he said
+persuasively.
+
+She suffered him to put it to her lips and drank submissively. But in a
+moment she put up a restraining hand. "You finish it!" she said, and
+pushed it gently towards him.
+
+He took it and held it high. The light gleamed crimson in the wine; it
+glowed like liquid fire. A moment he held it so, then without a word he
+carried it to his lips and drained it.
+
+A second later there came the sound of splintering glass, and Avery,
+turning in her chair, discovered that he had flung it over his shoulder.
+
+She gazed at him in amazement astonished by his action. "Piers!"
+
+But something in his face checked her. "No one will ever drink out of
+that glass again," he said. "Are you ready? Shall we go in the garden for
+a breath of air?"
+
+She went with him, but on the terrace outside he stopped impulsively.
+"Avery darling, I don't mean to be a selfish beast; but I've got to prowl
+for a bit. Would you rather go to bed?"
+
+His arm was round her; she leaned against him half-laughing. "Do you
+know, dear, that bedroom frightens me with its magnificence! Don't prowl
+too long!"
+
+He bent to her swiftly. "Avery! Do you want me?"
+
+"Just to scare away the bogies," she made answer, with a lightness that
+scarcely veiled a deeper feeling. "And when you've done that--quite
+thoroughly--perhaps--" She stopped.
+
+"Perhaps--" whispered Piers.
+
+"Perhaps I'll tell you a secret," she said still lightly. "By the way,
+dear, I found a letter from Mr. Crowther waiting for me. I put it in your
+room for you to read. He writes so kindly. Wouldn't you like him to be
+our first visitor?"
+
+There was a moment's silence before Piers made answer.
+
+"To be sure," he said then. "We mustn't forget Crowther. You wrote and
+told him everything, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, everything. He seems very fond of you, Piers. But you must read his
+letter. It concerns you quite as much as it does me. There! I am going.
+Good-bye! Come up soon!"
+
+She patted his shoulder and turned away. Somehow it had not been easy to
+speak of Crowther. She had known that in doing so she had introduced an
+unwelcome subject. But Crowther was too great a friend to ignore. She
+felt that she had treated him somewhat casually already; for it was only
+the previous week that she had written to tell him of her marriage.
+
+Crowther was in town, studying hard for an examination, and she felt
+convinced that he would be willing to pay them a visit. She also knew
+that for some reason Piers was reluctant to ask him, but she felt that
+that fact ought not to influence her. For she owed a debt of gratitude to
+Crowther which she could never forget.
+
+But all thought of Crowther faded from her mind when she found herself
+once more in that eerie, tapestry-hung bedroom. The place had been
+lighted with candles, but they only seemed to emphasize the gloom. She
+wondered how often the last Lady Evesham--the warm-blooded, passionate
+Italian woman with her love of the sun and all things beautiful--had
+stood as she stood now and shuddered at the dreary splendour of her
+surroundings. How homesick she must have been, Avery thought to herself,
+as she undressed in the flickering candle-light! How her soul must have
+yearned for the glittering Southern life she had left!
+
+She thought of Sir Beverley. He must have been very like Piers in his
+youth, less fierce, less intense, but in many ways practically the same,
+giving much and demanding even more, restless and exacting, but withal so
+lovable, so hard to resist, so infinitely dear. All her love for Piers
+throbbed suddenly up to the surface. How good he was to her! What would
+life be without him? She reproached herself for ingratitude and
+discontent. Life was a beautiful thing if only she would have it so.
+
+She knelt down at length by the deep cushioned window-seat and began to
+pray. The night was dim and quiet, and as she prayed she gradually
+forgot the shadows behind her and seemed to lose herself in the
+immensity of its peace. She realized as never before that by her love
+she must prevail. It was the one weapon, unfailing and invincible, that
+alone would serve her, when she could rely upon no other. She knew that
+he had felt its influence, that there were times when he did instinctive
+reverence to it, as to that which is holy. She knew moreover that there
+was that within him that answered to it as it were involuntarily--a
+fiery essence in which his passion had no part which dwelt deep down in
+his turbulent heart--a germ of greatness which she knew might blossom
+into Love Immortal.
+
+He was young, he was young. He wanted life, all he could get of it. And
+he left the higher things because as yet he was undeveloped. He had not
+felt that hunger of the spirit which only that which is spiritual can
+satisfy. It would come. She was sure it would come. She was watching for
+it day by day. His wings were still untried. He did not want to soar. But
+by-and-bye the heights would begin to draw him. And then--then they would
+soar together. But till that day dawned, her love must be the guardian of
+them both.
+
+There came a slight sound in the room behind her. She turned
+swiftly. "Piers!"
+
+He was close to her. As she started to her feet his arms enclosed her. He
+looked down into her eyes, holding her fast pressed to him.
+
+"I didn't mean to disturb you," he said. "But--when I saw you were
+praying--I had to come in. I wanted so awfully to know--if you would get
+an answer."
+
+"But, Piers!" she protested.
+
+He kissed her lips. "Don't be angry, Avery! I'm not scoffing. I don't
+know enough about God to scoff at Him. Tell me! Do you ever get an
+answer, or are you content to go jogging on like the rest of the
+world without?"
+
+She made an effort to free herself. "Do you know, Piers, I can't talk to
+you about--holy things--when you are holding me like this."
+
+He looked stubborn. "I don't know what you mean by holy things. I'm not a
+believer. At least I don't believe in prayer. I can get all I want
+without it."
+
+"I wonder!" Avery said.
+
+She was still trying to disengage herself, but as he held her with
+evident determination she desisted.
+
+There followed a silence during which her grey eyes met his black ones
+steadily, fearlessly, resolutely. Then in a whisper Piers spoke, his lips
+still close to hers. "Tell me what you were praying for, sweetheart!"
+
+She smiled a little. "No, dear, not now! It's nothing that's in your
+power to give me. Shall we sit on the window-seat and talk?"
+
+But Piers was loath to let her go from his arms. He knelt beside her as
+she sat, still holding her.
+
+She put her arm round his neck. "Do you remember your Star of Hope?" she
+asked him softly.
+
+"I remember," said Piers, but he did not turn his eyes to the night sky;
+they still dwelt upon her.
+
+Avery's face was toward the window. The drapery fell loosely away from
+her throat. He stooped forward suddenly and pressed his hot lips upon her
+soft white flesh.
+
+A little tremor went through her at his touch; she kept her face
+turned from him.
+
+"Have you really got all you want?" she asked after a moment. "Is there
+nothing at all left to hope for?"
+
+"Didn't we drink to the future only to-night?" he said.
+
+His arms were drawing her, but still she kept her face turned away. "Did
+you mean anything by that?" she asked. "Were you--were you thinking of
+anything special?"
+
+He did not at once answer her. He waited till with an odd reluctance she
+turned her face towards him. Then, "I was thinking of you," he said.
+
+Her heart gave a quick throb. "Of me?" she questioned below her breath.
+
+"Of you," he said again. "For myself, I have got all I can ever hope for.
+But you--you would be awfully happy, wouldn't you, if--"
+
+"If--" murmured Avery.
+
+He stooped again to kiss her white bosom. "And it would be a bond between
+us," he said, as if continuing some remark he had not uttered.
+
+She turned more fully to him. "Do we need that?" she said.
+
+"We might--some day," he answered, in a tone that somehow made it
+impossible for her to protest. "Anyhow, my darling, I knew,--I guessed.
+And I'm awfully glad--for your sake."
+
+She bent towards him. "Not for your own?" she whispered pleadingly.
+
+He laid his head suddenly down upon her knees with a sound that was
+almost a groan.
+
+"Piers!" she said in distress.
+
+He was silent for a space, then slowly raised himself. She had a sense
+of shock at sight of his face. It looked haggard and grey, as if a
+withering hand had touched him and shorn away his youth.
+
+"Avery,--oh, Avery," he said, "I wish I were a better man!"
+
+It was a cry wrung from his soul--the hungry cry which she had longed to
+hear, and it sent a great joy through her even though it wrung her own
+soul also.
+
+She bent to him swiftly. "Dearest, we all feel that sometimes. And I
+think it is the Hand of God upon us, opening our eyes."
+
+He did not answer or make any response to her words. Only as he clasped
+her to him, she heard him sigh. And she knew that, strive as he might to
+silence that soul-craving with earthly things, it would beat on
+unsatisfied through all. She came nearer to understanding him that night
+that ever before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FIRST GUEST
+
+
+"I am greatly honoured to be your first guest," said Crowther.
+
+"The honour is ours to get you," Avery declared. She sat on the terrace
+whither she had conducted him, and smiled at him across the tea-table
+with eyes of shining friendship.
+
+Crowther smiled back, thinking to himself how pleasant a picture she
+made. She was dressed in white, and her face was flushed and happy, even
+girlish in its animation. There was a ring of laughter in her voice when
+she talked that was very good to hear. She had herself just brought him
+from the station in Piers' little two-seater, and her obvious pleasure at
+meeting him still hung about her, making her very fair to see.
+
+"Piers is so busy just now," she told him. "He sent all sorts of
+messages. He had to go over to Wardenhurst to see Colonel Rose. The M.P.
+for this division retired at the end of the Session, and Piers is to
+stand for the constituency. They talk of having the election in October."
+
+"Will he get in?" asked Crowther, still watching her with friendly
+appreciation in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I expect so. He gets most things that he sets his
+heart on. His grandfather--you knew Sir Beverley?--was so anxious that he
+should enter Parliament."
+
+"Yes, I knew Sir Beverley," said Crowther. "He thought the world
+of Piers."
+
+"And Piers of him," said Avery.
+
+"Ah! Was it a great blow to him when the old man died?"
+
+"A very great blow," she answered soberly. "That was the main reason for
+our marrying so suddenly. The poor boy was so lonely I couldn't bear to
+think of him by himself in this great house."
+
+"He was very lucky to get you," said Crowther gravely.
+
+She smiled. "I was lucky too. Don't you think so? I never in my wildest
+dreams pictured such a home as this for myself."
+
+A great magnolia climbed the house behind her with creamy flowers that
+shed their lemon fragrance all about them. Crowther compared her in his
+own mind to the wonderful blossoms. She was so sweet, so pure, yet also
+in a fashion so splendid.
+
+"I think it is a very suitable setting for you, Lady Evesham!" he said.
+
+She made a quick, impulsive movement towards him. "Do call me
+Avery!" she said.
+
+"Thank you," he answered, with a smile. "It certainly seems more natural.
+How long have you been in this home of yours, may I ask?"
+
+"Only a fortnight," she said, laughing. "Our honeymoon took ten weeks.
+Piers wanted to make it ten years; but the harvest was coming on, and I
+knew he ought to come back and see what was happening. And then Mr.
+Ferrars resigned his seat, and it became imperative. But isn't it a
+beautiful place?" she ended. "I felt overwhelmed by the magnificence of
+it at first, but I am getting used to it now."
+
+"A glorious place," agreed Crowther. "Piers must be very proud of it.
+Have you begun to have many visitors yet?"
+
+She shook her head. "No, not many. Nearly all the big people have gone
+to Scotland. Piers says they will come later, but I shall not mind them
+so much then. I shall feel less like an interloper by that time."
+
+"I don't know why you should feel like that," said Crowther. Avery
+smiled. "Well, all the little people think that I set out to catch Piers
+for his money and his title."
+
+"Does what the little people think have any weight with you?"
+asked Crowther.
+
+She flushed faintly under the kindly directness of his gaze. "Not really,
+I suppose. But one can't quite shake off the feeling of it. There is the
+Vicar for instance. He has never liked me. He congratulates me almost
+every time we meet."
+
+"Evidently a cad," commented Crowther in his quiet way.
+
+Avery laughed a little. She had always liked this man's plain speech. "He
+is not the only one," she said.
+
+"But you have friends--real friends--also?" he questioned.
+
+"Oh yes; indeed! The Vicarage children and their mother are the greatest
+friends I have." Avery spoke with warmth. "The children are having tea
+down in one of the cornfields now. We must go and see them presently. You
+are fond of children, I know."
+
+"I sort of love them," said Crowther with his slow, kind smile. "Ah,
+Piers, my lad, are you trying to steal a march on us? Did you think I
+didn't know?"
+
+He spoke without raising his voice. Avery turned sharply to see her
+husband standing on the steps of a room above them. One glimpse she had
+of Piers' face ere he descended and joined them, and an odd feeling of
+dismay smote her. For that one fleeting moment there seemed, to be
+something of the cornered beast in his aspect.
+
+But as he came straight down to Crowther and wrung his hand, his dark
+face was smiling a welcome. He was in riding-dress, and looked very
+handsome and young.
+
+"How did you know it was I? Awfully pleased to see you! Sorry I couldn't
+get back sooner. I've been riding like the devil. Avery explained, did
+she?" He threw himself into a chair, and tossed an envelope into her lap.
+"An invitation to Ina Rose's wedding on the twenty-third. That's the week
+after next. They are sorry they can't manage to call before, hope you'll
+understand and go. I said you should do both."
+
+"Thank you, Piers." Avery laid the envelope aside unopened. She did not
+feel that he was being very cordial to Crowther. "I am not sure that I
+shall go."
+
+"Oh yes, you will," he rejoined quickly. "You must. It's an order, see?"
+His dark eyes laughed at her, but there was more than a tinge of
+imperiousness in his manner. "Well, Crowther, how are you? Getting ready
+to scatter the Philistines? Don't give me milk, Avery! You know I hate it
+at this time of day."
+
+She looked at him in surprise. He had never used that impatient tone
+to her before. "I didn't know," she observed simply, as she handed
+him his cup.
+
+"Well, you know now," he rejoined with an irritable frown. "Hurry up,
+Crowther! I want you to come and see the crops."
+
+Avery was literally amazed by his manner. He had never been so frankly
+and unjustifiably rude to her before. She came to the conclusion that
+something had happened at the Roses' to annoy him; but that he should
+visit his annoyance upon her was a wholly new experience.
+
+He drank his tea, talking hard to Crowther the while, and finally sprang
+to his feet as if in a ferment to be gone.
+
+"Won't Lady Evesham come too?" asked Crowther, as he rose.
+
+Avery rose also. "Yes, I have promised the children to join them in the
+cornfield," she said.
+
+Piers said nothing; but she had a very distinct impression that he would
+have preferred her to remain behind. The wonder crossed her mind if he
+were jealous because he could no longer have her exclusively to himself.
+
+They walked down through the park to the farm. It was a splendid August
+evening. The reaping was still in progress, and the whirr of the machine
+rose slumbrous through the stillness. But of the Vicarage children there
+was at first no sign.
+
+Avery searched for them in surprise. She had sent a picnic basket down to
+the farm earlier in the afternoon, and she had expected to find them
+enjoying the contents thereof in a shady corner. But for a time she
+searched in vain.
+
+"They must have gone home," said Piers.
+
+But she did not believe they would have left without seeing her, and she
+went to the farm to make enquiries.
+
+Here she heard that the picnic-party had taken place and that the basket
+had been brought back by one of the men, but for some reason the children
+had evidently gone home early, for they had not been seen since.
+
+Avery wanted to run to the Vicarage and ascertain if all were well, but
+Piers vetoed this.
+
+"It's too hot," he said. "And you'll only come in for some row with the
+Reverend Stephen. I won't have you go, Avery. Stay with us!"
+
+His tone was peremptory, and Avery realized that his assumption of
+authority was intentional. A rebellious spirit awoke within her, but she
+checked it. Something had gone wrong, she was sure. He would tell her
+presently what it was.
+
+She yielded therefore to his desire and remained with them. They spent a
+considerable time in the neighbourhood of the farm, in all of which
+Crowther took a keen interest. Avery tried to be interested too, but
+Piers' behaviour troubled and perplexed her. He seemed to be all on edge,
+and more than once his manner to Crowther also verged upon abruptness.
+
+They were leaving the farm to turn homeward when there came to Avery the
+sound of flying feet along the lane outside. She went to the gate, and
+beheld Gracie, her face crimson with heat, racing towards her.
+
+Avery moved to meet her, surprised by her sudden appearance. She was
+still more surprised when Gracie reached her, flung tempestuous arms
+about her, and broke into stormy crying on her breast.
+
+"My dear! My dear! What has happened?" Avery asked in distress.
+
+But Gracie was for the moment quite beyond speech. She hung upon Avery,
+crying as if her heart would break.
+
+Piers came swiftly down the path. "Why, Pixie, what's the matter?" he
+said.
+
+He put his hand on her shoulder, drawing her gently to lean against
+himself, for in her paroxysm of weeping she had thrown herself upon Avery
+with childish unrestraint.
+
+"Who's been bullying you, Pixie?" he said.
+
+"Nobody! Nobody!" sobbed Gracie. She transferred herself to his arms
+almost mechanically, so overwhelming was her woe. "Oh, it's dreadful!
+It's dreadful!" she cried.
+
+He patted her soothingly, his cheek against her fair hair. "Well, what is
+it, kiddie? Let's hear! One of the youngsters in trouble, what? Not
+Jeanie, I say?"
+
+"No, no, no! It's--Mike." The name came out with a great burst of tears.
+
+"Mike!" Piers looked at Avery, mystified for the moment. "Ah, to be sure!
+The dog! Well, what's happened to him? He isn't dead, what?"
+
+"He is! He is!" sobbed Gracie. "He--he has been killed--by--by his
+own chain!"
+
+"What!" said Piers again.
+
+Gaspingly she told him the tragic tale. "Father always will have him kept
+on the chain, and--and--"
+
+"An infernally cruel thing to do!" broke indignantly from Piers.
+
+"Yes, we--we all said so. And we tried to give him little outings
+sometimes to--to make up. But to-day--somehow--we forgot him, and--and he
+must have seen us go, and jumped the wall after us. Pat and I went back
+afterwards to fetch him, and found him--found him--oh, Piers!" She cried
+out in sudden agony and said no more.
+
+"Choked?" said Piers. "Choked with his own chain, poor devil!" He looked
+up again at Avery with something unfathomable in his eyes. "Oh, don't cry
+so, child!" he said. "A chained creature is happier dead--a thousand
+times happier!"
+
+He spoke passionately, so passionately that Gracie's wild grief was
+stayed. She lifted her face, all streaming with tears. "Do you think
+so really?"
+
+"Of course I think so," he said. "Life on a chain is misery unspeakable.
+No one with any heart could condemn a dog to that! It's the refinement of
+cruelty. Don't wish the poor beast back again! Be thankful he's gone!"
+
+The vehemence of his speech was such that it carried conviction even to
+Gracie's torn heart. She looked up at him with something of wonder and of
+awe. "If only--he hadn't suffered so!" she whispered.
+
+He put his hand on her forehead and smoothed back the clustering hair.
+"You poor kid!" he said pityingly. "You've suffered much more than he did
+at the end. But it's over. Don't fret! Don't fret!"
+
+Gracie lifted trembling lips to be kissed. He was drying her eyes with
+his own handkerchief as tenderly as any woman. He stooped and kissed her.
+"Look here! I'll walk home with you," he said. "Avery, you go back with
+Crowther! I shan't be late."
+
+Avery turned at once. The sight of Piers soothing the little girl's
+distress had comforted her subtly. She felt that his mood had softened.
+
+"Won't you go too?" said Crowther, as she joined him. "Please don't stay
+on my account! I am used to being alone, and I can find my own way back."
+
+"Oh no!" she said. "I had better come with you. I shan't be wanted now."
+
+They started to walk back among the shocks of corn; but they had not gone
+many yards when Gracie came running after them, reached them, flung her
+arms about Avery.
+
+"Good-bye, darling Avery!" she said.
+
+Avery held her close. She was sobbing still, but the first wild anguish
+of her grief was past.
+
+"Good-bye, darling!" Avery whispered, after a moment.
+
+Gracie's arms tightened. "You think like Piers does?" she murmured. "You
+think poor Mikey is happier now?"
+
+Avery paused an instant. The memory of Piers' look as he had uttered the
+words: "Choked with his own chain, poor devil!" seemed to grip her heart.
+Then: "Yes, dearie," she said softly. "I think as Piers does. I am
+glad--for poor Mikey's sake--that his troubles are over."
+
+"Then I'll try and be glad too," sobbed poor Gracie. "But it's very, very
+difficult. Pat and I loved him so, and he--he loved us."
+
+"My dear, that love won't die," Avery said gently.
+
+"The gift immortal," said Crowther. "The only thing that counts."
+
+She looked round at him quickly, but his eyes were gazing straight into
+the sunset--steadfast eyes that saw to the very heart of things.
+
+"And Life in Death," he added quietly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PRISONER IN THE DUNGEON
+
+
+Avery was already dressed when she heard Piers enter his room and say a
+word to Victor. She stood by her window waiting. It was growing late, but
+she felt sure he would come to her.
+
+She heard Victor bustling about in his resilient fashion, and again
+Piers' voice, somewhat curt and peremptory, reached her through the
+closed door. He was evidently dressing at full speed. She was conscious
+of a sense of disappointment, though she kept it at bay, reminding
+herself that they must not keep their guest waiting.
+
+But presently, close upon the dinner-hour, she went herself to the door
+of her husband's room and knocked.
+
+His voice answered her immediately, but it still held that unwonted
+quality of irritation in it. "Oh, Avery, I can't let you in. I'm sorry.
+Victor's here."
+
+Something--a small, indignant spirit--sprang up within her in response.
+"Send Victor away!" she said. "I want to come in."
+
+"I shall be late if I do," he made answer. "I'm horribly late as it is."
+
+But for once Avery's habitual docility was in abeyance. "Send Victor
+away!" she reiterated.
+
+She heard Piers utter an impatient word, and then in a moment or two he
+raised his voice again. "Come in then! What is it?"
+
+She opened the door with an odd unaccustomed feeling of trepidation.
+
+He was standing in his shirt-sleeves brushing his hair vigorously at the
+table. His back was towards her, but the glass reflected his face, and
+she saw that his brows were drawn into a single hard black line. His lips
+were tightly compressed. He looked undeniably formidable.
+
+"Don't you want me, Piers?" she asked, pausing in the doorway.
+
+His eyes flashed up to hers in the glass, glowing with the smouldering
+fire, oddly fitful, oddly persistent. "Come in!" he said, without
+turning. "What is it?"
+
+She went forward to him. "Did you go to the Vicarage?" she asked. "Are
+they in great trouble?"
+
+She thought she saw relief in his face at her words. "Oh yes," he said.
+"Mrs. Lorimer crying as usual, Jeanie trying to comfort her. I did my
+best to hearten them up but you know what they are. I say, sit down!"
+
+"No, I am going," she answered gently. "Did you get on all right this
+afternoon?"
+
+"Oh yes," he said again. "By the way, we must get a wedding-present for
+Ina Rose and another for Guyes. You'll come to the wedding, Avery?"
+
+"If you wish it, dear," she said quietly.
+
+He threw down his brushes and turned fully to her. "Avery darling, I'm
+sorry I was bearish this afternoon. You won't punish me for it?"
+
+"Punish you, my own Piers!" she said.
+
+"Because I can't stand it," he said recklessly. "There are certain forms
+of torture that drive a man crazy. Bear with me--all you can!"
+
+His quick pleading touched her, went straight to her heart. She put her
+hands on his shoulders, lifting her face for his kiss. "It's all right,
+dear," she said.
+
+"Is it?" he said. "Is it?" He took her face between his hands, gazing
+down at her with eyes of passionate craving. "Say you love me!" he urged
+her suddenly. "Say it!"
+
+Her heart sank within her. She made a movement as if to withdraw herself;
+but he caught her fiercely to him, his hot lips sought and held her own.
+She felt as if a flame encompassed her, scorching her, consuming her.
+
+"Say you love me!" he whispered again between those fiery kisses.
+"Avery, I must have your soul as well. Do more than bear with me! Want
+me--want me!"
+
+There was more than passion in the words. They came to her like a cry of
+torment. She braced herself to meet his need, realizing it to be greater
+than she knew.
+
+"Piers! Piers!" she said. "I am altogether yours. I love you. Don't
+you know it?"
+
+He drew a deep, quivering breath. "Yes--yes, I do know it," he said.
+"But--but--Avery, I would go through hell for you. You are my religion,
+my life, my all. I am not that to you. If--if I were dragged down, you
+wouldn't follow me in."
+
+His intensity shocked her, but she would not have him know it. She
+sought to calm his agitation though she possessed no key thereto. "My
+dear," she said, "you are talking wildly. You don't know what you are to
+me, and I can't even begin to tell you. But surely--by now--you can take
+me on trust."
+
+He made a curious sound that was half-laugh, half-groan. "You don't know
+yourself, Avery," he said.
+
+"But you don't doubt my love, Piers," she protested very earnestly. "You
+know that it would never fail you."
+
+"Your love is like the moonlight, Avery," he answered. "It is all
+whiteness and purity. But mine--mine is red like the fire that is
+under the earth. And though sometimes it scorches you, it never quite
+reaches you. You stoop to me, but you can't lift me. You are too far
+above. And the moonlight doesn't always reach to the prisoner in the
+dungeon either."
+
+"All the same dear, don't be afraid that it will ever fail you!" she
+said.
+
+He kissed her again, hotly, lingeringly, and let her go. "Perhaps I shall
+remind you of that one day," he said.
+
+All through dinner his spirits were recklessly high. He talked
+incessantly, playing the host with a brilliant ease that betrayed no sign
+of strain. He did not seem to have a care in the world, and Avery
+marvelled at his versatility.
+
+She herself felt weary and strangely sick at heart. Those few words of
+his had been a bitter revelation to her. She knew now what was wanting
+between them. He desired passion from her rather than love. He had no use
+for spiritual things. And she,--she knew that she shrank inwardly
+whenever she encountered that fierce, untamed desire of his. It fettered
+her spirit, it hung upon her like an overpowering weight. She could not
+satisfy his wild Southern nature. He crushed her love with the very
+fierceness of his possession and ever cried to her for more. He seemed
+insatiable. Even though she gave him all she had, he still hungered,
+still strove feverishly to possess himself of something further.
+
+She felt worn out, body and soul, and she could not hide it. She was
+unspeakably glad when at length the meal was over and she was able to
+leave the table.
+
+Crowther opened the door for her, looking at her with eyes of kindly
+criticism.
+
+"You look tired," he said. "I hope you don't sit up late."
+
+She smiled at him. "Oh no! We will make Piers play to us presently, and
+then I will say good-night."
+
+"Then we mustn't keep you waiting long," he said. "So Piers is a
+musician, is he? I didn't know."
+
+"You had better go to bed, Avery; it's late," said Piers abruptly. "I
+can't play to-night. The spirit doesn't move me." He rose from the table
+with a careless laugh. "Say good-night to her, Crowther, and let her go!
+We will smoke in the garden."
+
+There was finality in his tone, its lightness notwithstanding. Again
+there came to Avery the impulse to rebel, and again instinctively she
+caught it back. She held out her hand to Crowther.
+
+"I am dismissed then," she said. "Good-night!"
+
+His smile answered hers. He looked regretful, but very kindly. "I am glad
+to see Piers takes care of you," he said.
+
+She laughed a little drearily as she went away, making no other response.
+
+Crowther turned back to the table with its shaded candles and gleaming
+wine. He saw that Piers' glass was practically untouched.
+
+Piers himself was searching a cabinet for cigars. He found what he
+sought, and turned round with the box in his hand.
+
+"I don't know what you generally smoke," he said. "Will you try one of
+these? It's a hot night. We may as well have coffee in the garden."
+
+He seemed possessed with a spirit of restlessness, just as he had been on
+that night at the Casino in the spring. Crowther, massive and
+self-contained, observed him silently.
+
+They went out on to the terrace, and drank their coffee in the dewy
+stillness. But even there Piers could not sit still. He prowled to and
+fro eternally, till Crowther set down his cup and joined him, pushing a
+quiet hand through his arm.
+
+"It's a lovely place you've got here, sonny," he said; "a regular garden
+of Paradise. I almost envy you."
+
+"Oh, you needn't do that. There's a serpent in every Eden," said Piers,
+with a mirthless laugh.
+
+He did not seek to keep Crowther at arm's length, but neither did he
+seem inclined for any closer intimacy. His attitude neither invited nor
+repelled confidence. Yet Crowther knew intuitively that his very
+indifference was in itself a barrier that might well prove
+insurmountable.
+
+He walked in silence while Piers talked intermittently of various
+impersonal matters, drifting at length into silence himself.
+
+In the western wing of the house a light burned at an upper window, and
+Crowther, still quietly observant, noted how at each turn Piers' eyes
+went to that light as though drawn by some magnetic force.
+
+Gently at length he spoke. "She doesn't look altogether robust, sonny."
+
+Piers started sharply as if something had pricked him. "What? Avery do
+you mean? No, she isn't over and above strong--just now."
+
+He uttered the last two words as if reluctantly, yet as if some measure
+of pride impelled him.
+
+Crowther's hand pressed his arm, in mute sympathy. "You are right to
+take care of her," he said simply. "And Piers, my lad, I want to tell you
+how glad I was to know that you were able to win her after all. I somehow
+felt you would."
+
+It was his first attempt to pass that intangible barrier, and it failed.
+Piers disregarded the words as if they had not reached him.
+
+"I don't know if I shall let her stay here through the winter," he said.
+"I am not sure that the place suits her. It's damp, you know; good
+hunting and so on, but a bit depressing in bad weather. Besides I'd
+rather have her under a town doctor. The new heir arrives in March," he
+said, with a slight laugh that struck Crowther as unconsciously pathetic.
+
+"I'm very pleased to hear it, sonny," said Crowther. "May he be
+the first of many! What does Avery think about it? I'll warrant
+she's pleased?"
+
+"Oh yes, she's pleased enough."
+
+"And you, lad?"
+
+"Oh yes, I'm pleased too," said Piers, but his tone lacked complete
+satisfaction and he added after a moment, "I'd rather have had her to
+myself a bit longer. I'm a selfish brute, you know, Crowther. I want all
+I can get--and even that's hardly enough to keep me from starvation."
+
+There was a note of banter in his voice, but there was something else as
+well that touched Crowther's kindly heart.
+
+"I don't think Avery is the sort of woman to sacrifice her husband to her
+children," he said. "You will always come first, sonny,--if I know her."
+
+"I couldn't endure anything else," said Piers, with sudden fire. "She is
+the mainspring of my life."
+
+"And you of hers," said Crowther.
+
+Piers stopped dead in his walk and faced him. "No,--no, I'm not!" he
+said, speaking quickly, unrestrainedly. "I'm a good deal to her, but I'm
+not that. She gives, but she never offers. If I went off on a journey
+round the world to-morrow, she'd see me go quite cheerfully, and she'd
+wait serenely till I came back again. She'd never fret. Above all, she'd
+never dream of coming to look for me."
+
+The passionate utterance went into a sound that resembled a laugh, but it
+was a sound of such bitterness that Crowther was strongly moved.
+
+He put his hand on Piers' shoulder and gave it an admonitory shake. "My
+dear lad, don't be a fool!" he said, with slow force. "You're consuming
+your own happiness--and hers too. You can't measure a woman's feelings
+like that. They are immeasurable. You can't even begin to fathom a
+woman's restraint--a woman's reserve. How can she offer when you are
+always demanding? As to her love, it is probably as infinitely great, as
+infinitely deep, as infinitely selfless, as yours is passionate, and
+fierce and insatiable. There are big possibilities in you, Piers; but
+you're not letting 'em grow. It would have done you good to have been
+kept waiting ten years or more. You're spoilt; that's what's the matter
+with you. You got your heart's desire too easily. You think this world is
+your own damn playground. And it isn't. Understand? You're put here to
+work, not play; to develop yourself, not batten on other people. You won
+her like a man in the face of desperate odds. You paid a heavy price for
+her. But even so, you don't deserve to keep her if you forget that she
+has paid too. By Heaven, Piers, she must have loved you a mighty lot to
+have done it!"
+
+He paused, for Piers had made a sharp, involuntary movement as of a man
+in intolerable pain. He almost wrenched himself from Crowther's hand, and
+walked to the low wall of the terrace. Here he stood for many seconds
+quite motionless, gazing down over the quiet garden.
+
+Finally he swung round, and looked at Crowther. "Yes," he said, in an odd
+tone as of one repeating something learned by heart. "I've got to
+remember that, haven't I? Thanks for--reminding me!" He stopped, seemed
+to collect himself, moved slowly forward. "You're a good chap, Crowther,"
+he said. "I wonder you've never got married yourself, what?"
+
+Crowther waited for him quietly, in his eyes that look of the man who has
+gazed for long over the wide spaces of the earth.
+
+"I never married, sonny," he said, "because I had nothing to offer to the
+woman I cared for, and so--she never knew."
+
+"By gad, old chap, I'm sorry," said Piers impulsively.
+
+Crowther held out a steady hand. "I'm happy enough," he said simply.
+"I've got--all I want."
+
+"All?" echoed Piers incredulously.
+
+Crowther was smiling. He lifted his face to the night sky. "Yes,--thank
+God,--all!" he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SWORD FALLS
+
+
+As Miss Whalley had predicted, Ina Rose's wedding was a very grand affair
+indeed. Everyone who was anyone attended it, and a good many besides. It
+took place in the midst of a spell of sultry weather, during which the
+sun shone day after day with brazen strength and the heat was intense.
+
+It was the sort of weather Piers revelled in. It suited his tropical
+nature. But it affected Avery very differently. All her customary energy
+wilted before it, and yet she was strangely restless also. A great
+reluctance to attend the wedding possessed her, wherefore she could not
+have said. But for some reason Piers was determined that she should go.
+He was even somewhat tyrannical on the subject, and rather than have a
+discussion Avery had yielded the point. For Piers was oddly difficult in
+those days. Crowther's visit, which had barely run into forty-eight
+hours, seemed to have had a disquieting effect upon him. There had
+developed a curious, new-born mastery in his attitude towards her, which
+she sometimes found it hard to endure. She missed the chivalry of the
+early days. She missed the sweetness of his boyish adoration.
+
+She did not understand him, but she knew that he was not happy. He never
+took her into his confidence, never alluded by word or sign to the change
+which he must have realized that she could not fail to notice. And Avery
+on her part made no further effort to open the door that was so
+strenuously locked against her. With an aching heart she gave herself to
+the weary task of waiting, convinced that sooner or later the nature of
+the barrier which he so stubbornly ignored would be revealed to her. But
+it was impossible to extend her full confidence to him. Moreover, he
+seemed to shrink from all intimate subjects. Instinctively and wholly
+involuntarily she withdrew into herself, meeting reserve with reserve.
+Since he had become master rather than lover, she yielded him obedience,
+and she hid away her love, not deliberately or intentionally, but rather
+with the impulse to protect from outrage that which was holy. He was not
+asking love of her just then.
+
+She saw but little of him during the day. He was busy on the estate, busy
+with the coming election, busy with a hundred and one matters that
+evidently occupied his thoughts very fully. The heat seemed to imbue him
+with inexhaustible energy. He never seemed tired after the most strenuous
+exertion. He never slacked for a moment or seemed to have a moment to
+spare till the day was done. He was generally late for meals, and always
+raced through them at a speed that Avery was powerless to emulate.
+
+He was late on the day of Ina Rose's wedding, so late that Avery, who had
+dressed in good time and was lying on the sofa in her room, began to
+wonder if he had after all abandoned the idea of going. But she presently
+heard him race into his own room, and immediately there came the active
+patter of Victor's feet as he waited upon him.
+
+She lay still, listening, wishing that the wedding were over, morbidly
+dreading the heat and crush and excitement which she knew awaited her and
+to which she felt utterly unequal.
+
+A quarter of an hour passed, then impetuously, without preliminary, her
+door opened and Piers stood on the threshold. He had the light behind
+him, for Avery had lowered the blinds, and so seeing him she was
+conscious of a sudden thrill of admiration. For he stood before her like
+a prince. She had never seen him look more handsome, more patrician, more
+tragically like that woman in the picture-frame downstairs who smiled so
+perpetually upon them both.
+
+He came to her with his light, athletic tread, stooped, and lifted her
+bodily in his arms. He held her a moment before he set her on her feet,
+and then in his hot, fierce way he kissed her.
+
+"You beautiful ghost!" he said.
+
+She leaned against him, breathing rather hard. "I wish--I wish we needn't
+go," she said.
+
+"Why?" said Piers.
+
+He held her to him, gazing down at her with his eyes of fiery possession
+that always made her close her own.
+
+"Because--because it's so hot," she said quiveringly. "There will be no
+one I know there. And I--and I--"
+
+"That's just why you are going," he broke in. "Don't you know it will be
+your introduction to the County? You've got to find your footing, Avery.
+I'm not going to have my wife overlooked by anyone."
+
+"Oh, my dear," she said, with a faint laugh, "I don't care two straws
+about the County. They've seen me once already, most of them,--in a ditch
+and covered with mud. If they want to renew the acquaintance they can
+come and call."
+
+He kissed her again with lips that crushed her own. "We won't stay longer
+than we can help," he said. "You ought to go out more, you know. It isn't
+good for you to stay in this gloomy old vault all day. We will really get
+to work and make it more habitable presently. But I've got such a lot on
+hand just now."
+
+"I know," she said quietly. "Please don't bother about me! Lunch is
+waiting for us. Shall we go?"
+
+He gave her a quick, keen look, as if he suspected her of trying to
+elude him; but he let her go without a word.
+
+They descended to lunch, and later went forth into the blazing sunshine
+where the car awaited them. Avery sank back into the corner and closed
+her eyes. Her head was aching violently. The sense of reluctance that had
+possessed her for so long amounted almost to a premonition of evil.
+
+"Avery!" Her husband's voice, curt, imperious, with just a tinge of
+anxiety broke in upon her. "Are you feeling faint or anything?"
+
+She looked at him. He was watching her with a frown between his eyes.
+
+"No, I am not faint," she said. "The heat makes my head ache,
+that's all."
+
+"You ought to see a doctor," he said restlessly. "But not that ass,
+Tudor. We'll go up to town to-morrow. Avery," his voice softened
+suddenly, "I'm sorry I dragged you here if you didn't want to come."
+
+She put out her hand to him instantly. It was the old Piers who had
+spoken, Piers the boy-lover who had won her heart so irresistibly, so
+completely.
+
+He held the hand tightly, and she thought his face quivered a little as
+he said: "I don't mean to be a tyrant, dear. But somehow--somehow, you
+know--I can't always help it. A man with a raging thirst will
+take--anything he can get."
+
+His eyes were still upon her, and her heart quickened to compassion at
+their look. They seemed to cry to her for mercy out of a depth of
+suffering that she could not bear to contemplate.
+
+She leaned swiftly towards him. "Piers,--my dear--what is it? What is
+it?" she said, under her breath.
+
+But in that instant the look vanished. The old fierce flare of passion
+blazed forth upon her, held her burningly, till finally she drew back
+before it in mute protest. "So you will forgive me," he said, in a tone
+that seemed to contain something of a jeering quality. "We are all human,
+what? You're looking better now. Egad, Avery, you're splendid!"
+
+Her heart died within her. She turned her face away, as one ashamed.
+
+The church at Wardenhurst was thronged with a chattering crowd of guests.
+Piers and Avery arrived late, so late that they had some difficulty in
+finding seats. Tudor, who was present and looking grimly disgusted with
+himself, spied them at length, and gave up his place to Avery.
+
+The bride entered almost immediately afterwards, young, lovely, with the
+air of a queen passing through her subjects. Dick Guyes at the altar was
+shaking with nervousness, but Ina was supremely self-possessed. She even
+sent a smile of casual greeting to Piers as she went.
+
+She maintained her attitude of complete _sang-froid_ throughout the
+service, and Piers watched her critically with that secret smile at the
+corners of his lips which was not good to see.
+
+He did not seem aware of anyone else in the church till the service was
+over, and the strains of the Wedding March were crashing through the
+building. Then very suddenly he turned and looked at his wife--with that
+in his dark eyes that thrilled her to the soul.
+
+A man's voice accosted him somewhat abruptly. "Are you Sir Piers Evesham?
+I'm the best man. They want you to sign the register."
+
+Piers started as one rudely awakened from an entrancing dream. An
+impatient exclamation rose to his lips which he suppressed rather badly.
+He surveyed the man who addressed him with a touch of hauteur.
+
+Avery surveyed him also, and as not very favourably impressed. He was a
+small man with thick sandy eyebrows and shifty uncertain eyes. He looked
+hard at Piers in answer to the latter's haughty regard, and Avery became
+aware of a sudden sharp change in his demeanour as he did so. He opened
+his eyes and stared in blank astonishment.
+
+"Hullo!" he ejaculated softly. "You!"
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Piers.
+
+It was a challenge, albeit spoken in an undertone. He stood like a man
+transfixed as he uttered it. There came to Avery a quick hot impulse to
+intervene, to protect him from some hidden danger, she knew not what,
+that had risen like a serpent in his path. But before she could take any
+action, the critical moment was passed. Piers had recovered himself.
+
+He stepped forward. "All right. I will come," he said.
+
+She watched him move away in the direction of the vestry with that free,
+proud gait of his, and a great coldness came down upon her, wrapping her
+round, penetrating to her very soul. Who was that man with the shifty
+eyes? Why had he stared at Piers so? Above all, why had Piers stood with
+that stiff immobility of shock as though he had been stabbed in the back?
+
+A voice spoke close to her. "Lady Evesham, come and wait by the door!
+There is more air there."
+
+She turned her head mechanically, and looked at Lennox Tudor with eyes
+that saw not. There was a singing in her ears that made the crashing
+chords of the organ sound confused and jumbled.
+
+His hand closed firmly, sustainingly, upon her elbow.
+
+"Come with me!" he said.
+
+She went with him blindly, unconscious of the curious eyes that
+watched her go.
+
+He led her quietly down the church and into the porch. The air from
+outside, albeit hot and sultry, was less oppressive than within. She drew
+great breaths of relief as it reached her. The icy grip at her heart
+seemed to relax.
+
+Tudor watched her narrowly. "What madness brought you here?" he said
+presently, as she turned at last and mustered a smile of thanks.
+
+She countered the question. "I might ask you the same," she said.
+
+His eyes contracted behind the shielding glasses. "So you might," he said
+briefly. "Well,--I came on the chance of meeting you."
+
+"Of meeting me!" She looked at him in surprise.
+
+He nodded. "Just so. I want a word with you; but it can't be said here.
+Give me an opportunity later if you can!"
+
+His hand fell away from her elbow, he drew back. The bridal procession
+was coming down the church.
+
+Ina was flushed and laughing. Dick Guyes still obviously nervous, but,
+also obviously, supremely happy. They went by Avery into a perfect storm
+of rose-leaves that awaited them from the crowd outside. Yet for one
+moment the eyes of the bride rested upon Avery, meeting hers almost as if
+they would ask her a question. And behind her--immediately behind
+her--came Piers.
+
+His eyes also found Avery, and in an instant with a haughty disregard of
+Tudor, he had swept her forward with him, his arm thrust imperially
+through hers. They also weathered the storm of rose-leaves, and as they
+went Avery heard him laugh,--the laugh of the man who fights with his
+back to the wall.
+
+They were among the first to offer congratulations to the bride and
+bridegroom, and again Avery was aware of the girl's eyes searching hers.
+
+"I haven't forgotten you," she said, as they shook hands. "I knew you
+would be Lady Evesham sooner or later after that day when you kept the
+whole Hunt at bay."
+
+Avery felt herself flush. There seemed to her to be a covert insinuation
+in the remark. "I was very grateful to you for taking my part," she said.
+
+"It was rather generous certainly," agreed the bride coolly. "Dick, do
+get off my train! You're horribly clumsy to-day."
+
+The bridegroom hastened to remove himself to a respectful distance, while
+Ina turned her pretty cheek to Piers. "You may salute the bride," she
+said graciously. "It's the only opportunity you will ever have."
+
+Piers kissed the cheek as airily as it was proffered, his dark eyes
+openly mocking. "Good luck to you, Ina!" he said lightly. "I wish you the
+first and best of all that's most worth having."
+
+Her red lips curled in answer. "You are superlatively kind," she said.
+
+Other guests came crowding round with congratulations, and they moved on.
+
+Piers knew everyone there, and presented one after another to his wife
+till she felt absolutely bewildered. He did not present the best man, who
+to her relief seemed disposed to keep out of their way. She wondered
+greatly if anything had passed between him and Piers, though by the
+latter at least the incident seemed to be wholly forgotten. He was in his
+gayest, most sparkling mood, and she could not fail to see that he was
+very popular whichever way he turned. People kept claiming his attention,
+and though he tried to remain near her he was drawn away at last by the
+bridegroom himself.
+
+Avery looked round her then for a quiet corner where Tudor might
+find her if he so desired, but while she was searching she came upon
+Tudor himself.
+
+He joined her immediately, with evident relief. "For Heaven's sake, let
+us get away from this gibbering crowd!" he said. "They are like a horde
+of painted monkeys. Come alone to the library! I don't think there are
+many people there."
+
+Avery accompanied him, equally thankful to escape. They found the
+library deserted, and Tudor made her sit down by the window in the most
+comfortable chair the room contained.
+
+"You look about as fit for this sort of show as Mrs. Lorimer," he
+observed drily. "She had the sense to stay away."
+
+"I couldn't," Avery said.
+
+"For goodness' sake," he exclaimed roughly, "don't let that young ruffian
+tyrannize over you! You will never know any peace if you do."
+
+Avery smiled a little and was silent.
+
+"Why are you so painfully thin?" he pursued relentlessly. "What's
+the matter with you? When I saw you in church just now I had a
+positive shock."
+
+She put out her hand to him. "I am quite all right," she assured him,
+still faintly smiling. "I should have sent for you if I hadn't been."
+
+"It's high time you sent for me now," said Tudor.
+
+He looked at her searchingly through his glasses, holding her hand firmly
+clasped in his.
+
+"Are you happy?" he asked her suddenly.
+
+She started at the question, started and flushed. "Why--why do you ask me
+that?" she said in confusion.
+
+"Because you don't look it," he said plainly. "No, don't be vexed with
+me! I speak as a friend--a friend who desires your happiness more than
+anything else on earth. And do you know, I think I should see a doctor
+pretty soon if I were you. If you don't, you will probably regret it. Get
+Piers to take you up to town! Maxwell Wyndham is about the best man I
+know. Go to him!"
+
+"Thank you," Avery said. "Perhaps I will."
+
+It was at this point that a sudden uproarious laugh sounded from
+below the window near which they sat, Avery looked round startled,
+and Tudor frowned.
+
+"It's that little brute of a best man--drunk as a lord. He's some sort
+of cousin of Guyes', just home from Australia; and the sooner he goes
+back the better for the community at large, I should say."
+
+"Piers knows him!" broke almost involuntarily from Avery.
+
+And with that swiftly she turned her head to listen, for the man outside
+had evidently gathered to himself an audience at the entrance of a tent
+that had been erected for refreshments, and was declaiming at the top of
+his voice.
+
+"Eric Denys was the name of the man. He was a chum of mine. Samson we
+used to call him. This Evesham fellow killed him in the first round. I've
+never forgotten it. I recognized him the minute I set eyes on him, though
+it's years ago now. And he recognized me! I wish you'd seen his face."
+Again came the uncontrolled, ribald laughter. "A bully sort of squire,
+eh? I suppose he's a justice of the peace now, a law-giver, eh? Damn
+funny, I call it!"
+
+Tudor was on his feet. He looked at Avery, but she sat like a statue,
+making no sign.
+
+Another man was speaking in a lower tone, as though he were trying to
+restrain the first; but his efforts were plainly useless, for the best
+man had more to say.
+
+"Oh, I can tell you a Queensland crowd is no joke. He'd have been
+manhandled if he hadn't bolted. Mistaken? Not I! Could anyone mistake a
+face like that? Go and ask the man himself, if you don't believe me!
+You'll find he won't deny it!"
+
+"Shall we go?" suggested Tudor brusquely.
+
+Avery made a slight movement, wholly mechanical; but she did not turn her
+head. Her whole attitude was one of tense listening.
+
+"I think I'll go in any case," said Tudor, after a moment. "That fellow
+will make an exhibition of himself if someone doesn't interfere."
+
+He went to the door, but before he reached it Avery turned in her chair
+and spoke.
+
+"He has gone inside for another drink. You had better let him have it."
+
+There was that in her voice that he had never heard before. He stopped
+short, looking back at her.
+
+"Let him have it!" she reiterated. "Let him soak himself with it! You
+won't quiet him any other way."
+
+Even as she spoke, that horrible, half-intoxicated laugh came to
+them, insulting the beauty of the summer afternoon. Avery shivered
+from head to foot.
+
+"Don't go!" she said. "Please!"
+
+She rose as Tudor came back, rose and faced him, her face like death.
+
+"I think I must go home," she said. "Will you find the car? No, I am not
+ill. I--" She paused, seemed to grope for words, stopped, and suddenly a
+bewildered look came into her face. Her eyes dilated. She gave a sharp
+gasp. Tudor caught her as she fell.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE MASK
+
+
+The bride and bridegroom departed amid a storm of rice and good wishes,
+Ina's face still wearing that slightly contemptuous smile to the last.
+Piers, in the foremost of the crowd, threw a handful straight into her
+lap as the car started, but only he and Dick Guyes saw her gather it up
+with sudden energy and fling it back in his face.
+
+Piers dropped off the step laughing. "Ye gods! What fun for Dick
+Guyes!" he said.
+
+A hand grasped his shoulder, and he turned and saw Lennox Tudor.
+
+"Hullo!" he said, sharply freeing himself.
+
+"I want a word with you," said Tudor briefly.
+
+A wary look came into Piers' face on the instant. He looked at Tudor with
+the measuring eye of a fencer.
+
+"What about?" he asked.
+
+"I can't tell you here. Will you walk back with me? Lady Evesham has
+already gone in the car."
+
+Piers' black brows went up, "Why was that? Wasn't she well?"
+
+"No," said Tudor curtly.
+
+"But she will send the car back," said Piers, stubbornly refusing to
+betray himself.
+
+"No, she won't. I told her we would walk."
+
+"The devil you did!" said Piers.
+
+He turned his back on Tudor, and went into the house.
+
+But Tudor was undaunted. In a battle of wills, he was fully a match for
+Piers. He kept close behind.
+
+Eventually, Piers turned upon him. "Look here! I'll give you five minutes
+in the library. I'm not going to walk three miles with you in this
+blazing heat. It would be damned unhealthy for us both. Moreover, I've
+promised to spend the evening with Colonel Rose."
+
+It was the utmost he could hope for, and Tudor had the sense to accept
+what he could get. He followed him to the library in silence.
+
+They found it empty, and Tudor quietly turned the key.
+
+"What's that for?" demanded Piers sharply.
+
+"Because I don't want to be disturbed," returned Tudor.
+
+He moved forward into the middle of the room and faced Piers.
+
+"I have an unpleasant piece of news for you," he said, in a grim,
+emotionless voice. "That cousin of Guyes'--you have met him before, I
+think? He claims to know something of your past, and he has been
+talking--somewhat freely."
+
+"What has he been saying?" said Piers.
+
+He stood up before Tudor with the arrogance of a man who mocks defeat,
+but there was a gleam of desperation in his eyes--something of the
+cornered animal in his very nonchalance.
+
+A queer touch of pity moved Tudor from his attitude of cold informer.
+There was an undercurrent of something that was almost sympathy in his
+voice as he made reply.
+
+"The fellow was more or less drunk, but I am afraid he was rather
+circumstantial. He recognized in you a man who had killed some chum of
+his years ago, in Queensland."
+
+"Well?" said Piers.
+
+Just the one word, uttered like a command! Tudor's softer impulse passed.
+
+"He was bawling it out at the top of his voice. A good many people must
+have heard him. I was in this room with Lady Evesham. We heard also."
+
+"Well?" Piers said again.
+
+He spoke without stirring an eyelid, and again, involuntarily, Tudor was
+moved, this time with a species of unwilling admiration. The fellow was
+no coward at least.
+
+He went on steadily. "It was impossible not to hear what the beast said.
+He mentioned names also,--your name and the name of the man whom he
+alleged you had killed. Lady Evesham heard it. We both heard it."
+
+He paused. Piers had not moved. His face was like a mask in its
+composure, but it was a dreadful mask. Tudor had a feeling that it hid
+unutterable things.
+
+"What was the man's name?" Piers asked, after a moment.
+
+"Denys--Eric Denys."
+
+Piers nodded, as one verifying a piece of information. His next question
+came with hauteur and studied indifference.
+
+"Lady Evesham heard, you say? Did she pay any attention to these maudlin
+revelations?"
+
+"She fainted," said Tudor shortly.
+
+"Oh? And what happened then?"
+
+It was maddeningly cold-blooded; but it was the mask that spoke. Tudor
+recognized that.
+
+"I brought her round," he made answer. "No one else was present. She
+begged me to let her go home alone. I did so."
+
+"She also asked you to make full explanation to me?" came in measured
+tones from Piers.
+
+"She did." Tudor paused a moment as though he found some difficulty in
+forming his next words. But he went on almost at once with resolution.
+"She said to me at parting: 'I must be alone. I must think. Beg Piers to
+understand! Beg him not to see me again to-day! I will talk to him in
+the morning!' I promised to deliver the message exactly as she gave it."
+
+"Thank you," said Piers. He turned with the words, moved away to the
+window, and looked forth at the now deserted marquee.
+
+Tudor stood mutely waiting; he felt as if it had been laid upon
+him to wait.
+
+Suddenly Piers jerked his head round and glanced at the chair in which
+Avery had been sitting, then abruptly turned himself and looked at Tudor.
+
+"What were you--and my wife--doing in here?" he said.
+
+Tudor frowned impatiently at the question. "Oh, don't be a fool,
+Evesham!" he said with vehemence.
+
+"I'm not a fool." Piers left the window with the gait of a prowling
+animal; he stood again face to face with the other man. But though his
+features were still mask-like, his eyes shone through the mask; and they
+were eyes of leaping flame. "Oh, I am no fool, I assure you," he said,
+and in his voice there sounded a deep vibration that was almost like a
+snarl. "I know you too well by this time to be hoodwinked. You would come
+between us if you could."
+
+"You lie!" said Tudor.
+
+He did not raise his voice or speak in haste. His vehemence had departed.
+He simply made the statement as if it had been a wholly impersonal one.
+
+Piers' hands clenched, but they remained at his sides. He looked at Tudor
+hard, as if he did not understand him.
+
+After a moment Tudor spoke again. "I am no friend of yours, and I never
+shall be. But I am the friend of your wife, and--whether you like it or
+not--I shall remain so. For that reason, whatever I do will be in your
+interests as well as hers. I have not the smallest intention or desire to
+come between you. And if you use your wits you will see that I couldn't
+if I tried. Your marriage with her tied my hands."
+
+"What proof have I of that?" said Piers, his voice low and fierce.
+
+Tudor made a slight gesture of disgust. "I am dealing with facts, not
+proofs," he said. "You know as well as I do that though you obtained her
+love on false pretences, still you obtained it. Whether you will keep it
+or not remains to be seen, but she is not the sort of woman to solace
+herself with anyone else. If you lose it, it will be because you failed
+to guard your own property--not because anyone deprived you of it."
+
+"Damnation!" exclaimed Piers furiously, and with the word the storm of
+his anger broke like a fiery torrent, sweeping all before it, "are you
+taking me to task, you--you--for this accursed trick of Fate? How was I
+to know that this infernal little sot would turn up here? Why, I don't so
+much as know the fellow's name! I had forgotten his very existence! Where
+the devil is he? Let me find him, and break every bone in his body!" He
+whirled round to the door, but in a moment was back again. "Tudor! Damn
+you! Where's the key?"
+
+"In my pocket," said Tudor quietly. "And, Piers, before you go--since I
+am your ally in spite of myself--let me warn you to keep your head!
+There's no sense in murdering another man. It won't improve your case.
+There's no sense in running amok. Sit down for Heaven's sake, and review
+the situation quietly!"
+
+The calm words took effect. Piers stopped, arrested in spite of himself
+by the other's steady insistence. He looked at Tudor with half-sullen
+respect dawning behind his ungoverned fury.
+
+"Listen!" Tudor said. "The fellow has gone. I packed him off myself. It
+was a piece of sheer ill-luck that brought him home in time for this
+show. He starts for America _en route_ for Australia in less than a week,
+and it is utterly unlikely that either you or any of your friends will
+see or hear anything more of him. Guyes himself is by no means keen on
+him and only had him as best man because a friend failed him at the last
+minute. If you behave rationally the whole affair will probably pass off
+of itself. Everyone knows the fellow was intoxicated, and no one is
+likely to pay any lasting attention to what he said. Treat the matter as
+unworthy of notice, and you will very possibly hear no more of it! But if
+you kick up a row, you will simply court disaster. I am an older man than
+you are. Take my word for it,--I know what I am talking about."
+
+Piers listened in silence. The heat had gone from his face, but his eyes
+still gleamed with a restless fire.
+
+Tudor watched him keenly. Not by his own choice would he have ranged
+himself on Piers' side, but circumstances having placed him there he was
+oddly anxious to effect his deliverance. He was fighting heavy odds, and
+he knew it, but there was a fighting strain in his nature also. He
+relished the odds.
+
+"For Heaven's sake don't be a fool and give the whole show away!" he
+urged. "You have no enemies. No one will want to take the matter up if
+you will only let it lie. No one wants to believe evil of you. Possibly
+no one will."
+
+"Except yourself!" said Piers, with a smile that showed his set teeth.
+
+"Quite so." Tudor also smiled, a grim brief smile. "But then I happen to
+know you better than most. You gave yourself away so far as I am
+concerned that night in the winter. I knew then that once upon a time in
+your career--you had--killed a man."
+
+"And you didn't tell Avery!" The words shot out unexpectedly. Piers was
+plainly astonished.
+
+"I'm not a woman!" said Tudor contemptuously. "That affair was
+between us two."
+
+"Great Scott!" said Piers.
+
+"At the same time," Tudor continued sternly, "if I had known what I know
+now, I would have told her everything sooner than let her ruin her
+happiness by marrying you."
+
+Piers made a sharp gesture that passed unexplained. He had made no
+attempt at self-defence; he made none then. Perhaps his pride kicked at
+the idea; perhaps in the face of Tudor's shrewd grip of the situation it
+did not seem worth while.
+
+He held out his hand. "May I have that key?"
+
+Tudor gave it to him. He was still watching narrowly, but Piers' face
+told him nothing. The mask had been replaced, and the man behind it was
+securely hidden from scrutiny. Tudor would have given much to have rent
+it aside, and have read the thoughts and intentions it covered. But he
+knew that he was powerless. He knew that he was deliberately barred out.
+
+Piers went to the door and fitted the key into the lock. His actions were
+all grimly deliberate. The volcanic fires which Tudor had seen raging but
+a few seconds before had sunk very far below the surface. Whatever was
+happening in the torture-chamber where his soul agonized, it was certain
+that no human being--save possibly one--would ever witness it. What he
+suffered he would suffer in proud aloofness and silence. It was only the
+effect of that suffering that could ever be made apparent, when the soul
+came forth again, blackened and shrivelled from the furnace.
+
+Yet ere he left Tudor, some impulse moved him to look back.
+
+He met Tudor's gaze with brooding eyes which nevertheless held a faint
+warmth like the dim reflection of a light below the horizon.
+
+"I am obliged to you," he said, and was gone before Tudor could
+speak again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GATES OF HELL
+
+
+Up and down, up and down, in a fever of restlessness, Avery walked. She
+felt trapped. The gloomy, tapestried room seemed to close her in like a
+prison. The whole world seemed to have turned into a monstrous place of
+punishment. One thing only was needed to complete the anguish of her
+spirit, and that was the presence of her husband.
+
+She could not picture the meeting with him. Body and soul recoiled from
+the thought. It would not be till the morning; that was her sole comfort.
+By the morning this fiery suffering would have somewhat abated. She would
+be calmer, more able to face him and hear his defence--if defence there
+could be. Somehow she never questioned the truth of the story. She knew
+that Tudor had not questioned it either. She knew moreover that had it
+been untrue, Piers would have been with her long ago in vehement
+indignation and wrath.
+
+No, the thing was true. He was the man who had wrecked her life at its
+beginning, and now--now he had wrecked it again. He was the man whose
+hands were stained with her husband's blood. He had done the deed in one
+of those wild tempests of anger with which she was so familiar. He had
+done the deed, possibly unintentionally, but certainly with murderous
+impulse; and then deliberately cynically, he had covered it up, and gone
+his arrogant way.
+
+He had met her, he had desired her; with a few, quickly-stifled qualms
+he had won her, trusting to luck that his sin would never find him out.
+And so he had made her his own, his property, his prisoner, the slave of
+his pleasure. She was bound for ever to her husband's murderer.
+
+Again body and soul shrank in quivering horror from the thought, and a
+wild revolt awoke within her. She could not bear it. She must break free.
+The bare memory of his passion sickened her. For the first time in her
+life hatred, fiery, intense, kindled within her. The thought of his touch
+filled her with a loathing unutterable. He had become horrible to her, a
+thing unclean, abominable, whose very proximity was pollution. She felt
+as if the blood on his hands had stained her also--the blood of the man
+she had once loved. For a space she became like a woman demented. The
+thing was too abhorrent to be endured.
+
+And then by slow degrees her brain began to clear again. She grew a
+little calmer. Monstrous though he was, he was still human. He was, in a
+fashion, at her mercy. He had sinned, but it was in her hands that his
+punishment lay.
+
+She was stronger than he. She had always known it. But she must keep her
+strength. She must not waste it in futile resentment. She would need it
+all. He had entered her kingdom by subtlety; but she would drive him
+forth in the strength of a righteous indignation. To suffer him to remain
+was unthinkable. It would be to share his guilt.
+
+Her thoughts tried to wander into the future, but she called them
+resolutely back. The future would provide for itself. Her immediate duty
+was all she now needed to face. When that dreaded interview was over,
+when she had shut him out finally and completely then it would be time
+enough to consider that. Probably some arrangement would have to be made
+by which they would meet occasionally, but as husband and wife--never,
+never more.
+
+It was growing late. The dinner-gong had sounded, but she would not go
+down. She rang for Victor, and told him to bring her something on a tray.
+It did not matter what.
+
+He looked at her with keen little eyes of solicitude, and swiftly obeyed
+her desire. He then asked her if the dinner were to be kept for _Monsieur
+Pierre_, who had not yet returned. She did not know what to say, but lest
+he should wonder at her ignorance of Piers' doings, she answered in the
+negative, and Victor withdrew.
+
+Then, again lest comment should be made, she forced herself to eat and
+drink, though the food nauseated her. A feeling of sick suspense was
+growing upon her, a strange, foreboding fear that hung leaden about her
+heart. What was Piers doing all this time? What effect had that message,
+delivered by Tudor, had upon him? Why had he not returned?
+
+Time passed. The evening waned and became night. A full moon rose red and
+wonderful out of a bank of inky cloud, lighting the darkness with an
+oddly tropical effect. The night was tropical, breathless, terribly
+still. It seemed as if a storm must be upon its way.
+
+She began to undress at last there in the moonlight. The heat was too
+intense to veil the windows, and she would not light the candles lest
+bats or moths should be attracted. At another time the eerieness of the
+shadowy room would have played upon her nerves, but to-night she was not
+even aware of it. The shadows within were too dark, too sinister.
+
+A great weariness had come upon her. She ached for rest. Her body felt
+leaden, and her brain like a burnt-out furnace. The very capacity for
+thought seemed to have left her. Only the horror of the day loomed
+gigantic whichever way she turned, blotting out all beside. Prayer was an
+impossibility to her. She felt lost in a wilderness of doubt, forsaken
+and wandering, and terribly alone.
+
+If she could rest, if she could sleep, she thought that strength might
+return to her--the strength to grapple with and overthrow the evil that
+had entered into and tainted her whole life. But till sleep should come
+to her, she was impotent. She was heavy and numb with fatigue.
+
+She lay down at length with a vague sense of physical relief beneath her
+crushing weight of trouble. How unutterably weary she was! How tired--how
+tired of life!
+
+Time passed. The moon rose higher, filling the room with its weird cold
+light. Avery lay asleep.
+
+Exhaustion had done for her what no effort of will could have
+accomplished, closing her eyes, drawing a soft veil of oblivion across
+her misery.
+
+But it was only a temporary lull. The senses were too alert, too fevered,
+for true repose. That blessed interval of unconsciousness was all too
+short. After a brief, brief respite she began to dream.
+
+And in her dream she saw a man being tortured in a burning, fiery
+furnace, imprisoned behind bars of iron, writhing, wrestling, agonizing,
+to be free. She saw the flames leaping all around him, and in the flames
+were demon-faces that laughed and gibed and jested. She saw his hands all
+blistered in the heat, reaching out to her, straining through those cruel
+bars, beseeching her vainly for deliverance. And presently, gazing with a
+sick horror that compelled, she saw his face....
+
+With a gasping cry she awoke, started up with every nerve stretched and
+quivering, her heart pounding as if it would choke her. It was a
+dream--it was a dream! She whispered it to herself over and over again,
+striving to control those awful palpitations. Surely it was all a dream!
+
+Stay! What was that? A sound in the room beyond--a movement--a step! She
+sprang up, obeying blind impulse, sped softly to the intervening door,
+with hands that trembled shot the bolt. Then, like a hunted creature,
+almost distracted by the panic of her dream, she slipped back to the
+gloomy four-poster, and cowered down again.
+
+Lying there, crouched and quivering, she began to count those hammering
+heart-beats, and wondered wildly if the man on the other side of the door
+could hear them also. She was sure that he had been there, sure that he
+had been on the point of entering when she had shot the bolt.
+
+He would not enter now, she whispered to her quaking heart. She would not
+have to meet him before the morning. And by then she would be strong. It
+was only her weariness that made her so weak to-night!
+
+She grew calmer. She began to chide herself for her senseless panic--she
+the bearer of other people's burdens, who prided herself upon her steady
+nerve and calmness of purpose. She had never been hysterical in her life
+before. Surely she could muster self-control now, when her need of it was
+so urgent, so imperative.
+
+And then, just as a certain measure of composure had returned to her,
+something happened. Someone passed down the passage outside her room and
+paused at the outer door. Her heart stood still, but again desperately
+she steadied herself. That door was bolted also.
+
+Yes, it was bolted, but there was a hand upon it,--a hand that felt
+softly for the lock, found the key outside, softly turned it.
+
+Then indeed panic came upon Avery. Lying there, tense and listening, she
+heard the quiet step return along the passage and enter her husband's
+room, heard that door also close and lock, and knew herself a prisoner.
+
+"Avery!"
+
+Every pulse leapt, every nerve shrank. She started up, wide-eyed,
+desperate.
+
+"I will talk to you in the morning, Piers," she said, steadying her voice
+with difficulty. "Not now! Not now!"
+
+"Open this door!" he said.
+
+There was dear command in his voice, and with it the old magnetic force
+reached her, quick, insistent, vital. She threw a wild look round, but
+only the dazzling moonlight met her eyes. There was no escape for
+her--no escape.
+
+She turned her face to the door behind which he stood. "Piers, please,
+not to-night!" she said beseechingly.
+
+"Open the door!" he repeated inexorably.
+
+Again that force reached her. It was like an electric current suddenly
+injected into her veins. Her whole body quivered in response. Almost
+before she knew it, she had started to obey.
+
+And then horror seized her--a dread unutterable. She stopped.
+
+"Piers, will you promise--"
+
+"I promise nothing," he said, in the same clear, imperious voice, "except
+to force this door unless you open it within five seconds."
+
+She stood in the moonlight, trembling, unnerved. He did not sound like a
+man bereft of reason. And yet--and yet--something in his voice appalled
+her. Her strength was utterly gone. She was just a weak, terrified woman.
+
+"Avery," his voice came to her again, short and stern, "I don't wish to
+threaten you; but it will be better for us both if I don't have to force
+the door."
+
+She forced herself to speak though her tongue felt stiff and dry. "I
+can't let you in now," she said. "I will hear what you have to say in
+the morning."
+
+He made no reply. There was an instant of dead silence. Then there came a
+sudden, hideous shock against the panel of the door. The socket of the
+bolt gave with the strain, but did not wholly yield. Avery shrank back
+trembling against the shadowy four-poster. She felt as if a raging animal
+were trying to force an entrance.
+
+Again came that awful shock. The wood splintered and rent, socket and
+bolt were torn free; the door burst inwards.
+
+There came a brief, fiendish laugh, and Piers broke in upon her.
+
+He recovered himself with a sharp effort, and stood breathing heavily,
+looking at her. The moonlight was full upon him, showing him deadly pale,
+and in his eyes there shone the red glare of hell.
+
+"Did you really think--a locked door--would keep me out?" he said,
+speaking with an odd jerkiness, with lips that twitched.
+
+She drew herself together with an instinctive effort at self-control. "I
+thought you would respect my wish," she said, her voice very low.
+
+"Did you?" said Piers. "Then why did you lock the door?"
+
+He swung it closed behind him and came to her.
+
+"Listen to me, Avery!" he said. "You are not your own any longer--to give
+or to take away. You are mine."
+
+She faced him with all the strength she could muster, but she could not
+meet those awful eyes that mocked her, that devoured her.
+
+"Piers," she said, almost under her breath, "remember,--what happens
+to-night we shall neither of us ever forget. Don't make me hate you!"
+
+"Haven't you begun to hate me then?" he demanded. "Would you have locked
+that door against me if you hadn't?"
+
+She heard the rising passion in his voice, and her heart fainted within
+her. Yet still desperately she strove for strength.
+
+"I don't want to do anything violent or unconsidered. I must have time to
+think. Piers, you have me at your mercy. Be merciful!"
+
+He made a sharp movement. "Are you going to be merciful to me?" he said.
+
+She hesitated. There was something brutal in the question, yet it
+pierced her. She knew that he had divined all that had been passing
+within her during that evening of misery. She did not answer him, for she
+could not.
+
+"Listen!" he said again. "What has happened has happened by sheer
+ill-luck. The past is nothing to you. You have said so yourself. The
+future shall not be sacrificed to it. If you will give me your solemn
+promise to put this thing behind you, to behave as if it had never been,
+I will respect your wishes, I will do my utmost to help you to forget.
+But if you refuse--" He stopped.
+
+"If I refuse--" she repeated faintly.
+
+He made again that curious gesture that was almost one of helplessness.
+"Don't ask for mercy!" he said.
+
+In the silence that followed there came to her the certain knowledge that
+he was suffering, that he was in an inferno of torment that goaded him
+into fierce savagery against her, like a mad animal that will wreak its
+madness first upon the being most beloved. It was out of his torment that
+he did this thing. She saw him again agonizing in the flames.
+
+If he had had patience then, that divine pity of hers might have come to
+help them both; but he read into her silence the abhorrence which a
+little earlier had possessed her soul; and the maddening pain of it drove
+him beyond all bounds.
+
+He seized her suddenly and savagely between his hands. "Are you any the
+less my wife," he said, speaking between his teeth, "because you have
+found out what manner of man I am?"
+
+She resisted him, swiftly, instinctively, her hands against his breast,
+pressing him back. "I may be your wife," she said gaspingly. "I am
+not--your slave."
+
+He laughed a fiendish laugh. Her resistance fired him. He caught her
+fiercely to him. He covered her face, her throat, her arms, her hands,
+with kisses that burned her through and through, seeming to sear her
+very soul.
+
+He crushed her in a grip that bruised her, that suffocated her. He
+pressed his lips, hot with passion, to hers.
+
+"And now!" he said. "And now!"
+
+She lay in his arms spent and quivering and helpless. The cruel triumph
+of his voice silenced all appeal.
+
+He went on deeply, speaking with his lips so close that she felt his
+breath scorch through her like the breath of a fiery furnace.
+
+"You are bound to me for better--for worse, and nothing will ever set
+you free. Do you understand? If you will not be my wife, you shall
+be--my slave."
+
+Quiveringly, through lips that would scarcely move she spoke at last. "I
+shall never forgive you."
+
+"I shall never ask your forgiveness," he said.
+
+So the gates of hell closed upon Avery also. She went down into the
+unknown depths. And in an agony of shame she learned the bitterest lesson
+of her life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+
+"Why, Avery dear, is it you? Come in!" Mrs. Lorimer looked up with a
+smile of eager welcome on her little pinched face and went forward almost
+at a run to greet her.
+
+The brown holland smock upon which she had been at work fell to the
+ground. It was Avery who, after a close embrace, stooped to pick it up.
+
+"Who is this for? Baby Phil? You must let me lend a hand," she said.
+
+"Ah, my dear, I do miss you," said Mrs. Lorimer wistfully. "The village
+girl who comes in to help is no good at all at needlework, and you know
+how busy Nurse always is. Jeanie does her best, and is a great help in
+many ways. But she is but a child. However," she caught herself up, "I
+mustn't start grumbling the moment you enter the house. Tell me about
+yourself, dear! You are looking very pale. Does the heat try you?"
+
+"A little," Avery admitted.
+
+She was spreading out the small garment on her knee, looking at it
+critically, with eyes downcast. She certainly was pale that morning. The
+only colour in her face seemed concentrated in her lips.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer looked at her uneasily. There was something not quite normal
+about her, she felt. She had never seen Avery look so statuesque. She
+missed the quick sweetness of her smile, the brightness and animation of
+her glance.
+
+"It is very dear of you to come and see me," she said gently, after a
+moment. "Did you walk all the way? I hope it hasn't been too much for
+you."
+
+"No," Avery said. "It did me good."
+
+She was on the verge of saying something further, but the words did not
+come.
+
+She continued to smooth out the little smock with minute care, while Mrs.
+Lorimer watched her anxiously.
+
+"Is all well, dear?" she ventured at last.
+
+Avery raised her brows slightly, but her eyes remained downcast. "I went
+to the wedding yesterday," she said, after a momentary pause.
+
+"Oh, did you, dear? Stephen went, but I stayed at home. Did you see him?"
+
+"Only from a distance," said Avery.
+
+"It was a very magnificent affair, he tells me." Mrs. Lorimer was
+becoming a little nervous. She had begun to be conscious of something
+tragic in the atmosphere. "And did you enjoy it, dear? Or was the heat
+too great?"
+
+"It was hot," Avery said.
+
+Again she seemed to be about to say something more, and again she failed
+to do so. Her lips closed.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer remained silent also for several seconds. Then softly she
+rose, went to Avery, put her arms about her.
+
+"My darling!" she said fondly.
+
+That was all. No further questioning, no anxious probing, simply her love
+poured out in fullest measure upon the altar of friendship! And it moved
+Avery instantly and overwhelmingly, shattering her reserve, sweeping away
+the stony ramparts of her pride.
+
+She turned and hid her face upon Mrs. Lorimer's breast in an anguish of
+tears.
+
+It lasted for several minutes, that paroxysm of weeping. It was the pent
+misery of hours finding vent at last. All she had suffered, all the
+humiliation, the bitterness of desecrated love, the utter despair of her
+soul, was in those tears. They shook her being to the depths. They seemed
+to tear her heart asunder.
+
+At last in broken whispers she began to speak. Still with those scalding
+tears falling between her words, she imparted the whole miserable story;
+she bared her fallen pride. There was no other person in the world to
+whom she could thus have revealed that inner agony, that lacerating
+shame. But Mrs. Lorimer, the despised, the downtrodden, was as an angel
+from heaven that day. A new strength was hers, born of her friend's utter
+need. She held her up, she sustained, her, through that the darkest hour
+of her life, with a courage and a steadfastness of which no one had ever
+deemed her capable.
+
+When Avery whispered at length, "I can never, never go back to him!" her
+answer was prompt.
+
+"My dear, you must. It will be hard, God knows. But He will give you
+strength. Oh Avery, don't act for yourself, dear! Let Him show the way!"
+
+"If He will!" sobbed Avery, with her burning face hidden against her
+friend's heart.
+
+"He will, dearest, He will," Mrs. Lorimer asserted with conviction. "He
+is much nearer to us in trouble than most of us ever realize. Only let
+Him take the helm; He will steer you through the storm."
+
+"I feel too wicked," whispered Avery, "too--overwhelmed with evil."
+
+"My dear, feelings are nothing," said the Vicar's wife, with a decision
+that would have shocked the Reverend Stephen unspeakably. "We can't help
+our feelings, but we can put ourselves in the way of receiving help. Oh,
+don't you think He often lets us miss our footing just because He wants
+us to lean on Him?"
+
+"I don't know," Avery said hopelessly. "But I think it will kill me to
+go back. Even if--if I pretended to forgive him--I couldn't possibly
+endure to--to go on as if nothing had happened. Eric--my first
+husband--will always stand between us now."
+
+"Dear, are you sure that what you heard was not an exaggeration?" Mrs.
+Lorimer asked gently.
+
+"Oh yes, I am sure." There was utter hopelessness in Avery's reply. "I
+have always known that there was something in his past, some cloud of
+which he would never speak openly. But I never dreamed--never guessed--"
+She broke off with a sharp shudder. "Besides, he has offered no
+explanation, no excuse, no denial. He lets me believe the worst, and he
+doesn't care. He is utterly callous--utterly brutal. That is how I know
+that the worst is true." She rose abruptly, as if inaction had become
+torture to her. "Oh, I must leave him!" she cried out wildly. "I am
+nothing to him. My feelings are less than nothing. He doesn't really want
+me. Any woman could fill my place with him equally well!"
+
+"Hush!" Mrs. Lorimer said. She went to Avery and held her tightly, as if
+she would herself do battle with the evil within. "You are not to say
+that, Avery. You are not to think it. It is utterly untrue. Suffering may
+have goaded him into brutality, but he is not wicked at heart. And, my
+dear, he is in your hands now--to make or to mar. He worships you
+blindly, and if his worship has become an unholy thing, it is because the
+thought of losing you has driven him nearly distracted. You can win it
+back--if you will."
+
+"I don't want to win it back!" Avery said. She suffered the arms about
+her, but she stood rigid in their embrace, unyielding, unresponding. "His
+love is horrible to me! I abhor it!"
+
+"Avery! Your husband!"
+
+"He is a murderer!" Avery cried passionately. "He would murder me too
+if--if he could bring himself to do without me! He hates me in his soul."
+
+"Avery, hush! You are distraught. You don't know what you are saying."
+Mrs. Lorimer drew her back to her chair with tender insistence. "Sit
+down, darling! And try--do try--to be quiet for a little! You are worn
+out. I don't think you can have had any sleep."
+
+"Sleep!" Avery almost laughed, and then again those burning, blinding
+tears rushed to her eyes. "Oh, you don't know what I've been through!"
+she sobbed. "You don't know! You don't know!"
+
+"God knows, darling," whispered Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+Minutes later, when Avery was lying back exhausted, no longer sobbing,
+only dumbly weeping, there came a gentle knock at the door.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer went to it quickly, and met her eldest daughter upon the
+point of entering. Jeanie looked up at her enquiringly.
+
+"Is anyone here?"
+
+"Yes, dear. Avery is here. She isn't very well this morning. Run and
+fetch her a glass of milk!"
+
+Jeanie hastened away. Mrs. Lorimer returned to Avery.
+
+"My darling," she said, "do you know I think I can see a way to help
+you?"
+
+Avery's eyes were closed. She put out a trembling hand. "You are very
+good to me."
+
+"I wonder how often I have had reason to say that to you," said Mrs.
+Lorimer softly. "Listen, darling! You must go back. Yes, Avery, you must!
+You must! But--you shall take my little Jeanie with you."
+
+Avery's eyes opened. Mrs. Lorimer was looking at her with tears in her
+own.
+
+"I know I may trust her to you," she said. "But oh, you will take care
+of her! Remember how precious she is--and how fragile!"
+
+"But, my dear--you couldn't spare her!" Avery said.
+
+"Yes, I can,--I will!" Mrs. Lorimer hastily rubbed her eyes and smiled--a
+resolute smile. "You may have her, dear. I know she will be happy with
+you. And Piers is so fond of her too. She will be a comfort to you--to
+you both, please God. She comforts everyone--my little Jeanie. It seems
+to be her _rôle_ in life. Ah, here she comes! You shall tell her, dear.
+It will come better from you."
+
+"May I come in?" said Jeanie at the door.
+
+Her mother went to admit her. Avery sat up, and pushed her chair back
+against the window-curtain.
+
+Jeanie entered, a glass of milk in one hand and a plate in the other.
+"Good morning, dear Avery!" she said, in her gentle, rather tired voice.
+"I've brought you a hot cake too--straight out of the oven. It smells
+quite good." She came to Avery's side, and stood within the circle of her
+arm; but she did not kiss her or look into her piteous, tearstained face.
+"I hope you like currants," she said. "Baby Phil calls them flies. Have
+you seen Baby Phil lately? He has just cut another tooth. He likes
+everybody to look at it."
+
+"I must see it presently," Avery said, with an effort.
+
+She drank the milk, and broke the cake, still holding Jeanie pressed
+to her side.
+
+Jeanie, gravely practical, held the plate. "I saw Piers ride by a little
+while ago," she remarked. "He was on Pompey. But he was going so fast he
+didn't see me. He always rides fast, doesn't he? But I think Pompey likes
+it, don't you?"
+
+"I don't know." There was an odd frozen note in Avery's voice. "He has to
+go--whether he likes it or not."
+
+"But he is very fond of Piers," said Jeanie. "And so is Caesar." She gave
+a little sigh. "Poor Mikey! Do you remember how angry he used to be when
+Caesar ran by?"
+
+Avery suppressed a shiver. Vivid as a picture flung on a screen, there
+rose in her brain the memory of that winter evening when Piers and Mike
+and Caesar had all striven together for the mastery. Again she seemed
+to hear those savage, pitiless blows. She might have known! She might
+have known!
+
+Sharply she wrenched herself back to the present. "Jeanie darling," she
+said, "your mother says that you may come and stay at the Abbey for a
+little while. Do you--would you--like to come?"
+
+Her voice was unconsciously wistful. Jeanie turned for the first time and
+looked at her.
+
+"Oh, Avery!" she said. "Stay with you and Piers?"
+
+Her eyes were shining. She slid a gentle arm round Avery's neck.
+
+"You would like to?" Avery asked, faintly smiling.
+
+"I would love to," said Jeanie earnestly. She looked across at her
+mother. "Shall you be able to manage, dear?" she asked in her
+grown-up way.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer stifled a sigh. "Oh yes, Jeanie dear. I shall do all right.
+Gracie will help with the little ones, you know."
+
+Jeanie smiled at that. "I think I will go and talk to Gracie," she said,
+quietly releasing herself from Avery's arm.
+
+But at the door she paused. "I hope Father won't mind," she said. "But he
+did say I wasn't to have any more treats till my Easter holiday-task was
+finished."
+
+"I will make that all right, dear," said Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"Thank you," said Jeanie. "Of course I can take it with me. I expect I
+shall get more time for learning it at the Abbey. You might tell him
+that, don't you think?"
+
+"I will tell him, darling," said Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+And Jeanie smiled and went her way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GREAT GULF
+
+
+"Hullo!" said Piers. "Has the Queen of all good fairies come to call?"
+
+He strode across the garden with that high, arrogant air of his as of one
+who challenges the world, and threw himself into the vacant chair by the
+tea-table at which his wife sat.
+
+The blaze of colour that overspread her pale face at his coming faded
+as rapidly as it rose. She glanced at him momentarily, under
+fluttering lids.
+
+"Jeanie has come to stay," she said, her voice very low.
+
+His arm was already round Jeanie who had risen to meet him. He pulled her
+down upon his knee.
+
+"That is very gracious of her," he said. "Good Heavens, child! You are as
+light as a feather! Why don't you eat more?"
+
+"I am never hungry," explained Jeanie. She kissed him and then drew
+herself gently from him, sitting down by his side with innate dignity.
+"Have you been riding all day?" she asked. "Isn't Pompey tired?"
+
+"Caesar and Pompey are both dead beat," said Piers. "And I--" he looked
+deliberately at Avery, "--am as fresh as when I started."
+
+Again, as it were in response to that look, her eyelids fluttered; but
+she did not raise them. Again the colour started and died in her cheeks.
+
+"Have you had anything to eat?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing," said Piers.
+
+He took the cup she offered him, and drained it. There was a fitful gleam
+in his dark eyes as of a red, smouldering fire.
+
+But Jeanie's soft voice intervening dispelled it. "How very hungry you
+must be!" she said in a motherly tone. "Will bread and butter and cake be
+enough for you?"
+
+"Quite enough," said Piers. "Like you, Jeanie, I am not hungry." He
+handed back his cup to be filled again. "But I have a lively
+thirst," he said.
+
+"It has been so hot to-day," observed Avery.
+
+"It is never too hot for me," he rejoined. "Hullo! Who's that?"
+
+He was staring towards the house under frowning brows. A figure had just
+emerged upon the terrace.
+
+"Dr. Tudor!" said Jeanie.
+
+Again Piers' eyes turned upon his wife. He looked at her with a
+sombre scrutiny. After a moment she lifted her own and resolutely
+returned the look.
+
+"Won't you go and meet him?" she said.
+
+He rose abruptly, and strode away.
+
+Avery's eyes followed him, watching narrowly as the two men met. Lennox
+Tudor, she saw, offered his hand, and after the briefest pause, Piers
+took it. They came back slowly side by side.
+
+Again, unobtrusively, Jeanie rose. Tudor caught sight of her almost
+before he saw Avery.
+
+"Hullo!" he said. "What are you doing here?"
+
+Jeanie explained with her customary old-fashioned air of responsibility:
+"I have come to take care of Avery, as she isn't very well."
+
+Tudor's eyes passed instantly and very swiftly to Avery's face. He bent
+slightly over the hand she gave him.
+
+"A good idea!" he said brusquely. "I hope you will take care of
+each other."
+
+He joined them at the tea-table, and talked of indifferent things. Piers
+talked also with that species of almost fierce gaiety with which Avery
+had become so well acquainted of late. She was relieved that there was no
+trace of hostility apparent in his manner.
+
+But, notwithstanding this fact, she received a shock of surprise when at
+the end of a quarter of an hour he got up with a careless: "Come along,
+my queen! We'll see if Pompey has got the supper he deserves."
+
+Even Tudor looked momentarily astonished, but as he watched Piers saunter
+away with his arm round Jeanie's thin shoulders his expression changed.
+He turned to her abruptly. "How are you feeling to-day?" he enquired. "I
+had to come in and ask."
+
+"It was very kind of you," she answered.
+
+He smiled in his rather grim fashion. "I came more for my own
+satisfaction than for yours," he observed. "You are better, are you?"
+
+She smiled also. "There is nothing the matter with me, you know."
+
+He gave her a shrewd look through his glasses. "No," he said. "I know."
+
+He said no more at all about her health, nor did he touch upon any other
+intimate subject, but she had a very distinct impression that he did not
+cease to observe her closely throughout their desultory conversation. She
+even tried to divert his attention, but she knew she did not succeed.
+
+He remained with her until they saw Piers and Jeanie returning, and then
+somewhat suddenly he took his leave. He joined the two on the lawn, sent
+Jeanie back to her, and walked away himself with his host.
+
+What passed between them she did not know and could not even conjecture,
+for she did not see Piers again till they met in the hall before dinner.
+Jeanie was with her, looking delicately pretty in her white muslin frock,
+and it was to her that Piers addressed himself.
+
+"Come here, my queen! I want to look at you."
+
+She went to him readily enough. He took her by the shoulders.
+
+"Are you made of air, I wonder? I should be ashamed of you, Jeanie, if
+you belonged to me."
+
+Jeanie looked up into the handsome, olive face with eyes that smiled
+love upon him. "I expect it's partly because you are so big and
+strong," she said.
+
+"No, it isn't," said Piers. "It's because you're so small and weak. Avery
+will have to take you away to the sea again, what? You'd like that."
+
+"And you too!" said Jeanie.
+
+"I? Oh no, you wouldn't want me. Would you, Avery?"
+
+He deliberately addressed her for the first time that day. Over the
+child's head his eyes flashed their mocking message. She felt as if he
+had struck her across the face.
+
+"Would you?" he repeated, with arrogant insistence.
+
+She tried to turn the question aside. "Well, as we are not going--"
+
+"But you are going," he said. "You and Jeanie. How soon can you start?
+To-morrow?"
+
+Avery looked at him in astonishment. "Are you in earnest?"
+
+"Of course I'm in earnest," he said, with a frown that was oddly boyish.
+"You had better go to Stanbury Cliffs. It suited you all right in the
+spring. Fix it up with Mrs. Lorimer first thing in the morning, and go
+down in the afternoon!"
+
+He spoke impatiently. Opposition or delay always set him chafing.
+
+Jeanie looked at him with wonder in her eyes. "But you, Piers!" she
+said. "What will you do?"
+
+"I? Oh, I shall be busy," he said. "I've got a lot on hand just now.
+Besides," again the gibing note was in his voice, "you'll get along much
+better without me. Avery says so."
+
+"She didn't!" exclaimed Jeanie, with a sudden rare touch of indignation.
+
+"All right. She didn't," laughed Piers. "My mistake!" He flicked the
+child's cheek teasingly, and then abruptly stooped and kissed it. "Don't
+be angry, Queen of the fairies! It isn't worth it."
+
+She slipped her arm round his neck on the instant. "I'm not, dear Piers.
+I'm not angry. But we shouldn't want to go away and leave you alone. We
+shouldn't really."
+
+He laughed again, carelessly, without effort. "No, but you'd get on all
+right without me. You and Avery are such pals. What do you say to it,
+Avery? Isn't it a good idea?"
+
+"I think perhaps it is," she said slowly, her voice very low.
+
+He straightened himself, and looked at her, and again that vivid, painful
+blush covered her face and neck as though a flame had scorched her. She
+did not meet his eyes.
+
+"Very well then. It's settled," he said jauntily. "Now let's go and have
+some dinner!"
+
+He kept up his light attitude throughout the meal, save that once he
+raised his wine-glass mockingly to the woman on the wall. But his mood
+was elusive. Avery felt it. It was as if he played a juggling game on the
+edge of the pit of destruction, and she watched him with a leaden heart.
+
+She rose from the table earlier than usual, for the atmosphere of the
+dining-room oppressed her almost unbearably. It was a night of heavy
+stillness.
+
+"You ought to go to bed, dear," she said to Jeanie.
+
+"Oh, must I?" said Jeanie wistfully. "I never sleep much on these hot
+nights. One can't breath so well lying down."
+
+Avery looked at her with quick anxiety, but she had turned to Piers and
+was leaning against him with a gentle coaxing air.
+
+"Please, dear Piers, would it tire you to play to us?" she begged.
+
+He looked down at her for a moment as if he would refuse; then very
+gently he laid his hand on her head, pressing back the heavy, clustering
+hair from her forehead to look into her soft eyes.
+
+"What do you want me to play?" he said.
+
+She made a wide gesture of the hands and let them fall. "Something big,"
+she said. "Something to take to bed with us and give us happy dreams."
+
+His lips--those mobile, sensitive lips--curved in a smile that made Avery
+avert her eyes with a sudden hot pang. He released Jeanie, and turned
+away to the door.
+
+"I'll see what I can do," he said. "You had better go into the
+garden--you and Avery."
+
+They went, though Jeanie looked as if she would have preferred to
+accompany him to the music-room. It was little cooler on the terrace than
+in the house. The heat brooded over all, dense, black, threatening.
+
+"I hope it will rain soon," said Jeanie, drawing her chair close
+to Avery's.
+
+"There will be a storm when it does," Avery said.
+
+"I like storms, don't you?" said Jeanie.
+
+Avery shook her head. "No, dear."
+
+She was listening in tense expectancy, waiting with a dread that was
+almost insupportable for the music that Piers was about to make. They
+were close to the open French window of the music-room, but there was no
+light within. Piers was evidently sitting there silent in the darkness.
+Her pulses were beating violently. Why did he sit so still? Why was
+there no sound?
+
+A flash of lightning quivered above the tree-tops and was gone. Jeanie
+drew in her breath, saying no word. Avery shrank and closed her eyes. She
+could hear her heart beating audibly, like the throbbing of a distant
+drum. The suspense was terrible.
+
+There came from far away the growl and mutter of the rising storm. The
+leaves of the garden began to tremble. And then, ere that roll of
+distant thunder had died away, another sound came through the
+darkness--a sound that was almost terrifying in its suddenness, and the
+grand piano began to speak.
+
+What music it uttered, Avery knew not. It was such as she had never heard
+before. It was unearthly, it was devilish, a fiendish chorus that was
+like the laughter of a thousand demons--a pandemonium that shocked her
+unutterably.
+
+Just as once he had drawn aside for her the veil that shrouded the Holy
+Place, so now he rent open the gates of hell and showed her the horrors
+of the prison-house, forcing her to look upon them, forcing her to
+understand.
+
+She clung to Jeanie's hand in nightmare fear. The anguish of the
+revelation was almost unendurable. She felt as if he had caught her
+quivering soul and was thrusting it into an inferno from which it could
+never rise again. Through and above that awful laughter she seemed to
+hear the crackling of the flames, to feel the blistering heat that had
+consumed so many, to see the red glare of the furnace gaping wide
+before her.
+
+She cried out without knowing it, and covered her face. "O God," she
+prayed wildly, "save us from this! Save us! Save us!"
+
+The man at the piano could not have heard her cry. Of that she was
+certain. But their souls were in more subtle communion than any
+established by bodily word or touch. He must have known, have fathomed
+her anguish. For quite suddenly, as if a restraining hand had been
+laid upon him, he checked that dread torrent of sound. A few bitter
+chords, a few stray notes that somehow spoke to her of a spirit
+escaped and wandering alone and naked in a desert of indescribable
+emptiness, and then silence--a crushing, fearful silence like the
+ashes of a burnt-out fire.
+
+"And in hell he lift up his eyes." ... Why did those words flash
+through her brain as though a voice had uttered them? She bowed her head
+lower, lower, barely conscious of Jeanie's enfolding arms. She was as one
+in the presence of a vision, hearing words that were spoken to her alone.
+
+"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments...."
+
+She waited quivering. Surely there was more to come. She listened for it
+even while she shrank in every nerve.
+
+It came at length slowly, heavily, like a death-sentence uttered within
+her. "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which
+would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that
+would come from thence."
+
+The words were spoken, the vision passed. Avery sat huddled in her chair
+as one stricken to the earth, rapt in a trance of dread foreboding from
+which Jeanie was powerless to rouse her.
+
+The lightning flashed again, and the thunder crashed above them like the
+clanging of brazen gates. From the room behind them came the sound of a
+man's laugh, but it was a laugh that chilled her to the soul.
+
+Again there came the sound of the piano,--a tremendous chord, then a
+slow-swelling volume of harmony, a muffled burst of music like the coming
+of a great procession still far away.
+
+Avery sprang upright as one galvanized into action by an electric force.
+"I cannot bear it!" she cried aloud, "I cannot bear it!"
+
+She almost thrust Jeanie from her. "Oh, go, child, go! Tell him--tell
+him--" Her voice broke, went into a gasping utterance more painful than
+speech, finally dropped into hysterical sobbing.
+
+Jeanie sprang into the dark room with a cry of, "Piers, oh, Piers!"--and
+the music stopped, went out utterly as flame extinguished in water.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Piers.
+
+His voice sounded oddly defiant, almost savage. But Jeanie was too
+precipitate to notice it.
+
+"Oh, please, will you go to Avery?" she begged breathlessly. "I think she
+is frightened at the storm."
+
+Piers left the piano with a single, lithe movement that carried him to
+the window in a second. He passed Jeanie and was out on the terrace
+almost in one bound.
+
+He discerned Avery on the instant, as she discerned him. A vivid flash of
+lightning lit them both, lit the whole scene, turned the night into
+sudden, glaring day. Before the thunder crashed above them he had caught
+her to him. They stood locked in the darkness while the great
+reverberations rolled over their heads, and as he held her he felt the
+wild beating of her heart against his own.
+
+She had not resisted him, she did not resist him. She even convulsively
+clung to him. But her whole body was tense against his, tense and
+quivering like a stretched wire.
+
+As the last of the thunder died, she raised her head and spoke.
+
+"Piers, haven't you tortured me enough?"
+
+He did not speak in answer. Only she heard his breath indrawn sharply as
+though he checked some headlong word or impulse.
+
+She stifled a great sob that took her unawares, and even as she did so
+she felt his arms slacken. He set her free.
+
+"There is nothing to be afraid of," he said. "Better come indoors before
+the rain begins."
+
+They went within, Jeanie pressing close to Avery in tender solicitude.
+
+They turned on the lights, but throughout the frightful storm that
+followed, Piers leaned against the window-frame sombrely watching.
+
+Avery sat on a sofa with Jeanie, her throbbing head leaning against the
+cushions, her eyes closed.
+
+Nearly half an hour passed thus, then the storm rolled sullenly away; and
+at last Piers turned.
+
+As though his look pierced her, Avery's eyes opened. She looked back at
+him, white as death, waiting for him to speak.
+
+"Hadn't you better send Jeanie to bed?" he said.
+
+Jeanie rose obediently. "Good-night, dear Avery."
+
+Avery sat up. Her hand was pressed hard upon her heart. "I am coming with
+you," she said.
+
+Piers crossed the room to the door. He held it open for them.
+
+Jeanie lifted her face for his kiss. An unaccustomed shyness seemed to
+have descended upon her. "Good-night," she whispered.
+
+He bent to her. "Good-night, Jeanie!"
+
+Her arms were round his neck in a moment. "Piers, thank you for your
+music, but--but--"
+
+"Good-night, dear!" said Piers again gently, but with obvious decision.
+
+"Good-night!" said Jeanie at once.
+
+She would have passed out instantly, but Avery paused, detaining her.
+
+Her eyes were raised steadily to her husband's face. "I will say
+good-night, too," she said. "I am spending the night with Jeanie. She is
+not used to sleeping alone, and--the storm may come back."
+
+She was white to the lips as she said it. She looked as if she
+would faint.
+
+"Oh, but--" began Jeanie, "I don't mind really. I--"
+
+With a brief, imperious gesture Piers silenced her for the second
+time. He looked over her head, straight into Avery's eyes for a long,
+long second.
+
+Then: "So be it!" he said, and with ironical ceremony he bowed her out.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SANCTUARY
+
+
+"Hullo, sonny! You!"
+
+Edmund Crowther turned from his littered writing-table, and rose to greet
+his visitor with a ready smile of welcome.
+
+"Hullo!" said Piers. "How are you getting on? I was in town and thought
+I'd look you up. By Jove, though, you're busy! I'd better not stay."
+
+"Sit down!" said Crowther.
+
+He took him by the shoulders with kindly force and made him sit in his
+easy-chair. "I'm never too busy to be pleased to see you, Piers," he
+said.
+
+"Very decent of you," said Piers.
+
+He spoke with a short laugh, but his dark eyes roved round restlessly.
+There was no pleasure in his look.
+
+The light from Crowther's unshaded lamp flared full upon him. In his
+faultless evening dress he looked every inch an aristocrat. That air of
+the old-Roman patrician was very strong upon him that night. But there
+was something behind it that Crowther was quick to note, something that
+reminded him vividly of an evening months before when he had fought hand
+to hand with the Evesham devil and had with difficulty prevailed.
+
+He pushed his work to one side and foraged in his cupboard for drinks.
+
+Piers watched him with an odd, half-scoffing smile about his lips. "Do
+you never drink when you are by yourself?" he asked.
+
+"Not when I'm working," said Crowther.
+
+"I see! Work is sacred, what?"
+
+Crowther looked at him. The mockery of the tone had been scarcely veiled;
+but there was no consciousness of the fact in Crowther's quiet reply.
+"Yes; just that, sonny."
+
+Piers laughed again, a bitter, gibing laugh. "I suppose it's more to you
+than your own soul--or anyone else's," he said.
+
+Crowther paused in the act of pouring out. "Now what do you mean?" he
+said.
+
+His eyes, direct and level, looked full at Piers. They held no anger, no
+indignation, only calm enquiry.
+
+Piers faced the look with open mockery. "I mean, my good friend," he
+said, "that if I asked you to chuck it all and go round the world with
+me--you'd see me damned first."
+
+Crowther's eyes dropped gravely to the job in hand. "Say when!" he said.
+
+Piers made a restless movement. "Oh, that's enough! Strong drink is not
+my weakness. Why don't you answer my question?"
+
+"I didn't know you asked one," said Crowther.
+
+He set the tumbler in front of Piers and began to help himself.
+
+Piers watched him for a couple of seconds longer, then leapt impulsively
+to his feet. "Oh, I'm going!" he said. "I was a fool to come!"
+
+Crowther set down the decanter and straightened himself. He did not seem
+to move quickly, but he was at the door before Piers reached it.
+
+He stood massively before him, blocking the way. "You've behaved
+foolishly a good many times in your life, my lad," he said. "But I
+shouldn't call you a fool. Why do you want me to go round the world with
+you? Tell me that!"
+
+His tone was mild, but there was a certain grimness about him
+notwithstanding. He looked at Piers with a faint smile in his eyes that
+had in it a quality of resolution that made itself felt. Piers stood
+still before him, half-chafing, half-subdued.
+
+"Tell me!" Crowther said again.
+
+"Oh, what's the good?" With a defiance that was oddly boyish Piers flung
+the question. "I see I've applied in the wrong quarter. Let me go!"
+
+"I will not," Crowther said. Deliberately he raised a hand and pointed to
+the chair from which Piers had just sprung. "Sit down again, sonny, and
+we'll talk."
+
+Piers swung round with an impatient gesture and went to the window. He
+threw it wide, and the distant roar of traffic filled the quiet room like
+the breaking of the sea.
+
+After a distinct pause Crowther followed him. They stood together gazing
+out over the dim wilderness of many roofs and chimneys to where the crude
+glare of an advertisement lit up the night sky.
+
+Piers was absolutely motionless, but there was a species of violence in
+his very stillness, as of a trapped animal preparing to make a wild rush
+for freedom. His attitude was feverishly tense.
+
+Suddenly and very quietly Crowther's hand came forth and linked itself in
+his arm. "What is it, lad?" he said.
+
+Piers made a jerky movement as if to avoid the touch, but the hand closed
+slowly and steadily upon him. He turned abruptly and met Crowther's eyes.
+
+"Crowther," he said, "I've behaved like a cur. I--broke that promise I
+made to you."
+
+He ground out the words savagely, between clenched teeth. Yet his look
+was defiant still. He held himself as a man defying shame.
+
+Crowther's eyes never varied. They looked straight back with a wide
+kindliness greater than compassion, wholly devoid of reproach.
+
+"All right, Piers," he said simply.
+
+Piers stared at him for a moment as one in blank amazement, then very
+strangely his face altered. The hardness went from it like a mask
+suddenly rent away. He made an inarticulate sound and turned from the
+open window.
+
+A second later he was sunk in Crowther's chair with his head in his
+hands, sobbing convulsively, painfully, uncontrollably, in an agony that
+tore like a living thing at the very foundations of his being.
+
+A smaller man than Crowther might have been at a loss to deal with such
+distress, but Crowther was ready. He had seen men in extremities of
+suffering before. He knew how to ease a crushing burden. He sat down on
+the arm of the chair and thrust a strong hand over Piers' shoulder,
+saying no word.
+
+Minutes passed ere by sheer violence that bitter anguish wore itself out
+at last. There came a long, piteous silence, then Piers' hand feeling
+blindly upwards. Crowther's grip encompassed it like a band of iron, but
+still for a space no word was spoken.
+
+Then haltingly Piers found his voice. "I'm sorry--beastly sorry--to have
+made such an ass of myself. You're jolly decent to me, Crowther."
+
+To which Crowther made reply with a tenderness as simple as his own soul.
+"You're just a son to me, lad."
+
+"A precious poor specimen!" muttered Piers.
+
+He remained bowed for a while longer, then lifted at length a face of
+awful whiteness and leaned back upon Crowther's arm, still fast holding
+to his hand.
+
+"You know, you're such an awfully good chap," he said, "that one gets
+into the way of taking you for granted. But I won't encroach on your
+goodness much longer. You're busy, what?" He smiled a quivering smile,
+and glanced momentarily towards the littered table.
+
+"It will keep," said Crowther quietly.
+
+"No, it won't. Life isn't long enough. On my soul, do you know it's like
+coming into sanctuary to enter a place like this? I feel as if I'd shut
+my own particular devil on the other side of the door. But he'll wait for
+me all right. We shan't lose each other on that account."
+
+He uttered a laugh that testified more to the utter weariness of his soul
+than its bitterness.
+
+"Where are you staying?" said Crowther.
+
+"At Marchmont's. At least I've got a room there. I haven't any definite
+plans at present."
+
+"Unless you go round the world with me," said Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes travelled upwards sharply. "No, old chap. I didn't mean it. I
+wouldn't have you if you'd come. It was only a try-on, that."
+
+"Some try-ons fit," said Crowther gravely. He turned towards the table,
+and reached for the drink he had prepared for Piers. "Look here, sonny!
+Have a drink!"
+
+Piers drank in silence, Crowther steadily watching.
+
+"You would have to be back by March," he said presently.
+
+"What?" said Piers.
+
+It was like a protest, the involuntary startled outcry of the patient
+under the probe. Crowther's hand grasped his more closely. "I'll go with
+you on that understanding, Piers," he said. "You'll be wanted then."
+
+Piers groaned. "If it hadn't been for--that," he said, "I'd have ended
+the whole business with a bullet before now."
+
+"No, you wouldn't," said Crowther quietly. "You don't know yourself, boy,
+when you talk like that. You've given up Parliament for the present?"
+
+"For good," said Piers. He paused, as if bracing himself for a great
+effort. "I went to Colonel Rose yesterday and told him I must withdraw.
+He had heard the rumours of course, but he advised me to hold on. I told
+him--I told him--" Piers stopped and swallowed hard, then forced himself
+on,--"I told him there was truth in it, and then--he let me go."
+
+There fell a painful silence, broken by Crowther. "How did this rumour
+get about?"
+
+"Oh, that was at Ina Rose's wedding." Piers' words came more freely now,
+as if the obstruction were passed. "A cousin of Guyes', the bridegroom,
+was there. He came from Queensland, had been present that night when I
+fought and killed Denys, and he recognized me. Then--he got tight and
+told everybody who would listen. It was rotten luck, but it had to
+happen." He paused momentarily; then: "I wasn't enjoying myself,
+Crowther, before it happened," he said.
+
+"I saw that, sonny." Crowther's arm pressed his shoulder in sympathy.
+It was characteristic of the man to display understanding rather than
+pity. He stood ever on the same level with his friends, however low
+that level might be.
+
+Again Piers looked at him as if puzzled by his attitude. "You've done
+me a lot of good," he said abruptly. "You've made me see myself as you
+don't see me, dear old fellow, and never would. Well, I'm going.
+Thanks awfully!"
+
+He made as if he would rise, but Crowther restrained him. "No, lad. I'm
+not parting with you for to-night. We'll send round for your traps. I'll
+put you up."
+
+"What? No, no, you can't! I shall be all right. Don't worry about me!"
+
+Piers began to make impulsive resistance, but Crowther's hold only
+tightened.
+
+"I'm not parting with you to-night," he reiterated firmly. "And look
+here, boy! You've come to me for help, and, to the best of my ability,
+I'll help you. But first,--are you sure you are justified in leaving
+home? Are you sure you are not wanted?"
+
+"Wanted! I!" Piers looked at him from under eye-lids that quivered a
+little. "Yes," he said, after a moment, with a deliberation that sounded
+tragically final. "I am quite sure of that, Crowther."
+
+Crowther asked no more. He patted Piers' shoulder gently and rose.
+
+"Very well," he said. "I'll take that six months' trip round the world
+with you."
+
+"But you can't!" protested Piers. "I never seriously thought you could! I
+only came to you because--" he halted, and a slow, deep flush mounted to
+his forehead--"because you've saved me before," he said. "And I was
+so--so horribly near--the edge of the pit this time."
+
+He spoke with an odd boyishness, and Crowther's lips relaxed in a smile
+that had in it something of a maternal quality. "So long as I can help
+you, you can count on me," he said.
+
+"You're the only man in the world who can help me," Piers said
+impulsively. "At least--" he smiled himself--"I couldn't take it from
+anyone else. But I'm not taking this from you, Crowther. You've got your
+own pet job on hand, and I'm not going to hinder it."
+
+Crowther was setting his writing-table in order. He did not speak for
+a few seconds. Then: "I am a man under authority, sonny," he said. "My
+own pet job, as you call it, doesn't count if it isn't what's wanted
+of me. It has waited twenty-five years; it'll keep--easy--for another
+six months."
+
+Piers got up. "I'm a selfish brute if I let you," he said, irresolutely.
+
+"You can't help yourself, my son." Crowther turned calm eyes upon him.
+"And now just sit down here and write a line home to say what you are
+going to do!"
+
+He had cleared a space upon the table; he pulled forward a chair.
+
+"Oh, I can't! I can't!" said Piers quickly.
+
+But Crowther's hand was on his shoulder. He pressed him down. "Do it,
+lad! It's got to be done," he said.
+
+And with a docility that sat curiously upon him, Piers submitted. He
+leaned his head on his hand, and wrote.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE FALLING NIGHT
+
+
+"You ought to rest, you know," said Tudor. "This sort of thing is
+downright madness for you."
+
+They were walking together in the February twilight along the long, dark
+avenue of chestnuts that led to Rodding Abbey. Avery moved with lagging
+feet that she strove vainly to force to briskness.
+
+"I don't think I do too much," she said. "It isn't good for me to be
+idle. It makes me--it makes me mope."
+
+The involuntary falter in the words spoke more eloquently than the words
+themselves, but she went on after a moment with that same forced
+briskness to which she was trying to compel her dragging limbs. "I only
+ran down to the Vicarage after lunch because it is Jeanie's birthday. It
+is no distance across the Park. It seemed absurd to go in state."
+
+"You are not wise," said Tudor in a tone that silenced all argument.
+
+Avery gave a little sigh and turned from the subject. "I thought Jeanie
+looking very fragile. Mrs. Lorimer has promised that she may come to me
+again just as soon as I am able to have her."
+
+"Ah! Jeanie is a comfort to you?" said Tudor.
+
+To which she answered with a catch in her breath, "The greatest comfort."
+
+They reached the great grey house and entered. A letter lay on the table
+by the door. Avery took it up with a sharp shiver.
+
+"Prom Piers?" asked Tudor abruptly.
+
+She bent her head. "He writes--every week."
+
+"When is he coming home?" He uttered the question with a directness that
+sounded almost brutal, but Avery caught the note of anxiety behind it and
+understood.
+
+She opened the letter in silence, and read it by the waning light of the
+open door. The crackling of the fire behind her was the only sound
+within. Without, the wind moaned desolately through the bare trees. It
+was going to rain.
+
+Slowly Avery raised her head at last and gazed out into the
+gathering dark.
+
+"Come inside!" said Tudor peremptorily.
+
+His hand closed upon her arm, he almost compelled her. "How painfully
+thin you are!" he said, as she yielded. "Are you starving yourself of
+food as well as rest?"
+
+Again she did not answer him. Her eyes were fixed, unseeing. They
+focused their gaze upon the fire as he led her to it. She sat down in
+the chair he placed for her and then very suddenly she began to shiver
+as if with an ague.
+
+"Don't!" said Tudor sharply.
+
+He bent over her, his hands upon her shoulders, holding her.
+
+She controlled herself, and leaned back. "Do sit down, doctor! I'm afraid
+I'm very rude--very forgetful. Will you ring for tea? Piers is in town.
+He writes very kindly, very--very considerately. He is only just back
+from Egypt--he and Mr. Crowther. The last letter was from Cairo. Would
+you--do you care to see what he says?"
+
+She offered him the letter with the words, and after the faintest
+hesitation Tudor took it.
+
+"I have come back to be near you." So without preliminary the letter ran.
+"You will not want me, I know, but still--I am here. For Heaven's sake,
+take care of yourself, and have anything under the sun that you need.
+Your husband, Piers."
+
+It only covered the first page. Tudor turned the sheet frowningly and
+replaced it in its envelope.
+
+"He always writes like that," said Avery. "Every week--all through the
+winter--just a sentence or two. I haven't written at all to him though
+I've tried--till I couldn't try any more."
+
+She spoke with a weariness so utter that it seemed to swamp all feeling.
+Tudor turned his frowning regard upon her. His eyes behind their glasses
+intently searched her face.
+
+"How does he get news of you?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"Through Mrs. Lorimer. She writes to him regularly, I believe,--either
+she or Jeanie. I suppose--presently--"
+
+Avery stopped, her eyes upon the fire, her hands tightly clasped
+before her.
+
+"Presently?" said Tudor.
+
+She turned her head slightly, without moving her eyes. "Presently there
+will have to be some--mutual arrangement made. But I can't see my way
+yet. I can't consider the future at all. I feel as if night were falling.
+Perhaps--for me--there is no future."
+
+"May I take your pulse?" said Tudor.
+
+She gave him her hand in the same tired fashion. He took it gravely,
+feeling her pulse, his eyes upon her face.
+
+"Have you no relations of your own?" he asked her suddenly.
+
+She shook her head. "No one near. My parents were both only children."
+
+"And no friends?" he said.
+
+"Only Mrs. Lorimer. I lost sight of people when I married. And then--"
+Avery halted momentarily "after my baby girl died, for a long time I
+didn't seem to care for making new friends."
+
+"Ah!" said Tudor, his tone unwontedly gentle. "You will soon have another
+child to care for now."
+
+She made a slight gesture as of protest. "Do you know I can't picture
+it? I do not feel that it will be so. I believe one of us--or
+both--will die."
+
+She spoke calmly, so calmly that even Tudor, with all his experience, was
+momentarily shocked. "Avery!" he said sharply. "You are morbid!"
+
+She looked at him then with her tired eyes. "Am I?" she said. "I really
+don't feel particularly sad--only worn out. When anyone has been
+burnt--badly burnt--it destroys the nerve tissues, doesn't it? They don't
+suffer after that has happened. I think that is my case."
+
+"You will suffer," said Tudor.
+
+He spoke brutally; he wanted to rouse her from her lethargy, to pierce
+somehow that dreadful calm.
+
+But he failed; she only faintly smiled.
+
+"I can bear bodily suffering," she said, "particularly if it leads to
+freedom and peace."
+
+He got up as if it were he who had been pierced. "You won't die!" he said
+harshly. "I won't let you die!"
+
+Her eyes went back to the fire, as if attracted thereto irresistibly.
+"Most of me died last August," she said in a low voice.
+
+"You are wrong!" He stood over her almost threateningly. "When you hold
+your child in your arms you will see how wrong. Tell me, when is your
+husband coming back to you?"
+
+That reached her. She looked up at him with a quick hunted look.
+"Never!" she said.
+
+He looked back at her mercilessly. "Never is a long time, Lady Evesham.
+Do you think he will be kept at arm's length when you are through your
+trouble? Do you think--whatever his sins--that he has no claim upon
+you? Mind, I don't like him. I never did and I never shall. But you--you
+are sworn to him."
+
+He had never spoken so to her before. She flinched as if he had struck
+her with a whip. She put her hands over her face, saying no word.
+
+He stood for a few moments stern, implacable, looking down at her. Then
+very suddenly his attitude changed. His face softened. He stooped and
+touched her shoulder.
+
+"Avery!" His voice was low and vehement; he spoke into her ear. "When you
+first kicked him out, I was mean enough to feel glad. But I soon
+saw--that he took all that is vital in you with him. Avery,--my
+dear,--for God's sake--have him back!"
+
+She did not speak or move, save for a spasmodic shuddering that shook her
+whole frame.
+
+He bent lower. "Avery, I say, can't you--for the baby's sake--anyway
+consider it?"
+
+She flung out her hands with a cry. "The child is cursed! The child will
+die!" There was terrible conviction in the words. She lifted a tortured
+face. "Oh, don't you see," she said piteously, "how impossible it is for
+me? Don't--don't say any more!"
+
+"I won't," said Tudor.
+
+He took the outflung hands and held them closely, restrainingly,
+soothingly.
+
+"I won't," he said again. "Forgive me for saying so much! Poor girl!
+Poor girl!"
+
+His lips quivered a little as he said it, but his hold was full of
+sustaining strength. She grew gradually calmer, and finally submitted to
+the gentle pressure with which he laid her back in her chair.
+
+"You are always so very good to me," she said presently. "I sometimes
+wonder how I ever came to--to--" She stopped herself abruptly.
+
+"To refuse me?" said Tudor quietly. "I always knew why, Lady Evesham. It
+was because you loved another man. It has been the case for as long as I
+have known you."
+
+He turned from her with the words wholly without emotion and took up his
+stand on the hearth-rug.
+
+"Now may I talk to you about your health?" he said professionally.
+
+She leaned forward slowly. "Dr. Tudor, first will you make me a promise?"
+
+He smiled a little. "I don't think so. I never do make promises."
+
+"Just this once!" she pleaded anxiously. "Because it means a great
+deal to me."
+
+"Well?" said Tudor.
+
+"It is only--" she paused a moment, breathing quickly--"only that you
+will not--whatever the circumstances--let Piers be sent for."
+
+"I can't promise that," said Tudor at once.
+
+She clasped her hands beseechingly. "You must--please--you must!"
+
+He shook his head. "I can't. I will undertake that he shall not come to
+you against your will. I can't do more than that."
+
+"Do you suppose you could keep him out?" Avery said, a note of quivering
+bitterness in her voice.
+
+"I am quite sure I can," Tudor answered steadily. "Don't trouble
+yourself on that head! I swear that, unless you ask for him, he shall
+not come to you."
+
+She shivered again and dropped back in her chair. "I shall never do
+that--never--never--so long as I am myself!"
+
+"Your wishes--whatever they are--shall be obeyed," Tudor promised
+gravely.
+
+And with that gently but very resolutely he changed the subject.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE DREAM
+
+
+How many times had he paced up and down the terrace? Piers could not have
+said. He had been there for hours, years, half a lifetime,
+waiting--waiting eternally for the summons that never came.
+
+Could it have been only that morning that Mrs. Lorimer's urgent telegram
+had reached him? Only that morning that he had parted from Crowther for
+the first time in six months? It seemed aeons ago. And yet here he was in
+the cold grey dusk, still waiting to be called to his wife's side.
+
+The night was fast approaching--a bitter, cheerless night with a driving
+wind that seemed to promise snow. It was growing darker every moment.
+Only her window shone like a beacon in the gloom. How long would he have
+to wait? How long? How long?
+
+He had brought a doctor with him in obedience to Mrs. Lorimer's message,
+transmitting Tudor's desire. Tudor was not satisfied. He wanted Maxwell
+Wyndham, the great surgeon--a man still comparatively young in years but
+high in his profession--a man in whose presence--so it was said--no
+patient ever died. That of course was an exaggeration--some hysterical
+woman's tribute to his genius. But genius he undoubtedly possessed and
+that of a very high order.
+
+If anyone could save her, it would be Maxwell Wyndham. So Piers told
+himself each time he turned in his endless pacing and looked at that
+lighted window. Tudor believed in him. And--yes, he believed in him also.
+There had been something in the great man's attitude, something of
+arrogant self-assurance that had inspired him with confidence almost
+against his will. He had watched him saunter up the stairs with his hands
+thrust into his pockets and an air of limitless leisure pervading his
+every movement, and he had been exasperated by the man's deliberation and
+subtly comforted at the same time. He was thankful that he had been able
+to secure him.
+
+Ah, what was that? A cry in the night! The weird, haunting screech of an
+owl! He ridiculed himself for the sudden wild thumping of his heart. But
+would they never call him? This suspense was tearing at the very roots of
+his being.
+
+Away in the distance a dog was barking, fitfully, peevishly--the bark of
+a chained animal. Piers stopped in his walk and cursed the man who had
+chained him. Then--as though driven by an invisible goad--he pressed on,
+walking resolutely with his back turned upon the lighted window, forcing
+himself to pace the whole length of the terrace.
+
+He had nearly reached the further end when a sudden fragrance swept
+across his path--pure, intoxicating, exquisitely sweet. Violets! The
+violets that grew in the great bed under the study-window! The violets
+that Sir Beverley's bride had planted fifty years ago!
+
+The thought of his grandfather went through him like a stab through the
+heart. He clenched his hands and held his breath while the spasm passed.
+Never since the night Victor had summoned Avery to comfort him, had he
+felt so sick a longing for the old man's presence. For a few lingering
+seconds it was almost more than he could bear. Then he turned about and
+faced the chill night-wind and that lighted window, and the anguish of
+his vigil drove out all other griefs. How long had he yet to wait? How
+long? How long?
+
+There came a low call behind him on the terrace. He wheeled, strangling a
+startled exclamation in his throat. A man's figure--a broad, powerful
+figure--lounged towards him. He seemed to be wearing carpet slippers, for
+he made no sound. It was Maxwell Wyndham, and Piers' heart ceased to
+beat. He stood as if turned to stone. All the blood in his body seemed to
+be singing in his ears. His head was burning, the rest of him cold--cold
+as ice. He would have moved to meet the advancing figure, but he could
+not stir. He could only stop and listen to that maddening tarantella
+beating out in his fevered brain.
+
+"I say, you know--" the voice came to him out of an immensity of space,
+as though uttered from another world--"it's a bit too chilly for this
+sort of thing. Why didn't you put on an overcoat?"
+
+A man's hand, strong and purposeful, closed upon his arm and impelled him
+towards the house.
+
+Piers went like an automaton, but he could not utter a word. His mouth
+felt parched, his tongue powerless.
+
+Avery! Avery! The woman he had wronged--the woman he worshipped so
+madly--for whom his whole being mental and physical craved desperately,
+yearning, unceasingly,--without whom he lived in a torture that was never
+dormant! Avery! Avery! Was she lying dead behind that lighted window? If
+so, if so, those six months of torment had been in vain. He would end his
+misery swiftly and finally before it turned his brain.
+
+Maxwell Wyndham was guiding him towards the conservatory where a dim
+light shone. It was like an altar-flame in the darkness--that place where
+first their lips had met. The memory of that night went through him like
+a sword-thrust. Oh, Avery! Oh, Avery!
+
+"Now look here," said Maxwell Wyndham, in his steady, emotionless voice;
+"you're wanted upstairs, but you can't go unless you are absolutely sure
+of yourself."
+
+Wanted! His senses leapt to the word. Instinctively he pulled himself
+together, collecting all his strength. He spoke, and found to his
+surprise that speech was not difficult.
+
+"She has asked for me?"
+
+"Yes; but," Wyndham's tone was impressive, "I warn you, she is not
+altogether herself. And--she is very desperately ill."
+
+"The child?" questioned Piers.
+
+"The child never breathed." Curt and cold came the answer. "I have had to
+concentrate all my energies upon saving the mother's life, and--to be
+open with you--I don't think I have succeeded. There is still a chance,
+but--" He left the sentence unfinished.
+
+They had reached the conservatory, and, entering, it was Piers who led
+the way. His face, as they emerged into the library, was deathly, but he
+was absolute master of himself.
+
+"I believe there is a meal in the dining-room," he said. "Will you help
+yourself while I go up?"
+
+"No," said Wyndham briefly. "I am coming up with you."
+
+He kept a hand upon Piers' arm all the way up the stairs, deliberately
+restraining him, curbing the fevered impetuosity that urged him with a
+grim insistence that would not yield an inch to any chafing for freedom.
+
+He gave utterance to no further injunctions, but his manner was eloquent
+of the urgent need for self-repression. When Piers entered his wife's
+room, that room which he had not entered since the night of Ina's
+wedding, his tread was catlike in its caution, and all the eagerness was
+gone from his face.
+
+Then only did the doctor's hand fall from him, so that he
+advanced alone.
+
+She was lying on one side of the great four-poster, straight and
+motionless as a recumbent figure on a tomb. Her head was in deep shadow.
+He could see her face only in vaguest outline.
+
+Softly he approached, and Mrs. Lorimer, rising silently from a chair
+by the bedside, made room for him. He sat down, sinking as it were
+into a great abyss of silence, listening tensely, but hearing not so
+much as a breath.
+
+The doctor took up his stand at the foot of the bed. In the adjoining
+room sat Lennox Tudor, watching ceaselessly, expectantly, it seemed to
+Piers. Behind him moved a nurse, noiselessly intent upon polishing
+something that flashed like silver every time it caught his eye.
+
+Suddenly out of the silence there came a voice. "If I go down to
+hell,--Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning--the wings
+of the morning--" There came a pause, the difficult pause of
+uncertainty--"the wings of the morning--" murmured the voice again.
+
+Piers leaned upon the pillow. "Avery!" he said.
+
+She turned as if some magic moved her. Her hands came out to him,
+piteously weak and trembling. "Piers,--my darling!" she said.
+
+He gathered the poor nerveless hands into a tight clasp, kissing them
+passionately. He forgot the silent watcher at the foot of the bed, forgot
+little Mrs. Lorimer hovering in the shadows, and Tudor waiting with the
+nurse behind him. They all slipped into nothingness, and Avery--his
+wife--alone remained in a world that was very dark.
+
+Her voice came to him in a weak whisper. "Oh, Piers, I've
+been--wanting you so!"
+
+"My own darling!" he whispered back. "I will never leave you again!"
+
+"Oh yes, you will!" she answered drearily. "You always say that, but you
+are always gone in the morning. It's only a dream--only a dream!"
+
+He slipped his arms beneath her and drew her to his breast. "It is not a
+dream, Avery," he told her very earnestly. "I am here in the flesh. I am
+holding you."
+
+"I know," she said. "It's always so."
+
+The weary conviction of her tone smote cold to his heart. He gathered her
+closer still. He pressed his lips to her forehead.
+
+"Avery, can't you feel me?" he said.
+
+Her head sank against his shoulder. "Yes--yes," she said. "But you have
+always done that."
+
+"Done what, darling?"
+
+"Imposed your will on mine--made me feel you." Her voice quivered; she
+began to cry a little, weakly, like a tired child. "Do you remember--what
+you said--about--about--the ticket of leave?" she said. "You leave your
+dungeon--my poor Piers. But you have to go back again--when the leave has
+expired. And I--I am left alone."
+
+The tears were running down her face. He wiped them tenderly away.
+
+"My dearest, if you want me--if you need me,--I will stay," he said.
+
+"But you can't," she said hopelessly. "Even to-night--even to-night--I
+thought you were never coming. And I went at last to look for you--behind
+your iron bars. But, oh, Piers, the agony of it! And I couldn't reach you
+after all, though I tried so hard--so hard."
+
+"Never mind, my darling!" he whispered. "We are together now."
+
+"But we shan't be when the morning comes," sobbed Avery. "I know it is
+all a dream. It's happened so many, many times."
+
+He clasped her closer, hushing her with tender words, vowing he would
+never leave her, while the Shadow of Death gathered closer about them,
+threatening every instant to come between.
+
+She grew calmer at last, and presently sank into a state of
+semi-consciousness lying against his breast.
+
+Time passed. Piers did not know how it went. With his wife clasped in his
+arms he sat and waited, waited--for the falling of a deeper night or the
+coming of the day--he knew not which. His brain felt like a stopped
+watch; it did not seem to be working at all. Even the power to suffer
+seemed to have left him. He felt curiously indifferent, strangely
+submissive to circumstances,--like a man scourged into the numbness of
+exhaustion. He knew at the back of his mind that as soon as his vitality
+reasserted itself the agony would return. The respite could not last, but
+while it lasted he knew no pain. Like one in a state of coma, he was not
+even aware of thought.
+
+It might have been hours later, or possibly only minutes, that
+Maxwell Wyndham came round to his side and bent over him, a quiet
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"You had better lay her down," he said. "She won't wake now."
+
+"What?" said Piers sharply.
+
+The words had stabbed him back to understanding in a second. He glared at
+the doctor with eyes half-savage, half-frightened.
+
+"No, no!" said Wyndham gently. "I don't mean that. She is asleep. She is
+breathing. But she will rest better if you lay her down."
+
+The absolute calmness with which he spoke took effect upon Piers. He
+yielded, albeit not very willingly, to the mandate.
+
+They laid her down upon the pillow between them, and then for many
+seconds Wyndham stood, closely watching, almost painfully intent. Piers
+waited dumbly, afraid to move, afraid to speak.
+
+The doctor turned to him at last. "What about that meal you spoke of?
+Shall we go down and get it?"
+
+Piers stared at him. "I am not leaving her," he said in a quick whisper.
+
+Wyndham's hand was on his shoulder again--a steady, compelling hand. "Oh
+yes, you are. I want to talk to you," he said. "She is sleeping
+naturally, and she won't wake for some time. Come!"
+
+There was nothing peremptory about him, yet he gained his end. Piers
+rose. He hung for a moment over the bed, gazing hungrily downwards upon
+the shadowy, motionless form, then in silence turned.
+
+Tudor had risen. He met them in the doorway, and between him and the
+London doctor a few words passed. Then the latter pushed his hand through
+Piers' arm, and drew him away.
+
+They descended the wide oak stairs together and entered the dining-room.
+Piers moved like a man dazed. His companion went straight to the table
+and poured out a drink, which he immediately held out to Piers, looking
+at him with eyes that were green and very shrewd.
+
+"I think we shall save her," he said.
+
+Piers drank in great gulps, and came to himself. "I say, I'm beastly
+rude!" he said, with sudden boyishness. "For goodness' sake, help
+yourself! Sit down, won't you?"
+
+Maxwell Wyndham seated himself with characteristic deliberation of
+movement. He had fiery red hair that shone brazenly in the lamplight.
+
+"I can't eat by myself, Sir Piers," he remarked, after a moment. "And it
+isn't particularly good for you to drink without eating either, in your
+present frame of mind."
+
+Piers sat down, his attitude one of intense weariness. "You really think
+she'll pull through?" he said.
+
+"I think so," Wyndham answered. "But it won't be a walk over. She will be
+ill for a long time."
+
+"I'll take her away somewhere," said Piers. "A quiet time at the sea
+will soon pick her up."
+
+Maxwell Wyndham said nothing.
+
+Piers glanced at him with quick impatience. "Don't you advise that?"
+
+The green eyes countered his like the turn of a swordblade. "Certainly
+quiet is essential," said Wyndham enigmatically.
+
+Piers made a chafing movement. "What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean," very calmly came the answer, "that if you really value your
+wife's welfare, you will let someone else take her away."
+
+It was a straight thrust, and it went home. Piers flinched sharply. But
+in a moment he had recovered himself. He was on guard. He looked at
+Wyndham with haughty enquiry.
+
+"Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because her peace of mind depends upon it." Wyndham's answer came with
+brutal directness. "You will find, when this phase of extreme weakness
+is past, that your presence is not desired. She may try to hide it from
+you. That depends upon the kind of woman she is. But the fact will
+remain--does remain--that for some reason best known to yourself, she
+shrinks from you. I am not speaking rashly without knowledge. When a
+woman is in agony she can't help showing her soul. I saw your wife's
+soul to-day."
+
+Piers was white to the lips. He sat rigid, no longer looking at the
+doctor, but staring beyond him fixedly at a woman's face on the wall that
+smiled and softly mocked.
+
+"What did she say to you?" he said, after a moment.
+
+"She said," curtly Wyndham made reply,--"it was at a time when she
+could hardly speak at all--'Even if I ask for my husband, don't
+send--don't send!'"
+
+"Yet you fetched me!" Piers' eyes came swiftly back to him; they shone
+with a fierce glint.
+
+But Wyndham was undismayed. "I fetched you to save her life," he said.
+"There was nothing else to be done. She was in delirium, and nothing else
+would calm her."
+
+"And she wanted me!" said Piers. "She begged me to stay with her!"
+
+"I know. It was a passing phase. When her brain is normal, she will have
+forgotten."
+
+Piers sprang to his feet with sudden violence. "But--damn it--she is my
+wife!" he cried out fiercely.
+
+Maxwell Wyndham leaned across the table. "She is your wife--yes," he
+said. "But isn't that a reason for considering her to the very utmost?
+Have you always done that, I wonder? No, don't answer! I've no right to
+ask. Only--you know, doctors are the only men in the world who know just
+what women have to put up with, and the knowledge isn't exactly
+exhilarating. Give her a month or two to get over this! You won't be
+sorry afterwards."
+
+It was kindly spoken, so kindly that the flare of anger died out of Piers
+on the instant, and the sweetness dormant in him--that latent sweetness
+that had won Avery's heart--came swiftly to the surface.
+
+He threw himself down again, looking into the alert, green eyes with
+an oddly rueful smile. "All right, doctor!" he said. "I shan't go to
+her if she doesn't want me. But I've got to make sure she doesn't,
+haven't I? What?"
+
+There was a wholly unconscious note of pathos in the last word that sent
+the doctor's mouth up at one corner in a smile that was more pitying than
+humorous. "I should certainly do that," he said. "But I'm afraid you'll
+find I've told you the beastly truth."
+
+"For which I am obliged to you," said Piers, with a bow.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE HAND OF THE SCULPTOR
+
+
+During the week that followed, no second summons came to Piers from his
+wife's room. He hung about the house, aimless, sick at heart, with hope
+sinking ever lower within him like a fire dying for lack of
+replenishment.
+
+He could neither sleep nor eat, and Victor watched him with piteous
+though unspoken solicitude. Victor knew the wild, undisciplined
+temperament of the boy he had cherished from his cradle, and he lived in
+hourly dread of some sudden passionate outburst of rebellion, some
+desperate act that should lead to irremediable disaster. He had not
+forgotten that locked drawer in the old master's bureau or the quick
+release it contained, and he never left Piers long alone in its vicinity.
+
+But he need not have been afraid. Piers' thoughts never strayed in that
+direction. If his six months in Crowther's society had brought him no
+other comfort, they had at least infused in him a saner outlook and
+steadier balance. Very little had ever passed between them on the subject
+of the tragedy that had thrown them together. After the first bitter
+outpouring of his soul, Piers had withdrawn himself with so obvious a
+desire for privacy that Crowther had never attempted to cross the
+boundary thus clearly defined. But his influence had made itself felt
+notwithstanding. It would have been impossible to have lived with the man
+for so long without imbibing some of that essential greatness of soul
+that was his main characteristic, and Piers was ever swift to feel the
+effect of atmosphere. He had come to look upon Crowther with a reverence
+that in a fashion affected his daily life. That which Crowther regarded
+as unworthy, he tossed aside himself without consideration. Crowther had
+not despised him at his worst, and he was determined that he would show
+himself to be not despicable. He was moreover under a solemn promise to
+return to Crowther when he found himself at liberty, and in very
+gratitude to the man he meant to keep that promise.
+
+But, albeit he was braced for endurance, the long hours of waiting were
+very hard to bear. His sole comfort lay in the fact that Avery was making
+gradual progress in the right direction. It was a slow and difficult
+recovery, as Maxwell Wyndham had foretold, but it was continuous. Tudor
+assured him of this every day with a curt kindliness that had grown on
+him of late. It was his own fashion of showing a wholly involuntary
+sympathy of which he was secretly half-ashamed, and which he well knew
+Piers would have brooked in no other form. It established an odd sort of
+truce between them of which each was aware the while he sternly ignored
+it. They could never be friends. It was fundamentally impossible, but at
+least they had, if only temporarily, ceased to be enemies.
+
+Little Mrs. Lorimer's sympathy was also of a half-ashamed type. She did
+not want to be sorry for Piers, but she could not wholly restrain her
+pity. The look in his eyes haunted her. Curiously it made her think of
+some splendid animal created for liberty, and fretting its heart out in
+utter, hopeless misery on a chain.
+
+She longed with all her motherly heart to comfort him, and by the irony
+of circumstance it fell to her to deal the final blow to what was left of
+his hope. She wondered afterwards how she ever brought herself to the
+task, but it was in reality so forced upon her that she could not evade
+it. Avery, lying awake during the first hours of a still night, heard her
+husband's feet pacing up and down the terrace, and the mischief was done.
+She was thrown into painful agitation and wholly lost her sleep in
+consequence. When Mrs. Lorimer arrived about noon on the following day,
+she found her alarmingly weak, and the nurse in evident perplexity.
+
+"I am sure there is something worrying her," the latter said to Mrs.
+Lorimer. "I can't think what it is."
+
+But directly Mrs. Lorimer was alone with Avery, the trouble came out. For
+she reached out fevered hands to her, saying, "Why, oh, why did you
+persuade me to come back here? I knew he would come if I did!"
+
+Again the emergency impelled Mrs. Lorimer to a display of common-sense
+with which few would have credited her.
+
+"Oh, do you mean Piers, dear?" she said. "But surely you are not afraid
+of him! He has been here all the time--ever since you were so ill."
+
+"And I begged you not to send!" groaned Avery.
+
+"My dear," said Mrs. Lorimer very gently, "it was his right to be here."
+
+"Then that night--that night--" gasped Avery, "he really did come to
+me--that night after the baby was born."
+
+"My darling, you begged for him so piteously," said Mrs. Lorimer
+apologetically.
+
+Avery's lip quivered. "That was just what I feared--what I wanted to make
+impossible," she said. "When one is suffering, one forgets so."
+
+"But surely it was the cry of your heart, darling," urged Mrs. Lorimer
+tremulously. "And do you know--poor lad--he looks so ill, so miserable."
+
+But Avery's face was turned away. "I can't help it," she said. "I
+can't--possibly--see him again. I feel as if--as if there were a curse
+upon us both, and that is why the baby died. Oh yes, morbid, I know;
+perhaps wrong. But--I have been steeped in sin. I must be free for a
+time. I can't face him yet. I haven't the strength."
+
+"Dearest, he will never force himself upon you," said Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+Avery's eyes went instinctively to the door that led into the room that
+Piers had occupied after his marriage. The broken bolt had been removed,
+but not replaced. A great shudder went through her. She covered her face
+with her hands.
+
+"Oh, beg him--beg him to go away," she sobbed, "till I am strong enough
+to go myself!"
+
+Argument was useless. Mrs. Lorimer abandoned it with the wisdom born of
+close friendship. Instead, she clasped Avery tenderly to her and gave
+herself to the task of calming her distress.
+
+And when that was somewhat accomplished, she left her to go sadly in
+search of Piers.
+
+She found him sitting on the terrace with the morning-paper beside him
+and Caesar pressed close to his legs, his great mottled head resting on
+his master's knee.
+
+He was not reading. So much Mrs. Lorimer perceived before with a sharp
+turn of the head he discovered her. He was on his feet in a moment, and
+she saw his boyish smile for an instant, only for an instant, as he came
+to meet her. She noted with a pang how gaunt he looked and how deep were
+the shadows about his eyes. Then he had reached her, and was holding both
+her hands almost before she realized it.
+
+"I say, you're awfully good to come up every day like this," he said. "I
+can't think how you make the time. Splendid sun to-day, what? It's like a
+day in summer, if you can get out of the wind. Come and bask with me!"
+
+He drew her along the terrace to his sheltered corner, and made her sit
+down, spreading his newspaper on the stone seat for her accommodation.
+Her heart went out to him as he performed that small chivalrous act. She
+could not help it. And suddenly the task before her seemed so monstrous
+that she felt she could not fulfil it. The tears rushed to her eyes.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Piers gently. He sat down beside her, and
+slipped an encouraging hand through her arm. "Was it something you came
+out to say? Don't mind me! You don't, do you?"
+
+His voice was softly persuasive. He leaned towards her, his dark
+eyes searching her face. Mrs. Lorimer felt as if she were about to
+hurt a child.
+
+She blew her nose, dried her eyes, and took the brown hand very tightly
+between her own. "My dear, I'm so sorry for you--so sorry for you
+both!" she said.
+
+A curious little glint came and went in the eyes that watched her. Piers'
+fingers closed slowly upon hers.
+
+"I've got to clear out, what?" he said.
+
+She nodded mutely; she could not say it.
+
+He was silent awhile; then: "All right," he said. "I'll go this
+afternoon."
+
+His voice was dead level, wholly emotionless, but for a few seconds his
+grip taxed her endurance to the utmost. Then, abruptly, it relaxed.
+
+He bent his black head and kissed the nervous little hands that were
+clasped upon his own.
+
+"Don't you fret now!" he said, with an odd kindness that was to her more
+pathetic than any appeal for sympathy. "You've got enough burdens of your
+own to bear without shouldering ours. How is Jeanie?"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer choked down a sob. "She isn't a bit well. She has a cold and
+such a racking cough. I'm keeping her in bed."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," said Piers steadily. "Give her my love! And look
+here, when Avery is well enough, let them go away together, will you? It
+will do them both good."
+
+"It's dear of you to think of it," said Mrs. Lorimer wistfully. "Yes, it
+did do Jeanie good in the autumn. But Avery--"
+
+"It will do Avery good too," he said. "She can take that cottage at
+Stanbury Cliffs for the whole summer if she likes. Tell her to! And look
+here! Will you take her a message from me?"
+
+"A written message?" asked Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+He pulled out a pocket-book. "Six words," he said. He scrawled them, tore
+out the leaf and gave it to her, holding it up before her eyes that she
+might read it.
+
+"Good-bye till you send for me. Piers."
+
+"That's all," he said. "Thanks awfully. She'll understand that. And
+now--I say, you're not going to cry any more, are you?" He shook his head
+at her with a laugh in his eyes. "You really mustn't. You're much too
+tender-hearted. I say, it was a pity about the baby, what? I thought the
+baby might have made a difference. But it'll be all the same presently.
+She's wanting me really. I've known that ever since that night--you
+know--ever since I held her in my arms."
+
+He spoke with absolute simplicity. She had never liked him better than at
+that moment. His boyishness had utterly disarmed her, and not till later
+did she realize how completely he had masked his soul therewith.
+
+She parted with him with a full heart, and had a strictly private little
+cry on his account ere she returned to Avery. Poor lad! Poor lad! And
+when he wasn't smiling, he did look so ill!
+
+The same thought struck Crowther a few hours later as Piers sat with him
+in his room, and devoted himself with considerable adroitness to making
+his fire burn through as quickly as possible, the while he briefly
+informed him that his wife was considered practically out of danger and
+had no further use for him for the present.
+
+Crowther's heart sank at the news though he gave no sign of dismay.
+
+"What do you think of doing, sonny?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+"I? Why, what is there for me to do?" Piers glanced round momentarily.
+"I wonder what you'd do, Crowther," he said, with a smile that was
+scarcely gay.
+
+Crowther came to his side, and stood there massively, while he filled his
+pipe. "Piers," he said, "I presume she knows all there is to know of that
+bad business?"
+
+Piers rammed the poker a little deeper into the fire and said nothing.
+
+But Crowther had broken through the barricade of silence at last, and
+would not be denied.
+
+"Does she know, Piers?" he insisted. "Did you ever tell her how the
+thing came to pass? Does she know that the quarrel was forced upon
+you--that you took heavy odds--that you did not of your own free will
+avoid the consequences? Does she know that you loved her before you knew
+who she was?"
+
+He paused, but Piers remained stubbornly silent, still prodding at the
+red coals.
+
+He bent a little, taking him by the shoulder. "Piers, answer me!"
+
+Again Piers' eyes glanced upwards. His face was hard. "Oh, get away,
+Crowther!" he growled. "What's the good?" And then in his winning way
+he gripped Crowther's hand hard. "No, I never told her anything," he
+said. "And I made it impossible for her to ask. I couldn't urge
+extenuating circumstances because there weren't any. Moreover, it
+wouldn't have made a ha'porth's difference if I had. So shunt the
+subject like a good fellow! She must take me at my worst--at my worst,
+do you hear?--or not at all."
+
+"But, my dear lad, you owe it to her," began Crowther gravely.
+
+Piers cut him short with a recklessness that scarcely veiled the pain in
+his soul. "No, I don't! I don't owe her anything. She doesn't think any
+worse of me than I am. She knows me jolly well,--better than you do, most
+worthy padre-elect. If she ever forgives me, it won't be because she
+thinks I've been punished enough, but just because she is my mate,--and
+she loves me." His voice sank upon the words.
+
+"And you are going to wait for that?" said Crowther.
+
+Piers nodded. He dropped the poker with a careless clatter and stretched
+his arms high above his head. "You once said something to me about the
+Hand of the Sculptor," he said. "Well, if He wants to do any shaping so
+far as I am concerned, now is His time. I am willing to be shaped."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes were half-closed, and there was a drawn look about the lids
+as of a man in pain. "I mean, my good Crowther," he said, "that the mire
+and clay have ceased to attract me. My house is empty--swept and
+garnished,--but it is not open to devils at present. You want to know my
+plans. I haven't any. I am waiting to be taken in hand."
+
+He spoke with a faint smile that moved Crowther to deep compassion. "You
+will have to be patient a long while, maybe, sonny," he said.
+
+"I can be patient," said Piers. He shifted his position slightly,
+clasping his hands behind his head, so that his face was in shadow. "You
+think that is not much like me, Crowther," he said. "But I can wait for a
+thing if I feel I shall get it in the end. I have felt that--ever since
+the night after I went down there. She was so desperately ill. She wanted
+me--just to hold her in my arms." His voice quivered suddenly. He stopped
+for a few seconds, then went on in a lower tone. "She wasn't--quite
+herself at the time--or she would never have asked for me. But it made a
+difference to me all the same. It made me see that possibly--just
+possibly--there is a reason for things,--that even misery and iron
+may have their uses--that there may be something behind it
+all--what?--Something Divine."
+
+He stopped altogether, and pushed his chair further still into shadow.
+
+Crowther was smoking. He did not speak for several seconds, but smoked on
+with eyes fixed straight before him as though they scanned a far-distant
+horizon. At length: "I rather think the shaping has begun, sonny," he
+said. "You don't believe in prayer now?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Piers.
+
+Crowther's eyes came down to him. "Can't you pray without believing?" he
+said slowly.
+
+Piers made a restless movement. "What should I pray for?"
+
+Crowther was smiling slightly--the smile of a man who has begun to see,
+albeit afar off, the fulfilment of a beloved project.
+
+"Do you know, old chap," he said, "I expect I seem a fool to you; but
+it's the fools who confound the wise, isn't it? I believe a thundering
+lot in prayer. But I didn't always. I prayed without believing for a long
+time first."
+
+"That seems to me like offering an insult to God," said Piers.
+
+"I don't think He views it in that light," said Crowther, "any more than
+He blames a blind man for feeling his way. The great thing is to do
+it--to get started. You're wanting a big thing in life. Well,--ask for
+it! Don't be afraid of asking! It's what you're meant to do."
+
+He drew a long whiff from his pipe and puffed it slowly forth.
+
+There fell a deep silence between them. Piers sat in absolute stillness,
+gazing downwards into the fire with eyes still half-closed.
+
+Suddenly he jerked back his head. "It's a bit of a farce, what?" he said.
+"But I'll do it on your recommendation, I'll give it a six months' trial,
+and see what comes of it. That's a fair test anyhow. Something ought to
+turn up in another six months."
+
+He got to his feet with a laugh, and stood in front of Crowther with a
+species of challenge in his eyes. He looked as if he expected rebuke, and
+were prepared to meet it with arrogance.
+
+But Crowther uttered neither reproach nor admonition. He met the look
+with the utmost kindliness--the most complete understanding.
+
+"Something will turn up, lad," he said, with steady conviction. "But
+not--probably--in the way you expect."
+
+Piers' face showed a momentary surprise. "How on earth do you
+know?" he said.
+
+"I do know," Crowther made steadfast reply; but he offered no explanation
+for his confidence.
+
+Piers thrust out an impulsive hand. "You may be right and you may not;
+but you've been a brick to me, old fellow," he said, a note of deep
+feeling in his voice,--"several kinds of a brick, and I'm not likely to
+forget it. If you ever get into the Church, you'll be known as the parson
+who doesn't preach, and it'll be a reputation to be proud of."
+
+Crowther's answering grip was the grip of a giant. There was a great
+tenderness in the far-seeing grey eyes as he made reply. "It would be
+rank presumption on my part to preach to you, lad. You are made of
+infinitely finer stuff than I."
+
+"Oh, rats!" exclaimed Piers in genuine astonishment.
+
+But the elder man shook his head with a smile. "No; facts, Piers!" he
+said. "There are greater possibilities in you than I could ever
+attain to."
+
+"Possibilities for evil then," said Piers, with a very bitter laugh.
+
+Crowther looked him straight in the eyes. "And possibilities for good, my
+son," he said. "They grow together, thank God."
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE OPEN HEAVEN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE VERDICT
+
+
+"It's much better than learning by heart," said Jeanie, with her tired
+little smile. "Somehow, you know, I can't learn by heart--at least not
+long things. Father says it is because my brain is deficient. But Mother
+says hers is just the same, so I don't mind so much."
+
+"My dear, it will take you hours to read through all this," said
+Avery, surveying with dismay the task which the Vicar had set his
+small daughter.
+
+"Yes," said Jeanie. "I am to devote three hours of every day to it. I had
+to promise I would." She gave a short sigh. "It's very good for me, you
+know," she said.
+
+"Is it?" said Avery. She smoothed back the brown hair lovingly. "You
+mustn't overwork, Jeanie darling," she said.
+
+"I can't help it," said Jeanie quietly. "You see, I promised."
+
+That she would keep her promise, whatever the cost, was evidently a
+foregone conclusion; and Avery could say nothing against it.
+
+She left the child to work therefore, and wandered down herself to
+the shore.
+
+It was June. A soft breeze came over the sea, salt and pure, with the
+life-giving quality of the great spaces. She breathed it deeply,
+thankfully, conscious of returning strength.
+
+She and Jeanie had arrived only the week before, and she was sure their
+visit was going to do wonders for them both. Her own convalescence had
+been a protracted one, but she told herself as she walked along the beach
+towards the smiling, evening sea that she was already stronger than her
+companion. The old lassitude was evidently very heavy upon Jeanie. The
+smallest exertion seemed to tax her energies to the utmost. She had never
+shaken off her cough, and it seemed to wear her out.
+
+Avery had spoken to Lennox Tudor about her more than once, but he never
+discussed the subject willingly. He was never summoned to the Vicarage
+now, and, when they chanced to meet, the Vicar invariably reserved for
+him the iciest greeting that courtesy would permit. Tudor had defeated
+him once on his own ground, and he was not the man to forget it. So
+poor Jeanie's ailments were given none but home treatment to alleviate
+them, and it seemed to Avery that her strength had dwindled almost
+perceptibly of late.
+
+She pondered the matter as she strolled along the shore, debating with
+herself if she would indeed take a step that she had been contemplating
+for some time, and, now that Jeanie was in her care, take her up to town
+and obtain Maxwell Wyndham's opinion with regard to her. It was a project
+she had mentioned to no one, and she hesitated a good deal over putting
+it into practice. That Mrs. Lorimer would readily countenance such an act
+she well knew, but she was also aware that it would be regarded as a
+piece of rank presumption by the child's father which might easily be
+punished by the final withdrawal of Jeanie from her care. That was a
+contingency which she hardly desired to risk. Jeanie had become so
+infinitely precious to her in those days.
+
+Unconsciously her feet had turned towards their old haunt. She found
+herself halting by the low square rock on which Piers once had sat and
+cursed the sea-birds in bitterness of spirit. Often as she had visited
+the spot since, she had never done so without the memory of that spring
+morning flashing unbidden through her brain. It went through her now like
+a sharp dart of physical pain; the boyish figure, the ardent eyes, the
+black hair plastered wet on the wide, patrician brow. Her heart
+contracted. She seemed to hear again the eager, wooing words.
+
+He never wrote to her now. She believed he was in town, probably amusing
+himself as he had amused himself at Monte Carlo, passing the time in a
+round of gaieties, careless flirtations, possibly deeper intrigues.
+Crowther had probably kept him straight through the winter, but she did
+not believe that Crowther's influence would be lasting. There was a sting
+in the very thought of Crowther. She was sure now that he had always
+known the bitter secret that Piers had kept from her. It had been the
+bond between them. Piers had obviously feared betrayal, but Crowther had
+not deemed it his business to betray him. He had suffered the deception
+to continue. She recognized that his position had been a difficult one;
+but it did not soften her heart towards him. Her heart had grown hard
+towards all men of late. She sometimes thought that but for Jeanie it
+would have atrophied altogether. There were so few things nowadays that
+seemed to touch her. She could not even regret her lost baby. But yet the
+memory of Piers sitting on that rock at her feet pierced her oddly;
+Piers, the passionate, the adoring, the hot-blooded; Piers the
+invincible; Piers the prince!
+
+She turned from the spot with a wrung feeling of heart-break. She
+wished--how she wished--that she had died!
+
+In that moment she realized that she was no longer alone. A man's figure,
+thick-set and lounging, was sauntering towards her along the sand. He
+seemed to move with extreme leisureliness, yet his approach was but a
+matter of seconds. His hands were in his pockets, his hat rammed down
+over his eyes.
+
+There seemed to her to be something vaguely familiar about him, though
+wherein it lay she could not have told. She stood and awaited him with
+the certainty that he was coming with the express purpose of joining her.
+She knew him; she was sure she knew him, though who he was she had not
+the faintest idea.
+
+He reached her, lifted his cap, and the sun glinted on a head of fiery
+red hair. "I thought I was not mistaken, Lady Evesham," he said.
+
+She recognized him with an odd leap of the pulses, and in a moment held
+out her hand. "Dr. Wyndham!" she said. "How amazing!"
+
+"Why amazing?" said Wyndham. He held her hand for a second while his
+green eyes scanned her face. When he dropped it she felt that he had made
+a full and exhaustive inspection, and she was strangely disconcerted, as
+if in some fashion he had gained an unfair advantage over her.
+
+"Amazing that you should be here," she explained, with a flush of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Oh, not in the least, I assure you," he said. "I am staying at Brethaven
+for a couple of days with my wife's people. It's only ten miles away, you
+know. And I bicycled over here on the chance of seeing you."
+
+"But how did you know I was here?" she asked.
+
+"From your husband. I told him I was coming in this direction, and he
+suggested that I should come over and look you up." Very casually he made
+reply, and he could not have been aware of the flood of colour his words
+sent to her face, for he continued in the same cool fashion as he
+strolled by her side. "I was afraid you might consider it an unpardonable
+liberty, but he assured me you wouldn't. So--" the green eyes smiled upon
+her imperturbably--"as I am naturally interested in your welfare, I took
+my courage in both hands and, at the risk of being considered
+unprofessional,--I came."
+
+It was unexpected, but it was disarming. Avery found herself smiling
+in answer.
+
+"I am very pleased to see you," she said. "But your coming just at this
+time is rather amazing all the same, for I was thinking of you, wishing I
+could see you, only a few minutes ago."
+
+"What can I do for you?" said Maxwell Wyndham.
+
+She hesitated a little before the direct question; then as simply as he
+had asked she answered, laying the matter before him without reservation.
+
+He listened in his shrewd, comprehending way, asking one or two
+questions, but making no comments.
+
+"There need be no difficulty about it," he said, when she ended. "You say
+the child is tractable. Keep her in bed to-morrow, and say a medical
+friend of yours is coming over to see if he can do anything for her
+cough! Then if you'll ask me to lunch--I'll do the rest."
+
+He smiled as he ended, and thrust out his hand.
+
+"I'll be going now. I left my bicycle in the village and hope to find it
+still there. Now remember, Lady Evesham, my visit to-morrow is to be of a
+strictly unprofessional character. You didn't send for me, so I shall
+assume the privilege of coming as a friend. Is that understood?"
+
+He spoke with smiling assurance, and seeing that he meant to gain his
+point she yielded it.
+
+Not till he was gone did she come to ponder the errand that had brought
+him thither.
+
+She went back to Jeanie, and found her with aching eyes fixed resolutely
+on her book. Yes, she was a little tired, but she would rather go on,
+thank you. Oh no, she did not mind staying in bed to-morrow to please
+Avery, and she was sure she would like Avery's doctor though she didn't
+expect he would manage to stop the cough. She would have to do her task
+though all the same; dear Avery mustn't mind. You see, she had promised.
+But she would certainly stay in bed if Avery wished.
+
+And then came the tired sigh, and then that racking, cruel cough that
+seemed to rend her whole frame. No, she would not finish for another hour
+yet. Really she must go on.
+
+The brown head dropped on to the little bony hands, and Jeanie was
+immersed once more in her task.
+
+More than once in the night Avery awoke to hear that tearing, breathless
+cough in the room next to hers. It was no new thing, but in view of the
+coming ordeal it filled her with misgiving.
+
+When she rose herself in the morning she felt weighed down with anxious
+foreboding.
+
+Yet, when Maxwell Wyndham arrived in his sauntering, informal fashion at
+about noon, she was able to meet him with courage. There was something
+electric about his personality that seemed almost unconsciously to impart
+strength to the downhearted. He had drawn her back from the very Door of
+Death, and her confidence in him was absolute.
+
+They lunched alone together, and talked of many things. More than once,
+wholly incidentally, he mentioned her husband. She gathered that he did
+not know of their bitter estrangement. He talked of the polo-craze, with
+which it seemed Piers was badly bitten, and commented on his splendid
+horsemanship.
+
+"Yes, he is a wonderful athlete," Avery said.
+
+She wondered if he deemed her unresponsive, but decided that he set her
+coldness down to anxiety; for he finished his luncheon without lingering
+and declared himself ready for the business in hand.
+
+He became in fact strictly business-like from that moment, and throughout
+the examination that followed she had not the faintest notion as to what
+was passing in his mind. To Jeanie he was curtly kind, but to herself he
+was as utterly uncommunicative as if he had been a total stranger.
+
+The examination was a protracted one, and more painful than Avery had
+thought possible. It taxed poor Jeanie's powers of endurance to the
+uttermost, and long before it was finished she was weeping from sheer
+exhaustion. He was absolutely patient with her, but he insisted upon
+carrying the matter through, remaining when it was at last over until she
+had somewhat recovered from the ordeal.
+
+To Avery the suspense was well-nigh unbearable; but she dared not show
+the impatience that consumed her. She had a feeling that in some fashion
+the great doctor was depending upon her self-control, her strength of
+mind; and she was determined that he should not find her wanting.
+
+Yet, when she at length preceded him downstairs and into the little
+sitting-room she wondered if the hammering of her heart reached him, so
+tremendous were its strokes. They seemed to her to be beating out a
+death-knell in her soul.
+
+"You will tell me the simple truth, I know," she said, and waited,
+straining to catch his words above the clamour.
+
+He answered her instantly with the utmost quietness, the utmost kindness.
+
+"Lady Evesham, your own heart has already told you the truth."
+
+She put out a quick hand, and he took it and held it firmly,
+sustainingly, while he went on.
+
+"There is nothing whatever to be done. Give her rest, that's all;
+absolute rest. She looks as if she has been worked beyond her strength.
+Is that so?"
+
+Avery nodded mutely.
+
+"It must stop," he said. "She is in a very precarious state, and any
+exertion, mental or physical, is bound to hasten the end--which cannot,
+in any case, be very far off."
+
+He released Avery's hand and walked to the window, where he stood gazing
+out to sea with drawn brows.
+
+"The disease is of a good many months' standing," he said. "It has taken
+very firm hold. Such a child as that should have been sheltered and
+cosseted, shielded from every hardship. Even then--very possibly--this
+would have developed. No one can say for certain."
+
+"Can you advise--nothing?" said Avery in a voice that sounded oddly dull
+and emotionless even to herself.
+
+"Nothing," said Maxwell Wyndham. "No medical science can help in a case
+like this. Give her everything she wants, and give her rest! That is all
+you can do for her now."
+
+Avery came and stood beside him. The blow had fallen, but she had
+scarcely begun to feel its effects. There was so much to be
+thought of first.
+
+"Please be quite open with me!" she said. "Tell me how long you think she
+will live!"
+
+He turned slightly and looked at her. "I can tell you what I think,
+Lady Evesham," he said. "But, remember, that does not bring the end
+any nearer."
+
+"I know," she said.
+
+She looked straight back at him with eyes unflinching, and after a
+moment's thought he spoke.
+
+"I think that--given every care--she may live through the summer, but I
+do not consider it likely."
+
+Avery's face was very pale, but still she did not flinch. "Will she
+suffer?" she asked.
+
+He raised his brows at the question. "My dear lady, she has suffered
+already far more than you have any idea of. One lung is practically gone,
+wholly useless. The other is rapidly going the same way. She has probably
+suffered for a year or more, first lassitude, then shortness of breath,
+and pretty often actual pain. Hasn't she complained of these things?"
+
+"She is a child who never complains," Avery said. "But both her mother
+and I thought she was wasting."
+
+"She is mere skin and bone," he said. "Now--about her people, Lady
+Evesham; who is going to tell them? You or I?"
+
+She hesitated. "But I could hardly ask you to do that," she said.
+
+"You may command me in any way," he answered. "If I may presume to
+advise, I should say that the best course would be for me to go to
+Rodding, see the doctor there, and get him to take me to the Vicarage."
+
+"Oh, but they mustn't take her from me!" Avery said. "Let her mother come
+here! She can't--she mustn't--go back home!"
+
+"Exactly what I was going to say," he returned, in his quiet practical
+fashion. "To take her back there would be madness. But look here, Lady
+Evesham, you must have a nurse."
+
+"Oh, not yet!" said Avery. "I am quite strong now. I am used to nursing.
+I have--no other call upon me. Let me do this!"
+
+"None?" he said.
+
+His tone re-called her. She coloured burningly. "My husband--would
+understand," she said, with difficulty.
+
+He passed the matter by. "Will you promise to send me a message if you
+find night-nursing a necessity?"
+
+She hesitated.
+
+He frowned. "Lady Evesham, you must promise me this in fairness to the
+child as well as to yourself. Also, you will give me your word that you
+will never under any circumstances sleep with her."
+
+She saw that he would have his way, and she yielded both points rather
+than fight a battle which instinct warned her she could not win.
+
+"Then I will be going," he said.
+
+He turned back into the room, and again she was aware of his green eyes
+surveying her closely, critically. But he made no reference whatever to
+her health, and inwardly she blessed him for his forbearance.
+
+She did not know that as he rode away, he grimly remarked to himself:
+"The best tonics generally taste the bitterest, and she'll drink this one
+to the dregs, poor girl! But it'll help her in the end."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE TIDE COMES BACK
+
+
+"Give her everything she wants!" How often in the days that followed were
+those words in Avery's mind! She strove to fulfil them to the uttermost,
+but Jeanie seemed to want so little. The only trouble in her existence
+just then was her holiday-task, and that she steadily refused to
+relinquish unless her father gave her leave.
+
+A few days after Maxwell Wyndham's departure there came an agonized
+letter from Mrs. Lorimer. Olive had just developed scarlet fever, and as
+they could not afford a nurse she was nursing her herself. She entreated
+Avery to send her daily news of Jeanie and to telegraph at once should
+she become worse. She added in a pathetic postscript that her husband
+found it difficult to believe that Jeanie could be as ill as the great
+doctor had represented, and she feared he was a little vexed that Maxwell
+Wyndham's opinion had been obtained.
+
+It was exactly what Avery had expected of him. She wrote a soothing
+letter to Mrs. Lorimer, promising to keep her informed of Jeanie's
+condition, promising to lavish every care upon the child, and begging
+her to persuade Mr. Lorimer to remit the task which had become so
+heavy a burden.
+
+The reply to this did not come at once, and Avery had repeated the
+request twice very urgently and was contemplating addressing a protest
+to the Reverend Stephen in person when another agitated epistle arrived
+from Mrs. Lorimer. Her husband had decided to run down to them for a
+night and judge of Jeanie's state for himself.
+
+Avery received the news with dismay which, however, she was careful to
+conceal. Jeanie heard of the impending visit with as much perturbation as
+her tranquil nature would allow, and during the day that intervened
+before his arrival gave herself more sedulously than ever to her task.
+She had an unhappy premonition that he would desire to examine her upon
+what she had read, and she was guiltily aware that her memory had not
+retained very much of it.
+
+So for the whole of one day she strove to study, till she was so
+completely tired out that Avery actually took the book from her at last
+and declared that she should not worry herself any more about it. Jeanie
+yielded submissively, but a wakeful night followed, and in the morning
+she looked so wan that Avery wanted to keep her in bed.
+
+On this point, however, Jeanie was less docile than usual. "He will think
+I am shamming," she protested. "He never likes us to lie in bed unless we
+are really ill."
+
+So, since she was evidently anxious to get up, Avery permitted it, though
+she marked her obvious languor with a sinking heart.
+
+The Vicar arrived at about noon, and Avery saw at a glance that he was in
+no kindly mood.
+
+"Dear me, what is all this fuss?" he said to Jeanie. "You look to me
+considerably rosier than I have seen you for a long time."
+
+Jeanie was indeed flushed with nervous excitement, and Avery thought she
+had never seen her eyes so unnaturally bright. She endured her father's
+hand under her chin with evident discomfort, and the Vicar's face was
+somewhat severe when he finally released her.
+
+"I am afraid you are getting a little fanciful, my child," he said
+gravely. "I know that our kind friend, Lady Evesham--" his eyes twinkled
+ironically and seemed to slip inwards--"has always been inclined to
+indulge your whims. Now how do you occupy your time?"
+
+"I read," faltered Jeanie.
+
+"And sew, I presume," said the Vicar, who prided himself upon bringing up
+his daughter to be useful.
+
+"A little," said Jeanie.
+
+He opened his eyes upon her again with that suggestion of severity in his
+regard which Jeanie so plainly dreaded. "But you have done none since you
+have been here? Jeanie, my child, I detect in you the seeds of idleness.
+If your time were more fully occupied, you would find your general health
+would considerably improve. Now, do you rise early and go for a bathe
+before breakfast?"
+
+"No," said Jeanie, with a little shiver.
+
+He shook his head at her. "Then let us institute the habit at once! I
+cannot have you becoming slack just because you are away from home. If
+this indolence continue, I shall be compelled to have you back under my
+own eye. I clearly see that the self-indulgent life you lead here is
+having disastrous results. You will bathe with me to-morrow at
+seven-thirty, after which we will have half an hour of physical exercise.
+Then after a wholesome breakfast you will feel renewed and ready for the
+day's work."
+
+Avery, when this programme was laid before her, looked at him in
+incredulous amazement.
+
+"But surely Dr. Wyndham explained to you the serious condition she is
+in!" she exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Lorimer smiled his own superior smile. "He explained his point of
+view most thoroughly, my dear Lady Evesham." He always pronounced her
+name and title with satirical emphasis. "But that--very curious as it may
+appear to you--does not prevent my holding a very strong opinion of my
+own. And it chances to be in direct opposition to that expressed by Dr.
+Maxwell Wyndham. I know my own child,--her faults and her tendencies. She
+has been allowed to become extremely lax with regard to her daily duties,
+and this laxness is in my opinion the root of the evil. I shall therefore
+take my own measures to correct it, and if they are in any way resisted
+or neglected I shall at once remove the child from your care. I trust I
+have made myself quite explicit."
+
+He had. But Avery's indignation could not be contained.
+
+"You will kill her if you persist!" she said. "Even as it is--even as it
+is--her days are numbered."
+
+"The days of all of us are numbered," said the Reverend Stephen. "And it
+behoves us to make the very utmost of each one of them. I cannot allow
+my child's character to be ruined on account of a physical weakness
+which a little judicious discipline will speedily overcome. The spirit
+must triumph over the flesh, Lady Evesham. A hard rule for worldlings, I
+grant you, but one which must be observed by all who would enter the
+Kingdom of Heaven."
+
+Argument was futile. Avery realized it at the outset. He would have his
+way, whatever the cost, and no warning or entreaty would move him. For
+the rest of that day she had to stand by in impotent anguish, and watch
+Jeanie's martyrdom. During the afternoon he sat alone with her,
+conducting the intellectual examination which Jeanie had so dreaded,
+reprimanding, criticizing, scoffing at her ignorance. In the evening he
+took her for what he called a stroll upon which Avery was not allowed to
+accompany them. Mr. Lorimer playfully remarking that he wished to give
+his young daughter the benefit of his individual attention during the
+period of his brief sojourn with them.
+
+They returned from their expedition at eight. Avery was walking to and
+fro by the gate in a ferment of anxiety. They came by the cliff-road,
+and she went eagerly to meet them.
+
+Jeanie was hanging on her father's arm with a face of deathly whiteness,
+and looked on the verge of collapse.
+
+The Reverend Stephen was serenely satisfied with himself, laughed gently
+at his child's dragging progress, and assured Avery that a little
+wholesome fatigue was a good thing at the end of the day.
+
+Jeanie said nothing. She seemed to be speechless with exhaustion, almost
+incapable of standing alone.
+
+Mr. Lorimer recommended a cold bath, a brisk rub-down, and supper.
+
+"After which," he said impressively, "I shall hope to conduct a few
+prayers before we retire to rest."
+
+"That will be impossible, I am afraid," Avery rejoined. "Jeanie is
+overtired and must go at once to bed."
+
+She spoke with quiet decision, but inwardly she was quivering with fierce
+anger. She longed passionately to have the child to herself, to comfort
+and care for her and ease away the troubles of the day.
+
+But Mr. Lorimer at once asserted his authority. "Jeanie will certainly
+join us at supper," he said. "Run along, my child, and prepare for the
+meal at once!"
+
+Jeanie went up the stairs like an old woman, stumbling at every step.
+
+Avery followed her, chafing but impotent.
+
+At the top of the stairs Jeanie began to cough. She turned into her own
+room with blind, staggering movements and sank down beside the bed.
+
+The coughing was spasmodic and convulsive. It shook her whole frame. In
+the end there came a dreadful tearing sound, and she caught her
+handkerchief to her mouth.
+
+Avery knelt beside her, supporting her. She saw the white linen turn
+suddenly scarlet, and she called sharply to Mr. Lorimer to come to them.
+
+He came, and between them they got her on to the bed.
+
+"This is most unfortunate," said Mr. Lorimer. "Pray how did it happen?"
+
+And then Avery's pent fury blazed suddenly forth upon him. "It is your
+doing!" she said. "You--and you alone--are responsible for this!"
+
+He looked at her malignantly. "Pshaw, my dear Lady Evesham! You are
+hysterical!" he said.
+
+Avery was bending over the bed. "Go!" she said, without looking up. "Go
+quickly, and fetch a doctor!"
+
+And, very curiously, Mr. Lorimer obeyed her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE GAME
+
+
+Jeanie rallied. As though to comfort Avery's distress, she came back for
+a little space; but no one--not even her father--could doubt any longer
+that the poor little mortal life had nearly run out.
+
+"My intervention has come too late, alas!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Which remark was received by Avery in bitter silence.
+
+She had no further fear of being deprived of the child. It was quite out
+of the question to think of moving her, and she knew that Jeanie was hers
+for as long as the frail cord of her earthly existence lasted.
+
+She was thankful that the advent of a nurse made it impossible for the
+Vicar to remain, and she parted from him with almost open relief.
+
+"We must bow to the Supreme Will," he said, with his heavy sigh.
+
+And again Avery was silent.
+
+"I fear you are rebellious," he said with severity.
+
+"Good-bye!" said Avery.
+
+Her heart bled more for Mrs. Lorimer than for herself just then. She knew
+by instinct that she would not be allowed to come to her child.
+
+The nurse was middle-aged and kindly, and both she and Jeanie liked her
+from the outset. She took the night duty, and the day was Avery's, a
+division that pleased them all.
+
+Mr. Lorimer had demurred about having a nurse at all, but Avery had
+swept the objection aside. Jeanie was in her care, and she would provide
+all she needed. Mr. Lorimer had conceded the point as gracefully as
+possible, for it seemed that for once his will could not be regarded as
+paramount. Of course, as he openly reflected, Lady Evesham was very much
+in their debt, and it was but natural that she should welcome this
+opportunity to repay somewhat of their past kindness to her.
+
+So, for the first time in her life, little Jeanie was surrounded with all
+that she could desire; and very slowly, like a broken flower coaxed back
+to life, she revived again.
+
+It could scarcely be regarded in the light of an improvement. It was
+just a fluctuation that deceived neither Avery nor the nurse; but to the
+former those days were infinitely precious. She clung to them hour by
+hour, refusing to look ahead to the desolation that was surely coming,
+cherishing her darling with a passion of devotion that excluded all
+other griefs.
+
+The long summer days slipped away. June passed like a dream. Jeanie lay
+in the tiny garden with her face to the sea, gazing forth with eyes that
+were often heavy and wistful but always ready to smile upon Avery. The
+holiday-task was put away, not because Mr. Lorimer had remitted it, but
+because Avery--with rare despotism--had insisted upon removing it from
+her patient's reach.
+
+"Not till you are better, darling," she said. "That is your biggest duty
+now, just to get back all the strength you can."
+
+And Jeanie had smiled her wistful, dreamy smile, and submitted.
+
+Avery sometimes wondered if she knew of the great Change that was drawing
+so rapidly near. If so, it had no terrors for her; and she thanked God
+that the Vicar was not at hand to terrify the child. The journey from
+Rodding to Stanbury Cliffs was not an easy one by rail, and parish
+matters were fortunately claiming his attention very fully just then. As
+he himself had remarked more than once, he was not the man to permit mere
+personal matters to interfere with Duty, and many a weak soul depended
+upon his ministrations.
+
+So Jeanie was left entirely to Avery's motherly care while the golden
+days slipped by.
+
+With July came heat, intense, oppressive, airless; and Jeanie flagged
+again. A copper-coloured mist rose every morning over the sea, blotting
+out the sky-line, veiling the passing ships. Strange voices called
+through the fog, sirens hooted to one another persistently.
+
+"They are like people who have lost each other," Jeanie said once, and
+the simile haunted Avery's imagination.
+
+And then one sunny day a pleasure-steamer passed quite near the shore
+with a band on board. They were playing _The Little Grey Home in the
+West_, and very oddly Jeanie's eyes filled with sudden tears.
+
+Avery did not take any notice for a few moments, but as the strains
+died-away over the glassy water, she leaned towards the child.
+
+"My darling, what is it?" she whispered tenderly.
+
+Jeanie's hand found its way into hers. "Oh, don't you ever want Piers?"
+she murmured wistfully. "I do!"
+
+It was the first time she had spoken his name to Avery since they had
+left him alone nearly a year before, and almost as soon as she had
+uttered it she made swift apology.
+
+"Please forgive me, dear Avery! It just slipped out."
+
+"My dear!" Avery said, and kissed her.
+
+There fell a long silence between them. Avery's eyes were on the thick
+heat-haze that obscured the sky-line. In her brain there sounded again
+those words that Maxwell Wyndham had spoken so short a time before. "Give
+her everything she wants! It's all you can do for her now."
+
+But behind those words was something that shrank and quivered like a
+frightened child. Could she give her this one thing? Could she?
+Could she?
+
+It would mean the tearing open of a wound that was scarcely closed. It
+would mean a calling to life of a bitterness that was hardly past. It
+would mean--it would mean--
+
+"Avery darling!" Softly Jeanie's voice broke through her agitated
+thoughts.
+
+Avery turned and looked at her,--the frail, sweet face with its shining
+eyes of love.
+
+"I didn't mean to hurt you," whispered Jeanie. "Don't think any more
+about it!"
+
+"Do you want him so dreadfully?" Avery said.
+
+Jeanie's eyes were full of tears again. She tried to answer, but her lips
+quivered. She turned her face aside, and was silent.
+
+The day waxed hotter, became almost insupportable. In the afternoon
+Jeanie was attacked by breathlessness and coughing, both painful to
+witness. She could find no rest or comfort, and Avery was in momentary
+dread of a return of the hemorrhage.
+
+It did not return, but when evening came at length and with it the
+blessed coolness of approaching night, Jeanie was so exhausted as to be
+unable to speak above a whisper. She lay white and still, scarcely
+conscious, only her difficult breathing testifying to the fluttering life
+that had ebbed so low.
+
+The nurse's face was very grave as she came on duty, but after an
+interval of steady watching, during which the wind blew in with
+rising freshness from the sea, she turned to Avery, saying, "I think
+she will revive."
+
+Avery nodded and slipped away.
+
+There was not much time left. She ran all the way to the post-office and
+scribbled a message there with trembling fingers.
+
+"Jeanie wants you. Will you come? Avery."
+
+She sent the message to Rodding Abbey. She knew they would forward it
+from there.
+
+Passing out again into the road, a sudden sense of sickness swept over
+her. What had she done? What uncontrolled force would that telegram
+unfetter? Would he come to her like a whirlwind and sweep her back into
+his own tempestuous life? Would he break her will once more to his? Would
+he drag her once more through the hell of his passion, kindle afresh for
+her the flame that had consumed her happiness?
+
+She dared not face the possibility. She felt as if an iron hand had
+closed upon her, drawing her surely, irresistibly, back towards those
+gates of brass through which she had escaped into the desert. That fiery
+torture would be infinitely harder to bear now, and she knew that the
+fieriest point of it all would be the desperate, aching longing to know
+again the love that had shone and burnt itself out in the blast-furnace
+of his sin. He had loved her once; she was sure he had loved her. But
+that love had died with his boyhood, and it could never rise again. He
+had trodden it underfoot and her own throbbing heart with it. He had
+destroyed that which she had always believed to be indestructible.
+
+She never wanted to see him again. She would have given all she had to
+have avoided the meeting. Her whole being recoiled from the thought of
+it. And yet--and yet--she saw again the black head laid against her knee,
+and heard the low, half-rueful words: "Oh, my dear, there is no other
+woman but you in all the world!"
+
+The vision went with her all through the night. She could not escape it.
+
+In the morning she rose with a sense of being haunted, and a terrible
+weariness that hung upon her like a chain.
+
+The day was cooler. Jeanie was better. She had had a nice sleep, the
+nurse said. But there could be no question of allowing her to leave her
+bed that day.
+
+"You are looking so tired," the nurse said, in her kind way to Avery. "I
+am not wanting to go off duty till this afternoon. So won't you go and
+sit down somewhere on the rocks? Please do!"
+
+She was so anxious to gain her point that Avery yielded. She felt too
+feverishly restless to be a suitable companion for Jeanie just then. She
+went down to her favourite corner to watch the tide come in. But she
+could not be still. She paced the shore like a caged creature seeking a
+way of escape, dreading each turn lest it should bring her face to face
+with the man she had summoned.
+
+The tide came in and drove her up the beach. She went back not
+unwillingly, for the suspense had become insupportable.
+
+Had he come? But surely not! She was convinced he would have followed her
+to the shore if he had.
+
+She entered the tiny hall. It was square, and served them as a
+sitting-room. Coming in from the glare without, she was momentarily
+dazzled. And then all suddenly her eyes lighted upon an unaccustomed
+object, and her heart ceased to beat. A man's tweed cap lay carelessly
+tossed upon the back of a chair!
+
+She stood quite still, feeling her senses reel, knowing herself to be on
+the verge of fainting, and clinging with all her strength to her
+tottering self-control.
+
+Gradually she recovered, felt her heart begin to beat again and the
+deadly faintness pass. There was a telegram on the table. She took it up,
+found it addressed to herself, opened it with fumbling fingers.
+
+"Tell Jeanie I am coming to-day. Piers."
+
+It had arrived an hour before, and she was conscious of a vague sense of
+thankfulness that she had been spared that hour of awful certainty.
+
+A door opened at the top of the stairs. A voice spoke. "I'll come back,
+my queen. But I've got to pay my respects, you know, to the mistress of
+the establishment, or she'll be cross. Do you remember the Avery
+symphony? We'll have it presently."
+
+A light step followed the voice. Already he was on the stairs. He came
+bounding down to her like an eager boy. For one wild moment she thought
+he was going to throw his arms about her. But he stopped himself before
+he reached her.
+
+"I say, how ill you look!" he said.
+
+That was all the greeting he uttered, and in the same moment she saw that
+the black hair above his forehead was powdered with white. It sent such a
+shock through her as no word or action of his could have caused.
+
+She stood for a moment gazing at him in stiff inaction. Then, still
+stiffly, she held out her hand. But she could not utter a word. She felt
+as if she were going to burst into tears.
+
+He took the hand. His dark eyes interrogated her, but they told her
+nothing. "It's all right," he said rapidly. "I'm Jeanie's visitor. I
+shan't forget it. It was decent of you to send. I say, you--you are not
+really ill, what?"
+
+No, she was not ill. She heard herself telling him so in a voice she did
+not know. And all the while she felt as if her heart were bleeding,
+bleeding to death.
+
+He let her hand go, and straightened himself with the old free arrogance
+of movement. "May I have something to eat?" he said. "Your message only
+got to me this morning. I was at breakfast, and I had to leave it to
+catch the train. So I've had practically nothing."
+
+That moved her to activity. She led the way into the little parlour
+where luncheon had been laid. He sat down at the table, and she waited
+upon him, almost in silence, yet no longer with embarrassment.
+
+"Aren't you going to join me?" he said.
+
+She sat down also, and took a minute helping of cold chicken.
+
+"I say, you're not going to eat all that!" ejaculated Piers.
+
+She had to laugh a little, though still with that horrified sense of
+tragedy at her heart.
+
+He laughed too his careless boyish laugh, and in a moment all the
+electricity of the past few moments had gone out of the atmosphere. He
+leaned forward unexpectedly and transferred a wing of chicken from his
+plate to hers.
+
+"Look here, Avery! You must eat. It's absurd. So fire away like a
+sensible woman!"
+
+There was no tenderness in his tone, but, oddly, she thrilled to its
+imperiousness, conscious of the old magnetism compelling her. She began
+to eat in silence.
+
+Piers ate too in his usual quick fashion, glancing at her once or twice
+but making no further comment.
+
+"Tell me about Jeanie!" he said, finally. "What has brought her to this?
+Can't we do anything--take her to Switzerland or somewhere?"
+
+Avery shook her head. "Can't you see?" she said, in a low voice.
+
+He frowned upon her abruptly. "I see lots," he said enigmatically. "It's
+quite hopeless, what? Wyndham told me as much. But--I don't believe in
+hopeless things."
+
+Avery looked at him, mystified by his tone. "She is dying," she said.
+
+"I don't believe in death either," said Piers, in the tone of one who
+challenged the world. "And now look here, Avery! Let's make the best of
+things for the kiddie's sake! She's had a rotten time all her days. Let's
+give her a decent send-off, what? Let's give her the time of her life
+before she goes!"
+
+He got up suddenly from his chair and went to the open window.
+
+Avery turned her head to watch him, but for some reason she could
+not speak.
+
+He went on vehemently, his face turned from her. "In Heaven's name don't
+let's be sorry! It's such a big thing to go out happy. Let's play the
+game! I know you can; you were always plucky. Let's give her everything
+she wants and some over! What, Avery, what? I'm not asking for myself."
+
+She did not know exactly what he was asking, but she did not dare to tell
+him so. She sat quite silent, feeling her heart quicken, striving
+desperately to be calm.
+
+He flung round suddenly, and came to her. "Will you do it?" he said.
+
+She raised her eyes to his. She was white to the lips.
+
+He made one of his quick, half-foreign gestures. "Don't!" he said
+harshly. "You make me feel such a brute. Can't you trust me--can't you
+pretend to trust me--for Jeanie's sake?" His hand closed fiercely on the
+back of her chair. He bent towards her. "It's only a hollow bargain.
+You'll hate it of course. Do you suppose I shall enjoy it any better? Do
+you suppose I would ask it of you for any reason but this?"
+
+Something in his face or voice pierced her. She felt again that dreadful
+pain at her heart, as if the blood were draining from it with every beat.
+
+"I don't know what to say to you, Piers," she said at last.
+
+He bit his lip in sheer impatience, but the next moment he controlled
+himself. "I'm asking a difficult thing of you," he said, forcing his
+voice to a quiet level. "It isn't particularly easy for me either;
+perhaps in a sense, it's even harder. But you must have known when you
+sent for me that something of the kind was inevitable. What you didn't
+know--possibly--was that Jeanie is grieving badly over our estrangement.
+She wants to draw us together again. Will you suffer it? Will you play
+the game with me? It won't be for long."
+
+His eyes looked straight into hers, but they held only a great darkness
+in which no flicker of light burned. Avery felt as if the gulf between
+them had widened to a measureless abyss. Once she could have read him
+like an open book; but now she had not the vaguest clue to his feelings
+or his motives. He had as it were withdrawn beyond her ken.
+
+"Is it to be only make-believe?" she asked at last.
+
+"Just that," he said, but she thought his voice rang hard as he said it.
+
+An odd little tremor went through her. She put her hand up to her throat.
+"Piers, I don't know--I am afraid--" She broke off in agitation.
+
+He leaned towards her. "Don't be afraid!" he said. "There is
+nothing so damning as fear. Shall we go up to her now? I promised I
+wouldn't be long."
+
+She rose. He was still standing close to her, so close that she felt the
+warmth of his body, heard the sharp indrawing of his breath.
+
+For one sick second she thought he would snatch her to him; but the
+second passed and he had not moved.
+
+"Shall we go?" he said again. "And I say, can you put me up? I don't care
+where I sleep. Any sort of shakedown will do. That sofa--" he glanced
+towards the one by the window upon which Jeanie had been wont to lie.
+
+"If you like," Avery said.
+
+She felt that the power to refuse him had left her. He would do as he
+thought fit.
+
+They went upstairs together, and she saw Jeanie's face light up as they
+entered. Piers was behind. Coming forward, he slipped a confident hand
+through Avery's arm. She felt his fingers close upon her warningly,
+checking her slight start; and she knew with an odd mixture of relief and
+dismay that this was the beginning of the game. She forced herself to
+smile in answer, and she knew that she succeeded; but it was one of the
+greatest efforts of her life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
+
+
+For a week after Piers' arrival, Jeanie was better, so much better that
+she was able to be carried downstairs and into the garden where she loved
+to lie. There was a piano in the sitting-room, and Piers would sit at it
+by the hour together, playing anything she desired. She loved his music,
+would listen entranced for any length of time while he led her through a
+world of delight that she had never explored before. It soothed her
+restlessness, comforted her in weariness, made her forget her pain. And
+then the summer weather broke. There came a spell of rainy days that made
+the garden impossible, and immediately Jeanie's strength began to wane.
+It went from her very gradually. She suffered but little, save when her
+breathing or her cough troubled her. But it was evident to them all that
+her little craft was putting out to sea at last.
+
+Piers went steadfastly on with the _rôle_ he had assigned to himself. He
+never by word or look reminded Avery of the compact between them. He
+merely took her support for granted, and--probably in consequence of
+this--it never failed him.
+
+The nurse declared him to be invaluable. He always had a salutary effect
+upon her patient. For even more than at the sight of Avery did Jeanie
+brighten at his coming, and she was always happy alone with him. It even
+occurred to Avery sometimes that her presence was scarcely needed, so
+completely were they at one in understanding and sympathy.
+
+One evening, entering the room unexpectedly, she found Piers on his knees
+beside the bed. He rose instantly and made way for her in a fashion she
+could not ignore; but, though Jeanie greeted her with evident pleasure,
+it was obvious that for the moment she was not needed, and an odd little
+pang went through her with the knowledge.
+
+Piers left the room almost immediately, and in a few moments they heard
+him at the piano downstairs.
+
+"May I have the door open?" whispered Jeanie.
+
+Avery opened it, and drawing up a chair sat down with her work at
+the bedside.
+
+And then, slowly rolling forth, there came that wonderful music with
+which he had thrilled her soul at the very beginning of his courtship.
+
+Wordless, magnificent, the great anthem swelled through the falling dusk,
+and like a vision the unutterable arose and possessed her soul. Her eyes
+began to behold the Land that is very far off.
+
+And then, throbbing through the wonder of that vision, she heard the
+coming of the vast procession. It was like a dream, and yet it was wholly
+real. As yet lost in distance, veiled in mystery, she heard the tread of
+the coming host.
+
+Her hands were fast gripped together; she forgot all beside. It was as if
+the eyes of her soul had been opened, and she looked upon the Infinite. A
+voice at her side began to speak, or was it the voice of her own heart?
+It was only a whisper, but every word of it pierced her consciousness.
+She listened with parted lips.
+
+"I saw Heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and He that sat upon him
+was called Faithful and True ... His Eyes were as a flame of fire and on
+His Head were many crowns.... And He was clothed with a vesture dipped in
+blood.... And the armies which were in Heaven followed Him upon white
+horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.... And He treadeth the
+wine-press.... He treadeth the wine-press...."
+
+The voice paused. Avery was listening with bated breath for more. But it
+did not come at once. Only the Veil began to lift, so that she saw the
+Opening Gates and the Glory behind them.
+
+Then, and not till then, the dream-voice spoke again. "Surely--surely He
+hath borne our griefs, and carried--our sorrows.... And the Lord hath
+laid on Him--the iniquity of us all." The music crashed into
+wonder-chords such as Avery had never heard before, swelled to a climax
+that reached the Divine, held her quivering as it were upon wings in a
+space that was more transcendent than the highest mountain-top;--then
+softly, strangely, died....
+
+"That is Heaven," whispered the voice by her side. "Oh, Avery, won't it
+be nice when we are all there together?"
+
+But Avery sat as one in a trance, rapt and still. She felt as if the
+spirit had been charmed out of her body, and she did not want to return.
+
+A little thin hand slid into hers and clasped it close, recalling her.
+"Wasn't it beautiful?" said Jeanie. "He said he would make me see the
+Kingdom of Heaven. You saw it too, dear Avery, didn't you?"
+
+Yes, Avery had seen it too. She still felt as if the earth were very far
+below them both.
+
+Jeanie's voice had grown husky, but she still spoke in a tremulous
+whisper. "Did you see the Open Gates, dear Avery? He says they are never
+shut. And anyone who can reach them will be let in,--it doesn't matter
+who. Do you know, I think Piers is different from what he used to be? I
+think he is learning to love God."
+
+Absolutely simple words! Why did they send such a rush of
+feeling--tumultuous, indescribable feeling--through Avery? Was this the
+explanation? Was this how it came to pass that he treated her with that
+aloof reverence day by day? Was he indeed learning the supreme lesson to
+worship God with love?
+
+She sat for a while longer with Jeanie, till, finding her drowsy, she
+slipped downstairs.
+
+Piers was sitting in the hall, deep in a newspaper. He rose at her
+coming with an abruptness suggestive of surprise, and stood waiting for
+her to speak.
+
+But curiously the only words that she could utter were of a trivial
+nature. She had come to him indeed, drawn by a power irresistible, but
+the moment she found herself actually in his presence she felt
+tongue-tied, helpless.
+
+"Don't you want a light?" she said nervously. "I am sure you can't
+see to read."
+
+He stood silent for a moment, and the old tormenting doubt began to rise
+within her. Would he think she desired to make an overture? Would he take
+for granted that because his magnetism had drawn her he could do with her
+as he would?
+
+And then very quietly he spoke, and she experienced an odd revulsion of
+feeling that was almost disappointment.
+
+"Have you been reading the papers lately?"
+
+She had not. Jeanie occupied all her waking thoughts.
+
+He glanced down at the sheet he held. "There is going to be a bust-up on
+the Continent," he said, and there was that in his tone--a grim
+elation--which puzzled her at the moment. "The mightiest bust-up the
+world has ever known. We're in for it, Avery; in for the very deuce of a
+row." His voice vibrated suddenly. He stopped as though to check some
+headlong force that threatened to carry him away.
+
+Avery stood still, feeling a sick horror of impending disaster at her
+heart. "What can you mean?" she said.
+
+He leaned his hands upon the table facing her, and she saw in his eyes
+the primitive, savage joy of battle. "I mean war," he said. "Oh, it's
+horrible; yes, of course it's horrible. But it'll bring us to our senses.
+It'll make men of us yet."
+
+She shrank from his look. "Piers! Not--not a European war!"
+
+He straightened himself slowly. "Yes," he said. "It will be that.
+But there's nothing to be scared about. It'll be the salvation of
+the Empire."
+
+"Piers!" she gasped again through white lips. "But modern warfare! Modern
+weapons! It's Germany of course?"
+
+"Yes, Germany." He stretched up his arms with a wide gesture and let them
+fall. "Germany who is going to cut out all the rot of party politics and
+bind us together as one man! Germany who is going to avert civil war and
+teach us to love our neighbours! Nothing short of this would have saved
+us. We've been a mere horde of chattering monkeys lately. Now--all thanks
+to Germany!--we're going to be men!"
+
+"Or murderers!" said Avery.
+
+The word broke from her involuntarily, she scarcely knew that she had
+uttered it until she saw his face. Then in a flash she saw what she had
+done, for he had the sudden tragic look of a man who has received his
+death-wound.
+
+He made her a curious stiff bow as if he bent himself with difficulty.
+His face at that moment was whiter than hers, but his eyes glowed red
+with a deep anger.
+
+"I shall remember that," he said, "when I go to fight for my country."
+
+With the words he turned to the door. But she cried after him, dismayed,
+incoherent.
+
+"Oh Piers, you know--you know--I didn't mean that!"
+
+He did not pause or look back. "Nevertheless you said it," he rejoined
+in a tone that made her feel as if he had flung an icy shower of water in
+her face; and the next moment she heard his quick tread on the garden
+path and realized that he was gone.
+
+It was useless to attempt to follow him. Her knees were trembling under
+her. Moreover, she knew that she must return to Jeanie. White-lipped,
+quivering, she moved to the stairs.
+
+He had utterly misunderstood her; she had but voiced the horrified
+thought that must have risen in the minds of thousands when first brought
+face to face with that world-wide tragedy. But he had read a personal
+meaning into her words. He had deemed her deliberately cruel, ungenerous,
+bitter. That he could thus misunderstand her set her heart bleeding
+afresh. Oh, they were better apart! How was it possible that there could
+ever be any confidence, any intimacy, between them again?
+
+Tears, scalding, blinding tears ran suddenly down her face. She bowed her
+head in her hands, leaning upon the banisters....
+
+A voice called to her from above, and she started. What was she doing,
+weeping here in selfish misery, when Jeanie--Swiftly she commanded
+herself and mounted the stairs. The nurse met her at the top.
+
+"The little one isn't so well," she said. "I thought she was asleep, but
+I am afraid she is unconscious."
+
+"Oh, nurse, and I left her!"
+
+There was a sound of such heart-break in Avery's voice that the nurse's
+grave face softened in sympathy.
+
+"My dear, you couldn't have done anything," she said. "It is just the
+weakness before the end, and we can do nothing to avert it. What about
+her mother? Can she come?"
+
+Avery shook her head in despair. "Not for a week."
+
+"Ah!" the nurse said; and that was all. But Avery knew in that moment
+that only a few hours more remained ere little Jeanie Lorimer passed
+through the Open Gates.
+
+She would not go to bed that night though the child lay wholly
+unconscious of her. She knew that she could not sleep.
+
+She did not see Piers again till late. The nurse slipped down to tell him
+of Jeanie's condition, and he came up, white and sternly composed, and
+stood for many minutes watching the slender, quick-breathing figure that
+lay propped among pillows, close to the open window.
+
+Avery could not look at his face during those minutes; she dared not. But
+when he turned away at length he bent and spoke to her.
+
+"Are you going to stay here?"
+
+"Yes," she whispered.
+
+He made no attempt to dissuade her. All he said was, "May I wait in your
+room? I shall be within call there."
+
+"Of course," she answered.
+
+"And you will call me if there is any change?"
+
+"Of course," she said again.
+
+He nodded briefly and left her.
+
+Then began the long, long night-watch. It was raining, and the night was
+very dark. The slow, deep roar of the sea rose solemnly and filled the
+quiet room. The tide was coming in. They could hear the water shoaling
+along the beach.
+
+How often Avery had listened to it and loved the sound! To-night it
+filled her soul with awe, as the Voice of Many Waters.
+
+Slowly the night wore on, and ever that sound increased in volume,
+swelling, intensifying, like the coming of a mighty host as yet far off.
+The rain pattered awhile and ceased. The sea-breeze blew in, salt and
+pure. It stirred the brown tendrils of hair on Jeanie's forehead, and
+eddied softly through the room.
+
+The nurse sat working beside a hooded lamp that threw her grave, strong
+face into high relief, but only accentuated the shadows in the rest of
+the room. Avery sat close to the bed, not praying, scarcely thinking,
+waiting only for the opening of the Gates. And in that hour she
+longed,--oh, how passionately!--that when they opened she also might be
+permitted to pass through.
+
+It was in the darkest hour of the night that the tide began to turn. She
+looked almost instinctively for a change but none came. Jeanie stirred
+not, save when the nurse stooped over her to give her nourishment, and
+each time she took less and less.
+
+The tide receded. The night began to pass. There came a faint greyness
+before the window. The breeze freshened.
+
+And very suddenly the breathing to which Avery had listened all the night
+paused, ceased for a second or two, then broke into the sharp sigh of one
+awaking from sleep.
+
+She rose quickly, and the nurse looked up. Jeanie's eyes dark, unearthly,
+unafraid, were opened wide.
+
+She gazed at Avery for a moment as if slightly puzzled. Then, in a faint
+whisper: "Has Piers said good-night?" she asked.
+
+"No, darling. But he is waiting to. I will call him," Avery said.
+
+"Quickly!" whispered the nurse, as she passed her.
+
+Swiftly, noiselessly, Avery went to her own room. But some premonition of
+her coming must have reached him; for he met her on the threshold.
+
+His eyes questioned hers for a moment, and then together they turned back
+to Jeanie's room. No words passed between them. None were needed.
+
+Jeanie's face was turned towards the door. Her eyes looked beyond Avery
+and smiled a welcome to Piers. He came to her, knelt beside her.
+
+"Dear Sir Galahad!" she said.
+
+He shook his head. "No, Jeanie, no!"
+
+She was panting. He slipped his arm under the pillow to support her. She
+turned her face to his.
+
+"Oh, Piers," she breathed, "I do--so--want you--to be happy."
+
+"I am happy, sweetheart," he said.
+
+But Jeanie's vision was stronger in that moment than it had ever been
+before, and she was not deceived. "You are not happy, dear Piers," she
+said. "Avery is not happy either."
+
+Piers turned slightly. "Come here, Avery!" he said.
+
+The old imperious note was in his voice, yet with a difference. He
+stretched his free hand up to her, drawing her down to his side, and as
+she knelt also he passed his arm about her, pressing her to him.
+
+Jeanie's eyes were upon them both, dying eyes that shone with a mystic
+glory. They saw the steadfast resolution in Piers' face as he held his
+wife against his heart. They saw the quivering hesitation with which
+she yielded.
+
+"You're not happy--yet," she whispered. "But you will be happy."
+
+Thereafter she seemed to slip away from them for a space, losing touch as
+it were, yet still not beyond their reach. Once or twice she seemed to be
+trying to pray, but they could not catch her words.
+
+The dawn-light grew stronger before the window. The sound of the waves
+had sunk to a low murmuring. From where she knelt Avery could see the
+far, dim line of sea. Piers' arm was still about her. She felt as though
+they two were kneeling apart before an Altar invisible, waiting to receive
+a blessing.
+
+Jeanie's breathing was growing less hurried. She seemed already beyond
+all earthly suffering. Yet her eyes also watched that far dim sky-line as
+though they waited for a sign.
+
+Slowly the light deepened, the shadows began to lift. Piers' eyes were
+fixed unswervingly upon the child's quiet face. The light of the coming
+Dawn was reflected there. The great Change was very near at hand.
+
+Far away to the left there grew and spread a wondrous brightness. The sky
+seemed to recede, turned from grey to misty blue. A veil of cloud that
+had hidden the stars all through the night dissolved softly into shreds
+of gold, and across the sea with a diamond splendour there shot the first
+great ray of sunlight.
+
+It was then that Jeanie seemed to awake, to rise as it were from the
+depths of reverie. Her eyes widened, grew intense; then suddenly
+they smiled.
+
+She sought to raise herself, and never knew that it was by Piers'
+strength alone that she was lifted. She gave a gasp that was almost a
+cry, but it was gladness not pain that it expressed.
+
+For a few panting moments she gazed out as one rapt in delight, gazing
+from a mountain-peak upon a wider view than earthly eyes could compass.
+
+Then eagerly she turned to Piers. "I saw Heaven opened ..." she said,
+and in her low voice there throbbed a rapture that could not be
+uttered in words.
+
+She would have said more, but something stopped her. She made a
+gesture as though she would clasp him round the neck, failed, and sank
+down in his arms.
+
+He held her closely to him, and so holding her, felt the last quivering
+breath slip from the little tired body....
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE DESERT ROAD
+
+
+"That is just where you make a mistake, my good Crowther. You're an
+awfully shrewd chap in some ways, but you understand women just about as
+thoroughly as I understand theology."
+
+Piers clasped his hands behind his head, and regarded his friend
+affectionately.
+
+"Do you think so?" said Crowther a little drily.
+
+Piers laughed. "Now I've trodden on your pet corn. Bear up, old chap!
+It'll soon be better."
+
+Crowther's own face relaxed, but he did not look satisfied. "I'm not
+happy about you, my son," he said. "I think you've missed a big
+opportunity."
+
+"You think wrong," said Piers, unmoved. "I couldn't possibly have stayed
+another hour. I was in a false position. So--poor girl!--was she. We
+buried the hatchet for the kiddie's sake, but it wasn't buried very deep.
+I did my best, and I think she did hers. But--even that last night--we
+kicked against it. There was no sense in pretending any longer. The game
+was up. So--I came away."
+
+He uttered the last words nonchalantly; but if Crowther's knowledge of
+women was limited, he knew his own species very thoroughly, and he was
+not deceived.
+
+"You didn't see her at all after the little girl died?" he asked.
+
+"Not at all," said Piers. "I came away by the first train I could
+catch."
+
+"And left her to her trouble!" Crowther's wide brow was a little drawn.
+There was even a hint of sternness in his steady eyes.
+
+"Just so," said Piers. "I left her to mourn in peace."
+
+"Didn't you so much as write a line of explanation?" Crowther's voice was
+troubled, but it held the old kindliness, the old human sympathy.
+
+Piers shook his head, and stared upwards at the ceiling. "Really there
+was nothing to explain," he said. "She knows me--so awfully well."
+
+"I wonder," said Crowther.
+
+The dark eyes flashed him a derisive glance. "Better than you do,
+dear old man, though, I admit, I've let you into a few of my most
+gruesome corners. I couldn't have done it if I hadn't trusted you.
+You realize that?"
+
+Crowther looked him straight in the face. "That being so, my son," he
+said, "you needn't be so damned lighthearted for my benefit."
+
+A gleam of haughty surprise drove the smile out of Piers' eyes. He
+straightened himself sharply. "On my soul, Crowther--" he began; then
+stopped and leaned back again in his chair. "Oh, all right. I forgot. You
+say any silly rot you like to me."
+
+"And now and then the truth also," said Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes fenced with his, albeit a faint smile hovered about the
+corners of his mouth. "I really am not such a humbug as you are pleased
+to imagine," he said, after a moment with an oddly boyish touch of pride.
+"I'm feeling lighthearted, and that's a fact."
+
+"Then you are about the only man in England today who is,"
+responded Crowther.
+
+"That may be," carelessly Piers made answer. "Nearly everyone is more or
+less scared. I'm not. It's going to be a mighty struggle--a Titanic
+struggle--but we shall come out on top."
+
+"At a frightful cost," Crowther said.
+
+Piers leapt to his feet. "We shan't shirk it on that account. See here,
+Crowther! I'll tell you something--if you'll swear to keep it dark!"
+
+Crowther looked up at the eager, glowing face and a very tender look came
+into his own. "Well, Piers?" he said.
+
+Piers caught him suddenly by the shoulders. "Crowther, Crowther, old
+chap, congratulate me! I took--the King's shilling--to-day!"
+
+"Ah!" Crowther said.
+
+He gripped Piers' arms tightly, feeling the vitality of him pulse in
+every sinew, every tense nerve. And before his mental sight there rose
+the dread vision of war--the insatiable--striding like a devouring
+monster over a whole continent. With awful clearness he saw the fields
+of slain...
+
+His eyes came back to Piers, splendid in the fire of his youth, flushed
+already with the grim joy of the coming conflict. He got up slowly, still
+looking into the handsome, olive face with its patrician features and
+arrogant self-confidence. And a cold hand seemed to close upon his heart.
+
+"Oh, boy!" he said.
+
+Piers frowned upon him, still half-laughing. "What? Are we down-hearted?
+Buck up, man! Congratulate me! I was one of the first."
+
+But congratulation stuck in Crowther's throat. "I wish this had
+come--twenty years ago!" was all he found to say.
+
+"Thank Heaven it didn't!" ejaculated Piers. "Why, don't you see it's
+the one thing for me--about the only stroke of real luck I've ever had
+in my life?"
+
+"And your wife doesn't know?" said Crowther.
+
+"She does not. And I won't have her told. Mind that!" Piers' voice was
+suddenly determined. "She knows I shan't keep out of it, and that's
+enough. If she wants me--which she won't--she can get at me through
+Victor or one of them. But that won't happen. Don't you worry yourself as
+to that, my good Crowther! I know jolly well what I'm doing. Don't you
+see it's the chance of my life? Do you think I'm going to miss it, what?"
+
+"I think you're going to break her heart," Crowther said gravely.
+
+"That's because you don't understand," Piers made steady reply. "Nothing
+will alter so long as I stay. But this war is going to alter everything.
+We shall none of us come out of it as we went in. When I come
+back--things will be different."
+
+He spoke sombrely. The boyish ardour had gone out of him. Something of
+fatefulness, something of solemn realization, of steadfast fortitude, had
+taken its place.
+
+"I tell you, Crowther," he said, "I am not doing this thing without
+weighing the cost. But--I haven't much to lose, and I've all to gain.
+Even if it doesn't do--what I hope, it'll steady me down, it'll make a
+man of me--and not--a murderer."
+
+His voice sank on the last word. He freed himself from Crowther's hold
+and turned away.
+
+Once more he opened the window to the roar of London's life; and so
+standing, with his back to Crowther, he spoke again jerkily, with obvious
+effort. "Do you remember telling me that something would turn up?
+Well,--it has. I'm waiting to see what will come of it. But--if it's any
+satisfaction to you to know it--I've got clear of my own particular hell
+at last. I haven't got very far, mind, and it's a beastly desert road I'm
+on. But I know it'll lead somewhere; so I shall stick to it now."
+
+He paused a moment; then flung round and faced Crowther with a certain
+air of triumph.
+
+"Meantime, old chap, don't you worry yourself about either of us! My
+wife will go to her friend Mrs. Lorimer till I come home again. Then
+possibly, with any luck, she'll come to me."
+
+He smiled with the words and came back to the table. "May I have a
+drink?" he said.
+
+Crowther poured one out for him in silence. Somehow he could not
+speak. There was something about Piers that stirred him too deeply for
+speech just then. He lifted his own glass with no more than a gesture
+of goodwill.
+
+"I say, don't be so awfully jolly about it!" laughed Piers. "I tell you
+it's going to end all right. Life is like that."
+
+His voice was light, but it held an appeal to which Crowther could not
+fail to respond.
+
+"God bless you, my son!" he said. "Life is such a mighty big thing that
+even what we call failure doesn't count in the long run. You'll win
+through somehow."
+
+"And perhaps a little over, what?" laughed Piers. "Who knows?"
+
+"Who knows?" Crowther echoed, with a smile.
+
+But he could not shake free from the chill foreboding that had descended
+upon him, and when Piers had gone he stood for a long time before his
+open window, wrestling with the dark phantom, trying to reason away a
+dread which he knew to be beyond all reasoning.
+
+And all through the night that followed, those words of Piers' pursued
+him, marring his rest: "It's a beastly desert road I'm on, but I know
+it'll lead somewhere." And the high courage of his bearing! The royal
+confidence of his smile!
+
+Ah, God! Those boys of the Empire, going forth so gallantly to the
+sacrifice!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE ENCOUNTER
+
+
+Piers was right. When Avery left Stanbury Cliffs she went back to her
+old life at Rodding Vicarage.
+
+Local gossip regarding her estrangement from her husband had practically
+exhausted itself some time before, and in any case it would have been
+swamped by the fevered anxiety that possessed the whole country during
+those momentous days.
+
+She slipped back into her old niche almost as if she had never left it.
+Mrs. Lorimer was ill with grief and overwork. It seemed only natural that
+Avery should take up the burden of her care. Even the Vicar could say
+nothing against it.
+
+Avery sometimes wondered if Jeanie's death had pierced the armour of his
+self-complacence at any point. If it had, it was not perceptible; but she
+did fancy now and then that she detected in him a shade more of
+consideration for his wife than he had been wont to display. He
+condescended to bestow upon her a little more of his kindly patronage,
+and he was certainly less severe in his dealings with the children.
+
+Of the blank in Mrs. Lorimer's life only Avery had any conception, for
+she shared it with her during every hour of the day. Perhaps her own
+burden weighed more heavily upon her than ever before at that time, for
+the anxiety she suffered was sometimes more than she could bear. For
+Piers had gone from her without a word. Straight from Jeanie's
+death-bed he had gone, without a single word of explanation or farewell.
+That she had wounded him deeply, albeit inadvertently, on that last day
+she knew; but with his arm closely clasping her by Jeanie's bedside she
+had dared to hope that he had forgiven the wound. Now she felt that it
+was otherwise. He had gone from her in bitterness of soul, and the
+barrier between them was such that she could not call him back. More and
+more the conviction grew upon her that those moments of tenderness had
+been no more than a part of the game he had summoned her to play for
+Jeanie's sake. He had called it a hollow bargain. He had declared that
+for no other reason would he have proposed it to her. And now that the
+farce was over, he had withdrawn from it. He had said that he had not
+found it easy. He had called it mere pretence. And now she had begun to
+think that he meant their separation to be final. If he had uttered one
+word of farewell, if he had but sent her a line later, she knew that she
+would have responded in some measure even though the gulf between them
+remained unbridged. But his utter silence was unassailable. The
+conviction grew upon her that he no longer desired to bridge the gulf.
+He meant to accept their estrangement as inevitable. He had left her,
+and he did not wish to return.
+
+Through the long weary watches of many nights Avery pondered his
+attitude, and sought in vain for any other explanation. She came at
+last to believe that the fierce flame of his passion had wholly burnt
+itself out, consuming all the love he had ever known; and that only
+ashes remained.
+
+So she could not call him back, and for a time she even shrank from
+asking news of him. Then one day she met Victor sorrowfully exercising
+Caesar along the confines of the Park, and stopped him when with a
+melancholy salute he would have passed her by.
+
+His eyes brightened a little at her action, but he volunteered no
+information and she decided later that he had obeyed orders in adopting
+this attitude. With an effort she questioned him. How was it he was not
+with his master?
+
+He spread out his hands in mournful protest. _Mais Monsieur Pierre_ had
+not required his services _depuis longtemps._ He was become very
+independent. But yes, he was engaged upon war work. In the Army? But yes
+again. Did not _Madame_ know? And then he became vague and sentimental,
+bemoaning his own age and consequent inactivity, and finally went away
+with brimming eyes and the dubiously expressed hope that _le bon Dieu_
+would fight on the right side.
+
+It was all wholly unsatisfactory, and Avery yearned to know more. But the
+pain of investigating further held her back. If that growing conviction
+of hers were indeed the truth, she shrank morbidly from seeming to make
+any advance. No one seemed to know definitely what had become of Piers.
+She could not bring herself to apply to outsiders for information, and
+there was no one to take up her case and make enquiries on her behalf.
+Lennox Tudor had volunteered for service in the Medical Corps and had
+been accepted. She did not so much as know where he was, though he was
+declared by Miss Whalley, who knew most things, to be on Salisbury Plain.
+She sometimes wondered with wry humour if Miss Whalley could have
+enlightened her as to her husband's whereabouts; but that lady's attitude
+towards her was invariably expressive of such icy disapproval that she
+never ventured to put the wonder into words.
+
+And then one afternoon of brilliant autumn she was shopping with Gracie
+in Wardenhurst, and came face to face with Ina Guyes.
+
+Dick Guyes had gone into the Artillery, and Ina had returned to her
+father's house. She and Avery had not met since Ina's wedding day more
+than a year before; but their recognition was mutual and instant.
+
+There was a moment of hesitation on both sides, a difficult moment of
+intangible reluctance; then Avery held out her hand.
+
+"How do you do?" she said.
+
+Ina took the hand perfunctorily between her fingers and at once
+relinquished it. She was looking remarkably handsome, Avery thought; but
+her smile was not conspicuously amiable, and her eyes held something that
+was very nearly akin to condemnation.
+
+"Quite well, thanks," she said, with her off-hand air of arrogance which
+had become much more marked since her marriage. "You all right?"
+
+Avery felt herself grow reticent and chilly as she made reply. The girl's
+eyes of scornful enquiry made her stiffen instinctively. She was prepared
+to bow and pass on, but for some reason Ina was minded to linger.
+
+"Has Piers come down yet?" she asked abruptly. "I saw him in town two
+nights ago. I've been up there for a day or two with Dick, but he has
+rejoined now. It's been embarkation leave. They're off directly."
+
+Off! Avery's heart gave a single hard throb and stood still. She looked
+at Ina wordlessly. The shop in which they stood suddenly lost all form
+and sound. It seemed to float round her in nebulous billows.
+
+"Good gracious!" said Ina. "Don't look like that! What's up? Aren't you
+well? Here, sit down! Or better still, come outside!"
+
+She gripped Avery's arm in a tense, insistent grasp and piloted her
+to the door.
+
+Avery went, hardly knowing what she did. Ina turned commandingly
+to Gracie.
+
+"Look here, child! You stay and collect the parcels! I'm going to
+take Lady Evesham a little way in the car. We'll come back for you in
+a few minutes."
+
+She had her own way, as she had always had it on every occasion, save
+one, throughout her life.
+
+When Avery felt her heart begin to beat again, she was lying back in a
+closed car with Ina seated beside her, very upright, extremely alert.
+
+"Don't speak!" the latter said, as their eyes met. "I'll tell you all I
+know. Dick and I have been stopping at Marchmont's for the last five
+days, and one night Piers walked in. Of course we made him join us. He
+was very thin, but looked quite tough and sunburnt. He is rather
+magnificent in khaki--like a prince masquerading. I think he talked
+without ceasing during the whole evening, but he didn't say a single word
+that I can remember. He expects to go almost any day now. He is in a
+regiment of Lancers, but I couldn't get any particulars out of him. He
+didn't choose to be communicative, so of course I left him alone. He is
+turning white about the temples; did you know?"
+
+Avery braced herself to answer the blunt question. There was something
+merciless about Ina's straight regard. It pierced her; but oddly she felt
+no resentment, only a curious sensation of compassionate sympathy.
+
+"Yes, I saw him--some weeks ago," she said.
+
+"You have not decided to separate then? Everyone said you had."
+
+Ina's tone was brutally direct, yet still, strangely, Avery felt no
+indignation.
+
+"We have not been--friends--for the last year," she said.
+
+"Ah! I thought not. And why? Just because of that story about your first
+husband's death that Dick's hateful cousin spread about on our
+wedding-day?"
+
+Ina looked at her with searching, challenging eyes, and Avery felt
+suddenly as if she were the younger and weaker of the two.
+
+"Was it because of that?" Ina insisted.
+
+"Yes," she admitted.
+
+"And you let such a thing as that come between you and--and--Piers!"
+There was incredulous amazement in Ina's voice. "You actually had
+the--the--the presumption!" Coherent words suddenly seemed to fail her,
+but she went on regardless, not caring how they came. "A man like
+Piers,--a--a--Triton like that,--such a being as is only turned out once
+in--in a dozen centuries! Oh, fool! Fool!" She clenched her hands, and
+beat them impotently upon her lap. "What did it matter what he'd done? He
+was yours. He worshipped you. And the worship of a man like Piers must
+be--must be--" She broke off, one hand caught convulsively to her throat;
+then swallowed hard and rushed on. "You sent him away, did you? You
+wouldn't live with him any longer? My God! Piers!" Again her throat
+worked spasmodically, and she controlled it with fierce effort. "He won't
+stay true to you of course," she said, more quietly. "You don't expect
+that, do you? You can't care--since you wouldn't stick to him. You've
+practically forced him into the mire. I sometimes think that one virtuous
+woman can do more harm in the world than a dozen of the other sort.
+You've embittered him for life. You've made him suffer horribly. I expect
+you've suffered too. I hope you have! But your sorrows are not to be
+compared with his. He has red blood in his veins, but you're too
+attenuated with goodness to know what real suffering means. You had the
+whole world in your grasp and you threw it away for a whim, just because
+you were too small, too contemptibly mean, to understand. You thought you
+loved him, I daresay. Well, you didn't. Love is a very different thing.
+Love never casts away. But of course you can't understand that. You are
+one of those women who keep down all the blinds lest the sunshine should
+fade their souls. You don't know even the beginnings of Love!"
+
+Passionately she uttered the words, but in a voice pitched so low that
+Avery only just caught them. And having uttered them almost in the same
+breath, she took up the speaking-tube and addressed the chauffeur.
+
+Avery sat quite still and silent. She felt as if she had been attacked
+and completely routed by a creature considerably smaller, but infinitely
+more virile, more valiant, than herself.
+
+Ina did not speak to her again for several minutes. She threw herself
+back against the cushion with an oddly petulant gesture, and leaned there
+staring moodily out.
+
+Then, as they neared their starting-point, she sat up and spoke again
+with a species of bored indifference. "Of course it's no affair of mine.
+I don't care two straws how you treat him. But surely you'll try and give
+him some sort of send-off? I wouldn't let even Dick go without that."
+
+Even Dick! There was a world of revelation in those words. Avery's heart
+stirred again in pity, and still her indignation slumbered.
+
+They reached the shop before which Gracie was waiting for them,
+and stopped.
+
+"Good-bye!" Avery said gently.
+
+"Oh, good-bye!" Ina looked at her with eyes half closed. "I won't get out
+if you don't mind. I must be getting back."
+
+She did not offer her hand, but she did not refuse it when very quietly
+Avery offered her own. It was not a warm hand-clasp on either side, but
+neither was it unfriendly.
+
+As she drove away, Ina leaned forward and bowed with an artificial smile
+on her lips. And Avery saw that she was very pale.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE PLACE OF REPENTANCE
+
+
+Like a prince masquerading! How vivid was the picture those words called
+up to Avery's mind! The regal pose of the body, the turn of the head, the
+faultless beauty of the features, and over all, that nameless pride of
+race, arrogant yet wholly unconscious--the stamp of the old Roman
+patrician, revived from the dust of ages!
+
+Aloof, yet never out of her ken, that picture hung before her all through
+the night, the centre-piece of every vision that floated through her
+weary brain. In the morning she awoke to a definite resolve.
+
+He had left her before she could stay him; but she would go to him now.
+Whether or not he wanted her,--yes, even with the possibility of seeing
+him turn from her,--she would seek him out. Yet this once more she would
+offer to him that love and faith which he had so cruelly sullied. If he
+treated her with cold contempt, she would yet offer to him all that she
+had--all that she had. Not because she had forgiven him or in any sense
+forgotten; but because she must; because neither forgiveness nor
+forgetfulness came into the matter, but only those white hairs above his
+temples that urged her, that drove her, that compelled her.
+
+There were no white hairs in her own brown tresses. Could it be that he
+had really suffered more than she? If so, God pity him! God help him!
+
+For the first time since their parting, the prayer for him that rose
+from her heart kindled within her a glow that burned as fire from the
+altar. She had prayed. She had prayed. But her prayers had seemed to
+come back to her from a void immeasurable that held nought but the
+echoes of her cry.
+
+But now--was it because she was ready to act as well as to pray?--it
+seemed to her that her appeal had reached the Infinite. And it was then
+that she began to learn that prayer is not only a passive asking, but the
+eager straining of every nerve towards fulfilment.
+
+It seemed useless to go to the Abbey for news. She would master her
+reluctance and go to Crowther. She was sure that he would be in a
+position to tell her all there was to know.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer warmly applauded the idea. The continued estrangement of the
+two people whom she loved so dearly was one of her greatest secret
+sorrows now. She urged Avery to go, shedding tears over the thought of
+Piers going unspeeded into the awful dangers of war.
+
+So by the middle of the morning Avery was on her way. It seemed to her
+the longest journey she had ever travelled. She chafed at every pause.
+And through it all, Ina's fierce words ran in a perpetual refrain through
+her brain: "Love never casts away--Love never casts away."
+
+She felt as if the girl had ruthlessly let a flood of light in upon her
+gloom, dazzling her, bewildering her, hurting her with its brilliance.
+She had forced aside those drawn blinds. She had pierced to the innermost
+corners. And Avery herself was shocked by that which had been revealed.
+It had never before been given to her to see her own motives, her own
+soul, thus. She had not dreamed of the canker of selfishness that lay at
+the root of all. With shame she remembered her assurance to her husband
+that her love should never fail him. What of that love now--Love the
+Invincible that should have shattered the gates of the prison-house and
+led him forth in triumph?
+
+Reaching town, she drove straight to Crowther's rooms. But she was met
+with disappointment. Crowther was out. He would be back in the evening,
+she was told, but probably not before.
+
+Wearily she went down again and out into the seething life of the streets
+to spend the longest day of her life waiting for his return. Looking back
+upon that day afterwards, she often wondered how she actually spent the
+time. To and fro, to and fro, this way and that; now trying to ease her
+soul by watching the soldiers at drill in the Park, the long, long khaki
+lines and sunburnt faces; now pacing the edge of the water and seeking
+distraction in the antics of some water-fowl; now back again in the
+streets, moving with the crowd, seeing soldiers, soldiers on every hand,
+scanning each almost mechanically with the vagrant hope of meeting one
+who moved with a haughty pride of carriage and looked like a prince in
+disguise. Sometimes she stood to see a whole troop pass by, splendid boys
+swinging along with laughter and careless singing. She listened to the
+tramping feet and merry voices with a heart that sank ever lower and
+lower. She had started the day with a quivering wonder if the end of it
+might find her in his arms. But ever as the hours passed by the certainty
+grew upon her that this would not be. She grew sick with the longing to
+see his face. She ached for the sound of his voice. And deep in the heart
+of her she knew that this futile yearning was to be her portion for many,
+many days. For over a year he had waited, and he had waited in vain. Now
+it was her turn.
+
+It was growing dusk when she went again in search of Crowther. He had not
+returned, but she could not endure that aimless wandering any longer. She
+went in to wait for him, there in the room where Piers had found
+sanctuary during some of the darkest hours of his life.
+
+She was too utterly wearied to move about, but sat sunk in the chair
+by the window, almost too numbed with misery and fatigue for coherent
+thought. The dusk deepened about her. The roar of London's life came
+vaguely from afar. Through it and above it she still seemed to hear the
+tread of the marching feet as the gallant lines swung by. And still
+with aching concentration she seemed to be searching for that one
+beloved face.
+
+What did it matter what he had done? He was hers. He was hers. And, O
+God, how she wanted him! How gladly in that hour would she have yielded
+him all--all that she had to offer!
+
+There came a quiet step without, a steady hand on the door. She started
+up with a wild hope clamouring at her heart. Might he not be there also?
+It was possible! Surely it was possible!
+
+She took a quick step forward. No conventional word would rise to her
+lips. They only stiffly uttered the one name, "Piers!"
+
+And Crowther answered her, just as though no interval of more than a
+year lay between them and the old warm friendship. "He left for the
+Front today."
+
+With the words he reached her, and she remembered later the
+sustaining strength with which his hands upheld her when she reeled
+beneath the blow.
+
+He put her down again in the chair, and knelt beside her, for she clung
+to him convulsively, scarcely knowing what she did.
+
+"He ought to have let you know," he said. "But he wouldn't be persuaded.
+I believe--right up to the last--he hoped he would hear something of you.
+But you know him, his damnable pride,--or was it chivalry this time? On
+my soul, I scarcely know which. He behaved almost as if he were under an
+oath not to make the first advance. I am very sorry, Avery. But my hands
+were tied."
+
+He paused, and she knew that he was waiting for a word from her--of
+kindness or reproach--some intimation of her feelings towards himself.
+But she could only utter voicelessly, "I shall never see him again."
+
+He pressed her icy hands close in his own, but he said no word of hope.
+He seemed to know instinctively that it was not the moment.
+
+"You can write to him," he said. "You can write now--tonight. The letter
+will reach him in a few days at most. He calls himself Beverley--Private
+Beverley. Let me give you some tea, and you can sit down and write
+straight away."
+
+Kindly and practical, he offered her the consolation of immediate action;
+and the crushing sense of loss began gradually to lose its hold upon her.
+
+"I am going to tell you everything--all I know," he said. "I told him I
+should do so if you came to me. I only wish you had come a little sooner,
+but that is beside the point."
+
+Again he paused. Her eyes were upon him, but she said nothing.
+
+Finding her hold had slackened, he got up, lighted a lamp, and sat down
+with its light streaming across his rugged face.
+
+"I don't know what you have been thinking of me all this time," he said,
+"if you have stooped to think of me at all."
+
+"I have often thought of you," Avery answered. "But I had a feeling that
+you--that you--" she hesitated--"that you could scarcely be in sympathy
+with us both," she ended.
+
+"I see." Crowther's eyes met hers with absolute directness. "But you
+realize that that was a mistake," he said.
+
+She answered him in the affirmative. Before those straight eyes of his
+she could not do otherwise.
+
+"I could not express my sympathy with you," he said. "I did not even
+know that it would be welcome, and I could not interfere without your
+husband's consent. I was bound by a promise. But--" he smiled faintly--"I
+told him clearly that if you came to me I should not keep that promise. I
+should regard it as my release."
+
+"What have you to tell me?" Avery asked.
+
+"Just this," he said. "It isn't a very long story, but I don't think you
+have heard it before. It's just the story of one of the worst bits of bad
+luck that ever befell a man. He was only a lad of nineteen, and he went
+out into the world with all his life before him. He was rich and
+successful in every way, full of promise, brilliant. There was something
+so splendid about him that he seemed somehow to belong to a higher
+planet. He had never known failure or disgrace. But one night an evil
+fate befell him. He was forced to fight--against his will; and--he killed
+his man. It was an absolutely unforeseen result. He took heavy odds, and
+naturally he matched them with all the skill at his command. But it was a
+fair fight. I testify to that. He took no mean advantage."
+
+Crowther's eyes were gazing beyond Avery. He spoke with a curious
+deliberation as if he were describing a vision that hung before him.
+
+"He himself was more shocked by the man's death than anyone I have ever
+seen. He accepted the responsibility at once. There is a lot of nobility
+at the back of that man's soul. He wanted to give himself up. But I
+stepped in. I took the law into my own hands. I couldn't stand by and see
+him ruined. I made him bolt. He went, and I saw no more of him for six
+years. That ends the first chapter of the story."
+
+He paused, as if for question or comment; but Avery sat in unbroken
+silence. Her eyes also were fixed as it were upon something very far
+away.
+
+After a moment, he resumed. "Six years after, I stopped at Monte Carlo
+on my way home, and I chanced upon him there. He was with his old
+grandfather, living a life that would have driven most young men crazy
+with boredom. But--I told you there was something fine about him--he
+treated the whole thing as a joke, and I saw that he was the apple of the
+old man's eye. He hailed me as an old friend. He welcomed me back into
+his life as if I were only associated with pleasant things. But I soon
+saw that he was not happy. The memory of that tragedy was hanging on him
+like a millstone. He was trying to drag himself free. But he was like a
+dog on a chain. He could see his liberty, but he could not reach it. And
+the fact that he loved a woman, and believed that he had won her love
+made the burden even heavier. So I gathered, though he had his intervals
+of reckless happiness when nothing seemed to matter. I didn't know who
+the woman was at first, but I urged him strongly to tell her the truth
+before he married her. And then somehow, while we were walking together
+one night, it came out--that trick of Fate; and in his horror and despair
+the boy very nearly went under altogether. It was just the fineness of
+his nature that kept him up."
+
+"And your help," said Avery quietly.
+
+His eyes comprehended her for a moment. "Yes, I did my best," he said.
+"But it was his own nobility in the main that gave him strength. Have you
+never noticed that about him? He has the greatness that only comes to
+most men after years of struggle."
+
+"I have noticed," Avery said, her voice very low.
+
+Crowther went on in his slow, steady way. "Well, after that, I left. And
+the next thing I knew was that the old man had died, and he was married
+to you. You didn't let me into the secret very soon, you know." He smiled
+a little. "Of course I realized that you had gone to him rather suddenly
+to comfort his loneliness. It was just the sort of thing I should have
+expected of you. And I thought--too--that he had told you all, and you
+had loved him well enough to forgive him. It wasn't till I came to see
+you that I realized that this was not so, and I had been in the house
+some hours even then before it dawned on me."
+
+Again he spoke as one describing something seen afar.
+
+"Of course I was sorry," he said. "I knew that sooner or later you were
+bound to come up against it. I couldn't help. I just waited. And as it
+chanced, I didn't have to wait very long. Piers came to me one night in
+August, and told me that the whole thing had come out, and that you had
+refused to live with him any longer. I understood your feelings. It was
+inevitable that at first you should feel like that. But I knew you loved
+him. I knew that sooner or later that would make a difference. And I
+tried to hearten him up. For he--poor lad!--was nearly mad with trouble."
+
+Avery's hands closed tightly upon each other in her lap. She sat in
+strained silence, still gazing straight before her.
+
+Gently Crowther finished his tale. "That's about all there is to tell,
+except that from the day he left you to this, he has borne his burden
+like a man, and he has never once done anything unworthy of you. He is a
+man, Avery, not a boy any longer. He is a man you can trust, for he will
+never deceive you again. If he hasn't yet found his place of repentance,
+it hasn't been for lack of the seeking. If you can send him a line of
+forgiveness, he will go into this war with a high heart, and you will
+have reason to be proud of him when you meet again."
+
+He got up and moved in his slow, massive way across the room.
+
+"Now you will let me give you some tea," he said. "I am sure you must
+be tired."
+
+Had he seen the tears rolling down her face as she sat there? If so he
+gave no sign. Quietly he busied himself with his preparations, and before
+he came back to her, she had wiped them away.
+
+He waited upon her with womanly gentleness, and later he went with her to
+the hotel at which Piers usually stayed, and saw her established there
+for the night.
+
+It was not till the moment of parting that she found any words in which
+to express herself.
+
+Then, with her hand in his, she whispered chokingly, "I feel as if--as
+if--I had failed him--just when he needed me most. He was in prison,
+and--I left him there."
+
+Crowther's steady eyes looked into hers with kindness that was full of
+sustaining comfort. "He has broken out of his prison," he said. "Don't
+fret--don't fret!"
+
+Her lips were quivering painfully. She turned her face aside. "He will
+scarcely need me now," she said.
+
+"Write and ask him!" said Crowther gently.
+
+She made a piteous gesture of hopelessness. "I have got to find my own
+place of repentance first," she said.
+
+"It shouldn't wait," said Crowther. "Write tonight!"
+
+And so for half the night Avery sat writing a letter to her husband which
+he was destined never to receive.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE RELEASE OF THE PRISONER
+
+
+How long was it since the fight round the château? Piers had no idea. The
+damp chill of the autumn night was upon him and he was cold to the bone.
+
+It had been a desperate fight in which quarter had been neither asked nor
+given, hand to hand and face to face, with wild oaths and dreadful
+laughter. He had not noticed the tumult at the time, but the echoes of it
+still rang in his ears. A desperate fight against overwhelming odds! For
+the chateau had been strongly held, and the struggle for it had seemed
+Titanic, albeit only a detail of a rearguard action. There had been guns
+there that had harried them all the previous day. It had become a matter
+of necessity to silence those guns. So the effort had been made, a
+glorious effort crowned with success. They had mastered the garrison,
+they had silenced the guns; and then, within an hour of their victory,
+disaster had come upon them. Great numbers of the enemy had swept
+suddenly upon them, had surrounded them and swallowed them up.
+
+It was all over now. The tide of battle had swept on. The place was
+silent as the grave. He was the only man left, flung as it were upon a
+dust-heap in a corner of the world that had ceased to matter to anyone.
+
+He had lain for hours unconscious till those awful chills had awakened
+him. Doubtless he had been left for dead among his dead comrades. He
+wondered why he was not dead. He had a distinct recollection of being
+shot through the heart. And the bullet had gone out at his back. He
+vividly remembered that also--the red-hot anguish as it had torn its way
+through him, the awful emptiness of death that had followed.
+
+How had he escaped--if he had escaped? How had he returned from that
+great silence? Why had the dread Door shut against him only, imprisoning
+him here when all the rest had passed through? There seemed to be some
+mystery about it. He tried to follow it out. Death was no difficult
+matter. He was convinced of that. Yet somehow Death had eluded him. He
+was as a man who had lost his way in a fog. Doubtless he would find it
+again. He did not want to wander alone in this valley of dry bones. He
+wanted to get free. He was sure that sooner or later that searing,
+red-hot bullet would do its work.
+
+For a space he drifted back into the vast sea of unconsciousness in which
+he had been submerged for so long. Even that was bound to lead somewhere.
+Surely there was no need to worry!
+
+But very soon it ceased to be a calm sea. It grew troubled. It began to
+toss. He felt himself flung from billow to billow, and the sound of a
+great storm rose in his ears.
+
+He opened his eyes suddenly wide to a darkness that could be felt, and it
+was as though a flame of agony went through him, a raging thirst that
+burned him fiendishly.
+
+Ah! He knew the meaning of that! It was horribly familiar to him. He was
+back in hell--back in the torture-chamber where he had so often agonized,
+closed in behind those bars of iron which he had fought so often and so
+fruitlessly to force asunder.
+
+He stretched out his hands and one of them came into contact with the icy
+cold of a dead man's face. It was the man who had shot him, and who in
+his turn had been shot. He shuddered at the touch, shrank into himself.
+And again the fiery anguish caught him, set him writhing; shrivelled him
+as parchment is shrivelled in the flame. He went through it, racked with
+torment, conscious of nought else in all the world, so pierced and
+possessed by pain that it seemed as if all the suffering that those dead
+men had missed were concentrated within him. He felt as if it must
+shatter him, soul and body, dissolve him with its sheer intensity. And
+yet somehow his straining flesh endured. He came through his inferno,
+sweating, gasping, with broken prayers and the wrung, bitter crying of
+smitten strength!
+
+Again the black sea took him, bearing him to and fro, deadening his pain
+but giving him no rest. He tossed on the troubled waters for
+interminable ages. He watched a full moon rise blood-red and awful and
+turn gradually to a whiteness of still more appalling purity. For a
+long, long time he watched it, trying to recall something which eluded
+him, chasing a will-o'-the-wisp memory round and round the fevered
+labyrinths of his brain.
+
+Then at last very suddenly it turned and confronted him. There in the
+old-world garden that was every moment growing more distinct and
+definite, he looked once more upon his wife's face in the moonlight, saw
+her eyes of shrinking horror raised to his, heard her low-spoken words:
+"I shall never forgive you."
+
+The vision passed, blotted out by returning pain. He buried his head
+beneath his arms and groaned. . . .
+
+Again--hours after, it seemed,--the great cloud of his agony lifted. He
+came to himself, feeling deadly sick but no longer gripped by that
+fiendish torture. He raised himself on his elbows and faced the blinding
+moonlight. It seemed to pierce him, but he forced himself to meet it. He
+looked forth over the silent garden.
+
+Strange silhouettes of shrubs weirdly fashioned filled the place. At
+a little distance he caught the gleam of white marble, and there
+came to him the tinkle of a fountain. He became aware again of raging
+thirst--thirst that tore at the very root of his being. He gathered
+himself together for the greatest effort of his life. The sound of
+the water mocked him, maddened him. He would drink--he would
+drink--before he died!
+
+The man at his side lay with face upturned starkly to the moonlight. It
+gleamed upon eyes that were glazed and sightless. The ground all around
+them was dark with blood.
+
+Slowly Piers raised himself, feeling his heart pump with the effort,
+feeling the stiffened wound above it tear and gape asunder. He tried to
+hold his breath while he moved, but he could not. It came in sharp,
+painful gasps, sawing its way through his tortured flesh. But in spite of
+it he managed to lift himself to his hands and knees; and then for a
+long, long time he dared attempt no more. For he could feel the blood
+flowing steadily from his wound, and a deadly faintness was upon him
+against which he needed all his strength to fight.
+
+He thought it must have overwhelmed him for a time at least; yet when it
+began to lessen he had not sunk down again. He was still propped upon
+hands and knees--the only living creature in that place of dead men.
+
+He could see them which ever way he looked over the trampled
+sward--figures huddled or outstretched in the moonlight, all motionless,
+ashen-faced.
+
+He saw none wounded like himself. Perhaps the wounded had been already
+collected, perhaps they had crawled to shelter. Or perhaps he was the
+only one against whom the Door had been closed. He had been left for
+dead. He had nothing to live for. Yet it seemed that he could not die.
+
+He looked at the man at his side lying wrapt in the aloofness of Death.
+Poor devil! How horrible he looked, and how indifferent! A sense of
+shuddering disgust came upon Piers. He wondered if he would die as
+hideously.
+
+Again the fountain mocked him softly from afar. Again the fiery torment
+of his thirst awoke. He contemplated attempting to walk, but instinct
+warned him against the risk of a headlong fall. He began with infinite
+difficulty to crawl upon hands and knees.
+
+His progress was desperately slow, the suffering it entailed was
+sometimes unendurable. And always he knew that the blood was draining
+from him with every foot of ground he covered. But ever that maddening
+fountain lured him on...
+
+The night had stretched into untold ages. He wondered if in his
+frequent spells of unconsciousness he had somehow missed many days. He
+had seen the moon swing half across the sky. He had watched with
+delirious amusement the dead men rise to bury each other. And he had
+spent hours in wondering what would happen to the last of them. His
+head felt oddly light, as if it were full of air, a bubble of prismatic
+colours that might burst into nothingness at any moment. But his body
+felt as if it were fettered with a thousand chains. He could hear them
+clanking as he moved.
+
+But still that fountain with its marble basin seemed the end and aim of
+his existence. Often he forgot to be thirsty now, but he never forgot
+that he must reach the fountain before he died.
+
+Sometimes his thirst would come back in burning spasms to urge him on,
+and he always knew that there was a great reason for perseverance, always
+felt that if he slackened he would pay a terrible penalty.
+
+The fountain was very far away. He crawled along with ever-increasing
+difficulty, marking the progress of his own shadow in the strong
+moonlight. There was something pitiless about the moon. It revealed so
+much that might have been mercifully veiled.
+
+From the far distance there came the long roll of cannon, shattering the
+peace of the night, but it was a long way off. In the château-garden
+there was no sound but the tinkle of the fountain and the laboured,
+spasmodic breathing of a man wounded wellnigh unto death.
+
+Only a few yards separated him now from the running water. It sounded
+like a fairy laughter, and all the gruesome horrors of the place faded
+into unreality. Surely it was fed by the stream at home that flowed
+through the preserves--the stream where the primroses grew!
+
+Only a few more yards! But how damnably difficult it was to cover them!
+He could hardly drag his weighted limbs along. It was the old game. He
+knew it well. But how devilish to fetter him so! It had been the ruin of
+his life. He set his teeth, and forced himself on. He would win through
+in spite of all.
+
+The moonlight poured dazzlingly upon the white marble basin, and on the
+figure of a nymph who bent above it, delicately poised like a butterfly
+about to take wing. He wondered if she would flee at his approach, but
+she did not. She stood there waiting for him, a thing of infinite
+daintiness, the one object untouched in that ravaged garden. Perhaps
+after all it was she and not the fountain that drew him so irresistibly.
+He had a great longing to hear her speak, but he was afraid to address
+her lest he should scare her away. She was so slight, so spiritual, so
+exquisite in her fairy grace. She made him think of Jeanie--little Jeanie
+who had prayed for his happiness and had not lived to see her prayer
+fulfilled.
+
+He drew near with a certain stealthiness, fearing to startle her. He
+would have risen to his feet, but his strength was ebbing fast. He knew
+he could not.
+
+And then--just ere he reached the marble basin, the goal of that long,
+bitter journey--he saw her turn a little towards him; he heard her speak.
+
+"Dear Sir Galahad!"
+
+"Jeanie!" he gasped.
+
+She seemed to sway above the gleaming water. Even then--even then--he was
+not sure of her--till he saw her face of childish purity and the happy
+smile of greeting in her eyes!
+
+"How very tired you must be!" she said.
+
+"I am, Jeanie! I am!" he groaned in answer. "These chains--these iron
+bars--I shall never get free!"
+
+He saw her white arms reach out to him. He thought her fingers touched
+his brow. And he knew quite suddenly that the journey was over, and he
+could lie down and rest.
+
+Her voice came to him very softly, with a hushing tenderness through the
+miniature rush and gurgle of the water. As usual she sought to comfort
+him, but he heard a thrill of triumph as well as sympathy in her words.
+
+"He hath broken the gates of brass," she said. "And smitten the bars of
+iron in sunder."
+
+His fingers closed upon the edge of the pool. He felt the water splash
+his face as he sank down; and though he was too spent to drink he thanked
+God for bringing him thither.
+
+Later it seemed to him that a Divine Presence came through the garden,
+that Someone stooped and touched him, and lo, his chains were broken and
+his burden gone! And he roused himself to ask for pardon; which was
+granted to him ere that Presence passed away.
+
+He never knew exactly what happened after that night in the garden of the
+ruined château. There were a great many happenings, but none of them
+seemed to concern him very vitally.
+
+He wandered through great spaces of oblivion, intersected with terrible
+streaks of excruciating pain. During the intervals of this fearful
+suffering he was acutely conscious, but he invariably forgot everything
+again when the merciful unconsciousness came back. He knew in a vague way
+that he lay in a hospital-tent with other dying men, knew when they moved
+him at last because he could not die, suffered agonies unutterable upon
+an endless road that never seemed to lead to anywhere, and finally awoke
+to find that the journey had been over for several days.
+
+He tried very hard not to wake. Waking invariably meant anguish. He
+longed unspeakably for Death, but Death was denied him. And when someone
+came and stooped over him and took his nerveless hand, he whispered with
+closed eyes an earnest request not to be called back.
+
+"It's such--a ghastly business--" he muttered piteously--"this waking."
+
+"Won't you speak to a friend, Piers?" a voice said.
+
+He opened his eyes then. He had not heard his own name for months. He
+looked up into eyes that gleamed hawk-like through glasses, and a throb
+of recognition went through his heart.
+
+"You!" he whispered, striving desperately to master the sickening pain
+that that throb had started.
+
+"All right. Don't speak for a bit!" said Tudor quietly. "I think I can
+help you."
+
+He did help, working over him steadily, with the utmost gentleness, till
+the worst of the paroxysm was past.
+
+Piers was pathetically grateful. His high spirit had sunk very low in
+those days. No one that he could remember had ever done anything to ease
+his pain before.
+
+"It's been--so infernal," he whispered presently. "You know--I was
+shot--through the heart."
+
+Tudor's face was very grave. "Yes, you're pretty bad," he said. "But
+you've pulled through so far. It's in your favour, that. And look here,
+you must lie flat on your back always. Do you understand? It's about your
+only chance."
+
+"Of living?" whispered Piers. "But I don't want to live. I want to die."
+
+"Don't be a fool!" said Tudor.
+
+"I'm not a fool. I hate life!" A tremor of passion ran through the words.
+
+Tudor laid a hand upon him. "Piers, if ever any man had anything to live
+for, you are that man," he said.
+
+"What do you mean?" Piers' eyes, dark as the night through which he had
+come, looked up at him.
+
+"I mean just that. If you can't live for your own sake, live for hers!
+She wants you. It'll break her heart if you go out now."
+
+"Great Scott, man! You're not in earnest!" whispered Piers.
+
+"I am in earnest. I know exactly what I am saying. I don't talk at
+random. She loved you. She wants you. You've lived for yourself all your
+life. Now--you've got to live for her."
+
+Tudor's voice was low and vehement. A faint sparkle came into Piers' eyes
+as he heard it.
+
+"By George!" he said softly. "You're rather a brick, what? But haven't
+you thought--what might happen--if--if I went out after all? You used to
+be rather great--at getting me out of the way."
+
+"I didn't realize how all-important you were," rejoined Tudor, with a
+bitter smile. "You needn't go any further in that direction. It leads to
+a blank wall. You've got to live whether you like it or not. I'm going
+to do all I can to make you live, and you'll be a hound if you don't
+back me up."
+
+His eyes looked down upon Piers, dominant and piercingly intent.
+And--perhaps it was mere physical weakness, or possibly the voluntary
+yielding of a strong will that was in its own way as great as the
+strength to which it yielded--Piers surrendered with a meekness such as
+Tudor had never before witnessed in him.
+
+"All right," he said. "I'll do--my best."
+
+And so oddly they entered into a partnership that had for its sole end
+and aim the happiness of the woman they loved; and in that partnership
+their rivalry was forever extinguished.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOLY GROUND
+
+
+"They say he will never fight again," said Crowther gravely. "He may
+live. They think he will live. But he will never be strong."
+
+"If only I might see him!" Avery said.
+
+"Yes, I know. That is the hardest part. But be patient a little longer!
+So much depends on it. I was told only this morning that any agitation
+might be fatal. No one seems to understand how it is that he has managed
+to live at all. He is just hanging on, poor lad,--just hanging on."
+
+"I want to help him," Avery said.
+
+"I know you do. And so you can--if you will. But not by going to him.
+That would do more harm than good."
+
+"How else can I do anything?" she said. "Surely--surely he wants
+to see me!"
+
+She was standing in Crowther's room, facing him with that in her eyes
+that moved him to a great compassion.
+
+He put his hand on her shoulder. "My dear, of course he wants to see you;
+but there will be no keeping him quiet when he does. He isn't equal to
+it. He is putting up the biggest fight of his life, and he wants all his
+strength for it. But you can do your part now if you will. You can go
+down to Rodding Abbey and make ready to receive him there. And you can
+send Victor to help me with him as soon as he is able to leave the
+hospital. He and I will bring him down to you. And if you will be there
+just in the ordinary way, I think there will be less risk of excitement.
+Will you do this, Avery? Is it asking too much of you?"
+
+His grey eyes looked straight down into hers with the wide friendliness
+that was as the open gateway to his soul, and some of the bitter strain
+of the past few weeks passed from her own as she looked back.
+
+"Nothing would be too much," she said. "I would do anything--anything.
+But if he should want me--and I were not at hand? If--if--he
+should--die--" Her voice sank.
+
+Crowther's hand pressed upon her. "He is not going to die," he said
+stoutly. "He doesn't mean to die. But he will probably have to go slow
+for the rest of his life. That is where you will be able to help him. His
+only chance lies in patience. You must teach him to be patient."
+
+Her lips quivered in a smile. "Piers!" she said. "Can you picture it?"
+
+"Yes, I can. Because I know that only patience can have brought him to
+where he is at present. They say it is nothing short of a miracle, and I
+believe it. God often works His miracles that way. And I always knew
+that Piers was great."
+
+Crowther's slow smile appeared, transforming his whole face. He held
+Avery's hand for a little, and let it go.
+
+"So you will do this, will you?" he said. "I think the boy would be just
+about pleased to find you there. And you can depend on me to bring him
+down to you as soon as he is able to bear it."
+
+"You are very good," Avery said. "Yes, I will go."
+
+But, as Crowther knew, in going she accepted the hardest part; and the
+weeks that she then spent at Rodding Abbey waiting, waiting with a sick
+anxiety, left upon her a mark which no time could ever erase.
+
+When Crowther's message came to her at last, she was almost too crushed
+to believe. Everything was in readiness, had been in readiness for weeks.
+She had prepared in fevered haste, telling herself that any day might
+bring him. But day had followed day, and the news had always been
+depressing, first of weakness, fits of pain, terrible collapses, and
+again difficult recoveries. Not once had she been told that any ground
+had been gained.
+
+And so when one day a telegram reached her earlier than usual, she
+hardly dared to open it, so little did she anticipate that the news
+could be good.
+
+And even when the words stared her in the face: "Bringing Piers this
+afternoon, Crowther," she could not for awhile believe them, and sought
+instinctively to read into them some sinister meaning.
+
+How she got through that day, she never afterwards knew. The hours
+dragged leaden-footed. There was nothing to be done. She would not leave
+the house lest by some impossible chance he might arrive before the
+afternoon, but she felt that to stay within its walls was unendurable. So
+for the most part she paced the terrace, breathing the dank, autumnal
+air, picturing every phase of his journey, but never daring to picture
+his arrival, praying piteous, disjointed prayers that only her own soul
+seemed to hear.
+
+The afternoon began to wane, and dusk came down. A small drifting rain
+set in with the darkness, but she was not even aware of it till David,
+very deferential and subdued, came to her and suggested that if she would
+wait in the hall Sir Piers would see her at once, as he had taken the
+liberty to turn on all the lights.
+
+She knew that the old man made the suggestion out of the goodness of his
+heart, and she fell in with it, realizing the wisdom of going within. But
+when she found herself in the full glare of the great hall, alone with
+those shining suits of armour that mounted guard on each side of the
+fireplace, the awful suspense came upon her with a force that nothing
+could alleviate. She turned with sick loathing from the tea-tray that
+David had placed for her so comfortingly close to the fire. Every moment
+that passed was an added torture. It was dark, it was late. The
+conviction was growing in her heart that when they came at last, they
+would bring with them only her husband's dead body.
+
+She rose and went to the open door. Where was his spirit now, she
+wondered? Had he leapt ahead of that empty, travelling shell? Was he
+already close--close--his arm entwined in hers? She covered her face
+with her hands. "Oh, Piers, I can't go on alone," she sobbed. "If you are
+dead--I must die too!"
+
+And then, as though in obedience to a voice that had spoken within her,
+she raised her head again and gazed forth. The rain had drifted away.
+Through scudding clouds of darkness there shone, serene and splendid, a
+single star. Her heart gave a great throb, and was still.
+
+"The Star of Hope!" she murmured wonderingly. "The Star of Hope!"
+
+And in that moment inexplicably yet convincingly she knew that her
+prayers that had seemed so fruitless had been heard, and that an answer
+was very near at hand....
+
+There came the sound of a horn from the direction of the lodge. They
+were coming.
+
+She turned her head and looked down the dark avenue. But she was no
+longer agitated or distressed by fear. She knew not what might be in
+store for her, but somehow, mystically, she had been endued with strength
+to meet it unafraid.
+
+She heard the soft buzz of a high-powered car, and presently two lights
+appeared at the further end. They came towards her swiftly, almost
+silently. It was like the swoop of an immense bird. And then in the
+strong glare shed forth by the hall-lamps she saw the huge body of an
+ambulance-car, and a Red Cross flared symbolic in the light.
+
+The car came to a stand immediately before her, and for a few moments
+nothing happened. And still she was not afraid. Still she was as it were
+guided and sustained and lifted above all turmoil. She seemed to stand on
+a mountain-top, above the seething misery that had for so long possessed
+her. She was braced to look upon even Death unshaken, undismayed.
+
+Steadily she moved. She went down to the car. Old David was behind her.
+He came forward and opened the door with fumbling, quivering hands. She
+had time to notice his agitation and to be sorry for him.
+
+Then a voice came to her from within, and a great throb went through her
+of thankfulness, of relief, of joy unspeakable.
+
+"Victor, you old ass, what are you blubbing for? Anyone would think--" A
+sudden pause, then in a low, eager tone, "Hullo,--Avery?"
+
+The incredulous interrogation of the words cut her to the heart. She went
+up the step and into the car as if drawn by an irresistible magnetism,
+seeing neither Crowther nor Victor, aware only of a prone, gaunt figure
+on a stretcher, white-haired, skeleton-featured, that reached a trembling
+hand to her and said again, "Hullo!"
+
+For one wild second she felt as if she were in the presence of old Sir
+Beverley, so striking was the likeness that the drawn, upturned face bore
+to him. Then Piers' eyes, black as the night, smiled up at her,
+half-imperious, half-pleading, and the illusion was gone.
+
+She stooped over him, that trembling hand fast clasped in hers; but she
+could not speak. No words would come.
+
+"Been waiting, what?" he said. "I hope not for long?"
+
+But still she could not speak. She felt choked. It was all so unnatural,
+so cruelly hard to bear.
+
+"I shan't be like this always," he said. "Afraid I look an awful guy just
+at present."
+
+That was all then, for Crowther came gently between them; and then he
+and Victor, with infinite care, lifted the stretcher and bore the master
+of the house into his own home.
+
+Half an hour later Avery turned from waving a farewell to Crowther, who
+had insisted upon going back to town with the car that had brought them,
+and softly shut out the night.
+
+She had had the library turned into a bedroom for Piers, and she crossed
+the hall to the door with an eagerness that carried her no further.
+There, gripping the handle, she was stayed.
+
+Within, she could hear Victor moving to and fro, but she listened in vain
+for her husband's voice, and a great shyness came upon her. She could not
+ask permission to enter.
+
+Minutes passed while she stood there, minutes of tense listening,
+during which she scarcely seemed to breathe. Then very suddenly she
+heard a sound that set every nerve a-quiver--a groan that was more of
+weariness than pain, but such weariness as made her own heart throb in
+passionate sympathy.
+
+Almost without knowing it, she turned the handle of the door, and opened
+it. A moment more, and she was in the room.
+
+He was lying flat in the bed, his dark eyes staring upwards out of deep
+hollows that had become cruelly distinct. There was dumb endurance in
+every line of him. His mouth was hard set, the chin firm as granite. And
+even then in his utter helplessness there was about him a greatness, a
+mute, unconscious majesty, that caught her by the throat.
+
+She went softly to the bedside.
+
+He turned his head at her coming, not quickly, not with any eagerness of
+welcome; but with that in his eyes, a slow kindling, that seemed to
+surround her with the glow of a great warmth.
+
+But when he spoke, it was upon no intimate subject. "Has Crowther
+gone?" he asked.
+
+His voice was pitched very low. She saw that he spoke with deliberate
+quietness, as if he were training himself thereto.
+
+"Yes," she made answer. "He wouldn't stay."
+
+"He couldn't," said Piers. "He is going to be ordained tomorrow."
+
+"Oh, is he?" she said in surprise. "He never told me!"
+
+"He wouldn't," said Piers. "He never talks about himself." He moved his
+hand slightly towards her. "Won't you sit down?"
+
+She glanced round. Victor was advancing behind her with a chair. Piers'
+eyes followed hers, and an instant later, turning back, she saw his quick
+frown. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers with the old imperious
+gesture, pointing to the door; and in a moment Victor, with a smile of
+peculiar gratification, put down the chair, trotted to it, opened it with
+a flourish, and was gone.
+
+Avery was left standing by the bed, slightly uncertain, wanting to smile,
+but wanting much more to cry.
+
+Piers' hand fell heavily. For a few seconds he lay perfectly still, with
+quickened breathing and drawn brows. Then his fingers patted the edge of
+the bed. "Sit down, sweetheart!" he said.
+
+It was Piers the boy-lover who spoke to her with those words, and,
+hearing them, something seemed to give way within her. It was as if a
+tight band round her heart had suddenly been torn asunder.
+
+She sank down on her knees beside the bed, and hid her face in his
+pillow. Tears--tears such as she had not shed since the beginning
+of their bitter estrangement--came welling up from her heart and
+would not be restrained. She sobbed her very soul out there beside
+him, subconsciously aware that in that hour his strength was
+greater than hers.
+
+Like an overwhelming torrent her distress came upon her, caught her
+tempestuously, swept her utterly from her own control, tossed her hither
+and thither, flung her at last into a place of deep, deep silence, where,
+still kneeling with head bowed low, she became conscious, strangely,
+intimately conscious, of the presence of God.
+
+It held her like a spell, that consciousness. She was as one who kneels
+before a vision. And even while she knelt there, lost in wonder, there
+came to her the throbbing gladness of faith renewed, the certainty that
+all would be well.
+
+Piers' hand was on her head, stroking, caressing, soothing. By no words
+did he attempt to comfort her. It was strange how little either of them
+felt the need of words. They were together upon holy ground, and in
+closer communion each with each than they had ever been before. Those
+tears of Avery's had washed away the barrier.
+
+Once, some time later, he whispered to her, "I never asked you to forgive
+me, Avery; but--"
+
+And that was the nearest he ever came to asking her forgiveness. For she
+stopped the words with her lips on his, and he never thought of uttering
+them again.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+Christmas Eve and children's voices singing in the night! Two figures by
+the open window listening--a man and a woman, hand in hand in the dark!
+
+"Don't let them see us yet!" It was the woman's voice, low but with a
+deep thrill in it as of full and complete content. "I knew they were
+coming. Gracie whispered it to me this morning. But I wasn't to tell
+anyone. She was so afraid their father might forbid it."
+
+The man answered with a faint, derisive laugh that yet had in it an echo
+of the woman's satisfaction. He did not speak, for already through the
+winter darkness a single, boyish voice had taken up another verse:
+
+"He comes, the prisoners to release
+In Satan's bondage held;
+The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+The woman's fingers clung fast to his. "Love opens every door," she
+whispered.
+
+His answering grip was close and strong. But he said nothing while the
+last triumphant lines were repeated.
+
+"The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+The next verse was sung by two voices in harmony, very soft and hushed.
+
+"He comes the broken heart to bind,
+The bleeding soul to cure,
+And with the treasures of His grace
+To bless the humble poor."
+
+Then came a pause, while through the quiet night there floated the sound
+of distant bells.
+
+"Look!" said Piers suddenly.
+
+And Avery, kneeling beside him, raised her eyes.
+
+There, high above the trees, alone and splendid, there shone a great,
+quivering star.
+
+His arm slid round her neck. "The Star of Hope, Avery," he whispered.
+"Yours--and mine."
+
+She clung to him silently, with a closeness that was passionate.
+
+And so the last verse, very clear and strong, came to them out of
+the night.
+
+"Our glad hosannas, Prince of Peace,
+Thy welcome shall proclaim,
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name.
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name."
+
+Avery leaned her head against her husband's shoulder. "I hear an angel
+singing," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ten minutes later, Gracie stood in the great hall with the red glow of
+the fire spreading all about her, her bright eyes surveying the master of
+the house who lay back in a low easy-chair with his wife kneeling beside
+him and Caesar the Dalmatian curled up with much complacence at his feet.
+
+"How very comfy you look!" she remarked.
+
+And, "We are comfy," said Piers, with a smile.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BARS OF IRON***
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Bars of Iron, by Ethel May Dell
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Bars of Iron
+
+Author: Ethel May Dell
+
+Release Date: December 20, 2003  [eBook #10509]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BARS OF IRON***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
+Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+The Bars of Iron
+
+By Ethel M. Dell
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY BROTHER REGINALD WITH MY LOVE
+
+
+
+
+"He hath broken the gates of brass:
+And smitten the bars of iron in sunder."
+Psalm cvii., 16.
+
+"I saw heaven opened."
+Revelation xix., II.
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE GATES OF BRASS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+       I.  A JUG OF WATER
+
+      II.  CONCERNING FOOLS
+
+     III.  DISCIPLINE
+
+      IV.  THE MOTHER'S HELP
+
+       V.  LIFE ON A CHAIN
+
+      VI.  THE RACE
+
+     VII.  A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+    VIII.  A TALK BY THE FIRE
+
+      IX.  THE TICKET OF LEAVE
+
+       X.  SPORT
+
+      XI.  THE STAR OF HOPE
+
+     XII.  A PAIR OF GLOVES
+
+    XIII.  THE VISION
+
+     XIV.  A MAN'S CONFIDENCE
+
+      XV.  THE SCHEME
+
+     XVI.  THE WARNING
+
+    XVII.  THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+   XVIII.  HORNS AND HOOFS
+
+     XIX.  THE DAY OF TROUBLE
+
+      XX.  THE STRAIGHT TRUTH
+
+     XXI.  THE ENCHANTED LAND
+
+    XXII.  THE COMING OF A FRIEND
+
+   XXIII.  A FRIEND'S COUNSEL
+
+    XXIV.  THE PROMISE
+
+     XXV.  DROSS
+
+    XXVI.  SUBSTANCE
+
+   XXVII.  SHADOW
+
+  XXVIII.  THE EVESHAM DEVIL
+
+    XXIX.  A WATCH IN THE NIGHT
+
+     XXX.  THE CONFLICT
+
+    XXXI.  THE RETURN
+
+   XXXII.  THE DECISION
+
+  XXXIII.  THE LAST DEBT
+
+   XXXIV.  THE MESSAGE
+
+    XXXV.  THE DARK HOUR
+
+   XXXVI.  THE SUMMONS
+
+  XXXVII.  "LA GRANDE PASSION"
+
+ XXXVIII.  THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+
+       I.  DEAD SEA FRUIT
+
+      II.  THAT WHICH IS HOLY
+
+     III.  THE FIRST GUEST
+
+      IV.  THE PRISONER IN THE DUNGEON
+
+       V.  THE SWORD FALLS
+
+      VI.  THE MASK
+
+     VII.  THE GATES OF HELL
+
+    VIII.  A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+      IX.  THE GREAT GULF
+
+       X.  SANCTUARY
+
+      XI.  THE FALLING NIGHT
+
+     XII.  THE DREAM
+
+    XIII.  THE HAND OF THE SCULPTOR
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE OPEN HEAVEN
+
+
+       I.  THE VERDICT
+
+      II.  THE TIDE COMES BACK
+
+     III.  THE GAME
+
+      IV.  THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
+
+       V.  THE DESERT ROAD
+
+      VI.  THE ENCOUNTER
+
+     VII.  THE PLACE OF REPENTANCE
+
+    VIII.  THE RELEASE OF THE PRISONER
+
+      IX.  HOLY GROUND
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+The Bars of Iron
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+"Fight? I'll fight you with pleasure, but I shall probably kill you if I
+do. Do you want to be killed?" Brief and contemptuous the question fell.
+The speaker was a mere lad. He could not have been more than nineteen.
+But he held himself with the superb British assurance that has its root
+in the British public school and which, once planted, in certain soils is
+wholly ineradicable.
+
+The man he faced was considerably his superior in height and build. He
+also was British, but he had none of the other's careless ease of
+bearing. He stood like an angry bull, with glaring, bloodshot eyes.
+
+He swore a terrific oath in answer to the scornful enquiry. "I'll break
+every bone in your body!" he vowed. "You little, sneering bantam, I'll
+smash your face in! I'll thrash you to a pulp!"
+
+The other threw up his head and laughed. He was sublimely unafraid. But
+his dark eyes shone red as he flung back the challenge. "All right, you
+drunken bully! Try!" he said.
+
+They stood in the garish light of a Queensland bar, surrounded by an
+eager, gaping crowd of farmers, boundary-riders, sheep-shearers, who had
+come down to this township on the coast on business or pleasure at the
+end of the shearing season.
+
+None of them knew how the young Englishman came to be among them. He
+seemed to have entered the drinking-saloon without any very definite
+object in view, unless he had been spurred thither by a spirit of
+adventure. And having entered, a boyish interest in the motley crowd,
+which was evidently new to him, had induced him to remain. He had sat in
+a corner, keenly observant but wholly unobtrusive, for the greater part
+of an hour, till in fact the attention of the great bully now confronting
+him had by some ill-chance been turned in his direction.
+
+The man was three parts drunk, and for some reason, not very
+comprehensible, he had chosen to resent the presence of this
+clean-limbed, clean-featured English lad. Possibly he recognized in him a
+type which for its very cleanness he abhorred. Possibly his sodden brain
+was stirred by an envy which the Colonials round him were powerless to
+excite. For he also was British-born. And he still bore traces, albeit
+they were not very apparent at that moment, of the breed from which he
+had sprung.
+
+Whatever the cause of his animosity, he had given it full and ready vent.
+A few coarse expressions aimed in the direction of the young stranger had
+done their work. The boy had risen to go, with disgust written openly
+upon his face, and instantly the action had been seized upon by the older
+man as a cause for offence.
+
+He had not found his victim slow to respond. In fact his challenge had
+been flung back with an alacrity that had somewhat astonished the
+bystanders and rendered interference a matter of some difficulty.
+
+But one of them did at this juncture make his voice heard in a word of
+admonition to the half-tipsy aggressor.
+
+"You had better mind what you do, Samson. There will be a row if that
+young chap gets hurt."
+
+"Yes, he'd better get out of it," said one or two.
+
+But the young chap in question turned on them with a flash of his white
+teeth. "Don't you worry yourselves!" he said. "If he wants to
+fight--let him!"
+
+They muttered uneasily in answer. It was plain that Samson's
+bull-strength was no allegory to them. But the boy's confidence
+remained quite unimpaired. He faced his adversary with the lust of
+battle in his eyes.
+
+"Come on, you slacker!" he said. "I like a good fight. Don't keep
+me waiting!"
+
+The bystanders began to laugh, and the man they called Samson turned
+purple with rage. He flung round furiously. "There's a yard at the back,"
+he cried. "We'll settle it there. I'll teach you to use your spurs on me,
+my young game-cock!"
+
+"Come on then!" said the stranger. "P'r'aps I shall teach you something
+too! You'll probably be killed, as I said before; but if you'll take the
+risk I have no objection."
+
+Again the onlookers raised a laugh. They pressed round to see the face of
+the English boy who was so supremely unafraid. It was a very handsome
+face, but it was not wholly English. The eyes were too dark and too
+passionate, the straight brows too black, the features too finely
+regular. The mouth was mobile, and wayward as a woman's, but the chin
+might have been modelled in stone--a fighting chin, aggressive,
+indomitable. There was something of the ancient Roman about the whole
+cast of his face which, combined with that high British bearing, made him
+undeniably remarkable. Those who looked at him once generally turned to
+look again.
+
+One of the spectators--a burly Australian farmer--pushed forward from the
+throng and touched his arm. "Look here, my son!" he said in an undertone.
+"You've no business here, and no call to fight whatever. Clear out of
+it--quick! Savvy? I'll cover your tracks."
+
+The boy drew himself up with a haughty movement. Plainly for the moment
+he resented the advice. But the next very suddenly he smiled.
+
+"Thanks! Don't trouble! I can hold my own and a bit over. There's no
+great difficulty in downing a drunken brute like that."
+
+"Don't you be too cock-sure!" the farmer warned him. "He's a heavy
+weight, and he's licked bigger men than you when he's been in just the
+state he's in now."
+
+But the English boy only laughed, and turned to follow his adversary.
+
+Every man present pressed after him. A well-sustained fight, though an
+event of no uncommon occurrence, was a form of entertainment that never
+failed to attract. They crowded out to the back premises in a body,
+unhindered by any in authority.
+
+A dingy backyard behind the house furnished ground for the fray. Here the
+spectators gathered in a ring around an arc of light thrown by a
+stable-lamp over the door, and the man they called Samson proceeded with
+savage energy to strip to the waist.
+
+The young stranger's face grew a shade more disdainful as he noted the
+action. He himself removed coat, waistcoat, and collar, all of which
+he handed to the farmer who had offered to assist him in making good
+his escape.
+
+"Just look after these for a minute!" he said.
+
+"You're a cool hand," said the other man admiringly. "I'll see you don't
+get bullied anyhow."
+
+The young man nodded his thanks. He looked down at his hands and slowly
+clenched and opened them again.
+
+"Oh, I shan't be bullied," he said, in a tone of grim conviction.
+
+And then the fight began.
+
+It was obvious from the outset that it could not be a very prolonged one.
+Samson attacked with furious zest. He evidently expected to find his
+opponent very speedily at his mercy, and he made no attempt to husband
+his strength. But his blows went wide. The English lad avoided them with
+an agility that kept him practically unscathed. Had he been a hard
+hitter, he might have got in several blows himself, but he only landed
+one or two. His face was set and white as a marble mask in which only the
+eyes lived--eyes that watched with darting intensity for the chance to
+close. And when that chance came he took it so suddenly and so
+unexpectedly that not one of the hard-breathing, silent crowd around him
+saw exactly how he gained his hold. One moment he was avoiding a
+smashing, right-handed blow; the next he had his adversary locked in a
+grip of iron, the while he bent and strained for the mastery.
+
+From then onwards an element that was terrible became apparent in the
+conflict. From a simple fisticuff it developed into a deadly struggle
+between skilled strength and strength that was merely brutal. Silently,
+with heaving, convulsive movements, the two struggling figures swayed to
+and fro. One of Samson's arms was imprisoned in that unyielding clutch.
+The other rained blows upon his adversary's head and shoulders that
+produced no further effect than if they had been bestowed upon cast-iron.
+
+The grip of the boy's arms only grew tighter and tighter with snake-like
+force, while a dreadful smile came into the young face and became stamped
+there, engraved in rigid lines. His lower lip was caught between his
+teeth, and a thin stream of blood ran from it over the smooth, clean-cut
+chin. It was the only sign he gave that he was putting forth the whole of
+his strength.
+
+A murmur of surprise that had in it a note of uneasiness began to run
+through the ring of onlookers. They had seen many a fight before, but
+never a fight like this. Samson's face had gone from red to purple. His
+eyes had begun to start. Quite plainly he also was taken by surprise.
+Desperately, with a streaming forehead, he changed his tactics. He had
+no skill. Until that day he had relied upon superior strength and weight
+to bring him victorious through every casual fray; and it had never
+before failed him. But that merciless, suffocating hold compelled him to
+abandon offensive measures to effect his escape. He stopped his wild and
+futile hammering and with his one free hand he grasped the back of his
+opponent's neck.
+
+The move was practically inevitable, but its effect was such as only one
+anticipated. That one was his adversary, who slowly bent under his weight
+as though overcome thereby, shifting his grip lower and lower till it
+almost looked as if he were about to collapse altogether. But just as the
+breaking-point seemed to be reached there came a change. He gathered
+himself together and with gigantic exertion began to straighten his bent
+muscles. Slowly but irresistibly he heaved his enemy upwards. There came
+a moment of desperate, confused struggle; and then, as the man lost his
+balance at last, he relaxed his grip quite suddenly, flinging him
+headlong over his shoulder.
+
+It was a clean throw, contrived with masterly assurance, the result of
+deliberate and trained calculation. The bully pitched upon his head on
+the rough stones of the yard, and turned a complete somersault with the
+violence of his fall.
+
+A shout of amazement went up from the spectators. This end of the
+struggle was totally unexpected.
+
+The successful combatant remained standing with the sweat pouring from
+his face and the blood still running down his chin. He stretched out his
+arms with a slow, mechanical movement as if to test the condition of his
+muscles after the tremendous strain he had put upon them. Then, still as
+it were mechanically, he felt the torn collar-band of his shirt, with
+speculative fingers. Finally he whizzed round on the heels and stared at
+the huddled form of his fallen foe.
+
+A shabby little man with thick, sandy eyebrows had gone to his
+assistance, but he lay quite motionless in a twisted, ungainly attitude.
+The flare of the lamp was reflected in his glassy, upturned eyes. Dumbly
+his conqueror stood staring down at him. He seemed to stand above them
+all in that his moment of dreadful victory.
+
+He spoke at length, and through his voice there ran a curious tremor as
+of a man a little giddy, a little dazed by immense and appalling height.
+
+"I thought I could do it!" he said. "I--thought I could!"
+
+It was his moment of triumph, of irresistible elation. The devil in him
+had fought--and conquered.
+
+It swayed him--and passed. He was left white to the lips and suddenly,
+terribly, afraid.
+
+"What have I done to him?" he asked, and the tremor was gone from his
+voice; it was level, dead level. "I haven't killed him really, have I?"
+
+No one answered him. They were crowding round the fallen man, stooping
+over him with awe-struck whispering, straightening the crumpled, inert
+limbs, trying to place the heavy frame in a natural posture.
+
+The boy pressed forward to look, but abruptly his supporter caught him by
+the shoulder and pulled him back.
+
+"No, no!" he said in a sharp undertone. "You're no good here. Get out of
+it! Put on your clothes and--go!"
+
+He spoke urgently. The boy stared at him, suffering the compelling hand.
+All the fight had gone completely out of him. He was passive with the
+paralysis of a great horror.
+
+The farmer helped him into his clothes, and himself removed the
+blood-stain from the lad's dazed face. "Don't be a fool!" he urged. "Pull
+yourself together and clear out! This thing was an accident. I'll
+engineer it."
+
+"Accident!" The boy straightened himself sharply with the movement of
+one brought roughly to his senses. "I suppose the throw broke his neck,"
+he said. "But it was no accident. I did it on purpose. I told him I
+should probably kill him, but he would have it." He turned and squarely
+faced the other. "I don't know what I ought to do," he said, speaking
+more collectedly. "But I'm certainly not going to bolt."
+
+The farmer nodded with brief comprehension. He had the steady eyes of a
+man accustomed to the wide spaces of the earth. "That's all right," he
+said, and took him firmly by the arm. "You come with me. My name is
+Crowther. We'll have a talk outside. There's more room there. You've got
+to listen to reason. Come!"
+
+He almost dragged the boy away with the words. No one intercepted or
+spoke a word to delay them. Together they passed back through the empty
+drinking-saloon--the boy with his colourless face and set lips, the man
+with his resolute, far-seeing eyes--and so into the dim roadway beyond.
+
+They left the lights of the reeking bar behind. The spacious night closed
+in upon them.
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE GATES OF BRASS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+A JUG OF WATER
+
+
+It was certainly not Caesar's fault. Caesar was as well-meaning a
+Dalmatian as ever scampered in the wake of a cantering horse. And if Mike
+in his headlong Irish fashion chose to regard the scamper as a gross
+personal insult, that was surely not a matter for which he could
+reasonably be held responsible. And yet it was upon the luckless Caesar
+that the wrath of the gods descended as a consequence of Mike's
+wrong-headed deductions.
+
+It began with a rush and a snarl from the Vicarage gate and it had
+developed into a set and deadly battle almost before either of the
+combatants had fully realized the other.
+
+The rider drew rein, yelling furiously; but his yells were about as
+effectual as the wail of an infant. Neither animal was so much as aware
+of his existence in those moments of delirious warfare. They were locked
+already in that silent, swaying grip which every fighting dog with any
+knowledge of the great game seeks to establish, to break which mere
+humans may put forth their utmost strength in vain.
+
+The struggle was a desperate and a bloody one, and it speedily became
+apparent to the rider that he would have to dismount if he intended to
+put an end to it.
+
+Fiercely he flung himself off his horse and threw the reins over the
+Vicarage gate-post. Then, riding-crop in hand, he approached the swaying
+fighting animals. It was like a ghastly wrestling-match. Both were on
+their feet, struggling to and fro, each with jaws hard gripped upon the
+other's neck, each silent save for his spasmodic efforts to breathe.
+
+"Stop it, damn you!" shouted the rider, slashing at them with the zeal of
+unrestrained fury. "Caesar, you infernal brute, stop it, will you? I'll
+kill you if you don't!"
+
+But Caesar was deaf to all threats and quite unconscious of the fact that
+his master and not his enemy was responsible for the flail-like strokes
+of the whirling lash. They shifted from beneath it instinctively, but
+they fought deliriously on.
+
+And at that the man with the whip completely lost his self-control. He
+set to work to thrash and thrash the fighting animals till one or other
+of them--or himself--should become exhausted.
+
+It developed into a horrible competition organized and conducted by the
+man's blind fury, and in what fashion it would have ended it would be
+hard to say. But, luckily for all three, there came at length an
+interruption. Someone--a woman--came swiftly out of the Vicarage garden
+carrying a bedroom jug. She advanced without a pause upon the seething,
+infuriated group.
+
+"It's no good beating them," she said, in a voice which, though somewhat
+hurried, was one of clear command. "Get out of the way, and be ready to
+catch your dog when they come apart!"
+
+The man glanced round for an instant, his face white with passion. "I'll
+kill the brutes!" he declared.
+
+"Indeed you won't," she returned promptly. "Stand away now or you will be
+drenched!"
+
+As she spoke she raised her jug above the struggling animals. Her face
+also shone white in the wintry dusk, but her actions denoted unwavering
+resolution.
+
+"Now!" she said; and, since he would not move, she flung the icy water
+without compunction over the dogs and him also.
+
+"Damnation!" he cried violently. But she broke in upon him. "Quick!
+Quick! Now's the time! Grab your dog! I'll catch Mike!"
+
+The urgency of the order compelled compliance. Almost in spite of himself
+he stooped to obey. And so it came to pass that five seconds later,
+Caesar was being mercilessly thrashed by his enraged master, while the
+real culprit was being dragged, cursing breathlessly, from the scene.
+
+It was a brutal thrashing and wholly undeserved. Caesar, awaking to the
+horror of it, howled his anguish; but no amount of protest on his part
+made the smallest impression upon the wielder of the whip. It continued
+to descend upon his writhing body with crashing force till he rolled upon
+the ground in agony.
+
+Even then the punishment would not have ceased, but for a second
+interruption. It was the woman from the Vicarage garden again; but she
+burst upon the scene this time with something of the effect of an
+avalanche. She literally whirled between the man and his victim. She
+caught his upraised arm.
+
+"Oh, you brute!" she cried. "You brute!"
+
+He stiffened in her hold. They stood face to face. Caesar crept whining
+and shivering to the side of the road.
+
+Slowly the man's arm fell to his side, still caught in that quivering
+grasp. He spoke in a voice that struggled boyishly between resentment and
+shame. "The dog's my own."
+
+Her hold relaxed. "Even a dog has his rights," she said. "Give me that
+whip, please!"
+
+He looked at her oddly in the growing darkness. She was trembling as she
+stood, but she held her ground.
+
+"Please!" she repeated with resolution.
+
+With an abrupt movement he put the weapon into her hand. "Are you going
+to give me a taste?" he asked.
+
+She uttered a queer little gasping laugh. "No. I--I'm not that sort.
+But--it's horrible to see a man lose control of himself. And to thrash a
+dog--like that!"
+
+She turned sharply from him and went to the Dalmatian who crouched
+quaking on the path. He wagged an ingratiating tail at her approach. It
+was evident that in her hand the whip had no terrors for him. He crept
+fawning to her feet.
+
+She stooped over him, fondling his head. "Oh, poor boy! Poor boy!" she
+said.
+
+The dog's master came and stood beside her. "He'll be all right," he
+said, in a tone of half-surly apology.
+
+"I'm afraid Mike has bitten him," she said. "See!" displaying a long,
+dark streak on Caesar's neck.
+
+"He'll be all right," repeated Caesar's master. "I hope your dog is none
+the worse."
+
+"No, I don't think so," she said. "But don't you think we ought to
+bathe this?"
+
+"I'll take him home," he said. "They'll see to him at the stables."
+
+She stood up, a slim, erect figure, the whip still firmly grasped in her
+hand. "You won't thrash him any more, will you?" she said.
+
+He gave a short laugh. "No, you have cooled me down quite effectually.
+I'm much obliged to you for interfering. And I'm sorry I used language,
+but as the circumstances were exceptional, I hope you will make
+allowances."
+
+His tone was boyish still, but all the resentment had gone out of it.
+There was a touch of arrogance in his bearing which was obviously natural
+to him, but his apology was none the less sincere.
+
+The slim figure on the path made a slight movement of dismay. "But you
+must be drenched to the skin!" she said. "I was forgetting. Won't you
+come in and get dry?"
+
+He hunched his shoulders expressively. "No, thanks. It was my own fault,
+as you kindly omit to mention. I must be getting back to the Abbey. My
+grandfather is expecting me. He fidgets if I'm late."
+
+He raised a hand to his cap, and would have turned away, but she made a
+swift gesture of surprise, which arrested him. "Oh, you are young Mr.
+Evesham!--I beg your pardon--you are Mr. Evesham! I thought I must have
+seen you before!"
+
+He stopped with a laugh. "I am commonly called 'Master Piers' in this
+neighbourhood. They won't let me grow up. Rather a shame, what? I'm
+nearly twenty-five, and the head-keeper still refers to me in private as
+'that dratted boy.'"
+
+She laughed for the first time. Possibly he had angled for that laugh.
+"Yes, it is a shame!" she agreed. "But then Sir Beverley is rather old,
+isn't he? No doubt it's the comparison that does it."
+
+"He isn't old," said Piers Evesham in sharp contradiction. "He's only
+seventy-four. That's not old for an Evesham. He'll go for another twenty
+years. There's a saying in our family that if we don't die violently, we
+never die at all." He pulled himself up abruptly. "I've given you my name
+and history. Won't you tell me yours?"
+
+She hesitated momentarily. "I am only the mother's help at the Vicarage,"
+she said then.
+
+"By Jove! I don't envy you." He looked at her with frank interest
+notwithstanding. "I suppose you do it for a living," he remarked.
+"Personally, I'd sooner sweep a crossing than live in the same house with
+that mouthing parson."
+
+"Hush!" she said, but her lips smiled as she said it, a small smile that
+would not be denied. "I must go in now. Here you are!" She gave him back
+his whip. "Good-bye! Get home quick--and change!"
+
+He turned half-reluctantly; then paused. "You might tell me your name
+anyway," he said.
+
+She had begun to move away, light-footed, swift as a bird. She
+also paused.
+
+"My name is Denys," she said.
+
+He put his hand to his cap again. "Miss Denys?"
+
+"No. Mrs. Denys. Good-bye!"
+
+She was gone. He heard the light feet running up the wet gravel drive and
+then the quick opening of a door. It closed again immediately, with
+decision, and he stood alone in the wintry dusk.
+
+Caesar crept to him and grovelled abjectly in the mud. The young man
+stood motionless, staring at the Vicarage gates, a slight frown between
+his brows. He was not tall, but he had the free pose of an athlete and
+the bearing of a prince.
+
+Suddenly he glanced down at his cringing companion and broke into a
+laugh. "Get up, Caesar, you fool! And think yourself lucky that you've
+got any sound bones left! You'd have been reduced to a jelly by this time
+if I'd had my way."
+
+He bent with careless good-nature, and patted the miscreant; then turned
+towards his horse.
+
+"Poor old Pompey! A shame to keep you standing! All that brute's fault."
+He swung himself into the saddle. "By Jove, though, she's got some
+pluck!" he said. "I like a woman with pluck!"
+
+He touched his animal with the spur, and in a moment they were speeding
+through the gathering dark at a brisk canter. Pompey was as anxious to
+get home as was his master, and he needed no second urging. He scarcely
+waited to get within the gates of the Park before he gathered himself
+together and went like the wind. His rider lay forward in the saddle
+and yelled encouragement like a wild Indian. Caesar raced behind them
+like a hare.
+
+The mad trio went like a flash past old Marshall the head-keeper who
+stood gun on shoulder at the gate of his lodge and looked after them with
+stern disapproval.
+
+"Drat the boy! What's he want to ride hell-for-leather like that for?" he
+grumbled. "He'll go and kill himself one of these days as his father did
+before him."
+
+It was just twenty-five years since Piers' father had been carried dead
+into Marshall's cottage, and Marshall had stumped up the long avenue to
+bear the news to Sir Beverley. Piers was about the same age now as that
+other Piers had been, and Marshall had no mind to take part in a similar
+tragedy. It had been a bitter task, that of telling Sir Beverley that his
+only son was dead; but to have borne him ill tidings of his grandson
+would have been infinitely harder. For Sir Beverley had never loved his
+son through the whole of his brief, tempestuous life; but his grandson
+was the very core of his existence, as everyone knew, despite his
+strenuous efforts to disguise the fact.
+
+No, emphatically Marshall had not the faintest desire to have to inform
+the old man that harm had befallen Master Piers, and his frown deepened
+as he trudged up his little garden and heard the yelling voice and
+galloping hoofs grow faint in the distance.
+
+"The boy is madder even than his father was," he muttered darkly. "Bad
+stock! Bad stock!"
+
+He shook his head over the words, and went within. He was the only man
+left on the estate who could remember the beautiful young Italian bride
+whom Sir Beverley had once upon a time brought to reign there. It had
+been a short, short reign, and no one spoke of it now,--least of all the
+old, bent man who ruled like a feudal lord at Rodding Abbey, and of whom
+even the redoubtable Marshall himself stood in awe.
+
+But Marshall remembered her well, and it was upon that dazzling memory
+that his thoughts dwelt when he gave utterance to his mysterious verdict.
+For was not Master Piers the living image of her? Had he not the same
+imperial bearing and regal turn of the head? Did not the Evesham blood
+run the hotter in his veins for that passionate Southern strain that
+mingled with it?
+
+Marshall sometimes wondered how Sir Beverley with his harsh intolerance
+brooked the living likeness of the boy to the woman in whose bitter
+memory he hated all women. It was scarcely possible that he blinded
+himself to it. It was too vividly apparent for that. "A perpetual
+eyesore," Marshall termed it in private. But then there was no accounting
+for the ways of folk in high places. Marshall did not pretend to
+understand them. He was, in his own grumpy fashion, sincerely attached to
+his master, and he never presumed to criticize his doings. He only
+wondered at them.
+
+As for Master Piers, he had been an unmitigated nuisance to him
+personally ever since he had learned to walk alone. Marshall had always
+disapproved of him, and he hated Victor, the French valet, who had
+brought him up from his cradle. Yet deep in his surly old heart there
+lurked a certain grudging affection for him notwithstanding. The boy
+had a winning way with him, and but for his hatred of Victor, who was
+soft and womanish, but extremely tenacious, Marshall would have liked
+to have had a hand in his upbringing. As it was, he could only look on
+from afar and condemn the vagaries of "that dratted boy," prophesying
+disaster whenever he saw him and hoping that Sir Beverley might not
+live to see it. Certainly it seemed as if Piers bore a charmed life,
+for, like his father before him, he risked it practically every day.
+With sublime self-confidence, he laughed at caution, ever choosing the
+shortest cut, whatever it might entail; and it was remarkably seldom
+that he came to grief.
+
+As he clattered into the stable-yard on that dark November evening,
+his face was sparkling with excitement as though he had drunk strong
+wine. The animal he rode was covered with foam, and danced a springy
+war-dance on the stones. Caesar trotted in behind them with tail erect
+and a large smile of satisfaction on his spotty face despite the gory
+streak upon his neck.
+
+"Confound it! I'm late!" said Piers, throwing his leg over his horse's
+neck. "It's all that brute's fault. Look at him grinning! Better wash him
+one of you! He can't come in in that state." He slipped to the ground and
+stamped his sodden feet. "I'm not much better off myself. What a beastly
+night, to be sure!"
+
+"Yes, you're wet, sir!" remarked the groom at Pompey's head. "Had a
+tumble, sir?"
+
+"No. Had a jug of water thrown over me," laughed Piers. "Caesar will tell
+you all about it. He's been sniggering all the way home." He snapped his
+fingers in the dog's complacent face. "By Jove!" he said to him, "I
+couldn't grin like that if I'd had the thrashing you've had. And I
+couldn't kiss the hand that did it either. You're a gentleman, Caesar,
+and I humbly apologize. Look after him, Phipps! He's been a bit mauled.
+Good-night! Good-night, Pompey lad! You've carried me well." He patted
+the horse's foam-flecked neck, and turned away.
+
+As he left the stable-yard, he was whistling light-heartedly, and Phipps
+glanced at a colleague with a slight flicker of one eyelid.
+
+"Wonder who chucked that jug of water!" he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CONCERNING FOOLS
+
+
+In the huge, oak-panelled hall of the Abbey, Sir Beverley Evesham
+sat alone.
+
+A splendid fire of logs blazed before him on the open hearth, and the
+light from a great chandelier beat mercilessly down upon him. His hair
+was thick still and silvery white. He had the shoulders of a strong man,
+albeit they were slightly bowed. His face, clean-shaven, aristocratic,
+was the colour of old ivory. The thin lips were quite bloodless. They had
+a downward, bitter curve, as though they often sneered at life. The eyes
+were keen as a bird's, stone-grey under overhanging black brows.
+
+He held a newspaper in one bony hand, but he was not apparently reading,
+for his eyes were fixed. The shining suits of armour standing like
+sentinels on each side of the fireplace were not more rigid than he.
+
+There came a slight sound from the other end of the hall, and instantly
+and very sharply Sir Beverley turned his head.
+
+"Piers!"
+
+Cheerily Piers' voice made answer. He shut the door behind him and came
+forward as he spoke. "Here I am, sir! I'm sorry I'm late. You shouldn't
+have waited. You never ought to wait. I'm never in at the right time."
+
+"Confound you, why aren't you then?" burst forth Sir Beverley. "It's easy
+to say you're sorry, isn't it?"
+
+"Not always," said Piers.
+
+He came to the old man, bent down over him, slid a boyish arm around
+the bent shoulders. "Don't be waxy!" he coaxed. "I couldn't help it
+this time."
+
+"Get away, do!" said Sir Beverley, jerking himself irritably from him. "I
+detest being pawed about, as you very well know. In Heaven's name, have
+your tea, if you want it! I shan't touch any. It's past my time."
+
+"Oh, rot!" said Piers. "If you don't, I shan't."
+
+"Yes, you will." Sir Beverley pointed an imperious hand towards a table
+on the other side of the fire. "Go and get it and don't be a fool!"
+
+"I'm not a fool," said Piers.
+
+"Yes, you are--a damn fool!" Sir Beverley returned to his newspaper with
+the words. "And you'll never be anything else!" he growled into the
+silence that succeeded them.
+
+Piers clattered the tea-things and said nothing. There was no resentment
+visible upon his sensitive, olive face, however. He looked perfectly
+contented. He turned round after a few seconds with a cup of steaming tea
+in his hand. He crossed the hearth and set it on the table at Sir
+Beverley's elbow.
+
+"That's just as you like it, sir," he urged. "Have it--just to
+please me!"
+
+"Take it away!" said Sir Beverley, without raising his eyes.
+
+"It's only ten minutes late after all," said Piers, with all meekness. "I
+wish you hadn't waited, though it was jolly decent of you. You weren't
+anxious of course? You know I always turn up some time."
+
+"Anxious!" echoed Sir Beverley. "About a cub like you! You flatter
+yourself, my good Piers."
+
+Piers laughed a little and stooped over the blaze. Sir Beverley read on
+for a few moments, then very suddenly and not without violence crumpled
+his paper and flung it on the ground.
+
+"Of all the infernal, ridiculous twaddle!" he exclaimed. "Now what the
+devil have you done to yourself? Been taking a water-jump?"
+
+Piers turned round. "No, sir. It's nothing. I shouldn't have come in in
+this state, only it was late, and I thought I'd better report myself."
+
+"Nothing!" repeated Sir Beverley. "Why, you're drenched to the skin! Go
+and change! Go and change! Don't stop to argue! Do you hear me, sir? Go
+and change!"
+
+He shouted the last words, and Piers flung round on his heel with a hint
+of impatience.
+
+"And behave yourself!" Sir Beverley threw after him. "If you think I'll
+stand any impertinence from you, you were never more mistaken in your
+life. Be off with you, you cheeky young hound! Don't let me see you again
+till you're fit to be seen!"
+
+Piers departed without a backward look. His lips were slightly compressed
+as he went up the stairs, but before he reached his own room they were
+softly whistling.
+
+Victor, the valet, who was busily employed in laying out his evening
+clothes, received him with hands upraised in horror.
+
+_"Ah, mais, Monsieur Pierre_, how you are wet!"
+
+"Yes, I want a bath," said Piers. "Get it quick! I must be down again in
+ten minutes. So scurry, Victor, my lad!"
+
+Victor was a cheery little rotundity of five-and-fifty. He had had the
+care of Piers ever since the first fortnight of that young man's
+existence, and he worshipped him with a whole-hearted devotion that was
+in its way sublime. In his eyes Piers could do no wrong. He was in fact
+dearer to him than his own flesh and blood.
+
+He prepared the bath with deft celerity, and hastened back to assist in
+removing his young master's boots. He exclaimed dramatically upon their
+soaked condition, but Piers was in too great a hurry to give any details
+regarding the cause of his plight. He whirled into the bathroom at
+express speed, and was out again almost before Victor had had time to
+collect his drenched garments.
+
+Ten minutes after his departure he returned to the hall, the gay
+whistle still on his lips, and trod a careless measure to its tune as
+he advanced.
+
+Sir Beverley got up stiffly from his knees on the hearth-rug and turned a
+scowling face. "Well, are you decent now?"
+
+"Quite," said Piers. He smiled as he said it, a boyish disarming smile.
+"Have you had your tea, sir? Oh, I say what a brick you are! I didn't
+expect that."
+
+His eyes, travelling downwards, had caught sight of a cup pushed close to
+the blaze, and a plate of crumpets beside it.
+
+"Or deserve it," said Sir Beverley grimly.
+
+Piers turned impulsively and took him by the shoulders. "You're a dear
+old chap!" he said. "Thanks awfully!"
+
+Against its will the hard old mouth relaxed. "There, boy, there! What an
+infant you are! Sit down and have it for goodness' sake! It'll be
+dinner-time before you've done."
+
+"You've had yours?" said Piers.
+
+"Oh, yes--yes!" Irritation made itself heard again in Sir Beverley's
+voice; he freed himself from his grandson's hold, though not urgently.
+"I'm not so keen on your precious tea," he said, seating himself again.
+"It's only young milksops like you that have made it fashionable. When I
+was young--"
+
+"Hullo!" broke in Piers. He had picked up the cup of tea and was sniffing
+it suspiciously. "You've been doctoring this!" he said.
+
+"You drink it!" ordered Sir Beverley peremptorily. "I'm not going to
+have you laid up with rheumatic fever if I know it. Drink it, Piers! Do
+you hear?"
+
+Piers looked for a moment as if he were on the verge of rebellion, then
+abruptly he raised the cup to his lips and drained it. He set it down
+with a shudder of distaste.
+
+"You might have let me have it separately," he remarked. "Tea and brandy
+don't blend well. I shall sleep like a hog after this. Besides, I
+shouldn't have had rheumatic fever. It's not my way. Anything in the
+paper to-night?"
+
+"Yes," said Sir Beverley disgustedly. "There's that prize-fight
+business."
+
+"What's that?" Piers looked up with quick interest.
+
+"Surely you saw it!" returned Sir Beverley. "That fellow
+Adderley--killed his man in a wrestling-match. A good many people said
+it was done by a foul."
+
+"Adderley!" repeated Piers. "I know him. He gave me some quite useful
+tips once. What happened? It's the first I've heard of it."
+
+"Well, he's a murderer," said Sir Beverley. "And he deserves to be
+hanged. He killed his man,--whether by a foul or not I can't say; but
+anyway he meant to kill him. It's obvious on the face of it. But they
+chose to bring it in manslaughter, and he's only got five years; while
+some brainless fool must needs write an article a column and a half long
+to protest against the disgraceful practice of permitting wrestling or
+boxing matches, which are a survival of the Dark Ages and a perpetual
+menace to our civilization! A survival of your grandmother! A nice set of
+nincompoops the race will develop into if such fools as that get their
+way! We're soft enough as it is, Heaven knows. Why couldn't they hang the
+scoundrel as he deserved? That's the surest way of putting an end to
+savagery. But to stop the sport altogether! It would be tomfoolery!"
+
+Piers picked up the paper from the floor and smoothed it out. He
+proceeded to study it with drawn brows, and Sir Beverley sat and
+watched him with that in his stone-grey eyes which no one was ever
+allowed to see.
+
+"Eat your crumpets, boy!" he said at last.
+
+"What?" Piers glanced up momentarily. "Oh, all right, sir, in a minute.
+This is rather an interesting case, what? You see, Adderley was a
+friend of mine."
+
+"When did you meet him?" demanded Sir Beverley.
+
+"I knew him in my school-days. He spent a whole term in the
+neighbourhood. It was just before I left for my year of travel. I got to
+know him rather well. He gave me several hints on wrestling."
+
+"Did he teach you how to break your opponent's neck?" asked Sir
+Beverley drily.
+
+Piers made a slight, scarcely perceptible movement of one hand. It
+clenched upon the paper he held. "They were--worth knowing," he said,
+with his eyes upon the sheet. "But I should have thought he was too old a
+hand himself to get into trouble."
+
+Sir Beverley grunted. Piers read on. At the end of a lengthy pause he
+laid the paper aside. "I'm beastly rude," he remarked. "Have a crumpet!"
+
+"Eat 'em yourself!" said Sir Beverley. "I hate 'em!"
+
+Piers picked up the plate and began to eat. He stared at the blaze as he
+did so, obviously lost in thought.
+
+"Don't dream!" said Sir Beverley sharply.
+
+He turned his eyes upon his grandfather's face--those soft Italian eyes
+of his so suggestive of hidden fire. "I wasn't--dreaming," he said
+slowly. "I wonder why you think Adderley ought to be hanged."
+
+"Because he's a murderer," snapped Sir Beverley.
+
+"Yes; but--" said Piers, and became silent as though he were following
+out some train of thought.
+
+"Go on, boy! Finish!" commanded Sir Beverley. "I detest a sentence left
+in the middle."
+
+"I was only thinking," said Piers deliberately, "that hanging in my
+opinion is much the easier sentence of the two. I should ask to be hanged
+if I were Adderley."
+
+"Would you indeed?" Sir Beverley sounded supremely contemptuous.
+
+But Piers did not seem to notice. "Besides, there are so many
+murderers in the world," he said, "though it's only the few who get
+punished. I'm sorry for the few myself. Its damned bad luck, human
+nature being what it is."
+
+"You don't know what you're talking about," said Sir Beverley.
+
+"All right; let's talk about something else," said Piers. "Caesar had a
+glorious mill with that Irish terrier brute at the Vicarage this
+afternoon. I couldn't separate 'em, so I just joined in. We'd have been
+at it now if we had been left to our own devices." He broke into his
+sudden boyish laugh. "But a kind lady came out of the Vicarage garden and
+flung the contents of a bedroom jug over the three of us. Rather plucky
+of her, what? I'm afraid I wasn't over-complimentary at the moment, but
+I've had time since to appreciate her tact and presence of mind. I'm
+going over to thank her to-morrow."
+
+"Who was it?" growled Sir Beverley suspiciously. "Not that little white
+owl, Mrs. Lorimer?"
+
+"Mrs. Lorimer! Great Scott, no! She'd have squealed and run to the
+Reverend Stephen for protection. No, this was a woman, not an owl. Her
+name is Denys--Mrs. Denys she was careful to inform me. They've started a
+mother's help at the Vicarage. None too soon I should say. Who wouldn't
+be a mother's help in that establishment?"
+
+Sir Beverley uttered a dry laugh. "Daresay she knows how to feather her
+own nest. Most of 'em do."
+
+"She knows how to keep her head in an emergency, anyhow," remarked Piers.
+
+"Feline instinct," jeered Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers looked across with a laugh in his dark eyes. "And feline pluck,
+sir," he maintained.
+
+Sir Beverley scowled at him. He could never brook an argument. "Oh, get
+away, Piers!" he said. "You talk like a fool."
+
+Piers turned his whole attention to devouring crumpets, and there fell a
+lengthy silence. He rose finally to set down his empty plate and help
+himself to some more tea.
+
+"That stuff is poisonous by now," said Sir Beverley.
+
+"It won't poison me," said Piers.
+
+He drank it, and returned to the hearth-rug. "I suppose I may smoke?" he
+said, with a touch of restraint.
+
+Sir Beverley was lying back in his chair, gazing straight up at him.
+Suddenly he reached out a trembling hand.
+
+"You're a good boy, Piers," he said. "You may do any damn thing you
+like."
+
+Piers' eyes kindled in swift response. He gripped the extended
+hand. "You're a brick, sir!" he said. "Look here! Come along to
+the billiard-room and have a hundred up! It'll give you an
+appetite for dinner."
+
+He hoisted the old man out of his chair before he could begin to protest.
+They stood together before the great fire, and Sir Beverley straightened
+his stiff limbs. He was half a head taller than his grandson.
+
+"What a fellow it is!" he said half laughing. "Why can't you sit still
+and be quiet? Don't you want to read the paper? I've done with it."
+
+"So have I," said Piers. He swept it up with one hand as he spoke and
+tossed it recklessly on to the blaze. "Come along, sir! We haven't
+much time."
+
+"Now what did you do that for?" demanded Sir Beverley, pausing. "Do you
+want to set the house on fire? What did you do it for, Piers?"
+
+"Because I was a fool," said Piers with sudden, curious vehemence. "A
+damn fool sir, if you want to know. But it's done now. Let it burn!"
+
+The paper flared fiercely and crumbled to ashes. Sir Beverley suffered
+himself to be drawn away.
+
+"You're a queer fellow, Piers," he said. "But, taking 'em altogether, I
+should say there are a good many bigger fools in the world than you."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Piers.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+DISCIPLINE
+
+
+"Mrs. Denys, may I come in?" Jeanie Lorimer's small, delicate face peeped
+round the door. "I've brought my French exercise to do," she said
+half-apologetically. "I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind."
+
+"Of course come in, dear child! I like to have you." The mother's help
+paused in her rapid stitching to look up with a smile at the pretty,
+brown-haired child. "Come close to the light!" she said. "I hope it isn't
+a very long one; is it?"
+
+"It is--rather," Jeanie sighed a sharp, involuntary sigh. "I ought to
+have done it sooner, but I was busy with the little ones. Is that
+Gracie's frock you're mending? What an awful tear!" She came and stood by
+Mrs. Denys's side, speaking in a low, rather monotonous voice. A heavy
+strand of her hair fell over the work as she bent to look; she tossed it
+back with another sigh. "Gracie is such a tomboy," she said. "It's a
+pity, isn't it?"
+
+"My dear, you're tired," said Mrs. Denys gently. She put a motherly arm
+about the slim body that leaned against her, looking up into the pale
+young face with eyes of kindly criticism.
+
+"A little tired," said Jeanie.
+
+"I shouldn't do that exercise to-night if I were you," said Mrs. Denys.
+"You will find it easier in the morning. Lie down on the sofa here and
+have a little rest till supper time!"
+
+"Oh no, I mustn't," said Jeanie. "Father will never let any of us go to
+bed till the day's work is done."
+
+"But surely, when you're really tired--" began Mrs. Denys.
+
+But Jeanie shook her head. "No; thank you very much, I must do it. Olive
+did hers long ago."
+
+"Where is Olive?" asked Mrs. Denys.
+
+"She's reading a story-book downstairs. We may always read when we've
+finished our lessons." Again came that short, unconscious sigh. Jeanie
+went to the table and sat down. "Mother is rather upset to-night," she
+said, as she turned the leaves of her book. "Ronald and Julian have been
+smoking, and she is so afraid that Father will find out. I hope he
+won't--for her sake. But if they don't eat any supper, he is sure to
+notice. He flogged Julian two nights running the last time because he
+told a lie about it."
+
+A quick remark rose to her listener's lips, but it was suppressed
+unuttered. Mrs. Denys began to stitch very rapidly with her face bent
+over her work. It was a very charming face, with level grey eyes, wide
+apart, and a mouth of great sweetness. There was a fugitive dimple on one
+side of it that gave her a girlish appearance when she smiled. But she
+was not a girl. There was about her an air of quiet confidence as of one
+who knew something of the world and its ways. She was young still, and it
+was yet in her to be ardent; but she had none of the giddy restlessness
+of youth. Avery Denys was a woman who had left her girlhood wholly behind
+her. Her enthusiasms and her impulses were kindled at a steadier flame
+than the flickering torch of youth. There was no romance left in her
+life, but yet was she without bitterness. She had known suffering and
+faced it unblanching. The only mark it had left upon her was that air of
+womanly knowledge that clothed her like a garment even in her lightest
+moods. Of a quick understanding and yet quicker sympathy, she had
+learned to hold her emotions in check, and the natural gaiety of her hid
+much that was too sacred to be carelessly displayed. She had a ready
+sense of humour that had buoyed her up through many a storm, and the
+brave heart behind it never flinched from disaster. As her father had
+said of her in the long-ago days of happiness and prosperity, she took
+her hedges straight.
+
+For several minutes after Jeanie's weary little confidence, she worked
+in silence; then suddenly, with needle poised, she looked across at
+the child.
+
+Jeanie's head was bent over her exercise-book. Her hair lay in a heavy
+mass all about her shoulders. There was a worried frown between her
+brows. Slowly her hand travelled across the page, paused, wrote a word or
+two, paused again.
+
+Suddenly from the room above them there came the shrill shriek of a
+violin. It wailed itself into silence, and then broke forth again in a
+series of long drawn-out whines. Jeanie sighed.
+
+Avery laid down her work with quiet decision, and went to her side. "What
+is worrying you, dear?" she asked gently. "I'm not a great French
+scholar, but I think I may be able to help."
+
+"Thank you," said Jeanie, in her voice of tired courtesy. "You mustn't
+help me. No one must."
+
+"I can find the words you don't know in the dictionary," said Avery.
+
+"No, thank you," said Jeanie. "Father doesn't like us to have help of
+any kind."
+
+There were deep shadows about the eyes she raised to Avery's face, but
+they smiled quite bravely, with all unconscious wistfulness.
+
+Avery laid a tender hand upon the brown head and drew it to rest against
+her. "Poor little thing!" she said compassionately.
+
+"But I'm not little really, you know," said Jeanie, closing her eyes for
+a few stolen moments. "I'm thirteen in March. And they're all younger
+than me except Ronnie and Julian."
+
+Avery bent with a swift, maternal movement and kissed the blue-veined
+forehead. Jeanie opened her eyes in slight surprise. Quite plainly she
+was not accustomed to sudden caresses.
+
+"I'm glad we've got you, Mrs. Denys," she said, with her quiet air of
+childish dignity. "You are a great help to us."
+
+She turned back to her French exercise with the words, and Avery, after a
+moment's thought, turned to the door. She heard again the child's sigh of
+weariness as she closed it behind her.
+
+The wails of the violin were very audible in the passage outside. She
+shivered at the atrocious sounds. From a further distance there came the
+screams of an indignant baby and the strident shouts of two small boys
+who were racing to and fro in an uncarpeted room at the top of the house.
+But after that one shiver Avery Denys had no further attention to bestow
+upon any of these things. She went with her quick, light tread down to
+the square hall which gave a suggestion of comfort to the Vicarage which
+not one of its rooms endorsed.
+
+Without an instant's hesitation she knocked upon the first door she came
+to. A voice within gave her permission to enter, and she did so.
+
+The Reverend Stephen Lorimer turned from his writing-table with a face of
+dignified severity to receive her, but at sight of her his expression
+changed somewhat.
+
+"Ah, Mrs. Denys! You, is it? Pray come in!" he said urbanely. "Is there
+any way in which I can be of service to you?"
+
+His eyes were dark and very small, so small that they nearly disappeared
+when he smiled. But for this slight defect, Mr. Lorimer would have been a
+handsome man. He rose as Avery approached and placed a chair for her with
+elaborate courtesy.
+
+"Thank you," she said. "I only ran in for a moment--just to tell you
+that little Jeanie is so tired to-night. She has had no time for her
+lessons all the afternoon because she has been helping with the little
+ones in the nursery. She insists upon doing her French exercise, but I am
+sure you would not wish her to do it if you knew how worn out the child
+is. May I tell her to leave it for to-night?"
+
+She spoke quickly and very earnestly, with clear eyes raised to Mr.
+Lorimer's face. She watched his smile fade and his eyes reappear as she
+made her appeal.
+
+He did not reply to it for some seconds, and a sharp doubt went through
+her. She raised her brows in mute interrogation.
+
+"Yes, my dear Mrs. Denys," he said, in response to her unspoken query, "I
+see that you appreciate the fact that there are at least two points of
+view to every proposition. You tell me that Jeanie was occupied in the
+nursery during that period of the day which should legitimately have been
+set aside for the assimilation of learning. I presume her presence there
+was voluntary?"
+
+"Oh, quite." There was a hint of sharpness in Avery's rejoinder. "She
+went out of the goodness of her heart because Nurse had been up
+practically all night with Baby and needed a rest and I was obliged to go
+into Wardenhurst for Mrs. Lorimer. So Jeanie took charge of Bertie and
+David, and Gracie and Pat went with me."
+
+Mr. Lorimer waved a protesting hand. "Pray spare yourself and me all
+these details, Mrs. Denys! I am glad to know that Jeanne has been useful
+to you, but at the same time she has no right to offer duty upon the
+altar of kindness. You will acknowledge that to obey is better than
+sacrifice. As a matter of principle, I fear I cannot remit any of her
+task, and I trust that on the next occasion she will remember to set
+duty first."
+
+A hot flush had risen in Avery's face and her eyes sparkled, but she
+restrained herself. There was no indignation in her voice as she said:
+"Mr. Lorimer, believe me, that child will never shirk her duty. She is
+far too conscientious. It is really for the sake of her health that I
+came to beg you to let her off that French exercise. I am sure she is not
+strong. Perhaps I did wrong to let her be in the nursery this afternoon,
+though I scarcely know how else we could have managed. But that is my
+fault, not hers. I take full responsibility for that."
+
+Mr. Lorimer began to smile again. "That is very generous of you," he
+said. "But, as a matter of justice, I doubt if the whole burden of it
+should fall to your share. You presumably were unaware that Jeanne's
+afternoon should have been devoted to her studies. She cannot plead a
+like ignorance. Therefore, while dismissing the petition, I hold you
+absolved from any blame in the matter. Pray do not distress yourself
+any further!"
+
+"I certainly thought it was a half-holiday," Avery admitted. "But I am
+distressed--very greatly distressed--on the child's account. She is not
+fit for work to-night."
+
+Mr. Lorimer made an airy gesture expressive of semi-humorous regret.
+"Discipline, my dear Mrs. Denys, must be maintained at all costs--even
+among the members of your charming sex. As a matter of fact, I am waiting
+to administer punishment to one of my sons at the present moment for an
+act of disobedience."
+
+He glanced towards the writing-table on which lay a cane, and again the
+quick blood mounted in Avery's face.
+
+"Oh, don't you think you are a little hard on your children?" she said;
+and then impulsively, "No; forgive me! I ought not to put it like that.
+But do you find it answers to be so strict? Does it make them any more
+obedient?"
+
+He raised his shoulders slightly; his eyes gleamed momentarily ere they
+vanished into his smile. He shook his head at her with tolerant irony. "I
+fear your heart runs away with you, Mrs. Denys, and I must not suffer
+myself to listen to you. I have my duty--my very distinct duty--to
+perform, and I must not shirk it. As to the results, they are in other
+Hands than mine."
+
+There came a low knock at the door as he finished speaking, and he turned
+at once to answer it.
+
+"Come in!"
+
+The door opened, and a very small, very nervous boy crept round it. A
+quick exclamation rose to Avery's lips before she could suppress it. Mr.
+Lorimer looked at her interrogatively.
+
+"I was only surprised to see Pat," she explained. "He has been with
+me all the afternoon. I hardly thought he could have had time to get
+into trouble."
+
+"Come here, Patrick!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Patrick advanced. He looked neither at Avery nor his father, but kept his
+eyes rigidly downcast. His freckled face had a half-frightened,
+half-sullen expression. He halted before Mr. Lorimer who took him by the
+shoulder, and turned him round towards Avery.
+
+"Tell Mrs. Denys what you did!" he said.
+
+Pat shot a single glance upwards, and made laconic reply. "I undid Mike."
+
+"Oh, dear!" exclaimed Avery in great distress. "I'm afraid that was
+my fault."
+
+"Yours, Mrs. Denys?" Mr. Lorimer's eyes became visible as two brilliant
+pin-points turned searchingly upon her face.
+
+"Yes, mine!" she reiterated. "Mike was whining on his chain, and I said I
+thought it was cruel to keep a dog tied up. I suppose I ought to have
+kept my thoughts to myself," she said with a pathetic little smile. "Do
+please forgive us both this time!"
+
+Mr. Lorimer ignored the appeal. "And do you know what happened in
+consequence of his being liberated?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, I do." Ruefully she made answer. "He fought Mr. Evesham's dog and I
+helped to pull him off."
+
+"You, Mrs. Denys!"
+
+"Yes, I." She nodded. "There wasn't much damage done, anyhow to Mike. I
+am very, very sorry, Mr. Lorimer. But really Pat is not to blame for
+this. Won't you--please--"
+
+She stopped, for very decidedly Mr. Lorimer interrupted her. "I am afraid
+I cannot agree with you, Mrs. Denys. You may have spoken unadvisedly, but
+Patrick was aware that in releasing the dog he was acting in direct
+opposition to my orders. Therefore he must bear his own punishment. I
+must beg that for the future you will endeavour to be a little more
+discreet in your observations. Patrick, open the door for Mrs. Denys!"
+
+It was a definite dismissal--perhaps the most definite that Avery had
+ever had in her life. A fury of resentment possessed her, but feeling her
+self-control to be tottering, she dared not give it vent. She turned in
+quivering silence and departed.
+
+As she went out of the room, she perceived that Pat had begun to cry.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MOTHER'S HELP
+
+
+"It's always the same," moaned Mrs. Lorimer. "My poor children! They're
+never out of trouble." Avery stood still. She had fled to the
+drawing-room to recover herself, only to find the lady of the house lying
+in tears upon the sofa there. Mrs. Lorimer was very small and pathetic.
+She had lost all her health long before in the bearing and nurturing of
+her children. Once upon a time she must have possessed the delicate
+prettiness that characterized her eldest daughter Jeanie, but it had
+faded long since. She was worn out now, a tired, drab little woman, with
+no strength left to stand against adversity. The only consolation in her
+life was her love for her husband. Him she worshipped, not wholly
+blindly, but with a devotion that never faltered. A kind word from him
+was capable of exalting her to a state of rapture that was only
+out-matched by the despair engendered by his displeasure. There was so
+much of sorrow mingled with her love for her children that they could
+scarcely have been regarded as a joy. In fact Avery often thought to
+herself how much happier she would have been without them.
+
+"Do sit down, Mrs. Denys!" she begged nervously, as Avery remained
+motionless in the middle of the room. "Stay with me for a little, won't
+you? I can never bear to be alone when any of the children are being
+punished. I sometimes think Pat is the worst of all. He is so highly
+strung, and he loses his head. And Stephen doesn't quite understand
+him, and he is so terribly severe when they rebel. And did you know
+that Ronald and Julian had been smoking again on the way back from
+school? They look so dreadfully ill, both of them. I know their father
+will find out."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer's whispered words went into soft weeping. She hid her face
+in the cushion.
+
+A curious little spasm went through Avery, and for a few mad seconds she
+wanted to burst into heartless laughter. She conquered the impulse with a
+desperate effort though it left her feeling slightly hysterical.
+
+She moved across to the forlorn little woman and stooped over her.
+
+"Don't cry, dear Mrs. Lorimer!" she urged. "It doesn't do any
+good. Perhaps Ronald and Julian are better by now. Shall we go
+upstairs and see?"
+
+The principle was a wrong one and she knew it, but for the life of her
+she could not have resisted the temptation at that moment. She had an
+unholy desire to get the better of the Reverend Stephen which would not
+be denied.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer checked her tears. "You're very kind," she murmured shakily.
+
+She dried her eyes and sat up. "Do you think it would be wrong to give
+them a spoonful of brandy?" she asked wistfully.
+
+But Avery's principles were proof against this at least. "Yes, I do," she
+said. "But we can manage quite well without it. Let us go, shall we, and
+see what can be done?"
+
+"I'm afraid I'm very wicked," sighed Mrs. Lorimer. "I'm very thankful to
+have you with us, dear. I don't know what I should do without you."
+
+Avery's pretty mouth took an unfamiliar curve of grimness for a moment,
+but she banished it at once. She slipped a sustaining hand through Mrs.
+Lorimer's arm.
+
+"Thank you for saying so, though, you know, I've only been with you a
+fortnight, and I don't feel that I have done very much to deserve such
+high praise."
+
+"I don't think time has much to do with friendship," said Mrs. Lorimer,
+looking at her with genuine affection in her faded blue eyes. "Do you
+know I became engaged to my husband before I had known him a fortnight?"
+
+But this was a subject upon which Avery found it difficult to express any
+sympathy, and she gently changed it. "You are looking very tired. Don't
+you think you could lie down for a little in your bedroom before supper?"
+
+"I must see the poor boys first," protested Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"Yes, of course. We will go straight up, shall we?"
+
+She led her to the door with the words, and they went out together into
+the hall. As they emerged, a sudden burst of stormy crying came from the
+study. Pat was literally howling at the top of his voice.
+
+His mother stopped and wrung her hands. "Oh, what is to be done? He
+always cries like that. He used to as a baby--the only one of them who
+did. Mrs. Denys, what shall I do? I don't think I can bear it."
+
+Avery drew her on towards the stairs. "My dear, come away!" she said
+practically. "You can't do anything. Interference will only make matters
+worse. Let us go right up to the boys' room! Pat is sure to come up
+directly."
+
+They went to the boys' room. It was a large attic in which the three
+elder boys slept. Ronald and Julian, aged fifteen and fourteen
+respectively, were both lying prostrate on their beds.
+
+Julian uttered a forced laugh at the sight of his mother's face. "My dear
+Mater, for Heaven's sake don't come fussing round here! We've been
+smoking some filthy cigars--little beastly Brown dared us to--and there's
+been the devil to pay. I can't get up. My tummy won't let me."
+
+"Oh, Julian, why do you do it?" said Mrs. Lorimer, in great distress.
+"You know what your father said the last time."
+
+She bent over him. Julian was her favourite of them all. But he turned
+his face sharply to avoid her kiss.
+
+"Don't, Mater! I don't feel up to it. I can't jaw either. I believe those
+dashed cigars were poisoned. Hullo, Ronald, are you quieting down yet?"
+
+"Shut up!" growled Ronald.
+
+His brother laughed again sardonically. "Stick to it, my hearty! There's
+a swishing in store for us. The mater always gives the show away."
+
+"Julian!" It was Avery's voice; she spoke with quick decision. "You've
+got exactly an hour--you and Ronald--to pull yourselves together. Don't
+lie here any longer! Get up and go out! Go for a hard walk! No, of course
+you don't feel like it. But it will do you good. You want to get that
+horrible stuff out of your lungs. Quick! Go now--while you can!"
+
+"But I can't!" declared Julian.
+
+"Yes, you can,--you must! You too, Ronald! Where are your coats? Pop them
+on and make a dash for it! You'll come back better. Perhaps you will get
+out of the swishing after all."
+
+Julian turned his head and looked at her by the light of the flaring,
+unshaded gas-jet. "By Jove!" he said. "You're rather a brick, Mrs.
+Denys."
+
+"Don't stop to talk!" she commanded. "Just get up and do as I say. Go
+down the back stairs, mind! I'll let you in again in time to get ready
+for supper."
+
+Julian turned to his brother. "What do you say to it, Ron?"
+
+"Can't be done," groaned Ronald.
+
+"Oh yes, it can." Sheer determination sounded in Avery's response. "Get
+up, both of you! If it makes you ill, it can't be helped. You will
+neither of you get any better lying here. Come, Ronald!" She went to him
+briskly. "Get up! I'll help you. There! That's the way. Splendid! Now
+keep it up! don't let yourself go again! You will feel quite different
+when you get out into the open air."
+
+By words and actions she urged them, Mrs. Lorimer standing pathetically
+by, till finally, fired by her energy, the two miscreants actually
+managed to make their escape without mishap.
+
+She ran downstairs to see them go, returning in time to receive the
+wailing Pat who had been sent to bed in a state verging on hysterics.
+Neither she nor his mother could calm him for some time, and when at
+length he was somewhat comforted one of the younger boys fell down in an
+adjacent room and began to cry lustily.
+
+Avery went to the rescue, earnestly entreating Mrs. Lorimer to go down to
+her room and rest. She was able to soothe the sufferer and leave him to
+the care of the nurse, and she then followed Mrs. Lorimer whom she found
+bathing her eyes and trying not to cry.
+
+So piteous a spectacle was she that Avery found further formality an
+absolute impossibility. She put her arm round the little woman and begged
+her not to fret.
+
+"No, I know it's wrong," whispered Mrs. Lorimer, yielding like a child
+to the kindly support. "But I can't help it sometimes. You see, I'm not
+very strong--just now." She hesitated and glanced at Avery with a
+guilty air. "I--I haven't told him yet," she said in a lower whisper
+still. "Of course I shall have to soon; but--I'm afraid you will think
+me very deceitful--I like to choose a favourable time, when the
+children are not worrying him quite so much. I don't want to--to vex
+him more than I need."
+
+"My dear!" Avery said compassionately. And she added as she had added to
+the daughter half an hour before, "Poor little thing!"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer gave a feeble laugh, lifting her face. "You are a sweet
+girl, Avery. I may call you that? I do hope the work won't be too much
+for you. You mustn't let me lean on you too hard."
+
+"You shall lean just as hard as you like," Avery said, and, bending,
+kissed the tired face. "I am here to be a help to you, you know. Yes, do
+call me Avery! I'm quite alone in the world, and it makes it feel like
+home. Now you really must lie down till supper. And you are not to worry
+about anything. I am sure the boys will come back much better. There! Is
+that comfortable?"
+
+"Quite, dear, thank you. You mustn't think about me any more. Good-bye!
+Thank you for all your goodness to me!" Mrs. Lorimer clung to her hand
+for a moment. "I was always prejudiced against mothers' helps before,"
+she said ingenuously. "But I find you an immense comfort--an immense
+comfort. You will try and stay, won't you, if you possibly can?"
+
+"Yes," Avery promised. "I will certainly stay--if it rests with me."
+
+Her lips were very firmly closed as she went out of the room and her grey
+eyes extremely bright. It had been a strenuous half-hour.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+LIFE ON A CHAIN
+
+
+"Oh, I say, are you going out?" said Piers. "I was just coming to
+call on you."
+
+"On me?" Avery looked at him with brows raised in surprised
+interrogation.
+
+He made her a graceful bow, nearly sweeping the path outside the Vicarage
+gate with his cap. "Even so, madam! On you! But as I perceive you are not
+at home to callers, may I be permitted to turn and walk beside you?"
+
+As he suited the action to the words, it seemed superfluous to grant the
+permission, and Avery did not do so.
+
+"I am only going to run quickly down to the post," she said, with a
+glance at some letters she carried.
+
+He might have offered to post them for her, but such a course did not
+apparently occur to him. Instead he said: "I'll race you if you like."
+
+Avery refrained from smiling, conscious of a gay glance flung in her
+direction.
+
+"I see you prefer to walk circumspectly," said Piers. "Well, I can do
+that too. How is Mike? Why isn't he with you?"
+
+"Mike is quite well, thank you," said Avery. "And he is kept chained up."
+
+"What an infernal shame!" burst from Piers. "I'd sooner shoot a dog than
+keep him on a chain."
+
+"So would I!" said Avery impulsively.
+
+The words were out before she could check them. It was a subject upon
+which she found it impossible to maintain her reticence.
+
+Piers grinned triumphantly and thrust out a boyish hand. "Shake!" he
+said. "We are in sympathy!"
+
+But Avery only shook her head at him, refusing to be drawn.
+"People--plenty of nice people--have no idea of the utter cruelty of it,"
+she said. "They think that if a dog has never known liberty, he is
+incapable of desiring it. They don't know, they don't realize, the
+bitterness of life on a chain."
+
+"Don't know and don't care!" declared Piers. "They deserve to be chained
+up themselves. One day on a chain would teach your nice people quite a
+lot. But no one cultivates feeling in this valley of dry bones. It isn't
+the thing nowadays. Let a dog whine his heart out on a chain! Who cares?
+There's no room for sentimental scruples of that sort. Can't you see the
+Reverend Stephen smile at the bare idea of extending a little of his
+precious Christian pity to a dog?" He broke off with a laugh that rang
+defiantly. "Now it's your turn!" he said.
+
+"My turn?" Avery glanced at his dark, handsome face with a touch of
+curiosity.
+
+He met her eyes with his own as if he would beat them back. "Aren't you
+generous enough to remind me that but for your timely interference I
+should have beaten my own dog to death only yesterday? You were almost
+ready to flog me for it at the time."
+
+"Oh, that!" Avery said, looking away again. "Yes, of course I might
+remind you of that if I wanted to be personal; but, you see,--I don't."
+
+"Why not!" said Piers stubbornly. "You were personal enough yesterday."
+
+The dimple, for which Avery was certainly not responsible, appeared
+suddenly near her mouth. "I am afraid I lost my temper yesterday," she
+said.
+
+"How wrong of you!" said Piers. "I hope you confessed to the
+Reverend Stephen."
+
+She glanced at him again and became grave. "No, I didn't confess to
+anyone. But I think it's a pity ever to lose one's temper. It involves a
+waste of power."
+
+"Does it?" said Piers.
+
+"Yes." She nodded with conviction. "We need all the strength we can
+muster for other things. How is your dog to-day?"
+
+Piers ignored the question. "What other things?" he demanded.
+
+She hesitated.
+
+"Go on!" said Piers imperiously.
+
+Avery complied half-reluctantly. "I meant--mainly--the burdens of life.
+We can't afford to weaken ourselves by any loss of self-control. The man
+who keeps his temper is immeasurably stronger than the man who loses it."
+
+Piers was frowning; his dark eyes looked almost black. Suddenly he turned
+upon her. "Mrs. Denys, I have a strong suspicion that your temper is a
+sweet one. If so, you're no judge of these things. Why didn't you leather
+me with my own whip yesterday? You had me at your mercy."
+
+Avery smiled. Plainly he was set upon a personal encounter, and she could
+not avoid it. "Well, frankly, Mr. Evesham," she said, "I was never nearer
+to striking anyone in my life."
+
+"Then why did you forbear? You weren't afraid to souse me with
+cold water."
+
+"Oh no," she said. "I wasn't afraid."
+
+"I believe you were," maintained Piers. "You're afraid to speak your mind
+to me now anyway."
+
+She laughed a little. "No, I'm not. I really can't explain myself to you.
+I think you forget that we are practically strangers."
+
+"You talk as if I had been guilty of familiarity," said Piers.
+
+"No, no! I didn't mean that," Avery coloured suddenly, and the soft glow
+made her wonderfully fair to see. "You know quite well I didn't mean
+it," she said.
+
+"It's good of you to say so," said Piers. "But I really didn't know. I
+thought you had decided that I was a suitable subject for snubbing. I'm
+not a bit. I'm so accustomed to it that I don't care a--" he paused with
+a glance of quizzical daring, and, as she managed to look severe, amended
+the sentence--"that I am practically indifferent to it. Mrs. Denys, I
+wish you had struck me yesterday."
+
+"Really?" said Avery.
+
+"Yes, really. I should then have had the pleasure of forgiving you.
+It's a pleasure I don't often get. You see, I'm usually the one that's
+in the wrong."
+
+She looked at him then with quick interest; she could not help it. But
+the dark eyes triumphed over her so shamelessly that she veiled it on
+the instant.
+
+Piers laughed. "Mrs. Denys, may I ask a directly personal question?"
+
+"I don't know why you should," said Avery.
+
+They were nearing the pillar-box at the end of the Vicarage lane, and she
+was firmly determined that at that box their ways should separate.
+
+"I know you think I'm bold and bad," said Piers. "Some kind friend has
+probably told you so. But I'm not. I've been brought up badly, that's
+all. I think you might bear with me. I'm quite willing to be bullied."
+There was actual pathos in the declaration.
+
+Again the fleeting dimple hovered near Avery's mouth. "Please don't take
+my opinion for granted in that way!" she said. "I have hardly had time to
+form one yet."
+
+"Then I may ask my question?" said Piers.
+
+She turned steady grey eyes upon him. "Yes; you may."
+
+Piers' face was perfectly serious. "Are you really married?" he asked.
+
+The level brows went up a little. "I have been a widow for six years,"
+said Avery very quietly.
+
+He stared at her in surprise unfeigned. "Six years!"
+
+She replied in the same quiet voice. "I lost my husband when I was
+twenty-two."
+
+"Great Heavens above!" ejaculated Piers. "But you're not--not--I say,
+forgive me, I must say it--you can't be as old as that!"
+
+"I am twenty-nine," said Avery faintly smiling.
+
+They had reached the letter-box. She dropped in her letters one by one.
+Piers stood confounded, looking on.
+
+Suddenly he spoke. "And you've been doing this mothers'-helping business
+for six years?"
+
+"Oh no!" she said.
+
+She turned round from the box and faced him. The red winter sunset glowed
+softly upon her. Her grey eyes looked straight into it.
+
+"No!" she said again. "I had my little girl to take care of for the first
+six months. You see, she was born blind, soon after her father's death,
+and she needed all the care I could give her."
+
+Piers made a sharp movement--a gesture that was almost passionate; but he
+said nothing.
+
+Avery withdrew her eyes from the sunset, and looked at him. "She died,"
+she said, "and that left me with nothing to do. I have no near
+relations. So I just had to set to work to find something to occupy me.
+I went into a children's hospital for training, and spent some years
+there. Then when that came to an end, I took a holiday; but I found I
+wanted children. So I cast about me, and finally answered Mr. Lorimer's
+advertisement and came here." She began to smile. "At least I have
+plenty of children now."
+
+"Oh, I say!" broke in Piers. "What a perfectly horrible life you've had!
+You don't mean to say you're happy, what?"
+
+Avery laughed. "I'm much too busy to think about it. And now I really
+must run back. I've promised to take charge of the babies this afternoon.
+Good-bye!" She held out her hand to him with frank friendliness, as if
+she divined the sympathy he did not utter.
+
+He gripped it hard for a moment. "Thanks awfully for being so decent as
+to tell me!" he said, looking back at her with eyes as frank as her own.
+"I'm going on down to the home farm. Good-bye!"
+
+He raised his cap, and abruptly strode away. And in the moment of his
+going Avery found she liked him better than she had liked him
+throughout the interview, for she knew quite well that he went only in
+deference to her wish.
+
+She turned to retrace her steps, feeling puzzled. There was something
+curiously attractive about the young man's personality, something that
+appealed to her, yet that she felt disposed to resist. That air of the
+ancient Roman was wonderfully compelling, too compelling for her taste,
+but then his boyishness counteracted it to a very great degree. There was
+a hint of sweetness running through his arrogance against which she was
+not proof. Audacious he might be, but it was a winning species of
+audacity that probably no woman could condemn. She thought to herself as
+she returned to her charges that she had never seen a face so faultlessly
+patrician and yet so vividly alive. And following that thought came
+another that dwelt longer in her mind. Deprived of its animation, it
+would not have been a happy face.
+
+Avery wondered why.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE RACE
+
+
+"Hooray! No more horrid sums for a whole month!" Gracie Lorimer's
+arithmetic-book soared to the ceiling and came down with a bang while
+Gracie herself pivoted, not ungracefully, on her toes till sheer
+giddiness and exhaustion put an end to her rhapsody. Then she staggered
+to Avery who was darning the family stockings by the window and flung
+ecstatic arms about her neck.
+
+"Dear Mrs. Denys, aren't you glad it's holidays?" she gasped. "We'll give
+you such a lovely time!"
+
+"I'm sure you will, dear," said Avery. "But do mind the needle!"
+
+She kissed the brilliant childish face that was pressed to hers. She and
+Gracie were close friends. Gracie was eleven, and the prettiest madcap of
+them all. It was a perpetual marvel to Avery that the child managed to be
+so happy, for she was continually in trouble. But she seemed to possess a
+cheery knack of throwing off adversity. She was essentially gay of heart.
+
+"Do put away those stupid old stockings and come out with us!" she
+begged, still hanging over Avery. "Don't you hate darning? I do. We had
+to do our own before you came. I was very naughty one day last summer. I
+went out and played in the garden instead of mending my stockings, and
+Father found out." Gracie cast up her eyes dramatically. "He sent me in
+to do them, and went off to one of his old parish parties; and I just
+sneaked out as soon as his back was turned and went on with the game. But
+there was no luck that day. He came back to fetch something and caught
+me. And then--just imagine!" Again Gracie was dramatic, though this time
+unconsciously. "He sent me to bed and--what do you think? When he came
+home to tea, he--whipped me!"
+
+Avery threaded her needle with care. She said nothing.
+
+"I think it was rather a shame," went on Gracie unconcernedly. "Because
+he never whips Jeanie or Olive. But then, he can make them cry without,
+and he can't make me. I 'spect that's what made him do it, don't you?"
+
+"I don't know, dear," said Avery rather shortly.
+
+Gracie peered round into her face. "Mrs. Denys, you don't like Father, do
+you?" she said.
+
+"My dear, that's not a nice question to ask," said Avery, with her eyes
+on her work.
+
+"I don't know why not," said Gracie. "I don't like him myself, and he
+knows I don't. He'd whip me again if he got the chance, but I'm too jolly
+careful now. I was pleased that you got Ronnie and Julian off the other
+day. He never suspected, did he? I thought I should have burst during
+prayers. It was so funny."
+
+"My dear!" protested Avery.
+
+"Yes, I know," said Gracie. "But you aren't really shocked, dear, kind
+Mrs. Denys! You know you aren't. I can see your sweet little dimple.
+No, I can't! Yes, I can! I do love your dimple. It goes in and out
+like the sun."
+
+Avery leaned back abruptly in her chair. "Oh, foolish one!" she said, and
+gathered the child to her with a warmth to which the ardent Gracie was
+swift to respond.
+
+"And you are coming out with us, aren't you? Because it's so lovely and
+cold. I want to go up on that big hill in Rodding Park, and run and run
+and run till I just can't run any longer. Ronnie and Julian are coming
+too. And Jeanie and Olive and Pat. We ought to begin and collect holly
+for the church decorations. You'll be able to help this year, won't you?
+Miss Whalley always bosses things. Have you met Miss Whalley yet? She's
+quite the funniest person in Rodding. She was the daughter of the last
+Vicar, and she has never forgotten it. So odd of her! As if there were
+anything in it! I often wish I weren't a parson's daughter. I'd much
+rather belong to someone who had to go up to town every day. There would
+be much more fun for everybody then."
+
+Avery was laying her mending together. She supposed she ought to check
+the child's chatter, but felt too much in sympathy with her to do so. "I
+really don't know if I ought to come," she said. "But it is certainly too
+fine an afternoon for you to waste indoors. Where are the boys?"
+
+"Oh, they're messing about somewhere in the garden. You see, they've got
+to keep out of sight or Father will set them to work to roll the lawn. He
+always does that sort of thing. He calls it 'turning our youthful
+energies to good account.'" Very suddenly and wickedly Gracie mimicked the
+pastoral tones. "But the boys call it 'nigger-driving,'" she added, "and
+I think the boys are right. When I'm grown up, I'll never, never, never
+make my children do horrid things like that. They shall have--oh, such a
+good time!"
+
+There was unconscious pathos in the declaration. Avery looked at the
+bright face very tenderly.
+
+"I wonder what you'll do with them when they're naughty, Gracie," she
+said.
+
+"I shall never whip them," said Gracie decidedly. "I think whipping is a
+horrid punishment. It makes you hate everybody. I think I shan't punish
+them at all, Mrs. Denys. I shall just tell them how wrong they've been,
+and that they are never to do it again. And I'm sure they won't," she
+added, with confidence. "They'll love me too much."
+
+She slipped her arm round Avery's waist as she rose. "Do you know I would
+dreadfully like to call you Aunt Avery?" she said. "I said so to Jeanie,
+and Jeanie wants to too. Do you mind?"
+
+"Mind!" said Avery. "I shall love it."
+
+"Oh, thank you--awfully!" Gracie kissed her fervently. "I'll run and tell
+Jeanie. She will be pleased."
+
+She skipped from the room, and Avery went to prepare for the walk. "Poor
+little souls!" she murmured to herself. "How I wish they were mine!"
+
+They mustered only five when they started--the three girls, Pat, and
+Avery herself; but ere they had reached the end of the lane the two elder
+boys leapt the Vicarage wall with a whoop of triumph and joined them. The
+party became at once uproariously gay. Everyone talked at the same time,
+even Jeanie becoming animated. Avery rejoiced to see the pretty face
+flushed and merry. She had begun to feel twinges of anxiety about Jeanie
+lately. But she was able to banish them at least for to-day, for Jeanie
+ran and chattered with the rest. In fact, Olive was the only one who
+showed any disposition to walk sedately. It had to be remembered that
+Olive was the clever one of the family. She more closely resembled her
+father than any of the others, and Avery firmly believed her to be the
+only member of the family that Mr. Lorimer really loved. She was a
+cold-hearted, sarcastic child, extremely self-contained, giving nothing
+and receiving nothing in return. It was impossible to become intimate
+with her. Avery had given up the attempt almost at the outset, realizing
+that it was not in Olive's nature to be intimate with anyone. They were
+always exceedingly polite to each other, but beyond that their
+acquaintance made no progress. Olive lived in a world of books, and the
+practical side of life scarcely touched her, and most certainly never
+appealed to her sympathy. "She will be her father over again," Mrs.
+Lorimer would declare, with pathetic pride. "So dignified, so handsome,
+and so clever!"
+
+And Avery agreed, not without reserve, that she certainly resembled him
+to a marked degree.
+
+She was by far the most sober member of the party that entered Rodding
+Park that afternoon. Avery, inspired by the merriment around her, was in
+a frankly frivolous mood. She was fast friends with the two elder boys,
+who had voted her a brick on the night that she had intervened to
+deliver them from the just retribution for their misdeeds. They had
+conceived an immense admiration for her which placed her in a highly
+privileged position.
+
+"If Mrs. Denys says so, it is so," was Ronald's fiat, and she knew that
+such influence as he possessed with his brothers and sisters was always
+at her disposal.
+
+She liked Ronald. The boy was a gentleman. Though slow, he was solid; and
+she suspected that he possessed more depth of character than the more
+brilliant Julian. Julian was crafty; there was no denying it. She was
+sure that he would get on in the world. But of Ronald's future she was
+not so sure. It seemed to her that he might plod on for ever without
+reaching his goal. He kept near her throughout that riotous scamper
+through the bare, wind-swept Park, making it plain that he regarded
+himself as her lieutenant whether she required his services or not. As a
+matter of fact, she did not require them, but she was glad to have him
+there and she keenly appreciated the gentlemanly consideration with which
+he helped her over every stile.
+
+They reached the high hill of Gracie's desire, and rapidly climbed it.
+The sun had passed over to the far west and had already begun to dip ere
+they reached the summit.
+
+"Now we'll all stand in a row and race down," announced Gracie, when
+they reached the top. "Aunt Avery will start us. We'll run as far as that
+big oak-tree on the edge of the wood. Now line up, everybody!"
+
+"I'm not going to do anything so silly," said Olive decidedly. "Mrs.
+Denys and I will follow quietly."
+
+"Oh no!" laughed Avery. "You can do the starting, my dear, and I will
+race with the others."
+
+Olive looked at her, faintly contemptuous. "Oh, of course if you prefer
+it--" she said.
+
+"I do indeed!" Avery assured her. "But I think the two big boys and I
+ought to be handicapped. Jeanie and Gracie and Pat must go ten paces
+in front."
+
+"I am bigger than Gracie and Pat," said Jeanie. "I think I ought to
+go midway."
+
+"Of course," agreed Ronald. "And, Aunt Avery, you must go with her. You
+can't start level with Julian and me."
+
+Avery laughed at the amendment and fell in with it. They adjusted
+themselves for the trial of speed, while Olive stationed herself on a
+mole-hill to give the signal.
+
+The valley below them was in deep shadow. The last of the sunlight lay
+upon the hilltop. It shone dazzlingly in Avery's eyes as the race began.
+
+There had been a sprinkling of snow the day before, and the grass was
+crisp and rough. She felt it crush under her feet with a keen sense of
+enjoyment. Instinctively she put all her buoyant strength into the run.
+She left Jeanie behind, overtook and passed the two younger children, and
+raced like a hare down the slope. Keenly the wind whistled past her, and
+she rejoiced to feel its clean purity rush into her lungs. She was for
+the moment absurdly, rapturously happy,--a child amongst children.
+
+The sun went out of sight, and the darkness of the valley swallowed her.
+She sped on, fleet-footed, flushed and laughing, moving as if on wings.
+
+She neared the dark line of wood, and saw the stark, outstretched
+branches of the oak that was her goal. In the same instant she caught
+sight of a man's figure standing beneath it, apparently waiting for her.
+
+He had evidently just come out of the wood. He carried a gun on his
+shoulder, but the freedom of his pose was so striking that she likened
+him on the instant to a Roman gladiator.
+
+She could not stop herself at once though she checked her speed, and when
+she finally managed to come to a stand, she was close to him.
+
+He stepped forward to meet her with a royal air of welcome. "How nice of
+you to come and call on me!" he said.
+
+His dark eyes shone mischievously as they greeted her, and she was too
+flushed and dishevelled to stand upon ceremony. Pantingly she threw back
+her gay reply.
+
+"This is the children's happy hunting ground, not mine, I suppose, if the
+truth were told, we are trespassing."
+
+He made her his sweeping bow. "There is not a corner of this estate that
+is not utterly and for ever at your service."
+
+He turned as the two elder boys came racing up, and she saw the
+half-mocking light go out of his eyes as they glanced up the hill.
+"Hullo!" he said. "There's one of them come to grief."
+
+Sharply she turned also. Pat and Gracie were having a spirited race down
+the lower slope of the hill. Olive had begun to descend from the top with
+becoming dignity. And midway, poor Jeanie crouched in a forlorn little
+heap with her hands tightly covering her face.
+
+"The child's hurt!" exclaimed Avery.
+
+She started to run back, but in a moment Piers sprang past her, crying,
+"All right. Don't run! Take it easy!"
+
+He himself went like the wind. She watched him with subconscious
+admiration. He was so superbly lithe and strong.
+
+She saw him reach Jeanie and kneel down beside her. There was no
+hesitation about him. He was evidently deeply concerned. He slipped a
+persuasive arm about the child's huddled form.
+
+When Avery reached them, Jeanie's head in its blue woollen cap was
+pillowed against him and she was telling him sobbingly of her trouble.
+
+"I--I caught my foot. I don't know--how I did it. It twisted right
+round--and oh, it does hurt, I--I--I can't help--being silly!"
+
+"All right, kiddie, all right!" said Piers. "It was one of those
+confounded rabbit-holes. There! You'll be better in a minute. Got a
+handkerchief, what? Oh, never mind! Take mine!"
+
+He pulled it out and dried her eyes as tenderly as if he had been a
+woman; then raised his head abruptly and spoke to Avery.
+
+"I expect it's a sprain. I'd better get her boot off and see, what?"
+
+"No, we had better take her home first," said Avery with quick decision.
+
+"All right," said Piers at once. "I'll carry her. I daresay she isn't
+very heavy. I say, little girl, you mustn't cry." He patted her shoulder
+kindly. "It hurts horribly, I know. These things always do. But you're
+going to show me how plucky you can be. Women are always braver than men,
+aren't they, Mrs. Denys?"
+
+Thus admonished, Jeanie lifted her face and made a valiant effort to
+regain her self-command. But she clasped her two hands very tightly upon
+Piers' arm so that he could not move to lift her.
+
+"I'll be brave in a minute," she promised him tremulously. "You won't
+mind waiting--just a minute?"
+
+"Two, if you like," said Piers.
+
+Avery was stooping over the injured foot. Jeanie was propped sideways,
+half-lying against Piers' knee.
+
+"Don't touch it, please, Aunt Avery!" she whispered.
+
+The other children had drawn round in an interested group. "It looks like
+a fracture to me," observed Olive in her precise voice.
+
+Piers flashed her a withering glance. "Mighty lot you know about it!" he
+retorted rudely.
+
+Pat sniggered. He was not fond of his second sister. But his mirth was
+checked by the impulsive Gracie who pushed him aside with a brief,
+"Don't be a pig!"
+
+Olive retired into the background with her nose in the air, looking so
+absurdly like her father that a gleam of humour shot through even Piers'
+sternness. He suppressed it and turned to the two elder boys.
+
+"Which of you is to be trusted to carry a loaded gun?"
+
+"I am," said Julian.
+
+"No--Ronald," said Avery very firmly.
+
+Julian stuck out his tongue at her, and was instantly pummeled therefor
+by the zealous Gracie.
+
+"Ronald," said Piers. "Mind how you pick it up, and don't point it at
+anyone! Carry it on your shoulder! That's the way. Go slow with it! Now
+you walk in front and take it down to the lodge!"
+
+He issued his orders with the air of a commanding-officer, and having
+issued them turned again with renewed gentleness to the child who lay
+against his arm.
+
+"Now, little girl, shall we make a move? I'm afraid postponing it won't
+make it any better. I'll carry you awfully carefully."
+
+"Thank you," whispered Jeanie.
+
+He stooped over her. "Put your arm round my neck! That'll be a help. Mrs.
+Denys, can you steady her foot while I get up?"
+
+Avery bent to do so. He moved with infinite care; but even so the strain
+upon the foot was inevitable. Jeanie gave a sharp cry, and sank helpless
+in his arms.
+
+He began to speak encouragingly but broke off in the middle, feeling the
+child's head lie limp upon his shoulder.
+
+"Afraid it's serious," he said to Avery. "We will get her down to the
+lodge and send for a doctor."
+
+"By Jove! She's fainted!" remarked Julian. "It's a jolly bad sprain."
+
+"It's not a sprain at all," said Olive loftily.
+
+And much as she would have liked to disagree, Avery knew that she
+was right.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+
+Mrs. Marshall at the lodge was a hard-featured old woman whose god was
+cleanliness. Perhaps it was hardly to be expected of her that she should
+throw open her door to the whole party. Piers, with his limp burden, and
+Avery she had to admit, but after the latter's entrance she sternly
+blocked the way.
+
+"There's no room for any more," she declared with finality. "You'd best
+run along home."
+
+And with that she shut the door upon them and followed her unwelcome
+visitors into her spotless parlour.
+
+"What's the matter with the young lady?" she enquired sourly.
+
+Avery answered her in her quick, friendly way. "She has had a fall, poor
+little thing, and hurt her foot--I'm afraid, badly. It's so good of you
+to let us bring her in here. Won't you spread a cloth to keep her boots
+off your clean chintz?"
+
+The suggestion was what Piers described later as "a lucky hit." It melted
+old Mrs. Marshall on the instant. She hastened to comply with it, and saw
+Jeanie laid down upon her sofa with comparative resignation.
+
+"She do look mortal bad, to be sure," she remarked.
+
+"Can't you find some brandy?" said Piers.
+
+"I think she will come to, now," Avery said. "Yes, look! Her eyes
+are opening."
+
+She was right. Jeanie's eyes opened very wide and fixed themselves
+enquiringly upon Piers' face. There was something in them, a species of
+dumb appeal, that went straight to his heart. He moved impulsively, and
+knelt beside her.
+
+Jeanie's hand came confidingly forth to him. "I did try to be brave," she
+whispered.
+
+Piers' hand closed instantly and warmly upon hers. "That's all right,
+little girl," he said kindly. "Pain pretty bad, eh?"
+
+"Yes," murmured Jeanie.
+
+"Ah, well, don't move!" he said. "We'll get your boot off and then you'll
+feel better."
+
+"Oh, don't trouble, please!" said Jeanie politely.
+
+She held his hand very tightly, and he divined that the prospect of the
+boot's removal caused her considerable apprehension.
+
+He looked round to consult Avery on the subject, but found that she had
+slipped out of the room. He heard her in the porch speaking to the
+children, and in a few seconds she was back again.
+
+"Don't let us keep you!" she said to Piers. "I can stay with Jeanie now.
+I have sent the children home, all but Ronald and Julian who have gone to
+fetch Dr. Tudor."
+
+Piers looked at Jeanie, and Jeanie looked at Piers. Her hand was still
+fast locked in his.
+
+"Shall I go?" said Piers.
+
+Jeanie's blue eyes were very wistful. "I would like you to stay," she
+said shyly, "if you don't mind."
+
+"If Mrs. Denys doesn't mind?" suggested Piers.
+
+To which Avery responded. "Thank you. Please stay!"
+
+She said it for Jeanie's sake, since it was evident that the child was
+sustaining herself on the man's strength, but the look Piers flashed her
+made her a little doubtful as to the wisdom of her action. She realized
+that it might not be easy to keep him at arm's length after this.
+
+Piers turned back to Jeanie. "Very well, I'll stay," he said, "anyhow
+till Tudor comes along. Let's see! You're the eldest girl, aren't you? I
+ought to know you by name, but somehow my memory won't run to it."
+
+He could not as a matter of fact remember that he had ever spoken to any
+of the young Lorimers before, though by sight he was well acquainted
+with them.
+
+Jeanie, in whose eyes he had ever shone as a knight of romance, murmured
+courteously that no one ever remembered them all by name.
+
+"Well, I shall remember you anyhow," said Piers. "Queenie is it?"
+
+"No,--Jeanie."
+
+"I shall call you Queenie," he said. "It sounds more imposing. Now won't
+you let me just slit off that boot? I can do it without hurting you."
+
+"Slit it!" said Jeanie, shocked.
+
+"We shan't get it off without," said Piers. "What do you think about it,
+Mrs. Denys?"
+
+"I will unfasten the lace first," Avery said.
+
+This she proceeded to do while Piers occupied Jeanie's attention with a
+success which a less dominant personality could scarcely have achieved.
+
+But when it came to removing the boot he went to Avery's assistance. It
+was no easy matter but they accomplished it between them, Piers
+ruthlessly cutting the leather away from the injured ankle which by that
+time was badly swollen. They propped it on a cushion, and made her as
+comfortable as circumstances would allow.
+
+"Can't that old woman make you some tea?" Piers said then, beginning to
+chafe at the prospect of an indefinite period of inaction.
+
+"I think she is boiling her kettle now," Avery answered.
+
+Piers grunted. He fidgeted to the window and back, and then, finding
+Jeanie's eyes still mutely watching him, he pulled up a chair to her side
+and took the slender hand again into his own.
+
+Avery turned her attention to coaxing the fire to burn, and presently
+went out to Mrs. Marshall in her kitchen to offer her services there. She
+was graciously permitted to cut some bread and butter while the old woman
+prepared a tray.
+
+"I suppose it was Master Piers' fault," the latter remarked with
+severity. "He's always up to some mischief or other."
+
+Avery hastened to assure her that upon this occasion Piers was absolutely
+blameless and had been of the utmost assistance to them.
+
+"I'm very glad to hear it," said Mrs. Marshall. "He's a feckless young
+gentleman, and I often think as he's like to bring the old master's hairs
+with sorrow to the grave. Sir Beverley do set such store by him, always
+did from the day he brought him back from his dead mother in Paris, along
+with that French valet who carried him like as if he'd been a parcel of
+goods. He's been brought up by men from his cradle, miss, and it hasn't
+done him any good. But there! Sir Beverley is that set against all
+womenkind there's no moving him."
+
+Mrs. Marshall was beginning to expand--a mark of high favour which she
+bestowed only upon the few.
+
+Avery listened with respect, comfortably aware that by this simple means
+she was creating a good impression. She was anxious to win the old dame
+to a benevolent frame of mind if possible, since to be thrown upon
+unwilling hospitality was the last thing she desired.
+
+It was characteristic of her that she achieved her purpose. When she
+returned to the parlour in Mrs. Marshall's wake, she had completely won
+her hostess's heart, a fact which Piers remarked on the instant.
+
+"There's magic in you," he said to Avery, as she gave him his cup of
+tea.
+
+"I prefer to call it common sense," she answered.
+
+She turned her attention at once to Jeanie, coaxing her to drink the tea
+though her utmost persuasion could not induce her to eat anything. She
+was evidently suffering a good deal of pain, but she begged them not to
+trouble about her. "Please have your tea, Aunt Avery! I shall be quite
+all right."
+
+"Yes, Aunt Avery must certainly have some tea," said Piers with
+determination, and he refused to touch his own until she had done so.
+
+It was a relief to all three of them when the doctor's dogcart was heard
+on the drive. Avery rose at once and went to receive him.
+
+Piers stretched a kindly arm behind the cushion that supported Jeanie's
+head. "Do you really want me to stay with you, little girl?" he asked.
+
+Jeanie was very white, but she looked at him bravely. "Do you
+mind?" she said.
+
+His dark eyes smiled encouragement. "No, of course I don't mind if I can
+be of any use to you. Tudor will probably want to kick me out, but if you
+have the smallest desire to keep me, I'll stay."
+
+"You are kind," said Jeanie very earnestly. "I think it will help me to
+be brave if I may hold your hand. You have such a strong hand."
+
+"It is entirely at your service," said Piers.
+
+He turned in his chair at the doctor's entrance, without rising. His
+attitude was decidedly dogged. He looked as if he anticipated a struggle.
+
+Dr. Tudor came in behind Avery. He was a man of forty, curt of speech and
+short of temper, with eyes that gleamed shrewdly behind gold pince-nez.
+He gave Piers a look that was conspicuously lacking in cordiality.
+
+"Hullo!" he said. "You here!"
+
+"Yes, I'm here," said Piers.
+
+The doctor's eyes passed him and went straight to the white face of the
+child on the sofa. He advanced and bent over her.
+
+"So you've had an accident, eh?" he said.
+
+"Yes," whispered Jeanie, pressing a little closer to Piers.
+
+"What happened?"
+
+"I think it was a rabbit-hole," said Jeanie not very lucidly.
+
+"Caught your foot and fell, I suppose?" said the doctor. "Was that all?
+Did you do any walking after it?"
+
+"Oh no!" said Jeanie, with a shudder. "Mr. Evesham carried me."
+
+"I see." He was holding her wrist between his fingers. Very suddenly he
+looked at Piers again. "I can't have you here," he said.
+
+"Can't you?" said Piers. He threw back his head with an aggressive
+movement, but said no more.
+
+"Please let him stay!" said Jeanie beseechingly.
+
+The doctor frowned.
+
+In a low voice Avery intervened. "I told him he might--for the
+child's sake."
+
+Dr. Tudor turned his hawk eyes upon her. "Who are you, may I ask?"
+
+Piers' free hand clenched, and a sudden hot flush rose to his forehead.
+But Avery made answer before he could speak.
+
+"I am the mother's help at the Vicarage. My name is Denys--Mrs. Denys.
+And Jeanie is in my care. Now, will you look at the injury?"
+
+She smiled a little as she said it, but the decision of her speech was
+past disputing. Dr. Tudor regarded her piercingly for a moment or two,
+then without a word turned aside.
+
+The tension went out of Piers' attitude; he held Jeanie comfortingly
+close.
+
+At the end of a brief examination the doctor spoke. "Yes. A simple
+fracture. I can soon put that to rights. You can help me, Mrs. Denys."
+
+He went to work at once, giving occasional curt directions to Avery,
+while Jeanie clung convulsively to Piers, her face buried in his coat,
+and fought for self-control.
+
+It was a very plucky fight, for the ordeal was a severe one; and when it
+was over the poor child broke down completely in spite of all her efforts
+and wept upon Piers' shoulder. He soothed and consoled her with the
+utmost kindness. It had been something of an ordeal for him also, and
+with relief he turned his attention to comforting her.
+
+She soon grew calmer and apologized humbly for her weakness. "I don't
+think I could have borne it without you," she told him, with
+tremulous sincerity. "But I'm so dreadfully sorry to have given you
+all this trouble."
+
+"That's all right," Piers assured her. "I'm glad you found me of use."
+
+He dried her tears for the second time that afternoon, and then, with a
+somewhat obvious effort at civility, addressed the doctor.
+
+"I suppose it will be all right to move her now? Can we take her home in
+the landaulette?"
+
+Curtly the doctor made answer. "Very well indeed, I should say, if we
+lift her carefully and keep the foot straight. I'll drive you to the
+Abbey if you like. I'm going up to see your grandfather."
+
+"I don't know why you should," said Piers quickly. "There's nothing the
+matter with him."
+
+Dr. Tudor made no reply. "Are you coming?" he asked.
+
+"No, thanks." There was latent triumph in Piers' response. "If you are
+going up, you can give the order for the landaulette, and tell my
+grandfather I am staying to see Miss Lorimer safely home."
+
+Dr. Tudor grunted and turned away, frowning.
+
+"Well, so long!" he said to Jeanie. "I'll look in on my way back, and
+lend a hand with moving you. But you will be all right now if you do as
+you're told."
+
+"Thank you," said Jeanie meekly.
+
+He went out with Avery, and the door closed behind them.
+
+Jeanie stole a glance at Piers who was looking decidedly grim.
+
+"Yes," he said in answer. "I detest him, and he knows it."
+
+Jeanie looked a little startled. "Oh, do you?" she said.
+
+"Don't you?" said Piers.
+
+"I--I really don't know. Isn't it--isn't it wrong to detest anyone!"
+faltered Jeanie.
+
+"Wrong!" said Piers. He frowned momentarily, then as suddenly he smiled.
+He bent very abruptly and kissed her on the forehead. "Yes, of course
+it's wrong," he said, "for the people who keep consciences."
+
+"Oh, but--" Jeanie remonstrated, and then something in his face stopped
+her. She flushed and murmured in confusion, "Thank you for!--for
+kissing me!"
+
+"Don't mention it!" said Piers, with a laugh.
+
+"I should like to kiss you if I may," said Jeanie. "You have been so
+very kind."
+
+He bent his face to hers and received the kiss. "You're a nice little
+girl," he said, and there was an odd note of feeling in the words for all
+their lightness that made Jeanie aware that in some fashion he was moved.
+
+"I don't think he is quite--quite happy, do you?" she said to Avery that
+night when the worst of her troubles were over, and she was safely back
+at the Vicarage.
+
+And Avery answered thoughtfully, "Perhaps--not quite."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A TALK BY THE FIRE
+
+
+The Reverend Stephen Lorimer was writing his sermon for the last Sunday
+in Advent. His theme was eternal punishment and one which he considered
+worthy of his utmost eloquence. There was nothing mythical or allegorical
+in that subject in the opinion of the Reverend Stephen. He believed in it
+most firmly, and the belief afforded him the keenest satisfaction. It was
+a nerve-shaking sermon. Had it been of a secular nature, it might almost
+have been described as inhuman, so obviously was it designed to render
+his hearers afraid to go home in the dark. But since it was not secular,
+it took the form of a fine piece of inspiration which, from Mr. Lorimer's
+point of view at least, could scarcely fail to make the most stubborn
+heart in his congregation tremble. He pictured himself delivering his
+splendid rhetoric with a grand and noble severity as impressive as the
+words he had to utter, reading appreciation--possibly unwilling
+appreciation--and dawning uneasiness on the upturned faces of his
+listeners.
+
+Mr. Lorimer did not love his flock; his religion did not take that
+form. And the flock very naturally as a whole had scant affection for
+Mr. Lorimer. The flock knew, or shrewdly suspected, that his eloquence
+was mere sound--not always even musical--and as a consequence its
+power was somewhat thrown away. His command of words was practically
+limitless, but words could not carry him to the hearts of his
+congregation, and he had no other means at his disposal. For this of
+course he blamed the congregation, which certainly had no right to wink
+and snigger when he passed.
+
+This Advent sermon however was a masterpiece, and as Mr. Lorimer lovingly
+fingered the pages of his manuscript he told himself that it could not
+fail to make an impression upon the most hardened sinner.
+
+A low knock at the door disturbed these pleasant thoughts and he frowned.
+There was an unwritten law at the Vicarage that save for the most urgent
+of reasons he should never be interrupted at this hour.
+
+Softly the door opened. Humbly his wife peeped in.
+
+"Are you very busy, Stephen?"
+
+His frown melted away. Here at least was one whose appreciation was never
+lacking. "Well, my dear Adelaide, I think I may truthfully say that the
+stress of my business is fairly over. You may come in."
+
+She crept in, mouse-like, and a distant burst of music wafted in with
+her, causing her to turn and quickly close the door.
+
+"Have you finished your sermon, dear? Can we have a little talk?" she
+asked him nervously.
+
+He stretched out a large white hand to her without rising. "Yes. I do not
+think much remains to be said. We have as it were regarded the matter
+from every point of view. I do not think there will be many consciences
+unaroused when I have enunciated my final warning."
+
+"You have such a striking delivery," murmured Mrs. Lorimer, clasping the
+firm white hand between both her own.
+
+Mr. Lorimer's eyes vanished in an unctuous smile. "Thou idle
+flatterer!" he said.
+
+"No, indeed, dear," his wife protested. "I think you are always
+impressive, especially at the end of your sermons. That pause you make
+before you turn your face to the altar--it seems to me so effective--so,
+if one may say it, dramatic."
+
+"To what request is this the prelude?" enquired Mr. Lorimer, emerging
+from his smile.
+
+She laughed a little nervous laugh. Her thin face was flushed. "Shall we
+sit by the fire, Stephen, as we used to that first happy winter--do you
+remember?--after we were married?"
+
+"Dear me!" said Mr. Lorimer. "This sounds like a plunge into sentiment."
+
+Nevertheless he rose with a tolerant twinkle and seated himself in the
+large easy-chair before the fire. It was the only really comfortable
+chair in the room. He kept it for his moments of reflection.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer sat down at his feet on the fender-curb, her tiny hand still
+clinging to his. "This is a real treat," she said, laying her head
+against his knee with a gesture oddly girlish. "It isn't often, is it,
+that we have it all to ourselves?"
+
+"What is it you have to say to me?" he enquired.
+
+She drew his hand down gently over her shoulder, and held it against her
+cheek. There fell a brief silence, then she said with a slight effort:
+"Your idea of a mother's help has worked wonderfully, Stephen. As you
+know, I was averse to it at first but I am so glad you insisted. Dear
+Avery is a greater comfort to me than I can possibly tell you."
+
+"Avery!" repeated the Reverend Stephen, with brows elevated. "I presume
+you are talking of Mrs. Denys?"
+
+"Yes, dear. I call her Avery. I feel her to be almost one of ourselves."
+There was just a hint of apology in Mrs. Lorimer's voice. "She has
+been--and is--so very kind to me," she said. "I really don't know what
+the children and I would do without her."
+
+"I am glad to hear she is kind," said Mr. Lorimer, with a touch
+of acidity.
+
+"My dearest, she is quite our equal in position," murmured Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"That may be, my dear Adelaide." The acidity developed into a note of
+displeasure. "In a sense doubtless we are all equal. But in spite of
+that, extremes of intimacy are often inadvisable. I do not think you are
+altogether discreet in making a bosom friend of a woman in Mrs. Denys's
+position. A very good woman, I grant you. But familiarity with her is
+altogether unsuitable. From my own experience of her I am convinced that
+she would very soon presume upon it."
+
+He paused. Mrs. Lorimer said nothing. She was sitting motionless with her
+soft eyes on the fire.
+
+Mr. Lorimer looked down at the brown head at his knee with growing
+severity. "You will, therefore, Adelaide, in deference to my wish--if for
+no other reason--discontinue this use of Mrs. Denys's Christian name."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer's lips moved, but they said nothing.
+
+"Adelaide!" He spoke with cold surprise.
+
+Instantly her fingers tightened upon his with a grip that was almost
+passionate. She raised her head, and looked up at him with earnest,
+pleading eyes. "I am sorry, Stephen--dear Stephen--but I have already
+given my friendship to--to Mrs. Denys. She has been--she is--like a
+sister to me. So you see, I can't possibly take it away again. You would
+not wish it if you knew."
+
+"If I knew!" repeated Mr. Lorimer, in a peculiar tone.
+
+She turned her face from him again, but he leaned slowly forward in his
+chair and taking her chin between his finger and thumb turned it
+deliberately back again.
+
+She shrank a little, but she did not resist him. He looked searchingly
+into her eyes. The lids flickered nervously under his gaze, but he did
+not relax his scrutiny.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+Her lips quivered. She said nothing.
+
+But her silence was enough. He released her abruptly and dropped back in
+his chair without another word.
+
+She sank down trembling against his knee, and there followed a most
+painful pause. Through the stillness there crept again the faint
+strains of distant music. Someone was playing the Soldiers' March out
+of _Faust_ on the old cracked schoolroom piano, which was rising nobly
+to the occasion.
+
+Mr. Lorimer moved at length and turned his head. "Who is that playing?"
+
+"Piers Evesham," whispered Mrs. Lorimer. She was weeping softly and dared
+not stir lest he should discover the fact.
+
+There was a deep, vertical line between Mr. Lorimer's brows. "And what
+may Piers Evesham be doing here?" he enquired.
+
+"He comes often--to see Jeanie," murmured his wife deprecatingly.
+
+He laughed unpleasantly. "A vast honour for Jeanie!"
+
+Two tears fell from Mrs. Lorimer's eyes. She began to feel furtively for
+her handkerchief.
+
+"And Dr. Lennox Tudor,"--he pronounced the name with elaborate care,--"he
+comes--often--for the same reason, I presume?"
+
+"He--he came to see me yesterday," faltered Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"Indeed!" The word was as water dropped from an icicle.
+
+She dabbed her eyes and bravely turned and faced him. "Stephen dear, I am
+very sorry. I didn't want to vex you unnecessarily. I hoped against
+hope--" She broke off, and knelt up before him, clasping his hand tightly
+against her breast. "Stephen--dearest, you said--when our firstborn
+came--that he was--God's gift."
+
+"Well?" Again that one, uncompromising word. The vertical line deepened
+between her husband's brows. His eyes looked coldly back at her.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer caught her breath on a little sob. "Will not this little
+one--be just as much so?" she whispered.
+
+He began to draw his hand away from her. "My dear Adelaide, we will not
+be foolishly sentimental. What must be, must. I am afraid I must ask you
+to run away now as I have yet to put the finishing touches to my sermon.
+Perhaps you will kindly request young Evesham on my behalf to make a
+little less noise."
+
+He deliberately put her from him, and prepared to rise. But Mrs. Lorimer
+suddenly and very unexpectedly rose first. She stood before him, slightly
+bending, her hands on his broad shoulders.
+
+"Will you kiss me, Stephen?" she said.
+
+He lifted a grim, reluctant face. She stooped, slipping her arms about
+his neck. "My own dear husband!" she whispered.
+
+He endured her embrace for a couple of seconds; then, "That will do,
+Adelaide," he said with decision. "You must not let yourself get
+emotional. Dear me! It is getting late. I am afraid I really must ask you
+to leave me."
+
+Her arms fell. She drew back, dispirited. "Forgive me,--oh, forgive me!"
+she murmured miserably.
+
+He turned back to his writing-table, still frowning. "I was not aware
+that I had anything to forgive," he said. "But if you think so,--" he
+shrugged his shoulders, beginning already to turn the pages of his
+masterpiece--"my forgiveness is yours. I wonder if you would care to
+divert your thoughts from what I am sure you will admit to be a purely
+selfish channel by listening to a portion of this Advent sermon."
+
+"What is it about?" asked Mrs. Lorimer, hesitating.
+
+"My theme," said the Reverend Stephen, "is the awful doom that awaits
+the unrepentant sinner."
+
+There was a moment's silence, and then Mrs. Lorimer did an extraordinary
+thing. She turned from him and walked to the door.
+
+"Thank you very much, Stephen," she said, and she spoke with decision
+albeit her voice was not wholly steady. "But I don't feel that that kind
+of diversion would do me much good. I think I shall run up to the nursery
+and see Baby Phil have his bath."
+
+She was gone; but so noiselessly that Mr. Lorimer, turning in his chair
+to rebuke her frivolity, found himself addressing the closed door.
+
+He turned back again with a heavy sigh. There seemed to be some
+disturbing element at work. Time had been when she had deemed it her
+dearest privilege to sit and listen to his sermons. He could not
+understand her refusal of an offer that ought to have delighted her. He
+hoped that her heart was not becoming hardened.
+
+Could he have seen her ascending the stairs at that moment with the tears
+running down her face, he might have realized that that fear at least was
+groundless.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE TICKET OF LEAVE
+
+
+Seated at the schoolroom piano, Piers was thoroughly in his element. He
+had a marvellous gift for making music, and his audience listened
+spell-bound. His own love for it amounted to a passion, inherited, so it
+was said, from his Italian grandmother. He threw his whole soul into the
+instrument under his hands, and played as one inspired.
+
+Jeanie, from her sofa, drank in the music with shining eyes. She had
+never heard anything to compare with it before, and it stirred her to
+the depths.
+
+It stirred Avery also, but in a different way. The personality of the
+player forced itself upon her with a curious insistence, and she had an
+odd feeling that he did it by deliberate intention. Every chord he struck
+seemed to speak to her directly, compelling her attention, dominating her
+will. He was playing to her alone, and, though she chose to ignore the
+fact, she was none the less aware of it. By his music he enthralled her,
+making her see the things he saw, making her feel the fiery unrest that
+throbbed in every beat of his heart.
+
+Gracie, standing beside him, watching with fascinated eyes the strong
+hands that charmed from the old piano such music as probably it had never
+before uttered, was enthralled also, but only in a superficial sense. She
+was keenly interested in the play of his fingers, which seemed to her
+quite wonderful, as indeed it was.
+
+He took no more notice of her admiring gaze than if she had been a fly,
+pouring out his magic flood of music with eyes fixed straight before him
+and lips that were sometimes hard and sometimes tender. He might have
+been a man in a trance.
+
+And then very suddenly the spell was broken. For no apparent reason, he
+fell headlong from his heights and burst into a merry little jig that set
+Gracie dancing like an elf.
+
+He became aware of her then, threw her a laugh, quickened to a mad
+tarantella that nearly whirled her off her feet, finally ended with a
+crashing chord, and whizzed round on the music-stool in time to catch her
+as she fell gasping against him.
+
+"What a featherweight you are!" he laughed. "You'll dance the Thames on
+fire some day. Giddy, what?"
+
+Gracie lay in his arms in a collapsed condition. "You--you made me do
+it!" she panted.
+
+"To be sure!" said Piers. "I'm a wizard. Didn't you know? I can make
+anybody do anything." There was a ring of triumph in his voice.
+
+Jeanie drew a deep breath and nodded from her sofa. "It's called
+hyp--hyp--Aunt Avery, what is the word?"
+
+"Aunt Avery doesn't know," said Piers. "And why Aunt Avery, I wonder?
+You'll be calling me Uncle Piers next."
+
+Both children laughed. "I have a special name for you," Jeanie said.
+
+But Piers was not attending. He cast a daring glance across the room at
+Avery who was darning stockings under the lamp.
+
+"Do they call you Aunt Avery because you are so old?" he enquired, as
+Avery did not respond to it.
+
+She smiled a little. "I expect so," she said.
+
+"Oh no!" said Jeanie politely. "Only because we are children and she is
+grown up."
+
+Piers, with Gracie still lounging comfortably on his knee, bowed to her.
+"I thank your majesty. I appeal to you as queen of this establishment; am
+I--as a grown-up--entitled to drop the title of Aunt when addressing the
+gracious lady in question?"
+
+Again he glanced towards Avery, but she did not raise her eyes. She
+worked on, still with that faint, enigmatical smile about her lips.
+
+Jeanie looked slightly dubious. "I don't think you could ever call her
+Aunt, could you?" she said.
+
+Piers turned upon the music-stool, and with one of Gracie's fingers began
+to pick out an impromptu tune that somehow had a saucy ring.
+
+"I like that," said Gracie, enchanted.
+
+He laughed. "Yes, it's pretty, isn't it? It's--Avery without the Aunt."
+
+He began to elaborate the tune, accompanying it with his left hand, to
+Gracie's huge delight, "Here we come into a minor key," he said, speaking
+obviously and exclusively to Gracie; "this is Avery when she is cross and
+inclined to be down on a fellow. And here we begin to get a little
+excited and breathless; this is Avery in a tantrum, getting angrier and
+angrier every moment." He hammered out his impertinent little melody with
+fevered energy, protest from Gracie notwithstanding. "No, you've never
+seen her in a tantrum of course. Thank your lucky stars you haven't! It's
+an awful sight, take my word for it! She calls you a brute and nearly
+knocks you down with a horsewhip." The music became very descriptive at
+this point; then gradually returned to the original refrain, somewhat
+amplified and embellished. "This is Avery in her everyday mood--sweet and
+kind and reasonable,--the Avery we all know and love--with just a hint
+of what the French call _'diablerie'_ to make her--_tout-a-fait
+adorable_."
+
+He cast his eyes up at the ceiling, and then, releasing Gracie's hand,
+brought his impromptu to a close with a few soft chords.
+
+"Here endeth the Avery Symphony!" he declared, swinging round again on
+the music-stool. "I could show you another Avery, but she is not on view
+to everybody. It's quite possible that she has never seen herself yet."
+
+He got up with the words, tweaked Gracie's hair, caressed Jeanie's, and
+strolled across to the fire beside which Avery sat with her work.
+
+"It's awfully kind of you to tolerate me like this," he said.
+
+"Isn't it?" said Avery, without raising her eyes.
+
+He looked down at her, an odd gleam in his own that came and went like a
+leaping flame.
+
+"You suffer fools gladly, don't you?" he said, a queer inflection that
+was half a challenge in his voice.
+
+She frowned very slightly above her stocking. "Not particularly," she
+said.
+
+"You bear with them then?" Piers tone was insistent.
+
+She paused as though considering her reply. "I generally try to avoid
+them," she said finally.
+
+"You keep aloof--and darn stockings," suggested Piers.
+
+"And listen to your music," said Avery.
+
+"Do you like my music?" He shot the question at her imperiously.
+
+Avery nodded.
+
+"Really? You do really?" There was boyish eagerness about him now. He
+leaned towards her, his brown face aglow.
+
+She nodded again. "Do you ever--write music?"
+
+"No," said Piers.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+He answered with a curious touch of bitterness. "No one would understand
+it if I did."
+
+"But what a mistake!" she said.
+
+"Is it? Why?" His voice sounded stubborn.
+
+She looked suddenly straight up at him and spoke with impulsive warmth.
+"Because it is quite beside the point. It wouldn't matter to anyone but
+yourself whether people understood it or not. Of course popularity is
+pleasant. Everyone likes it. But do you suppose the really big people
+think at all about the world's opinion when they are at work? They just
+give of their best because nothing less would satisfy them, but they
+don't do it because they want to be appreciated by the crowd. Genius
+always gets above the crowd. It's only those who can't rise above their
+critics who really care what the critics say."
+
+She stopped. Her face was flushed, her eyes kindling; but she lowered
+them very suddenly and returned to her work. For the fitful gleam in
+Piers' eyes had leaped in response to a blaze so hot, so ardent, that she
+could not meet it unflinching.
+
+She was oddly grateful to him when he passed her brief confusion by as
+though he had not seen it. "So I'm a genius, am I?" he said, and laughed
+a careless laugh. "Are you listening, Queen of my heart? Aunt Avery says
+I'm a genius."
+
+He moved to Jeanie's sofa, and sat down on the edge of it. Her hand stole
+instantly into his.
+
+"Yes, of course," she said, in her soft, tired voice. "That's what I
+meant when I was trying to remember that other word--the word that
+begins 'hyp.'"
+
+"Hypnotism," said Avery very quietly.
+
+Piers laughed again. "It's a word you don't understand, my Queen of all
+good fairies. It's only the naughty fairies--the will-o'-the-wisps and
+the hobgoblins--that know anything about it. It's a wicked spell
+concocted by the King of Evil himself, and it's only under that spell
+that his prisoners ever see the light. It's the one ticket of leave from
+the dungeons, and they must either use it or die in the dark."
+
+Jeanie was listening with a puzzled frown, but Gracie's imagination was
+instantly fired.
+
+"Do go on!" she said eagerly. "I know what a ticket of leave is. Nurse's
+uncle had one. It means you have to go back after a certain time,
+doesn't it?"
+
+"Exactly," said Piers grimly. "When the ticket expires."
+
+"But I don't see," began Jeanie. Her face was flushed and a little
+distressed. "How can hypnotism be like--like a ticket of leave?"
+
+"I told you you wouldn't understand," said Piers. "You see you've got to
+realize what hypnotism is before you can know what it's like. It's really
+the art of imposing one's will upon someone else's, of making that other
+person see things as you want them to see them--not as they really are.
+It's the power of deception carried to a superlative degree. And when
+that power is exhausted, the ticket may be said to have expired--and the
+prisoner returns to the dungeon. Sometimes he takes the other person with
+him. Sometimes he goes alone."
+
+He stopped abruptly as a hand rapped smartly on the door.
+
+Avery looked up again from her work. "Come in!" she said.
+
+"It's the doctor!" whispered Gracie to Piers. "Bother him!"
+
+Piers laughed with his lower lip between his teeth, and Lennox Tudor
+opened the door and paused upon the threshold.
+
+Avery rose to receive him, but his look passed her almost instantly and
+rested frowningly upon Piers.
+
+"Enter the Lord High Executioner!" said Piers flippantly. "Well? Who is
+the latest victim? And what have you come here for?"
+
+The doctor came in. He shook hands with Avery, and turned at once to
+Piers.
+
+"I have come to see my patient," he said aggressively.
+
+"Have you?" said Piers. "So have I." He stood up, squaring his broad
+shoulders. "And I'm coming again--by special invitation." His dark eyes
+flung a gibe with the words.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Evesham!" said Avery somewhat pointedly.
+
+He turned sharply, and took her extended hand with elaborate courtesy.
+
+"Good-bye,--Mrs. Denys!" he said.
+
+"I'll come down and see you off," cried Gracie, attaching herself to
+his free arm.
+
+"Ah! Wait a bit!" said Piers. "I haven't said good-bye to the Queen of
+the fairies yet."
+
+He dropped upon one knee by Jeanie's sofa. Her arm slid round his neck.
+
+"When will you come again?" she whispered.
+
+"When do you hold your next court?" he whispered back.
+
+She smiled, her pale face close to his. "I love to see you--always," she
+said. "Come just any time!"
+
+"Shall I?" said Piers.
+
+He was looking straight into the tired, blue eyes, and his own were soft
+with a tenderness that must have charmed any child to utter confidence.
+She lifted her lips to his. "As often as ever you can," she murmured.
+
+He kissed her. "I will. Good-night, my Queen!"
+
+"Good-night," she answered softly, "dear Sir Galahad!"
+
+Avery had a glimpse of Piers' face as he went away, and she wondered
+momentarily at the look it wore.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SPORT
+
+
+It was the day before Christmas Eve, and Avery had been shopping.
+
+She and Mrs. Lorimer were preparing a Christmas Tree for the children, a
+secret to which only Jeanie had been admitted. The tree itself was
+already procured and hidden away in a corner of the fruit cupboard--to
+which special sanctum Mrs. Lorimer and Avery alone had access. But the
+numerous gifts and ornaments which they had been manufacturing for weeks
+were safely stored in a corner of Avery's own room. It was to complete
+this store that Avery had been down into Rodding that afternoon, and she
+was returning laden and somewhat wearied.
+
+The red light of a cloudy winter sunset lay behind her. Ahead of her, now
+veiled, now splendidly revealed, there hung a marvellous, glimmering
+star. A little weight of sadness was dragging at her heart, but she would
+not give it place or so much as acknowledge its presence. She hummed a
+carol as she went, stepping lightly through the muddy fields.
+
+The frost had given place to an unseasonable warmth, and there had been
+some heavy rain earlier in the day. It was threatening to rain again. In
+fact, as she mounted her second stile, the first drops of what promised
+to be a sharp shower began to fall. She cast a hasty glance around for
+shelter, and spied some twenty yards away against the hedge a hut which
+had probably been erected for the use of some shepherd. Swiftly she made
+for it, reaching it just as the shower became a downpour.
+
+There was neither door nor window to the place, but an ancient shutter
+which had evidently done duty for the former was lodged against the wall
+immediately inside.
+
+She had to stoop to enter, and but for the pelting rain she might have
+hesitated to do so; for the darkness within was complete. But once in,
+she turned her face back to the dying light of the sunset and saw that
+the rain would not last.
+
+At the same moment she heard a curious sound behind her, a panting,
+coughing sound as of some creature in distress, and something stirred in
+the furthest corner. Sharply she turned, and out of the darkness two wild
+green eyes glared up at her.
+
+Avery's heart gave a great jerk. Instinctively she drew back. Her first
+impulse was to turn and flee, but something--something which at the
+moment she could not define--prompted her to remain. The frantic terror
+of those eyes appealed to that in her which was greater than her own
+personal fear.
+
+She paused therefore, and in the pause there came to her ears a swelling
+tumult that arose from the ridge of an eminence a couple of fields away.
+Right well Avery knew that sound. In the far-off days of her early
+girlhood it had quickened her pulses many a time. It was enough even now
+to set every nerve throbbing with a tense excitement.
+
+She turned her face once more to the open, and as she did so she heard
+again in the hut behind her that agonized sound, half-cough, half-whine,
+of an animal exhausted and in the extremity of mortal fear.
+
+It was enough for Avery. She grasped the situation on the instant, and
+on the instant she acted. She felt as if a helpless and tortured being
+had cried to her for deliverance, and all that was great in her
+responded to the cry.
+
+She seized the crazy shutter that was propped against the wall, put forth
+her strength, and lifted it out into the open. It was no easy matter to
+set it securely against the low doorway. She wondered afterwards how she
+did it; at the time she tore her gloves to ribbons with the exertion, but
+yet was scarcely aware of making any.
+
+When the pack swept across the grass in a single yelling, heaving mass,
+she was ready. She leaned against the improvised door with arms
+outstretched and resolutely faced the swarming, piebald multitude.
+
+In a moment the hounds were upon her. She was waist-deep in them. They
+leapt almost to her shoulders in their madness, smothering her with mud
+and slobber. For a second or two the red eyes and gaping jaws made even
+Avery's brave heart quail. But she stood her ground, ordering them back
+with breathless insistence. They must have thought her a maniac, she
+reflected afterwards. At the time she fully expected to be torn in
+pieces, and was actually surprised when they suddenly parted and swept
+round the hut, encircling it with deep-mouthed baying.
+
+The huntsman, arriving on the scene, found her white-faced but still
+determined, still firmly propping the shutter in place with the weight of
+her body. He called the hounds to order with hoarse oaths and furious
+crackings of the whip, and as he did so the rest of the field began to
+arrive, a laughing, trampling crowd of sportsmen who dropped into
+staring, astounded silence as they reached the scene.
+
+And then the huntsman addressed Avery with sardonic affability.
+
+"P'r'aps now, miss, you'd be good enough to step aside and let the 'ounds
+attend to business."
+
+But Avery, with eyes that blazed in her pale face, made scathing answer.
+
+"You shan't kill the poor brute like a rat in a trap. He deserves better
+than that. You had your chance of killing in the open, and you failed. It
+isn't sport to kill in the dark."
+
+"We'll soon have 'im out," said the huntsman grimly.
+
+She shook her head. Her hands, in the ripped gloves, were clenched and
+quivering.
+
+The huntsman slashed and swore at one of the hounds to relieve his
+feelings, and looked for inspiration to the growing crowd of riders.
+
+One of them, the M.F.H., Colonel Rose of Wardenhurst, pushed his horse
+forward. He raised his hat with extreme courtliness.
+
+"Madam," he said, "while appreciating your courage, allow me to point out
+that that fox is now the legal property of the Hunt, and you have no
+right whatever to deprive us of it."
+
+His daughter Ina, a slim girl of twenty, was at his elbow. She jogged it
+impatiently. "He'll remain our property whether we kill or not, Dad. Let
+him live to run again!"
+
+"What?" cried a voice in the rear. "Let a woman interfere? Great Heavens
+above, Barchard! Have you gone mad?"
+
+Barchard the huntsman glanced round uneasily as an old man on a powerful
+white horse forced his way to the front. His grey eyes glowered down at
+Avery as though he would slay her. The trampling hoofs came within a yard
+of her. But if he thought to make her desert her post by that means, he
+was mistaken. She stood there, actually waiting to be hustled by the
+fretting animal, and yielding not an inch.
+
+"Stand aside!" thundered Sir Beverley. "Confound you! Stand aside!"
+
+But Avery never stirred. She faced him panting but unflinching. The foam
+of his hunter splashed her, the mud from the stamping hoofs struck
+upwards on her face; but still she stood to defend the defenceless thing
+behind her.
+
+She often wondered afterwards what Sir Beverley would have done had he
+been left to settle the matter in his own way. She was horribly afraid,
+but she certainly would never have yielded to aught but brute force.
+
+But at this juncture there came a sudden diversion. Another voice made
+itself heard in furious protest. Another horse was spurred forward; and
+Piers, white to the lips, with eyes of awful flame, leaned from his
+saddle and with his left hand caught Sir Beverley's bridle, dragging his
+animal back.
+
+What he said Avery did not hear; it was spoken under his breath. But she
+saw a terrible look flash like an evil spirit into Sir Beverley's face.
+She saw his right arm go up, and heard his riding-crop descend with a
+sound like a pistol-shot upon Piers' shoulders.
+
+It was a horrible sight and one which she was never to forget. Both
+horses began to leap madly, the one Sir Beverley rode finally rearing and
+being pulled down again by Piers who hung on to the bridle like grim
+death, his head bent, his shoulders wholly exposed to those crashing
+merciless blows.
+
+They reeled away at length through the crowd, which scattered in dismay
+to let them pass, but for many seconds it seemed to Avery that the
+awful struggle went on in the dusk as Piers dragged his grandfather
+from the spot.
+
+A great weakness had begun to assail her. Her knees were quivering under
+her. She wondered what the next move would be, and felt utterly powerless
+to put forth any further effort. And then she heard Ina Rose's clear
+young voice.
+
+"Barchard, take the hounds back to kennels! I'm sure we've all had enough
+for one day."
+
+"Hear, hear!" said a man in the crowd.
+
+And Ina laughed. "Thank you, Dick! Come along, Dad! Leave the horrid old
+fox alone! Don't you think we ought to go and separate Sir Beverley and
+Piers? What an old pepper-pot he is!"
+
+"Piers isn't much better," remarked the man she had called Dick. His
+proper appellation was Richard Guyes, but his friends never stood on
+ceremony with him.
+
+The girl laughed again inconsequently. She was spoken of by some as the
+spoilt beauty of the county. "Oh, Piers is stuffed tight with gunpowder
+as everybody knows. He explodes at a touch. Get along, Barchard! What are
+you waiting for? I told you to take the hounds home."
+
+Barchard looked at the Colonel.
+
+"I suppose you'd better," the latter said. He threw a glance of
+displeasure at Avery. "It's a most unheard of affair altogether, but I
+admit there's not much to be said for a kill in cold blood. Yes, take
+'em home!"
+
+Barchard made a savage cut at two of the hounds who were scratching and
+whimpering at a tiny chink in the boarding, and with surly threats
+collected the pack and moved off.
+
+The rest of the field melted away into the deepening dusk. Ina and Dick
+Guyes were among the last to go. They moved off side by side.
+
+"It'll be the laugh of the county," the man said, "but, egad, I like
+her pluck."
+
+And in answer the girl laughed again, a careless, merry laugh. "Yes, I
+wonder who she is. A friend of Piers' apparently. Did you see what a
+stiff fury he was in?"
+
+"It was a fairly stiff flogging," remarked Guyes. "Ye gods! I wonder how
+he stood it."
+
+"Oh, Piers can stand anything," said Ina unconcernedly. "He's as strong
+as an ox."
+
+The voices dwindled and died in the distance. The dusk deepened. A sense
+of utter forlornness, utter weariness, came upon Avery. The struggle was
+over, and she had emerged triumphant; but it did not seem to matter. She
+could think only of those awful blows raining down upon the defenceless
+shoulders of the boy who had championed her. And, leaning there in the
+drizzling wet, she covered her face with her hands and wept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE STAR OF HOPE
+
+
+There came the swift drumming of galloping hoofs, the check and pause of
+a leap, and then close at hand the thud of those same hoofs landing on
+the near side of the hedge. The rider slithered to the ground, patted the
+animal's neck, and turned forthwith towards the hut. Avery heard nought
+of his coming. She was crying like a weak, unnerved woman, draggled and
+mud-spattered, unspeakably distressed. It was so seldom that she gave way
+that perhaps the failure of her self-control was the more absolute when
+it came. She had been tried beyond her strength. Body and mind were alike
+exhausted.
+
+But when strong arms suddenly encircled her and she found herself drawn
+close to a man's breast, quick and instinctive came the impulse to
+resist. She drew back from him with a sharp exclamation.
+
+"It's only me," said Piers. "Surely you don't mind me!"
+
+It was naively expressed, so naively that she assayed to laugh in the
+midst of her woe. "Oh, how you startled me!" was all she found to say.
+
+"But surely you knew I was coming back!" he said.
+
+The dogged note was in his voice. It embarrassed her subtly. Seeing his
+face through the deepening gloom, it seemed to her to be set in stern,
+unyielding lines.
+
+She collected her scattered forces, and gently put his arms away from
+her. "It was very kind of you, Mr. Evesham," she said. "But please
+remember that I'm not Jeanie!"
+
+He made an impulsive movement of impatience. "I never pretended you
+were," he said gruffly. "But you were crying, weren't you? Why were
+you crying?"
+
+His tone was almost aggressive. He seemed to be angry, but whether with
+her, himself, or a third person, Avery could not determine.
+
+She decided that the situation demanded firmness, and proceeded to treat
+it accordingly.
+
+"I was very foolish to cry," she said. "I have quite recovered now, so
+please forget it! It was very kind of you to take my part a little while
+ago--especially as you couldn't have been really in sympathy with me.
+Thank you very much!"
+
+Again he made that gesture of imperious impatience. "Oh, don't be so
+beastly formal! I can't stand it. If it had been any other man
+threatening you, I believe I should have killed him!"
+
+He spoke with concentrated passion, but Avery was resolved not to be
+tragic. She was striving to get back to wholesome commonplace.
+
+"What a good thing it wasn't!" she said. "I shouldn't have cared to have
+been responsible for that. I had quite enough to answer for as it was. I
+hope you will make peace with your grandfather as soon as possible."
+
+Piers laughed a savage laugh. "He broke his whip over me. Do you think
+I'm going to make peace with him for that?"
+
+"Oh, Piers!" she exclaimed in distress.
+
+It was out before she could check it--that involuntary use of his
+Christian name for which it seemed to her afterwards he had been
+deliberately lying in wait.
+
+He did not take immediate advantage of her slip, but she knew that he
+noticed it, registered it as it were for future reference.
+
+"No," he said moodily, after a pause. "I don't think the debt is on my
+side this time. He had the satisfaction of flogging me with the whole
+Hunt looking on." There was sullen resentment in his tone, and then very
+suddenly to Avery's amazement he began to laugh. "It was worth it anyway,
+so we won't cavil about the price. How much longer are you going to
+bottle up that unfortunate brute? Don't you think it's time he went home
+to his wife?"
+
+Avery moved away from the shutter against which she had stood so long. "I
+couldn't let him be killed," she said. "You won't understand, of course.
+But I simply couldn't."
+
+"Why shouldn't I understand?" said Piers. "You threw that in my teeth
+before. I don't know why."
+
+His tone baffled her. She could not tell whether he spoke in jest or
+earnest. She refrained from answering him, and in the silence that
+followed he lifted the shutter away from the hut entrance and looked
+inside. Avery's basket of purchases lay at his feet. He picked it up.
+"Come along! He's crouched up in the corner, and his eyes look as if he
+thought all the devils in hell were after him. Odd as it may seem to you,
+I can understand his feelings--and yours. Let's go, and leave him to
+escape in peace!"
+
+He took her arm as naturally as though he had a right, and led her
+away. Her basket was in his other hand in which he carried his
+riding-whip also. He whistled over his shoulder to his horse who
+followed him like a dog.
+
+The rain was gradually ceasing, but the clouds had wholly closed upon the
+sunset. Avery did not want to walk in silence, but somehow she could not
+help it. His hold upon her arm was as light as a feather, but she could
+not help that either for the moment. She walked as one beneath a spell.
+
+And before them the clouds slowly parted, and again there shone that
+single, magic star, dazzingly pure against the darkness.
+
+"Do you see that?" said Piers suddenly.
+
+She assented almost under her breath.
+
+For a moment she was conscious of the tightening of his hand at her
+elbow. "It's the Star of Hope, Avery," he whispered. "Yours--and mine."
+He stopped with the words. "Don't say anything!" he said hurriedly.
+"Pretend you didn't hear, if--if you wish you hadn't. Goodbye!"
+
+He thrust her basket into her hand, and turned from her.
+
+A moment he stood as if to give her the opportunity of detaining him
+if she so desired, and then as she made no sign he went to his horse
+who waited a couple of yards away, mounted, and without word or salute
+rode away.
+
+Avery drew a deep, deep breath and walked on. There was a curious
+sensation at her heart--almost a trapped feeling--such as she had never
+before experienced. Again deeply she drew her breath, as if to rid
+herself of some oppression. Life was difficult--life was difficult!
+
+But presently, as she walked, the sense of oppression lessened. She
+even faintly smiled to herself. What an odd, passionate youth he was!
+It was impossible to be angry with him; better far not to take him
+seriously at all.
+
+She recalled old Mrs. Marshall's dour remarks concerning him;--"brought
+up by men from his cradle," brought up, moreover, by that terrible old
+Sir Beverley on the one hand and an irresponsible French valet on the
+other. She caught herself wishing that she had had the upbringing of him,
+and smiled again. There was a great deal of sweetness in his nature; of
+that she was sure, and because of it she found she could forgive his
+waywardness, reflecting that he had probably been mismanaged from his
+earliest infancy.
+
+At this point she reached the high-road, and heard the wheels of a
+dog-cart behind her. She recognized the quick, hard trot of the doctor's
+cob, and paused at the side of the road to let him pass. But the doctor's
+eyes behind their glasses were keen as a hawk's. He recognized her, the
+deepening dusk notwithstanding, while he was still some yards from her,
+and pulled in his horse to a walk.
+
+"Jump up!" he said. "I'm going your way."
+
+He reached down a hand to her, and Avery mounted beside him. "How lucky
+for me!" she said.
+
+"Tired, eh?" he questioned.
+
+She laughed a little. "Oh no, not really. But it's nice to get a lift.
+Were you coming to see Jeanie?"
+
+"Yes," said Tudor briefly.
+
+She glanced at him, caught by something in his tone. "Dr. Tudor," she
+said, after a moment's hesitation, "are you--altogether--satisfied
+about her?"
+
+Tudor was looking at his horse's ears; for some reason he was holding the
+animal in to a walk. "I am quite satisfied with regard to the fracture,"
+he said. "She will soon be on her legs again."
+
+His words were deliberately wary. Avery felt a little tremor of
+apprehension go through her.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't consider her very strong," she said uneasily.
+
+He did not at once reply. She had a feeling that he was debating within
+himself as to the advisability of replying at all. And then quite
+suddenly he turned his head and spoke. "Mrs. Denys, you are accustomed to
+hearing other people's burdens, so I may as well tell you the truth. I
+can't say--because I don't know--if there is anything radically wrong
+with that little girl; but she has no stamina whatever. If she had to
+contend with anything serious, things would go very badly with her. In
+any case--" he paused.
+
+"Yes?" said Avery.
+
+Tudor had become wary again. "Perhaps I have said enough," he said.
+
+"I don't know why you should hesitate to speak quite openly," she
+rejoined steadily. "As you say, I am a bearer of burdens. And I don't
+think I am easily frightened."
+
+"I am sure you are not," he said. "If I may be allowed to say so, I think
+you are essentially a woman to be relied on. If I did not think so, I
+certainly should not have spoken as I have done."
+
+"Then will you tell me what it is that you fear for her?" Avery said.
+
+He was looking straight at her through the gloom, but she could not see
+his eyes behind their glasses. "Well," he said somewhat brusquely at
+length, "to be quite honest, I fear--mind you, I only fear--some trouble,
+possibly merely some delicacy, of the lungs. Without a careful
+examination I cannot speak definitely. But I think there is little room
+for doubt that the tendency is there."
+
+"I see," Avery said. She was silent a moment; then, "You have not
+considered it advisable to say this to her father?" she said.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "Would it make any difference?"
+
+Avery was silent.
+
+He went on with gathering force. "I went to him once, Mrs. Denys,--once
+only--about his wife's health. I told him in plain language that she
+needed every care, every consideration, that without these she would
+probably lose all her grip on life and become a confirmed invalid with
+shattered nerves. I was very explicit. I told him the straight,
+unvarnished truth. I didn't like my job, but I felt it must be done. And
+he--good man--laughed in my face, begged me to croak no more, and assured
+me that he was fully capable of managing all his affairs, including his
+wife and family, in his own way. He was touring in Switzerland when the
+last child was born."
+
+"Hound!" said Avery, in a low voice.
+
+Tudor uttered a brief laugh, and abruptly quitted the subject. "That
+little girl needs very careful watching, Mrs. Denys. She should never be
+allowed to overtire herself, mentally or physically. And if she should
+develop any untoward symptom, for Heaven's sake don't hesitate to send
+for me! I shan't blame you for being too careful."
+
+"I understand," Avery said.
+
+He flicked his horse's ears, and the animal broke into a trot.
+
+When Tudor spoke again, it was upon a totally different matter. His voice
+was slightly aggressive as he said: "That Evesham boy seems to be for
+ever turning up at the Vicarage now. He's an ill-mannered cub. I wonder
+you encourage him."
+
+"Do I encourage him?" Avery asked.
+
+He made a movement of irritation. "He would scarcely be such a constant
+visitor if you didn't."
+
+Avery smiled faintly and not very humorously in the darkness. "It is
+Jeanie he comes to see," she observed.
+
+"Oh, obviously." Tudor's retort was so ironical as to be almost rude.
+
+She received it in silence, and after a moment he made a half-grudging
+amendment.
+
+"He never showed any interest in Jeanie before, you know. I don't think
+she is the sole attraction."
+
+"No?" said Avery.
+
+Her response was perfectly courteous, but so vague that it sounded to
+Lennox Tudor as if she were thinking of something else. He clenched his
+hand hard upon the handle of his whip.
+
+"People tolerate him for the sake of his position," he said bitterly.
+"But to my mind he is insufferable. His father was a scapegrace, as
+everyone knows. His mother was a circus girl. And his grandmother--an
+Italian--was divorced by Sir Beverley before they had been married
+two years."
+
+"Oh!" Avery emerged from her vagueness and turned towards him. "Lady
+Evesham was Italian, was she? That accounts for his appearance, doesn't
+it? That air of the old Roman patrician about him; you must have
+noticed it?"
+
+"He's handsome enough," admitted Tudor.
+
+"Oh, very handsome," said Avery. "I should say that for that type his
+face was almost faultless. I wondered where he got it from. Sir Beverley
+is patrician too, but in a different way." She stopped to bow to a tall,
+gaunt lady at the side of the road. "That is Miss Whalley. Didn't you see
+her? I expect she has just come from the Vicarage. She was going to
+discuss the scheme for the Christmas decorations with the Vicar."
+
+"She's good at scheming," growled Tudor.
+
+Avery became silent again. At the Vicarage gates however very suddenly
+and sweetly she spoke. "Dr. Tudor, forgive me,--but isn't it rather a
+pity to let oneself get intolerant? It does spoil life so."
+
+He looked at her. "There's not much in my life that could spoil," he
+said gloomily.
+
+She laughed a little, but not derisively. "But there's always something,
+isn't there? Have you no sense of humour?"
+
+He pulled up at the Vicarage gates. "I have a sense of the ridiculous,"
+he said bluntly. "And I detest it in the person of Miss Whalley."
+
+"I believe you detest a good many people," Avery said, as she descended.
+
+He laughed himself at that. "But I am capable of appreciating the few,"
+he said. "Mind the step! And don't trouble to wait for me! I've got to
+tie this animal up."
+
+He stopped to do so, and Avery opened the gate and walked slowly
+up the path.
+
+At the porch she paused to await him, and turned her face for a moment to
+the darkening sky. But the Star of Hope was veiled.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A PAIR OF GLOVES
+
+
+"Piers! Where the devil are you, Piers?"
+
+There was loud exasperation in the query as Sir Beverley halted in the
+doorway of his grandson's bedroom.
+
+There was a moment's pause; then Victor the valet came quickly forward.
+
+"But, _Monsieur Pierre_, he bathe himself," he explained, with beady eyes
+running over the gaunt old figure in the entrance.
+
+Sir Beverley growled at him inarticulately and turned away.
+
+A moment later he was beating a rousing tattoo on the bathroom-door.
+"Piers! Let me in! Do you hear? Let me in!"
+
+The vigorous splashing within came to a sudden stop. "That you, sir?"
+called Piers.
+
+"Of course it's me!" shouted back Sir Beverley, shaking the door
+with fierce impatience. "Damn it, let me in! I'll force the door if
+you don't."
+
+"No, don't, sir; don't! I'm coming!"
+
+There came the sound of a splashing leap, and bare feet raced across the
+bathroom floor. The door was wrenched from Sir Beverley's grasp, and
+flung open. Piers, quite naked, stood back and bowed him in with
+elaborate ceremony.
+
+Sir Beverley entered and glared at him.
+
+Piers shut the door and took a flying jump back into the bath. The room
+was dense with steam.
+
+"You don't mind if I go on with my wash, do you?" he said. "I shall be
+late for dinner if I don't."
+
+"What in thunder do you want to boil yourself like this for?" demanded
+Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers, seated with his hands clasped round his knees, looked up with the
+smile of an infant. "It suits my constitution, sir," he said. "I freeze
+myself in the morning and boil myself at night--always. By that means I
+am rendered impervious to all atmospheric changes of temperature."
+
+"You're a fool, Piers," said Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers laughed, a gay, indifferent laugh. "That all?" he said lightly.
+
+"No, it isn't all." Sir Beverley's voice had a curious forced ring,
+almost as if he were stern in spite of himself. "I came to ask--and I
+mean to know--" He broke off. "What the devil have you done to your
+shoulders?"
+
+Piers' hands unlocked as if at the touch of a spring. He slipped down
+backwards into the bath and lay with the water lapping round his black
+head. His eyes, black also, and very straight and resolute, looked up at
+Sir Beverley.
+
+"Look here, sir; if there's anything you want to know I'll tell you after
+dinner. I thought--possibly--you'd come to shake hands, or I shouldn't
+have been in such a hurry to let you in. As it is,--"
+
+"Confound you, Piers!" broke in Sir Beverley. "Don't preach to me! Sit up
+again! Do you hear? Sit up, and let me look at you!"
+
+But Piers made no movement to comply. "No, sir; thanks all the same. I
+don't want to be looked at. Do you mind going now? I'm going to splash."
+
+His tone was deliberately jaunty, but it held undoubted determination.
+He kept his eyes unswervingly on his grandfather's face.
+
+Sir Beverley stood his ground, however, his black brows fiercely drawn.
+"Get up, Piers!" he ordered, his tone no longer blustering, but curtly
+peremptory. "Get up, do you hear?" he added with a gleam of humour. "You
+may as well give in at once, you young mule. You'll have to in the end."
+
+"Shall I?" said Piers.
+
+And then suddenly his own sense of humour was kindled again, and he
+uttered his boyish laugh.
+
+"We won't quarrel about it, what?" he said, and stretched a wet hand
+upwards. "Let's consider the incident closed! There's nothing whatever to
+be fashed about."
+
+Sir Beverley's thin lips twitched a little. He pulled at the hand, and
+slowly Piers yielded. The water dripped from his shoulders. They gleamed
+in the strong light like a piece of faultless statuary, godlike, superbly
+strong. But it was upon no splendour of form that Sir Beverley's
+attention was focussed.
+
+He spoke after a moment, an odd note of contrition in his voice. "I
+didn't mean to mark you like that, boy. It was your own doing of course.
+You shouldn't have interfered with me. Still--"
+
+"Oh, rats!" said Piers, beginning to splash. "What's a whacking more or
+less when you're used to 'em?"
+
+His dark eyes laughed their impudent dismissal to the old man. It was
+very evident that he desired to put an end to the matter, and after a
+moment Sir Beverley grunted and withdrew.
+
+He had not asked what he wanted to know; somehow it had not been
+possible. He had desired to put his question in a whirl of righteous
+indignation, but in some fashion Piers had disarmed him and it had
+remained unuttered.
+
+The very sight of the straight, young figure had quenched the fire of
+his wrath. Confound the boy! Did he think he could insult him as he had
+insulted him only that afternoon and then twist him round his little
+finger? He would have it out with him presently. He would have the truth
+and no compromise, if he had to wring it out of him. He would--Again the
+vision of those strong young shoulders, with red stripes crossing their
+gleaming white surface, rose before Sir Beverley. He swore a strangled
+oath. No, he hadn't meant to punish the boy to that extent, his infernal
+impudence notwithstanding. It wasn't the first time he had thrashed him,
+and, egad, it mightn't be the last. But he hadn't meant to administer
+quite such a punishment as that. It was decent of the young rascal not to
+sulk after it, though he wasn't altogether sure that he approved of the
+light fashion with which Piers had elected to treat the whole episode. It
+looked as if he had not wholly taken to heart the lesson Sir Beverley had
+intended to convey, and if that were the case--again Sir Beverley swore
+deep in his soul--he was fully equal to repeating it, ay, and again
+repeating it, until the youngster came to heel. He never had endured any
+nonsense from Piers, and, by Gad, he never would!
+
+With these reflections he stumped downstairs, and seated himself on the
+black, oaken settle in the hall to await the boy's advent.
+
+The fire blazed cheerily, flinging ruddy gleams upon the shining suits of
+armour, roaring up the chimney in a sheet of flame. Sir Beverley sat
+facing the stairs, the grim lines hardened to implacability about his
+mouth, his eyes fixed in a stare that had in it something brutal. He was
+seeing again that slim, straight figure of womanhood standing in his
+path, with arms outstretched, and white, determined face upraised,
+barring the way.
+
+"Curse her!" he growled. "Curse 'em all!"
+
+The vision grew before his gaze of hate; and now she was no longer
+standing between him and a mere, defenceless animal. But there, on his
+own stairs, erect and fearless, she withstood him, while behind her,
+descending with a laugh on his lips and worship in his eyes, came Piers.
+
+The stone-grey eyes became suffused; for a few, whirling moments of
+bewilderment and fury, they saw all things red. Then, gradually, the mist
+cleared, and the old man dropped back in a lounging posture with an ugly
+sound in his throat that was like a snarl. Doubtless that was her game;
+doubtless--doubtless! He had always known that a day would come when
+something of the kind would happen. Piers was young, wealthy,
+handsome,--a catch for any woman; but--fiercely he swore it--he should
+fall a prey to no schemer. When he married--as marry eventually he
+must--he should make an alliance of which any man might be proud. The
+Evesham blood should mix with none but the highest. In Piers he would see
+the father's false step counteracted. He thanked Heaven that he had never
+been able to detect in the boy any trace of the piece of cheap prettiness
+that had given him birth. He might have been his own son, son of the
+woman who had been the rapture and the ruin of his life. There were times
+when Sir Beverley almost wished he had been, albeit in the bitterness of
+his soul he had never had any love for the child she had borne him.
+
+He had never wanted to love Piers either, but somehow the matter had not
+rested with him. From the arms of Victor, Piers had always yearned to his
+grandfather, wailing lustily till he found himself held to the hard old
+heart that had nought but harshness and intolerance for all the world
+beside. He had as it were taken that unwilling heart by storm, claiming
+it as his right before he was out of his cradle. And later the attachment
+between them had grown and thriven, for Piers had never relinquished the
+ground he had won in babyhood. By sheer arrogance of possession he had
+held his own till the impetuous ardour of his affection and the utter
+fearlessness on which it was founded had made of him the cherished idol
+of the heart which had tried to shut him out. Sir Beverley gloried in the
+boy though he still flattered himself that no one suspected the fact, and
+still believed that his rule was a rule of stern discipline under which
+Piers might chafe but against which he would never openly revolt.
+
+He could not remember a single occasion upon which he had not been able
+to master Piers, possibly after a fierce struggle but always with
+absolute completeness in the end. And there was so much of sweetness in
+the youngster's nature that, unruly though he might be, he never nurtured
+a grievance. He would fight for his own way to the last of his strength,
+but when beaten he always yielded with a good grace. To his grandfather
+alone he could submit without any visible wound to his pride. Who could
+help glorying in a boy like that?
+
+David the butler, a man of infinite respectability, came softly into the
+hall and approached his master.
+
+"Are you ready for dinner, Sir Beverley?"
+
+"No," snapped Sir Beverley. "Can't you see Master Piers isn't here?"
+
+"Very good, sir," murmured David, and retired decorously, fading into
+the background without the faintest sound, while Caesar the Dalmatian
+who had entered with him lay sedately down in well-bred silence at Sir
+Beverley's feet.
+
+There fell a pause, while Sir Beverley's eyes returned to the wide oak
+staircase, watching it ceaselessly, with vulture-like intentness. Then
+after the passage of minutes, there came the sound of feet that literally
+scampered along the corridor above, and in a moment, with meteor-like
+suddenness, Piers flashed into view.
+
+He seemed to descend the stairs without touching them, and was greeted
+at the foot by Caesar, who leapt to meet him with wide-mouthed delight.
+
+"Hullo, you scamp, hullo!" laughed Piers, responding to the dog's
+caresses with a careless hand. "Out of the way with you! I'm late."
+
+"As usual," observed Sir Beverley, leaning slowly forward, still with his
+eyes unblinkingly fixed upon his grandson's merry face. "Come here, boy!"
+
+Piers came to him unabashed.
+
+Sir Beverley got heavily to his feet and took him by the shoulder. "Who
+is that woman, Piers?" he said, regarding him piercingly.
+
+Piers' forehead was instantly drawn by a quick frown. He stood passive,
+but there was a suggestion of resistance about him notwithstanding.
+
+"Whom do you mean, sir?" he said. "What woman?"
+
+"You know very well who I mean," snarled Sir Beverley. "Come, I'll have
+none of your damn' nonsense. Never have stood it and never will. Who was
+that white-faced cat that got in my way this afternoon and helped you to
+a thrashing? Eh, Piers? Who was she, I say? Who was she?"
+
+Piers made a sharp involuntary movement of the hands, and as swiftly
+restrained himself. He looked his grandfather full in the face.
+
+"Ask me after dinner, sir," he said, speaking with something of an
+effort, "and I'll tell you all I know."
+
+"You'll tell me now!" declared Sir Beverley, shaking the shoulder he
+gripped with savage impatience.
+
+But Piers put up a quick hand and stopped him. "No, sir, not now. Come
+and dine first! I've no mind to go dinnerless to bed. Come, sir, don't
+badger me!" He smiled suddenly and very winningly into the stern grey
+eyes. "There's all the evening before us, and I shan't shirk."
+
+He drew the bony old hand away from his shoulder, and pulled it
+through his arm.
+
+"I suppose you think you're irresistible," grumbled Sir Beverley. "I
+don't know why I put up with you; on my soul, I don't, you impudent
+young dog!"
+
+Piers laughed. "Let's do one thing at a time anyway, and I'm ravenous for
+dinner. So must you be. Come along! Let's trot in and have it!"
+
+He had his way. Sir Beverley went with him, though half against his will.
+They entered the dining-room still linked together, and a woman's face
+smiled down upon them from a picture-frame on the wall with a smile
+half-sad, half-mocking--such a smile as even at that moment curved Piers'
+lips, belying the reckless gaiety of his eyes.
+
+They dined in complete amicability. Piers had plenty to say at all times,
+and he showed himself completely at his ease. He was the only person in
+the world who ever was so in Sir Beverley's presence. He even now and
+then succeeded in provoking a sardonic laugh from his grandfather. His
+own laughter was boyishly spontaneous.
+
+But at the end of the meal, when wine was placed upon the table, he
+suddenly ceased his careless chatter, and leaned forward with his dark
+eyes full upon Sir Beverley's face.
+
+"Now, sir, you want to know the name of the girl who wasn't afraid of you
+this afternoon, I mentioned her to you once before. Her name is Avery
+Denys. She is a widow; and she calls herself the mother's help at the
+Vicarage."
+
+He gave his information with absolute steadiness. His voice was
+wholly free from emotion of any sort, but it rang a trifle stern, and
+his mouth--that sensitive, clean-cut mouth of his--had the grimness
+of an iron resolution about it. Sir Beverley looked at him frowningly
+over his wine.
+
+"The woman who threw a pail of water over you once, eh?" he said, after
+a moment. "I suppose she has become a very special friend in
+consequence."
+
+"I doubt if she would call herself so," said Piers.
+
+The old man's mouth took a bitter, downward curve. "You see, you're
+rather young," he observed.
+
+Piers' eyes fell away from his abruptly. "Yes, I know," he said, in a
+tone that seemed to hide more than it expressed.
+
+Sir Beverley continued to stare at him, but he did not lift his eyes
+again. They were fixed steadily upon the ruby light that shone in the
+wine in front of him.
+
+The silence lengthened and became oppressive. Sir Beverley still watched
+Piers' intent face. His lips moved soundlessly, while behind his silence
+the storm of his wrath gathered.
+
+What did the boy mean by treating him like this? Did he think he would
+endure to be set aside thus deliberately as one whose words had no
+weight? Did he think--confound him!--did he think that he had reached
+his dotage?
+
+A sudden oath escaped him; he banged a furious fist upon the table. He
+would make himself heard at least.
+
+In the same instant quite unexpectedly Piers leaped to his feet with
+uplifted hand. "What's that?"
+
+"What do you mean?" thundered Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers' hand descended, gripping his arm. "That, sir, that! Don't
+you hear?"
+
+Voice and gesture compelled. Sir Beverley stopped dead, arrested in full
+career by his grandson's insistence, and listened with pent breath, as
+Piers was listening.
+
+For a moment or two he heard nothing, then, close outside the window,
+there arose the sound of children's voices. They were singing a hymn, but
+not in the customary untuneful yell of the village school. The voices
+were clear and sweet and true, and the words came distinct and pure to
+the two men standing at the table.
+
+"He comes, the prisoners to release
+In Satan's bondage held,
+The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+Piers' hand tightened all-unconsciously upon Sir Beverley's arm. His face
+was very white. In his eyes there shone a curious hunger--such a look as
+might have gleamed in the eyes of the prisoners behind the gates.
+
+Again came the words, triumphantly repeated:
+
+"The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+And an odd sound that was almost a sob broke from Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley looked at him sharply; but in the same moment he drew
+back, relinquishing his hold, and stepped lightly across the room to
+the window.
+
+There was a decided pause before the next verse. Piers stood with his
+face to the blind, making no movement. At last, tentatively, like the
+song of a very shy angel, a single boy's voice took up the melody.
+
+"He comes, the broken heart to bind,
+The bleeding soul to cure,
+And with the treasures of His grace
+To bless the humble poor."
+
+Sir Beverley sat down again at the table. Half mechanically his eyes
+turned to the pictured face on the wall, the face that smiled so
+enigmatically. Not once in a year did his eyes turn that way. To-night he
+regarded it with half-ironical interest. He had no pity to spare for
+broken hearts. He did not believe in them. No man could have endured more
+than he had had to endure. He had been dragged through hell itself. But
+it had hardened, not broken his heart. Save in one respect he knew that
+he could never be made to suffer any more. Save for that charred
+remnant, there was nothing left for the flame to consume.
+
+And so through all the bitter years he had borne that smiling face upon
+his wall, cynically indifferent to the beauty which had been the rapture
+and the agony of his life,--a man released from the place of his torment
+because his capacity for suffering was almost gone.
+
+Again there were two children's voices singing, and that of the shy angel
+gathered confidence. With a species of scoffing humour Sir Beverley's
+stony eyes travelled to the window. They rested upon his boy standing
+there with bent head--a mute, waiting figure with a curious touch of
+pathos in its pose. Sir Beverley's sudden frown drew his forehead. What
+ailed the youngster? Why did he stand as if the whole world were resting
+on his shoulders?
+
+He made an impatient movement. "For Heaven's sake," he said testily,
+"tell those squalling children to go!"
+
+Piers did not stir. "In a moment, sir!" he said.
+
+And so, clear through the night air, the last verse came unhindered
+to an end.
+
+"Our glad hosannas, Prince of peace,
+Thy welcome shall proclaim;
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name.
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name."
+
+Piers threw up his head with a sudden, spasmodic movement as of a
+drowning man. And then without pause he snatched up the blind and flung
+the window wide.
+
+"Hi, you kiddies! Where are you? Don't run away! Gracie, is that you?"
+
+There was a brief silence, then chirpily came the answer. "Pat did the
+solo; but he's gone. He would have gone sooner--when we saw your shadow
+on the blind--only I held him so that he couldn't."
+
+Piers broke into a laugh. "Well, come in now you are here! You're not
+afraid anyhow, what?"
+
+"Oh no!" laughed Gracie. "I'm not a bit afraid. But I'm supposed to be in
+bed; and if Father finds out I'm not--" She paused with her customary
+sense of the dramatic.
+
+"Well?" laughed Piers. "What'll happen then?"
+
+"I shall cop it," said Gracie elegantly.
+
+Nevertheless she came to him, and stood on the grass outside the window.
+The lamplight from within shone on her upturned face with its saucy,
+confiding smile. Her head was uncovered and gleamed golden in the
+radiance. She was wearing a very ancient fur cloak belonging to her
+mother, and she glowed like a rose in the sombre drapery.
+
+Piers stooped to her with hands invitingly outstretched. "Come along,
+Pixie! We shan't eat you, and I'll take you home on my shoulder
+afterwards and see you don't get copped."
+
+She uttered a delighted little laugh, and went upwards into his hold like
+a scrap of floating thistledown.
+
+He lifted her high in his arms, crossed the room with her, and set her
+down before the old man who still sat at the table, sardonically
+watching. "Miss Gracie Lorimer!" he said.
+
+"Hullo, child!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+Gracie looked at him with sparkling, adventurous eyes. As she had told
+Piers, she was not a bit afraid. After the briefest pause she held out
+her hand with charming _insouciance_.
+
+"How do you do?" she said.
+
+Sir Beverley slowly took the hand, and pulled her towards him, gazing at
+her from under his black brows with a piercing scrutiny that would have
+terrified a more timid child.
+
+Timidity however was not one of Gracie's weaknesses. She gave him a
+friendly smile, and waited without the smallest sign of uneasiness for
+him to speak.
+
+"What have you come here for?" he demanded gruffly at length.
+
+"I'll tell you," said Gracie readily. She went close to him, confidingly
+close, looking straight into the formidable grey eyes. "You see, it was
+my idea. Pat didn't want to come, but I made him."
+
+"Forward young minx!" commented Sir Beverley.
+
+Gracie laughed at the compliment.
+
+Piers, smoking his cigarette behind her, stood ready to take her part,
+but quite obviously she was fully equal to the occasion.
+
+"Yes, I know," she agreed, with disarming amiability. "But it wouldn't
+have mattered a bit if you hadn't found out who it was. You won't tell
+anyone, will you?"
+
+"Why not?" demanded Sir Beverley.
+
+Gracie pulled down her red lips, and cast up her dancing eyes. "There'd
+be such a scandal," she said.
+
+Piers broke into an involuntary laugh, and Sir Beverley's thin lips
+twitched in a reluctant smile.
+
+"You're a saucy little baggage!" he observed. "Well, get on! Let's hear
+what you've come for! Cadging money, I'll be bound."
+
+Gracie nodded in eager confirmation of this suggestion. "That's just it!"
+she said. "And that's where the scandal would come in if you told. You
+see, poor children can go round squalling carols to their hearts' content
+for pennies, but children like us who want pennies just as much haven't
+any way of getting them. We mayn't carry hand-bags, or open
+carriage-doors, or turn cart-wheels, or--or do anything to earn a living.
+It's hard luck, you know."
+
+"Beastly shame!" said Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley scowled at him. "You needn't stick your oar in. Go and
+shut the window, do you hear? Now, child, let's have the truth, so far
+as any female is capable of speaking it! You've come here for pennies,
+you say. Don't you know that's a form of begging? And begging is
+breaking the law."
+
+"I often do that," said Gracie, quite undismayed. "So would you, if you
+were me. I expect you did too when you were young."
+
+"I!" Sir Beverley uttered a harsh laugh, and released the child's hand.
+"So you break the law, do you?" he said. "How often?"
+
+Gracie's laugh followed his like a silvery echo. "I shan't tell you 'cos
+you're a magistrate. But we weren't really begging, Pat and I. At least
+it wasn't for ourselves."
+
+"Oh, of course not!" said Sir Beverley.
+
+She looked at him with her clear eyes, unconscious of irony. "No. We
+wanted to buy a pair of gloves for someone for Christmas. And nice
+gloves cost such a lot, don't they? And we hadn't got more than
+tenpence-halfpenny among us. So I said I'd think of a plan to get more.
+And--that was the plan," ended Gracie, with her sweetest smile.
+
+"I see," said Sir Beverley, with his eyes still fixed immovably upon her.
+"And what made you come here?"
+
+"Oh, we came here just because of Piers," said Gracie, without hesitation.
+"You see, he's a great friend of ours."
+
+"Is he?" said Sir Beverley. "And so you think you'll get what you can out
+of him, eh?"
+
+"Sir!" said Piers sharply.
+
+"Be quiet, Piers!" ordered his grandfather testily. "Who spoke to you?
+Well, madam, continue! How much do you consider him good for?"
+
+Piers pulled a coin impetuously from his pocket and slapped it down on
+the table in front of Gracie. "There you are, Pixie!" he said. "I'm good
+for that."
+
+Gracie stared at the coin with widening eyes, not offering to touch it.
+
+"Oh, Piers!" she said, with a long indrawn breath. "It's a whole
+sovereign! Oh no!"
+
+He laughed a reckless laugh, while over her head his eyes challenged his
+grandfather's. "That's all right, Piccaninny," he said lightly. "Put it
+in your pocket! And I'll come round with the car to-morrow and run you
+into Wardenhurst to buy those gloves."
+
+But Gracie shook her head. "Gloves don't cost all that," she said
+practically. "And besides, you won't have any left for yourself. Fancy
+giving away a whole sovereign at a time!" She addressed Sir Beverley. "It
+seems almost a tempting of Providence, doesn't it!"
+
+"The deed of a fool!" said Sir Beverley.
+
+But Piers, with a sudden hardening of the jaw, stooped over Gracie. "Take
+it!" he said. "I wish it."
+
+She looked up at him. "No, Piers; I mustn't really. It's ever so nice of
+you." She rubbed her golden head against his shoulder caressingly.
+"Please don't be cross! I do thank you--awfully. But I don't want it.
+Really, I don't."
+
+"Rot!" said Piers. "Do as I tell you! Take it!"
+
+Gracie turned to Sir Beverley. "I can't, can I? Tell him I can't!"
+
+But Piers was not to be thwarted. With a sudden dive he seized the coin
+and without ceremony swept Gracie's hair from her shoulders and dropped
+it down the back of her neck.
+
+"There!" he said, slipping his hands over her arms and holding her while
+she squealed and writhed. "It's quite beyond reach. You can't in decency
+return it now. It's no good wriggling. You won't get it up again unless
+you stand on your head."
+
+"You're horrid--horrid!" protested Gracie; but she reached back and
+kissed him notwithstanding. "Thank you ever so much. I hope I shan't lose
+it. But I don't know what I shall do with it all. It's quite dreadful to
+think of. Please don't be cross with him!" she said to Sir Beverley.
+"It's--awfully--kind."
+
+Sir Beverley smiled sardonically. "And whom are the gloves for? Some
+other kind youth?"
+
+"Oh no!" she laughed. "Only Aunt Avery. She tore hers all to bits this
+afternoon. I expect it was over a dog fight or something, but she
+wouldn't tell us what. They were nice gloves too. She isn't a bit rich,
+but she always wears nice gloves."
+
+"Being a woman!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+"Don't you like women?" asked Gracie sympathetically. "I like men best
+too as a rule. But Aunt Avery is so very sweet. No one could help loving
+her, could they, Piers?"
+
+"Have an orange!" said Piers, pulling the dish towards him.
+
+"Oh, thank you, I mustn't stop," Gracie turned to Sir Beverley and lifted
+her bright face. "Good-bye! Thank you for being so kind."
+
+There was no irony in her thanks, and even he could scarcely refuse the
+friendly offer of her lips. He stooped and grimly received her farewell
+salute on his cheek.
+
+Piers loaded her with as many oranges as she could carry, and they
+finally departed through the great hall which Gracie surveyed with eyes
+of reverent admiration.
+
+"It's as big as a church," she said, in an awed whisper.
+
+Sir Beverley followed them to the front-door, and saw them out into the
+night. Gracie waved an ardent farewell from her perch on Piers' shoulder,
+and he heard the merry childish laugh more than once after they had
+passed from sight.
+
+The night air was chilly, and he turned inwards at length with an
+inarticulate growl, and shut the door.
+
+Heavily he tramped across to the old carved settle before the fire, and
+dropped down upon it, his whole bearing expressive of utter weariness.
+
+David came in with stealthy footfall and softly replenished the fire.
+
+"Shall I bring the coffee, Sir Beverley?" he asked him.
+
+"No," said Sir Beverley. "I'll ring."
+
+And David effaced himself without sound.
+
+Half an hour passed, and Sir Beverley still sat there motionless as a
+statue, with thin lips drawn in a single bitter line, and eyes that gazed
+aloofly at the fire. The silence was intense. The hall seemed desolate
+as a vault. Over in a corner a grandfather's clock ticked the seconds
+away--slowly, monotonously, as though very weary of its task.
+
+Suddenly in the distance there came a faint sound, the opening of a door;
+and a breath of night-air, pure and cold, blew in across the stillness.
+In a moment there followed a light, elastic step, and Piers came into
+view at the other end of the hall. He moved swiftly as though he trod
+air. His head was thrown back, his face rapt and intent as though he saw
+a vision. He did not see the lonely figure sitting there before the
+hearth, but turned aside ere he neared it and entered an unlighted room,
+shutting himself gently in.
+
+Again the silence descended, but only for a few seconds. Then softly it
+was dispelled, as through it there stole the tender, passionate-sweet
+harmonies of a Chopin nocturne.
+
+At the first note Sir Beverley started, almost winced as at the sudden
+piercing of a nerve. Then as the music continued, he leaned rigidly back
+again and became as still as before.
+
+Very softly the music thrilled through the silence. It might have come
+from somewhere very far away. There was something almost unearthly about
+it, a depth and a mystery that seemed to spread as it were invisible
+wings, filling the place with dim echoes of the Divine.
+
+It died away at last into a silence like the hush of prayer. And then the
+still figure of the old man before the fire became suddenly vitalized. He
+sat up abruptly and seized with impatience a small hand-bell from the
+table beside him.
+
+David made his discreet appearance with the coffee almost at the
+first tinkle.
+
+"Coffee!" his master flung at him. "And fetch Master Piers!"
+
+David set down the tray at his master's elbow, and turned to obey the
+second behest. But the door of the drawing-room opened ere he reached
+it, and Piers came out. His dark eyes were shining. He whistled softly
+as he came.
+
+David stood respectfully on one side, and Piers passed him like a man in
+a dream. He came to his grandfather, and threw himself on to the settle
+by his side in silence.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Beverley. "You took that chattering monkey back,
+I suppose?"
+
+Piers started and seemed to awake. "Oh yes, I got her safely home. We had
+to dodge the Reverend Stephen. But it was all right. She and the boy got
+in without being caught."
+
+He stirred his coffee thoughtfully, and fell silent again.
+
+"You'd better go to bed," said Sir Beverley abruptly.
+
+Piers looked up, meeting the hard grey eyes with the memory of his dream
+still lingering in his own.
+
+Slowly the dream melted. He began to smile. "I think I'd better," he
+said. "I'm infernally sleepy, and it's getting late." He drank off his
+coffee and rose. "You must be pretty tired yourself, sir," he remarked.
+"Time you trotted to bed too."
+
+He moved round to the back of the settle and paused, looking down at the
+thick white hair with a curious expression of hesitancy in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, go on! Go on!" said Sir Beverley irritably. "What are you
+waiting for?"
+
+Piers stooped impulsively in response, his hand on the old man's
+shoulder, and kissed him on the forehead.
+
+"Good-night, sir!" he said softly.
+
+The action was purely boyish. It pleaded for tolerance. Sir Beverley
+jerked his head impatiently, but he did not repulse him.
+
+"There! Be off with you!" he said. "Go to bed and behave yourself!
+Good-night, you scamp! Good-night!"
+
+And Piers went from him lightfooted, a smile upon his lips. He knew that
+his tacit overture for peace had been accepted for the time at least.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE VISION
+
+
+It was growing very dark in the little church, almost too dark to see the
+carving of the choir-stalls, and Avery gave a short sigh of weariness.
+
+She had so nearly finished her task that she had sent the children in to
+prepare for tea, declaring that she would follow them in five minutes,
+and then just at the last a whole mass of ivy and holly, upon which the
+boys had been at work, had slipped and strewn the chancel-floor. She was
+the only one left in the church, and it behooved her to remove the
+litter. It had been a hard day, and she was frankly tired of the very
+sight and smell of the evergreens.
+
+There was no help for it, however. The chancel must be made tidy before
+she could go, and she went to the cupboard under the belfry for the
+dustpan and brush which the sexton's wife kept there. She found a candle
+also, and thus armed she returned to the scene of her labours at the
+other end of the dim little church. She tried to put her customary energy
+into the task, but it would not rise to the occasion, and after a few
+strenuous seconds she paused to rest.
+
+It was very still and peaceful, and she was glad of the solitude. All day
+long she had felt the need of it; and all day long it had been denied
+her. She had been decorating under Miss Whalley's superintendence, and
+the task had been no light one. Save for the fact that she had gone in
+Mrs. Lorimer's stead, she had scarcely undertaken it. For Miss Whalley
+was as exacting as though the church were her own private property. She
+deferred to the Vicar alone, and he was more than willing to leave the
+matter in her hands. "My capable assistant" was his pet name for this
+formidable member of his flock, and very conscientiously did Miss Whalley
+maintain her calling. She would have preferred to direct Mrs. Lorimer
+rather than the mother's help, but since the latter had firmly determined
+to take the former's place, she had accepted her with condescension and
+allotted to her all the hardest work.
+
+Avery had laboured uncomplainingly in her quiet, methodical fashion, but
+now that the stress was over and Miss Whalley safely installed in the
+Vicarage drawing-room for tea, she found it impossible not to relax
+somewhat, and to make the most of those few exquisite moments of
+sanctuary.
+
+She was very far from expecting any invasion of her solitude, and when
+after a moment or two she went on with her sweeping she had no suspicion
+of another presence in the dark building. She had set herself resolutely
+to finish her task, and so energetic was she that she heard no sound of
+feet along the aisle behind her.
+
+Some unaccountable impulse induced her to pause at length and still
+kneeling, brush in hand, to throw a backward glance along the nave. Then
+it was that she saw a man's figure standing on the chancel-steps, and so
+unexpected was the apparition that her weary nerves leapt with violence
+out of all proportion to the event, and she sprang to her feet with a
+startled cry that echoed weirdly through the empty place. Then with a
+rush of self-ridicule she recognized Piers Evesham. "Oh, it is you!" she
+said. "How stupid of me!"
+
+He came straight to her with an air of determination that would brook no
+opposition and took the brush out of her hand. "That's not your job," he
+said. "You go and sit down!"
+
+She stared at him in silence, trying to still the wild agitation that his
+unlooked-for coming had raised in her. He was wearing a heavy motor-coat,
+but he divested himself of this, and without further parley bent himself
+to the task of which he had deprived her.
+
+Avery sat down somewhat limply on the pulpit-stairs and watched him. He
+was very thorough and far brisker than she could have been. In a very few
+minutes the litter was all collected, and Piers turned round and looked
+back at her across the dim chancel.
+
+"Feeling better?" he said.
+
+She did not answer him. "What made you come in like that?" she asked.
+
+He replied to the question with absolute simplicity. "I've just brought
+Gracie home again. She asked me to tea in the schoolroom, but you weren't
+there, and they said I should find you here, so I came to fetch you."
+
+He moved slowly across and stood before her, looking down into her tired
+eyes with an odd species of relentlessness in his own.
+
+"It's an infernal shame that you should work so hard!" he said, with
+sudden resentment. "You're looking fagged to death."
+
+Avery smiled a little. "I like hard work," she said.
+
+"Not such as this!" said Piers. "It isn't fit for you. Why can't the lazy
+hound do it himself?"
+
+Her smile passed. "Hush, Piers!" she said. "Not here!"
+
+He glanced towards the altar, and she thought a shade of reverence came
+into his face for a moment. But he turned to her again immediately with
+his flashing, boyish smile.
+
+"Well, it isn't good for you to overwork, you know, Avery. I hate to
+think of it. And you have no one to take care of you and see you don't."
+
+Avery got up slowly. Her own face was severe in the candlelight, but
+before she could speak he went lightly on.
+
+"Would you like me to play you something before we go? Or are you too
+tired to blow? It's rather a shame to suggest it. But it's such a grand
+opportunity."
+
+Avery turned at once to the organ with a feeling of relief. As usual she
+found it very hard to rebuke him as he deserved.
+
+"Yes, I will blow for you," she said. "But it must be something short,
+for we ought to be going."
+
+She sat down and began to blow.
+
+Piers took his place at once at the organ. It was characteristic of him
+that he never paused for inspiration. His fingers moved over the keys as
+it were by instinct, and in a few moments Avery forgot that she was tired
+and dispirited with the bearing of many burdens, forgot all the problems
+and difficulties of life, forgot even her charges at the Vicarage and the
+waiting schoolroom tea, and sat wrapt as it were in a golden mist of
+delight, watching the slow spreading of a dawn such as she had never seen
+even in her dreams. What he played she knew not, and yet the music was
+not wholly unfamiliar to her. It waked within her soul harmonies that
+vibrated in throbbing response. He spoke to her in a language that she
+knew. And as the magic moments passed, the wonderful dawn so grew and
+deepened that it seemed to her that all pain, all sorrow, had fallen
+utterly away, and she stood on the threshold of a new world.
+
+Wider and wider spread the glory. There came to her an overwhelming sense
+of greatness about to be revealed. She became strung to a pitch of
+expectancy that was almost anguish, while the music swelled and swelled
+like the distant coming of a vast procession as yet unseen. She stood as
+it were on a mountain-top before the closed gates of heaven, waiting for
+the moment of revelation.
+
+It came. Just when she felt that she could bear no more, just when the
+wild beating of her heart seemed as if it would choke her, the music
+changed, became suddenly all-conquering, a paean of triumph, and the
+gates swung back before her eager eyes.
+
+In spirit she entered the Holy Place, and the same hand that had admitted
+her lifted for her the last great Veil. For one moment of unutterable
+rapture such as no poor palpitating mortal body could endure for long,
+the vision was her own. She saw Heaven opened....
+
+And then the Veil descended, and the Gates closed. She came down from the
+mountain-top, leaving the golden dawn very far behind her. She opened her
+eyes in darkness and silence.
+
+Someone was bending over her. She felt warm hands about her own. She
+heard a voice, sudden and imploring, close to her.
+
+"Avery! Avery darling! For God's sake, dear, speak to me! What is it?
+Are you ill?"
+
+"Ill!" she said, bewildered.
+
+His hands gripped hers impetuously. "You gave me such a fright," he said.
+"I thought you'd fainted. Did you faint?"
+
+"Of course not!" she said slowly. "I never faint. Why did you stop
+playing?"
+
+"I didn't," said Piers. "At least, you stopped first."
+
+"Oh, did I forget to blow?" she said. "I'm sorry."
+
+She knew that she ought not to suffer that close clasp of his, but
+somehow for the moment she was powerless to resist it. She sat quite
+still, gazing out before her with a curious sense of powerlessness.
+
+"You're tired out," said Piers softly. "It was a shame to keep you here.
+I'm awfully sorry, dear."
+
+She stirred at that, beginning to seek for freedom. "Don't, Piers!" she
+said. "It--it isn't right of you. It isn't fair."
+
+He knelt swiftly down before her. His voice came quick and passionate in
+answer. "It can't be wrong to love you," he said. "And you will never be
+any the worse for my love. Let me love you, Avery! Let me love you!"
+
+The words rushed out tempestuously. His forehead was bowed upon her
+hands. He became silent, and through the silence she heard his breathing,
+hard and difficult,--the breathing of a man who faces stupendous odds.
+
+With an effort she summoned her strength. Yet she could not speak harshly
+to him, for her heart went out in pity. "No, you mustn't, Piers," she
+said. "You mustn't indeed. I am years older than you are, and it is
+utterly unsuitable. You must forget it. You must indeed. There! Let us be
+friends! I like you well enough for that."
+
+He uttered a laugh that sounded as though it covered a groan. "Yes,
+you're awfully good to me," he said. "But you're not--in one
+sense--anything approaching my age, and pray Heaven you never will be!"
+
+He raised his head and looked at her. "And you're not angry with me?" he
+said, half wistfully.
+
+No, she was not angry. She could not even pretend to be. "But please be
+sensible!" she begged. "I know it was partly my fault. If I hadn't been
+so tired, it wouldn't have happened."
+
+He got to his feet, still holding her hands. "No; you're not to blame
+yourself," he said. "What has happened was bound to happen, right from
+the very beginning. But I'm sorry if it has upset you. There is no reason
+why it should that I can see. You are better now?"
+
+He helped her gently to rise. They stood face to face in the dim
+candlelight, and his eyes looked into hers with such friendly concern
+that again she had it not in her heart to be other than kind.
+
+"I am quite well," she assured him. "Please forget my foolishness! Tell
+me what it was you played just now!"
+
+"That last thing?" he said. "Surely you know that! It was Handel's
+_Largo_."
+
+She started. "Of course! I remember now! But--I've never heard it played
+like that before."
+
+A very strange smile crossed his face. "No one but you would have
+understood," he said. "I wanted you to hear it--like that."
+
+She withdrew her hands from his. Something in his words sent a curious
+feeling that was almost dread through her heart.
+
+"I don't--quite--know what you mean," she said.
+
+"Don't you?" said Piers, and in his voice there rang a note of
+recklessness. "It's a difficult thing to put into words, isn't it? I just
+wanted you to see the Open Heaven as I have seen it--and as I shall never
+see it again."
+
+"Piers!" she said.
+
+He answered her almost fiercely. "No, you won't understand. Of course you
+can't understand. You will never stand hammering at the bars, breaking
+your heart in the dark. Wasn't that the sort of picture our kindly parson
+drew for us on Sunday? It's a pretty theme--the tortures of the damned!"
+
+"My dear Piers!" Avery spoke quickly and vehemently. "Surely you have too
+much sense to take such a discourse as that seriously! I longed to tell
+the children not to listen. It is wicked--wicked--to try to spread
+spiritual terror in people's hearts, and to call it the teaching of
+religion. It is no more like religion than a penny-terrible is like life.
+It is a cruel and fantastic distortion of the truth."
+
+She paused. Piers was listening to her with that odd hunger in his eyes
+that had looked out of them the night before.
+
+"You don't believe in hell then?" he said quietly, after a moment.
+
+"As a place of future torment--no!" she said. "The only real hell is here
+on earth--here in our hearts when we fall away from God. Hell is the
+state of sin and all that goes with it--the fiery hell of the spirit. It
+is here and now. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine a God of Love
+devising hideous tortures hereafter, for the punishment of the pigmies
+who had offended Him? Tortures that were never to do them any good, but
+just to keep them in misery for ever and ever? It is unthinkable--it's
+almost ludicrous. What is the good of suffering except to purify? That we
+can understand and thank God for. But the other--oh, the other is sheer
+imagery, more mythical than Jonah and the whale. It just doesn't go."
+Again she paused, then very frankly held out her hand to him. "But I like
+your picture of the Open Heaven, Piers," she said. "Show it me again some
+day--when I'm not as tired and stupid as I am to-day."
+
+He bent over her hand with a gesture that betrayed the foreign blood in
+him, and his lips, hot and passionate, pressed her cold fingers. He did
+not utter a word. Only when he stood up again he looked at her with eyes
+that burned with the deep fires of manhood, and suddenly all-unbidden
+the woman's heart in her quivered in response. She bent her head and
+turned away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A MAN'S CONFIDENCE
+
+
+"Aren't you going to kiss Aunt Avery under the mistletoe?" asked Gracie.
+
+"No," said Piers. "Aunt Avery may kiss me if she likes." He looked at
+Avery with his sudden, boyish laugh. "But I know she doesn't like, so
+that's an end of the matter."
+
+"How do you know?" persisted Gracie. "She's very fond of kissing. And
+anyone may kiss under the mistletoe."
+
+"That quite does away with the charm of it in my opinion," declared
+Piers. "I don't appreciate things when you can get 'em cheap."
+
+He moved over to Jeanie's sofa and sat down on the edge. Her soft eyes
+smiled a welcome, the little thin hand slipped into his.
+
+"I've been wishing for you all day long," she said.
+
+He leaned towards her. "Have you, my fairy queen? Well, I'm here at
+last."
+
+Avery, from the head of the schoolroom table, looked across at them with
+a feeling of fulness at her heart. She never liked Piers so well as when
+she saw him in company with her little favourite. His gentleness and
+chivalry made of him a very perfect knight.
+
+"Yes," said Jeanie, giving his hand a little squeeze. "We're going to
+have our Christmas Tree to-night, and Dr. Tudor is coming. You don't like
+him, I know. But he's really quite a nice man."
+
+She spoke the last words pleadingly, in response to a slight frown
+between Piers' brows.
+
+"Oh, is he?" said Piers, without enthusiasm.
+
+"He's been very kind," said Jeanie in a tone of apology.
+
+"He'd better be anything else--to you!" said Piers, with a smile that was
+somewhat grim.
+
+Jeanie's fingers caressed his again propitiatingly. "Do let's all be nice
+to each other just for to-night!" she said.
+
+Piers' smile became tender again. "As your gracious majesty decrees!" he
+said. "Where is the ceremony to be held?"
+
+"Up in the nursery. We've had the little ones in here all day, while
+Mother and Nurse have been getting it ready. I haven't seen it yet."
+
+"Can't we creep up when no one's looking and have a private view?"
+suggested Piers.
+
+Jeanie beamed at the idea. "I would like to, for I've been in the secret
+from the very beginning. But you must finish your tea first. We'll go
+when the crackers begin."
+
+As the pulling of crackers was the signal for every child at the table to
+make as much noise as possible, it was not difficult to effect their
+retreat without exciting general attention. Avery alone noted their
+departure and smiled at Jeanie's flushed face as the child nodded
+farewell to her over Piers' shoulder.
+
+"You do carry me so beautifully," Jeanie confided to him as he mounted
+the stairs to the top of the house. "I love the feel of your arms. They
+are so strong and kind. You're sure I'm not too heavy?"
+
+"I could carry a dozen of you," said Piers.
+
+They found the nursery brilliantly lighted and lavishly adorned with
+festoons of coloured paper.
+
+"Aunt Avery and I did most of that," said Jeanie proudly.
+
+Piers bore her round the room, admiring every detail, finally depositing
+her in a big arm-chair close to the tall screen that hid the Christmas
+Tree. Jeanie's leg was mending rapidly, and gave her little trouble now.
+She lay back contentedly, with shining eyes upon her cavalier.
+
+"It was very nice of you to be so kind to Gracie last night," she said.
+"She told me all about it to-day. Of course she ought not to have done
+it. I hope--I hope Sir Beverley wasn't angry about it."
+
+Piers laughed a little. "Oh no! He got over it. Was Gracie scared?"
+
+"Not really. She said she thought he wasn't quite pleased with you. I do
+hope he didn't think it was your fault."
+
+"My shoulders are fairly broad," said Piers.
+
+"Yes, but it wouldn't be right," maintained Jeanie. "I think I ought to
+write to him and explain."
+
+"No, no!" said Piers. "You leave the old chap alone. He
+understands--quite as much as he wants to understand."
+
+There was a note of bitterness in his voice which Jeanie was quick to
+discern. She reached up a sympathetic hand to his. "Dear Sir Galahad!"
+she said softly.
+
+Piers looked down at her for a few moments in silence. And then, very
+suddenly, moved by the utter devotion that looked back at him from her
+eyes, he went down on his knees beside her and held her to his heart.
+
+"It's a beast of a world, Jeanie," he said.
+
+"Is it?" whispered Jeanie, with his hand pressed tight against her cheek.
+
+There was silence between them for a little space; then she lifted her
+face to his, to murmur in a motherly tone, "I expect you're tired."
+
+"Tired!" said Piers with gloomy vehemence. "Yes, I am tired--sick to
+death of everything. I'm like a dog on a chain. I can see what I want,
+but it's always just out of my reach."
+
+Jeanie's hand came up and softly stroked his face. "I wish I could get
+it for you," she said.
+
+"Bless you, sweetheart!" said Piers. "You don't so much as know what it
+is, do you?"
+
+"Yes, I do," said Jeanie. She leaned her head back against his shoulder,
+looking up into his face with all her child's soul shining in her eyes.
+"It's--Aunt Avery; isn't it?"
+
+"How did you know?" said Piers.
+
+"I don't know," said Jeanie. "It just--came to me--that day in the
+schoolroom when you talked about the ticket of leave. You were unhappy
+that day, weren't you?"
+
+"Yes," said Piers. He added after a moment, "You see, I'm not good
+enough for her."
+
+"Not good enough!" Jeanie's face became incredulous and a little
+distressed. "I'm sure--she--doesn't think that," she said.
+
+"She doesn't know me properly," said Piers. "Nor do you. If you did,
+you'd be shocked,--you'd be horrified."
+
+He spoke recklessly, almost defiantly; but Jeanie only stretched up a
+thin arm and wound it about his neck. "Never!" she told him softly.
+"No, never!"
+
+He held her to him; but he would not be silenced. "I assure you, I'm no
+saint," he said. "I feel more like a devil sometimes. I've done bad
+things, Jeanie, I can't tell you how bad. It would only hurt you."
+
+The words ran out impulsively. His breathing came quick and short; his
+hold was tense. In that moment the child's pure spirit recognized that
+the image had crumbled in her shrine, but the brave heart of her did
+not flinch. Very tenderly she veiled the ruin. The element of worship
+had vanished in that single instant of revelation; but her love
+remained, and it shone out to him like a beacon as he knelt there in
+abasement by her side.
+
+"But you're sorry," she whispered. "You would undo the bad things if
+you could."
+
+"God knows I would!" he said.
+
+"Perhaps He will undo them for you," she murmured softly. "Have you
+asked Him?"
+
+"There are some things that can't be undone," groaned Piers. "It would be
+too big a job even for Him."
+
+"Nothing is that," said Jeanie with conviction. "If we are sorry and if
+we pray, some day He will undo all the bad we've ever done."
+
+"I haven't prayed for six years," said Piers. "Things went wrong with me.
+I felt as if I were under a curse. And I gave it up."
+
+"Oh, Piers!" she said, holding him closer. "How miserable you must
+have been!"
+
+"I've been in hell!" he said with bitter vehemence. "And the gates tight
+shut! Not that I was ever very great in the spiritual lines," he added
+more calmly. "But I used to think God took a friendly interest in my
+affairs till--till I went down into hell and the gates shut on me; and
+then--" he spoke grimly--"I knew He didn't care a rap."
+
+"But, dear, He does care!" said Jeanie very earnestly.
+
+"He doesn't!" said Piers moodily. "He can't!"
+
+"Piers, He does!" She raised her head and looked him straight in the
+eyes. "Everyone feels like that sometimes," she said. "But Aunt Avery
+says it's only because we are too little to understand. Won't you begin
+and pray again? It does make a difference even though we can't see it."
+
+"I can't," said Piers. And then with swift compunction he kissed her
+face of disappointment. "Never mind, my queen! Don't you bother your
+little head about me! I shall rub along all right even if I don't come
+out on top."
+
+"But I want you to be happy," said Jeanie. "I wish I could help you,
+Piers,--dear Piers."
+
+"You do help me," said Piers.
+
+There came the sound of voices on the stairs, and he got up.
+
+Jeanie looked up at him wistfully. "I shall try," she said. "I shall
+try--hard."
+
+He patted her head and turned away.
+
+Mr. Lorimer and Miss Whalley entered the room. The former raised his
+brows momentarily at the sight of Piers, but he greeted him with much
+geniality.
+
+"I am quite delighted to welcome you to the children's Christmas party,"
+he declared, with Piers' hand held impressively in his. "And how is your
+grandfather, my dear lad?"
+
+Piers contracted instinctively. "He is quite well, thanks," he said. "I
+haven't come to stay. I only looked in for a moment."
+
+He glanced towards Miss Whalley whom he had never met before. The Vicar
+smilingly introduced him. "This is the Squire's grandson and heir, Miss
+Whalley. Doubtless you know him by sight as well as by repute--the
+keenest sportsman in the county, eh, my young friend?" His eyes
+disappeared with the words as if pulled inwards by a string.
+
+"I don't know," said Piers, becoming extremely blunt and British. "I'm
+certainly keen, but so are dozens of others." He bowed to Miss Whalley
+with stiff courtesy. "Pleased to meet you," he said formally.
+
+Miss Whalley acknowledged the compliment with a severe air of
+incredulity. She had never approved of Piers since a certain Sunday
+morning ten years before when she had caught him shooting at the
+choir-boys with a catapult, during the litany, over the top of the
+squire's large square pew.
+
+She had reported the crime to the Vicar, and the Vicar had lodged a
+formal complaint with Sir Beverley, who had soundly caned the delinquent
+in his presence, and given him half a sovereign as soon as the clerical
+back had been turned for taking the punishment like a man.
+
+But in Miss Whalley's eyes Piers had from that moment ceased to be
+regarded as one of the elect, and his curt reception of the good Vicar's
+patronage did not further elevate him in her esteem. She made as brief a
+response to the introduction as politeness demanded, and crossed the room
+to Jeanie.
+
+"I must be off," said Piers. "I've stayed longer than I intended
+already."
+
+"Pray do not hurry!" urged Mr. Lorimer. "The festivities are but just
+beginning."
+
+But Piers was insistent, and even Jeanie's wistful eyes could not detain
+him. He waved her a careless farewell, and extricated himself as quickly
+as possible from surroundings that had become uncongenial.
+
+Descending the stairs somewhat precipitately, he nearly ran into Avery
+ascending with a troop of children, and stopped to say good-bye.
+
+"You're not going!" cried Gracie, with keen disappointment.
+
+"Yes, I am. I can't stop. It's later than I thought. See you to-morrow!"
+said Piers.
+
+He held Avery's hand again in his, and for one fleeting second his eyes
+looked into hers. Then lightly he pressed her fingers and passed on
+without further words.
+
+On the first landing he encountered Mrs. Lorimer. She smiled upon him
+kindly. "Oh, Piers, is it you?" she said. "Have you been having tea in
+the schoolroom?"
+
+He admitted that he had.
+
+"And must you really go?" she said. "I'm sorry for that. Come again,
+won't you?"
+
+Her tone was full of gentle friendliness, and Piers was touched. "It's
+awfully good of you to ask me," he said.
+
+"I like to see you here," she answered simply. "And I am so grateful to
+you for your kindness to my little Jeanie."
+
+"Oh, please don't!" said Piers. "I assure you it's quite the other way
+round. I shall certainly come again since you are good enough to ask me."
+
+He smiled with boyish gallantry into the wistful, faded face, carried her
+fingers lightly to his lips, and passed on.
+
+"Such a nice boy!" Mrs. Lorimer murmured to herself as she went up to
+the nursery.
+
+"Poor little soul!" was Piers' inward comment as he ran down to the hall.
+
+Here he paused, finding himself face to face with Lennox Tudor who was
+taking off his coat preparatory to ascending.
+
+The doctor nodded to him without cordiality. Neither of them ever
+pretended to take any pleasure in the other's society.
+
+"Are you just going?" he asked. "Your grandfather is wanting you."
+
+"Who says so?" said Piers aggressively.
+
+"I say so." Curtly Tudor made answer, meeting Piers' quick frown with one
+equally decided.
+
+Piers stood still in front of him. "Have you just come from the Abbey?"
+he demanded.
+
+"I have." Tudor's tone was non-committal. He stood facing Piers,
+waiting to pass.
+
+"What are you always going there for?" burst forth Piers, with heat. "He
+doesn't want you--never follows your advice, and does excellently well
+without it."
+
+"Really!" said Tudor. He uttered a short, sarcastic laugh, albeit his
+thick brows met closely above his glasses. "Well, you ought to
+know--being such a devoted and attentive grandson."
+
+Piers' hands clenched at the words. He looked suddenly dangerous. "What
+in thunder do you mean?" he demanded.
+
+Tudor was nothing loth to enlighten him. He was plainly angry himself.
+"I mean," he said, "if you must have it, that the time you spend
+philandering here would be better employed in looking after the old man,
+who has spent a good deal over you and gets precious little interest out
+of the investment."
+
+"Confound you!" exclaimed Piers violently. "Who the devil are you to talk
+to me like this? Do you think I'm going to put up with it, what? If so,
+you're damned well mistaken. You leave me alone--and my grandfather too;
+do you hear? If you don't--" He broke off, breathing short and hard.
+
+But Tudor remained unimpressed. He looked at Piers as one might
+look at an animal raging behind bars. "Well?" he said. "Pray
+finish! If I don't--"
+
+Piers' face was very pale. His eyes blazed out of it, red and
+threatening. "If you don't--I'll murder you!" he said.
+
+And at that he stopped short and suddenly wheeled round as he caught the
+swish of a dress on the stairs. He looked up into Avery's face as she
+came swiftly down, and the blood rose in a deep, dark wave to his
+forehead. He made no attempt to cover or excuse his passionate outburst,
+which it was perfectly obvious she must have heard. He merely made way
+for her, his hands still hard clenched, his eyes immovably upon her.
+
+Avery passed him with scarcely a glance, but her voice as she addressed
+Lennox Tudor sounded a trifle austere. "I heard you speaking," she said,
+"and ran down to fetch you upstairs. Will you come up at once, please?
+The ceremony is just beginning."
+
+Tudor held out a steady hand, "Very kind of you, Mrs. Denys," he said.
+"Will you lead the way?" And then for a moment he turned from her to
+Piers. "If you have anything further to say to me, Evesham, I shall be
+quite ready to give you a hearing on a more suitable occasion."
+
+"I have nothing further to say," said Piers, still with his eyes
+upon Avery.
+
+She would not look at him. With deliberate intention, she ignored his
+look. "Come, doctor!" she said.
+
+They mounted the stairs together, Piers still standing motionless, still
+mutely watching. There was no temper nor anger in his face. Simply he
+stood and waited. And, as if that silent gaze drew her, even against her
+will, suddenly at the top she turned. Her own sweet smile flashed into
+her face. She threw a friendly glance down to him.
+
+"Good-night, Mr. Evesham!" she called softly. "A happy Christmas to you!"
+
+And as if that were what he had been waiting for, Piers bowed very low in
+answer and at once turned away.
+
+His face as he went out into the night wore a very curious expression. It
+was not grim, nor ashamed, nor triumphant, and yet there was in it a
+suggestion of all three moods.
+
+He reached his car, standing as he had left it in the deserted lane, and
+stooped to start the engine. Then, as it throbbed in answer, he
+straightened himself, and very suddenly he laughed. But it was not a
+happy laugh; and in a moment more he shot away into the dark as though
+pursued by fiends. If he had gained his end, if he had in any fashion
+achieved his desire, it was plain that it did not give him any great
+satisfaction. He went like a fury through the night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE SCHEME
+
+
+"Look here, boy!" Very suddenly, almost fiercely, Sir Beverley addressed
+his grandson that evening as they sat together over dessert. "I've had
+enough of this infernal English climate. I'm going away."
+
+Piers was peeling a walnut. He did not raise his eyes or make the
+faintest sign of surprise. Steadily his fingers continued their task. His
+lips hardened a little, that was all.
+
+"Do you hear?" rapped out Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers bent his head. "What about the hunting?" he said.
+
+"Damn the hunting!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers was silent a moment. Then: "I suggested it to you myself, didn't
+I?" he said deliberately, "six weeks ago. And you wouldn't hear of it."
+
+"Confound your impertinence!" began Sir Beverley. But abruptly Piers
+raised his eyes, and he stopped. "What do you mean?" he said, in a
+calmer tone.
+
+Very steadily Piers met his look. "That's a question I should like to
+ask, sir," he said. "Why do you want to go abroad? Aren't you well?"
+
+"I am perfectly well," declared Sir Beverley, who furiously resented any
+enquiry as to his health. "Can't a man take it into his head that he'd
+like a change from this beastly damp hole of a country without being at
+death's door, I should like to know?"
+
+"You generally have a reason for what you do, sir," observed Piers.
+
+"Of course I have a reason," flung back Sir Beverley.
+
+A faint smile touched the corners of Piers' mouth. "But I am not to know
+what it is, what?" he asked.
+
+Sir Beverley glared at him. There were times when he was possessed by an
+uneasy suspicion that the boy was growing up into a manhood that
+threatened to overthrow his control. He had a feeling that Piers'
+submission to his authority had become a matter of choice rather than of
+necessity. He had inherited his Italian grandmother's fortune,
+moreover,--a sore point with Sir Beverley who would have repudiated every
+penny had it been left at his disposal--and was therefore independent.
+
+"I've given you a reason. What more do you want?" he growled.
+
+Piers looked straight at him for a few seconds longer; then broke into
+his sudden boyish laugh. "All right, sir. When shall we start?" he said.
+
+Sir Beverley stared. "What the devil are you laughing at?" he demanded.
+
+Piers had returned to the peeling of his walnut. "Nothing, sir," he
+said airily. "At least, nothing more important than your reason for
+going abroad."
+
+"Damn your impudence!" said Sir Beverley, and then for some reason he too
+began to smile. "That's settled then. We'll go to Monte Carlo, eh, Piers?
+You'll like that."
+
+"Do you think I am to be trusted at Monte Carlo?" said Piers.
+
+"I let you go round the world by yourself while you were still an infant,
+so I almost think I can trust you at Monte Carlo under my own eye,"
+returned Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers was silent. The smile had left his lips. He frowned slightly
+over his task.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Beverley, suddenly and sharply.
+
+"Well, sir?" Piers raised his brows without looking up.
+
+The old man brought down an impatient fist on the table. "Why can't you
+say what you think?" he demanded angrily. "You sit there with your mouth
+shut as if--as if--" His eyes went suddenly to the woman's face on the
+wall with the red lips that smiled half-sadly, half-mockingly, and the
+eyes that perpetually followed him but never smiled at all. "Confound
+you, Piers!" he said. "I sometimes think that voyage round the world did
+you more harm than good."
+
+"Why, sir?" said Piers quickly.
+
+Sir Beverley's look left the smiling, baffling face upon the wall and
+sought his grandson's. "You were so mad to be off the bearing-rein,
+weren't you?" he said. "So keen to feel your own feet? I thought it would
+make a man of you, but I was a fool to do it. I'd better have kept you on
+the rein after all."
+
+"I should have run away if you had," said Piers. He poured himself
+out a glass of wine and raised it to his lips. He looked at Sir Beverley
+above it with a smile half-sad, half-mocking, and eyes that veiled his
+soul. "I should have gone to the devil if you had, sir," he said,
+"and--probably--I shouldn't have come back." He drank slowly, his eyes
+still upon Sir Beverley's face.
+
+When he set the glass down again he was openly laughing. "Besides, you
+horsewhipped me for something or other, do you remember? It hurts to be
+horsewhipped at nineteen."
+
+Sir Beverley growled at him inarticulately.
+
+"Yes, I know," said Piers, "But it doesn't affect me so much now. I'm
+past the sensitive age." He ate his walnut, drained his glass, and rose.
+
+"You--puppy!" said Sir Beverley, looking up at him.
+
+Piers came to his side. He suddenly knelt down and pulled the old man's
+arm round his shoulders. "I say, I'm going to enjoy that trip," he said
+boyishly. "Let's get away before the New Year!"
+
+Sir Beverley suffered the action with no further protest than a frown.
+"You weren't so mighty anxious when I first suggested it," he grumbled.
+
+Piers laughed. "Can't a man change his mind? I'm keen enough now."
+
+"What do you want to go for?" Sir Beverley looked at him suspiciously.
+
+But Piers' frank return of his look told him nothing. "I love the South
+as you know," he said.
+
+"Damn it, yes!" said Sir Beverley irritably. He could never endure any
+mention of the Southern blood in Piers.
+
+"And--" Piers' brown fingers grew suddenly tight upon the bony hand he
+had drawn over his shoulder--"I like going away with you."
+
+"Oh, stow it, Piers!" growled Sir Beverley.
+
+"The truth, sir!" protested Piers, with eyes that suddenly danced. "It
+does me good to be with you. It keeps me young."
+
+"Young!" ejaculated Sir Beverley. "You--infant!"
+
+Piers broke into a laugh. He looked a mere boy when he gave himself up to
+merriment. "And it'll do you good too," he said, "to get away from that
+beastly doctor who is always hanging around. I long to give him the boot
+whenever I see him."
+
+"You don't like each other, eh?" Sir Beverley's smile was sardonic.
+
+"We loathe and detest each other," said Piers. All the boyishness went
+out of his face with the words; he looked suddenly grim, and in that
+moment the likeness between them was very marked. "I presume this change
+of air scheme was his suggestion," he said abruptly.
+
+"And if it was?" said Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers threw back his head and laughed again through clenched teeth. "For
+which piece of consideration he has my sincere gratitude," he said. He
+pressed his grandfather's hand again and rose. "So it's to be Monte
+Carlo, is it? Well, the sooner the better for me. I'll tell Victor to
+look up the trains. We can't get away to-morrow or the next day. But we
+ought to be able to manage the day after."
+
+He strolled across to the fire, and stood there with his back to the
+room, whistling below his breath.
+
+Sir Beverley regarded him frowningly. There was no denying the fact, he
+did not understand Piers. He had expected a strenuous opposition to his
+scheme. He had been prepared to do battle with the boy. But Piers had
+refused the conflict. What was the fellow's game, he asked himself? Why
+this prompt compliance with his wishes? He was not to be deceived into
+the belief that he wanted to go. The attraction was too great for that.
+Unless indeed--he looked across at the bent black head in sudden
+doubt--was it possible that the boy had met with a check in the least
+likely direction of all? Could it be that the woman's plans did not
+include him after all?
+
+No! No! That was out of the question. He knew women. A hard laugh rose to
+his lips. If she had put a check upon Piers' advances it was not with the
+ultimate purpose of stopping him. She knew what she was about too well
+for that, confound her!
+
+He stared at Piers who had wheeled suddenly from the fire at the sound of
+the laugh. "Well?" he said irritably. "Well? What's the matter now?"
+
+The eyes that countered his were hard, with just a hint of defiance. "You
+laughed, sir," said Piers curtly.
+
+"Well, what of it?" threw back Sir Beverley. "You're deuced suspicious. I
+wasn't laughing at you."
+
+"I know that," said Piers. He spoke deliberately, as one choosing his
+words. His face was stern. "I don't want to know the joke if it's
+private. But I should like to know how long you want to be away."
+
+"How long? How the devil can I tell?" growled Sir Beverley. "Till I've
+had enough of it, I suppose."
+
+"Does it depend on that only?" said Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley pushed back his chair with fierce impatience. "Oh, leave me
+alone, boy, do! I'll let you know when it's time to come home again."
+
+Piers came towards him. He halted with the light from the lamp full on
+his resolute face. "If you are going to wait on Tudor's convenience," he
+said, "you'll wait--longer than I shall."
+
+"What the devil do you mean?" thundered Sir Beverley.
+
+But again Piers turned aside from open conflict. He put a quiet hand
+through his grandfather's arm.
+
+"Come along, sir! We'll smoke in the hall," he said. "I think you
+understand me. If you don't--" he paused and smiled his sudden, winning
+smile into the old man's wrathful eyes--"I'll explain more fully when the
+time comes."
+
+"Confound you, Piers!" was Sir Beverley's only answer.
+
+Yet he left the room with the boy's arm linked in his. And the woman's
+face on the wall smiled behind them--the smile of a witch, mysterious,
+derisive, aloof, yet touched with that same magic with which Piers had
+learned even in his infancy to charm away the evil spirit that lurked in
+his grandfather's soul.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE WARNING
+
+
+"Going away to-morrow, are you?" said Ina Rose, in her cool young voice.
+"I hope you'll enjoy it."
+
+"Thanks!" said Piers. "No doubt I shall."
+
+He spoke with his eyes on the dainty lace fan he had taken from her.
+
+Ina frankly studied his face. She had always found Piers Evesham
+interesting.
+
+"I should be wild if I were in your place," she remarked, after a moment.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders, and his brown face slightly smiled. "Because
+of the hunting?" he said, and turned his eyes upon her fresh, girlish
+face. "But there's always next year, what?"
+
+"Good gracious!" said Ina. "You talk as if you were older than your
+grandfather. It wouldn't comfort me in the least to think of next
+season's hunting. And I don't believe it does you either. You are only
+putting it on."
+
+"All right!" said Piers. His eyes dwelt upon her with a species of
+mocking homage that yet in a fashion subtly flattered. He always knew how
+to please Ina Rose, though not always did he take the trouble. "Let us
+say--for the sake of argument--that I am quite inconsolable. It doesn't
+matter to anyone, does it?"
+
+"I don't know why you should say that," said Ina. "It ought to
+matter--anyhow to your grandfather. Why don't you make him go by
+himself?"
+
+Piers laughed a careless laugh, still boldly watching her. "That wouldn't
+be very dutiful of me, would it?" he said.
+
+"I suppose you're not afraid of him?" said Ina, who knew not the meaning
+of the word.
+
+"Why should you suppose that?" said Piers.
+
+She met his look in momentary surprise. "To judge by the way you behaved
+the other day, I should say you were not."
+
+Piers frowned. "Which day?"
+
+Ina explained without embarrassment. "The day that girl held up the whole
+Hunt in Holland's meadow. My word, Piers, how furious the old man was!
+Does he often behave like that?"
+
+Piers still frowned. His fingers were working restlessly at the ivory
+sticks of her fan. "If you mean, does he often thrash me with a
+horsewhip, no, he doesn't," he said shortly. "And he wouldn't have done
+it then if I'd had a hand to spare. I'm glad you enjoyed the spectacle.
+Hope you were all edified."
+
+"You needn't be waxy," said Ina calmly. "I assure you, you never showed
+to greater advantage. I hope your lady friend was duly grateful to her
+deliverer. I rather liked her pluck, Piers. Who is she?"
+
+There was a sudden crack between Piers' fingers. He looked down hastily,
+and in a moment displayed three broken ivory fan-sticks to the girl
+beside him. "I'm horribly sorry, Ina," he said.
+
+Ina looked at the damage, and from it to his face of contrition. "You did
+it on purpose," she said.
+
+"I did not," said Piers.
+
+"You're very rude," she rejoined.
+
+"No, I'm not," he protested. "I'm sorry. I hope you didn't value it for
+any particular reason. I'll send you another from Paris."
+
+She spurned the broken thing with a careless gesture. "Not you! You'd be
+afraid to."
+
+Piers' brows went up. "Afraid?"
+
+"Of your grandfather," she said, with a derisive smile. "If he caught you
+sending anything to me--or to the lady of the meadow--" she paused
+eloquently.
+
+Piers looked grim. "Of course I shall send you a fan if you'll
+accept it."
+
+"How nice of you!" said Ina. "Wouldn't you like to send something for
+her in the same parcel? I'll deliver it for you--if you'll tell me the
+lady's address."
+
+Her eyes sparkled mischievously as she made the suggestion. Piers frowned
+yet a moment longer, then laughed back with abrupt friendliness.
+
+"Thanks awfully! But I won't trouble you. It's decent of you not to be
+angry over this. I'll get you a ripping one to make up."
+
+Ina nodded. "That'll be quite amusing. Everyone will think that you're
+really in earnest at last. Poor Dick will be furious when he knows."
+
+"You'll probably console him pretty soon," returned Piers.
+
+"Think so?" Ina's eyes narrowed a little; she looked at Piers
+speculatively. "That's what you want to believe, is it?"
+
+"I? Of course not!" Piers laughed again. "I never wished any girl
+engaged yet."
+
+"Save one," suggested Ina, and an odd little gleam hovered behind
+her lashes with the words. "Why won't you tell me her name? You
+might as well."
+
+"Why?" said Piers.
+
+"I shall find it out in any case," she assured him. "I know already that
+she dwells under the Vicar's virtuous roof, and that the worthy Dr. Tudor
+finds it necessary to drop in every day. I suppose she is the
+nurse-cook-housekeeper of that establishment."
+
+"I say, how clever of you!" said Piers.
+
+The girl laughed carelessly. "Isn't it? I've studied her in church--and
+you too, my cavalier. I don't believe you have ever attended so regularly
+before, have you? Did she ever tell you her age?"
+
+"Never," said Piers.
+
+"I wonder," said Ina coolly. And then rather suddenly she rose. "Piers,
+if I'm a prying cat, you're a hard-mouthed mule! There! Why can't you
+admit that you're in love with her?"
+
+Piers faced her with no sign of surprise. "Why don't you tell me that
+you're in love with Guyes?" he said.
+
+"Because it wouldn't be true!" She flung back her answer with a laugh
+that sounded unaccountably bitter. "I have yet to meet the man who is
+worth the trouble."
+
+"Oh, really!" said Piers. "Don't flatter us more than you need! I'm sorry
+for Guyes myself. If he weren't so keen on you, it's my belief you'd like
+him better."
+
+"Oh no, I shouldn't!" Ina spoke with a touch of scorn. "I shouldn't like
+him either less or more, whatever he did. I couldn't. But of course he's
+extremely eligible, isn't he?"
+
+"Does that count with you?" said Piers curiously.
+
+She looked at him. "It doesn't with you of course?" she said.
+
+"Not in the least," he returned with emphasis.
+
+She laughed again, and pushed the remnants of her fan with her foot. "It
+wouldn't. You're so charmingly young and romantic. Well, mind the doctor
+doesn't cut you out in your absence! He would be a much more suitable
+_parti_ for her, you know, both as to age and station. Shall we go back
+to the ball-room now? I am engaged to Dick for the next dance. I mustn't
+cut him in his own house."
+
+It was an annual affair but quite informal--this Boxing Night dance at
+the Guyes'. Dick himself called it a survival of his schoolboy days, and
+it was always referred to in the neighbourhood as "Dick's Christmas
+party." He and his mother would no more have dreamed of discontinuing the
+festivity than of foregoing their Christmas dinner, and the Roses of
+Wardenhurst were invariably invited and as invariably attended it. Piers
+was not so constant a guest. Dick had thrown him an open invitation on
+the hunting-field a day or two before, and Piers, having nothing better
+to do, had decided to present himself.
+
+He liked dancing, and was easily the best dancer among the men. He also
+liked Ina Rose, or at least she had always thought so, till that night.
+They were friends of the hunting-field rather than of the drawing-room,
+but they always drifted together wherever they met. Sir Beverley had
+never troubled himself about the intimacy. The girl belonged to the
+county, and if not quite the brilliant match for Piers that he would have
+chosen, she came at least of good old English stock. He knew and liked
+her father, and he would not have made any very strenuous opposition to
+an alliance between the two. The girl was well bred and heiress to the
+Colonel's estate. She would have added considerably to Piers' importance
+as a landowner, and she knew already how to hold up her head in society.
+Also, she led a wholesome, outdoor existence, and was not the sort of
+girl to play with a man's honour.
+
+No, on the whole Sir Beverley had no serious objection to the prospect of
+a marriage between them, save that he had no desire to see Piers married
+for another five years at feast. But Ina could very well afford to wait
+five years for such a prize as Piers. Meanwhile, if they cared to get
+engaged--it would keep the boy out of mischief, and there would be no
+harm in it.
+
+So had run Sir Beverley's thoughts prior to the appearance of the
+mother's help at the Vicarage. But she--the woman with the resolute mouth
+and grey, steadfast eyes--had upset all his calculations. It had not
+needed Lennox Tudor's hint to put him on his guard. He had known whither
+the boy's wayward fancy was tending before that. The scene in the
+hunting-field had been sufficient revelation for him, and had lent
+strength to his arm and fury to his indignation.
+
+Piers' decision to spend his last night in England at a dance had been a
+surprise to him, but then the boy had puzzled him a good many times of
+late. He had even asked himself once or twice if it had been his
+deliberate intention to do so. But since it was absolutely certain that
+the schemer at the Vicarage would not be present at Dick Guyes' party,
+Sir Beverley did not see any urgent necessity for keeping his grandson at
+his side. He even hoped that Piers would enjoy himself though he deemed
+him a fool to go.
+
+And, to judge from appearances, Piers was enjoying himself. Having parted
+from Ina, he claimed for his partner his hostess,--a pretty, graceful
+woman who danced under protest, but so exquisitely that he would hardly
+be persuaded to give her up when the dance was over.
+
+He scarcely left the ball-room for the rest of the evening, and when the
+party broke up he was among the last to leave. Dick ingenuously thanked
+him for helping to make the affair a success. He was not feeling
+particularly happy himself, since Ina had consistently snubbed him
+throughout; but he did not hold Piers in any way responsible for her
+attitude. Dick's outlook on life was supremely simple. He never attempted
+to comprehend the ways of women, being serenely content to regard them as
+beyond his comprehension. He hoped and believed that one day Ina would be
+kind to him, but he was quite prepared to wait an indefinite time for
+that day to dawn. He took all rebuffs with resignation, and could
+generally muster a smile soon after.
+
+He smiled tranquilly upon Piers at parting and congratulated him upon the
+prospect of missing the worst of the winter. To which Piers threw back a
+laugh as he drove away in his little two-seater, coupled with the
+careless assurance that he meant to make the most of his time, whatever
+the weather.
+
+"Lucky dog!" said Guyes, as he watched him disappear down the drive.
+
+But if he had seen the expression that succeeded Piers' laugh, he might
+have suppressed the remark. For Piers' face, as he raced alone through
+the darkness, was the set, grim face of a man who carries a deadly
+purpose in his soul. He had laughed and danced throughout the evening,
+but in his first moment of solitude the devil he had kept at bay had
+entered into full possession.
+
+To the rush and throb of his engine, he heard over and over the gibing,
+malicious words of a girl's sore heart: "Mind the doctor doesn't cut you
+out in your absence!"
+
+Obviously then this affair was the common talk of the neighbourhood since
+news of it had even penetrated to Wardenhurst. People were openly
+watching the rivalry between Lennox Tudor and himself, watching and
+speculating as to the result. And he, about to be ignominiously removed
+from the conflict by his grandfather, at Tudor's suggestion, had become
+the laughing-stock of the place. Piers' teeth nearly met in his lower
+lip. Let them laugh! And let them chatter! He would give them ample food
+for amusement and gossip before he left.
+
+He had yielded to his grandfather's desire because instinct had told him
+that his absence just at that stage of his wooing would be more
+beneficial than his presence. He was shrewd enough to realize that the
+hot blood in him was driving him too fast, urging him to a pace which
+might irreparably damage his cause. For that reason alone, he was ready
+to curb his fierce impetuosity. But to leave a free field for Lennox
+Tudor was not a part of his plan. He had scarcely begun to regard the man
+in the light of a serious rival, although fully aware of the fact that
+Tudor was doing his utmost to remove him from his path. But if Ina
+thought him so, he had probably underestimated the danger.
+
+He had always detested Tudor very thoroughly. Piers never did anything by
+halves, and the doctor's undisguised criticism of him never failed to
+arouse his fiercest resentment. That Tudor disliked him in return was a
+fact that could scarcely escape the notice of the most careless observer.
+The two were plainly antipathetic, and were scarcely civil to one another
+even in public.
+
+But that night Piers' antagonism flared to a deadly hatred. The
+smouldering fire had leaped to a fierce blaze. Two nights before he had
+smothered it with the exultant conviction that Tudor's chances with Avery
+were practically non-existent. He had known with absolute certainty that
+he was not the type of man to attract her. But to-night his mood had
+changed. Whether Tudor's chances had improved or not, he scarcely stopped
+to question, but that other people regarded them as possibly greater than
+his own was a fact that sent the mad blood to his head. He tore back
+through the winter night like a man possessed, with Ina Rose's scoffing
+warning beating a devil's tattoo in his brain.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+
+The surgery-bell pealed imperiously, and Tudor looked up from his book.
+It was his custom to read far into the night, for he was a poor sleeper
+and preferred a cosy fireside to his bed. But that night he was even
+later than usual. Glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece, he saw that
+it was a quarter to two. With a shrug of the shoulders expressive rather
+of weariness than indifference, he rose to answer the bell.
+
+It pealed again before he reached the door, and the doctor frowned. He
+was never very tolerant of impatience. He unfastened the bolts without
+haste. The case might be urgent, but a steady hand and cool nerve were
+usually even more essential than speed in his opinion. He opened the door
+therefore with a certain deliberation, and faced the sharp night air with
+grim resignation. "Well? Who is it? Come in!"
+
+He expected to see some village messenger, and the sight of Piers,
+stern-faced, with the fur collar of his motor-coat turned up to his ears,
+was a complete surprise.
+
+"Hullo!" he said, staring at him. "Anything wrong?"
+
+Piers stared back with eyes of burning hostility. "I want a word with
+you," he announced curtly. "Will you come out, or shall I come in?"
+
+"You'd better come in," said Tudor, suppressing a shiver, "unless I'm
+wanted up at the Abbey."
+
+"You're not," said Piers.
+
+He stepped into the passage, and impetuously stripped off his heavy
+coat. Tudor shut the door, and turned round. He surveyed his visitor's
+evening-dress with a touch of contempt. He himself was clad in an
+ancient smoking-jacket, much frayed at the cuffs; and his
+carpet-slippers were so trodden down at the heel that he could only just
+manage to shuffle along in them.
+
+"Go into the consulting-room!" he said. "There's a light there."
+
+Piers strode in, and waited for him. Seen by the light of the gas that
+burned there, his face was pale and set in lines of iron determination.
+His eyes shone out of it like the eyes of an infuriated wild beast.
+
+"Do you know what I've come for?" he said, as Tudor shambled into the
+room.
+
+Tudor looked him over briefly and comprehensively. "No, I don't," he
+said. "I hoped I'd seen the last of you."
+
+His words were as brief as his look. It was obvious that he had no
+intention of wasting time in mere courtesy.
+
+Piers' lips tightened at his tone. He looked full and straight at the
+baffling glasses that hid the other man's contemptuous eyes.
+
+"I've come for a reckoning with you," he said.
+
+"Really?" said Tudor. He glanced again at the clock. "Rather an unusual
+hour, isn't it?"
+
+Piers passed the question by. He was chafing on his feet like a caged
+animal. Abruptly he came to the point.
+
+"I told you the other day that I wouldn't put up with any interference
+from you. I didn't know then how far your interference had gone. I do
+know now. This scheme to get me out of the country was of your
+contrivance."
+
+Fiercely he flung the words. He was quivering with passionate
+indignation. But the effect on Tudor was scarcely perceptible. He only
+looked a little colder, a little more satirical, than was his wont.
+
+"Well?" he said. "What of it?"
+
+Piers showed his teeth momentarily. His hands were hard gripped behind
+him, as though he restrained himself by main force from open violence.
+
+"You don't deny it?" he said.
+
+"Why should I?" Tudor's thin lips displayed a faint sneer. "I certainly
+advised your grandfather to go away, and I think the advice was sound."
+
+"It was--from your point of view." A tremor of fierce humour ran through
+Piers' speech. "But plans--even clever ones--don't always turn out as
+they should. This one for instance--what do you think you are going to
+gain by it?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Tudor stood by the table facing Piers, his attitude
+one of supreme indifference. He seemed scarcely to feel the stormy
+atmosphere that pulsated almost visibly around the younger man. His eyes
+behind their glasses were cold and shrewd, wholly emotionless.
+
+Piers paused an instant to grip his self-control the harder, for every
+word he uttered seemed to make his hold the more precarious.
+
+"I'll tell you what I mean," he said, his voice low and savagely
+distinct. "I mean that what you've done--all this sneaking and scheming
+to get me out of your way--isn't going to serve your purpose. I mean that
+you shall swear to me here and now to give up the game during my absence,
+or take the consequences. It is entirely due to you that I am going,
+but--by Heaven--you shall reap no advantage from it!"
+
+His voice rose a little, and the menace of it became more apparent. He
+bent slightly towards the man he threatened. His eyes blazed red and
+dangerous. Tudor stood his ground, but it was impossible any longer to
+ignore Piers' open fury. It was like the blast of a hurricane hurled
+full against him. He made a slight gesture of remonstrance.
+
+"My good fellow, all this excitement is utterly uncalled for. The advice
+I gave your grandfather would, I am convinced, have been given by any
+other medical man in the country. If you are not satisfied with it, you
+had better get him to have another opinion. As to taking advantage of
+your absence, I really don't know what you mean, and I think if you are
+wise you won't stop to explain. It's getting late and if you don't value
+your night's rest, I can't do without mine. Also, I think when the
+morning comes, you'll be ashamed of this foolery."
+
+He spoke with studied coldness. He knew the value of a firm front when
+facing odds. But he did not know the fiery soul of the man before him,
+or realize that contempt poured upon outraged pride is as spirit poured
+upon flame.
+
+He saw the devil in Piers' eyes too late to change his tactics. Almost in
+the same moment the last shred of Piers' self-control vanished like smoke
+in a gale. He uttered a fearful oath and sprang upon Tudor like an animal
+freed from a leash.
+
+The struggle that followed was furious if brief. Tudor's temper, once
+thoroughly roused, was as fierce as any man's, and though his knowledge
+of the science of fighting was wholly elementary, he made a desperate
+resistance. It lasted for possibly thirty seconds, and then he found
+himself flung violently backwards across the table and pinned there, with
+Piers' hands gripping his throat, and Piers' eyes, grim and murderous,
+glaring down into his own.
+
+"Be still!" ordered Piers, his voice no more than a whisper. "Or I'll
+kill you--by Heaven, I will!"
+
+Tudor was utterly powerless in that relentless grip. His heart was
+pumping with great hammer-strokes; his breathing came laboured between
+those merciless hands. His own hands were closed upon the iron wrists,
+but their hold was weakening moment by moment, he knew their grasp to be
+wholly ineffectual. He obeyed the order because he lacked the strength to
+do otherwise.
+
+Piers slowly slackened his grip. "Now," he said, speaking between lips
+that scarcely seemed to move, "you will make me that promise."
+
+"What--promise?" Gaspingly Tudor uttered the question, yet something of
+the habitual sneer which he always kept for Piers distorted his mouth as
+he spoke. He was not an easy man to beat, despite his physical
+limitations.
+
+Sternly and implacably Piers answered him. "You will swear--by all you
+hold sacred--to take no advantage whatever of me while I am away. You had
+a special purpose in view when you planned to get me out of the way. You
+will swear to give up that purpose, till I come back."
+
+"I?" said Tudor.
+
+Just the one word flung upwards at his conqueror, but carrying with it a
+defiance so complete that even Piers was for the moment taken by
+surprise! Then, the devil urging him, he tightened his grip again.
+"Either that," he said, "or--"
+
+He left the sentence unfinished. His hands completed the threat. He had
+passed the bounds of civilization, and his savagery whirled him like a
+fiery torrent through the gaping jaws of hell. The maddening flames were
+all around him, the shrieking of demons was in his ears, driving him on
+to destruction. He went, blinded by passion, goaded by the intolerable
+stabs of jealousy. In those moments he was conscious of nothing save a
+wild delirium of anger against the man who, beaten, yet resisted him, yet
+threw him his disdainful refusal to surrender even in the face of
+overwhelming defeat.
+
+But the brief respite had given Tudor a transient renewal of strength.
+Ere that terrible grip could wholly lock again, he made another frantic
+effort to free himself. Spasmodic as it was, and wholly unconsidered, yet
+it had the advantage of being unexpected. Piers shifted his hold, and in
+that instant Tudor found and gripped the edge of the table. Sharply, with
+desperate strength, he dragged himself sideways, and before his adversary
+could prevent it he was over the edge. He fell heavily, dragging Piers
+with him, struck his head with violence against the table-leg, and
+crumpled with the blow like an empty sack.
+
+Piers found himself gripping a limp, inanimate object, and with a sudden
+sense of overpowering horror he desisted. He stumbled up, staggering
+slightly, and drew a long, hard breath. His heart was racing like a
+runaway engine. All the blood in his body seemed to be concentrated
+there. Almost mechanically he waited for it to slow down. And, as he
+waited, the madness of that wild rush through hell fell away from him.
+The demons that had driven him passed into distance. He was left standing
+in a place of desolation, utterly and terribly alone.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A trickle of cold water ran down Tudor's chin. He put up a hesitating,
+groping hand, and opened his eyes.
+
+He was lying in the arm-chair before the fire in which he had spent the
+evening. The light danced before him in blurred flashes.
+
+"Hullo!" he muttered thickly. "I've been asleep."
+
+He remained passive for a few moments, trying, not very successfully, to
+collect his scattered senses. Then, with an effort that seemed curiously
+laboured, he slowly sat up. Instinctively, his eyes went to the clock
+above him, but the hands of it seemed to be swinging round and round. He
+stared at it bewildered.
+
+But when he tried to rise and investigate the mystery, the whole room
+began to spin, and he sank back with a feeling of intense sickness.
+
+It was then that he became aware of another presence. Someone came from
+behind him and, stooping, held a tumbler to his lips. He looked up
+vaguely, and as in a dream he saw the face of Piers Evesham.
+
+But it was Piers as he had never before seen him, white-lipped, unnerved,
+shaking. The hand that held the glass trembled almost beyond control.
+
+"What's the matter?" questioned Tudor in hazy wonder. "Have you been
+boozing, or have I?"
+
+And then, his perceptions growing stronger, he took the glass from the
+quivering hand and slowly drank.
+
+The draught steadied him. He looked up with more assurance, and saw
+Piers, still with that deathly look on his face, leaning against the
+mantelpiece for support.
+
+"What on earth's the matter?" said Tudor sharply.
+
+He felt for his glasses, found them dangling over his shoulder, and put
+them on. One of them was cracked across, an illuminating fact which
+accounted for much. He looked keenly at Piers for several quiet seconds.
+
+At length with a shade of humour he spoke. "Here endeth the first lesson!
+You'd make a better show if you had a drink also. I'm sorry there's only
+one glass. You see, I wasn't expecting any friends to-night."
+
+Piers started a little and straightened himself; but his face remained
+bloodless, and there was a curiously stunned look in his eyes. He did not
+attempt to utter a word.
+
+Tudor drained his glass, sat a moment or two longer, then got up. There
+were brandy and water on his writing-table. He poured out a stiff dose,
+and turned to Piers with authority.
+
+"Pull yourself together, Evesham! I should have thought you'd made a
+big enough fool of yourself for one night. Drink this! Don't spill it
+now! And don't sit down on the fire, for I don't feel equal to
+pulling you off!"
+
+His manner was briskly professional, the manner he usually reserved for
+the hysterical portion of his patients. He was still feeling decidedly
+shaky himself, but Piers' collapse was an admirable restorative. He stood
+by, vigilant and resolute, while the brandy did its work.
+
+Piers drank in silence, not looking at him. All the arrogance had gone
+out of him. He looked broken and unmanned.
+
+"Better?" asked Tudor at length.
+
+He nodded mutely, and set down the glass.
+
+Tudor surveyed him questioningly. "What happened to you?" he asked
+finally.
+
+"Nothing!" Piers found his voice at last, it was low and shamed. "Nothing
+whatever! You--you--my God!--I thought you were dead, that's all."
+
+"That all?" said Tudor. He put his hand up to his temple. There was a
+fair-sized lump there already, and it was swelling rapidly.
+
+Piers nodded again. The deathly pallor had gone from his face, but he
+still avoided Tudor's eyes. He spoke again, below his breath, as if more
+to himself than to Tudor.
+
+"You looked so horribly like--like--a man I once--saw killed."
+
+"If you are wise, you will go home to bed," said Tudor gruffly.
+
+Piers flashed a swift look at him. He stood hesitating. "You're not
+really hurt?" he questioned, after a moment.
+
+"Thank you," said Tudor drily, "I am not."
+
+He made no movement of reconciliation. Perhaps it was hardly to be
+expected of him. Piers made none either. He turned away in silence.
+
+The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour. Two o'clock! Tudor looked
+at it with a wry smile. It had been a lively quarter of an hour.
+
+The surgery-door banged upon Piers' departure. He heard his feet move
+heavily to the gate, and the dull clang of the latter closing behind him.
+Then, after a protracted pause, there came the sound of his motor.
+
+As this throbbed away into distance Tudor smiled again grimly,
+ironically. "Yes, you young ruffian," he said. "It's given your nerves a
+nasty jolt, and serves you jolly well right! I never saw any fellow in
+such a mortal funk before, and--from your somewhat rash remark--I gather
+that it's not the first lesson after all. I wonder when--and how--you
+killed that other man."
+
+He was still speculating as he turned out the light and went to his room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+HORNS AND HOOFS
+
+
+It was the Reverend Stephen Lorimer's custom to have all letters that
+arrived by the morning post placed beside his breakfast plate to be
+sorted by him at the end of family prayers,--a custom which Gracie freely
+criticized in the sanctuary of the schoolroom, and which her mother in
+earlier days had gently and quite ineffectually tried to stop. It was
+always a somewhat lengthy proceeding as it entailed a careful scrutiny of
+each envelope, especially in the case of letters not addressed to the
+Reverend Stephen. He was well acquainted with the handwriting of all his
+wife's correspondents, and was generally ready with some shrewd guess as
+to their motives for writing. They were usually submitted to him for
+perusal as soon as she had read them herself, a habit formed by Mrs.
+Lorimer when she discovered that he looked upon her correspondence as his
+own property and deeply resented any inclination on her part to keep it
+to herself.
+
+Avery's arrival had brought an additional interest to the morning budget.
+Her letters were invariably examined with bland curiosity and handed on
+to her with comments appropriate to their appearance. Occasionally
+envelopes with an Australian postmark reached her, and these always
+excited especial notice. The brief spell of Avery's married life had been
+spent in a corner of New South Wales. In the early part of their
+acquaintance, Mr. Lorimer had sought to draw her out on the subject of
+her experiences during this period, but he had found her reticent. And so
+whenever a letter came addressed in the strong, masculine hand of her
+Australian correspondent, some urbane remark was invariably made, while
+his small daughter Gracie swelled with indignation at the further
+end of the table.
+
+"Two epistles for Mrs. Denys!" he announced, as he turned over the
+morning's mail at the breakfast-table two days after Christmas. "Ah, I
+thought our Australian friend would be calling attention to himself ere
+the festive season had quite departed. He writes from Adelaide on this
+occasion. That indicates a move if I mistake not. His usual
+_pied-a-terre_ has been Brisbane hitherto, has it not?"
+
+His little dark eyes interrogated Avery for a moment before they vanished
+inwards with disconcerting completeness.
+
+Avery stiffened instinctively. She was well aware that Mr. Lorimer did
+not like her, but the fact held no disturbing element. To her mind the
+dislike of the man was preferable to his favour and after all she saw but
+little of him.
+
+She went on therefore with her occupation of cutting bread and butter for
+the children with no sign of annoyance save that slight, scarcely
+perceptible stiffening of the neck which only Gracie saw.
+
+"I hope you are kind to your faithful correspondent," smiled Mr. Lorimer,
+still holding the letter between his finger and thumb. "He evidently
+regards your friendship as a pearl of price, and doubtless he is
+well-advised to do so."
+
+Here he opened his eyes again, and sent a barbed glance at Avery's
+unresponsive face.
+
+"Friendship is a beautiful thing, is it not?" he said.
+
+"It is," said Avery, deftly cutting her fifth slice.
+
+The Reverend Stephen proceeded with clerical fervour to embellish his
+subject, for no especial reason save the pleasure of listening to his own
+eloquence--a pleasure which never palled. "It partakes of that divine
+quality of charity so sadly lacking in many of us, and sheds golden beams
+of sunshine in the humblest earthly home. It has been aptly called the
+true earnest of eternity."
+
+"Really!" said Avery.
+
+"An exquisite thought, is it not?" said the Vicar. "Grace, my child, for
+the one-and-twentieth time I must beg of you not to swing your legs when
+sitting at table."
+
+"I wasn't," said Gracie.
+
+Her father's brows were elevated in surprise. His eyes as a consequence
+were opened rather wider than usual, revealing an unmistakably
+malignant gleam.
+
+"That is not the way in which a Christian child should receive
+admonition," he said. "If you were not swinging your legs, you were
+fidgeting in a fashion which you very well know to be unmannerly. Do not
+let me have to complain of your behaviour again!"
+
+Gracie's cheeks were crimson, her violet eyes blazing with resentment;
+and Avery, dreading an outburst, laid a gentle restraining hand upon her
+shoulder for an instant.
+
+The action was well-meant, but its results were unfortunate. Gracie
+impulsively seized and kissed the hand with enthusiasm. "All right, Avery
+dear," she said with pointed docility.
+
+Mr. Lorimer's brows rose a little higher, but being momentarily at a loss
+for a suitable comment he contented himself with a return to Avery's
+correspondence.
+
+"The other letter," he said, "bears the well-known crest of the Evesham
+family. Ah, Mrs. Denys!" he shook his head at her. "Now, what does
+that portend?"
+
+"What is the crest?" asked Avery, briskly cutting another slice.
+
+"The devil," said Gracie.
+
+"My dear!" remonstrated Mrs. Lorimer, with a nervous glance towards
+her husband.
+
+The Reverend Stephen was smiling, but in a fashion she did not quite
+like. He addressed Avery.
+
+"The Evesham crest, Mrs. Denys, is a gentleman with horns and hoofs and
+under him the one expressive word, _'Cave.'_ Excellent advice, is it not?
+I think we should do well to follow it." He turned the envelope over, and
+studied the address. "What a curious style of writing the young man has,
+unrestrained to a degree! This looks as if it had been written in a
+desperate mood. Mrs. Denys, Mrs. Denys, what have you been doing?"
+
+He began to laugh, but stopped abruptly as Julian, who was seated near
+him, with a sudden, clumsy movement, upset a stream of cocoa across the
+breakfast-table. This created an instant diversion. Mr. Lorimer turned
+upon him vindictively, and soundly smacked his head, Mrs. Lorimer covered
+her face and wept, and Avery, with Gracie close behind, hurried to remedy
+the disaster.
+
+Ranald came to help her in his quiet, gentlemanly way, dabbing up the
+thick brown stream with his table-napkin. Pat slipped round to his
+mother and hugged her hard. And Olive, the only unmoved member of the
+party, looked on with contemptuous eyes the while she continued her
+breakfast. Jeanie still breakfasted upstairs in the schoolroom, and so
+missed the _fracas_.
+
+"The place is a pig-sty!" declared Mr. Lorimer, roused out of all
+complacence and casting dainty phraseology to the winds. "And you,
+sir,"--he addressed his second son,--"wholly unfit for civilized
+society. Go upstairs, and--if you have any appetite left after this
+disgusting exhibition--satisfy it in the nursery!"
+
+Julian, crimson but wholly unashamed, flung up his head defiantly and
+walked to the door.
+
+"Stop!" commanded Mr. Lorimer, ere he reached it.
+
+Julian stopped.
+
+His father looked him up and down with gradually returning composure.
+"You will not go to the nursery," he said. "You will go to the study and
+there suffer the penalty for insolence."
+
+"Stephen!" broke from Mrs. Lorimer in anguished protest.
+
+"A beastly shame!" cried Gracie vehemently, flinging discretion to the
+winds; she adored her brother Julian. "He never spoke a single word!"
+
+"Go, Julian!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Julian went, banging the door vigorously behind him.
+
+Then, amid an awful silence, the Vicar turned his scrutiny upon his
+small daughter.
+
+Gracie stood up under it with all the courage at her disposal, but she
+was white to the lips before that dreadful gaze passed from her to Avery.
+
+"Mrs. Denys," said Mr. Lorimer, in tones of icy courtesy, "will you
+oblige me by taking that child upstairs, undressing her, and putting her
+to bed? She will remain there until I come."
+
+Avery, her task accomplished, turned and faced him. She was as white as
+Gracie, but there was a steadfast light in her eyes that showed her
+wholly unafraid.
+
+"Mr. Lorimer," she said, "with your permission I will deal with
+Gracie. She has done wrong, I know. By-and-bye, she will be sorry and
+tell you so."
+
+Mr. Lorimer smiled sarcastically. "An apology, my dear Mrs. Denys, does
+not condone the offence. It is wholly against my principles to spare the
+rod when it is so richly merited, and I shall not do so on this occasion.
+Will you kindly do as I have requested?"
+
+It was final, and Avery knew it. Mrs. Lorimer knew it also, and burst
+into hysterical crying.
+
+Avery turned swiftly. "Go upstairs, dear!" she said to Gracie, and Gracie
+went like an arrow.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer started to her feet. "Stephen! Stephen!" she cried
+imploringly.
+
+But her husband turned a deaf ear. With a contemptuous gesture he tossed
+Avery's letters upon the table and stalked from the room.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer uttered a wild cry of despair, and fell back fainting in
+her chair.
+
+For the next quarter of an hour Avery was fully occupied in restoring
+her, again assisted by Ronald. When she came to herself, it was only to
+shed anguished tears on Avery's shoulder and repeat over and over again
+that she could not bear it, she could not bear it.
+
+Avery was of the same opinion, but she did not say so. She strove
+instead with the utmost tenderness to persuade her to drink some tea.
+But even when she had succeeded in this, Mrs. Lorimer continued to be so
+exhausted and upset that at last, growing uneasy, Avery despatched
+Ronald for the doctor.
+
+She sent Olive for the children's nurse and took counsel with her as to
+getting her mistress back to bed. But Nurse instantly discouraged this
+suggestion.
+
+"For the Lord's sake, ma'am, don't take her upstairs!" she said. "The
+master's up there with Miss Gracie, and he's whipping the poor lamb
+something cruel. He made me undress her first."
+
+"Oh, I cannot have that!" exclaimed Avery. "Stay here a minute, Nurse,
+while I go up!"
+
+She rushed upstairs in furious anger to the room in which the three
+little girls slept. The door was locked, but the sounds within were
+unmistakable. Gracie was plainly receiving severe punishment from her
+irate parent. Her agonized crying tore Avery's heart.
+
+She threw herself at the door and battered at it with her fists. "Mr.
+Lorimer!" she called. "Mr. Lorimer, let me in!"
+
+There was no response. Possibly she was not even heard, for the dreadful
+crying continued and, mingled with it, the swish of the slender little
+riding-switch which in the earlier, less harassed days of his married
+life the Reverend Stephen had kept for the horse he rode, and which now
+he kept for his children.
+
+They were terrible moments for Avery that she spent outside that locked
+door, listening impotently to a child's piteous cries for mercy from one
+who knew it not. But they came to an end at last. Gracie's distress sank
+into anguished sobs, and Avery knew that the punishment was over. Mr.
+Lorimer had satisfied both his sense of duty and his malice.
+
+She heard him speak in cold, cutting tones. "I have punished you more
+severely than I had ever expected to find necessary, and I hope that the
+lesson will be sufficient. But I warn you, Grace, most solemnly that I
+shall watch your behaviour very closely for the future, and if I detect
+in you the smallest indication of the insolence and defiance for which I
+have inflicted this punishment upon you to-day I shall repeat the
+punishment fourfold. No! Not another word!" as Gracie made some
+inarticulate utterance. "Or you will compel me to repeat it to-night!"
+
+And with that, he walked quietly to the door and unlocked it.
+
+Avery had ceased to beat upon it; she met him white and stiff in
+the doorway.
+
+"I have just sent for the doctor," she said. "Mrs. Lorimer has been
+taken ill."
+
+She passed him at once with the words, not looking at him, for she could
+not trust herself. Straight to Gracie, huddled on the floor in her
+night-dress, she went, and lifted the child bodily to her bed.
+
+Gracie clung to her, sobbing passionately. Mr. Lorimer lingered in
+the doorway.
+
+"Will you go, please?" said Avery, tight-lipped and rigid, the child
+clasped to her throbbing heart.
+
+It was a definite command, spoken in a tone that almost compelled
+compliance, and Mr. Lorimer lingered no more.
+
+Then for one long minute Avery sat and rocked the poor little tortured
+body in her arms.
+
+At length, through Gracie's sobs, she spoke. "Gracie darling, I'm going
+to ask you to do something big for me."
+
+"Yes?" sobbed Gracie, clinging tightly round her neck.
+
+"Leave off crying!" Avery said. "Please leave off crying, darling, and be
+your own brave self!"
+
+"I can't," cried Gracie.
+
+"But do try, darling!" Avery urged her softly. "Because, you see, I can't
+leave you like this, and your poor little mother wants me so badly. She
+is ill, Gracie, and I ought to go to her, but I can't while you are
+crying so."
+
+Thus adjured, Gracie made gallant efforts to check herself. But her
+spirit was temporarily quite broken. She stood passively with the tears
+running down her face while Avery hastily dressed her again and set her
+rumpled hair to rights. Then again for a few seconds they held each other
+very tightly.
+
+"Bless you, my own brave darling!" Avery whispered.
+
+To which Gracie made tearful reply: "Whatever should we do without you,
+dear--dear Avery?"
+
+"And you won't cry any more?" pleaded Avery, who was nearer to tears
+herself than she dared have owned.
+
+"No," said Gracie valiantly.
+
+She began to dry her eyes with vigour--a hopeful sign; and after pressing
+upon Avery another damp kiss was even able to muster a smile.
+
+"Now you can do something to help me," said Avery. "Give yourself five
+minutes--here's my watch to go by!" She slipped it off her own wrist and
+on to Gracie's. "Then run up to the nursery and see after the children
+while Nurse is downstairs! And drink a cup of milk, dearie! Mind you do,
+for you've had nothing yet."
+
+"I shall love to wear your watch," murmured Gracie, beginning to be
+comforted.
+
+"I know you'll take care of it," Avery said, with a loving hand on the
+child's hair. "Now you'll be all right, will you? I can leave you without
+worrying?"
+
+Gracie gave her face a final polish, and nodded. Spent and sore though she
+was, her spirit was beginning to revive. "Is Mother really ill?" she
+asked, as Avery turned to go.
+
+"I don't know, dear. I'm rather anxious about her," said Avery.
+
+"It's all Father's fault," said Gracie.
+
+Avery was silent. She could not contradict the statement.
+
+As she reached the door, Gracie spoke again, but more to herself than to
+Avery. "I hope--when he dies--he'll go to hell and stay there for ever
+and ever and ever!"
+
+"Oh, Gracie!" Avery stopped, genuinely shocked. "How wrong!" she said.
+
+Gracie nodded several times. "Yes, I know it's wrong, but I don't care.
+And I hope he'll die to-morrow."
+
+"Hush! Hush!" Avery said.
+
+Whereat Gracie broke into a propitiatory smile. "The things I wish for
+never happen," she said.
+
+And Avery departed, wondering if this statement deserved to be treated in
+the light of an amendment.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE DAY OF TROUBLE
+
+
+Lennox Tudor spent hours at the Vicarage that day in close attendance
+upon Mrs. Lorimer in company with Avery who scarcely left her side.
+Terrible hours they were, during which they battled strenuously to keep
+the poor, quivering life in her weary body.
+
+"There is no reason why she shouldn't pull round," Tudor assured Avery.
+
+But yet throughout the day she hovered on the verge of collapse.
+
+By night the worst danger was over, but intense weakness remained. She
+lay white and still, taking notice of nothing. Only once, when Avery was
+giving her nourishment, did she rouse herself to speak.
+
+"Beg my husband not to be vexed with me!" she whispered. "Tell him there
+won't be another little one after all! He'll be glad to know that."
+
+And Avery, cut to the heart, promised to deliver the message.
+
+A little later she stole away, leaving the children's nurse in charge,
+and slipped up to the schoolroom for some tea. Tudor had gone to see
+another patient, but had promised to return as soon as possible.
+
+The children were all gathered round the table at which Olive very
+capably presided. Gracie, looking wan and subdued, sat on the end of
+Jeanie's sofa; but she sprang to meet Avery the moment she appeared.
+
+Avery sat down, holding the child's hand in hers. She glanced round the
+table as she did so.
+
+"Where is Julian?"
+
+"Upstairs," said Ronald briefly. "In disgrace."
+
+Avery felt her heart contract with a sick sense of further trouble in the
+air. "Has he been there all day?" she asked. Ronald nodded. "And another
+flogging to-night if he doesn't apologize. He says he'll die first."
+
+"So would I," breathed Gracie.
+
+At this juncture the door swung open with stately precision, and Mr.
+Lorimer entered. Everyone rose, according to established custom, with the
+exceptions of Avery and Jeanie. Gracie's fingers tightened convulsively
+upon Avery's hand, and she turned as white as the table-cloth.
+
+Mr. Lorimer, however, looked over her head as if she did not exist, and
+addressed Avery.
+
+"Mrs. Denys, be so good as to spare me two minutes in the study!" he said
+with extreme formality.
+
+"Certainly," Avery made quiet reply. "I will come to you before I go back
+to Mrs. Lorimer."
+
+He raised his brows slightly, as if he had expected a more prompt
+compliance with his request. And then his eyes fell upon Gracie, clinging
+fast to Avery's hand.
+
+"Grace," he said, in his clear, definite tones, "come here!"
+
+The child gave a great start and shrank against Avery's shoulder. "Oh
+no!" she whispered. "No!"
+
+"Come here!" repeated Mr. Lorimer.
+
+He extended his hand, but Gracie only shrank further away. She was
+trembling violently, so violently that Avery felt impelled to pass a
+sustaining arm around her.
+
+"Come, my child!" said the Vicar, the majestic composure of his features
+gradually yielding to a look of dawning severity.
+
+"Go, dear!" whispered Avery.
+
+"I don't want to," gasped Gracie.
+
+"I shall not punish you," her father said, "unless I find you disobedient
+or still unrepentant."
+
+"Darling, go!" Avery urged softly into her ear. "It'll be all right now."
+
+But Gracie, shaking from head to foot and scarcely able to stand, only
+clung to her the faster, and in a moment she began agitatedly to cry.
+
+Mr. Lorimer's hand fell to his side. "Still unrepentant, I fear," he
+said.
+
+Avery, with the child gathered closely to her, looked across at him with
+wide, accusing eyes.
+
+"She is frightened and upset," she said. "It is not fair to judge her in
+this condition."
+
+Mr. Lorimer's eyes gleamed back malignantly. He made her an icy bow. "In
+that case, Mrs. Denys," he said, "she had better go to bed and stay there
+until her condition has improved."
+
+Avery compressed her lips tightly, and made no rejoinder.
+
+The Reverend Stephen compressed his, and after a definite pause of most
+unpleasant tension, he uttered a deep sigh and withdrew.
+
+"I know he means to do it again!" sobbed Gracie. "I know he does!"
+
+"He shall not!" said Avery.
+
+And with the words she put the child from her, rose, and with great
+determination walked out of the room.
+
+Mr. Lorimer had scarcely settled himself in what he called his "chair of
+ease" in the study when her low knock reached him, and she entered. Her
+grey eyes were no longer angry, but very resolute. She closed the door
+softly, and came straight to the fire.
+
+"Mr. Lorimer," she said, her voice pitched very low, "I want you to be
+patient with me just for a minute. Will you?"
+
+Mr. Lorimer sighed again. "I am yearning for the refreshment of a little
+solitary meditation, Mrs. Denys," he said.
+
+"I shall not keep you," Avery rejoined steadily. She stood before him,
+very pale but wholly composed. "What I have to say can be said in a very
+few seconds. First, with regard to Gracie; the child is so upset that I
+think any further punishment would make her downright ill."
+
+"Pooh, my dear Mrs. Denys!" said the Reverend Stephen.
+
+Avery paused a moment. "Will you try to listen to me with an open
+mind?" she said.
+
+"I am listening," said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+"I know she was naughty this morning," Avery continued. "I am not trying
+to defend her behaviour. But her punishment was a very severe one, and it
+has so terrified her that at present she can think of nothing else. Give
+her time to be sorry! Please give her time!"
+
+Mr. Lorimer glanced at the clock. "She has already had nine hours," he
+observed. "I shall give her three more."
+
+"And then?" said Avery.
+
+His eyes travelled up to her troubled face. "And if by then," he said
+deliberately, "she has not come to me to express her penitence, I shall
+be reluctantly compelled to repeat the punishment."
+
+"You will drive the child out of her senses if you do!" Avery exclaimed.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "My dear Mrs. Denys, permit me to remind you
+that I have had considerable experience in the upbringing of children."
+
+"And they are all afraid of you," Avery said.
+
+He smiled. "In my opinion a little wholesome awe is salutary. No, Mrs.
+Denys, I cannot listen any further to your persuasion. In fact I fear
+that in Grace's case I have so far erred on the side of laxness. She has
+become very wild and uncontrolled, and--she must be tamed."
+
+He closed his lips upon the word, and despair entered Avery's heart. She
+gripped her self-control with all her might, realizing that the moment
+she lost it, her strength would be gone.
+
+With a great effort she turned from the subject. "I have a message for
+you from Mrs. Lorimer," she said, after a moment, and proceeded to
+deliver it in a low, steady voice, her eyes upon the fire.
+
+The man in the chair heard it without the movement of a muscle of his
+face. "I will endeavour to look in upon her presently," was all the
+reply he made.
+
+Avery turned to go, but he stopped her with a gesture.
+
+"Mrs. Denys," he said smoothly, "you forget, I think, that I also had
+something to say."
+
+Avery paused. She had forgotten.
+
+He turned his eyes deliberately up to hers, as he leaned back in his
+chair. "I am sorry to have to tell you," he said, "that in consequence of
+your unfortunate zeal in encouraging the children in insubordination, I
+can no longer look upon you as in any sense a help in my household. I
+therefore desire that you will take a month's notice from now. If I can
+fill your place sooner, I shall dispense with your services earlier."
+
+Calmly, dispassionately, he uttered the words. Avery stood quite still to
+hear them. And through her like a stab there ran the thought of the poor
+little woman upstairs. The pain of it was almost unbearable. She caught
+her breath involuntarily.
+
+But the next moment she was herself again. She bowed without a word, and
+turned to go.
+
+She had nearly reached the door ere she discovered that it stood open,
+and that Lennox Tudor was on the threshold, more grimly strong than she
+had ever before realized him to be.
+
+He stood back for her to pass, holding the door for her without speaking.
+And in silence Avery departed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE STRAIGHT TRUTH
+
+
+"Ah, my worthy physician, enter, enter!" was Mr. Lorimer's bland
+greeting. "What news of the patient?"
+
+Tudor tramped up to the hearth, looking very square and resolute. "I've
+come from the schoolroom," he said, "where I went to take a look at
+Jeanie. But I found Gracie required more of my attention than she did.
+Are you absolutely mad, I wonder, to inflict corporal punishment upon a
+highly-strung child like that? Let me tell you this! You'll turn her into
+a senseless idiot if you persist! The child is nearly crazed with terror
+as it is. I've told them to put her to bed, and I'm going up to give her
+a soothing draught directly."
+
+Mr. Lorimer rose with dignity. "You somewhat magnify your office,
+doctor," he said.
+
+"No, I don't!" said Tudor rudely. "I do what I must. And I warn you that
+child is wrought up to a highly dangerous pitch of excitement. You don't
+want her to have brain-fever, I suppose?"
+
+"Pooh!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Tudor stamped a furious foot, and let himself go. He had no scruples
+about losing his temper at that moment. He poured forth his indignation
+in a perfect tornado of righteous anger.
+
+"That's all you have to say, is it? You--a man of God, so-called--killing
+your wife by inches and not caring a damn what suffering you cause! I
+tell you, she has been at death's door all day, thanks to your infernal
+behaviour. She may die yet, and you will be directly responsible. You've
+crushed her systematically, body and soul. As to the children, if you
+touch that little girl again--or any of 'em--I'll haul you before the
+Bench for cruelty. Do you hear that?"
+
+Mr. Lorimer, who had been waving a protesting hand throughout this
+vigorous denunciation, here interposed a lofty: "Sir! You
+forget yourself!"
+
+"Not I!" flung back Tudor. "I know very well what I'm about. I spoke to
+you once before about your wife, and you wouldn't listen. But--by
+Heaven--you shall listen this time, and hear the straight truth for once.
+Her life has been a perpetual martyrdom for years. You've tortured her
+through the children as cruelly as any victim was ever tortured on the
+rack. But it's got to stop now. I don't deal in empty threats. What I've
+said I shall stick to. You may be the Vicar of the parish, but you're
+under the same law as the poorest of 'em. And if anything more of this
+kind happens, you shall feel the law. And a pretty scandal it'll make."
+
+He paused a moment, but Mr. Lorimer stood in frozen silence; and almost
+immediately he plunged on.
+
+"Now as regards Mrs. Denys; I heard you give her notice just now. That
+must be taken back--if she will consent to stay. For Mrs. Lorimer
+literally can't do without her yet. Mrs. Lorimer will be an invalid for
+some time to come, if not for good and all. And who is going to take
+charge of the house if you kick out the only capable person it contains?
+Who is going to look after your precious comfort, not to mention that of
+your wife and children? I tell you Mrs. Denys is absolutely indispensable
+to you all for the present. If you part with her, you part with every
+shred of ease and domestic peace you have. And you will have to keep a
+properly qualified nurse to look after your wife. And it isn't every
+nurse that is a blessing in the home, I can assure you."
+
+He stopped again; and finding Mr. Lorimer still somewhat dazed by this
+sudden attack, he turned and began to pace the room to give him time
+to recover.
+
+There followed a prolonged silence. Then at last, with a deep sigh, the
+Vicar dropped down again in his chair.
+
+"My good doctor," he said, "I am convinced that your motives are good
+though your language be somewhat lacking in restraint. I am sorely
+perplexed; let me admit it! Mrs. Denys is, I believe, a thoroughly
+efficient housekeeper, but--" he paused impressively--"her presence is a
+disturbing element with which I would gladly dispense. She is continually
+inventing some pretext for presenting herself at the study-door.
+Moreover, she is extremely injudicious with the children, and I am bound
+to think of their spiritual welfare before their mere bodily needs."
+
+He was evidently anxious to avoid an open rupture, so perhaps it was as
+well that he did not see the look on Tudor's face as he listened to
+this harangue.
+
+"Why don't you pack them off to school?" said Tudor, sticking to the
+point with commendable resolution. "Peace in the house is absolutely
+essential to Mrs. Lorimer. All the elder ones would be better out of
+it--with the exception of Jeanie."
+
+"And why with the exception of Jeanie, may I ask?" There was a touch of
+asperity in Mr. Lorimer's voice. He had been badly browbeaten, and--for
+some reason--he had had to submit. But he was in no docile mood
+thereafter.
+
+Tudor heard the note of resentment in his tone, and came back to the
+hearth. "I have been awaiting a suitable opportunity to talk to you about
+Jeanie," he said.
+
+"What next? What next?" said Mr. Lorimer fretfully.
+
+Tudor proceeded to tell him, his tone deliberately unsympathetic. "She
+needs most careful treatment, most vigilant watching. There is a weakness
+of the lungs which might develop at any time. Mrs. Denys understands her
+and can take care of her. But she is in no state to be entrusted to
+strangers."
+
+"Why was this not mentioned to me before?" said Mr. Lorimer querulously.
+"Though the head of the house, I am always the last to be told of
+anything of importance. I suppose you are sure of what you say?"
+
+"Quite sure," said Tudor, "though I should be absolutely willing for you
+to have another opinion at any time. As to not telling you, I have always
+found it difficult to get you to listen, and, as a rule, I have no time
+to waste on persuasion." He looked at the clock. "I ought to be going
+now. You will consider what I have said about sending the other children
+away to school? You'll find it's the only thing to do."
+
+Mr. Lorimer sighed again with deep melancholy.
+
+Tudor squared his shoulders aggressively. "And with your permission I'll
+tell Mrs. Denys that you have reconsidered the matter and hope she will
+remain for a time at least, if she can see her way to do so."
+
+He paused very definitely for a reply to this. Mr. Lorimer's mouth was
+drawn down at the corners, but he looked into the fire with the aloofness
+of a mind not occupied with mundane things.
+
+Tudor faced him and waited with grim resolution; but several seconds
+passed ere his attitude seemed to become apparent to the abstracted
+Vicar. Then with extreme deliberation his eyelids were raised.
+
+"Excuse me, doctor! My thoughts were for the moment elsewhere. Yes, you
+have my permission to tell her that. And--I agree with you. It seems
+advisable to remove the elder children from her influence without delay.
+I shall therefore take steps to do so."
+
+Tudor nodded with a shrug of the shoulders. It did not matter to him in
+what garb his advice was dressed, so long as it was followed.
+
+"Very well," he said. "I am now going to settle Gracie, and I shall tell
+her you have issued a free pardon all round, and no more will be said to
+anyone. I was told one of the boys was in hot water too, but you can let
+him off for once. You're much more likely to make him ashamed of himself
+that way."
+
+Mr. Lorimer resumed his contemplation of the fire without speaking.
+
+Tudor turned to go. He was fairly satisfied that he had established peace
+for the time being, and he was not ill-pleased with his success.
+
+He told himself as he departed that he had discovered how to deal with
+the Reverend Stephen. It had never occurred to him to attempt such
+treatment before.
+
+To Avery later he gave but few details of the interview, but she could
+not fail to see his grim elation and smiled at it.
+
+"I am to stay then, am I?" she said.
+
+"If you will graciously consent to do so," said Tudor, with his
+brief smile.
+
+"I couldn't do anything else," she said.
+
+"I'm glad of that," he said abruptly, "for my own sake."
+
+And with that very suddenly he turned the subject.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+THE ENCHANTED LAND
+
+
+At ten o'clock that night, Avery went round to bid each child good-night.
+She found Gracie sleeping peacefully with her bed pushed close to
+Jeanie's. The latter was awake and whispered a greeting. On the other
+side of the room Olive slept the sleep of the just. Avery did not pause
+by her bed, but went straight to Jeanie, who held her hand for a little
+and then gently begged her to go to bed herself.
+
+"You must be so tired," she said.
+
+Avery could not deny the fact. But she had arranged to sleep in Mrs.
+Lorimer's room, so she could not look forward to a night without care.
+She did not tell Jeanie this, however, but presently kissed her tenderly
+and stole away.
+
+She visited the younger boys, and found them all asleep; then slipped up
+to the attic in which the elder lads slept.
+
+She heard their voices as she reached the closed door. She knocked softly
+therefore, and in a moment heard one of them leap to open it.
+
+It was Ronald, clad in pyjamas but unfailingly courteous, who invited
+her to enter.
+
+"I knew it must be you, Mrs. Denys. Come in! Very pleased to see you.
+Wait a second while I light a candle!"
+
+He did so, and revealed Julian sitting up in bed with sullen defiance
+writ large upon his face. But he smiled at sight of her, and patted the
+side of his bed invitingly.
+
+"Don't sit on the chair! It's untrustworthy. It's awfully decent of you
+to look us up like this,--that is, if you haven't come to preach."
+
+"I haven't," said Avery, accepting the invitation since she felt too
+weary to stand.
+
+Julian nodded approval. "That's right. I knew you were too much of a
+brick. I'm awaiting my next swishing for upsetting my cup at breakfast in
+your defence, so I hardly think I deserve any pi-jaw from you, do I?"
+
+"Oh, I'm not at all pi, I assure you," Avery said. "And if it was done
+for my sake, I'm quite grateful, though I wish you hadn't."
+
+Julian grinned at her, and she proceeded.
+
+"I don't think you need wait any longer for the swishing. Your father has
+decided, I understand, not to carry the matter any further."
+
+Julian opened his eyes wide. "What? You've been at him, have you?"
+
+Avery smiled even while she sighed.
+
+"Oh, I'm no good, Julian. I only make things worse when I interfere. No,
+it's not due to me. But, all the same, I hope and believe the trouble has
+blown over for the present. Do--do try and keep the peace in the future!"
+
+Her weariness sounded in her voice; it quivered in spite of her.
+
+Julian placed a quick, clammy hand on hers and squeezed it
+affectionately.
+
+"Anything to oblige!" he promised generously. "Here Ron! Shy over those
+letters! She wants something to cheer her up."
+
+"Letters!" Avery looked round sharply. "I had forgotten my
+letters!" she said.
+
+"Here they are!" Ronald came forward and placed them in her hand. "I
+picked 'em up this morning, and then when you sent me off for the doc, I
+forgot all about 'em. I'm sorry. I only came across them when I was
+undressing, and you were busy in the mater's room, so I thought I'd keep
+them safe till to-morrow. I hope they are not important," he added.
+
+"I don't suppose so," said Avery; yet her heart jerked oddly as she
+slipped them into her dress. "Thank you for taking care of them. I must
+be going now. You are going to be good?"
+
+She looked at Julian, who, still feeling generous, thrust a rough, boyish
+arm about her neck and kissed her.
+
+"You're a trump!" he said. "There! Good-night! I'll be as meek as Moses
+in the morning."
+
+It was a definite promise, and Avery felt relieved. She took leave of
+Ronald more ceremoniously. His scrupulous politeness demanded it. And
+then with feet that felt strangely light, considering her fatigue, she
+ran softly down again to Mrs. Lorimer's room.
+
+In the dressing-room adjoining, she opened and read her letters. One of
+them--the one with the Australian stamp, characteristically brief but
+kind--was to tell her that the writer, a friend of some standing, was
+coming to England, and hoped to see her again ere long.
+
+The other, bearing the sinister Evesham crest, lay on the table unopened
+till she was undressed and ready to join Mrs. Lorimer. Then--for the
+first time in all that weary day of turmoil--Avery stole a few moments
+of luxury.
+
+She sat down and opened Piers' letter.
+
+It began impetuously, without preliminary. "I wonder whether you have any
+idea what it costs to clear out without a word of farewell. Perhaps you
+are even thinking that I've forgotten. Or perhaps it matters so little to
+you that you haven't thought at all. I know you won't tell me, so it's
+not much good speculating. But lest you should misunderstand in any way,
+I want to explain that I haven't been fit to come near you since we
+parted on Christmas Eve. You were angry with me then, weren't you? Avery
+in a temper! Do you remember how it went? At least you meant to be, but
+somehow you didn't get up the steam. You wished me a happy Christmas
+instead, and I ought to have had one in consequence. But I didn't. I
+played the giddy goat off and on all day long, and my grandfather--dear
+old chap--thought what a merry infant I was. But--you've heard of the
+worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched? The Reverend
+Stephen has taken care of that. Do you remember his 'penny-terrible' of a
+Sunday or two ago? You were very angry about it, Avery. I love you when
+you're angry. And how he dilated on the gates of brass and the bars of
+iron and the outer darkness etc, etc, till we all went home and shivered
+in our beds! Well, that's the sort of place I spent my Christmas in, and
+I wanted to come to you and Jeanie and be made happy, but--I couldn't. I
+was too fast in prison. I felt too murderous. I hunted all the next day
+to try and get more wholesome. But it was no good. I was seeing red all
+the time. And at night something happened that touched me off like an
+exploded train of gunpowder. Has Tudor told you about it yet? Doubtless
+he will. I tried to murder him, and succeeded in cracking his eye-glass.
+Banal, wasn't it? And I have an uneasy feeling that he came out top-dog
+after all, confound him!
+
+"Avery, whomever else you have no use for, I know you're not in love with
+him, and in my saner moments I realize that you never could be. But I
+wasn't sane just then. I love you so! I love you so! It's good to be able
+to get it right out before you have time to stop me. For I worship you,
+Avery, my darling! You don't realize it. How should you? You think it is
+just the passing fancy of a boy. A boy--ye gods!
+
+"I think of you hour by hour. You are always close in your own secret
+place in my heart. I hold you in my arms when no one else is near. I
+kiss your forehead, your eyes, your hair. No, not your lips, dear, even
+in fancy. I have never in my maddest dreams kissed your lips. But I ache
+and crave and long for them, though--till you give me leave--I dare not
+even pretend that they are mine. Will you ever give me leave? You say No
+now. Yet I think you will, Avery. I think you will. I have known ever
+since that first moment when you held me back from flaying poor old
+Caesar that I have met my Fate, and because I know it I'm trying--for
+your sweet sake--to make myself a better man. It's beastly uphill work,
+and that episode with Tudor has pulled me back. Confound him! By the way
+though, it's done me good in one sense, for I find I don't detest him
+quite so hideously as I did. The man has his points.
+
+"And now Avery,--dear Avery, will you forgive me for writing all this? I
+know you won't write to me, but I send my address in case! And I shall
+watch every mail day after day, night after night, for the letter that
+will never come.
+
+"Pathetic picture, isn't it? Good-bye!
+
+"PIERS.
+
+"My love to the Queen of all good fairies, and tell Pixie that I hope the
+gloves fitted."
+
+Avery's lips parted in a smile; a soft flush overspread her face. That
+costly gift from the children--she had guessed from the beginning
+whence it came.
+
+And then slowly, even with reverence, she folded the letter up, and rose.
+Her smile became a little tremulous. It had been a day of many troubles,
+and she was very tired. The boy's adoration was strangely sweet to her
+wearied senses. She felt subtly softened and tender towards him.
+
+No, it must not be! It could not be! He must forget her. She would write
+to-morrow and tell him so. Yet for that one night the charm held her.
+She viewed from afar an enchanted land--a land of sunshine and singing
+birds--a land where it was always spring. It was a country she had seen
+before, but only in her dreams. Her feet had never wandered there. The
+path she had followed had not led to it. Perhaps it was all a mirage.
+Perhaps there was no path.
+
+Yet in her dreams she crossed the boundary, and entered the
+forbidden land.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE COMING OF A FRIEND
+
+
+"Eternal sunshine!" said Piers, with a grimace at the deep, deep blue
+of the slumbering water that stretched below him to the horizon. "And
+at night eternal moonshine. Romantic but monotonous. I wonder if the
+post is in."
+
+He cast an irresolute glance up the path behind him, but decided to
+remain where he was. He had looked so many times in vain.
+
+There were a good many people in the hotel, but he was not feeling
+sociable. The night before he had dropped a considerable sum at the
+Casino, but it had not greatly interested him. Regretfully he had come to
+the conclusion that gambling in that form did not attract him. The greedy
+crowd that pushed and strove in the heated rooms, he regarded as
+downright revolting. He himself had been robbed with astonishing audacity
+by a lady with painted eyes who had snatched his only winnings before he
+could reach them. It was a small episode, and he had let it pass, but it
+had not rendered the tables more attractive. He had in fact left them in
+utter disgust.
+
+Altogether he was feeling decidedly out of tune with his surroundings
+that morning, and the beauty of the scene irritated rather than soothed
+him. In the garden a short distance from him, a voluble French party were
+chattering with great animation and a good deal of cackling laughter. He
+wondered what on earth they found to amuse them so persistently. He also
+wondered if a swim in that faultless blue would do anything to improve
+his temper, and decided with another wry grimace that it was hardly worth
+while to try.
+
+It was at this point that there fell a step on the winding path below him
+that led down amongst shrubs to the sea. The top of a Panama hat caught
+Piers' attention. He watched it idly as it ascended, speculating without
+much interest as to the face beneath it. It mounted with the utmost
+steadiness, neither hastening nor lingering. There was something about
+its unvarying progress that struck Piers as British. His interest
+increased at once. He suddenly discovered that he wanted someone British
+to talk to, forgetting the fact that he had fled but ten minutes before
+from the boring society of an Anglo-Indian colonel.
+
+The man in the Panama came nearer. Piers from above began to have a
+glimpse of a tweed coat and a strong brown hand that swung in time to the
+steady stride. The path curved immediately below him, and the last few
+yards of it led directly to the spot on which he stood. As the stranger
+rounded the curve he came into full view.
+
+He was a big man, broadly built and powerful. His whole personality was
+suggestive of squareness. And yet to Piers' critical eyes he did not look
+wholly British. His gait was that of a man accustomed to long hours in
+the saddle. Under the turned-down Panama the square, determined chin
+showed massively. It was a chin that obviously required constant shaving.
+
+Quietly the man drew near. He did not see Piers under his lowered
+hat-brim till he was within a few feet of him. Then, becoming suddenly
+aware of him, he raised his eyes. A moment later, his hand went up in a
+brief, friendly salute.
+
+Piers' hand made instant response. "Splendid morning!" he began to
+say--and stopped with the words half-uttered. The blood surged up to his
+forehead in a great wave. "Good Heavens!" he said instead.
+
+The other man paused. He did not look at Piers very narrowly, but merely
+glanced towards him and then turned his eyes towards the wonderful,
+far-stretching blue below them.
+
+"Yes, splendid," he said quietly. "Worth remembering--a scene
+like this."
+
+His tone was absolutely impersonal. He stood beside Piers for a moment or
+two, gazing forth into the infinite distance; then with a slight gesture
+of leave-taking he turned as if to continue his progress.
+
+In that instant, however, Piers recovered himself sufficiently to speak.
+His face was still deeply flushed, but his voice was steady enough as he
+turned fully and addressed the new-comer.
+
+"Don't you know me? We have met before."
+
+The other man stopped at once. He held out his hand. "Yes, of course I
+know you--knew you the moment I set eyes on you. But I wasn't sure that
+you would care to be recognized by me."
+
+"What on earth do you take me for?" said Piers bluntly.
+
+He gripped the hand hard, looking straight into the calm eyes with a
+curious sense of being sustained thereby. "I believe," he said, with an
+odd impulse of impetuosity, "that you are the one man in the world that I
+couldn't be other than pleased to see."
+
+The elder man smiled. "That's very kind of you," he said.
+
+He had the slow speech of one accustomed to solitude. He kept Piers' hand
+in his in a warm, firm grip. "I have often thought about you," he said.
+"You know, I never heard your name."
+
+"My name is Evesham," said Piers, with the quick, gracious manner
+habitual to him. "Piers Evesham."
+
+"Thank you. Mine is Edmund Crowther. Odd that we should meet like this!"
+
+"A piece of luck I didn't expect!" said Piers boyishly. "Have you only
+just arrived?"
+
+"I came here last night from Marseilles." Crowther's eyes rested on the
+smiling face with its proud, patrician features with the look of a man
+examining a perfect bronze. "It's very kind of you to welcome me like
+this," he said. "I was feeling a stranger in a strange land as I came up
+that path."
+
+"I've been watching you," said Piers. "I liked the business-like way you
+tackled it. It was British."
+
+Crowther smiled. "I suppose it has become second nature with me to put
+business first," he said.
+
+"Wish I could say the same," said Piers; and then, with his hand on
+the other man's arm: "Come and have a drink! You are staying for some
+time, I hope?"
+
+"No, not for long," said Crowther. "It was yielding to temptation to come
+here at all."
+
+"Are you alone?" asked Piers.
+
+"Quite alone."
+
+"Then there's no occasion to hurry," said Piers. "You stay here for a
+bit, and kill time with me."
+
+"I never kill time," said Crowther deliberately. "It's too scarce a
+commodity."
+
+"It is when you're happy," said Piers.
+
+Crowther looked at him with a question in his eyes that he did not put
+into words, and in answer to which Piers laughed a reckless laugh.
+
+They were walking side by side up the hotel-garden, and each successive
+group of visitors that they passed turned to stare. For both men were in
+a fashion remarkable. The massive strength of the elder with his square,
+dogged face and purposeful stride; the lithe, muscular power of the
+younger with his superb carriage and haughty nobility of feature, formed
+a contrast as complete as it was arresting.
+
+They ascended the steps that led up to the terrace, and here Piers
+paused. "You sit down here while I go and order drinks! Here's a
+comfortable seat, and here's an English paper!"
+
+He thrust it into Crowther's hand and departed with a careless whistle on
+his lips. But Crowther did not look at the paper. His eyes followed Piers
+as long as he was in sight, and then with that look in them as of one who
+watches from afar turned contemplatively towards the sea. After a little
+he took his hat off and suffered the morning-breeze to blow across his
+forehead. He had the serene brow of a child, though the hair above it was
+broadly streaked with grey.
+
+He was still sitting thus when there came the sound of jerky footsteps on
+the terrace behind him and an irascible voice addressed him with scarcely
+concealed impatience.
+
+"Excuse me! I saw you talking to my grandson just now. Do you know where
+the young fool is gone to?"
+
+Crowther turned in his solid, imperturbable fashion, looked at the
+speaker, and got to his feet.
+
+"I can," he said, with a smile. "He has gone to procure drinks in my
+honour. He and I are--old friends."
+
+"Oh!" said Sir Beverley, and looked him up and down in a fashion which
+another man might have found offensive. "And who may you be?"
+
+"My name is Crowther," said the other with simplicity.
+
+Sir Beverley grunted. "That doesn't tell me much. Never heard of
+you before."
+
+"I daresay not." Crowther was quite unmoved; there was even a hint of
+humour in his tone. "Your grandson is probably a man of many friends."
+
+"Why should you say that?" demanded Sir Beverley suspiciously.
+
+"Won't you sit down?" said Crowther.
+
+Sir Beverley hesitated a moment, then abruptly complied with the
+suggestion. Crowther followed his example, and they faced one another
+across the little table.
+
+"I say it," said Crowther, "because that is the sort of lad I take
+him to be."
+
+Sir Beverley grunted again. "And when and where did you make his
+acquaintance?" he enquired, with a stern, unsparing scrutiny of the calm
+face opposite.
+
+"We met in Australia," said Crowther. "It must be six years or more ago."
+
+"Australia's a big place," observed Sir Beverley.
+
+Crowther's slow smile appeared. "Yes, sir, it is. It's so mighty big that
+it makes all the other places of the world seem small. Have you ever been
+in Queensland--ever seen a sheep-farm?"
+
+"No, I've never been in Queensland," snapped Sir Beverley. "But as to
+sheep-farms, I've got one of my own."
+
+"How many acres?" asked Crowther.
+
+"Oh, don't ask me! Piers will tell you. Piers knows. Where the devil is
+the boy? Why doesn't he come?"
+
+"Here, sir, here!" cried Piers, coming up behind him. "I see you have
+made the acquaintance of my friend. Crowther, let me present you to my
+grandfather, Sir Beverley Evesham! I've just been to look for you," he
+added to the latter. "But Victor told me you had gone out, and then I
+spied you out of the window."
+
+"I told you I was coming out, didn't I?" growled Sir Beverley. "So this
+is a friend of yours, is it? How is it I've never heard of him before?"
+
+"We lost sight of each other," explained Piers, pulling forward a chair
+between them and dropping into it. "But that state of affairs is not
+going to happen again. How long are you over for, Crowther?"
+
+"Possibly a year, possibly more." Again Crowther's eyes were upon him,
+critical but kindly.
+
+"Going to spend your time in England?" asked Piers.
+
+Crowther nodded. "Most of it, yes."
+
+"Good!" said Piers with satisfaction. "We shall see plenty of you then."
+
+"But I am going to be busy," said Crowther, with a smile.
+
+"Of course you are. You can come down and teach me how to make the Home
+Farm a success," laughed Piers.
+
+"I shall be very pleased to try," said Crowther, "though," he turned
+towards Sir Beverley, "I expect you, sir, know as much on that subject as
+either of us."
+
+Sir Beverley's eyes were upon him with searching directness. He seemed to
+be trying to discover a reason for his boy's obvious pleasure in his
+unexpected meeting with this man who must have been nearly twice his age.
+
+"I've never done much in the farming line," he said briefly, in answer to
+Crowther's observation. "It's been more of a pastime with me than
+anything else. It's the same with Piers here. He's only putting in time
+with it till the constituency falls vacant."
+
+"I see," said Crowther, adding with his quiet smile: "There seems to be
+plenty of time anyhow in the old country, whatever else she may be
+short of."
+
+Piers laughed as he lifted his glass. "Time for everything but work,
+Crowther. She has developed beastly loose morals in her old age. Some day
+there'll come a nasty bust up, and she may pull herself together and do
+things again, or she may go to pieces. I wonder which."
+
+"I don't," said Crowther.
+
+"You don't?" Piers paused, glass in hand, looking at him expectantly.
+
+"No, I don't." Crowther also raised his glass; he looked Piers straight
+in the eyes. "Here's to the boys of England, Piers!" he said. "They'll
+see to it that she comes through."
+
+Sir Beverley also drank, but with a distasteful air. "You've a higher
+opinion of the young fools than I have," he remarked.
+
+"I've made a study of the breed, sir," said Crowther.
+
+The conversation drifted to indifferent matters, but Piers' interest
+remained keen. It seemed that all his vitality had reawakened at the
+coming of this slow-speaking man who had looked so long upon the wide
+spaces of the earth that his vision seemed scarcely adaptable to lesser
+things. There was that in his personality that caught Piers' fancy
+irresistibly. Perhaps it was his utter calmness, his unvarying, rock-like
+strength. Perhaps it was just the good fellowship that looked out of the
+steady eyes and sounded in every tone of the leisurely voice. Whatever
+the cause, his presence had made a vast difference to Piers. His boredom
+had completely vanished. He even forgot to wonder if there were a letter
+lying waiting for him inside the hotel.
+
+Crowther excused himself at length and rose to take his leave, whereupon
+Sir Beverley very abruptly, and to his grandson's surprise and
+gratification, invited him to dine with them that night. Piers at once
+seconded the invitation, and Crowther without haste or hesitation
+accepted it.
+
+Then, square and purposeful, he went away.
+
+"A white man!" murmured Piers half to himself.
+
+"One who knows his own mind anyhow," remarked Sir Beverley drily.
+
+He did not ask Piers for the history of their friendship, and Piers,
+remembering this later, wondered a little at the omission.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+A FRIEND'S COUNSEL
+
+
+When Piers went to dress that night he found two letters laid discreetly
+upon his table, awaiting perusal.
+
+Victor, busily engaged in laying out his clothes, cast a wicked eye back
+over his shoulder as his young master pounced upon them, then with a
+shrug resumed his task, smiling to himself the while.
+
+Both letters were addressed in womanly handwriting, but Piers went
+unerringly to the one he most desired to read. His hands shook a little
+as he opened it, but he caught sight of his Christian name at the head of
+it and breathed a sigh of relief.
+
+"Dear Piers,"--so in clear, decided writing the message ran,--"I have
+wondered many times if I ought to be angry as well as sorry over that
+letter of yours. It was audacious, wasn't it? Only I know so well that
+you did not mean to hurt me when you wrote it. But, Piers, what I said
+before, you compel me to say again. This thing must stop. You say you are
+not a boy, so I shall not treat you as such. But indeed you must take my
+word for it when I tell you that I shall never marry again.
+
+"I want to be quite honest with you, so you mustn't think that my two
+years of married life were by any means idyllic. They were not. The man I
+married was a failure, but I loved him, and because I loved him I
+followed him to the world's end. We were engaged two years before we
+married. My father disapproved; but when he died I was left lonely, so I
+followed Eric, whom I had not seen for eighteen months, to Australia. We
+were married in Sydney. He had work at that time in a shipping-office,
+but he did not manage to keep it. I did not know why at first. I was
+young, and I had always led a sheltered life. Then one night I found that
+he had been drinking, and after that I understood--many things. I think I
+know what you will say of him when you read this. It looks so crude
+written. But, Piers, he was not a bad man. He had this one fatal
+weakness, but he loved me, and he was good to me nearly always."
+
+Piers' teeth closed suddenly and fiercely on his lower lip at this point;
+but he read on grimly with no other sign of indignation.
+
+"Do you remember how I took upon myself once to warn you against losing
+your self-control?" The handwriting was not quite so steady here; the
+letters looked hurried, as if some agitation had possessed the writer. "I
+felt I had to do it, for I had seen a man's life completely wrecked
+through it. I know he was one of the many that go under every day, but
+the tragedy was so near me. I have never quite been able to shake off the
+dreadful memories of it. He was to all outward appearance a strong-willed
+man, but that habit was stronger, though he fought and fought against it.
+When he failed, he seemed to lose everything,--self-respect,
+self-control, strength of purpose,--everything. But when the demon left
+him, he always repented so bitterly, so bitterly. I had a little money,
+enough to live on. He used to urge me to leave him, to go back to
+England, and live in peace. As if I could have done such a thing! And so
+we struggled on, making a desperately hard fight for it, till one awful
+night when he came home in raving delirium. I can't describe that to
+you. I don't want you to know what it was like. I nursed him through it,
+but it was terrible. He did not always know what he was doing. At times
+he was violent."
+
+A drop of blood suddenly ran down Piers' chin; he pulled out his
+handkerchief sharply and wiped it away, still reading on.
+
+"He got over it, but it broke him. He knew--we both knew--that things
+were hopeless. We tried for a time to shut our eyes to the fact, but it
+remained. And then one day very suddenly he roused himself and told me
+that he had heard of a job up-country and was going to it. I could not
+stop him. I could not even go with him. And so--for the first time since
+our marriage--we parted. He promised to come back to me for the birth of
+our child. But before that happened he was dead, killed in a drunken
+brawl. It was just what I had always feared--the tragedy that overhung us
+from the beginning. Piers, that's all. I've told it very badly. But I
+felt you must know how my romance died; and how impossible it is that I
+should ever have another. It didn't break my heart. It wasn't sudden
+enough for that. And now that he is gone, I can see it is best. But the
+manner of his going--that was the dreadful part. I told you about my baby
+girl, how she was born blind, and how five years ago she died.
+
+"So now you know my little tragic history from beginning to end. There is
+no accounting for love. We follow our instincts, I suppose. But it leads
+us sometimes along paths that we could never bear to travel twice. Is
+there any pain, I wonder, like the pain of disillusionment, of seeing the
+beloved idol lying in the dust? This is a selfish point of view, I know;
+but I want you to realize that you have made a mistake. Dear Piers, I am
+very, very sorry it has happened. No, not angry at all; somehow I can't
+be angry. It's such a difficult world to live in, and there are so many
+influences at work. But you must forget this wish of yours
+indeed--indeed. I am too old, too experienced, too worldly-wise, too
+prosaic for you in every way. You must marry a girl who has never loved
+before. You must have the first and best of a woman's heart. You must
+have 'The True Romance.'
+
+"That, Piers, will always be the wish and prayer of
+
+"Your loving friend,
+
+"AVERY."
+
+Piers' hands were steady enough now. There was something slow and
+fatalistic in the way they folded the letter. He looked up from it at
+length with dark eyes that gazed unwaveringly before him, as though they
+saw a vision.
+
+"You will be late, _Monsieur Pierre_," suggested Victor softly at
+his elbow.
+
+"What?" Piers turned those dreaming eyes upon him, and suddenly he
+laughed and stretched his arms wide as one awaking. The steadfast look
+went out of his eyes; they danced with gaiety. "Hullo, you old joker!
+Well, let's dress then and be quick about it!"
+
+During the process it flashed upon Piers that all mention of Tudor had
+been avoided in the letter he had just read. He frowned momentarily at
+the thought. Had she deliberately avoided the subject? And if so--but on
+the instant his brow cleared again. No, she had written too frankly for
+that. She had not mentioned the matter simply because she regarded it as
+unimportant. The great question lay between herself and him alone. Of
+that he was wholly certain. He smiled again at the thought. No, he was
+not afraid of Tudor.
+
+"_Monsieur_ is well pleased," murmured Victor, with a flash of his round
+black eyes.
+
+"Quite well pleased, _mon vieux!_" laughed back Piers
+
+"_C'est bien_!" said Victor, regarding him with the indulgent smile that
+he had bestowed upon him in babyhood. "And _Monsieur_ does not want his
+other letter? But no--no!"
+
+His voice was openly quizzical; he dodged a laughing backhander from
+Piers with a neat gesture of apology. It had not escaped his notice
+that the letter Piers had read had disappeared unobtrusively into an
+inner pocket.
+
+"Who's the other letter from?" said Piers, glancing at it perfunctorily.
+"Oh, I know. No one of importance. She'll keep till after dinner."
+
+Ina Rose would not have felt flattered had she heard the statement. The
+fan Piers had promised to send her had duly arrived from Paris with a
+brief--very brief--note from him, requesting her acceptance of it. She
+had written in reply a letter which she had been at some pains to
+compose, graciously accepting the gift and suggesting that an account of
+any adventures that befell him would be received by her with interest.
+She added that, a spell of frost having put an end to the hunting, life
+at Wardenhurst had become extremely flat, and she had begun to envy Piers
+in his exile. Her father was talking of going to Mentone for a few weeks,
+and wanted her to accompany him. But she was not sure that she would care
+for it. What did Piers think?
+
+When Piers did eventually read the letter, he smiled at this point,--a
+smile that was not altogether good to see. He was just going out to the
+Casino with Crowther. The latter had gone to fetch a coat, and he had
+occupied the few moments of waiting with Ina's letter.
+
+He was still smiling over the open page when Crowther joined him; but he
+folded the letter at once, and they went out together.
+
+"Have you had any luck at the tables?" Crowther asked.
+
+"None," said Piers. "At least I won, eventually, but Fate, in the form of
+a powdered and bedizened female snatched the proceeds before I got the
+chance. A bad omen, what?"
+
+"I hope not," said Crowther.
+
+There was a touch of savagery in Piers' laugh. "It won't happen again,
+anyhow," he said.
+
+They entered the Casino with its brilliant rooms and pushing crowds. The
+place was thronged. As they entered, a woman with a face of evil beauty,
+pressed close to Piers and spoke a word or two in French. But he looked
+at her and through her with royal disdain, and so passed her by.
+
+They made their way to the table at which Piers had tried his luck the
+previous night, waited for and finally secured a place.
+
+"You take it!" said Crowther. "I believe in your luck."
+
+Piers laughed. He staked five francs on the figure five and lost, doubled
+his stakes and lost again, trebled them and lost again.
+
+"This is getting serious," said Crowther.
+
+But still Piers laughed. "Damn it!" he said. "I will win to-night!"
+
+"Try another figure!" said Crowther.
+
+But Piers refused. He laid down twenty-five francs, and with that he won.
+It was the turning-point. From that moment it seemed he could not do
+wrong. Stake after stake he won, either with his own money, or
+Crowther's; and finally left the table in triumph with full pockets.
+
+A good many watched him enviously as he went. He refused to try his luck
+elsewhere, but went arrogantly away with his hand through Crowther's arm.
+
+"He'll come back to-morrow," observed a shrewd American. "And the next
+day, and the next. He's just the sort that helps to keep this
+establishment going. They'll pick him clean."
+
+But he was wrong. Though elated by victory, Piers was not drawn by the
+gambling vice. The thing amused him, but it did not greatly attract. He
+was by no means dazzled by the spoils he carried away.
+
+They went out to the gardens, and called for liqueurs. The woman who had
+spoken to Piers yet hovered about the doors. She cursed him through her
+painted lips as he passed, but he went by her like a prince, haughtily
+aloof, contemptuously regardless.
+
+They sat down in a comparatively quiet corner, whence they could watch
+the ever-shifting picture without being disturbed. A very peculiar mood
+possessed Piers. He was restless and uneasy in spite of his high spirits.
+For no definite reason he wanted to keep on the move. In deference to
+Crowther's wish, he controlled the desire, but it was an obvious effort.
+
+He seemed to find difficulty also in attending to Crowther's quiet
+remarks, and after a while Crowther ceased to make them. He finished his
+liqueur and sat smoking with his eyes on the dark, sensitive face that
+watched the passing crowd so indifferently, yet so persistently.
+
+Piers noticed his silence at last, and looked at him enquiringly.
+"Shall we go?"
+
+Crowther leaned slowly towards him. The place was public, but their
+privacy was complete.
+
+"Piers," he said, "may I take the privilege of an old friend?"
+
+"You may take anything you like so far as I am concerned," said Piers
+impetuously.
+
+Crowther smiled a little. "Thank you. Then I will go ahead. Are you
+engaged to be married?"
+
+"What?" said Piers. He looked momentarily startled; then laughed across
+the table with a freedom that was wholly unaffected. "Am I engaged, did
+you say? No, I'm not. But I'm going to be married for all that."
+
+"Ah!" said Crowther. "I thought I knew the signs."
+
+He rose with the words, and instantly Piers sprang up also. "Yes, let's
+go! I can't breathe here. Come down to the shore for a breath of air, and
+I'll tell you all about it!"
+
+He linked his arm again in Crowther's, obviously glad to be gone; but
+when they had left the glittering place behind them, he still talked
+inconsequently about a thousand things till in his calm fashion Crowther
+turned him back.
+
+"I don't want you to tell me anything personal," he said, "save one
+thing. This girl whom you hope to marry--I gather you are pretty
+sure of her?"
+
+Piers threw back his head with a gesture that defied the world. "I am
+quite sure of her," he said; and a moment later, with impulsive
+confidence: "She has just taken the trouble to write at length and tell
+me why she can't have me."
+
+"Ah?" Crowther's tone held curiosity as well as kindly sympathy. "A
+sound reason?"
+
+"No reason at all," flung back Piers, still with his face to the stars.
+"She knows that as well as I do. I tell you, Crowther, I know the way to
+that woman's heart, and I could find it blindfold. She is mine already."
+
+"And doesn't know it?" suggested Crowther.
+
+"Yes, she does in her heart of hearts,--or soon will. I shall send her a
+post-card to-morrow and sum up the situation."
+
+"On a post-card?"
+
+Crowther sounded puzzled, and Piers broke into a laugh and descended to
+earth.
+
+"Yes, in one expressive word--'Rats!' No one else will understand it, but
+she will."
+
+"A little abrupt!" commented Crowther.
+
+"Yes, I'm going to be abrupt now," said Piers with imperial confidence.
+"I'm going to storm the position."
+
+"And you are sure you will carry it?"
+
+"Quite sure." Piers' voice held not the faintest shade of doubt.
+
+"I hope you will, lad," said Crowther kindly. "And--that being the
+case--may I say what I set out to say?"
+
+"Oh, go ahead!" said Piers.
+
+"It's only this," said Crowther, in his slow, quiet way. "Only a word of
+advice, sonny, which I shouldn't give if I didn't know that your life's
+happiness hangs on your taking it. You're young, but there's a locked
+door in your past. Open that door just once before you marry the woman
+you love, and show her what is behind it! It'll give her a shock maybe.
+But it'll be better for you both in the end. Don't let there be any
+locked doors between you and your wife! You're too young for that. And if
+she's the right sort, it won't make a pin's difference to her love. Women
+are like that, thank God!"
+
+He spoke with the utmost earnestness. He was evidently keenly anxious to
+gain his point. But his words went into utter silence. Ere they were
+fully spoken Piers' hand was withdrawn from his arm. His careless,
+swinging stride became a heavy, slackening tramp, and at last he halted
+altogether. They stood side by side in silence with their faces to the
+moon-silvered water. And there fell a long, long pause, as though the
+whole world stopped and listened.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+THE PROMISE
+
+
+After all, it was Crowther who broke that tragic silence; perhaps because
+he could bear it no longer. The path on which they stood was deserted. He
+laid a very steady hand upon Piers' shoulder with a compassionate glance
+at the stony young face which a few minutes before had been so full of
+abounding life.
+
+"It comes hard to you, eh, lad?" he said.
+
+Piers stirred, almost made as if he would toss the friendly hand away;
+but in the end he suffered it, though he would not meet Crowther's eyes.
+
+"You owe it to her," urged Crowther gently. "Tell her, lad! She's bound
+to be up against it sooner or later if you don't."
+
+"Yes," Piers said. "I know."
+
+He spoke heavily; all the youth seemed to have gone out of him. After a
+moment, as Crowther waited he turned with a gesture of hopelessness and
+faced him. "I'm like a dog on a chain," he said. "I drag this way and
+that, and eat my heart out for freedom. But it's all no use. I've got to
+live and die on it." He clenched his hands in sudden passionate
+rebellion. "But I'm damned if I'm going to tell anybody! It's hell enough
+without that!"
+
+Crowther's hand closed slowly and very steadily on his shoulder. "It's
+just hell that I want to save you from, sonny," he said. "It may seem the
+hardest part to you now, but if you shirk it you'll go further in still.
+I know very well what I'm saying. And it's just because you're man enough
+to feel this thing and not a brute beast to forget it, that it's hurt you
+so infernally all these years. But it'll hurt you worse, lad, it'll wring
+your very soul, if you keep it a secret between you and the woman you
+love. It's a big temptation, but--if I know you--you're going to stand up
+to it. She'll think the better of you for it in the end. But it'll be a
+shadow over both your lives if you don't. And there are some things that
+even a woman might find it hard to forgive."
+
+He stopped. Piers' eyes were hard and fixed. He scarcely looked as if he
+heard. From below them there arose the murmur of the moonlit sea. Close
+at hand the trees in a garden stirred mysteriously as though they moved
+in their sleep. But Piers made neither sound nor movement. He stood like
+an image of stone.
+
+Again the silence began to lengthen intolerably, to stretch out into a
+desert of emptiness, to become fateful with a bitterness too poignant to
+be uttered. Crowther said no more. He had had his say. He waited with
+unswerving patience for the result.
+
+Piers spoke at last, and there was a queer note of humour in his
+voice,--humour that was tragic. "So I've got to go back again, have I?
+Back to my valley of dry bones! There's no climbing the heights for me,
+Crowther, never will be. Somehow or other, I am always tumbled back."
+
+"You're wrong," Crowther said, with quiet decision. "It's the only way
+out. Take it like a man, and you'll win through! Shirk it and--well,
+sonny, no shirker ever yet got anything worth having out of life. You
+know that as well as I do."
+
+Piers straightened himself with a brief laugh. "Yes, I know that much.
+But--I sometimes ask myself if I'm any better than a shirker. Life is
+such a beastly farce so far as I am concerned. I never do anything.
+There's never anything to do."
+
+"Oh, rats!" said Crowther, and smiled. "There are not many fellows who do
+half as much. If to-day is a fair sample of your life, I'm damned if it's
+an easy one."
+
+"I'm used to it," said Piers quickly. "You know, I'm awfully fond of my
+grandfather--always have been. We suit each other marvellously well--in
+some ways." He paused a moment, then, with an effort, "I never told him
+either, Crowther. I never told a soul."
+
+"No," Crowther said. "I don't see any reason that you should. But the
+woman you marry--she is different. If you take her into your inner life
+at all, she is bound to come upon it sooner or later. You must see it,
+lad. You know it in your heart."
+
+"And you think she will marry me when she knows I'm a--murderer?" Piers
+uttered the word through clenched teeth. He had the haggard look of a man
+who has endured long suffering.
+
+There was deep compassion in Crowther's eyes as he watched him. "I don't
+think--being a woman--she will put it in that way," he said, "not, that
+is, if she loves you."
+
+"How else could she put it?" demanded Piers harshly. "Is there any other
+way of putting it? I killed the man intentionally. I told you so at the
+time. The fellow who taught me the trick warned me that it would almost
+certainly be fatal to a heavy man taken unawares. Why, he himself is now
+doing five years' penal servitude for the very same thing. Oh, I'm not a
+humbug, Crowther. I bolted from the consequences. You made me bolt. But
+I've often wished to heaven since that I'd stayed and faced it out. It
+would have been easier in the end, God knows."
+
+"My dear fellow," Crowther said, "you will never convince me of that as
+long as you live. There was nothing to gain by your staying and all to
+lose. Consequences there were bound to be--and always are. But there was
+no good purpose to be served by wrecking your life. You were only a boy,
+and the luck was against you. I couldn't have stood by and seen you
+dragged under."
+
+Piers groaned. "I sometimes wish I was dead!" he said.
+
+"My dear chap, what's the good of that?" Crowther slipped his hand from
+his shoulder to his arm, and drew him quietly forward. "You've suffered
+infernally, but it's made a man of you. Don't forget that! It's the
+Sculptor and the Clay, lad. He knows how best to fashion a good thing. It
+isn't for the clay to cry out."
+
+"Is that your point of view?" Piers spoke with reckless bitterness. "It
+isn't mine."
+
+"You'll come to it," said Crowther gently.
+
+They walked on for a space in silence, till turning they began to ascend
+the winding path that led up to the hotel,--the path which Piers had
+watched Crowther ascend that morning.
+
+Side by side they mounted, till half-way up Crowther checked their
+progress. "Piers," he said, "I'm grateful to you for enduring my
+interference in this matter."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Piers, "I owe you that much anyhow."
+
+"You owe me nothing," said Crowther emphatically. "What I did for you, I
+did for myself. I've rather a weakness--it's a very ordinary one too--for
+trying to manage other people's concerns. And there's something so fine
+about you that I can't bear to stand aside and see you mess up your own.
+So, sonny,--for my satisfaction,--will you promise me not to take a wrong
+turning over this?"
+
+He spoke very earnestly, with a pleading that could not give offence.
+Piers' face softened almost in spite of him. "You're an awfully good
+chap," he said.
+
+"Promise me, lad!" pleaded Crowther, still holding his arm in a friendly
+grasp; then as Piers hesitated: "You know, I'm an older man than you
+are. I can see further. You'll be making your own hell if you don't."
+
+"But why should I promise?" said Piers uneasily.
+
+"Because I know you will keep a promise--even against your own judgment."
+Simply, with absolute conviction, Crowther made reply. "I shan't feel
+happy about you--unless you promise."
+
+Piers smiled a little, but the lines about his mouth were grim. "Oh, all
+right," he said, after a moment, "I promise;--for I think you are right,
+Crowther. I think too that I should probably have to tell her--whether I
+wanted to or not. She's that sort--the sort that none but a skunk could
+deceive. But--" his voice altered suddenly; he turned brooding eyes upon
+the sleeping sea--"I wonder if she will forgive me," he said.
+"I--wonder."
+
+"Does she love you?" said Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes flashed round at him. "I can make her love me," he said.
+
+"You are sure?"
+
+"I am sure."
+
+"Then, my son, she'll forgive you. And if you want to play a straight
+game, tell her soon!" said Crowther.
+
+And Piers, with all the light gone out of his eyes, answered soberly,
+"I will."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+DROSS
+
+
+In the morning they hired horses and went towards the mountains. The day
+was cloudless, but Sir Beverley would not be persuaded to accompany them.
+
+"I'm not in the mood for exertion," he said to Piers. "Besides, I detest
+hired animals, always did. I shall spend an intellectual morning
+listening to the band."
+
+"Hope you won't be bored, sir," said Piers.
+
+"Your going or coming wouldn't affect that one way or another," responded
+Sir Beverley.
+
+Whereat Piers laughed and went his way.
+
+He was curiously light-hearted again that morning. The soft Southern air
+with its many perfumes exhilarated him like wine. The scent of the
+orange-groves rose as incense to the sun.
+
+The animal he rode danced a skittish side-step from time to time. It was
+impossible to go with sober mien.
+
+"It's a good land," said Crowther.
+
+"Flowing with milk and honey," laughed Piers, with his eyes on the
+olive-clothed slopes. "But there's no country like one's own, what?"
+
+"No country like England, you mean," said Crowther.
+
+"Of course I do, but I was too polite to say so."
+
+"You needn't be polite to me," said Crowther with his slow smile. "And
+England happens to be my country. I am as British--" he glanced at Piers'
+dark face--"perhaps even a little more so--than you are."
+
+"I plead guilty to an Italian grandmother," said Piers. "But you--I
+thought you were Colonial."
+
+"I am British born and bred," said Crowther.
+
+"You?" Piers looked at him in surprise. "You don't belong to
+Australia then?"
+
+"Only by adoption. I was the son of an English parson. I was destined for
+the Church myself for the first twenty years of my life." Crowther was
+still smiling, but his eyes had left Piers; they scanned the horizon
+contemplatively.
+
+"Great Scott!" said Piers. "Lucky escape for you, what?"
+
+"I didn't think so at the time," Crowther spoke thoughtfully, sitting
+motionless in his saddle and gazing straight before him. "You see, I was
+keen on the religious life. I was narrow in my views--I was astonishingly
+narrow; but I was keen."
+
+"Ye gods!" said Piers.
+
+He looked at the square, strong figure incredulously. Somehow he could
+not associate Crowther with any but a vigorous, outdoor existence.
+
+"You would never have stuck to it," he said, after a moment. "You'd have
+loathed the life."
+
+"I don't think so," said Crowther, in his deliberate way, "though I admit
+I probably shouldn't have expanded much. It wasn't easy to give it up at
+the time."
+
+"What made you do it?" asked Piers.
+
+"Necessity. When my father died, my mother was left with a large family
+and quite destitute. I was the eldest, and a sheep-farming uncle--a
+brother of hers--offered me a wage sufficient to keep her going if I
+would give up the Church and join him. I was already studying. I could
+have pushed through on my own; but I couldn't have supported her. So I
+had to go. That was the beginning of my Colonial life. It was
+five-and-twenty years ago, and I've never been Home since."
+
+He turned his horse quietly round to continue the ascent. The road was
+steep. They went slowly side by side.
+
+Crowther went on in a grave, detached way, as though he were telling the
+story of another man's life. "I kicked hard at going, but I've lived to
+be thankful that I went. I had to rough it, and it did me good. It was
+just that I wanted. There's never much fun for a stranger in a strange
+land, sonny, and it took me some time to shake down. In fact just for a
+while I thought I couldn't stand it. The loneliness out there on those
+acres and acres of grass-land was so awful; for I was city-bred. I'd
+never been in the desert, never been out of the sound of church-bells."
+He began to smile again. "I'd even got a sort of feeling that God wasn't
+to be found outside civilization," he said. "I think we get
+ultra-civilized in our ideas sometimes. And the emptiness was almost
+overpowering. It was like being shut down behind bars of iron with
+occasional glimpses of hell to enliven the monotony. That was when one
+went to the townships, and saw life. They didn't tempt me at first. I
+was too narrow even for that. But the loneliness went on eating and
+eating into me till I got so desperate in the end I was ready to snatch
+at any diversion." He paused a moment, and into his steady eyes there
+came a shadow that made them very human. "I went to hell," he said. "I
+waded up to the neck in mire. I gave myself up to it body and soul. I
+wallowed. And all the while it revolted me, though it was so sickeningly
+easy and attractive. I loathed myself, but I went on with it. It seemed
+anyhow one degree better than that awful homesickness. And then one day,
+right in the middle of it all, I had a sort of dream. Or perhaps it
+wasn't any more a dream than Jacob had in the desert. But I felt as if
+I'd been called, and I just had to get up and go. I expect most people
+know the sensation, for after all the Kingdom of Heaven is within us;
+but it made a bigger impression on me at the time than anything in my
+experience. So I went back into the wilderness and waited. Old chap, I
+didn't wait in vain."
+
+He suddenly turned his head, and his eyes rested upon Piers with the
+serenity of a man at peace with his own soul. "That's about all my
+story," he said with simplicity. "I got the strength for the job, and so
+carried it through. When my uncle died, I was left in command, and I've
+stuck to it ever since. But I took a partner a few years back, and now
+I've handed over the whole thing to him and I'm going Home at last to my
+old mother."
+
+"Going to settle in England?" asked Piers.
+
+Crowther shook his head. "Not now, lad. I couldn't. There's too much to
+be done. No; I'm going to fulfil my old ambitions if I can. I'm going to
+get myself ordained. After that--"
+
+He paused, for Piers had turned to stare at him in open amazement. "You!"
+he ejaculated.
+
+Crowther's smile came over his face like a spreading light. "You don't
+think much of parsons, I gather, sonny," he said.
+
+Piers broke into his sudden laugh. "Not as a tribe, I admit. I can't
+stand any man who makes an ass of himself, whatever his profession. But
+of course I don't mean to assert that all parsons answer to that
+description. I've met a few I liked."
+
+Crowther's smile developed into a laugh. "Then you won't deprive me of
+the pleasure of your friendship if I become one?"
+
+"My dear chap," said Piers forcibly, "if you became the biggest
+blackguard in creation, you would remain my friend."
+
+It was regally spoken, but the speaker was plainly so unconscious of
+arrogance that Crowther's hand came out to him and lay for a moment on
+his arm. "I gathered that, sonny," he said gently.
+
+Piers' eyes flashed sympathy. "And what are you going to do then? You say
+you're not going to settle in England?"
+
+"I am not," said Crowther, and again he was looking out ahead of him with
+eyes that spanned the far distance. "No; I'm going back again to the old
+haunts. There's a thundering lot to do there. It's more than a one-man
+job. But, please God, I'll do what I can. I know I can do a little. It's
+a hell of a place, sonny. You saw the outside edge of it yourself."
+
+Piers nodded without speaking. It had been in a sense his baptism of
+fire.
+
+"It's the new chums I want to get hold of," Crowther said. "They get
+drawn in so devilishly easily. They're like children, many of 'em, trying
+to walk on quicksands. They're bound to go in, bound to go under, and a
+big percentage never come up again. It's the children I want to help. I
+hate to think of fresh, clean lives being thrown on to the dust-heap.
+It's so futile,--such a crying waste."
+
+"If anyone can do it, you can," said Piers.
+
+"Ah! I wonder. It won't be easy, but I know their temptations so awfully
+well. I've seen scores go under, I've been under myself. And that makes a
+lot of difference."
+
+"Life is infernally difficult for most of us," said Piers.
+
+They rode in silence for awhile, and then he changed the subject.
+
+It was not till they returned that Crowther announced his intention of
+leaving on the following day.
+
+"I've no time for slacking," he said. "I didn't come Home to slack. And
+there's the mother waiting for me."
+
+"Oh, man," Piers said suddenly, "how I wish I had a mother!"
+
+And then half-ashamed, he turned and went in search of his grandfather.
+
+Again that evening Crowther accepted Sir Beverley's invitation to dine at
+their table. The old man seemed to regard Piers' friend with a kind of
+suspicious interest. He asked few questions but he watched him narrowly.
+
+"If you and the boy want to go to the Casino again, don't mind me!" he
+said, at the end of dinner.
+
+"We don't, sir," said Piers promptly. "Can't we sit out on the terrace
+all together and smoke?"
+
+"I don't go beyond the lounge," said Sir Beverley, with decision.
+
+"All right, we'll sit in the lounge," said Piers.
+
+His grandfather frowned at him. "Don't be a fool, Piers! Can't you see
+you're not wanted?" He thrust out an abrupt hand to Crowther. "Good-night
+to you! I shall probably retire before you come in."
+
+"He is leaving first thing in the morning," said Piers.
+
+Sir Beverley's frown was transferred to Crowther. He looked at him
+piercingly. "Leaving, are you? Going to England, eh? I suppose we shall
+meet again then?"
+
+"I hope so," said Crowther.
+
+Sir Beverley grunted. "Do you? Well, we shan't be moving yet. But--if
+you care to look us up at Rodding Abbey when we do get back--you can;
+eh, Piers?"
+
+"I tell him, he must, sir," said Piers.
+
+"You are very kind," said Crowther. "Good-bye sir! And thank you!"
+
+He and Piers went out together, and walked to and fro in the garden above
+the sea. The orchestra played fitfully in the hotel behind them, and now
+and then there came the sounds of careless voices and wandering feet.
+They themselves talked but little. Piers was in a dreamy mood, and his
+companion was plainly deep in thought.
+
+He spoke at length out of a long silence. "Did your grandfather say
+Rodding Abbey just now?"
+
+"Yes," said Piers, waking up.
+
+"It's near a place called Wardenhurst?" pursued Crowther.
+
+"Yes," said Piers again. "Ever been there?"
+
+"No," Crowther spoke slowly, as though considering his words. "Someone I
+know lives there, that's all."
+
+"Someone you know?" Piers stood still. He looked at Crowther sharply
+through the dimness.
+
+"I don't suppose you have ever met her, lad," said Crowther quietly.
+"From what I know of society in the old country you wouldn't move in the
+same circle. But as I have promised myself to visit her, it seems better
+to mention the fact."
+
+"Why shouldn't you mention it? What is her name?" Piers spoke quickly, in
+the imperious fashion habitual to him when not quite at his ease.
+
+Crowther hesitated. He seemed to be debating some point with himself.
+
+At length, "Her name," he said slowly, "is Denys."
+
+Piers made a sudden movement that passed unexplained. There fell a few
+moments of silence. Then, in a voice even more measured than
+Crowther's, he spoke.
+
+"As it happens, I have met her. Tell me what you know about her,--if you
+don't mind."
+
+Again Crowther hesitated.
+
+"Go on," said Piers.
+
+They were facing one another in the darkness. The end of Piers' cigar had
+ceased to glow. He did not seem to be breathing. But in the tense moments
+that followed his words there came to Crowther the hard, quick beating of
+his heart like the thud of a racing engine far away.
+
+Instinctively he put out a hand. "Piers, old chap,--" he said.
+
+"Go on!" Piers said again.
+
+He gripped both hand and wrist with nervous fingers, holding them almost
+as though he would force from him the information he desired.
+
+Crowther waited no longer, for he knew in that moment that he stood in
+the presence of a soul in torment. "You'll have to know it," he said,
+"though why these things happen, God alone knows. Sonny, she is the widow
+of the man whose death you caused."
+
+The words were spoken, and after them came silence--such a silence as
+could be felt. Once the hands that gripped Crowther's seemed about to
+slacken, and then in a moment they tightened again as the hands of a
+drowning man clinging to a spar.
+
+Crowther attempted nothing in the way of sympathy or consolation. He
+merely stood ready. But it was evident that he did not need to be told
+of the tragedy that had suddenly fallen upon Piers' life. His attitude
+said as much.
+
+Very, very slowly at last, as if not wholly sure of his balance, Piers
+let him go. He took out his cigar with a mechanical movement and
+looked at it; then abruptly returned it to his lips and drew it
+fiercely back to life.
+
+Then, through a cloud of smoke, he spoke. "Crowther, I made you a promise
+yesterday."
+
+"You did," said Crowther gravely.
+
+Piers threw him a quick look. "Oh, you needn't be afraid," he said. "I'm
+not going to cry off. It's not my way. But--I want you to make me a
+promise in return."
+
+"What is it, sonny?" There was just a hint of anxiety in Crowther's tone.
+
+Piers made a reckless, half-defiant movement of the head. "It is that you
+will never--whatever the circumstances--speak of this thing again to
+anyone--not even to me."
+
+"You think it necessary to ask that of me?" said Crowther.
+
+"No, I don't!" Impulsively Piers made answer. "I believe I'm a cur to
+ask it. But this thing has dogged me so persistently that I feel like an
+animal being run to earth. For my peace of mind, Crowther;--because I'm a
+coward if you like--give me your word on it!"
+
+He laid a hand not wholly steady upon Crowther's shoulder, and impelled
+him forward. His voice was low and agitated.
+
+"Forgive me, old chap!" he urged. "And understand, if you can. It's all
+you can do to help."
+
+"My dear lad, of course I do!" Instant and reassuring came Crowther's
+reply. "If you want my promise, you have it. The business is yours, not
+mine. I shall never interfere."
+
+"Thank you--thanks awfully!" Piers said.
+
+He drew a great breath. His hand went through Crowther's arm.
+
+"That gives me time to think," he said. "What an infernal tangle this
+beastly world is! I suppose you think there's a reason for everything?"
+
+"You've heard of gold being tried in the fire," said Crowther.
+
+Piers broke into his sudden laugh. "I'm not gold, my dear chap, but the
+tinniest dross that ever was made. Shall we go and have a drink, what?
+This sort of thing always makes me thirsty."
+
+It was characteristically abrupt. It ended the matter in a trice. They
+went together to the hotel _buffet_, and there Piers quenched his thirst.
+It was while there that Crowther became aware that his mood had wholly
+changed. He laughed and joked with the bright-eyed French girl who waited
+upon them, and seemed loth to depart. Silently, but with a growing
+anxiety, Crowther watched him. There was certainly nothing forced about
+his gaiety. It was wildly, recklessly spontaneous; but there was about it
+a fevered quality that set Crowther almost instinctively on his guard.
+He did not know, and he had no means of gauging, exactly how deeply the
+iron had pierced. But that some sort of wound had been inflicted he could
+not doubt. It might be merely a superficial one, but he feared that it
+was something more than that. There was a queer, intangible species of
+mockery in Piers' attitude, as though he set the whole world at defiance.
+
+And yet he did not look like a man who had been stunned by an unexpected,
+sledge-hammer blow of Fate. He was keenly, fiercely alive to his
+surroundings. He seemed to be gibing rather at a blow that had glanced
+aside. Uneasily Crowther wondered.
+
+It was he who finally suggested a move. It was growing late.
+
+"So it is!" said Piers. "You ought to be turning in if you really mean to
+make an early start."
+
+He stood still in the hall and held out his hand. "Good-night, old chap!
+I'm not going up at present."
+
+"You'd better," said Crowther.
+
+"No, I can't. I couldn't possibly turn in yet." He thrust his hand upon
+Crowther. "Good-night! I shall see you in the morning."
+
+Crowther took the hand. The hall was deserted. They stood together under
+a swinging lamp, and by its flaring light Crowther sought to read his
+companion's face.
+
+For a moment or two Piers refused to meet his look, then with sudden
+stubbornness he raised his eyes and stared back. They shone as black and
+hard as ebony.
+
+"Good-night!" he said again.
+
+Crowther's level brows were slightly drawn. His hand, square and strong,
+closed upon Piers' and held it.
+
+For a few seconds he did not speak; then: "I don't know that I feel like
+turning in yet either, sonny," he said deliberately.
+
+Piers made a swift movement of impatience. His eyes seemed to grow
+brighter, more grimly hard.
+
+"I'm afraid I must ask you to excuse me in any case," he said. "I'm going
+up to see if my grandfather has all he wants."
+
+It was defiantly spoken. He turned with the words, almost wresting his
+hand free, and strode away towards the lift.
+
+Reaching it, some sense of compunction seemed to touch him for he looked
+back over his shoulder with an abrupt gesture of farewell.
+
+Crowther made no answering sign. He stood gravely watching. But, as
+the lift shot upwards, he turned aside and began squarely to ascend
+the stairs.
+
+When Piers came out of his room ten minutes later with a coat over his
+arm he came face to face with him in the corridor. There was a certain
+grimness apparent about Crowther also by that time. He offered no
+explanation of his presence, although quite obviously he was waiting.
+
+Piers stood still. There was a dangerous glitter in his eyes that came
+and went. "Look here, Crowther!" he said. "It's no manner of use your
+attempting this game with me. I'm going out, and--whether you like it or
+not, I don't care a damn--I'm going alone."
+
+"Where are you going?" said Crowther.
+
+"To the Casino," Piers flung the words with a gleam of clenched teeth.
+
+Crowther looked at him straight and hard. "What for?" he asked.
+
+"What do people generally go for?" Piers prepared to move on as he
+uttered the question.
+
+But Crowther deliberately blocked his way. "No, Piers," he said quietly.
+"You're not going to-night."
+
+The blood rose in a great wave to Piers' forehead. His eyes shone
+suddenly red. "Do you think you're going to stop me?" he said.
+
+"For to-night, sonny--yes." Quite decidedly Crowther made reply.
+"To-morrow you will be your own master. But to-night--well, you've had a
+bit of a knock out; you're off your balance. Don't go to-night!"
+
+He spoke with earnest appeal, but he still blocked the passage squarely,
+stoutly, immovably.
+
+The hot flush died out of Piers' face; he went slowly white. But the
+blaze of wrath in his eyes leaped higher. For the moment he looked
+scarcely sane.
+
+"If you don't clear out of my path, I shall throw you!" he said, speaking
+very quietly, but with a terrible distinctness that made misunderstanding
+impossible.
+
+Crowther, level-browed and determined, remained where he was. "I don't
+think you will," he said.
+
+"Don't you?" A faint smile of derision twisted Piers' lips. He gathered
+up the coat he carried, and threw it across his shoulder.
+
+Crowther watched him with eyes that never varied. "Piers!" he said.
+
+"Well?" Piers looked at him, still with that slight, grim smile.
+
+Crowther stood like a rock. "I will let you pass, sonny, if you can tell
+me--on your word of honour as a gentleman--that the tables are all you
+have in your mind."
+
+Piers tossed back his head with the action of an angry beast. "What the
+devil has that to do with you?"
+
+"Everything," said Crowther.
+
+He moved at last, quietly, massively, and took Piers by the shoulders.
+"My son," he said, "I know where you are going. I've been there myself.
+But in God's name, lad, don't--don't go! There are some stains that never
+come out though one would give all one had to be rid of them."
+
+"Let me go!" said Piers.
+
+He was breathing quickly; his eyes gazed fiercely into the elder man's
+face. He made no violent movement, but his whole body was tensely strung
+to resist.
+
+Crowther's hands tightened upon him. "Not to-night!" he said.
+
+"Yes, now!" Something of electricity ran through Piers; there came as it
+were the ripple of muscles contracting for a spring. Yet still he stood
+motionless, menacing but inactive.
+
+"I will not!" Sudden and hard Crowther's answer came; his hold became a
+grip. By sheer unexpectedness of action, he forced Piers back against the
+door behind him.
+
+It gave inwards, and they stumbled into the darkness of the bedroom.
+
+"You fool!" said Piers. "You fool!"
+
+Yet he gave ground, scarcely resisting, and coming up against the bed sat
+down upon it suddenly as if spent.
+
+There fell a brief silence, a tense, hard-breathing pause. Then Piers
+reached up and freed himself.
+
+"Oh, go away, Crowther!" he said. "You're a kind old ass, but I don't
+want you. And you needn't spend the night in the corridor either. See?
+Just go to bed like a Christian and let me do the same!"
+
+The struggle was over; so suddenly, so amazingly, that Crowther stood
+dumbfounded. He had girded himself to wrestle with a giant, but there was
+nothing formidable about the boy who sat on the edge of his bed and
+laughed at him with easy ridicule.
+
+"Why don't you switch on the light," he jeered, "and have a good look
+round for the devil? He was here a minute ago. What? Don't you believe in
+devils? That's heresy. All good parsons--" He got up suddenly and went to
+the switch. In a second the room was flooded with light. He returned to
+Crowther with the full flare on his face, and the only expression it wore
+was one of careless friendliness. He held out his hand. "Good-night,
+dear old fellow! Say your prayers and go to bed! And you needn't have any
+more nightmares on my account. I'm going to turn in myself directly."
+
+There was no mistaking his sincerity, or the completeness of his
+surrender. Crowther could but take the extended hand, and, in silent
+astonishment, treat the incident as closed.
+
+He even wondered as he went away if he had not possibly exaggerated the
+whole matter, though at the heart of him he knew that this was only what
+Piers himself desired him to believe. He could not but feel convinced,
+however, that the danger was past for the time at least. In his own
+inimitable fashion Piers had succeeded in reassuring him. He was fully
+satisfied that the boy would keep his word, for his faith in him was
+absolute. But he felt the victory that was his to be a baffling one. He
+had conquered merely because Piers of his own volition had ceased to
+resist. He did not understand that sudden submission. Like Sir Beverley,
+he was puzzled by it. There was about it a mysterious quality that eluded
+his understanding. He would have given a good deal for a glimpse of the
+motive that lay behind.
+
+But he had to go without it. Piers was in no expansive mood. Perhaps he
+might have found it difficult to explain himself even had he so desired.
+
+Whatever the motive that had urged him, it urged him no longer, or it had
+been diverted into a side-channel. For almost as soon as he was alone, he
+threw himself down and scribbled a careless line to Ina Rose, advising
+her to accompany her father to Mentone, and adding that he believed she
+would not be bored there.
+
+When he had despatched Victor with the letter, he flung his window wide
+and leaned out of it with his eyes wide opened on the darkness, and on
+his lips that smile that was not good to see.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+SUBSTANCE
+
+
+It was a blustering spring day, and Avery, caught in a sudden storm of
+driving sleet, stood up against the railings of the doctor's house,
+sheltering as best she might. She was holding her umbrella well in the
+teeth of the gale, and trying to protect an armful of purchases as well.
+
+She was alone, Gracie, the black sheep, having been sent to school at the
+close of the Christmas holidays, and Jeanie being confined to the house
+with a severe cold. Olive, having become more and more her father's
+constant companion, disdained shopping expeditions. The two elder boys
+and Pat were all at a neighbouring school as weekly boarders, and though
+she missed them Avery had it not in her heart to regret the arrangement.
+The Vicarage might at times seem dreary, but it had become undeniably an
+abode of peace.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer was gradually recovering her strength, and Avery's care now
+centred more upon Jeanie than her mother. Though the child had recovered
+from her accident, she had not been really well all the winter, and the
+cold spring seemed to tax her strength to the uttermost. Tudor still
+dropped in at intervals, but he said little, and his manner did not
+encourage Avery to question him. Privately she was growing anxious about
+Jeanie, and she wished that he would be more communicative. He had
+absolutely forbidden book-work, a fiat to which Mr. Lorimer had yielded
+under protest.
+
+"The child will grow up a positive dunce," he had declared.
+
+To which Tudor had brusquely rejoined, "What of it?"
+
+But his word was law so far as Jeanie was concerned, and Mr. Lorimer had
+relinquished the point with the sigh of one submitting to the inevitable.
+He did not like Lennox Tudor, but for some reason he always avoided an
+open disagreement with him.
+
+It was of Jeanie that Avery was thinking as she stood there huddled
+against the railings while the sleet beat a fierce tattoo on her levelled
+umbrella and streamed from it in rivers on to the ground. She even
+debated with herself if it seemed advisable to turn and enter the
+doctor's dwelling, and try to get him to speak frankly of the matter as
+he had spoken once before.
+
+She dismissed the idea, however, reflecting that he would most
+probably be out, and she was on the point of collecting her forces to
+make a rush for another sheltered spot further on when the front door
+opened unexpectedly behind her, and Tudor himself came forth
+bareheaded into the rain.
+
+"What are you doing there, Mrs. Denys?" he said. "Why don't you
+come inside?"
+
+He opened the gate for her, and took her parcels without waiting for a
+reply. And Avery, still with her umbrella poised against the blast,
+smiled her thanks and passed in.
+
+The hair grew far back on Tudor's forehead, it was in fact becoming
+scanty on the top of his head; and the raindrops glistened upon it as he
+entered behind Avery. He wiped them away, and then took off his glasses
+and wiped them also.
+
+"Come into the dining-room!" he said. "You are just in time to join
+me at tea."
+
+"You're very kind," Avery said. "But I ought to hurry back the moment the
+rain lessens."
+
+"It won't lessen yet," said Tudor. "Take off your mackintosh, won't you?
+I expect your feet are wet. There's a fire to dry them by."
+
+Certainly the storm showed no signs of abating. The sky was growing
+darker every instant. Avery slipped the streaming mackintosh from her
+shoulders and entered the room into which he had invited her.
+
+The blaze on the hearth was cheering after the icy gale without. She went
+to it, stretching her numbed hands to the warmth.
+
+Tudor pushed forward a chair. "I believe you are chilled to the
+bone," he said.
+
+She laughed at that. "Oh no, indeed I am not! But it is a cold wind,
+isn't it? Have you finished your work for to-day?"
+
+Tudor foraged in a cupboard for an extra cup and saucer. "No. I've got to
+go out again later. I've just come back from Miss Whalley's. She's got a
+touch of jaundice."
+
+"Oh, poor thing!" said Avery.
+
+"Yes; poor thing!" echoed Tudor grimly. "She is very sorry for herself, I
+can assure you; but as full of gossip as ever." He paused.
+
+Avery, with her face to the fire, laughed a little. "Anything new?"
+
+"Miss Whalley," said Tudor deliberately, "always gets hold of something
+new. Never noticed that?"
+
+"Wouldn't you like me to pour out?" suggested Avery.
+
+"No. You keep your feet on the fender. Do you want to hear the latest
+tittle-tattle--or not?"
+
+There was a wary gleam behind Tudor's glasses; but Avery did not turn her
+eyes from the fire. A curious little feeling of uneasiness possessed her,
+a sensation that scarcely amounted to dread yet which quickened the
+beating of her heart in a fashion that she found vaguely disconcerting.
+
+"Don't tell me anything ugly!" she said gently, still not looking at
+him.
+
+Tudor uttered a short laugh. "There's nothing especially venomous about
+it that I can see." He lifted the teapot and began to pour. "Have you
+heard from young Evesham lately?"
+
+The question was casually uttered; but Avery's hands made a slight
+involuntary movement over the fire towards which she leaned.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+At the same moment the cup that Tudor was filling overflowed, and he
+whispered something under his breath and set down the tea-pot.
+
+Avery turned towards him instinctively, to see him dabbing the table with
+his handkerchief.
+
+"It's almost too dark to see what one is doing," he said.
+
+"It is," she assented gravely, and turned back quietly to the fire, not
+offering to assist. A soft veil of reserve seemed to have descended
+upon her. She did not speak again until he had remedied the disaster
+and brought her some tea. Then, with absolute composure, she raised her
+eyes to his.
+
+"You were going to tell me something about Piers Evesham," she said.
+
+His eyes looked back into hers with a certain steeliness, as though they
+sought to penetrate her reserve.
+
+"I was," he said, after a moment, "though I don't suppose it will
+interest you very greatly. I had it from Miss Whalley, but I was not told
+the source of her information. Rumour says that the young man is engaged
+to Miss Ina Rose of Wardenhurst."
+
+"Oh, really?" said Avery. She took the cup he offered her with a hand
+that was perfectly steady, though she was conscious of the fact that her
+face was pale. "They are abroad, I think?"
+
+"Yes, in the Riviera." Tudor's eyes fell away from hers abruptly. "At
+least they have been. Someone said they were coming home." He stooped to
+put wood on the fire, and there fell a silence.
+
+Avery spoke after a moment. "No doubt he will be happier married."
+
+"I wonder," said Tudor. "I should say myself that he has the sort of
+temperament that is never satisfied. He's too restless for that. I don't
+think Miss Ina Rose is greatly to be envied."
+
+"Unless she loves him," said Avery. She spoke almost under her breath,
+her eyes upon the fire. Tudor, standing beside her with his elbow on
+the mantelpiece, was still conscious of that filmy veil of reserve
+floating between them. It chafed him, but it was too intangible a thing
+to tear aside.
+
+He waited therefore in silence, watching her face, the tender lines of
+her mouth, the sweet curves that in childhood must have made a perfect
+picture of happiness.
+
+She raised her eyes at length. "Dr. Tudor!"
+
+And then she realized his scrutiny, and a soft flush rose and overspread
+her pale face. She lifted her straight brows questioningly.
+
+And all in a moment Tudor found himself speaking,--not of his own
+volition, not the words he had meant to speak, but nervously,
+stammeringly, giving utterance to the thoughts that suddenly welled over
+from his soul. "I've been wanting to speak for ages. I couldn't get it
+out. But it's no good keeping it in, is it? I don't get any nearer that
+way. I don't want to vex you, make you feel uncomfortable. No one knows
+better than I that I haven't much to offer. But I can give you a home
+and--and all my love, if you will have it. It may seem a small thing to
+you, but it's bigger than the calf-love of an infant like young Evesham.
+I know he dared to let his fancy stray your way, and you see now what it
+was worth. But mine--mine isn't fancy."
+
+And there he stopped; for Avery had risen and was facing him in the
+firelight with eyes of troubled entreaty.
+
+"Oh, please," she said, "please don't go on!"
+
+He stood upright with a jerk. The distress on her face restored his
+normal self-command more quickly than any words. Half-mechanically he
+reached out and took her tea-cup, setting it down on the mantelpiece
+before her.
+
+"Don't be upset!" he said. "I didn't mean to upset you. I shan't go on,
+if it is against your wish."
+
+"It is," said Avery. She spoke tremulously, locking her hands fast
+together. "It must be my own fault," she said, "I'm dreadfully sorry. I
+hoped you weren't--really in earnest."
+
+He smiled at that with a touch of cynicism. "Did you think I was amusing
+myself--or you? Sit down again, won't you? There is no occasion whatever
+for you to be distressed. I assure you that you are in no way to blame."
+
+"I am dreadfully sorry," Avery repeated.
+
+"That's nice of you. I had scarcely dared to flatter myself that you
+would be--glad. So you see, you have really nothing to reproach yourself
+with. I am no worse off than I was before."
+
+She put out her hand to him with a quick, confiding gesture. "You are
+very kind to put it in that way. I value your friendship so much, so very
+much. Yes, and I value your love too. It's not a small thing to me. Only,
+you know--you know--" she faltered a little--"I've been married before,
+and--though I loved my husband--my married life was a tragedy. Oh yes, he
+loved me too. It wasn't that sort of misery. It was--it was drink."
+
+"Poor girl!" said Tudor.
+
+He spoke with unwonted gentleness, and he held her hand with the utmost
+kindness. There was nothing of the rejected lover in his attitude. He
+was man enough to give her his first sympathy.
+
+Avery's lips were quivering. She went on with a visible effort. "He died
+a violent death. He was killed in a quarrel with another man. I was told
+it was an accident, but it didn't seem like that to me. And--it had an
+effect on me. It made me hard--made me bitter."
+
+"You, Avery!" Tudor's voice was gravely incredulous.
+
+She turned her face to the fire, and he saw on her lashes the gleam of
+tears. "I've never told anyone that; but it's the truth. It seemed to me
+that life was cruel, mainly because of men's vices. And women were
+created only to go under. It was a horrid sort of feeling to have, but it
+has never wholly left me. I don't think I could ever face marriage a
+second time."
+
+"Oh yes, you could," said Tudor, quietly, "if you loved the man."
+
+She shook her head. "I am too old to fall in love. I have somehow
+missed the romance of life. I know what it is, but it will never come
+to me now."
+
+"And you won't marry without?" he said.
+
+"No."
+
+There fell a pause; then, still with the utmost quietness, he
+relinquished her hand. "I think you are right," he said. "Marriage
+without love on both sides is a ship without ballast. Yet, I can't help
+thinking that you are mistaken in your idea that you have lost the
+capacity for that form of love. You may know what it is. Most women do.
+But I wonder if you have ever really felt it."
+
+"Not to the full," Avery answered, her voice very low. "Then I was too
+young. Mine was just a child's rapture and it was simply extinguished
+when I came to know the kind of burden I had to bear. It all faded so
+quickly, and the reality was so terribly grim. Now--now I look on the
+world with experienced eyes. I am too old."
+
+"You think experience destroys romance?" said Tudor.
+
+She looked at him. "Don't you?"
+
+"No," he said. "If it did, I do not think you would be afraid to marry
+me. Don't think I am trying to persuade you! I am not. But are you sure
+that in refusing me you are not sacrificing substance to shadow?"
+
+"I don't quite understand you," she said.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders slightly. "I can't be more explicit. No doubt
+you will follow your own instincts. But allow me to say that I don't
+think you are the sort of woman to go through life unmated; and though I
+may not be romantic, I am sound. I think I could give you a certain
+measure of happiness. But the choice is yours. I can only bow to your
+decision."
+
+There was a certain dignity in his speech that gave it weight. Avery
+listened in silence, and into silence the words passed.
+
+Several seconds slipped away, then without effort Tudor came back to
+everyday things. "Sit down, won't you? Your tea is getting cold."
+
+Avery sat down, and he handed it to her, and after a moment turned aside
+to the table.
+
+"As a matter of fact," he said, "I have just come back from the
+Vicarage."
+
+"Oh, have you?" Avery looked round quickly. "You went to see Jeanie?"
+
+"Yes." Tudor spoke gravely. "I also saw the Vicar. I told him the child
+must go away. That cough of hers is tearing her to pieces. She ought to
+go to the South Coast. I told him so."
+
+"Oh! What did he say?" Avery spoke with eagerness. She had been longing
+to suggest that very proposal for some time past.
+
+Tudor smiled into his cup. "He said it was a total impossibility. That
+was the starting-point. At the finish it was practically decided that
+you should take her away next week."
+
+"I!" said Avery.
+
+"Yes, you. Mrs. Lorimer will manage all right now. The nurse can look
+after her and the little ones without assistance. And the second
+girl--Olive isn't it?--can look after the Reverend Stephen. It's all
+arranged in fact, unless it fails to meet with your approval, in which
+case of course the whole business must be reconsidered."
+
+"But of course I approve," Avery said. "I would do anything that lay in
+my power. But I don't quite like the idea of leaving Mrs. Lorimer."
+
+"She will be all right," Tudor asserted again. "She wouldn't be happy
+away from her precious husband, and she would sooner have you looking
+after Jeanie than anyone. She told me so."
+
+"She always thinks of others first," said Avery.
+
+"So does someone else I know," rejoined Tudor. "It's just a habit
+some women have,--not always a good habit from some points of view.
+We may regard it as settled then, may we? You really have no
+objections to raise?"
+
+"None," said Avery. "I think the idea is excellent. I have been feeling
+troubled about Jeanie nearly all the winter. This last cold has worn her
+out terribly."
+
+Tudor nodded. "Yes."
+
+He drank his tea thoughtfully, and then spoke again. "I sounded her this
+afternoon. The left lung is not in a healthy condition. She will need all
+the attention you can give her if she is going to throw off the mischief.
+It has not gone very far at present, but--to be frank with you--I am very
+far from satisfied that she can muster the strength." He got up and began
+to pace the room. "I have not said this plainly to anyone else. I don't
+want to frighten Mrs. Lorimer before I need. The poor soul has enough to
+bear without this added. Possibly the change will work wonders. Possibly
+she will pull round. Children have marvellous recuperative powers. But I
+have seen this sort of thing a good many times before, and--" he came
+back to the hearth--"it doesn't make me happy."
+
+"I am glad you have told me," Avery said.
+
+"I had to tell you. I believe you more than half suspected it." Tudor
+spoke restlessly; his thoughts were evidently not of his companion at
+that moment. "There are of course a good many points in her favour. She
+is a good, obedient child with a placid temperament. And the summer is
+before us. We shall have to work hard this summer, Mrs. Denys." He smiled
+at her abruptly. "It is like building a sea-wall when the tide is out.
+We've got to make it as strong as possible before the tide comes back."
+
+"You may rely on me to do my very best," Avery said earnestly.
+
+He nodded. "Thank you. I know I may. I always do. Hence my confidence in
+you. May I give you some more tea?"
+
+He quitted the subject as suddenly as he had embarked upon it. There was
+something very friendly in his treatment of her. She knew with
+unquestioning intuition that for the future he would keep strictly within
+the bounds of friendship unless he had her permission to pass beyond
+them. And it was this knowledge that emboldened her at parting to say,
+with her hand in his: "You are very, very good to me. I would like to
+thank you if I could."
+
+He pressed her hand with the kindness of an old friend. "No, don't thank
+me!" he said, smiling at her in a way that somehow went to her heart. "I
+shall always be at your service. But I'd rather you took it as a matter
+of course. I feel more comfortable that way."
+
+Avery left him at length and trudged home through the mud with a curious
+feeling of uncertainty in her soul. It was as though she had been
+vouchsafed a far glimpse of destiny which had been too fleeting for her
+comprehension.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+SHADOW
+
+
+The preparations that must inevitably precede a departure for an
+indefinite length of time kept Avery from dwelling overmuch on what had
+passed on that gusty afternoon when she had taken shelter in the
+doctor's house.
+
+Whether or not she believed the rumour concerning Piers she scarcely
+asked herself. For some reason into which she did not enter she was
+firmly resolved to exclude him from her mind, and she welcomed the many
+occupations that kept her thoughts engrossed. No word from him had
+reached her since that daring letter written nearly three months
+before, just after his departure. It seemed that he had accepted her
+answer just as she had meant him to accept it, and that he had nothing
+more to say. So at least she viewed the matter, not suffering any
+inward question to arise.
+
+She saw Lennox Tudor several times before the last day arrived. He did
+not seek her out. It simply came about in the ordinary course of things.
+He was plainly determined that neither in public nor private should there
+be any secret sense of embarrassment between them. And for this also she
+was grateful, liking him for his blunt consideration for her better than
+she had ever liked him before.
+
+It was on the evening of the day preceding her departure with Jeanie that
+she ran down in the dusk to the post at the end of the lane with a
+letter. Her Australian friend had written to propose a visit, and she had
+been obliged to put him off.
+
+There was a bitter wind blowing, but she hastened along hatless, with a
+cloak thrown round her shoulders. Past the church with its sheltering
+yew-trees she ran, intent only upon executing her errand in as short a
+time as possible.
+
+Her hair blew loose about her face, and before she reached her goal she
+was ashamed of her untidiness, but it was not worth while to return for a
+hat, and she pressed on with a girl's impetuosity, hoping that she would
+meet no one.
+
+The hope was not to be fulfilled. She reached the box and deposited her
+letter therein, but as she turned from doing so, there came the fall of a
+horse's hoofs along the road at the end of the lane.
+
+She caught the sound, and was pierced by a sudden, quite unaccountable
+suspicion. Swiftly she gathered her cloak more securely about her, and
+hastened away.
+
+Instantly it seemed to her that the hoof-beats quickened. The lane was
+steep, and she realized in a moment that if the rider turned up in her
+wake, she must very speedily be overtaken. She slackened her pace
+therefore, and walked on more quietly, straining her ears to listen, not
+venturing to look back.
+
+Round the corner came the advancing animal at a brisk trot. She had
+known in her heart that it would be so. She had known from the first
+moment of hearing those hoof-beats, that Fate, strong and relentless,
+was on her track.
+
+How she had known it she could not have said, but the wild clamour of her
+heart stifled any reasoning that she might have tried to form. Her breath
+came and went like the breath of a hunted creature. She could not hurry
+because of the trembling of her knees. Every instinct was urging her to
+flee, but she lacked the strength. She drew instead nearer to the wall,
+hoping against hope that in the gathering darkness he would pass her by.
+
+Nearer and nearer came the hammering hoofs. She could hear the horse's
+sharp breathing, the creak of leather. And then suddenly she found she
+could go no further. She stopped and leaned against the wall.
+
+She saw the animal pulled suddenly in, and knew that she was caught. With
+a great effort she lifted a smiling face, and simulated surprise.
+
+"You! How do you do?"
+
+"You knew it was me," said Piers rather curtly.
+
+He dropped from the saddle with the easy grace that always marked his
+movements, and came to her, leaving the animal free.
+
+"Why were you running away from me?" he said. "Did you want to cut me?"
+
+He must have felt the trembling of her hand, for all in a moment his
+manner changed. His fingers closed upon hers with warm assurance. He
+suddenly laughed into her face.
+
+"Don't answer either of those questions!" he said. "Didn't you expect
+to see me? We came home yesterday, thank the gods! I'm deadly sick of
+being away."
+
+"Haven't you enjoyed yourself?" Avery managed to ask.
+
+He laughed again somewhat grimly. "I wasn't out for enjoyment. I've
+been--amusing myself more or less. But that's not the same thing, is it?
+I should have drowned myself if I'd stayed out there much longer."
+
+"Don't talk nonsense!" said Avery.
+
+She spoke with a touch of sharpness. Her agitation had passed leaving her
+vexed with herself and with him.
+
+He received the admonition with a grimace. "Have you heard about my
+engagement yet?" he enquired irrelevantly, after a moment.
+
+Avery looked at him very steadily through the falling dusk. She had a
+feeling that he was trying to hoodwink her by some means not wholly
+praiseworthy.
+
+"Are you engaged?" she asked him, point-blank.
+
+He made a careless gesture. "Everybody says so."
+
+"Are you engaged?" Avery repeated with resolution.
+
+She freed her hand as she uttered the question the second time. She was
+standing up very straight against the churchyard wall sternly determined
+to check all trifling.
+
+Piers straightened himself also. From the pride of his attitude she
+thought that he was about to take offence, but his voice held none as he
+made reply.
+
+"I am not."
+
+She felt as if some constriction at her heart, of which till that moment
+she had scarcely been aware, had suddenly slackened. She drew a long,
+deep breath.
+
+"Sorry, what?" suggested Piers.
+
+He began to tap a careless tattoo with his whip on the toe of his boot.
+He did not appear to be regarding her very closely. Yet she did not feel
+at her ease. That sudden sense as of strain relaxed had left her
+curiously unsteady.
+
+She ignored his question and asked another. "Why is everybody saying that
+you are engaged?"
+
+He lifted his shoulders. "Because everybody is more or less of a
+gossiping fool, I should say. Still," he threw up his head with a laugh,
+"notions of that sort have their uses. My grandfather for instance is
+firmly of the opinion that I have come home to be married. I didn't
+undeceive him."
+
+"You let him believe--what wasn't true?" said Avery slowly.
+
+He looked straight at her, with his head flung back. "I did. It suited my
+purpose. I wanted to get home. He thought it was because the Roses had
+returned to Wardenhurst. I let him think so. It certainly was deadly
+without them."
+
+It was then that Avery turned and began quietly to walk on up the hill.
+He linked his arm in Pompey's bridle, and walked beside her.
+
+She spoke after a few moments with something of constraint. "And how have
+you been--amusing yourself?"
+
+"I?" Carelessly he made reply. "I have been playing around with Ina Rose
+chiefly--to save us both from boredom."
+
+There sounded a faint jeering note behind the carelessness of his voice.
+Avery quickened her pace almost unconsciously.
+
+"It's all right," said Piers. "There's been no damage done."
+
+"You don't know that," said Avery, without looking at him.
+
+"Yes, I do. She'll marry Dick Guyes. I told her she would the night
+before they left, and she didn't say she wouldn't. He's a much better
+chap than I am, you know," said Piers, with an odd touch of sincerity.
+"And he's head over ears in love with her into the bargain."
+
+"Are you trying to excuse yourself?" said Avery.
+
+He laughed. "What for? For not marrying Ina Rose? I assure you I never
+meant to marry her."
+
+"For trifling with her." Avery's voice was hard, but he affected not
+to notice.
+
+"A game's a game," he said lightly.
+
+Avery stopped very suddenly and faced round upon him. "That sort of
+game," she said, and her voice throbbed with the intensity of her
+indignation, "is monstrous--is contemptible--a game that none but
+blackguards ever stoop to play!"
+
+Piers stood still. "Great Scott!" he said softly.
+
+Avery swept on. Once roused, she was ruthless in her arraignment.
+
+"Men--some men--find it amusing to go through life breaking women's
+hearts just for the sport of the thing. They regard it as a pastime, in
+the same light as fox-hunting or cards or racing. And when the game is
+over, they laugh among themselves and say what fools women are. And so
+they may be, and so they are, many of them. But is it honourable, is it
+manly, to take advantage of their weakness? I never thought you were that
+sort. I thought you were at least honest."
+
+"Did you?" said Piers.
+
+He was holding himself very straight and stiff, just as he had held
+himself on that day in the winter when she had so indignantly intervened
+to save his dog from his ungovernable fury. But he did not seem to resent
+her attack, and in spite of herself Avery's own resentment began to wane.
+She suddenly remembered that her very protest was an admission of
+intimacy of which he would not scruple to avail himself if it suited his
+purpose, and with this thought in her mind she paused in confusion.
+
+"Won't you finish?" said Piers.
+
+She turned to leave him. "That's all I have to say."
+
+He put out a restraining hand. "Then may I say something?"
+
+The request was so humbly uttered that she could not refuse it. She
+remained where she was.
+
+"I should like you to know," said Piers, "that I have never given
+Miss Rose or any other girl with whom I have flirted the faintest
+shadow of a reason for believing that I was in earnest. That is the
+truth--on my honour."
+
+"I wonder if--they--would say the same," said Avery.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "No one ever before accused me of being a
+lady-killer. As to your other charge against me, it was not I who
+deceived my grandfather. It was he who deceived himself."
+
+"Isn't that a distinction without a difference?" said Avery, in a
+low voice.
+
+She was beginning to wish that she had not spoken with such vehemence.
+After all, what were his delinquencies to her? She almost expected him to
+ask the question; but he did not.
+
+"Do you mind explaining?" he said.
+
+With an effort she made response. "You can't say it was honourable to let
+your grandfather come home in the belief that you wanted to become
+engaged to Miss Rose."
+
+"Have I said so?" said Piers.
+
+Avery paused. She had a sudden feeling of uncertainty as if he had kicked
+away a foothold upon which she had rashly attempted to rest.
+
+"You admit that it was not?" she said.
+
+He smiled a little. "I admit that it was not strictly honest, but I
+didn't see much harm in it. In any case it was high time we came home,
+and it gave him the impetus to move."
+
+"And when are you going to tell him the truth?" said Avery.
+
+Piers was silent.
+
+Looking at him through the dusk, she was aware of a change in his
+demeanour, though as to its nature she was slightly doubtful.
+
+"And if I don't tell him?" said Piers at length.
+
+"You will," she said quickly.
+
+"I don't know why I should." Piers' voice was dogged. "He'll know fast
+enough--when she gets engaged to Guyes."
+
+"Know that you have played a double game," said Avery.
+
+"Well?" he said. "And if he does?"
+
+"I think you will be sorry--then," she said.
+
+Somehow she could not be angry any longer. He had accepted her rebuke in
+so docile a spirit. She did not wholly understand his attitude. Yet it
+softened her.
+
+"Why should I be sorry?" said Piers.
+
+She answered him quickly and impulsively. "Because it isn't your nature
+to deceive. You are too honest at heart to do it and be happy."
+
+"Happy!" said Piers, an odd note of emotion in his voice. "Do you suppose
+I'm ever that--or ever likely to be?"
+
+She recoiled a little from the suppressed vehemence of his tone, but
+almost instantly he put out his hand again to her with a gesture of
+boyish persuasion.
+
+"Don't rag me, Avery! I've had a filthy time lately. And when I saw you
+cut and run at sight of me--I just couldn't stand it. I've been wanting
+to answer your letter, but I couldn't."
+
+"But why should you?" Avery broke in gently. "My letter was the answer
+to yours."
+
+She gave him her hand, because she could not help it.
+
+He held it in a hungry clasp. "I know--I know," he said rather
+incoherently. "It--it was very decent of you not to be angry. I believe I
+let myself go rather--what? Thanks awfully for being so sweet about it!"
+
+"My dear boy," Avery said, "you thank me for nothing! The matter is past.
+Don't let us re-open it!"
+
+She spoke with unconscious appeal. His hand squeezed hers in instant
+response. "All right. We won't. And look here,--if you want me to tell my
+grandfather that he has been building his castle in the air,--it'll mean
+a row of course, but--I'll do it."
+
+"Will you?" said Avery.
+
+He nodded. "Yes--as you wish it. And may I come to tea with Jeanie
+to-morrow?"
+
+His dark eyes smiled suddenly into hers as he dropped her hand. She had a
+momentary feeling of uncertainty as she met them--a sense of doubt that
+disquieted her strangely. It was as if he had softly closed a door
+against her somewhere in his soul.
+
+With a curious embarrassment she answered him. "Jeanie has not been well
+all the winter. Dr. Tudor has ordered a change, and we are going--she and
+I--to Stanbury Cliffs to-morrow."
+
+"Are you though?" He opened his eyes. "Just you and she, eh? What a
+cosy party!"
+
+"The other children will probably join us for the Easter holidays," Avery
+said. "It's a nice place, they say. Do you know it?"
+
+"I should think I do. Victor and I used to go there regularly when I was
+a kid. It was there I learnt to swim."
+
+"Who is Victor?" asked Avery, beginning to walk on up the hill.
+
+"Victor? Oh, he's my French nurse--the best chap who ever walked. We are
+great pals," laughed Piers. "And so you're off to-morrow, are you? Hope
+you'll have a good time. Give my love to the kiddie! She isn't really
+ill, what?"
+
+"Dr. Tudor is not satisfied about her," Avery said.
+
+"Oh, Tudor!" Piers spoke with instant disparagement. "I don't suppose
+he's any good. What does he say anyway?"
+
+"He is afraid of lung trouble," Avery said. "But we hope the change is
+going to do wonders for her. Do you know, I think I must run in now? I
+have several little jobs still to get through this evening."
+
+Piers stopped at once. "Good-bye!" he said. "I'm glad I saw you. Take
+care of yourself, Avery! And the next time you see me coming--don't
+run away!"
+
+He set his foot in the stirrup and swung himself up into the saddle.
+Pompey immediately began to execute an elaborate dance in the roadway,
+rendering further conversation out of the question. Piers waved his cap
+in careless adieu, and turned the animal round. In another moment he was
+tearing down the lane at a gallop, and Avery was left looking after him
+still with that curious sense of doubt lying cold at her heart.
+
+The sight of a black, clerical figure emerging from the churchyard caused
+her to turn swiftly and pursue her way to the Vicarage gate. But the
+sounds of those galloping hoofs still wrought within her as she went.
+They beat upon her spirit with a sense of swift-moving Destiny.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+THE EVESHAM DEVIL
+
+
+"Confound the boy!" said Sir Beverley.
+
+He rose up from the black oak settle in the hall with a jerky movement of
+irritation, and tramped to the front-door.
+
+It had been one of those strange soft days that sometimes come in the
+midst of blustering March storms, and though the sun had long gone down
+the warmth still lingered. It might have been an evening in May.
+
+He opened the great door with an impatient hand. What on earth was the
+boy doing? Had he gone love-making to Wardenhurst? A grim smile touched
+the old man's grim lips as this thought occurred to him. That he was not
+wasting his time nearer home he was fairly convinced; for only that
+morning he had heard from Lennox Tudor that the mother's help at the
+Vicarage, over whom in the winter Piers had been inclined to make a fool
+of himself, had taken one of the children away for a change. It seemed
+more than probable by this time that Piers' wandering fancy had wholly
+ceased to stray in her direction, but the news of her absence had caused
+Sir Beverley undoubted satisfaction. He hoped his boy would not encounter
+that impertinent, scheming woman again until he was safely engaged to Ina
+Rose. That this engagement was imminent Sir Beverley was fully convinced.
+His only wonder was that it had not taken place sooner. The two had been
+thrown together almost daily during the sojourn of Colonel Rose and his
+daughter at Mentone, and they had always seemed to enjoy each other's
+society. Of course Sir Beverley did not like the girl. He actively
+disliked the whole female species. But she belonged to the county, and
+she seemed moreover to be a normal healthy young woman who would be the
+mother of normal healthy children. And this was the sort of wife Piers
+wanted. For Piers--drat the boy!--was not normal. He inherited a good
+deal of his Italian grandmother's temperament as well as her beauty. And
+life was not likely to be a very easy matter for him in consequence.
+
+But an ordinary young English wife of his own rank would be a step in
+the right direction. So reasoned Sir Beverley, who had taken that fatal
+step in the wrong one in his youth and had never recovered the ground
+thus lost.
+
+Standing there at the open door, he dwelt upon his boy's future with a
+kind of grim pleasure that was not unmixed with heartache. He and his
+wife would have to go and live at the Dower House of course. No feminine
+truck at the Abbey for him! But the lad should continue to manage the
+estate with him. That would bring them in contact every day. He couldn't
+do without that much. The evenings would be lonely enough. He pictured
+the long silent dinners with a weary frown. How infernally lonely the
+Abbey could be!
+
+The steady tick of the clock in the corner forced itself upon his notice.
+He swore at it under his breath, and went out upon the steps.
+
+At the same instant a view-halloo from the dark avenue greeted him, and
+in spite of himself his face softened.
+
+"Hullo, you rascal!" he shouted back. "What the devil are you up to?"
+
+Piers came running up, light-footed and alert. "I've been unlucky,"
+he explained. "Had two punctures. I left the car at the garage and
+came on as quickly as I could. I say, I'm awfully sorry. I've been
+with Dick Guyes."
+
+Sir Beverley growled inarticulately, and turned inwards. So he had not
+been to the Roses' after all!
+
+"Get along with you!" he said. "And dress as fast as you can!"
+
+And Piers bounded past him and went up the stairs in three great leaps.
+He seemed to have grown younger during the few days that had elapsed
+since their return, more ardent, more keenly alive. The English spring
+seemed to exhilarate him; but for the first time Sir Beverley began to
+have his doubts as to the reason for his evident pleasure in returning.
+What on earth had he been to see Guyes for? Guyes of all people--who was
+well-known as one of Miss Ina's most devoted adorers!
+
+It was evident that the news he desired to hear would not be imparted to
+him that night, and Sir Beverley considered himself somewhat aggrieved in
+consequence. He was decidedly short with Piers when he reappeared--a fact
+which in no way disturbed his grandson's equanimity. He talked cheery
+commonplaces throughout dinner without effort, regardless of Sir
+Beverley's discouraging attitude, and it was not till dessert was placed
+upon the table that he allowed his conversational energies to flag.
+
+Then indeed, as David finally and ceremoniously withdrew, did he suddenly
+seem to awake to the fact that conversation was no longer a vital
+necessity, and forthwith dropped into an abrupt, uncompromising silence.
+
+It lasted for a space of minutes during which neither of them stirred or
+uttered a syllable, becoming at length ominous as the electric stillness
+before the storm.
+
+They came through it characteristically, Sir Beverley staring fixedly
+before him under the frown that was seldom wholly absent from his face;
+Piers, steady-eyed and intent, keenly watching the futile agonies of a
+night-moth among the candles. There was about him a massive, statuesque
+look in vivid contrast to the pulsing vitality of a few minutes before.
+
+It was Sir Beverley who broke the silence at last with a species of
+inarticulate snarl peculiarly his own. Piers' dark eyes were instantly
+upon him, but he said nothing, merely waiting for the words to which this
+sound was the preface.
+
+Sir Beverley's brow was thunderous. He looked back at Piers with a
+piercing grim regard.
+
+"Well?" he said. "What fool idea have you got in your brain now? I
+suppose I've got to hear it sooner or later."
+
+It was not a conciliatory speech, yet Piers received it with no visible
+resentment. "I don't know that I want to say anything very special," he
+said, after a moment's thought.
+
+"Oh, don't you?" growled Sir Beverley. "Then what are you thinking about?
+Tell me that!"
+
+Piers leaned back in his chair. "I was thinking about Dick Guyes," he
+said. "He is dining at the Roses' to-night."
+
+"Oh!" said Sir Beverley shortly.
+
+A faint smile came at the corners of Piers' mouth. "He wants to propose
+to Ina for about the hundred and ninetieth time," he said, "but doesn't
+know if he can screw himself up to it. I told him not to be such a shy
+ass. She is only waiting for him to speak."
+
+"Eh?" said Sir Beverley.
+
+A queer little dancing gleam leaped up in Piers' eyes--the gleam that
+had invariably heralded some piece of especial devilry in the days of
+his boyhood.
+
+"I told him she was his for the asking, sir," he said coolly, "and
+promised not to flirt with her any more till they were safely married."
+
+"Damn you!" exclaimed Sir Beverley violently and without warning.
+
+He had a glass of wine in front of him, and with the words his fingers
+gripped the stem. In another second he would have hurled the liquid full
+in Piers' face; but Piers was too quick for him. Quick as lightning, his
+own hand shot out across the corner of the table and grasped the old
+man's wrist.
+
+"No, sir! No!" he said sternly.
+
+They glared into each other's eyes, and Sir Beverley uttered a
+furious oath; but after the first instinctive effort to free himself
+he did no more.
+
+At the end of possibly thirty seconds Piers took his hand away. He pushed
+back his chair in the same movement and rose.
+
+"Shall we talk in the library?" he said. "This room is hot."
+
+Sir Beverley raised the wine-glass to his lips with a hand that shook,
+and drained it deliberately.
+
+"Yes," he said then, "We will--talk in the library."
+
+He got up with an agility that he seldom displayed, and turned to the
+door. As he went he glanced up suddenly at the softly mocking face on the
+wall, and a sharp spasm contracted his harsh features. But he scarcely
+paused. Without further words he left the room; and Piers followed, light
+of tread, behind him.
+
+The study windows stood wide open to the night. Piers crossed the room
+and quietly closed them. Then, without haste and without hesitation, he
+came to the table and stopped before it.
+
+"I never intended to marry Ina Rose," he said. "I was only amusing
+myself--and her."
+
+"The devil you were!" ejaculated Sir Beverley.
+
+Piers went on with the utmost steadiness. "We are not in the least
+suited to one another, and we have the sense to realize it. The next time
+Guyes asks her, I believe she will have him."
+
+"Sense!" roared Sir Beverley. "Do you dare to talk to me of sense,
+you--you blind fool? Mighty lot of sense you can boast of! And what the
+devil does it matter whether you suit one another--as you call it--or
+not, so long as you keep the whip-hand? You'll tell me next that you're
+not--in love with her, I suppose?"
+
+The bitterness of the last words seemed to shake him from head to foot.
+He looked at Piers with the memory of a past torment in his eyes. And
+because of it Piers turned away his own.
+
+"It's quite true, sir," he said, in a low voice. "I am not--in love with
+her. I never have been."
+
+Sir Beverley's fist crashed down upon the table. "Love!" he thundered.
+"Love! Do you want to make me sick? I tell you, sir, I would sooner see
+you in your coffin than married to a woman with whom you imagined
+yourself in love. Oh, I know what you have in your mind. I've known for a
+long time. You're caught in the toils of that stiff-necked, scheming Judy
+at the Vicarage, who--"
+
+"Sir!" blazed forth Piers.
+
+He leaned across the table with a face gone suddenly white, and struck
+his own fist upon the polished oak with a passionate force that compelled
+attention.
+
+Sir Beverley ceased his tirade in momentary astonishment. Such violence
+from Piers was unusual.
+
+Instantly Piers went on speaking, his voice quick and low, quivering with
+the agitation that he had no time to subdue. "I won't hear another word
+on that subject! You hear me, sir? Not one word! It is sacred, and as
+such I will have it treated."
+
+But the check upon Sir Beverley was but brief, and the flame of his
+anger burned all the more fiercely in consequence of it. He broke in upon
+those few desperate words of Piers' with redoubled fury.
+
+"You will have this, and you won't have that! Confound you! What the
+devil do you mean? Are you master in this house, or am I?"
+
+"I am master where my own actions are concerned," threw back Piers. "And
+what I do--what I decide to do--is my affair alone."
+
+Swiftly he uttered the words. His breathing came quick and short as the
+breathing of a man hard pressed. He seemed to be holding back every
+straining nerve with a blind force that was physical rather than mental.
+
+He drew himself suddenly erect as he spoke. He had flung down the
+gauntlet of his independence at last, and with clenched hands he waited
+for the answer to his challenge.
+
+It came upon him like a whirlwind. Sir Beverley uttered an oath that fell
+with the violence of a blow, and after it a tornado of furious speech
+against which it was futile to attempt to raise any protest. He could
+only stand as it were at bay, like an animal protecting its own,
+fiery-veined, quivering, yet holding back from the spring.
+
+Not for any insult to himself would he quit that attitude. He was
+striving desperately to keep his self-control. He had been within an ace
+of losing it, as the blood that oozed over his closed fist testified;
+but, for the sake of that manhood which he was seeking to assert, he made
+a Titanic effort to command himself.
+
+And Sir Beverley, feeling the dumb strength that opposed him, resenting
+the forbearance with which he was confronted, infuriated by the
+unexpected force of the boy's resistance, turned with a snarl to seize
+and desecrate that which he had been warned was holy.
+
+"As for this designing woman, I tell you, she is not for you,--not, that
+is, in any honourable sense. If you choose to make a fool of her, that's
+your affair. I suppose you'll sow the usual crop of wild oats before
+you've done. But as to marrying her--"
+
+"By God, sir!" broke in Piers passionately. "Do you imagine that I
+propose to do anything else?"
+
+The words came from him like a cry wrung from a man in torture, and as he
+uttered them the last of his self-control slipped from his grasp. With a
+face gone suddenly devilish, he strode round the table and stood before
+his grandfather, furiously threatening.
+
+"I have warned you!" he said, and his voice was low, sunk almost to a
+whisper. "You can say what you like of me. I'm used to it. But--if you
+speak evil of her--I'll treat you as I would any other blackguard who
+dared to insult her. And now that we are on the subject, I will tell you
+this. If I do not marry this woman whom I love--I swear that I will
+never marry at all! That is my final word!"
+
+He hurled the last sentence in Sir Beverley's face, and with it he would
+have swung round upon his heel; but something in that face detained him.
+
+Sir Beverley's eyes were shining with an icy, intolerable sparkle. His
+thin lips were drawn in the dreadful semblance of a smile. He was
+half-a-head taller than Piers, and he seemed to tower above him in that
+moment of conflict.
+
+"Wait a minute!" he said. "Wait a minute!"
+
+His right hand was feeling along the leathern surface of the
+writing-table, but neither his eyes nor Piers' followed the movement.
+They held each other in a fixed, unalterable glare.
+
+There followed several moments of complete and terrible silence--a
+silence more fraught with violence than any speech.
+
+Then, with a slight jerk, Sir Beverley leaned towards Piers. "So," he
+said, "you defy me, do you?"
+
+His voice was as grim as his look. A sudden, odd sense of fear went
+through Piers. Sharply the thought ran through his mind that the same
+Evesham devil possessed them both. It was as if he had caught a glimpse
+of the monster gibing at his elbow, goading him, goading them, both.
+
+He made a sharp, involuntary movement; he almost flinched from those
+pitiless, stony eyes.
+
+"Ha!" Sir Beverley uttered a brief and very bitter laugh. "You've begun
+to think better of it, eh?"
+
+"No, sir." Curtly Piers made answer, speaking because he must. "I meant
+what I said, and I shall stick to it. But it wasn't for the sake of
+defying you that I said it. I have a better reason than that."
+
+He was still quivering with anger, yet because of that gibing devil at
+his elbow he strove to speak temperately, strove to hold back the raging
+flood of fierce resentment that threatened to overwhelm him.
+
+As for Sir Beverley, he had never attempted to control himself in moments
+such as these, and he did not attempt to do so now. Before Piers' words
+were fairly uttered, he had raised his right hand and in it a stout,
+two-foot ruler that he had taken from the writing-table.
+
+"Take that then, you young dog!" he shouted, and struck Piers furiously,
+as he stood. "And that! And that!"
+
+The third blow never fell. It was caught in mid-air by Piers who, with
+eyes that literally flamed in his white face, sprang straight at his
+grandfather, and closed with him.
+
+There was a brief--a very brief--struggle, then a gasping oath from Sir
+Beverley as the ruler was torn from his grasp. The next moment he was
+free and tottering blindly. Piers, with an awful smile, swung the weapon
+back as if he would strike him down with it. Then, as Sir Beverley
+clutched instinctively at the nearest chair for support, he flung
+savagely round on his heel, altering his purpose. There followed the loud
+crack of rending wood as he broke the ruler passionately across his knee,
+putting forth all his strength, and the clatter of the falling fragments
+as he hurled them violently from him.
+
+And then in a silence more dreadful than any speech, he strode to the
+door and went out, crashing it furiously shut behind him.
+
+Sir Beverley, grown piteously feeble, sank down in the chair, and
+remained there huddled and gasping for many dragging minutes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+A WATCH IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+He came at last out of what had almost been a stupor of inertia, sat
+slowly up, turned his brooding eyes upon the door through which Piers had
+passed. A tremor of anger crossed his face, and was gone. A grim smile
+took its place. He still panted spasmodically; but he found his voice.
+
+"Egad!" he said. "The fellow's as strong as a young bear. He's
+hugged--all the wind--out of my vitals."
+
+He struggled to his feet, straightening his knees with difficulty, one
+hand pressed hard to his labouring heart.
+
+"Egad!" he gasped again. "He's getting out of hand--the cub! But he'll
+come to heel,--he'll come to heel! I know the rascal!"
+
+He stumbled to the bell and rang it.
+
+David appeared with a promptitude that seemed to indicate a certain
+uneasiness.
+
+"Coffee!" growled his master. "And liqueur!"
+
+David departed at as high a rate of speed as decorum would permit.
+
+During his absence Sir Beverley set himself rigidly to recover his normal
+demeanour. The encounter had shaken him, shaken him badly; but he was not
+the man to yield to physical weakness. He fought it with angry
+determination.
+
+Before David's reappearance he had succeeded in controlling his gasping
+breath, though the hand with which he helped himself shook very
+perceptibly.
+
+There were two cups on the tray. David lingered.
+
+"You can go," said Sir Beverley.
+
+David cocked one eyebrow in deferential enquiry. "Master Piers in the
+garden, sir?" he ventured. "Shall I find him?"
+
+"No!" snapped Sir Beverley.
+
+"Very good, sir." David turned regretfully to the door. "Shall I keep the
+coffee hot, Sir Beverley?" he asked, as he reached it, with what was
+almost a pleading note in his voice.
+
+Sir Beverley's frown became as menacing as a thunder-cloud. "No!"
+he shouted.
+
+David nodded in melancholy submission and withdrew.
+
+Sir Beverley sat down heavily in his chair and slowly drank his coffee.
+Finally he put aside the empty cup and sat staring at the closed door,
+his brows drawn heavily together.
+
+How had the young beggar dared to defy him so? He must have been getting
+out of hand for some time by imperceptible degrees. He had always vowed
+to himself that he would not spoil the boy. Had that resolution of his
+become gradually relaxed? His frown grew heavier. He had never before
+contemplated the possibility that Piers might some day become an
+individual force utterly beyond his control.
+
+His eye fell upon a fragment of the broken ruler lying under the table
+and again grimly he smiled.
+
+"Confound the scamp! He's got some muscle," he murmured.
+
+Again his look went to the door. Why didn't the young fool come back and
+apologize? How much longer did he mean to keep him waiting?
+
+The minutes dragged away, and the silence of emptiness gathered and
+brooded in the great room and about the master of the house who sat
+within it, with bent head, waiting.
+
+It was close upon ten o'clock when at length he rose and irritably
+rang the bell.
+
+"See if you can find Master Piers!" he said to David. "He can't be far
+away. Look in the drawing-room! Look in the garden! Tell him I want him!"
+
+David withdrew upon the errand, and again the oppressive silence drew
+close. For a long interval Sir Beverley sat quite motionless, still
+staring at the door as though he expected Piers to enter at any moment.
+But when at length it opened, it was only to admit David once more.
+
+"I'm sorry to say I can't find Master Piers anywhere in the house or
+garden, Sir Beverley," he said, looking straight before him and blinking
+vacantly at the lamp. "I'm inclined to believe, sir, that he must have
+gone into the park."
+
+Sir Beverley snarled inarticulately and dismissed him.
+
+During the hour that followed, he did not move from his chair, and
+scarcely changed his position. But at last, as the stable-clock was
+tolling eleven, he rose stiffly and walked to the window. It was
+fastened; he dragged at the catch with impatient fingers.
+
+His face was haggard and grey as he finally thrust up the sash, and
+leaned out with his hands on the sill.
+
+The night was very still all about him. It might have been a night in
+June. Only very far away a faint breeze was stirring, whispering
+furtively in the bare boughs of the elm trees that bordered the park.
+Overhead the stars shone dimly behind a floating veil of mist, and
+from the garden sleeping at his feet there arose a faint, fugitive
+scent of violets.
+
+The old man's face contracted as at some sudden sense of pain as that
+scent reached his nostrils. His mouth twitched with a curious tremor,
+and he covered it with his hand as though he feared some silent
+watcher in that sleeping world might see and mock his weakness. That
+violet-bed beneath the window had been planted fifty years before at
+the whim of a woman.
+
+"We must have a great many violets," she had said. "They are sweeter than
+all the roses in the world. Next year I must have handfuls and handfuls
+of sweetness."
+
+And the next year the violets had bloomed in the chosen corner, but her
+hands had not gathered them. And they had offered their magic ever since,
+year after year--even as they offered it tonight--to a heart that was too
+old and too broken to care.
+
+Fifty years before, Sir Beverley had stood at that same window waiting
+and listening in the spring twilight for the beloved footfall of the
+woman who was never again to enter his house. They had had a
+disagreement, he had spoken harshly, he had been foolishly, absurdly
+jealous; for her wonderful beauty, her quick, foreign charm drew all the
+world. But, returning from a long ride that had lasted all day, he had
+entered with the desire to make amends, to win her sweet and gracious
+forgiveness. She had forgiven him before. She had laughed with a sweet,
+elusive mockery and passed the matter by as of no importance. It had
+seemed a foregone conclusion that she would forgive him again, would
+reassure him, and set his mind at rest. But he had come back to an empty
+house--every door gaping wide and the beloved presence gone.
+
+So he had waited for her, expecting her every moment, refusing to believe
+the truth that nevertheless had forced itself upon him at the last. So
+now he waited for her grandson--the boy with her beauty, her quick and
+generous charm, her passionate, emotional nature--to come back to him.
+And yet again he waited in vain.
+
+Piers had gone forth in fierce anger, driven by that devil that had
+descended to him through generations of stiff-necked ancestors; and for
+the first time in all his hot young life he had not returned repentant.
+
+"I treated him like a dog, egad," murmured Sir Beverley into the
+shielding hand. "But he'll come back. He always comes back, the scamp."
+
+But the minutes crawled by, the night-wind rustled and passed; and still
+Piers did not come.
+
+It was hard on midnight when Sir Beverley suddenly raised both hands to
+his mouth and sent a shrill, peculiar whistle through them across the
+quiet garden. It had been his special call for Piers in his childhood.
+Even as he sent it out into the darkness, he seemed to see the sturdy,
+eager little figure that had never failed to answer that summons with
+delight racing headlong towards him over the dim, dewy lawn.
+
+But to-night it brought no answer though he repeated it again and yet
+again; and as twelve o'clock struck heavily upon the stillness he turned
+from the window and groaned aloud. The boy had gone, gone for good, as he
+might have known he would go. He had driven him forth with blows and
+bitter words, and it was out of his power to bring him back again.
+
+Slowly he crossed the room and rang the bell. He was very cold, and he
+shivered as he moved.
+
+It was Victor who answered the summons, Victor with round, vindictive
+eyes that openly accused him for a moment, and then softened inexplicably
+and looked elsewhere.
+
+"You ask me for _Monsieur Pierre_?" he said, spreading out his hands,
+"_Mais--_"
+
+"I didn't ask for anything," growled Sir Beverley. "I rang the bell to
+tell you and all the other fools to lock up and go to bed."
+
+"But--me!" ejaculated Victor, rolling his eyes upwards in astonishment.
+
+"Yes, you! Where's the sense of your sitting up? Master Piers knows how
+to undress himself by this time, I suppose?"
+
+Sir Beverley scowled at him aggressively, but Victor did not even see the
+scowl. Like a hen with one chick, and that gone astray, he could think of
+naught beside.
+
+"_Mais Monsieur Pierre_ is not here! Where then is _Monsieur Pierre?_" he
+questioned in distress.
+
+"How the devil should I know?" snarled Sir Beverley. "Stop your chatter
+and be off with you! Shut the window first, and then go and tell David to
+lock up! I shan't want anything more to-night."
+
+Victor shrugged his shoulders in mute protest, and went to the window.
+Here he paused, looking forth with eyes of eager searching till recalled
+to his duty by a growl of impatience from his master. Then with a
+celerity remarkable in one of his years and rotundity, he quickly popped
+in his head and closed the window.
+
+"Leave the blind!" ordered Sir Beverley. "And the catch too! There! Now
+go! _Allez-vous-en!_? Don't let me see you again to-night!"
+
+Victor threw a single shrewd glance at the drawn face, and trotted with a
+woman's nimbleness to the door. Here he paused, executed a stiff bow;
+then wheeled and departed. The door closed noiselessly behind him, and
+again Sir Beverley was left alone.
+
+He dragged a chair to the window, and sat down to watch.
+
+Doubtless the boy would return when he had walked off his indignation. He
+would be sure to see the light in the study, and he would come to him for
+admittance. He himself would receive him with a gruff word or two of
+admonition and the whole affair should be dismissed. Grimly he pictured
+the scene to himself as, ignoring the anxiety that was growing within
+him, he settled himself to his lonely vigil.
+
+Slowly the night dragged on. A couple of owls were hooting to one another
+across the garden, and far away a dog barked at intervals. Old Sir
+Beverley never stirred in his chair. His limbs were rigid, his eyes fixed
+and watchful. But his face was grey--grey and stricken and incredibly
+old. He had the look of a man who carried a burden too heavy to be borne.
+
+One after another he heard the hours strike, but his position never
+altered, his eyes never varied, his face remained as though carved in
+granite--a graven image of despair. Unspeakable weariness was in his
+pose, and yet he did not relax or yield a hair's breadth to the body's
+importunity. He suffered too bitterly in the spirit that night to be
+aware of physical necessity.
+
+Slowly the long hours passed. The night began to wane. A faint grey
+glimmer, scarcely perceptible, came down from a mist-veiled sky. The wind
+that had sunk to stillness came softly back and wandered to and fro as
+though to rouse the sleeping world. Behind the mist the stars went out,
+and from the rookery in the park a hoarse voice suddenly proclaimed the
+coming day.
+
+The grey light grew. In the garden ghostly shapes arose, phantoms of the
+dawn that gradually resolved into familiar forms of tree and shrub. From
+the rookery there swelled a din of many raucous voices. The dog in the
+distance began to bark again with feverish zest, and from the stables
+came Caesar's cheery answering yell.
+
+The mist drifted away from the face of the sky. A brightness was growing
+there. Stiffly, painfully, Sir Beverley struggled up from his chair,
+stood steadying himself--a figure tragic and forlorn--with his hands
+against the wood of the window-frame, then with a groaning effort thrust
+up the sash.
+
+Violets! Violets! The haunting scent of them rose to greet him. The air
+was full of their magic fragrance. For a second he was aware of it; he
+almost winced. And then in a moment he had forgotten. He stood there
+motionless--a desolate old man, bowed and shrunken and grey--staring
+blindly out before him, unconscious of all things save the despair that
+had settled in his heart.
+
+The night had passed and his boy had not returned.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+THE CONFLICT
+
+
+Stanbury Cliffs was no more than a little fishing-town at the foot of the
+sandy cliff--a sheltered nest of a place in which the sound of the waves
+was heard all day long, but which no bitter wind could reach. The peace
+of it was balm to Avery's spirit. She revelled in its quiet.
+
+Jeanie loved it too. She delighted in the freedom and the warmth, and
+almost from the day of their arrival her health began to improve.
+
+They had their quarters in what was little more than a two-storey
+cottage belonging to one of the fishermen, and there was only a tiny
+garden bright with marigolds between them and the shore. Day after day
+they went through the little wicket gate down a slope of loose sand to
+the golden beach where they spent the sunny hours in perfect happiness.
+The waves that came into the bay were never very rough, though they
+sometimes heard them raging outside with a fury that filled the whole
+world with its roaring. Jeanie called it "the desired haven," and
+confided to Avery that she was happier than she had ever been in her
+life before.
+
+Avery was happy too, but with a difference; for she knew in her secret
+heart that the days of her tranquillity were numbered. She knew with a
+woman's sure instinct that the interval of peace would be but brief,
+that with or without her will she must soon be drawn back again into
+the storm and stress of life. And knowing it, she waited, strengthening
+her defences day by day, counting each day as a respite while she
+devoted herself to the child and rejoiced to see the change so quickly
+wrought in her. Tudor's simile of the building of a sea-wall often
+recurred to her. She told herself that the foundation thereof should be
+as secure as human care could make it, so that when the tide came back
+it should stand the strain.
+
+The Vicar would have been shocked beyond words by the life of complete
+indulgence led by his small daughter. She breakfasted in bed every day,
+served by Avery who was firm as to the amount of nourishment taken but
+comfortably lax on all other points. When the meal was over, Avery
+generally went marketing while Jeanie dressed, and they then went to the
+shore. If there were no marketing to be done, Avery would go down to the
+beach alone and wait for her there. There was a sheltered corner that
+they both loved where, protected by towering rocks, they spent many a
+happy hour. It was just out of reach of the sea, exposed to the sun and
+sheltered from the wind--an ideal spot; and here they brought letters,
+books, or needlework, and were busy or idle according to their moods.
+
+Jeanie was often idle. She used to lie in the soft sand and dream, with
+her eyes on the far horizon; but of what she dreamed she said no word
+even to Avery. But she was always happy. Her smile was always ready, the
+lines of her mouth were always set in perfect content. She seemed to have
+all she desired at all times. They did not often stray from the shore,
+for she was easily tired; but they used to roam along it and search the
+crevices of the scattered rocks which held all manner of treasures. They
+spent the time in complete accord. It was too good to last, Avery told
+herself. The way had become too easy.
+
+It was on a morning about a week after their arrival that she went down
+at an early hour to their favourite haunt. There had been rain in the
+night, and a brisk west wind was blowing; but she knew that in that
+sheltered spot they would be protected, and Jeanie was pledged to join
+her there as soon as she was ready. The tide was coming in, and the sun
+shone amidst scudding white clouds. It was a morning on which to be happy
+for no other reason than lightness of heart; and Avery, with her work-bag
+on her arm, sang softly to herself as she went.
+
+As usual she met no one. It was a secluded part of the shore. The little
+town was out of sight on the other side of a rocky promontory, and the
+place was lonely to desolation.
+
+But Avery did not feel the loneliness. She had had a letter only that
+morning from Crowther, the friend of those far-off Australian days, and
+he expressed a hope of being able to pay her a flying visit at Stanbury
+Cliffs before settling down to work in grim earnest for the
+accomplishment of his life's desire. She would have welcomed Edmund
+Crowther at any time. He was the sort of friend whose coming could never
+bring anything but delight.
+
+She wondered as she walked along which day he would choose. She was
+rather glad that he had not fixed a definite date. It was good to feel
+that any day might bring him.
+
+Nearing her destination she became aware of light feet running on the
+firm sand behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, but the sun shone
+full in her eyes, and she only managed to discern vaguely a man's figure
+drawing near. He could not be pursuing her, she decided, and resumed her
+walk and her thoughts of Crowther--the friend who had stood by her at a
+time when she had been practically friendless.
+
+But the running feet came nearer and nearer. She suddenly realized that
+they meant to overtake her, and with the knowledge the old quick dread
+pierced her heart. She wheeled abruptly round and stood still.
+
+He was there, not a dozen yards from her. He hailed her as she turned.
+
+She clenched her hands with sudden determination and went to meet him.
+
+"Piers!" she said, and in her voice reproach and severity were
+oddly mingled.
+
+But Piers was unabashed. He ran swiftly up to her, and caught her
+hands into his with an impetuous rush of words. "Here you are at last!
+I've been waiting for you for hours. But I was in the water when you
+first appeared, and I hadn't any towels, or I should have caught you
+up before."
+
+He was laughing as he spoke, but it seemed to Avery that there was
+something not quite normal about him. His black hair lay in a wet plaster
+on his forehead, and below it his eyes glittered oddly, as if he were
+putting some force upon himself.
+
+"How in the world did you get here?" she said.
+
+He laughed again between his teeth. "I tell you, I've been here for
+hours. I came last night. But I couldn't knock you up at two in the
+morning. So I had to wait. How are you and Jeanie getting on?"
+
+Avery gravely withdrew her hands, and turned to pursue her way towards
+her rocky resting-place. "Jeanie is better," she said, in a voice that
+did not encourage any further solicitude on either Jeanie's behalf or
+her own.
+
+Piers marched beside her, a certain doggedness in his gait. The laughter
+had died out of his face. He looked pale and stern, and fully as
+determined as she.
+
+"Why didn't you tell us to expect you?" Avery asked at last.
+
+"Were you not expecting me?" he returned, and his voice had the sharpness
+of a challenge.
+
+She looked at him steadily for a moment or two, meeting eyes that flung
+back her scrutiny with grim defiance.
+
+"Of course I was not expecting you," she said.
+
+"And yet you were not--altogether--surprised to see me," he rejoined, a
+faint jeering echo in his voice.
+
+Avery walked on till she reached her sheltered corner. Then she laid her
+work-bag down in the accustomed place, and very resolutely turned and
+faced him.
+
+"Tell me why you have come!" she said.
+
+He gazed at her for a moment fiercely from under his black brows; then
+suddenly and disconcertingly he seized her by the wrists.
+
+"I'll tell you," he said, speaking rapidly, with feverish utterance.
+"I've come because--before Heaven--I can't keep away. Avery, listen to
+me! Yes, you must listen. I've come because I must, because you are all
+the world to me and I want you unutterably. I don't believe--I can't
+believe--that I am nothing to you. You can't with honesty tell me so. I
+love you with all my soul, with all there is of me, good and bad.
+Avery--Avery, say you love me too!"
+
+Just for an instant the arrogance went out of his voice, and it sank to
+pleading. But Avery stood mute before him, very pale, desperately calm.
+She made not the faintest attempt to free herself, but her hands were
+hard clenched. There was nothing passive in her attitude.
+
+He was aware of strong resistance, but it only goaded him to further
+effort. He lifted the clenched hands and held them tight against his
+heart.
+
+"You needn't try to cast me off," he said, "for I simply won't go. I know
+you care. You wouldn't have taken the trouble to write that letter if you
+didn't. And so listen! I've come now to marry you. We can go up to town
+to-day,--Jeanie too, if you like. And to-morrow--to-morrow we will be
+married by special licence. I've thought it all out. You can't refuse. I
+have money of my own--plenty of money. And you belong to me already.
+It's no good trying to deny it any more. You are my mate--my mate; and I
+won't try to live without you any longer!"
+
+Wildly the words rushed out, spending themselves as it were upon utter
+silence. Avery's hands were no longer clenched. They lay open against his
+breast, and the mad beating of his heart thrilled through and through her
+as she stood.
+
+He bent towards her eagerly, passionately. His hands reached out to clasp
+her; yet he paused. "Avery! Avery!" he whispered very urgently.
+
+Her eyes were raised to his, grey and steady and fearless. Not by the
+smallest gesture did she seek to escape him. She suffered the hands upon
+her shoulders. She suffered the fiery passion of his gaze.
+
+Only at last very clearly, very resolutely, she spoke. "Piers--no!"
+
+His face was close to hers, glowing and vital and tensely determined. "I
+say 'Yes,'" he said, with brief decision.
+
+Avery was silent. His hands were drawing her, and still she did not
+resist; but in those moments of silent inactivity she was stronger than
+he. Her personality was at grips with his, and if she gained no ground at
+least she held her own.
+
+"Avery!" he said suddenly and sharply. "What's the matter with you? Why
+don't you speak?"
+
+"I am waiting," she said.
+
+"Waiting!" he echoed. "Waiting for what?"
+
+"Waiting for you to come to yourself, Piers," she made steadfast answer.
+
+He laughed at that, a quick, insolent laugh. "Do you think I don't know
+what I'm doing, then?"
+
+"I am quite sure," she answered, "that when you know, you will be more
+ashamed than any honourable man should ever have reason to be."
+
+He winced at the words. She saw the hot blood surge in a great wave to
+his forehead, and she quailed inwardly though outwardly she made no sign.
+His grip was growing every instant more compelling. She knew that he was
+bracing himself for one great effort that should batter down the strength
+that withstood him. His lips were so close to hers that she could feel
+his breath, quick and hot, upon her face. And still she made no struggle
+for freedom, knowing instinctively that the instant her self-control
+yielded, the battle was lost.
+
+Slowly the burning flush died away under her eyes. His face changed, grew
+subtly harder, less passionate. "So," he said, with an odd quietness,
+"I'm not to kiss you. It would be dishonourable, what?"
+
+She made unflinching reply. "It would be despicable and you know it--to
+kiss any woman against her will."
+
+"Would it be against your will?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, it would." Firmly she answered him, yet a quiver of agitation went
+through her. She felt her resolution begin to waver.
+
+But in that moment something in Piers seemed to give way also. He cried
+out to her as if in sudden, intolerable pain. "Avery! Avery! Are you made
+of stone? Can't you see that this is life or death to me?"
+
+She answered him instantly; it was almost as if she had been waiting for
+that cry of his. "Yes, but you must get the better of it. You can if you
+will. It is unworthy of you. You are trying to take what is not yours.
+You have made a mistake, and you are wronging yourself and me."
+
+"What?" he exclaimed. "You don't love me then!"
+
+He flung his arms wide upon the words, with a gesture of the most utter
+despair, and turned from her. A moment he stood swaying, as if bereft of
+all his strength; and then with abrupt effort he began to move away. He
+stumbled blindly, heavily, as he went, and the crying of the wheeling
+sea-gulls came plaintively through a silence that could be felt.
+
+But ere that silence paralysed her, Avery spoke, raising her voice, for
+the urgency was great.
+
+"Piers, stop!"
+
+He stopped instantly, but he did not turn, merely stood tensely waiting.
+
+She collected herself and went after him. She laid a hand that trembled
+on his arm.
+
+"Don't leave me like this!" she said.
+
+Slowly he turned his head and looked at her, and the misery of that look
+went straight to her heart. All the woman's compassion in her throbbed up
+to the surface. She found herself speaking with a tenderness which a
+moment before no power on earth would have drawn from her.
+
+"Piers, something is wrong; something has happened. Won't you tell me
+what it is?"
+
+"I can't," he said.
+
+His lower lip quivered unexpectedly and she saw his teeth bite savagely
+upon it. "I'd better go," he said.
+
+But her hand still held his arm. "No; wait!" she said. "You can't go like
+this. Piers, what is the matter with you? Tell me!"
+
+He hesitated. She saw that his self-control was tottering. Abruptly at
+length he spoke. "I can't. I'm not master of myself. I--I--" He broke off
+short and became silent.
+
+"I knew you weren't," she said, and then, acting upon an impulse which
+she knew instinctively that she would never regret, she gave him her
+other hand also. "Let us forget all this!" she said.
+
+It was generously spoken, so generously that it could not fail to take
+effect. He looked at her in momentary surprise, began to speak, stopped,
+and with a choked, unintelligible utterance took her two hands with the
+utmost reverence into his own, and bowed his forehead upon them. The
+utter abandonment of the action revealed to her in that moment how
+completely he had made her the dominating influence of his life.
+
+"Shall we sit down and talk?" she said gently.
+
+She could not be other than gentle with him. The appeal of his
+weakness was greater than any display of strength. She could not but
+respond to it.
+
+He set her free and dropped down heavily upon a rock, leaning his head in
+his hands.
+
+She waited a few moments beside him; then, as he remained silent, she
+bent towards him.
+
+"Piers, what is it?"
+
+With a sharp movement he straightened himself, and turned his face
+to the sea.
+
+"I'm a fool," he said, speaking with an odd, unsteady vehemence. "Fact
+is, I've been out all night on this beastly shore. I've walked miles. And
+I suppose I'm tired."
+
+He made the confession with a shamefaced laugh, still looking away to
+the horizon.
+
+"All night!" Avery repeated in astonishment. "But, Piers!"
+
+He nodded several times, emphatically. "And those infernal sea-birds have
+been squawking along with those thrice-accursed crows ever since
+day-break. I'd like to wring their ugly necks, every jack one of 'em!"
+
+Avery laughed in spite of herself. "We all feel peevish sometimes," she
+said, as one of the offenders sailed over-head with a melancholy cry.
+"But haven't you had any breakfast? You must be starving."
+
+"I am!" said Piers. "I feel like a wolf. But you needn't be afraid to sit
+down. I shan't gobble you up this time."
+
+She heard the boyish appeal in his voice and almost unconsciously she
+yielded to it. She sat down on the rock beside him, but he instantly
+slipped from it and stretched himself in a dog-like attitude at her feet.
+
+His chin was propped in his hands, his face turned to the white sand on
+which he lay. She looked down at his black head with more than compassion
+in her eyes. It was horribly difficult to snub this boy-lover of hers.
+
+She sat and waited silently for him to speak.
+
+He dropped one hand at length and began to dig his brown fingers into the
+powdery sand with irritable energy; but a minute or more passed before
+very grumpily he spoke.
+
+"I've had a row with my grandfather. We both of us behaved like wild
+beasts. In the end, he thought he was going to give me a caning, and that
+was more than I could stand. I smashed his ruler for him and bolted. I
+should have struck him with it if I hadn't. And after that, I cleared out
+and came here. And I'm not going back."
+
+So with blunt defiance he made the announcement, and as he did so, it
+came to Avery suddenly and quite convincingly that she had been the
+cause of the quarrel. A shock of dismay went through her. She had not
+anticipated this. She felt that the suspicion must be verified or
+refuted at once.
+
+"Piers," she said quickly, "why did you quarrel with your grandfather?
+Was it because of your affair with Miss Rose?"
+
+"I never had an affair with Miss Rose," said Piers rather sullenly. He
+dug up a small stone, and flung it with vindictive force at the face of
+the cliff. "Ask her, if you don't believe me!"
+
+He paused a moment, then went on in a dogged note: "I told him--of a
+certain intention of mine. He tackled me about it first, was absolutely
+intolerable. I just couldn't hold myself in. And then somehow we got
+violent. It was his fault. Anyway, he began it."
+
+"You haven't told me--yet--what you quarrelled about," said Avery, with a
+sinking heart.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders without looking at her. "It doesn't matter,
+does it?"
+
+She made answer with a certain firmness. "Yes, I think it does."
+
+"Well, then,"--abruptly he raised himself and faced round, his dark eyes
+raised to hers,--"I told him, Avery, that if I couldn't marry the woman I
+loved, I would never marry at all."
+
+There was no sullenness about him now, only steadfast purpose. He looked
+her full in the face as he said it, and she quivered a little before the
+mastery of his look.
+
+He laid a hand upon her knee as she sat above him in sore perplexity.
+"Would you have me do anything else?" he said.
+
+She answered him with a conscious effort. "I want you to love--and
+marry--the right woman."
+
+He uttered a queer, unsteady laugh and leaned his head against her. "Oh,
+my dear," he said, "there is no other woman but you in all the world."
+
+Something fiery that was almost like a dart of pain went through Avery at
+his words. She moved instinctively, but it was not in shrinking. After a
+moment she laid her hand upon his.
+
+"Piers," she said, "I can't bear hurting you."
+
+"You wouldn't hurt a fly," said Piers.
+
+She smiled faintly. "Not if I could help it. But that doesn't prove that
+I am fond of flies. And now, Piers, I am going to ask a very big thing of
+you. I wonder if you will do it."
+
+"I wonder," said Piers.
+
+He had not moved at her touch, yet she felt his fingers close tensely
+as they lay upon her knee, and she guessed that he was still striving to
+control the inner tumult that had so nearly overwhelmed him a few
+minutes before.
+
+"I know it is a big thing," she said. "Yet--for my sake if you like--I
+want you to do it."
+
+"I will do anything for your sake," he made passionate answer.
+
+"Thank you," she said gently. "Then, Piers, I want you--please--to go
+back to Sir Beverley at once, and make it up."
+
+He withdrew his hand sharply from hers, and sat up, turning his back upon
+her. "No!" he said harshly. "No!"
+
+"Please, Piers!" she said very earnestly.
+
+He locked his arms round his knees and sat in silence, staring moodily
+out to sea.
+
+"Please, Piers!" she said again, and lightly touched his shoulder with
+her fingers.
+
+He hunched the shoulder away from her with a gesture of boyish
+impatience, and then abruptly, as if realizing what he had done, he
+turned back to her, caught the hand, and pressed it to his lips.
+
+"I'm a brute, dear. Forgive me! Of course--if you wish it--I'll go back.
+But as to making it up, well--" he gulped once or twice--"it doesn't rest
+only with me, you know."
+
+"Oh, Piers," she said, "you are all he has. He couldn't be hard to you!"
+
+Piers smiled a wry smile, and said nothing.
+
+"Besides," she went on gently, "there is really nothing for you to
+quarrel about,--that is, if I am the cause of the trouble. It is
+perfectly natural that your grandfather should wish you to make a
+suitable marriage, perfectly natural that he should not want you to run
+after the wrong woman. You can tell him, Piers, that I absolutely see his
+point of view, but that so far as I am concerned, he need not be
+anxious. It is not my intention to marry again."
+
+"All right," said Piers.
+
+He gave her hand a little shake and released it. For a second--only a
+second--she caught a sparkle in his eyes that seemed to her almost like
+a gleam of mockery. And then with characteristic suddenness he sprang
+to his feet.
+
+"Well, I'd better be going," he said in a voice that was perfectly normal
+and free from agitation. "I can't stop to see the kiddie this time. I'm
+glad she's going on all right. I wonder when you'll be back again."
+
+"Not at present, I think," said Avery, trying not to be disconcerted by
+his abruptness.
+
+He looked down at her whimsically. "You're a good sort, Avery," he said.
+"I won't be so violent next time."
+
+"There mustn't be a next time," she said quickly. "Please Piers, that
+must be quite understood!"
+
+"All right," he said again. "I understand."
+
+And with that very suddenly he left her, so suddenly that she sat
+motionless on her rock and stared after him, not believing that he was
+really taking his leave.
+
+He did not turn his head, however, and very soon he passed round the
+jutting headland, and was gone from her sight. Only when that
+happened did she draw a long, long breath and realize how much of her
+strength had been spent to gain what after all appeared to be but a
+very barren victory.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+THE RETURN
+
+
+"_Ah! C'est Monsieur Pierre enfin!_" Eagerly Victor greeted the
+appearance of his young master. He looked as if he would have liked to
+embrace him.
+
+Piers' attitude, however, did not encourage any display of tenderness.
+He flung himself gloomily down into a chair and regarded the man with
+sombre eyes.
+
+"Where's Sir Beverley?" he said.
+
+Victor spread forth expressive hands. _"Mais_, Sir Beverley, he sit up
+all the night attending you, _mon petit monsieur. Et moi_, I sit up also.
+_Mais Monsieur Pierre! Monsieur Pierre!"_
+
+He began to shake his head at Piers in fond reproof, but Piers paid no
+attention.
+
+"Sat up all night, what?" he said. "Then where is he now? In bed?"
+
+There was a deep line between his black brows; all the gaiety and sparkle
+had gone from his eyes. He looked tired out.
+
+It was close upon the luncheon-hour, and he had tramped up from the
+station. There were refreshments in front of him, but he bluntly refused
+to touch them.
+
+"Why can't you speak, man?" he said irritably. "Tell me where he is!"
+
+"He has gone for his ride as usual," Victor said, speaking through pursed
+lips. "But he is very, very feeble to-day, _Monsieur Pierre_. We beg him
+not to go. But what would you? He is the master. We could not stop him.
+But he sit in his saddle--like this."
+
+Victor's gesture descriptive of the bent, stricken figure that had ridden
+forth that morning was painfully true to life.
+
+Piers sprang to his feet. "And he isn't back yet? Where on earth can he
+be? Which way did he go?"
+
+Victor raised his shoulders. "He go down the drive--as always. _Apres
+cela, je ne sais pas._"
+
+"Confusion!" ejaculated Piers, and was gone.
+
+He had returned by a short cut across the park, but now he tore down
+the long avenue, running like a trained athlete, head up and elbows in,
+possessed by the single purpose of reaching the lodge in as brief a
+time as possible. They would know at the lodge which way his
+grandfather had gone.
+
+He found Marshall just turning in at his gate for the midday meal, and
+hailed him without ceremony.
+
+The old man stopped and surveyed him with sour disapproval. The news of
+Piers' abrupt disappearance on the previous night had spread.
+
+No, Marshall could give him no news as to the master's whereabouts; he
+had been out all the morning.
+
+"Well, find Mrs. Marshall!" ordered Piers impatiently. "She'll know
+something. She must have opened the gate."
+
+Mrs. Marshall, summoned by a surly yell from her husband, stood in the
+door-way, thin-lipped and austere, and announced briefly that Sir
+Beverley had gone down towards the Vicarage; she didn't know no more
+than that.
+
+It was enough for Piers. He was gone again like a bird on the wing. The
+couple at the lodge looked after him with a species of unwilling
+admiration. His very arrogance fed their pride in him, disapprove
+though they might of his wild, foreign ways. Whatever the mixture in
+his veins, the old master's blood ran there, and they would always be
+loyal to that.
+
+That run to the Vicarage taxed even Piers' powers. The steep hill at the
+end made him aware that his strength had its limits, and he was forced to
+pause for breath when he reached the top. He leaned against the Vicarage
+gate-post with the memory of that winter evening in his mind when Avery
+had come swift-footed to the rescue, and had cooled his fury with a
+bucket of cold water.
+
+A step in the garden made him straighten himself abruptly. He turned to
+see a tall, black-coated figure emerge. The Reverend Stephen Lorimer came
+up with dignity and greeted him.
+
+"Were you about to enter my humble abode?" he enquired.
+
+"Is my grandfather here?" asked Piers.
+
+Mr. Lorimer smiled benignly. He liked to imagine himself upon terms of
+intimacy with Sir Beverley though the latter did very little to
+justify the idea.
+
+"Well, no," he said, "I have not had the pleasure of seeing him here
+to-day. Did he express the intention of paying me a visit?"
+
+"No, sir, no!" said Piers impatiently. "I only thought it possible,
+that's all. Good-bye!"
+
+He swung round and departed, leaving the worthy Vicar looking after him
+with a shrewd and not over-friendly smile at the corners of his eyes.
+
+Beyond the Vicarage the road wound round again to the park, and Piers
+followed it. It led to a gate that opened upon a riding which was a
+favourite stretch for a gallop with both Sir Beverley and himself.
+Through this he passed, no longer running, but striding over the springy,
+turf between the budding beech saplings at a pace that soon took him into
+the heart of the woodland.
+
+Pressing on, he came at length to a cross-riding, and here on boggy
+ground he discovered recent hoof-marks. There were a good many of them,
+and he was puzzled for a time as to the direction they had taken. The
+animal seemed to have wandered to and fro. But he found a continuous
+track at length and followed it.
+
+It led to an old summer-house perched on a slope that overlooked the
+scene of Jeanie's accident in the winter. A cold wind drove down upon him
+as he ascended. The sky was grey with scurrying clouds. The bare downs
+looked indescribably desolate.
+
+Piers hastened along with set teeth. The dread he would not acknowledge
+hung like a numbing weight upon him. Somehow, inexplicably, he knew that
+he was nearing the end of his quest.
+
+The long moan of the wind was the only sound to be heard. It seemed to
+fill the world. No voice of bird or beast came from near or far. He
+seemed to travel through a vast emptiness--the only living thing astir.
+
+He reached the thatched summer-house at last, noted with a curious
+detachment that it was beginning to look dilapidated, wondered if he
+would find it after all deserted, and the next moment was nearly
+overwhelmed by a huge grey body that hurled itself upon him from the
+interior of the little arbour.
+
+It was Caesar the great Dalmatian who greeted him thus effusively, and
+Piers realized in an instant that the dog had some news to impart. He
+pushed him aside with a brief word of welcome and entered the
+ivy-grown place.
+
+"Hullo!" gasped a voice with painful utterance. "Hullo!"
+
+And in a moment he discerned Sir Beverley crouched in a corner,
+grey-faced, his riding-whip still clutched in his hand.
+
+Impetuously he went to him, stooped above him. "What on earth has
+happened, sir? You haven't been thrown?" he queried anxiously.
+
+"Thrown! I!" Sir Beverley's voice cracked derisively. "No! I got off--to
+have a look at the place,--and the brute jibbed--and gave me the slip."
+
+The words came with difficult jerks, his breathing was short and
+laboured. Piers, bending over him, saw a spasm of pain contract the grey
+face that nevertheless looked so indomitably into his.
+
+"He'll go back to stables," growled Sir Beverley. "It's a way colts
+have--when they've had their fling. What have you come back for, eh?
+Thought I couldn't do without you?"
+
+There was a stony glint in his eyes as he asked the question. His thin
+lips curved sardonically.
+
+Piers, still with anxiety lying cold at his heart, had no place left for
+resentment. He made swift and winning answer. "I've been a brute, sir.
+I've come back to ask your forgiveness."
+
+The sardonic lips parted. "Instead of--a hiding--eh?" gasped Sir
+Beverley.
+
+Piers drew back momentarily; but the grey, drawn face compelled his
+pity. He stifled his wrath unborn. "I'll take that first, sir," he
+said steadily.
+
+Sir Beverley's frown deepened, but his breathing was growing less
+oppressed. He suddenly collected his energies and spoke with his usual
+irascibility.
+
+"Oh, don't try any of your damned heroics on me, sir! Apologize like a
+gentleman--if you can! If not--if not--" He broke off panting, his lips
+still forming words that he lacked the strength to utter.
+
+Piers sat down beside him on the crazy bench. "I will do anything you
+wish, sir," he said. "I'm horribly sorry for the way I've treated you.
+I'm ready to make any amends in my power."
+
+"Oh, get away!" growled out Sir Beverley. But with the words his hand
+came gropingly forth and fastened in a hard grip on Piers' arm. "You
+talk like a Sunday-school book," he said. "What the devil did you do
+it for, eh?"
+
+It was roughly spoken, but Piers was quick to recognize the spirit behind
+the words. He clapped his own hand upon his grandfather's, and was
+shocked afresh at its icy coldness.
+
+"I say, do let's go" he said. "We can't talk here. It's downright madness
+to sit in this draughty hole. Come along, sir!" He thrust a vigorous arm
+about the old man and hoisted him to his feet.
+
+"Oh, you're mighty strong!" gasped Sir Beverley. "Strong enough--to kick
+over--the traces, eh?"
+
+"Never again, sir," said Piers with decision.
+
+Whereat Sir Beverley looked at him searchingly, and gibed no more.
+
+They went out together on to the open wind-swept hillside, Piers still
+strongly supporting him, for he stumbled painfully. It was a difficult
+progress for them both, and haste was altogether out of the question.
+
+Sir Beverley revived somewhat as they went, but more than once he had to
+pause to get his breath. His weakness was a revelation to Piers though he
+sought to reassure himself with the reflection that it was the natural
+outcome of his night's vigil; and moment by moment his compunction grew.
+
+They were no more than a mile from the Abbey, but it took them the
+greater part of two hours to accomplish the distance, and at the end
+of it Sir Beverley was hanging upon Piers in a state that bordered
+upon collapse.
+
+His animal had just returned riderless, and considerable consternation
+prevailed. Victor, who was on the watch, rushed to meet them with
+characteristic nimbleness, and he and Piers between them carried Sir
+Beverley in, and laid him down before the great hall fire.
+
+But though so exhausted as to be scarcely conscious, he still clung fast
+to Piers, not suffering him to stir from side; and there Piers remained,
+chafing the cold hands administering brandy, while Victor, invaluable in
+an emergency, procured pillows, blankets, hot-water bottles, everything
+that his fertile brain could suggest to restore the failing strength.
+
+Again, though slowly, Sir Beverley rallied, recovered his faculties, came
+back to full understanding. "Had anything to eat?" he rapped out so
+suddenly that Piers, kneeling beside him, jumped with astonishment.
+
+"I, sir? No, I'm not hungry," he said. "You're feeling better, what? Can
+I get you something?"
+
+"Oh, don't be a damn' fool!" said Sir Beverley. "Tell 'em to fetch
+some lunch!"
+
+It was the turning-point. From that moment he began to recover in a
+fashion that amazed Piers, cast aside blankets and pillows, sternly
+forbade Piers to summon the doctor, and sat up before the fire with a
+grim refusal to be coddled any longer.
+
+They lunched together in the warmth of the blazing logs, and Sir Beverley
+became so normal in his attitude that Piers began at last to feel
+reassured.
+
+He did not broach the matter that lay between them, knowing well that his
+grandfather's temperament was not such as to leave it long in abeyance;
+and they smoked together in peace after the meal as though the strife of
+the previous evening had never been.
+
+But the memory of it overhung them both, and finally at the end of a
+lengthy silence Sir Beverley turned his stone-grey eyes upon his grandson
+and spoke.
+
+"Well? What have you to say for yourself?"
+
+Piers came out of a reverie and looked up with a faint rueful smile.
+"Nothing, sir," he said.
+
+"Nothing? What do you mean by that?" Sir Beverley's voice was sharp. "You
+go away like a raving lunatic, and stay away all night, and then come
+back with nothing to say. What have you been up to? Tell me that!"
+
+Piers leaned slowly forward, took up the poker and gently pushed it
+into the fire. "She won't have me," he said, with his eyes upon the
+leaping flames.
+
+"What?" exclaimed Sir Beverley. "You've been after that hussy again?"
+
+Piers' brows drew together in a thick, ominous line; but he merely nodded
+and said, "Yes."
+
+"The devil you have!" ejaculated Sir Beverley. "And she refused you?"
+
+"She did." Again very softly Piers poked at the blazing logs, his eyes
+fixed and intent. "It served me right--in a way," he said, speaking
+meditatively, almost as if to himself. "I was a hound--to ask her.
+But--somehow--I was driven. However," he drove the poker in a little
+further, "it's all the same now as she's refused me. That's why," he
+turned his eyes suddenly upon Sir Beverley, "there's nothing to be said."
+
+There was no defiance in his look, but it held something of a baffling
+quality. It was almost as if in some fashion he were conscious of relief.
+
+Sir Beverley stared at him, angry and incredulous. "Refused you! What the
+devil for? Wanted my consent, I suppose? Thought I held the
+purse-strings, eh?"
+
+"Oh no," said Piers, again faintly smiling, "she didn't care a damn about
+that. She knows I am not dependent upon you. But--she has no use for me,
+that's all."
+
+"No use for you!" Sir Beverley's voice rose. "What the--what the devil
+does she want then, I should like to know?"
+
+"She doesn't want anyone," said Piers. "At least she thinks she doesn't.
+You see, she's been married before."
+
+There was a species of irony in his voice that yet was without
+bitterness. He turned back to his aimless stirring of the fire, and there
+fell a silence between them.
+
+But Sir Beverley's eyes were fixed upon his grandson's face in a close,
+unsparing scrutiny. "So you thought you might as well come back," he
+said at last.
+
+"She made me," said Piers, without looking round.
+
+"Made you!"
+
+Again Piers nodded. "I was to tell you from her that she quite
+understands your attitude; but that you needn't be anxious, as she has no
+intention of marrying again."
+
+"Confound her impudence!" ejaculated Sir Beverley.
+
+"Oh no!" Piers' voice sounded too tired to be indignant. "I don't think
+you can accuse her of that. There has never been any flirtation between
+us. It wasn't her fault. I--made a fool of myself. It just happened in
+the ordinary course of things."
+
+He ceased to speak, laid down the poker without sound, and sat with
+clasped hands, staring blindly before him.
+
+Again there fell a silence. The clock in the corner ticked on with
+melancholy regularity, the logs hissed and spluttered viciously; but
+the two men sat in utter stillness, both bowed as if beneath a
+pressing burden.
+
+One of them moved at last, stretched out a bony, trembling hand, laid it
+on the other's shoulder.
+
+"Piers boy," Sir Beverley said, with slow articulation, "believe me,
+there's not a woman on this earth worth grizzling about. They're liars
+and impostors, every one."
+
+Piers started a little, then with a very boyish movement, he laid his
+cheek against the old bent fingers. "My dear sir," he said, "but you're a
+woman-hater!"
+
+"I know," said Sir Beverley, still in that heavy, fateful fashion. "And I
+have reason. I tell you, boy,--and I know,--you would be better off in
+your coffin than linked to a woman you seriously cared for. It's hell on
+earth--hell on earth!"
+
+"Or paradise," muttered Piers.
+
+"A fool's paradise, boy; a paradise that turns to dust and ashes." Sir
+Beverley's voice quivered suddenly. He withdrew his hand to fumble in an
+inner pocket. In a moment he stretched it forth again with a key lying
+on the palm.
+
+"Take that!" he said. "Open that bureau thing behind you! Look in the
+left-hand drawer! There's something there for you to see."
+
+Piers obeyed him. There was that in Sir Beverley's manner that silenced
+all questioning. He pulled out the drawer and looked in. It contained one
+thing only--a revolver.
+
+Sir Beverley went on speaking, calmly, dispassionately, wholly
+impersonally. "It's loaded--has been loaded for fifty years. But I never
+used it. And that not because my own particular hell wasn't hot enough,
+but just because I wouldn't have it said that I'd ever loved any
+she-devil enough to let her be my ruin. There were times enough when I
+nearly did it. I've sat all night with the thing in my hand. But I hung
+on for that reason, till at last the fire burnt out, and I didn't care.
+Every woman is the same to me now. I know now--and you've got to know it
+too--that woman is only fit to be the servant, not the mistress, of
+man,--and a damn treacherous servant at that. She was made for man's
+use, and if he is fool enough to let her get the upper hand, then Heaven
+help him, for he certainly won't be in a position to help himself!"
+
+He stopped abruptly, and in the silence Piers shut and relocked
+the drawer. He dropped the key into his own pocket, and came back
+to the fire.
+
+Sir Beverley looked up at him with something of an effort. "Boy," he
+said, "you've got to marry some day, I know. You've got to have
+children. But--you're young, you know. There's plenty of time before
+you. You might wait a bit--just a bit--till I'm out of the way. I won't
+keep you long; and I won't beat you often either--if you'll condescend
+to stay with me."
+
+He smiled with the words, his own grim ironical smile; but the pathos of
+it cut straight to Piers' heart. He went down on his knees beside the old
+man and thrust his arm about the shrunken shoulders.
+
+"I'll never leave you again, sir," he vowed earnestly. "I've been a
+heartless brute, and I'm most infernally sorry. As to marrying,
+well--there's no more question of that for me. I couldn't marry Ina Rose.
+You understand that?"
+
+"Never liked the chit," growled Sir Beverley. "Only thought she'd answer
+your purpose better than some. For you've got to get an heir, boy;
+remember that! You're the only Evesham left."
+
+"Oh, damn!" said Piers very wearily. "What does it matter?"
+
+Sir Beverley looked at him from under his thick brows piercingly but
+without condemnation. "It's up to you, Piers," he said.
+
+"Is it?" said Piers, with a groan. "Well, let's leave it at that for the
+present! Sure you've forgiven me?"
+
+Sir Beverley's grim face relaxed again. He put his arm round Piers and
+held him hard for a moment.
+
+Then: "Oh, drat it, Piers!" he said testily. "Get away, do! And behave
+yourself for the future!"
+
+Whereat Piers laughed, a short, unsteady laugh, and went back to
+his chair.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+THE DECISION
+
+
+"The matter is settled," said the Reverend Stephen Lorimer, in the tones
+of icy decision with which his wife was but too tragically familiar. "I
+engaged Mrs. Denys to be a help to you, not exclusively to Jeanie. The
+child is quite well enough to return home, and I do not feel myself
+justified in incurring any further expense now that her health is quite
+sufficiently restored."
+
+"But the children were all counting on going to Stanbury Cliffs for the
+Easter holidays," protested Mrs. Lorimer almost tearfully. "We cannot
+disappoint them, Stephen!" Mr. Lorimer's lips closed very firmly for a
+few seconds. Then, "The change home will be quite sufficient for them,"
+he said. "I have given the matter my full consideration, my dear
+Adelaide, and no argument of yours will now move me. Mrs. Denys and
+Jeanie have been away for a month, and they must now return. It is your
+turn for a change, and as soon as Eastertide is over I intend to take you
+away with me for ten days or so and leave Mrs. Denys in charge of--the
+bear-garden, as I fear it but too truly resembles. You are quite unfit
+for the noise and racket of the holidays. And I myself have been feeling
+lately the need of a little--shall I call it recreation?" Mr. Lorimer
+smiled self-indulgently over the term. He liked to play with words. "I
+presume you have no vital objection to accompanying me?"
+
+"Oh, of course not. I should like it above all things," Mrs. Lorimer
+hastened to assure him, "if it were not for Jeanie. I don't like the
+thought of bringing her home just when her visit is beginning to do her
+so much good."
+
+"She cannot remain away for ever," said Mr. Lorimer. "Moreover, her
+delicacy must have been considerably exaggerated, or such a sudden
+improvement could scarcely have taken place. At all events, so it appears
+to me. She must therefore return home and spend the holidays in wholesome
+amusements with the other children; and when they are over, I really must
+turn my serious attention to her education which has been so sadly
+neglected since Christmas. Mrs. Denys is doubtless a very excellent woman
+in her way, but she is not, I fear, one to whom I could safely entrust
+the intellectual development of a child of Jeanie's age." He paused,
+looking up with complacent enquiry at his wife's troubled face. "And now
+what scruples are stirring in the mind of my spouse?" he asked, with
+playful affection.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer did not smile in answer. Her worried little face only
+drew into more anxious lines. "Stephen," she said, "I do wish you
+would consult Dr. Tudor before you quite decide to have Jeanie home
+at present."
+
+The Vicar's mouth turned down, and he looked for a moment so extremely
+unpleasant that Mrs. Lorimer quailed. Then, "My dear," he said
+deliberately, "when I decide upon a specific course of action, I carry it
+through invariably. If I were not convinced that what I am about to do
+were right, I should not do it. Pray let me hear no more upon the
+subject! And remember, Adelaide, it is my express command that you do not
+approach Dr. Tudor in this matter. He is a most interfering person, and
+would welcome any excuse to obtain a footing in this house again. But now
+that I have at length succeeded in shaking him off, I intend to keep him
+at a distance for the future. And he is not to be called in--understand
+this very clearly, if you please--except in a case of extreme urgency.
+This is a distinct order, Adelaide, and I shall be severely displeased if
+you fail to observe it. And now," he resumed his lighter manner again as
+he rose from his chair, "I must hie me to the parish room where my good
+Miss Whalley is awaiting me."
+
+He stretched forth a firm, kind hand and patted his wife's shoulder.
+
+"We must see what we can do to bring a little colour into those pale
+cheeks," he said. "A fortnight in the Cornish Riviera perhaps. Or we
+might take a peep at Shakespeare's country. But we shall see, we
+shall see! I will write to Mrs. Denys and acquaint her with my
+decision this evening."
+
+He was gone, leaving Mrs. Lorimer to pace up and down his study in futile
+distress of mind. Only that morning a letter from Avery had reached her,
+telling her of Jeanie's continued progress, and urging her to come and
+take her place for a little while. It was such a change as her tired soul
+craved, but she had not dared to tell her husband so. And now, it seemed,
+Jeanie's good time also was to be terminated.
+
+There was no doubt about it. Rodding did not suit the child. She was
+never well at home. The Vicarage was shut in by trees, a damp, unhealthy
+place. And Dr. Tudor had told her in plain terms that Jeanie lacked the
+strength to make any headway there. She was like a wilting plant in that
+atmosphere. She could not thrive in it. Dry warmth was what she needed,
+and it had made all the difference to her. Avery's letter had been full
+of hope. She referred to Dr. Tudor's simile of the building of a
+sea-wall. "We are strengthening it every day," she wrote. "In a few more
+weeks it ought to be proof against any ordinary tide."
+
+A few more weeks! Mrs. Lorimer wrung her hands. Stephen did not know,
+did not realize; and she was powerless to convince him. Avery would not
+convince him either. He tolerated only Avery because she was so useful.
+
+She knew exactly the sort of letter he would write, desiring their
+return; and Avery, for all her quiet strength, would have to submit. Oh,
+it was cruel--cruel!
+
+The tears were coursing down her cheeks when the door opened unexpectedly
+and Olive entered. She paused at sight of her mother, looking at her with
+just the Vicar's air of chill enquiry.
+
+"Is anything the matter?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer turned hastily to the window and began to dry her eyes.
+
+Olive went to a bookshelf and stood before it. After a moment she took
+out a book and deliberately turned the leaves. Her attitude was plainly
+repressive.
+
+Finally she returned the book to the shelf and turned. "Why are you
+crying, Mother?"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer leaned her head against the window-frame with a heavy sigh.
+"I am very miserable, Olive," she said, a catch in her voice.
+
+"No one need be that," observed Olive. "Father says that misery is a sign
+of mental weakness."
+
+Mrs. Lorimer was silent.
+
+"Don't you think you had better leave off crying and find something to
+do?" suggested her daughter in her cool, young voice.
+
+Still Mrs. Lorimer neither moved nor spoke.
+
+Olive came a step nearer. There was obvious distaste on her face. "I
+wish you would try to be a little brighter--for Father's sake," she
+said. "I don't think you treat him very kindly."
+
+It was evident that she spoke from a sense of duty. Mrs. Lorimer
+straightened herself with another weary sigh.
+
+"Run along, my dear!" she said. "I am sure you are busy."
+
+Olive turned, half-vexed and half-relieved, and walked to the door. Her
+mother watched her wistfully. It was in her mind to call her back, fold
+her in her arms, and appeal for sympathy. But the severity of the child's
+pose was too suggestive of the Vicar's unbending attitude towards
+feminine weakness, and she restrained the impulse, knowing that she would
+appeal in vain. There was infinitely more comfort to be found in the
+society of Baby Phil, and, smiling wanly at the thought, she went up to
+the nursery in search of it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+THE LAST DEBT
+
+
+There was no combating the Vicar's decision. Avery realized that fact
+from the outset even before Mrs. Lorimer's agitated note upon the subject
+reached her. The fiat had gone forth, and submission was the only course.
+
+Jeanie received the news without a murmur. "I don't mind really," she
+said. "It's very nice here, but then it's nice at home too when you are
+there. And then there is Piers too."
+
+Yes, there was Piers,--another consideration that filled Avery with
+uneasiness. No word from Piers had reached her since that early morning
+on the shore, but his silence did not reassure her. She had half expected
+a boyish letter of apology, some friendly reassurance, some word at least
+of his return to Rodding Abbey. But she had heard nothing. She did not so
+much as know if he had returned or not.
+
+Neither had she heard from her friend Edmund Crowther. With a sense of
+keen disappointment she wrote to his home in the North to tell him of the
+change in her plans. She could not ask him to the Vicarage, and it seemed
+that she might not meet him after all.
+
+She also sent a hurried note to Lennox Tudor, but they had only three
+days in which to terminate their visit, and she received no reply. Later,
+she heard that Tudor had been away for those days and did not open the
+note until the actual day of their return.
+
+The other children were expected home from school during the week before
+Easter, and Mr. Lorimer desired that Avery should be at the Vicarage to
+prepare for them. So, early in the week, they returned.
+
+It seemed that Spring had come at last. The hedges were all bursting into
+tenderest green, and all the world looked young.
+
+"The primroses will be out in the Park woods," said Jeanie. "We will go
+and gather heaps and heaps."
+
+"Are you allowed to go wherever you like there?" asked Avery, thinking
+of the game.
+
+"Oh no," said Jeanie thoughtfully. "But we always do. Mr. Marshall chases
+us sometimes, but we always get away."
+
+She smiled at the thought, and Avery frankly rejoiced to see her
+enthusiasm for the wicked game of trespassing in the Squire's preserves.
+She did not know that the amusement had been strictly prohibited by the
+Vicar, and it did not occur to Jeanie to tell her. None of the children
+had ever paid any attention to the prohibition. There were some rules
+that no one could keep.
+
+The return of the rest of the family kept the days that succeeded their
+return extremely lively. Jeanie was in higher spirits than Avery had
+ever seen her. She seemed more childish, more eager for fun, as though
+some of the zest of life had got into her veins at last. Her mother
+ascribed the change to Avery's influence, and was pathetic in her
+gratitude, though Avery disclaimed all credit declaring that the sea-air
+had wrought the wonder.
+
+When Lennox Tudor saw her, he looked at Avery with an odd smile behind
+his glasses. "You've built the wall," he said.
+
+They had met by the churchyard gate, and Jeanie and Pat were having a
+hopping race down the hill. Avery looked after them with a touch of
+wistfulness. "But I wish she could have been away longer."
+
+Tudor frowned. "Yes. Why on earth not? The Reverend Stephen again, I
+suppose. I wish I had had your letter sooner, though as a matter of fact
+I'm not in favour just now, and my interference would probably weigh in
+the wrong balance. Keep the child out as much as possible! It's the only
+way. She has made good progress. There is no reason at present why she
+should go back again."
+
+No, there was no reason; yet Avery's heart misgave her. She wished she
+might have had longer for the building of that wall. Good Friday was more
+or less a day of penance in the Vicar's family. It began with lengthy
+prayers in the dining-room, so lengthy that Avery feared that Mrs.
+Lorimer would faint ere they came to an end. Then after a rigorously
+silent breakfast the children were assembled in the study to be
+questioned upon the Church Catechism--a species of discipline peculiarly
+abhorrent to them all by reason of the Vicar's sarcastic comments upon
+their ignorance.
+
+At the end of this dreary exercise they were dismissed to prepare for
+church where there followed a service which Avery regarded as downright
+revolting. It consisted mainly of prayers--as many prayers as the Vicar
+could get in, rendered in an emotionless monotone with small regard for
+sense and none whatever for feeling. The whole thing was drab and
+unattractive to the utmost limit, and Avery rose at length from her
+knees with a feeling of having been deliberately cheated of a thing she
+valued. She left the church in an unwonted spirit of exasperation, which
+lasted throughout the midday meal, which was as oppressively silent as
+breakfast had been.
+
+The open relief with which the children trooped away to the schoolroom
+found a warm echo in her heart. She even almost smiled in sympathy when
+Julian breathed a deep thanksgiving that that show was over for one
+more year.
+
+Neither Piers nor his grandfather had been in the church, and their
+absence did not surprise her. She did not feel that she herself could
+ever face such a service again. The memory of Piers at the organ came to
+her as she dressed to accompany the children upon their primrosing
+expedition, and a sudden passionate longing followed it to hear that
+music again. She was feeling starved in her soul that day.
+
+But when they reached the green solitudes of the park woodlands the
+bitterness began to pass away. It was all so beautiful; the mossy riding
+up which they turned was so springy underfoot, and the singing of a
+thousand birds made endless music whichever way they wandered.
+
+"It's better than church, isn't it?" said Jeanie softly, pressing close
+to her. And Avery smiled in answer. It was balm to the spirit.
+
+The Squire's preserves were enclosed in wire netting, and over this they
+climbed into their primrose paradise. Several partridges rose from the
+children's feet, and whirred noisily away, to the huge delight of the
+boys but to Avery's considerable dismay. However, Marshall was evidently
+not within earshot, and they settled down to the serious business of
+filling their baskets for the church decorations without interference.
+
+The primroses grew thickly in a wonderful carpet that spread in all
+directions, sloping down to a glade where gurgled a brown stream. Down
+this glade Avery directed her party, keeping a somewhat anxious eye upon
+Gracie and the three boys who were in the wildest spirits after the
+severe strain of the morning. She and Jeanie picked rapidly and
+methodically. Olive had decided not to accompany the expedition. She did
+not care for primrosing, she told Avery, and her father had promised to
+read the Testament in Greek with her later in the afternoon, an
+intellectual exercise which she plainly regarded as extremely
+meritorious.
+
+Her absence troubled no one; in fact Julian, having over-heard her
+excuse, remarked rudely that if she was going to put on side, they were
+better off without her; and Avery secretly agreed with him.
+
+So in cheery accord they went their careless way through the preserves,
+scaring the birds and filling their baskets with great industry. They had
+reached the end of the glade and were contemplating fording the brook
+when like a bolt from the blue discovery came upon them. A sound, like
+the blare of an angry bull, assailed them--a furious inarticulate sound
+that speedily resolved into words.
+
+"What the devil are you mischievous brats doing there?"
+
+The whole party jumped violently at the suddenness of the attack. Avery's
+heart gave a most unpleasant jerk. She knew that voice.
+
+Swiftly she turned in the direction whence it came, and saw again the
+huge white horse of the trampling hoofs that had once before been urged
+against her.
+
+He was stamping and fretting on the other side of the stream, the banks
+of which were so steep as almost to form a chasm, and from his back the
+terrible old Squire hurled the vials of his wrath.
+
+Ronald drew near to Avery, while Jeanie slipped a nervous hand into hers.
+Julian, however, turned a defiant face. "It's all right. He can't get at
+us," he said audibly.
+
+At which remark Gracie laughed a little hysterically, and Pat made
+a grimace.
+
+Perhaps it was this last that chiefly infuriated the Squire, for he
+literally bellowed with rage, snatched his animal back with a merciless
+hand, and then with whip and spur set him full at the stream.
+
+It was a dangerous leap, for the ground on both banks was yielding and
+slippery. Avery stood transfixed to watch the result.
+
+The horse made a great effort to obey his master's behests. It almost
+seemed as if he were furious too, Avery thought, as he pounded forward to
+clear the obstacle. His leap was superb, clearing the stream by a good
+six feet, but as he landed among the primroses disaster overtook him. It
+must have been a rabbit-hole, Avery reflected later; for he blundered as
+he touched the ground, plunged forward, and fell headlong.
+
+There followed a few moments of sickening confusion during which the
+horrified spectators had time to realize that Sir Beverley was pinned
+under the kicking animal; then with a savage effort the great brute
+rolled over and struggled to his feet.
+
+With a promptitude that spoke well for his nerve, Julian sprang forward
+and caught the dangling bridle. The creature tried to jib back upon his
+prostrate master, but he dragged him forward and held him fast.
+
+Old Sir Beverley lay prone on the ground, in an awful stillness, with his
+white face turned to the sky. His eyes were fast shut, his arms flung
+wide, one hand still grasping the whip which he had wielded so fiercely a
+few seconds before.
+
+"Is he dead?" whispered Jeanie, clinging close to Avery.
+
+Avery gently released herself and moved forward. "No, dear, no! He--he is
+only stunned."
+
+She knelt beside Sir Beverley, overcoming a horrible sensation of
+sickness as she did so. The whole catastrophe had been of so sudden and
+so violent a nature that she felt almost stunned herself.
+
+She slipped an arm under the old man's head, and it hung upon her like a
+leaden weight.
+
+"Oh, Avery, how dreadful!" exclaimed Gracie, aghast.
+
+"Take my handkerchief!" said Avery quickly. "Run down and soak it in the
+stream! Mind how you go! It's very steep."
+
+Gracie went like the wind.
+
+Avery began with fingers that shook in spite of her utmost resolution,
+to try to loosen Sir Beverley's collar.
+
+"Let me!" said Ronald, gently.
+
+She glanced up gratefully and relinquished the task to him. Ronald was
+neat in all his ways.
+
+The return of Gracie with the wet handkerchief gave her something to do,
+and she tenderly moistened the stark, white face. But the children's
+fears were crowding thick in her own heart. That awful inertness looked
+so terribly like death.
+
+And then suddenly the grim lips parted and a quivering sigh passed
+through them.
+
+The next moment abruptly the grey eyes opened and gazed full at Avery
+with a wide, glassy stare.
+
+"What the--what the--" stammered Sir Beverley, and broke off with a
+hard gasp.
+
+Avery sought to raise him higher, but his weight was too much for her
+even with Ronald assisting.
+
+"Find my--flask!" jerked out Sir Beverley, with panting breath.
+
+Ronald began to search in his pockets and finally drew it forth. He
+opened it and gave it to Avery who held it to the twitching lips.
+
+Sir Beverley drank and closed his eyes. "I shall be--better soon," he
+said, in a choked whisper.
+
+Avery waited, supporting him as strongly as she could, listening to the
+short laboured breathing with deep foreboding.
+
+"Couldn't I run down to the Abbey for help?" suggested Julian, who had
+succeeded at length in tying the chafing animal to a tree.
+
+Avery considered. "I don't know. How far is it?"
+
+"Not more than a mile. P'r'aps I should find Piers there. I'm sure I'd
+better go," the boy urged, with his eyes on the deathly face.
+
+And after a moment Avery agreed with him. "Yes, I think perhaps you'd
+better. Gracie and Pat might go for Dr. Tudor meanwhile. I do hope you
+will find Piers. Tell him to bring two men, and something that they can
+carry him on. Jeanie dear, you run home to your mother and tell her how
+it is that we shall be late for tea. You won't startle her, I know."
+
+They fell in with her desires at once. There was not one of them who
+would not have done anything for her. And so they scattered, departing
+upon their several missions, leaving Ronald only to share her vigil by
+the old Squire's side.
+
+For a long time after their departure, there was no change in Sir
+Beverley's state. He lay propped against Avery's arm and Ronald's knee
+breathing quickly, with painful effort, through his parted lips. He kept
+his eyes closed, but they knew that he was conscious by the heavy frown
+that drew his forehead. Once Avery offered him more brandy, but he
+refused it impatiently, and she desisted.
+
+The deathly pallor had, however, begun to give place to a more natural
+hue, and as the minutes passed his breathing gradually grew less
+distressed. Once more his eyes opened, and he stared into Avery's face.
+
+"Help me--to sit up!" he commanded.
+
+They did their best, he struggling with piteously feeble efforts to
+help himself. Finally he managed to drag himself to a leaning position
+on one elbow, though for several seconds thereafter his gasping was
+terrible to hear.
+
+Avery saw his lips move several times before any sound came from them. At
+length, "Send--that boy--away!" he gasped out.
+
+Avery and Ronald looked at each other, and the boy got to his feet with
+an undecided air.
+
+"Do you hear? Go!" rapped out Sir Beverley.
+
+"Shall I, Avery?" whispered Ronald.
+
+She nodded. "Yes, just a little way! I'll call you if I want you."
+
+And half-reluctantly Ronald obeyed.
+
+"Has he gone?" asked Sir Beverley.
+
+"Yes." Avery remained on her knees beside him. He looked as if he might
+collapse at any moment.
+
+For awhile he lay struggling for breath with his face towards the ground;
+then very suddenly his strength seemed to return. He raised his head and
+regarded her piercingly.
+
+"You," he said curtly, "are the young woman who refused to marry my
+grandson."
+
+The words were so totally unexpected that Avery literally gasped with
+astonishment. To be taken to task on this subject was an ordeal for which
+she was wholly unprepared.
+
+"Well?" he said irritably. "That is so, I believe? You did refuse to
+marry him?"
+
+"Yes," Avery admitted, feeling the hot colour flood her face under the
+merciless scrutiny of the stone-grey eyes.
+
+"But--but--"
+
+"Well?" he said again, still more irritably. "But what?"
+
+"Oh, need we discuss it?" she said appealingly. "I would so much
+rather not."
+
+"I desire to discuss it," said Sir Beverley autocratically. "I desire
+to know--what objection you have to my grandson. Many women, let me
+tell you, of far higher social standing than yourself would jump at
+such a chance. But you--you take upon yourself to refuse it. I desire
+to know why."
+
+He spoke with a stubbornness that overbore all bodily weakness. He would
+be a tyrant to his last breath.
+
+But Avery could not bring herself to answer him. She felt as if he were
+trying to force his way into a place which regarded as peculiarly sacred,
+from which in some fashion she owed it to Piers as well as to herself to
+bar him out.
+
+"I am sorry," she said gently after a moment, "but I am afraid that is
+just what I can't tell you."
+
+She saw Sir Beverley's chin thrust out at just the indomitable angle with
+which Piers had made her familiar, and she realized that he had no
+intention of abandoning his point.
+
+"You told him, I suppose?" he demanded gruffly.
+
+A faint sense of amusement arose within her, her anxiety notwithstanding.
+It struck her as ludicrous that she should be browbeaten on this point.
+
+She made answer with more assurance. "I told him that the idea was
+unsuitable, out of the question, that he ought to marry a girl of his own
+age and station--not a middle-aged widow like me."
+
+"Pshaw!" exclaimed Sir Beverley impatiently. "You belong to the same
+generation, don't you? What more do you want?"
+
+If he had slapped her face, Avery would scarcely have felt more amazed,
+She gazed at him in silence, wondering if she could have heard aright.
+
+Sir Beverley frowned upon her fiercely, the iron will of him scorning and
+surmounting his physical weakness.
+
+"You've got nothing against the boy, I suppose?" he pursued, with the
+evident determination to get at the truth despite all opposition. "He has
+never given you any cause for complaint? He's behaved himself like a
+gentleman, hey?"
+
+"Oh, of course, of course!" Avery said in distress. "It's not that!"
+
+Sir Beverley frowned still more heavily. "Then--what the devil is it?"
+he demanded. "Don't you like him well enough? Aren't you--in love with
+him?" His lips curled ironically over the words; they sounded
+inexpressibly bitter.
+
+Avery's eyes fell before his pitiless stare. She began with fingers that
+trembled to pluck the primroses that grew in a large tuft close to her,
+saying no word.
+
+"Well?" said Sir Beverley, with growing impatience.
+
+She kept her eyes lowered, for she felt she could not meet his look as
+she made reluctant answer. "No, it is not either. In fact, if I were a
+girl--I had not been married before--I think I should say Yes.
+But--but--" she paused, searching for words, striving to restrain a
+rising agitation, "as it is, I don't think it would be quite fair to him.
+I don't know if I could make him happy. I am not young enough, fresh
+enough, gay enough. I can't offer him a girl's first love, and that is
+what he ought to have. I so want him to have the best. I so want him to
+be happy."
+
+The words were out with a rush, almost before she was aware of uttering
+them, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears, tears that caught her off
+her guard, so that she had neither time nor strength to check them. She
+turned quickly from him, fighting for self-control.
+
+Sir Beverley uttered a grunt that might have denoted either surprise or
+disgust, and there followed a silence that she found peculiarly
+difficult to bear.
+
+"So," he said at last, in a tone that was strictly devoid of feeling,
+"you care for him too much to marry him? Is that it?"
+
+It sounded preposterous, but she was still too near tears for any sense
+of humour to penetrate her distress. She felt as if he had remorselessly
+wrested from her and dragged to light a treasure upon which she herself
+had scarcely dared to look. She continued feverishly to pluck the pale
+flowers that grew all about them, her eyes fixed upon her task.
+
+With a growling effort, Sir Beverley raised himself, thrust forward a
+quivering hand and gripped hers.
+
+Startled, she turned towards him, meeting not hostility but a certain
+grim kindliness in the hard old eyes.
+
+"Will you honour me with your attention for a moment?" he asked, with
+ironical courtesy.
+
+"I am attending," she answered meekly.
+
+"Then," he said, dropping all pretence at courtesy without further
+ceremony, "permit me to say that if you don't marry my grandson, you'll
+be a bigger fool than I take you for. And in my opinion, a sober-minded
+woman like you who will see to his comfort and be faithful to him is more
+likely to make him happy than any of your headlong, flighty girls."
+
+He stopped; but he did not relinquish his hold upon her. There was
+to Avery something oddly pathetic in the close grasp of those
+unsteady fingers. It was as if they made an appeal which he would
+have scorned to utter.
+
+"You really wish me to marry him?" she said.
+
+He snarled at her like a surly dog. "Wish it? I! Good Heavens above, if
+I had my way I'd never let him marry at all! But unfortunately
+circumstances demand it; and the boy himself--the boy himself, well--"
+his voice softened imperceptibly, rasped on a note of tenderness, "he
+wants looking after; he's young, you know. He'll be all alone very
+soon, and--it isn't considered good for a man to live alone--not a young
+man anyway."
+
+He broke off, still looking hard at Avery from under his drawn white
+brows as if daring her to dispute the matter.
+
+But she said nothing, and after a moment he resumed more equably: "That's
+all I have to say on the subject. I wish you to understand that for the
+boy's sake--and for other considerations--I have withdrawn my opposition.
+You can marry him--as soon as you like."
+
+He sank down again on his elbow, and she saw a look of exhaustion on his
+face. His head drooped forward on his chest, and, watching him, she
+realized that he was an old, old man and very tired of life.
+
+Suddenly he jerked his head up again and met her pitying eyes.
+
+"I'm done, yes," he said grimly, as if in response to her unspoken
+thought. "But I've paid my debts--all of 'em, including this last." His
+voice began to fail, but he forced it on, speaking spasmodically, with
+increasing difficulty. "You sent my boy back to me--the other
+day--against his will. Now I--make you a present of him--in return.
+There's good stuff in the lad,--nothing shabby about him. If you care for
+him at all--you ought to be able to hold him--make him happy.
+Anyway--anyway--you might try!"
+
+The appeal in the last words, whispered though they were, was
+undisguised; and swiftly, impulsively, almost before she knew what she
+was doing, Avery responded to it.
+
+"Oh, I will try!" she said very earnestly. "I will indeed!"
+
+He looked at her fixedly for a moment with eyes of deep searching that
+she never forgot, and then his head dropped forward heavily.
+
+"You--have--said it!" he said, and sank unconscious upon the ground.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+THE MESSAGE
+
+
+"My good Mrs. Denys, it is quite fruitless for you to argue the matter.
+Nothing you can say can alter the fact that you took the children
+trespassing in the Rodding Park preserves against my most stringent
+commands, and this deplorable accident to the Squire is the direct
+outcome of the most flagrant insubordination. I have borne a good deal
+from you, but this I cannot overlook. You will therefore take a month's
+notice from to-day, and as it is quite impossible for me to reconsider
+my decision in this respect it would be wasted effort on your part to
+lodge any appeal against it. As for the children, I shall deal with them
+in my own way."
+
+The Vicar's thin lips closed upon the words with the severity of an
+irrevocable resolution. Avery heard him with a sense of wild rebellion at
+her heart to which she knew she must not give rein. She stood before him,
+a defenceless culprit brought up for punishment.
+
+It was difficult to be dignified under such circumstances, but she
+did her best.
+
+"I am extremely sorry that I took the children into the preserves," she
+said. "But I accept the full responsibility for having done so. They were
+not greatly to blame in the matter."
+
+"Upon that point," observed Mr. Lorimer, "I am the best judge. The
+children will be punished as severely as I deem necessary. Meantime, you
+quite understand, do you not, that your duties here must terminate a
+month from now? I am only sorry that I allowed myself to be persuaded to
+reconsider my decision on the last occasion. For more than one reason I
+think it is to be regretted. However,--" he completed the sentence with a
+heavy sigh and said no more.
+
+It was evident that he desired to close the interview, yet Avery
+lingered. She could not go with the children's fate still in the balance.
+
+He looked at her interrogatively with raised brows.
+
+"You will not surely punish the children very severely?" she said.
+
+He waved a hand of cool dismissal. "I shall do whatever seems to me right
+and advisable," he said.
+
+It came to Avery that interference on this subject would do more harm
+than good, and she turned to go. At the door his voice arrested her.
+"This day month then, Mrs. Denys!"
+
+She bent her head in silent acquiescence, and went out.
+
+In the passage Gracie awaited her and wound eager arms about her.
+
+"Was he very horrid to you, Avery darling? What did he say?"
+
+Avery went with her to the schoolroom where the other offenders were
+assembled. It seemed to her almost cruel to attempt to suppress the
+truth, but their reception of it went to her heart. Jeanie--the placid,
+sweet-tempered Jeanie--wept tears of such anguished distress that she
+feared she would make herself ill. Gracie was too angry to weep. She
+wanted to go straight to the study and beard the lion in his den, and
+only Avery's most strenuous opposition restrained her. And into the midst
+of their tribulation came Mrs. Lorimer to mingle her tears with theirs.
+
+"What I shall do without you, Avery, I can't think," was the burden of
+her lament.
+
+Avery couldn't think either, for she knew better even than Mrs. Lorimer
+herself how much the latter had come to lean upon her.
+
+She had to turn her energies to comforting her disconsolate companions,
+but this task was still unaccomplished when the door opened and the Vicar
+stalked in upon them.
+
+He observed his wife's presence with cold displeasure, and at once
+proceeded to dismiss her.
+
+"I desire your presence in the study for a few moments, Adelaide. Perhaps
+you will be kind enough to precede me thither."
+
+He held the door open for her with elaborate ceremony, and Mrs. Lorimer
+had no choice but to obey. She departed with a scared effort to check her
+tears under the stern disapproval of his look.
+
+He closed the door upon her and advanced to the table, gazing round upon
+them with judicial severity.
+
+"I am here," he announced, "to pass sentence."
+
+Jeanie, crying softly in her corner, made desperate attempts to
+control herself under the awful look that was at this point
+concentrated upon her.
+
+After a pause the Vicar proceeded, with a spiteful glance at Avery. "It
+is my intention to impose a holiday-task of sufficient magnitude to keep
+you all out of mischief during the rest of the holidays. You will
+therefore commit to memory various different portions of Milton's
+_Paradise Lost_ which I shall select, and which must be repeated to me in
+their entirety without mistake on my return from my own hard-earned
+holiday. And let me give you all fair warning," he raised his voice and
+looked round again, regarding poor Jeanie with marked austerity, "that if
+any one of you is not word-perfect in his or her task by the day of my
+return--boy or girl I care not, the offence is the same--he or she will
+receive a sound caning and the task will be returned."
+
+Thus he delivered himself, and turned to go; but paused at the door to
+add, "Also, Mrs. Denys, will you be good enough to remember that it is
+against my express command that either you or any of the children should
+enter any part of Rodding Park during my absence. I desire that to be
+clearly understood."
+
+"It is understood," said Avery in a low voice.
+
+"That is well," said the Reverend Stephen, and walked majestically
+from the room.
+
+A few seconds of awed silence followed his departure; then to Avery's
+horror Gracie snatched off one of her shoes and flung it violently at the
+door that he had closed behind him. Luckily for Gracie, her father was at
+the foot of the stairs before this episode took place and beyond earshot
+also of the furious storm of tears that followed it, with which even
+Avery found it difficult to cope.
+
+It had been a tragic day throughout, and she was thankful when at length
+it drew to a close.
+
+But when night came at last, and she lay down in the darkness, she found
+herself much too full of thought for sleep. Till then, she had not had
+time to review the day's happenings, but they crowded upon her as she
+lay, driving away all possibility of repose.
+
+What was she going to do? Over and over again she asked herself the
+question, bringing herself as it were each time to contemplate afresh the
+obstacle that had arisen in her path. Had she really promised to marry
+Piers? The Squire evidently thought she had. The memory of those last
+words of his came back to her again and again. He had been very much in
+earnest, very anxious to provide for his boy's future, desperately afraid
+of leaving him alone. How would he view his impetuous action, she
+wondered, on the morrow? Had he not even now possibly begun to repent?
+Would he really desire her to take him literally?
+
+And Piers,--what of Piers? A sudden, warm thrill ran through her. She
+glowed from head to foot. She had not seen Piers since that morning by
+the sea. She had a feeling that he was purposely avoiding her, and yet
+deep in the secret heart of her she knew that what she had rejected over
+and over again was still irrevocably her own. He would come back to her.
+She knew he would come back. And again that strange warmth filled her
+veins. The memory of him just then was like a burst of sunshine after a
+day of storm.
+
+He had not been at home when Julian had taken the news of the Squire's
+accident to the Abbey, and only menservants had come to the rescue. She
+had accompanied them part of the way back, but Tudor had overtaken them
+in the drive, and she and the boys had turned back. Sir Beverley had been
+exhausted and but half-conscious, and he had not uttered another word to
+her. She wished Dr. Tudor had looked in on his way home, and then
+wondered if the Squire's condition were such as to necessitate his
+spending the night at the Abbey. He had once told her that Sir Beverley
+suffered from a weakness of the heart which might develop seriously at
+any time; but though himself fully aware of the fact, the old man had
+never permitted Piers to be told. She had deemed it unfair to Piers, but
+it was no matter for interference. A great longing to know what was
+happening possessed her. Surely--surely Mr. Lorimer would send up in the
+morning to enquire!
+
+Her thoughts took another turn. She had been given definite notice to go.
+In her efforts to console Mrs. Lorimer, and the children, she had
+scarcely herself realized all that it would imply. She began to picture
+the parting, and a quiver of pain went through her. How they had all
+grown about her heart! How would she bear to say good-bye to her little
+delicate Jeanie? And how would the child fare without her? She hardly
+dared to think.
+
+And then again that blinding ray of sunshine burst riotously through her
+clouds. If the impossible happened, if she ever married Piers--for the
+first time she deliberately faced and contemplated the thought--would she
+not be at least within reach if trouble came? A little thrill of spiteful
+humour ran through her at this point. She was quite sure that under such
+circumstances she would not be refused admittance to the Vicar's home. As
+Piers' wife, its doors would always be open to her.
+
+As Piers' wife! She found herself repeating the words, repeating and
+repeating them till their strangeness began to give place to a certain
+familiarity. Was it after all true, as he had once so vehemently
+asserted, that they were meant for each other, belonged to each other,
+that the fate of each was bound in that of the other? What if she were a
+woman grown? What if her years outnumbered his? Had he not waked in her
+such music as her soul had never known before? Had he not opened for her
+the gates of the forbidden land? And was there after all, any actual
+reason that she should refuse to enter? That land where the sun shone
+always and the flowers bloomed without fading! That land where it was
+always spring!
+
+There came in her soul a sudden swift ecstasy that was like the singing
+of many birds in the dawning, thrilling her through and through. She rose
+from her bed as though in answer to a call, and went to her open window.
+
+There before her, silver against the darkness, there shone a single star.
+The throbbing splendour of it seemed to pierce her. She held her breath
+as one waiting for a message.
+
+And, as she stood waiting, through her heart, softly, triumphantly, the
+message came, spoken in the voice she had come to hear through all
+other voices.
+
+"It is the Star of Hope, Avery; yours--and mine."
+
+But even as she watched with all her spirit a-quiver with the wonder of
+it, the vision passed; the star was veiled.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+THE DARK HOUR
+
+
+Avery was very early at the church on the following morning, and had
+begun the work of decorating even before Miss Whalley appeared on the
+scene. It was a day of showers and fleeting gleams of sunshine, and the
+interior of the little building flashed from gloom to brilliance, and
+from brilliance back to gloom with fitful frequency.
+
+Daffodils and primroses were littered all around Avery, and a certain
+subdued pleasure was hers as she decked the place with the spring
+flowers. She was quite alone, for by the Vicar's inflexible decree all
+the elder children, with the exception of Olive, were confined to the
+schoolroom for the morning with their respective tasks.
+
+The magnitude of these tasks had struck dismay to Avery's heart. She did
+not privately believe that any one of them could ever be accomplished in
+the prescribed time. But the day of reckoning was not yet, and she put it
+resolutely from her mind. It was useless to forestall trouble, and her
+own burden of toil that day demanded all her energies.
+
+The advent of Miss Whalley, thin and acid, put an end to all enjoyment
+thereof. She bestowed a cool greeting upon Avery, and came at once to her
+side to criticize her decoration of the font. Miss Whalley always assumed
+the direction of affairs on these occasions, and she regarded Avery's
+assistance in the place of Mrs. Lorimer's weak efforts in something of
+the light of an intrusion.
+
+Avery stood and listened to her suggestions with grave forbearance. She
+never disputed anything with Miss Whalley, which may have been in part
+the reason for the latter's somewhat suspicious attitude towards her.
+
+They were still standing before the font while Miss Whalley unfolded her
+scheme when there came the sound of feet in the porch, and Lennox Tudor
+put his head in.
+
+His eyes fell at once upon Avery. He hesitated a moment then entered.
+
+She turned eagerly to meet him. "Oh, how is the Squire this morning? Have
+you been up to the Abbey yet?"
+
+"The Squire!" echoed Miss Whalley. "Is he ill? I was not aware of it."
+
+Avery's eyes were fixed on Tudor's face, and all in a moment she realized
+that he had been up all night.
+
+He did not seem to notice Miss Whalley, but spoke to Avery, and to her
+alone. "I have just come back from the Abbey. The Squire died about an
+hour ago."
+
+"The Squire!" said Miss Whalley again, in staccato tones.
+
+Avery said nothing, but she turned suddenly white, so white that Tudor
+was moved to compunction.
+
+"I shouldn't have blurted it out like that. Sit down! The poor old chap
+never rallied really. He had a little talk with Piers half-an-hour or so
+before he went. But it was only the last flicker of the candle. We
+couldn't save him."
+
+He bent down over her. "Don't look like that! It wasn't your fault. It
+was bound to come. I've foreseen it for some little time. I told him it
+was madness to go out riding as he did; but he wouldn't listen to me.
+Avery, I say! Avery!" His voice sank to an undertone.
+
+She forced her stiff lips to smile faintly in answer to the concern it
+held. With an effort she commanded herself.
+
+"What of Piers?" she said.
+
+He stood up again with a sharp gesture, and turned from her to answer
+Miss Whalley's eager questions.
+
+"Surely it is very sudden!" the latter was saying. "How did it happen?
+Will there be an inquest?"
+
+"There will not," said Tudor curtly. "I have been attending the Squire,
+for some time, and I knew that sooner or later this would happen. The
+Vicar is not here?" He turned to Avery. "I promised to look in on him on
+my way back. Shall I find him at the Vicarage?"
+
+He was gone almost before she could answer, and Avery was left on the
+seat by the door, staring before her with a wildly throbbing heart, still
+asking herself with a curious insistence, "What of Piers? What of Piers?"
+
+Miss Whalley surveyed her with marked disapproval. She considered it
+great presumption on Avery's part to be upset by such a matter, and her
+attitude said as much as she walked with a stately air down the church
+and commenced her own self-appointed task of decorating the pulpit.
+
+Avery did not stir for several seconds; and when she did it was to go to
+the open door and stand there looking out into the spring sunshine. She
+felt strangely incapable of grasping what had happened. She could not
+realize that that dominant personality that had striven with her only
+yesterday--only yesterday--had passed utterly away in a few hours. It
+seemed incredible, beyond the bounds of possibility. Again and again Sir
+Beverley's speech and look returned to her. How emphatic he had been,
+how resolutely determined to attain his end! He had discharged his
+obligation, as he had said. He had paid his last debt. And in the
+payment of it he had laid upon her a burden which she had felt compelled
+to accept.
+
+Would it prove too much for her, she wondered? Had she yet again taken a
+false step that could never be retraced? Again the thought of Piers went
+through her, piercing her like a sword. Piers alone! Piers in trouble!
+She wished that Dr. Tudor had answered her question even though she
+regretted having asked it. How would he bear his solitude, she wondered
+with an aching heart; and a sudden great longing arose within her to go
+and comfort him, as she alone possessed the power to comfort. All
+selfish considerations departed with the thought. She realized
+poignantly all that Sir Beverley had visualized when he had told her
+that very soon his boy would be all alone. She knew fully why he had
+pressed upon her the task of helping Piers through his dark hour. He had
+known--as she also knew--how sore would be his need of help. And as
+this came home to her, her strength--that strength which was the patient
+building of all the years of her womanhood--came back to her, and she
+felt renewed and unafraid.
+
+She returned to her work with a steadfastness of purpose that even
+Miss Whalley viewed with distant admiration; working throughout the
+morning while the minute bell tolled overhead, rendering honour to the
+departed Squire.
+
+When she left at length to return to the Vicarage for the midday meal,
+her portion was done.
+
+But it was not till night came again that she found time to write the few
+brief words that she had been revolving in her mind all day long.
+
+"DEAR PIERS,
+
+"I am thinking of you constantly, and longing to help you in your
+trouble. Let me know if there is anything whatever that I can do, and I
+shall be ready at any time.
+
+"With love from Avery."
+
+Her face glowed softly over the writing of the note. She slipped out and
+posted it before she went to bed.
+
+He would get it in the morning, and he would be comforted. For he would
+understand. She was sure that he would understand.
+
+Of herself all through that second wakeful night she did not think at
+all, and so no doubts rose to torment her. She lay in a species of tired
+wonder. She was keeping her promise to the dead man, and in the keeping
+of it there was peace.
+
+The great square Abbey pew at the top of the church was empty
+throughout Easter Sunday. A heavy gloom reigned at the Vicarage. Avery
+and the children were in dire disgrace, and Mrs. Lorimer spent most of
+the day in tears. She could not agree with the Vicar that they were
+directly responsible for the Squire's death. Dr. Tudor had been very
+emphatic in assuring them that what had happened had been the
+inevitable outcome of a disease of long standing. But this assurance
+did not in any way modify the Vicar's attitude, and he decided that the
+five children should spend their time in solitary confinement until
+after the day fixed for the funeral.
+
+This was to be Easter Tuesday, and he himself had arranged to depart the
+day after--an event to which the entire household, with the single
+exception of Olive, looked forward with the greatest eagerness.
+
+No message came from Piers that night, and Avery wondered a little, but
+without uneasiness. He must have so very much to think of and do at such
+a time, she reflected. He would scarcely even have begun to feel the
+dreadful loneliness.
+
+But when the next day passed, and still no answer came, a vague anxiety
+awoke within her. Surely her message had reached him! Surely he must have
+read it! The Piers she knew would have dashed off some species of reply
+at once. How was it he delayed?
+
+The day of the funeral came, and the Easter flowers were all taken away.
+The Vicarage blinds were drawn, the bell tolled again, and Jeanie,
+weighed down with a dreadful sense of wickedness, lay face downwards on
+the schoolroom sofa and wept and wept.
+
+Avery was very anxious about her. The disgrace and punishment of the
+past few days had told upon her. She was sick with trouble and
+depression, and Avery could find no means of comforting her. She had
+meant herself to slip out and to go to the funeral for Piers' sake, but
+she felt she could not leave the child. So she sat with her in the
+darkened room, listening to her broken sobbing, aware that in the
+solitude of her room Gracie was crying too, and longing passionately to
+gather together all five of the luckless offenders and deliver them from
+their land of bondage.
+
+But there was to be no deliverance that day, nor any lightening of the
+burden. The funeral over, the Vicar returned and sent for each child
+separately to the study for prayer and admonition. Jeanie was the last to
+face this ordeal and before it was half over Avery was sent for also to
+find her lying on the study sofa in a dead faint.
+
+Avery's indignation was intense, but she could not give it vent. Even the
+Vicar was a little anxious, and when Avery's efforts succeeded at length
+in restoring her, he reprimanded Jeanie severely and reduced her once
+more to tears of uncontrollable distress.
+
+The long, dreary day came to an end at last, and the thought of a happier
+morrow comforted them all. But Avery, though she slept that night, was
+troubled by a dream that came to her over and over again throughout the
+long hours. She seemed to see Piers, as he had once described himself, a
+prisoner behind bars; and ever as she looked upon him he strove with
+gigantic efforts that were wholly vain, to force the bars asunder and
+come to her. She could not help him, could not even hear his voice. But
+the agony of his eyes haunted her--haunted her. She awoke at last in
+anguish of spirit, and slept no more.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+THE SUMMONS
+
+
+With the morning came a general feeling of relief. The Vicar was almost
+jocose, and Mrs. Lorimer made timid attempts to be mirthful though the
+parting with her children sorely tried her fortitude.
+
+The boys' spirits were subdued, but they burst forth uproariously as soon
+as the station-cab was well outside the gate. Ronald and Julian cheered
+themselves hoarse, and Pat scuttled off to the back of the house to
+release Mike from his chain to participate in the great rejoicing.
+
+There was no disguising the fact that everyone was pleased--everyone
+except Olive who went away to her father's study which had been left
+in her especial charge, and locked herself in for a morning of
+undisturbed reading.
+
+Avery could not feel joyful. The thought of Piers was still with her
+continually. She had heard so little of him--merely that he had followed
+his grandfather to the grave supported by the old family solicitor from
+Wardenhurst, Lennox Tudor, and a miscellaneous throng of neighbours; that
+he had borne himself without faltering, and had gone back to his solitude
+with no visible sign of suffering. Only indirectly had she heard this,
+and she yearned to know more.
+
+She knew that like herself he was practically devoid of relatives,--the
+last of his race,--a figure of splendid isolation that would appeal to
+many. She knew that as a wealthy and unmarried baronet, he would be
+greatly sought after and courted; made much of by the whole county, and
+half London as well. He was so handsome, so romantic, so altogether
+eligible in every way. Was it for this that he had left that note of
+hers unanswered? Did he think that now that his horizon had widened the
+nearer haven was hardly worth attaining? Above all, if he decided to
+take that which she had so spontaneously offered, would it satisfy him?
+Would he be content therewith? Had she not done better to have waited
+till he came again to ask of her that which she had till the day of his
+bereavement withheld?
+
+It was useless to torture herself with such questionings. Because of her
+promise to the dead, she had acted, and she could now but await the
+result of her action. If he never answered,--well, she would understand.
+
+So passed yet another day of silence.
+
+She was busy with the household accounts that night which Mrs. Lorimer in
+her woe had left in some confusion, and they kept her occupied till long
+after the children had gone to bed, so late indeed that the servants also
+had retired and she was left alone in the dining-room to wrestle with her
+difficulties.
+
+She found it next to impossible to straighten out the muddle, and she
+came at length reluctantly to the conclusion that it was beyond her
+powers. Wondering what the Reverend Stephen would have said to such a
+crime, she abstracted a few shillings from her own purse and fraudulently
+made up the deficit that had vexed Mrs. Lorimer's soul.
+
+"I can write and tell her now that it has come right," she murmured to
+herself, as she rose from the table.
+
+It was close upon eleven o'clock. The house was shuttered and silent. The
+stillness was intense; when suddenly, as she was in the act of lighting a
+candle, the electric bell pinged through the quiet of the night.
+
+She started and listened. The thought of Piers sprang instinctively to
+her mind. Could it be he? But surely even Piers would not come to her at
+this hour! It must be some parishioner in need of help.
+
+She turned to answer the summons, but ere she reached the hall it was
+repeated twice, with nervous insistence. She hastened to withdraw the
+bolts and open the door.
+
+At once a voice accosted her, and a sharp pang of disappointment or
+anxiety, she knew not which, went through her.
+
+"Mrs. Denys, is she here?" it said. "May I speak with her?"
+
+It was the unmistakable speech of a Frenchman. By the light of the
+hall-lamp, Avery saw the plump, anxious face and little pointed moustache
+of the speaker. He entered uninvited and stood before her.
+
+"Ah! But you are Mrs. Denys!" he exclaimed with relief. "_Madame_, I beg
+that you will pardon me! I am come to you in distress the most profound.
+You will listen to me, yes?"
+
+He regarded her with quick black eyes that both confided and besought.
+Avery's heart was beating in great throbs, she felt strangely breathless
+and uncertain of herself.
+
+"Where do you come from?" she said. "Who are you?"
+
+But she knew the answer before it came. "I am Victor, _madame_,--Victor
+Lagarde. I am the valet of _Monsieur Pierre_ almost since he was born. He
+calls me his _bonne_!" A brief smile touched his worried countenance and
+was gone. "And now I am come to you, _madame_,--not by his desire. _Mais
+non_, he does not know even that I am here. But because he is in great,
+great misery, and I cannot console him. I have not the power. And he is
+all alone--all alone. And I fear--I fear--" He broke off with eloquent
+hands outspread. Avery saw the tears standing in his eyes.
+
+She closed the door softly. "What is it?" she said. "Tell me what
+you fear!"
+
+He looked at her, mastering his emotion with difficulty.
+"_Madame, Monsieur Pierre_ has sentiments the most profound. He
+feel--_passionnement_. He try to hide his sentiments from me. But me--I
+know. He sit alone in the great hall and look--and look. He sleep--never
+at all. He will not even go to bed. And in the great hall is an
+_escritoire_, and in it a drawer." Victor's voice sank mysteriously.
+"To-night--when he think he is alone--he open that drawer, and I see
+inside. It hold a revolver, _madame_. And he look at it, touch it, and
+then shake his head. But I am so afraid--so afraid. So--_enfin_--in my
+trouble I come to you. You have the influence with him, is it not so? You
+have--the power to console. _Madame--chere madame_--will you not come
+and speak with him for five little minutes? Just to encourage him,
+_madame_, in his sadness; for he is all alone!"
+
+The tears ran down Victor's troubled face as he made his earnest appeal.
+He mopped them openly, making no secret of his distress which was too
+pathetic to be ludicrous.
+
+Avery looked at him in dismay. She knew not what to say or do; and even
+as she stood irresolute the hall-clock struck eleven through the silence
+of the house.
+
+Victor watched her anxiously. "_Madame_ is married," he insinuated. "She
+can please herself, no? And _Monsieur Pierre_--"
+
+"Wait a minute, please!" she interrupted gently. "I want to think."
+
+She went to the unlatched door and stood with her face to the night. She
+felt as if a call had come to her, but somehow--for no selfish
+reason--she hesitated to answer. Some unknown influence held her back.
+
+Victor came softly up and stood close to her. "_Madame_," he said in a
+whisper, "I tell you a secret--I, Victor, who have known _Monsieur
+Pierre_ from his infancy. He loves you, _madame_. He loves you much.
+_C'est la grande passion_ which comes only once in a life--only once."
+
+The low words went through her, seeming to sink into her very heart. She
+made a slight, involuntary gesture as of wincing. There was something in
+them that was almost more than she could bear.
+
+She stood motionless with the chill night air blowing in upon her, trying
+to collect her thoughts, trying to bring herself to face and consider the
+matter before she made her decision. But it was useless. Those last words
+had awaked within her a greater force than she could control. From the
+moment of their utterance she was driven irresistibly, the decision was
+no longer her own.
+
+Piers was alone. Piers loved her--wanted her. His soul cried to hers
+through the darkness. She saw him again as in her dream wrestling with
+those cruel iron bars, striving with vain agony to reach her. And all
+doubt went from her like a cloud.
+
+She turned to Victor with grey eyes shining and resolute. "Let us
+go!" she said.
+
+She took a cloak from a peg in the hall, lowered the light, took the key
+from the lock, and passed out into the dark.
+
+Victor followed her closely, softly latching the door behind him. He had
+known from the outset that the English _madame_ would not be able to
+resist his appeal. Was not _Monsieur Pierre_ as handsome and as desirable
+as though he had been a prince of the blood? He walked a pace behind her,
+saying no word, fully satisfied with the success of his mission.
+
+Avery went with swift unerring feet; yet it seemed to her afterwards as
+if she had moved in a dream, for only the vaguest impression of that
+journey through the night remained with her. It was dark, but the
+darkness did not hinder her. She went as if drawn irresistibly--even
+against her will. At the back of her mind hovered the consciousness that
+she was doing a rash thing, but the woman's heart in it was too deeply
+stirred to care for minor considerations. The picture of Piers in his
+lonely hall hung ever before her, drawing her on.
+
+He had not sent for her. She knew now that he would not send. Yet she
+went to him on winged feet. For she knew that his need of her was great.
+
+There was no star in the sky and the night wind moaned in the trees as
+they went up the long chestnut avenue to the Abbey. The loneliness was
+great. It folded them in on every hand. It seemed to hang like a pall
+about the great dim building massed against the sky, as though the whole
+place lay beneath a spell of mourning.
+
+Emerging from the deep shadow of the trees, she paused for the first time
+in uncertainty. Victor pressed forward instantly to her side.
+
+"We will enter by the library, _madame_. See, I will show you the way.
+From there to the great hall, it is only a few steps. And you will find
+him there. I leave you alone to find him."
+
+He led her across a dew-drenched lawn and up a flight of steps to the
+door of a conservatory which gave inwards at his touch.
+
+Obedient to his gesture, Avery entered. Her heart was beating hard and
+fast. She was conscious of a wild misgiving which had not assailed her
+during all the journey thither. What if he did not want her after all?
+What if her coming were unwelcome?
+
+Silently Victor piloted her, and she could not choose but follow, though
+she felt sick with the sudden apprehension that had sprung to life as she
+left the sleeping world outside. She seemed to be leaving her freedom,
+all she valued, behind her as she entered this shadowy prison. And all
+for what? Her quivering heart could find no answer.
+
+There was a heavy scent of hothouse flowers in the air. She almost
+gasped for breath in the exotic fragrance of the unseen blossoms. A
+strong impulse possessed her to turn and flee by the way she had come.
+
+"_Madame!_" It was Victor's voice, low and entreating. He had opened an
+inner door, and stood waiting for her.
+
+Had he seen her wavering resolution, she wondered? Was he trying to
+hasten her ere it should wholly evaporate--to close the way of escape
+ere she could avail herself of it? Or was he anxious solely on Piers'
+account--lest after all she might arrive too late?
+
+She could not determine, but the urgency of his whisper moved her. She
+passed him and entered the room beyond.
+
+It was dimly lighted by a single shaded electric lamp that illumined a
+writing-table. She saw that it was the ancient library of the Abbey, a
+wonderful apartment which she knew to contain an almost priceless
+collection of old parchments. It was lined with bookshelves and had the
+musty smell inseparable from aged bindings.
+
+Victor motioned her silently to a door at the further end, but before
+either of them could reach it there came a sudden footfall on the other
+side, the handle turned sharply, and it opened.
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed Victor, and fell back as one caught red-handed in a
+crime.
+
+Avery stood quite motionless with her heart beating up against her
+throat, and a tragic sense of trespass overwhelming her. She could not
+find a single word to say, so sudden and so terrible was the ordeal. She
+could only wait in silence.
+
+Piers stood still as one transfixed, with eyes that blazed sleepless out
+of a drawn, pale face; then at length with a single snap of the fingers
+imperiously he dismissed Victor by the still open door.
+
+It closed discreetly upon the Frenchman's exit, and then only did Piers
+move forward; he came to Avery, drew her to a chair, knelt mutely down
+before her, and bowed his head upon her lap.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+"LA GRANDE PASSION"
+
+
+She spoke to him at last, half-frightened by his silence, yet by his
+attitude wholly reassured. For he wanted her still, of that no doubt
+remained. His hands were clasped behind her. He could have held her in
+his arms; but he did not. He only knelt there at her feet in utter
+silence, his black head pillowed on her hands.
+
+"Piers!" she said. "Piers! Let me help you!"
+
+He groaned in answer, and she felt a great shiver run through him. She
+knew intuitively that he was battling for self-control and dared not for
+the moment show his face.
+
+"You--can't," he said at last.
+
+"But I think I can," she urged gently. "It isn't so very long ago that
+you wanted me."
+
+"I was an infernal blackguard to tell you so!" he made answer.
+
+And then suddenly his arms tightened about her, and he held her fast.
+"That you--you, Avery,--should come to me--like this!" he said.
+
+She freed one of her hands and laid it on his bent head. "Shall I tell
+you what made me come, Piers?"
+
+He shook his head in silence, but there was passion in the holding
+of his arms.
+
+For a space he continued to hold her so, speaking no word, and through
+his silence there came to her the quick, fierce beat of his heart. Then
+at length very suddenly, almost with violence, he flung his arms wide
+and started to his feet.
+
+"Avery," he said, "you were a saint to come to me like this. I shan't
+forget it ever. But there's nothing--nothing you can do, except leave me
+to my own devices. It's only just at first, you know, that the loneliness
+seems so--awful." His voice shook unexpectedly; he swung round away from
+her and walked to the end of the room.
+
+He came back almost immediately and stood before her. "Victor was a
+criminal fool to bring you here. He meant well though. He always does.
+That note of yours--I ought to have answered it. I was just coming in
+here to do so. I shouldn't have kept you waiting so long, but
+somehow--somehow--" Again, in spite of him, his voice quivered. He turned
+sharply and walked to the fireplace, leaned his arms upon it, and stood
+so, his back to her, his head bent.
+
+"It was so awfully good of you," he went on after a moment. "You always
+have been--awfully good. My grandfather realized that, you know. I think
+he told you so, didn't he? He wasn't really sorry that I wouldn't marry
+Ina Rose. By the way, she is engaged to Dick Guyes already, so there was
+not much damage done in that direction. I told you it was nothing but a
+game, didn't I? You didn't quite believe me, what?"
+
+It came to her that he was talking to gain time, that he was trying to
+muster strength to give the lie to the passion that had throbbed in the
+holding of his arms, that for some reason he deemed it incumbent upon him
+to mask his feelings and hide from her the misery that had driven Victor
+in search of her.
+
+She rose quietly and moved across the room till she stood beside him.
+"Piers," she said, "tell me what is wrong!"
+
+He stiffened at her approach, straightened himself, faced her.
+"Avery," he said, "do you know, dear, it would be better if you went
+straight back again? I hate to say it. It was so dear of you,
+so--so--great of you to come. But--no, there's nothing wrong,--nothing
+that is, that hasn't been wrong for ages. Fact is, I'm not fit to
+speak to you, never have been; far less make love to you. And I was a
+cur and a brute to do it. I've had a bit of a shake-up lately. It's
+made me feel my responsibilities, see things as they are. I've got an
+awful lot to see to just now. I'm going to work mighty hard. I mustn't
+think of--other things."
+
+He stopped. He was looking at her, looking at her, with the red fire of
+passion kindling in his eyes, a gleam so fierce and so insistent that she
+was forced to lower her own. It was as if his soul cried out to her all
+that he restrained his lips from uttering.
+
+He saw her instinctive avoidance of his gaze, and turned away from her,
+leaning again upon the mantelpiece as if spent.
+
+"I can't help it, Avery. I'm so dog-tired, and I can't sleep. I'm
+horribly sorry, but I'm nothing but a brute-beast to-night.
+Really--really--you had better go."
+
+There was desperation in his voice. He bowed his head upon his arms, and
+she saw that his hands were clenched.
+
+But she could not leave him so. That inner urging that had impelled her
+thither warned her to remain, even against her own judgment, even against
+her will. The memory of Victor's fears came back to her. She could not
+turn and go.
+
+"My dear boy," she said, speaking very gently, "do you think I don't know
+that you are miserable, lonely, wretched? That is why I am here!"
+
+"God knows how lonely!" he whispered.
+
+Her heart stirred within her at the desolation of the words. "Nearly all
+of us go through it some time," she said gently. "And if there isn't a
+friend to stand by, it's very hard to bear. That is the part I want to
+play--if you will let me. Won't you treat me as a friend?"
+
+But Piers neither moved nor spoke. With his head still upon his arms he
+stood silent.
+
+She drew nearer to him. "Piers, I think I understand. I think you are a
+little afraid of going too far, of--of--" her voice faltered a little in
+spite of her--"of hurting my feelings. Is that it? Because,--my
+dear,--you needn't be afraid any longer. If you really think I can make
+you happy, I am willing--quite willing--to try."
+
+The words were spoken, and with them she offered all she had, freely,
+generously, with a quick love that was greater possibly than even she
+realized.
+
+She was standing close to him waiting for him to turn and clasp her in
+his arms, as he had so nearly clasped her once against her will. But
+seconds passed and he did not move, and a cold foreboding began to knock
+at her heart lest after all--lest after all--his love for her had waned.
+
+He stirred at last, just as she was on the point of turning from him,
+stretched out a groping hand that found and drew her to his side. But
+still he did not look at her or so much as raise his head.
+
+He spoke after a moment in a choked voice that seemed to be wrung from
+him by sheer physical torture. "Avery, don't--don't tempt me.
+I--daren't!"
+
+The anguish of the words went through her, banishing all thought of
+anything else. Very suddenly she knew that he was fighting a desperate
+battle for her sake, that he was striving with all the strength that was
+in him to set her happiness before his own. And something that was
+greater than pity entered into her with the knowledge, something so great
+as to be all-possessing, compelling her to instant action.
+
+She slipped her arm about his bent shoulders with a gesture of infinite
+tenderness. "Piers--dear boy, what is it?" she said softly. "Is there
+some trouble in your past--something you can't bear to speak of?
+Remember, I am not a girl, I may understand--some things--better than
+you think."
+
+She felt his hold upon her tighten almost convulsively, but for a while
+he made no answer.
+
+Then at length slowly he raised his head and looked at her. "Do
+you--really--think the past matters?" he said.
+
+She met his eyes with their misery and their longing, and a tremor of
+uncertainty went through her.
+
+"Tell me, Avery!" he insisted. "If you felt yourself able to get away
+from old burdens, and if--if there was no earthly reason why they should
+hamper your future--" He broke off, and again his arm tightened. "It's
+damnable that they should!" he muttered savagely.
+
+"My dear, I don't know how to answer you," she said. "Are--you afraid to
+be open with me? Do you think I shouldn't understand?"
+
+His eyes fell abruptly. "I am quite sure," he said, "that it would be
+easier for me to give you up." And with that he suddenly set her free and
+stood up before her straight and stiff. "Let me see you home!" he said.
+
+They faced one another in the dimness, and Avery marked afresh the
+weariness of his face. He looked like a man who had come through many
+days and nights of suffering.
+
+He glanced up as she did not speak. "Shall we go?" he said.
+
+But Avery stood hesitating, asking herself if this could indeed be the
+end, if the impulse that had drawn her thither had been after all a
+mistaken one, or if even yet it might not carry her further than she had
+ever thought to go.
+
+He turned towards the conservatory door by which she had entered, and
+quietly opened it. A soft wind blew through to her, laden with the scent
+of the wet earth and a thousand opening buds. It seemed to carry the
+promise of eternal hope on unseen wings straight to her heart.
+
+Slowly she followed him across the room, reached him, passed through into
+the scented darkness. A few steps more and she would have been in the
+open air, but she was uncertain of the way. The place was too dim for her
+to see it. She paused for him to guide her.
+
+The door closed behind her; she heard it softly swing on its hinges, and
+then came his light footfall close to her.
+
+"Straight on!" he said, and his voice sounded oddly cold and constrained.
+"There are three steps at the end. Be careful how you go! Perhaps you
+would rather wait while I fetch a light."
+
+His tone hurt her subtly, wounding her more deeply than she had realized
+that he had it in his power to wound.
+
+She moved forward blindly with a strangled sensation at her throat and a
+rush of hot tears in her eyes. She had never dreamed that Piers--the
+warm-hearted, the eager--had it in him to treat her so.
+
+The instinct to escape awoke within her. She quickened her steps and
+reached the further door. Before her lay the open night, immense and
+quiet and very dark. She pressed forward, hoping he would not follow,
+longing only for solitude and silence.
+
+But in her agitation she forgot his warning, forgot to tread warily, and
+missed her footing on the steps. She slipped with a sharp exclamation and
+went down, catching vainly at the door-post to save herself.
+
+Piers exclaimed also, and sprang forward. His arms were about her before
+she reached the ground. He lifted her bodily ere she could recover her
+balance; and suddenly she knew that with the touch of her the fire of his
+passion had burst into scorching flame--knew herself powerless--a woman
+in the hold of her captor.
+
+For he held her so fast that she gasped for breath, and with her head
+pressed back against his shoulder, he kissed her on the lips, fiercely,
+violently, hungrily--kissed her eyes, her hair, and again her lips,
+sealing them closely with his own, making protest impossible. Neither
+could she resist him, for he held her gathered up against his heart,
+bearing her whole weight with a strength that mocked her weakness,
+compelling her to lie at his mercy while the wild storm of his passion
+swept on its way.
+
+She was as one caught in the molten stream of a volcano, and
+carried by the fiery current that seethed all about her, consuming
+her with its heat.
+
+Once when his lips left hers she tried to whisper his name, to call him
+back from his madness; but her voice was gone. She could only gasp and
+gasp till with an odd, half-savage laugh he silenced her again with those
+burning kisses that made her feel that he had stormed his way to the last
+and inner sanctuary of her soul, depriving her even of the right to
+dispute his overwhelming possession.
+
+Later it seemed to her that she must have been near to fainting, for
+though she knew that he bore her inwards from the open door she could not
+so much as raise a hand in protest. She was utterly spent and almost
+beyond caring, so complete had been his conquest. When he set her on her
+feet she tottered, clinging to him nervelessly for support.
+
+He kept his arm about her, but his hold was no longer insistent. She was
+aware of his passion still; it seemed to play around her like a lambent
+flame; but the first fierce flare was past. He spoke to her at last in a
+voice that was low but not without the arrogance of the conqueror.
+
+"Are you very angry with me, I wonder?"
+
+She did not answer him, for still she could not.
+
+He went on, a vein of recklessness running through his speech. "It won't
+make any difference if you are. Do you understand? I've tried to let you
+go, but I can't. I must have you or die."
+
+He paused a moment, and it seemed as if the tornado of his passion were
+sweeping back again; but, curiously, he checked it.
+
+"That's how it is with me, Avery," he said. "The fates have played a
+ghastly joke on me, but you are mine in spite of it. You came to tell me
+so; didn't you?"
+
+Was there a note of pleading in his voice? She fancied so; but still she
+could not speak in answer. She leaned against him with every pulse
+throbbing. She dared not turn her face to his.
+
+"Are you afraid of me, Avery?" he said, and this time surely she heard a
+faint echo of that boyish humour that had first won her. "Because it's
+all right, dear," he told her softly. "I've got myself in hand now. You
+know, I couldn't hold you in my arms just then and not--not kiss you. You
+don't hate me for it, do you? You--understand?"
+
+Yes, she understood. Yet she felt as if he had raised a barrier between
+them which nothing could ever take away. She tried to ignore it, but
+could not. The glaring fact that he had not cared how much or how little
+she had desired those savage kisses of his had begun already to torment
+her, and she knew that she would carry the scorching memory of those
+moments with her for the rest of her life.
+
+She drew herself slowly from him. "I am going now," she said.
+
+He put out a hand that trembled and laid it on her shoulder. "If I will
+let you go, Avery!" he said, and she was again aware of the leaping of
+the flame that had scarcely died down but a moment before.
+
+She straightened herself and resolutely faced him. "I am going,
+Piers," she said.
+
+His hand tightened sharply. He caught his breath for a few tense seconds.
+Then very slowly his hold relaxed; his hand fell. "You will let me see
+you back," he said, and she knew by his voice that he was putting strong
+force upon himself.
+
+She turned. "No. I will go alone."
+
+He did not move. "Please, Avery!" he said.
+
+Her heart gave a quick throb at the low-spoken words. She paused almost
+involuntarily, realizing with a great rush of thankfulness that he would
+not stir a step to follow unless she gave him leave.
+
+For an instant she stood irresolute. Then: "Come if you wish!" she said.
+
+She heard him move, and herself passed on, descending the steps into the
+dewy garden with again that odd feeling of unreality, almost as if she
+walked in a dream.
+
+He came behind her, silent as a shadow, and not till she deliberately
+waited for him did he overtake and walk beside her.
+
+No words passed between them as they went. They seemed to move through a
+world of shadows,--a spell-bound, waiting world. And gradually, as if a
+soothing hand had been laid upon her, Avery felt the wild tumult at her
+heart subside. She remembered that he had refrained himself almost at her
+first word, and slowly her confidence came back. He had appealed to her
+to understand, and she could not let his appeal go wholly unanswered.
+
+As they passed at length through the gate that led into the Vicarage
+lane, she spoke. "Piers, I am not angry."
+
+"Aren't you?" he said, and by the eager relief of his voice she knew that
+her silence had been hard to bear.
+
+She put out a hand to him as they walked. "But, Piers, that--is not the
+way to make me love you."
+
+"I know--I know," he said quickly; and then haltingly: "I've been--so
+beastly lonely, Avery. Make allowances for me--forgive me!"
+
+He had not taken her hand; she slipped it into his. "I do," she said
+simply. She felt his fingers close tensely, but in a moment they opened
+again and set her free.
+
+He did not utter another word, merely walked on beside her till they
+reached the Vicarage gate. She thought he would have left her there, but
+he did not. They went up the drive together to the porch.
+
+From his kennel at the side of the house Mike barked a sharp challenge
+that turned into an unmistakable note of welcome as they drew near. Avery
+silenced him with a reassuring word.
+
+She found the key, and in the darkness of the porch she began to fumble
+for the lock.
+
+Piers stooped. "Let me!"
+
+She gave him the key, and as she stood up again she noted the brightness
+of the fanlight over the floor. She thought that she had lowered the
+light at leaving; she had certainly intended to do so.
+
+Very softly Piers opened the door. It swung noiselessly back upon its
+hinges, and the full light smote upon them.
+
+In the same instant a slim, white figure came calmly forward through the
+hall and stopped beneath the lamp.
+
+Olive Lorimer, pale, severe, with fixed, accusing eyes, stood
+confronting them.
+
+"Mrs. Denys!" she said, in accents of frozen surprise.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES
+
+
+The encounter was so amazing, so utterly unlooked for, that Avery had a
+moment of downright consternation. The child's whole air and expression
+were so exactly reminiscent of her father that she almost felt as if she
+stood before the Vicar himself--a culprit caught in a guilty act.
+
+She looked at Olive without words, and Olive looked straight back at her
+with that withering look of the righteous condemning the ungodly which so
+often regarded a dumb but rebellious congregation through the Vicar's
+stern eyes.
+
+Piers, however, was not fashioned upon timid lines, and he stepped into
+the hall without the faintest sign of embarrassment.
+
+"Hullo, little girl!" he said. "Why aren't you in bed?"
+
+The accusing eyes turned upon him. Olive seemed to swell with
+indignation. "I was in bed long ago," she made answer, still in those
+frozen tones. "May I ask what you are doing here, Mr. Evesham?"
+
+"I?" said Piers jauntily. "Now what do you suppose?"
+
+"I cannot imagine," the child said.
+
+"Not really?" said Piers. "Well, perhaps when you are a little older
+your imagination will develop. In the meantime, if you are a wise
+little girl, you will run back to bed and leave your elders to settle
+their own affairs."
+
+Olive drew herself up with dignity. "It is not my intention to go so
+long as you are in the house," she said with great distinctness.
+
+"Indeed!" said Piers. "And why not?"
+
+He spoke with the utmost quietness, but Avery caught the faintest tremor
+in his voice that warned her that Olive was treading dangerous ground.
+
+She hastened to intervene. "But of course you are going now," she said to
+him. "It is bedtime for us all. Good-night! And thank you for walking
+home with me!"
+
+Her own tone was perfectly normal. She turned to him with outstretched
+hand, but he put it gently aside.
+
+"One minute!" he said. "I should like an answer to my question first. Why
+are you so determined to see me out of the house?"
+
+He looked straight at Olive as he spoke, no longer careless of mien, but
+implacable as granite.
+
+Olive, however, was wholly undismayed. She was the only one of the
+Vicar's children who had never had cause to feel a twinge of fear. "You
+had better ask yourself that question," she said, in her cool young
+treble. "You probably know the answer better than I do."
+
+Piers' expression changed. For a single instant he looked furious, but he
+mastered himself almost immediately. "It's a lucky thing for you that you
+are not my little girl," he observed grimly. "If you were, you should
+have the slapping of your life to-night. As it is,--well, you have asked
+me for an explanation of my presence here, and you shall have one. I am
+here in the capacity of escort to Mrs. Denys. Have you any fault to find
+with that?"
+
+Olive returned his look steadily with her cold grey eyes while she
+considered his words. She seemed momentarily at a loss for an answer, but
+Piers' first remarks were scarcely of a character to secure goodwill or
+allay suspicion. She rapidly made up her mind.
+
+"I shall tell Miss Whalley in the morning," she said. "My father said I
+was to go to her if anything went wrong." She added, with a malevolent
+glance towards Avery, "I suppose you know that Mrs. Denys is under notice
+to leave at the end of her month?"
+
+Piers glanced at Avery too--a glance of swift interrogation. She nodded
+very slightly in answer.
+
+He looked again at Olive with eyes that gleamed in a fashion that few
+could have met without quailing.
+
+"Is she indeed?" he said. "I venture to predict that she will leave
+before then. If you are anxious to impart news to Miss Whalley, you may
+tell her also that Mrs. Denys is going to be my wife, and that the
+marriage will take place--" he looked at Avery again and all the hardness
+went out of his face--"just as soon as she will permit."
+
+Dead silence followed the announcement. Avery's face was pale, but there
+was a faint smile at her lips. She met Piers' look without a tremor. She
+even drew slightly nearer to him; and he, instantly responding, slipped a
+swift hand through her arm.
+
+Olive, sternly judicial, stood regarding them in silence, for perhaps a
+score of seconds. And then, still undismayed, she withdrew her forces in
+good order from the field.
+
+"In that case," she said, with the air of one closing a discussion,
+"there is nothing further to be said. I suppose Mrs. Denys wishes to
+be Lady Evesham. My father told me she was an adventuress. I see he
+was right."
+
+She went away with this parting shot, stepping high and holding her
+head poised loftily--an absurd parody of the Vicar in his most
+clerical moments.
+
+Avery gave a little hysterical gasp of laughter as she passed out of
+sight.
+
+Piers' arm was about her in a moment. He held her against his heart.
+"What a charming child, what?" he murmured.
+
+She hid her face on his shoulder. "I think myself she was in the right,"
+she said, still half laughing. "Piers, you must go."
+
+"In a moment. Let me hear from your own dear lips first that you are
+not--not angry?" He spoke the words softly into her ear. There was only
+tenderness in the holding of his arms.
+
+"I am not," she whispered back.
+
+"Nor sorry?" urged Piers.
+
+She turned her face a little towards him. "No, dear, not a bit
+sorry; glad!"
+
+He held her more closely but with reverence. "Avery, you don't--love
+me, do you?"
+
+"Of course I do!" she said.
+
+"There can't be any 'of course' about it," he declared almost fiercely.
+"I've been a positive brute to you. Avery--Avery, I'll never be a brute
+to you again."
+
+And there he stopped, for her arms were suddenly about his neck, her lips
+raised in utter surrender to his.
+
+"Oh, Piers," she said in a voice that thrilled him through and through,
+"do you think I would have less of your love--even if it hurts me? It is
+the greatest thing that has ever come into my life."
+
+He held her head between his hands and looked into her eyes of perfect
+trust. "Avery! Avery!" he said.
+
+"I mean it!" she told him earnestly. "I have been drawing nearer to you
+all the while--in spite of myself--though I tried so hard to hold back.
+Piers, my past life is a dream, and this--this is the awaking. You asked
+me--a long while ago--if the past mattered. I couldn't answer you then. I
+was still half-asleep. But now--now you have worked the miracle--my heart
+is awake, dear, and I will answer you. The past is nothing to you or me.
+It matters--not--one--jot!"
+
+Her words throbbed into the silence of his kiss. He held her long and
+closely. Once--twice--he tried to speak to her and failed. In the end he
+gave himself up mutely to the rapture of her arms. But his own wild
+passion had sunk below the surface. He sought no more than she offered.
+
+"Say good-bye to me now!" she whispered at length; and he kissed her
+again closely, lingeringly, and let her go.
+
+She stood in the doorway as he passed into the night, and his last sight
+of her was thus, silhouetted against the darkness, a tall, gracious
+figure, bending forward to discern him in the dimness.
+
+He went back to his lonely home, back to the echoing emptiness, the
+listening dark. He entered again the great hall where Sir Beverley had
+been wont to sit and wait for him.
+
+Victor was on the watch. He glided apologetically forward with shining,
+observant eyes upon his young master's weary face.
+
+"_Monsieur Pierre_!" he said insinuatingly.
+
+Piers looked at him heavily. "Well?"
+
+"I have put some refreshment for you in the dining-room. It is
+more--more comfortable," said Victor, gently indicating the open
+door. "Will you not--when you have eaten--go to bed, _mon cher, et
+peut-etre dormir_?"
+
+Very wistfully the little man proffered his suggestion. His eyes followed
+Piers' movements with the dumb worship of an animal.
+
+"Oh yes, I'll go to bed," said Piers.
+
+He turned towards the dining-room and entered. There was no elation in
+his step; rather he walked as a man who carries a heavy burden, and
+Victor marked the fact with eyes of keen anxiety.
+
+He followed him in and poured out a glass of wine, setting it before him
+with a professional adroitness that did not conceal his solicitude.
+
+Piers picked up the glass almost mechanically, and in doing so caught
+sight of some letters lying on the table.
+
+"Oh, damn!" he said wearily. "How many more?"
+
+There were bundles of them on the study writing-table. They poured in by
+every post.
+
+Victor groaned commiseratingly. "I will take them away, yes?" he
+suggested. "You will read them in the morning--when you have slept."
+
+"Yes, take 'em away!" said Piers. "Stay a minute! What's that top one?
+I'll look at that."
+
+He took up the envelope. It was addressed in a man's square, firm writing
+to "Piers Evesham, Esq., Rodding Abbey."
+
+"Someone who doesn't know," murmured Piers, and slit it open with a sense
+of relief. Some of the letters of condolence that he had received had
+been as salt rubbed into a wound.
+
+He took out the letter and glanced at the signature: "Edmund Crowther!"
+
+Suddenly a veil seemed to be drawn across his eyes. He looked up with a
+sharp, startled movement, and through a floating mist he saw his
+grandmother's baffling smile from the canvas on the wall. The blood was
+singing in his ears. He clenched his hands involuntarily. Crowther! He
+had forgotten Crowther! And Crowther knew--how much?
+
+But he had Crowther's promise of secrecy, so--after all--what had he to
+fear? Nothing--nothing! Yet he felt as if a devil were laughing somewhere
+in the room. They had caught him, they had caught him, there at the very
+gates of deliverance. They were dragging him back to his place of
+torment. He could hear the clanking of the chains which he had so nearly
+burst asunder, could feel them coiling cold about his heart. For he also
+was bound by a promise, the keeping of which meant utter destruction to
+all he held good in life.
+
+And not that alone. It meant the rending in pieces of that which was
+holy, the trampling into the earth of that sacred gift which had only
+now been bestowed upon him. It meant the breaking of a woman's
+heart--that of the only woman in the world, the woman he worshipped, body
+and soul, the woman who in spite of herself had come to love him also.
+
+He flung up his arms with a wild gesture. The torment was more than he
+could bear.
+
+"No!" he cried. "No!" And it was as if he cried out of the midst of a
+burning, fiery furnace. "I'm damned--I'm damned if I will!"
+
+_"Monsieur Pierre! Monsieur Pierre!"_ It was Victor's voice beside him,
+full of anxious remonstrance.
+
+He looked round with dazed eyes. His arms fell to his sides. "All right,
+my good Victor; I'm not mad," he said. "Don't be scared! Did you ever
+hear of a chap called Damocles? He's an ancestor of mine, and history has
+a funny fashion of repeating itself. But there'll be a difference this
+time all the same. He couldn't eat his dinner for fear of a naked sword
+falling on his head. But I'm going to eat mine--whatever happens; and
+enjoy it too."
+
+He raised his glass aloft with a reckless laugh. His eyes sought those of
+the woman on the wall with a sparkle of bitter humour. He made her a
+brief, defiant bow.
+
+"And you, madam, may look on--and smile!" he said.
+
+He drank the wine without tasting it and swung round to depart. And
+again, as he went, it seemed to him that somewhere near at hand--possibly
+in his own soul--a devil laughed and gibed.
+
+Yet when he lay down at length, he slept for many hours in dreamless,
+absolute repose--as a voyager who after long buffeting with wind and tide
+has come at last into the quiet haven of his desire.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE PLACE OF TORMENT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DEAD SEA FRUIT
+
+
+"I doubt if the County will call," said Miss Whalley, "unless the fact
+that Sir Piers is to stand for the division weighs with them. And Colonel
+Rose's patronage may prove an added inducement. He probably knows that
+the young man has simply married this Mrs. Denys out of pique, since his
+own charming daughter would have none of him. I must say that personally
+I am not surprised that Miss Rose should prefer marriage with a man of
+such sterling worth as Mr. Guyes. Sir Piers may be extremely handsome and
+fascinating; but no man with those eyes could possibly make a good
+husband. I hear it is to be a very grand affair indeed, dear Mrs.
+Lorimer,--far preferable in my opinion to the hole-in-a-corner sort of
+ceremony that took place this morning."
+
+"They both of them wished it to be as quiet as possible," murmured Mrs.
+Lorimer. "She being a widow and he--poor lad!--in such deep mourning."
+
+"Indecent haste, I call it," pronounced Miss Whalley severely, "with the
+earth still fresh on his poor dear grandfather's grave! A May wedding
+too! Most unsuitable!"
+
+"He said he was so lonely," pleaded Mrs. Lorimer gently. "And after all
+it was what his grandfather wished,--so he told me."
+
+Miss Whalley gave a high-bred species of snort. "My dear Mrs. Lorimer,
+that young man would tell you anything. Why, his grandfather was an
+inveterate woman-hater, as all the world knows."
+
+"I know," agreed Mrs. Lorimer. "That was really what made it so
+remarkable. I assure you, Miss Whalley,--Piers came to me only last night
+and told me with tears in his eyes--that just at the last poor Sir
+Beverley said to him: 'I believe you've pitched on the right woman after
+all, lad. Anyway, she cares for you--more than ordinary. Marry her as
+quick as you can--and my blessing on you both!' They were almost the last
+words he spoke," said Mrs. Lorimer, wiping her own eyes. "I thought it
+was so dear of Piers to tell me."
+
+"No doubt," sniffed Miss Whalley. "He is naturally anxious to secure
+your goodwill. But I wonder very much what point of view the dear Vicar
+takes of the matter. If I mistake not, he took Mrs. Denys's measure some
+time ago."
+
+"Did he?" said Mrs. Lorimer vaguely.
+
+Miss Whalley looked annoyed. The Vicar's wife obviously lacked sufficient
+backbone to quarrel on the subject. She was wont to say that she detested
+invertebrate women.
+
+"I think the Vicar was not altogether surprised," Mrs. Lorimer went on,
+in her gentle, conversational way. "You see, Piers had been somewhat
+assiduous for some time. I myself, however, did not fancy that dear Avery
+wished to encourage him."
+
+"Pooh!" said Miss Whalley. "It was the chance of her life."
+
+A faint flush rose in Mrs. Lorimer's face. "She is a dear girl," she
+said. "I don't know what I shall do without her."
+
+"The children are getting older now," said Miss Whalley. "Jeanie ought to
+be able to take her place to a very great extent."
+
+"My little Jeanie is not strong," murmured Mrs. Lorimer. "She does what
+she can, but her lessons tire her so. She never has much energy left,
+poor child. She has not managed to finish her holiday-task yet, and it
+occupies all her spare time. I told the Vicar that I really did not think
+she was equal to it. But--" the sentence went into a heavy sigh, and
+further words failed.
+
+"The Vicar is always very judicious with his children," observed
+Miss Whalley.
+
+"He does not err on the side of mercy," said his wife pathetically. "And
+he does not seem to realize that Jeanie lacks the vitality of the
+others,--though how they ever got through their tasks I can't imagine. It
+must have been dear Avery's doing. She is a genius with children. They
+all managed it but poor Jeanie. How ever we shall get on without her I
+cannot think."
+
+"But she was under notice to go, I am told," observed Miss Whalley.
+
+"Yes,--yes, I know. But I had hoped that the Vicar might relent. You see,
+she has been invaluable to us in so many ways. However, I hope when she
+comes back that we shall see a great deal of her. She is so good to the
+children and they adore her."
+
+"I doubt if she will have much time to bestow upon them if the County
+really do decide to accept her," remarked Miss Whalley. "You forget that
+she is now Lady Evesham, my dear Mrs. Lorimer, and little likely to
+remember old friends now that she has attained the summit of her
+ambition."
+
+"I don't think Avery would forget us if she became a royal princess,"
+said Mrs. Lorimer, with a confidence that Miss Whalley found peculiarly
+irritating.
+
+"Ah well, we shall see, we shall see!" she said. "I for one shall be
+extremely surprised if she elects to remain on the same intimate footing.
+From mother's help at the Vicarage to Lady Evesham of Rodding Abbey is a
+considerable leap, and she will be scarcely human if it does not turn
+her head."
+
+But Mrs. Lorimer merely smiled and said no more. She knew how little
+Avery was drawn by pomp and circumstance, but she would not vaunt her
+knowledge before one so obviously incapable of understanding. In silence
+she let the subject pass.
+
+"And where is the honeymoon to be spent?" enquired Miss Whalley, who was
+there to glean information and did not mean to go empty away.
+
+But Mrs. Lorimer shook her head. "Even I don't know that. Piers had a
+whim to go just where they fancied. They will call for letters at certain
+post-offices on certain days; but he did not want to feel bound to stay
+at any particular place. Where they are at the present moment or where
+they will spend to-night, I have not the faintest idea. Nobody knows!"
+
+"How extremely odd!" sniffed Miss Whalley. "But young Evesham always was
+so ill-balanced and eccentric. Is it true that Dr. Tudor went to the
+wedding this morning?"
+
+"Quite true," said Mrs. Lorimer. "I thought it was so kind of him. He
+arrived a little late. Avery did not know he was there until it was over.
+But he came forward then and shook hands with them both and wished them
+happiness. He and young Mr. Guyes, who supported Piers, were the only two
+present besides the Eveshams' family solicitor from Wardenhurst and
+ourselves. I gave the dear girl away," said Mrs. Lorimer with gentle
+pride. "And my dear husband conducted the service so impressively."
+
+"I am sure he would," said Miss Whalley. "But I think it was unfortunate
+that so much secrecy was observed. People are so apt to talk
+uncharitably. It was really most indiscreet."
+
+Could she have heard the remark which Piers was making at that identical
+moment to his bride, she would have understood one of the main reasons
+for his indiscretion.
+
+They were sitting in the deep, deep heart of a wood--an enchanted wood
+that was heavy with the spring fragrance of the mountain-ash,--and Piers,
+the while he peeled a stick with the deftness of boyhood, observed with
+much complacence: "Well, we've done that old Whalley chatterbox out of a
+treat anyway. Of all the old parish gossips, that woman is the worst. I
+never pass her house without seeing her peer over her blind. She always
+looks at me with a suspicious, disapproving eye. It's rather a shame, you
+know," he wound up pathetically, "for she has only once in her life found
+me out, and that was a dozen years ago."
+
+Avery laughed a little. "I don't think she approves of any men except
+the clergy."
+
+"Oh yes, she clings like a leech to the skirts of the Church," said Piers
+irreverently. "There are plenty of her sort about--wherever there are
+parsons, in fact. Of course it's the parsons' fault. If they didn't
+encourage 'em they wouldn't be there."
+
+"I don't know that," said Avery, with a smile. "I think you're a little
+hard on parsons."
+
+"Do you? Well, I don't know many. The Reverend Stephen is enough for me.
+I fight shy of all the rest."
+
+"My dear, how very narrow of you!" said Avery.
+
+He turned to her boyishly. "Don't tell me you want to be a female curate
+like the Whalley! I couldn't bear it!"
+
+"I haven't the smallest leaning in that direction," Avery assured him.
+"But at the same time, one of my greatest friends is about to enter the
+Church, and I do want you to meet and like him."
+
+A sudden silence followed her words. Piers resumed the peeling of his
+stick with minute attention. "I am sure to like him if you do," he
+remarked, after a moment.
+
+She touched his arm lightly. "Thank you, dear. He is an Australian, and
+the very greatest-hearted man I ever met. He stood by me in a time of
+great trouble. I don't know what I should have done without him. I hope
+he won't feel hurt, but I haven't even told him of my marriage yet."
+
+"We have been married just ten hours," observed Piers, still intent
+upon his task.
+
+She laughed again. "Yes, but it is ten days since we became engaged, and
+I owe him a letter into the bargain. He wanted to arrange to meet me in
+town one day; but he is still too busy to fix a date. He is studying
+very hard."
+
+"What's his name?" said Piers.
+
+"Crowther--Edmund Crowther. He has been a farmer for years in
+Queensland." Avery, paused a moment. "It was he who broke the news to me
+of my husband's death," she said, in a low voice. "I told you about
+that, Piers."
+
+"You did," said Piers.
+
+His tone was deliberately repressive, and a little quiver of
+disappointment went through Avery. She became silent, and the magic
+of the woods closed softly in upon them. Evening was drawing on, and
+the long, golden rays of sunshine lay like a benediction over the
+quiet earth.
+
+The silence between them grew and expanded into something of a barrier.
+From her seat on a fallen tree Avery gazed out before her. She could not
+see Piers' face which was bent above the stick which he had begun to
+whittle with his knife. He was sitting on the ground at her feet, and
+only his black head was visible to her.
+
+Suddenly, almost fiercely, he spoke. "I know Edmund Crowther."
+
+Avery's eyes came down to him in astonishment. "You know him!"
+
+"Yes, I know him." He worked furiously at his stick without looking up.
+His words came in quick jerks, as if for some reason he wanted to get
+them spoken without delay. "I met him years ago. He did me a good
+turn--helped me out of a tight corner. A few weeks ago--when I was at
+Monte Carlo with my grandfather--I met him again. He told me then that
+he knew you. Of course it was a rum coincidence. Heaven only knows what
+makes these things happen. You needn't write to him, I will."
+
+He ceased to speak, and suddenly Avery saw that his hands were
+trembling--trembling violently as the hands of a man with an ague. She
+watched them silently, wondering at his agitation, till Piers, becoming
+aware of her scrutiny, abruptly flung aside the stick upon which he had
+been expending so much care and leaped to his feet with a laugh that
+sounded oddly strained to her ears.
+
+"Come along!" he said. "If we sit here talking like Darby and Joan much
+longer, we shall forget that it's actually our wedding-day."
+
+Avery looked up at him without rising, a queer sense of foreboding at
+her heart. "Then Edmund Crowther is a friend of yours," she said. "A
+close friend?"
+
+He stood above her, and she saw a very strange look in his eyes--almost a
+desperate look.
+
+"Quite a close friend," he said in answer. "But he won't be if you waste
+any more thought on him for many days to come. I want your thoughts all
+for myself."
+
+Again he laughed, holding out his hands to her with a gesture that
+compelled rather than invited. She yielded to his insistence, but with
+a curious, hurt feeling as of one repulsed. It was as if he had closed
+a door in her face, not violently or in any sense rudely, yet with
+such evident intention that she had almost heard the click of the key
+in the lock.
+
+Hand in hand they went through the enchanted wood; and for ever after,
+the scent of mountain-ash blossom was to Avery a bitter-sweet memory of
+that which should have been wholly sweet.
+
+As for Piers, she did not know what was in his mind, though she was
+aware for a time of a lack of spontaneity behind his tenderness which
+disquieted her vaguely. She felt as if a shadow had fallen upon him,
+veiling his inner soul from her sight.
+
+Yet when they sat together in the magic quiet of the spring night in a
+garden that had surely been planted for lovers the cloud lifted, and she
+saw him again in all the ardour of his love for her. For he poured it
+out to her there in the silence, eagerly, burningly,--the worship that
+had opened to her the gate of that paradise which she had never more
+hoped to tread.
+
+She put her doubts and fears away from her, she answered to his call. He
+had awaked the woman's heart in her, and she gave freely, impulsively,
+not measuring her gift. If she could not offer him a girl's first
+rapture, she could bestow that which was infinitely greater--the deep,
+strong love of a woman who had suffered and knew how to endure.
+
+They sat in the dewy garden till in the distant woods the nightingales
+began their passion-steeped music, and then--because the ecstasy of the
+night was almost more than she could bear--Avery softly freed herself
+from her husband's arm and rose.
+
+"Going?" he asked quickly.
+
+He remained seated holding her hand fast locked in his. She looked down
+into his upraised face, conscious that her own was in shadow and that she
+need not try to hide the tears that had risen inexplicably to her eyes.
+
+"Yes, dear," she answered, with an effort at lightness. "You haven't had
+a smoke since dinner. I am going to leave you to have one now."
+
+But he still held her, as if he could not let her go.
+
+She bent to him after a moment with that sweet impulsiveness of hers that
+so greatly charmed all who loved her. "What is it, Piers? Don't you want
+me to go?"
+
+He caught her other hand in his and held them both against his lips.
+
+"Want you to go!" he muttered almost inarticulately; and then suddenly he
+raised his face again to hers. "Avery--Avery, promise me--swear to
+me--that, whatever happens, you will never leave me!"
+
+"But, my dearest, haven't I already sworn--only today?" she said,
+surprised by his vehemence and his request. "Of course I shall never
+leave you. My place is by your side."
+
+"I know! I know!" he said. "But it isn't enough. I want you to promise me
+personally, so that--I shall always feel--quite sure of you. You see,
+Avery," his words came with difficulty, his upturned face seemed to
+beseech her, "I'm not--the sort of impossible, chivalrous knight that
+Jeanie thinks me. I'm horribly bad. I sometimes think I've got a devil
+inside me. And I've done things--I've done things--" His voice shook
+suddenly; he ended abruptly, with heaving breath. "Before I ever met you,
+I--wronged you."
+
+He would have let her go then, but it was her hands that held. She
+stooped lower to him, divinely tender, her love seeming to spread all
+about him like wings, folding him in.
+
+"My dear," she said softly, "whatever there is of bad in you,--remember,
+the best is mine!"
+
+He caught at the words. "The best--the best! You shall always have that,
+Avery. But, my darling,--you understand--you do understand--how utterly
+unworthy that best is of you? You must understand that before--before--"
+
+Again his voice went into silence; but she saw his eyes glow suddenly,
+hotly, in the gloom, and her heart gave a quick hard throb that caught
+her breath and held it for the moment suspended, waiting.
+
+He went on after a second, mastering himself with obvious effort. "What
+I am trying to say is this. It's easier--or at least not impossible--to
+forfeit what you've never had. But afterwards--afterwards--" His hands
+closed tightly upon hers again; his voice sounded half-choked. "Avery,
+I--couldn't let you go--afterwards," he said.
+
+"But, my own Piers," she whispered, "haven't you said that there is no
+reason--no earthly reason--"
+
+He broke in upon her almost fiercely. "There is no reason--none
+whatever--I swear it! You said yourself that the past was nothing to you.
+You meant it, Avery. Say you meant it!"
+
+"But of course I meant it!" she told him. "Only, Piers, there is no
+secret chamber in my life that you may not enter. Perhaps some day, dear,
+when you come to realize that I am older than Jeanie, you will open all
+your doors to me!"
+
+There was pleading in her voice, notwithstanding its note of banter; but
+she did not stay to plead. With the whispered words she stooped and
+softly kissed him. Then ere he could detain her longer she gently
+released herself and was gone.
+
+He saw her light figure flit ghost-like across the dim stretch of grass
+and vanish into the shadows. And he started to his feet as if he would
+follow or call her back. But he did neither. He only stood swaying on his
+feet with a face of straining impotence--as of a prisoner wrestling
+vainly with his iron bars--until she had gone wholly from his sight. And
+then with a stifled groan he dropped down again into his chair and
+covered his face.
+
+He had paid a heavy price to enter the garden of his desire; but
+already he had begun to realize that the fruit he gathered there was
+Dead Sea Fruit.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THAT WHICH IS HOLY
+
+
+No bells had rung at the young Squire's wedding. It had been conducted
+with a privacy which Miss Whalley described as "almost indecent." But
+there was no privacy about his return, and Miss Whalley was shocked
+afresh at the brazen heartlessness of it after his recent bereavement.
+For Sir Piers and his wife motored home at the end of July through a
+village decked with flags and bunting and under a triumphant arch that
+made Piers' little two-seater seem absurdly insignificant; while the
+bells in the church-tower clanged the noisiest welcome they could
+compass, and Gracie--home for the holidays--mustered the school-children
+to cheer their hardest as the happy couple passed the schoolhouse gate.
+
+Avery would fain have stopped to greet the child, but Piers would not be
+persuaded.
+
+"No, no! To-morrow!" he said. "The honeymoon isn't over till after
+to-night."
+
+So they waved and were gone, at a speed which made Miss Whalley wonder
+what the local police could be about.
+
+Once past the lodge-gates and Marshall's half-grudging, half-pleased
+smile of welcome, the speed was doubled. Piers went like the wind, till
+Avery breathlessly cried to him to stop.
+
+"You'll kill us both before we get there!" she protested. In answer to
+which Piers moderated the pace, remarking as he did so, "But you would
+like to die by my side, what?"
+
+Victor was on the steps to receive them, Victor dancing with impatience
+and delight. For his young master's prolonged honeymoon had represented
+ten weeks of desolation to him.
+
+Old David was also present, inconspicuous and dignified, waiting to pour
+out tea for the travellers.
+
+And Caesar the Dalmatian who had mourned with Victor for his absent deity
+now leapt upon him in one great rush of ecstatic welcome that nearly bore
+him backwards.
+
+It was a riotous home-coming, for Piers was in boisterous spirits. They
+had travelled far that day, but he was in a mood of such restless energy
+that he seemed incapable of feeling fatigue.
+
+Avery on her part was thoroughly weary, but she would not tell him so,
+and they spent the whole evening in wandering about house and gardens,
+discussing the advisability of various alterations and improvements. In
+the end Piers awoke suddenly to the fact that she was looking utterly
+exhausted, and with swift compunction piloted her to her room.
+
+"What a fool I am!" he declared. "You must be dead beat. Why didn't you
+say you wanted to rest?"
+
+"I didn't, dear," she answered simply. "I wanted to be with you."
+
+He caught her hand to his lips. "You are happy with me then?"
+
+She uttered a little laugh that said more than words. "My own boy, you
+give me all that the most exacting woman could possibly desire and then
+ask me that!"
+
+He laughed too, his arm close about her. "I would give you the world if I
+had it. Avery, I hate to think we've come home--that the honeymoon is
+over--and the old beastly burdens waiting to be shouldered--" He laid his
+forehead against her neck with a gesture that made her fancy he did not
+wish her to see his face for the moment. "P'r'aps I'm a heartless brute,
+but I never missed the old chap all the time I was away," he whispered.
+"It's like being dragged under the scourge again--just when the old scars
+were beginning to heal--to come back to this empty barrack."
+
+She slid a quick arm round his neck, all the woman's heart in her
+responding to the cry from his.
+
+"The place is full of him," Piers went on; "I meet him at every corner.
+I see him in his old place on the settle in the hall, where he used to
+wait for me, and--and row me every night for being late." He gave a
+broken laugh. "Avery, if it weren't for you, I--I believe I should
+shoot myself."
+
+"Come and sit down!" said Avery gently. She drew him to a couch, and
+they sat down locked together.
+
+During all the ten weeks of their absence he had scarcely even mentioned
+his grandfather. He had been gay and inconsequent, or fiercely passionate
+in his devotion to her. But of his loss he had never spoken, and vaguely
+she had known that he had shut it out of his life with that other grim
+shadow that dwelt behind the locked door she might not open. She had not
+deemed him heartless, but she had regretted that deliberate shirking of
+his grief. She had known that sooner or later he would have to endure the
+scourging of which he spoke and that it would not grow the lighter with
+postponement.
+
+And now as she held him against her heart, she was in a sense relieved
+that it had come at last, thankful to be there with him while he stripped
+himself of all subterfuge and faced his sorrow.
+
+He could not speak much as he sat there clasped in her arms. One or two
+attempts he made, and then broke down against her breast. But no words
+were needed. Her arms were all he desired for consolation, and if they
+waked in him the old wild remorse, he stifled it ere it could take full
+possession.
+
+Finally, when the first bitterness had passed, they sat and talked
+together, and he found relief in telling her of the life he had lived in
+close companionship with the old man.
+
+"We quarrelled a dozen times," he said. "But somehow we could neither of
+us keep it up. I don't know why. We were violent enough at times. There's
+an Evesham devil somewhere in our ancestry, and he has a trick of
+cropping up still in moments of excitement. You've met him more than
+once. He's a formidable monster, what?"
+
+"I am not afraid of him," said Avery, with her cheek against his
+black head.
+
+He gave a shaky laugh. "You'd fling a bucket of water over Satan himself!
+I love you for not being afraid. But I don't know how you manage it, and
+that's a fact. Darling, I'm a selfish brute to wear you out like this.
+Send me away when you can't stand any more of me!"
+
+"Would you go?" she said, softly stroking his cheek.
+
+He caught her hand again and kissed it hotly, devouringly, in answer.
+"But I mustn't wear you out," he said, a moment later, with an odd
+wistfulness. "You mustn't let me, Avery."
+
+She drew her hand gently away from the clinging of his lips. "No, I
+won't let you," she said, in a tone he did not understand.
+
+He clasped her to him. "It's because I worship you so," he whispered
+passionately. "There is no one else in the world but you. I adore you! I
+adore you!"
+
+She closed her eyes from the fiery worship that looked forth from his.
+"Piers," she said, "wait, dear, wait!"
+
+"Why should I wait?" he demanded almost fiercely.
+
+"Because I ask you. Because--just now--to be loved like that is more than
+I can bear. Will you--can you--kiss me only, once, and go?"
+
+He held her in his arms. He gazed long and burningly upon her. In
+the end he stopped and with reverence he kissed her. "I am going,
+Avery," he said.
+
+She opened her eyes to him. "God bless you, my own Piers!" she murmured
+softly, and laid her cheek for a moment against his sleeve ere he took
+his arm away.
+
+As for Piers, he went from her as if he feared to trespass, and her heart
+smote her a little as she watched him go. But she would not call him
+back. She went instead to one of the great bay windows and leaned against
+the framework, gazing out. He was very good to her in all things, but
+there were times when she felt solitude to be an absolute necessity. His
+vitality, his fevered desire for her, wore upon her nerves. His attitude
+towards her was not wholly natural. It held something of a menace to her
+peace which disquieted her vaguely. She had a feeling that though she
+knew herself to be all he wanted in the world, yet she did not succeed in
+fully satisfying him. He seemed to be perpetually craving for something
+further, as though somewhere deep within him there burned a fiery thirst
+that nothing could ever slake. Her lightest touch seemed to awake it, and
+there were moments when his unfettered passion made her afraid.
+
+Not for worlds would she have had him know it. Her love for him was too
+deep to let her shrink; and she knew that only by that love did she
+maintain her ascendancy, appealing to his higher nature as only true love
+can appeal. But the perpetual strain of it told upon her, and that night
+she felt tired in body and soul.
+
+The great bedroom behind her with its dark hangings and oak furniture
+seemed dreary and unhome-like. She viewed the ancient and immense
+four-poster with misgiving and wondered if Queen Elizabeth had ever
+slept in it.
+
+After a time she investigated Piers' room beyond, and found it less
+imposing though curiously stiff and wholly lacking in ordinary
+cheery comfort. Later she discovered the reason for this grim
+severity of arrangement. No woman's touch had softened it for close
+upon half a century.
+
+She went back to her own room and dressed. Piers had wanted her to have a
+maid, but she had refused until other changes should be made in the
+establishment. There seemed so much to alter that she felt bewildered. A
+household of elderly menservants presented a problem with which she knew
+she would find it difficult to deal.
+
+She put the matter gently before Piers that night, but he dismissed it
+as trivial.
+
+"You can't turn 'em off of course," he said. "But you can have a dozen
+women to adjust the balance if you want 'em."
+
+Avery did not, but she was too tired to argue the point. She let the
+subject slide.
+
+They dined together in the oak-panelled dining-room where Piers had so
+often sat with his grandfather. The table seemed to stretch away
+inimitably into shadows, and Avery felt like a Lilliputian. From the wall
+directly facing her the last Lady Evesham smiled upon her--her baffling,
+mirthless smile that seemed to cover naught but heartache. She found
+herself looking up again and again to meet those eyes of mocking
+comprehension; and the memory of what Lennox Tudor had once told her
+recurred to her. This was Piers' Italian grandmother whose patrician
+beauty had descended to him through her scapegrace son.
+
+"Are you looking at that woman with the smile?" said Piers abruptly.
+
+She turned to him. "You are so like her, Piers. But I wouldn't like you
+to have a smile like that. There is something tragic behind it."
+
+"We are a tragic family," said Piers sombrely. "As for her, she ruined
+her own life and my grandfather's too. She might have been happy enough
+with him if she had tried."
+
+"Oh, Piers, I wonder!" Avery said, with a feeling that that smile
+revealed more to her than to him.
+
+"I say she might," Piers reiterated, with a touch of impatience. "He
+thought the world of her, just as--just as--" he smiled at her
+suddenly--"I do of you. He never knew that she wasn't satisfied until one
+fine day she left him. She married again--afterwards, and then died. He
+never got over it."
+
+But still Avery had a vagrant feeling of pity for the woman who had been
+Sir Beverley's bride. "I expect they never really understood each
+other," she said.
+
+Piers' dark eyes gleamed. "Do you know what I would have done if I had
+been in his place?" he said. "I would have gone after her and brought her
+back--even if I'd killed her afterwards."
+
+His voice vibrated on a deep note of savagery. He poured out a glass of
+wine with a hand that shook.
+
+Avery said nothing, but through the silence she was conscious of the hard
+throbbing of her heart. There was something implacable, something almost
+cruel, about Piers at that moment. She felt as if he had bruised her
+without knowing it.
+
+And then in his sudden, bewildering way he left his chair and came to
+her, stooped boyishly over her. "My darling, you're so awfully pale
+to-night. Have some wine--to please me!"
+
+She leaned her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes. "I am
+a little tired, dear; but I don't want any wine. I shall be all right in
+the morning."
+
+He laid his cheek against her forehead. "I want you to drink a toast with
+me. Won't you?"
+
+"We won't drink to each other," she protested, faintly smiling. "It's
+too like drinking to ourselves."
+
+"That's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me," he declared. "But we
+won't toast ourselves. We'll drink to the future, Avery, and--" he
+lowered his voice--"and all it contains. What?"
+
+Her eyes opened quickly, but she did not move. "Why do you say that?"
+
+"What?" he said again very softly.
+
+She was silent.
+
+He reached a hand for his own glass. "Drink with me, sweetheart!" he said
+persuasively.
+
+She suffered him to put it to her lips and drank submissively. But in a
+moment she put up a restraining hand. "You finish it!" she said, and
+pushed it gently towards him.
+
+He took it and held it high. The light gleamed crimson in the wine; it
+glowed like liquid fire. A moment he held it so, then without a word he
+carried it to his lips and drained it.
+
+A second later there came the sound of splintering glass, and Avery,
+turning in her chair, discovered that he had flung it over his shoulder.
+
+She gazed at him in amazement astonished by his action. "Piers!"
+
+But something in his face checked her. "No one will ever drink out of
+that glass again," he said. "Are you ready? Shall we go in the garden for
+a breath of air?"
+
+She went with him, but on the terrace outside he stopped impulsively.
+"Avery darling, I don't mean to be a selfish beast; but I've got to prowl
+for a bit. Would you rather go to bed?"
+
+His arm was round her; she leaned against him half-laughing. "Do you
+know, dear, that bedroom frightens me with its magnificence! Don't prowl
+too long!"
+
+He bent to her swiftly. "Avery! Do you want me?"
+
+"Just to scare away the bogies," she made answer, with a lightness that
+scarcely veiled a deeper feeling. "And when you've done that--quite
+thoroughly--perhaps--" She stopped.
+
+"Perhaps--" whispered Piers.
+
+"Perhaps I'll tell you a secret," she said still lightly. "By the way,
+dear, I found a letter from Mr. Crowther waiting for me. I put it in your
+room for you to read. He writes so kindly. Wouldn't you like him to be
+our first visitor?"
+
+There was a moment's silence before Piers made answer.
+
+"To be sure," he said then. "We mustn't forget Crowther. You wrote and
+told him everything, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, everything. He seems very fond of you, Piers. But you must read his
+letter. It concerns you quite as much as it does me. There! I am going.
+Good-bye! Come up soon!"
+
+She patted his shoulder and turned away. Somehow it had not been easy to
+speak of Crowther. She had known that in doing so she had introduced an
+unwelcome subject. But Crowther was too great a friend to ignore. She
+felt that she had treated him somewhat casually already; for it was only
+the previous week that she had written to tell him of her marriage.
+
+Crowther was in town, studying hard for an examination, and she felt
+convinced that he would be willing to pay them a visit. She also knew
+that for some reason Piers was reluctant to ask him, but she felt that
+that fact ought not to influence her. For she owed a debt of gratitude to
+Crowther which she could never forget.
+
+But all thought of Crowther faded from her mind when she found herself
+once more in that eerie, tapestry-hung bedroom. The place had been
+lighted with candles, but they only seemed to emphasize the gloom. She
+wondered how often the last Lady Evesham--the warm-blooded, passionate
+Italian woman with her love of the sun and all things beautiful--had
+stood as she stood now and shuddered at the dreary splendour of her
+surroundings. How homesick she must have been, Avery thought to herself,
+as she undressed in the flickering candle-light! How her soul must have
+yearned for the glittering Southern life she had left!
+
+She thought of Sir Beverley. He must have been very like Piers in his
+youth, less fierce, less intense, but in many ways practically the same,
+giving much and demanding even more, restless and exacting, but withal so
+lovable, so hard to resist, so infinitely dear. All her love for Piers
+throbbed suddenly up to the surface. How good he was to her! What would
+life be without him? She reproached herself for ingratitude and
+discontent. Life was a beautiful thing if only she would have it so.
+
+She knelt down at length by the deep cushioned window-seat and began to
+pray. The night was dim and quiet, and as she prayed she gradually
+forgot the shadows behind her and seemed to lose herself in the
+immensity of its peace. She realized as never before that by her love
+she must prevail. It was the one weapon, unfailing and invincible, that
+alone would serve her, when she could rely upon no other. She knew that
+he had felt its influence, that there were times when he did instinctive
+reverence to it, as to that which is holy. She knew moreover that there
+was that within him that answered to it as it were involuntarily--a
+fiery essence in which his passion had no part which dwelt deep down in
+his turbulent heart--a germ of greatness which she knew might blossom
+into Love Immortal.
+
+He was young, he was young. He wanted life, all he could get of it. And
+he left the higher things because as yet he was undeveloped. He had not
+felt that hunger of the spirit which only that which is spiritual can
+satisfy. It would come. She was sure it would come. She was watching for
+it day by day. His wings were still untried. He did not want to soar. But
+by-and-bye the heights would begin to draw him. And then--then they would
+soar together. But till that day dawned, her love must be the guardian of
+them both.
+
+There came a slight sound in the room behind her. She turned
+swiftly. "Piers!"
+
+He was close to her. As she started to her feet his arms enclosed her. He
+looked down into her eyes, holding her fast pressed to him.
+
+"I didn't mean to disturb you," he said. "But--when I saw you were
+praying--I had to come in. I wanted so awfully to know--if you would get
+an answer."
+
+"But, Piers!" she protested.
+
+He kissed her lips. "Don't be angry, Avery! I'm not scoffing. I don't
+know enough about God to scoff at Him. Tell me! Do you ever get an
+answer, or are you content to go jogging on like the rest of the
+world without?"
+
+She made an effort to free herself. "Do you know, Piers, I can't talk to
+you about--holy things--when you are holding me like this."
+
+He looked stubborn. "I don't know what you mean by holy things. I'm not a
+believer. At least I don't believe in prayer. I can get all I want
+without it."
+
+"I wonder!" Avery said.
+
+She was still trying to disengage herself, but as he held her with
+evident determination she desisted.
+
+There followed a silence during which her grey eyes met his black ones
+steadily, fearlessly, resolutely. Then in a whisper Piers spoke, his lips
+still close to hers. "Tell me what you were praying for, sweetheart!"
+
+She smiled a little. "No, dear, not now! It's nothing that's in your
+power to give me. Shall we sit on the window-seat and talk?"
+
+But Piers was loath to let her go from his arms. He knelt beside her as
+she sat, still holding her.
+
+She put her arm round his neck. "Do you remember your Star of Hope?" she
+asked him softly.
+
+"I remember," said Piers, but he did not turn his eyes to the night sky;
+they still dwelt upon her.
+
+Avery's face was toward the window. The drapery fell loosely away from
+her throat. He stooped forward suddenly and pressed his hot lips upon her
+soft white flesh.
+
+A little tremor went through her at his touch; she kept her face
+turned from him.
+
+"Have you really got all you want?" she asked after a moment. "Is there
+nothing at all left to hope for?"
+
+"Didn't we drink to the future only to-night?" he said.
+
+His arms were drawing her, but still she kept her face turned away. "Did
+you mean anything by that?" she asked. "Were you--were you thinking of
+anything special?"
+
+He did not at once answer her. He waited till with an odd reluctance she
+turned her face towards him. Then, "I was thinking of you," he said.
+
+Her heart gave a quick throb. "Of me?" she questioned below her breath.
+
+"Of you," he said again. "For myself, I have got all I can ever hope for.
+But you--you would be awfully happy, wouldn't you, if--"
+
+"If--" murmured Avery.
+
+He stooped again to kiss her white bosom. "And it would be a bond between
+us," he said, as if continuing some remark he had not uttered.
+
+She turned more fully to him. "Do we need that?" she said.
+
+"We might--some day," he answered, in a tone that somehow made it
+impossible for her to protest. "Anyhow, my darling, I knew,--I guessed.
+And I'm awfully glad--for your sake."
+
+She bent towards him. "Not for your own?" she whispered pleadingly.
+
+He laid his head suddenly down upon her knees with a sound that was
+almost a groan.
+
+"Piers!" she said in distress.
+
+He was silent for a space, then slowly raised himself. She had a sense
+of shock at sight of his face. It looked haggard and grey, as if a
+withering hand had touched him and shorn away his youth.
+
+"Avery,--oh, Avery," he said, "I wish I were a better man!"
+
+It was a cry wrung from his soul--the hungry cry which she had longed to
+hear, and it sent a great joy through her even though it wrung her own
+soul also.
+
+She bent to him swiftly. "Dearest, we all feel that sometimes. And I
+think it is the Hand of God upon us, opening our eyes."
+
+He did not answer or make any response to her words. Only as he clasped
+her to him, she heard him sigh. And she knew that, strive as he might to
+silence that soul-craving with earthly things, it would beat on
+unsatisfied through all. She came nearer to understanding him that night
+that ever before.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE FIRST GUEST
+
+
+"I am greatly honoured to be your first guest," said Crowther.
+
+"The honour is ours to get you," Avery declared. She sat on the terrace
+whither she had conducted him, and smiled at him across the tea-table
+with eyes of shining friendship.
+
+Crowther smiled back, thinking to himself how pleasant a picture she
+made. She was dressed in white, and her face was flushed and happy, even
+girlish in its animation. There was a ring of laughter in her voice when
+she talked that was very good to hear. She had herself just brought him
+from the station in Piers' little two-seater, and her obvious pleasure at
+meeting him still hung about her, making her very fair to see.
+
+"Piers is so busy just now," she told him. "He sent all sorts of
+messages. He had to go over to Wardenhurst to see Colonel Rose. The M.P.
+for this division retired at the end of the Session, and Piers is to
+stand for the constituency. They talk of having the election in October."
+
+"Will he get in?" asked Crowther, still watching her with friendly
+appreciation in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I expect so. He gets most things that he sets his
+heart on. His grandfather--you knew Sir Beverley?--was so anxious that he
+should enter Parliament."
+
+"Yes, I knew Sir Beverley," said Crowther. "He thought the world
+of Piers."
+
+"And Piers of him," said Avery.
+
+"Ah! Was it a great blow to him when the old man died?"
+
+"A very great blow," she answered soberly. "That was the main reason for
+our marrying so suddenly. The poor boy was so lonely I couldn't bear to
+think of him by himself in this great house."
+
+"He was very lucky to get you," said Crowther gravely.
+
+She smiled. "I was lucky too. Don't you think so? I never in my wildest
+dreams pictured such a home as this for myself."
+
+A great magnolia climbed the house behind her with creamy flowers that
+shed their lemon fragrance all about them. Crowther compared her in his
+own mind to the wonderful blossoms. She was so sweet, so pure, yet also
+in a fashion so splendid.
+
+"I think it is a very suitable setting for you, Lady Evesham!" he said.
+
+She made a quick, impulsive movement towards him. "Do call me
+Avery!" she said.
+
+"Thank you," he answered, with a smile. "It certainly seems more natural.
+How long have you been in this home of yours, may I ask?"
+
+"Only a fortnight," she said, laughing. "Our honeymoon took ten weeks.
+Piers wanted to make it ten years; but the harvest was coming on, and I
+knew he ought to come back and see what was happening. And then Mr.
+Ferrars resigned his seat, and it became imperative. But isn't it a
+beautiful place?" she ended. "I felt overwhelmed by the magnificence of
+it at first, but I am getting used to it now."
+
+"A glorious place," agreed Crowther. "Piers must be very proud of it.
+Have you begun to have many visitors yet?"
+
+She shook her head. "No, not many. Nearly all the big people have gone
+to Scotland. Piers says they will come later, but I shall not mind them
+so much then. I shall feel less like an interloper by that time."
+
+"I don't know why you should feel like that," said Crowther. Avery
+smiled. "Well, all the little people think that I set out to catch Piers
+for his money and his title."
+
+"Does what the little people think have any weight with you?"
+asked Crowther.
+
+She flushed faintly under the kindly directness of his gaze. "Not really,
+I suppose. But one can't quite shake off the feeling of it. There is the
+Vicar for instance. He has never liked me. He congratulates me almost
+every time we meet."
+
+"Evidently a cad," commented Crowther in his quiet way.
+
+Avery laughed a little. She had always liked this man's plain speech. "He
+is not the only one," she said.
+
+"But you have friends--real friends--also?" he questioned.
+
+"Oh yes; indeed! The Vicarage children and their mother are the greatest
+friends I have." Avery spoke with warmth. "The children are having tea
+down in one of the cornfields now. We must go and see them presently. You
+are fond of children, I know."
+
+"I sort of love them," said Crowther with his slow, kind smile. "Ah,
+Piers, my lad, are you trying to steal a march on us? Did you think I
+didn't know?"
+
+He spoke without raising his voice. Avery turned sharply to see her
+husband standing on the steps of a room above them. One glimpse she had
+of Piers' face ere he descended and joined them, and an odd feeling of
+dismay smote her. For that one fleeting moment there seemed, to be
+something of the cornered beast in his aspect.
+
+But as he came straight down to Crowther and wrung his hand, his dark
+face was smiling a welcome. He was in riding-dress, and looked very
+handsome and young.
+
+"How did you know it was I? Awfully pleased to see you! Sorry I couldn't
+get back sooner. I've been riding like the devil. Avery explained, did
+she?" He threw himself into a chair, and tossed an envelope into her lap.
+"An invitation to Ina Rose's wedding on the twenty-third. That's the week
+after next. They are sorry they can't manage to call before, hope you'll
+understand and go. I said you should do both."
+
+"Thank you, Piers." Avery laid the envelope aside unopened. She did not
+feel that he was being very cordial to Crowther. "I am not sure that I
+shall go."
+
+"Oh yes, you will," he rejoined quickly. "You must. It's an order, see?"
+His dark eyes laughed at her, but there was more than a tinge of
+imperiousness in his manner. "Well, Crowther, how are you? Getting ready
+to scatter the Philistines? Don't give me milk, Avery! You know I hate it
+at this time of day."
+
+She looked at him in surprise. He had never used that impatient tone
+to her before. "I didn't know," she observed simply, as she handed
+him his cup.
+
+"Well, you know now," he rejoined with an irritable frown. "Hurry up,
+Crowther! I want you to come and see the crops."
+
+Avery was literally amazed by his manner. He had never been so frankly
+and unjustifiably rude to her before. She came to the conclusion that
+something had happened at the Roses' to annoy him; but that he should
+visit his annoyance upon her was a wholly new experience.
+
+He drank his tea, talking hard to Crowther the while, and finally sprang
+to his feet as if in a ferment to be gone.
+
+"Won't Lady Evesham come too?" asked Crowther, as he rose.
+
+Avery rose also. "Yes, I have promised the children to join them in the
+cornfield," she said.
+
+Piers said nothing; but she had a very distinct impression that he would
+have preferred her to remain behind. The wonder crossed her mind if he
+were jealous because he could no longer have her exclusively to himself.
+
+They walked down through the park to the farm. It was a splendid August
+evening. The reaping was still in progress, and the whirr of the machine
+rose slumbrous through the stillness. But of the Vicarage children there
+was at first no sign.
+
+Avery searched for them in surprise. She had sent a picnic basket down to
+the farm earlier in the afternoon, and she had expected to find them
+enjoying the contents thereof in a shady corner. But for a time she
+searched in vain.
+
+"They must have gone home," said Piers.
+
+But she did not believe they would have left without seeing her, and she
+went to the farm to make enquiries.
+
+Here she heard that the picnic-party had taken place and that the basket
+had been brought back by one of the men, but for some reason the children
+had evidently gone home early, for they had not been seen since.
+
+Avery wanted to run to the Vicarage and ascertain if all were well, but
+Piers vetoed this.
+
+"It's too hot," he said. "And you'll only come in for some row with the
+Reverend Stephen. I won't have you go, Avery. Stay with us!"
+
+His tone was peremptory, and Avery realized that his assumption of
+authority was intentional. A rebellious spirit awoke within her, but she
+checked it. Something had gone wrong, she was sure. He would tell her
+presently what it was.
+
+She yielded therefore to his desire and remained with them. They spent a
+considerable time in the neighbourhood of the farm, in all of which
+Crowther took a keen interest. Avery tried to be interested too, but
+Piers' behaviour troubled and perplexed her. He seemed to be all on edge,
+and more than once his manner to Crowther also verged upon abruptness.
+
+They were leaving the farm to turn homeward when there came to Avery the
+sound of flying feet along the lane outside. She went to the gate, and
+beheld Gracie, her face crimson with heat, racing towards her.
+
+Avery moved to meet her, surprised by her sudden appearance. She was
+still more surprised when Gracie reached her, flung tempestuous arms
+about her, and broke into stormy crying on her breast.
+
+"My dear! My dear! What has happened?" Avery asked in distress.
+
+But Gracie was for the moment quite beyond speech. She hung upon Avery,
+crying as if her heart would break.
+
+Piers came swiftly down the path. "Why, Pixie, what's the matter?" he
+said.
+
+He put his hand on her shoulder, drawing her gently to lean against
+himself, for in her paroxysm of weeping she had thrown herself upon Avery
+with childish unrestraint.
+
+"Who's been bullying you, Pixie?" he said.
+
+"Nobody! Nobody!" sobbed Gracie. She transferred herself to his arms
+almost mechanically, so overwhelming was her woe. "Oh, it's dreadful!
+It's dreadful!" she cried.
+
+He patted her soothingly, his cheek against her fair hair. "Well, what is
+it, kiddie? Let's hear! One of the youngsters in trouble, what? Not
+Jeanie, I say?"
+
+"No, no, no! It's--Mike." The name came out with a great burst of tears.
+
+"Mike!" Piers looked at Avery, mystified for the moment. "Ah, to be sure!
+The dog! Well, what's happened to him? He isn't dead, what?"
+
+"He is! He is!" sobbed Gracie. "He--he has been killed--by--by his
+own chain!"
+
+"What!" said Piers again.
+
+Gaspingly she told him the tragic tale. "Father always will have him kept
+on the chain, and--and--"
+
+"An infernally cruel thing to do!" broke indignantly from Piers.
+
+"Yes, we--we all said so. And we tried to give him little outings
+sometimes to--to make up. But to-day--somehow--we forgot him, and--and he
+must have seen us go, and jumped the wall after us. Pat and I went back
+afterwards to fetch him, and found him--found him--oh, Piers!" She cried
+out in sudden agony and said no more.
+
+"Choked?" said Piers. "Choked with his own chain, poor devil!" He looked
+up again at Avery with something unfathomable in his eyes. "Oh, don't cry
+so, child!" he said. "A chained creature is happier dead--a thousand
+times happier!"
+
+He spoke passionately, so passionately that Gracie's wild grief was
+stayed. She lifted her face, all streaming with tears. "Do you think
+so really?"
+
+"Of course I think so," he said. "Life on a chain is misery unspeakable.
+No one with any heart could condemn a dog to that! It's the refinement of
+cruelty. Don't wish the poor beast back again! Be thankful he's gone!"
+
+The vehemence of his speech was such that it carried conviction even to
+Gracie's torn heart. She looked up at him with something of wonder and of
+awe. "If only--he hadn't suffered so!" she whispered.
+
+He put his hand on her forehead and smoothed back the clustering hair.
+"You poor kid!" he said pityingly. "You've suffered much more than he did
+at the end. But it's over. Don't fret! Don't fret!"
+
+Gracie lifted trembling lips to be kissed. He was drying her eyes with
+his own handkerchief as tenderly as any woman. He stooped and kissed her.
+"Look here! I'll walk home with you," he said. "Avery, you go back with
+Crowther! I shan't be late."
+
+Avery turned at once. The sight of Piers soothing the little girl's
+distress had comforted her subtly. She felt that his mood had softened.
+
+"Won't you go too?" said Crowther, as she joined him. "Please don't stay
+on my account! I am used to being alone, and I can find my own way back."
+
+"Oh no!" she said. "I had better come with you. I shan't be wanted now."
+
+They started to walk back among the shocks of corn; but they had not gone
+many yards when Gracie came running after them, reached them, flung her
+arms about Avery.
+
+"Good-bye, darling Avery!" she said.
+
+Avery held her close. She was sobbing still, but the first wild anguish
+of her grief was past.
+
+"Good-bye, darling!" Avery whispered, after a moment.
+
+Gracie's arms tightened. "You think like Piers does?" she murmured. "You
+think poor Mikey is happier now?"
+
+Avery paused an instant. The memory of Piers' look as he had uttered the
+words: "Choked with his own chain, poor devil!" seemed to grip her heart.
+Then: "Yes, dearie," she said softly. "I think as Piers does. I am
+glad--for poor Mikey's sake--that his troubles are over."
+
+"Then I'll try and be glad too," sobbed poor Gracie. "But it's very, very
+difficult. Pat and I loved him so, and he--he loved us."
+
+"My dear, that love won't die," Avery said gently.
+
+"The gift immortal," said Crowther. "The only thing that counts."
+
+She looked round at him quickly, but his eyes were gazing straight into
+the sunset--steadfast eyes that saw to the very heart of things.
+
+"And Life in Death," he added quietly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PRISONER IN THE DUNGEON
+
+
+Avery was already dressed when she heard Piers enter his room and say a
+word to Victor. She stood by her window waiting. It was growing late, but
+she felt sure he would come to her.
+
+She heard Victor bustling about in his resilient fashion, and again
+Piers' voice, somewhat curt and peremptory, reached her through the
+closed door. He was evidently dressing at full speed. She was conscious
+of a sense of disappointment, though she kept it at bay, reminding
+herself that they must not keep their guest waiting.
+
+But presently, close upon the dinner-hour, she went herself to the door
+of her husband's room and knocked.
+
+His voice answered her immediately, but it still held that unwonted
+quality of irritation in it. "Oh, Avery, I can't let you in. I'm sorry.
+Victor's here."
+
+Something--a small, indignant spirit--sprang up within her in response.
+"Send Victor away!" she said. "I want to come in."
+
+"I shall be late if I do," he made answer. "I'm horribly late as it is."
+
+But for once Avery's habitual docility was in abeyance. "Send Victor
+away!" she reiterated.
+
+She heard Piers utter an impatient word, and then in a moment or two he
+raised his voice again. "Come in then! What is it?"
+
+She opened the door with an odd unaccustomed feeling of trepidation.
+
+He was standing in his shirt-sleeves brushing his hair vigorously at the
+table. His back was towards her, but the glass reflected his face, and
+she saw that his brows were drawn into a single hard black line. His lips
+were tightly compressed. He looked undeniably formidable.
+
+"Don't you want me, Piers?" she asked, pausing in the doorway.
+
+His eyes flashed up to hers in the glass, glowing with the smouldering
+fire, oddly fitful, oddly persistent. "Come in!" he said, without
+turning. "What is it?"
+
+She went forward to him. "Did you go to the Vicarage?" she asked. "Are
+they in great trouble?"
+
+She thought she saw relief in his face at her words. "Oh yes," he said.
+"Mrs. Lorimer crying as usual, Jeanie trying to comfort her. I did my
+best to hearten them up but you know what they are. I say, sit down!"
+
+"No, I am going," she answered gently. "Did you get on all right this
+afternoon?"
+
+"Oh yes," he said again. "By the way, we must get a wedding-present for
+Ina Rose and another for Guyes. You'll come to the wedding, Avery?"
+
+"If you wish it, dear," she said quietly.
+
+He threw down his brushes and turned fully to her. "Avery darling, I'm
+sorry I was bearish this afternoon. You won't punish me for it?"
+
+"Punish you, my own Piers!" she said.
+
+"Because I can't stand it," he said recklessly. "There are certain forms
+of torture that drive a man crazy. Bear with me--all you can!"
+
+His quick pleading touched her, went straight to her heart. She put her
+hands on his shoulders, lifting her face for his kiss. "It's all right,
+dear," she said.
+
+"Is it?" he said. "Is it?" He took her face between his hands, gazing
+down at her with eyes of passionate craving. "Say you love me!" he urged
+her suddenly. "Say it!"
+
+Her heart sank within her. She made a movement as if to withdraw herself;
+but he caught her fiercely to him, his hot lips sought and held her own.
+She felt as if a flame encompassed her, scorching her, consuming her.
+
+"Say you love me!" he whispered again between those fiery kisses.
+"Avery, I must have your soul as well. Do more than bear with me! Want
+me--want me!"
+
+There was more than passion in the words. They came to her like a cry of
+torment. She braced herself to meet his need, realizing it to be greater
+than she knew.
+
+"Piers! Piers!" she said. "I am altogether yours. I love you. Don't
+you know it?"
+
+He drew a deep, quivering breath. "Yes--yes, I do know it," he said.
+"But--but--Avery, I would go through hell for you. You are my religion,
+my life, my all. I am not that to you. If--if I were dragged down, you
+wouldn't follow me in."
+
+His intensity shocked her, but she would not have him know it. She
+sought to calm his agitation though she possessed no key thereto. "My
+dear," she said, "you are talking wildly. You don't know what you are to
+me, and I can't even begin to tell you. But surely--by now--you can take
+me on trust."
+
+He made a curious sound that was half-laugh, half-groan. "You don't know
+yourself, Avery," he said.
+
+"But you don't doubt my love, Piers," she protested very earnestly. "You
+know that it would never fail you."
+
+"Your love is like the moonlight, Avery," he answered. "It is all
+whiteness and purity. But mine--mine is red like the fire that is
+under the earth. And though sometimes it scorches you, it never quite
+reaches you. You stoop to me, but you can't lift me. You are too far
+above. And the moonlight doesn't always reach to the prisoner in the
+dungeon either."
+
+"All the same dear, don't be afraid that it will ever fail you!" she
+said.
+
+He kissed her again, hotly, lingeringly, and let her go. "Perhaps I shall
+remind you of that one day," he said.
+
+All through dinner his spirits were recklessly high. He talked
+incessantly, playing the host with a brilliant ease that betrayed no sign
+of strain. He did not seem to have a care in the world, and Avery
+marvelled at his versatility.
+
+She herself felt weary and strangely sick at heart. Those few words of
+his had been a bitter revelation to her. She knew now what was wanting
+between them. He desired passion from her rather than love. He had no use
+for spiritual things. And she,--she knew that she shrank inwardly
+whenever she encountered that fierce, untamed desire of his. It fettered
+her spirit, it hung upon her like an overpowering weight. She could not
+satisfy his wild Southern nature. He crushed her love with the very
+fierceness of his possession and ever cried to her for more. He seemed
+insatiable. Even though she gave him all she had, he still hungered,
+still strove feverishly to possess himself of something further.
+
+She felt worn out, body and soul, and she could not hide it. She was
+unspeakably glad when at length the meal was over and she was able to
+leave the table.
+
+Crowther opened the door for her, looking at her with eyes of kindly
+criticism.
+
+"You look tired," he said. "I hope you don't sit up late."
+
+She smiled at him. "Oh no! We will make Piers play to us presently, and
+then I will say good-night."
+
+"Then we mustn't keep you waiting long," he said. "So Piers is a
+musician, is he? I didn't know."
+
+"You had better go to bed, Avery; it's late," said Piers abruptly. "I
+can't play to-night. The spirit doesn't move me." He rose from the table
+with a careless laugh. "Say good-night to her, Crowther, and let her go!
+We will smoke in the garden."
+
+There was finality in his tone, its lightness notwithstanding. Again
+there came to Avery the impulse to rebel, and again instinctively she
+caught it back. She held out her hand to Crowther.
+
+"I am dismissed then," she said. "Good-night!"
+
+His smile answered hers. He looked regretful, but very kindly. "I am glad
+to see Piers takes care of you," he said.
+
+She laughed a little drearily as she went away, making no other response.
+
+Crowther turned back to the table with its shaded candles and gleaming
+wine. He saw that Piers' glass was practically untouched.
+
+Piers himself was searching a cabinet for cigars. He found what he
+sought, and turned round with the box in his hand.
+
+"I don't know what you generally smoke," he said. "Will you try one of
+these? It's a hot night. We may as well have coffee in the garden."
+
+He seemed possessed with a spirit of restlessness, just as he had been on
+that night at the Casino in the spring. Crowther, massive and
+self-contained, observed him silently.
+
+They went out on to the terrace, and drank their coffee in the dewy
+stillness. But even there Piers could not sit still. He prowled to and
+fro eternally, till Crowther set down his cup and joined him, pushing a
+quiet hand through his arm.
+
+"It's a lovely place you've got here, sonny," he said; "a regular garden
+of Paradise. I almost envy you."
+
+"Oh, you needn't do that. There's a serpent in every Eden," said Piers,
+with a mirthless laugh.
+
+He did not seek to keep Crowther at arm's length, but neither did he
+seem inclined for any closer intimacy. His attitude neither invited nor
+repelled confidence. Yet Crowther knew intuitively that his very
+indifference was in itself a barrier that might well prove
+insurmountable.
+
+He walked in silence while Piers talked intermittently of various
+impersonal matters, drifting at length into silence himself.
+
+In the western wing of the house a light burned at an upper window, and
+Crowther, still quietly observant, noted how at each turn Piers' eyes
+went to that light as though drawn by some magnetic force.
+
+Gently at length he spoke. "She doesn't look altogether robust, sonny."
+
+Piers started sharply as if something had pricked him. "What? Avery do
+you mean? No, she isn't over and above strong--just now."
+
+He uttered the last two words as if reluctantly, yet as if some measure
+of pride impelled him.
+
+Crowther's hand pressed his arm, in mute sympathy. "You are right to
+take care of her," he said simply. "And Piers, my lad, I want to tell you
+how glad I was to know that you were able to win her after all. I somehow
+felt you would."
+
+It was his first attempt to pass that intangible barrier, and it failed.
+Piers disregarded the words as if they had not reached him.
+
+"I don't know if I shall let her stay here through the winter," he said.
+"I am not sure that the place suits her. It's damp, you know; good
+hunting and so on, but a bit depressing in bad weather. Besides I'd
+rather have her under a town doctor. The new heir arrives in March," he
+said, with a slight laugh that struck Crowther as unconsciously pathetic.
+
+"I'm very pleased to hear it, sonny," said Crowther. "May he be
+the first of many! What does Avery think about it? I'll warrant
+she's pleased?"
+
+"Oh yes, she's pleased enough."
+
+"And you, lad?"
+
+"Oh yes, I'm pleased too," said Piers, but his tone lacked complete
+satisfaction and he added after a moment, "I'd rather have had her to
+myself a bit longer. I'm a selfish brute, you know, Crowther. I want all
+I can get--and even that's hardly enough to keep me from starvation."
+
+There was a note of banter in his voice, but there was something else as
+well that touched Crowther's kindly heart.
+
+"I don't think Avery is the sort of woman to sacrifice her husband to her
+children," he said. "You will always come first, sonny,--if I know her."
+
+"I couldn't endure anything else," said Piers, with sudden fire. "She is
+the mainspring of my life."
+
+"And you of hers," said Crowther.
+
+Piers stopped dead in his walk and faced him. "No,--no, I'm not!" he
+said, speaking quickly, unrestrainedly. "I'm a good deal to her, but I'm
+not that. She gives, but she never offers. If I went off on a journey
+round the world to-morrow, she'd see me go quite cheerfully, and she'd
+wait serenely till I came back again. She'd never fret. Above all, she'd
+never dream of coming to look for me."
+
+The passionate utterance went into a sound that resembled a laugh, but it
+was a sound of such bitterness that Crowther was strongly moved.
+
+He put his hand on Piers' shoulder and gave it an admonitory shake. "My
+dear lad, don't be a fool!" he said, with slow force. "You're consuming
+your own happiness--and hers too. You can't measure a woman's feelings
+like that. They are immeasurable. You can't even begin to fathom a
+woman's restraint--a woman's reserve. How can she offer when you are
+always demanding? As to her love, it is probably as infinitely great, as
+infinitely deep, as infinitely selfless, as yours is passionate, and
+fierce and insatiable. There are big possibilities in you, Piers; but
+you're not letting 'em grow. It would have done you good to have been
+kept waiting ten years or more. You're spoilt; that's what's the matter
+with you. You got your heart's desire too easily. You think this world is
+your own damn playground. And it isn't. Understand? You're put here to
+work, not play; to develop yourself, not batten on other people. You won
+her like a man in the face of desperate odds. You paid a heavy price for
+her. But even so, you don't deserve to keep her if you forget that she
+has paid too. By Heaven, Piers, she must have loved you a mighty lot to
+have done it!"
+
+He paused, for Piers had made a sharp, involuntary movement as of a man
+in intolerable pain. He almost wrenched himself from Crowther's hand, and
+walked to the low wall of the terrace. Here he stood for many seconds
+quite motionless, gazing down over the quiet garden.
+
+Finally he swung round, and looked at Crowther. "Yes," he said, in an odd
+tone as of one repeating something learned by heart. "I've got to
+remember that, haven't I? Thanks for--reminding me!" He stopped, seemed
+to collect himself, moved slowly forward. "You're a good chap, Crowther,"
+he said. "I wonder you've never got married yourself, what?"
+
+Crowther waited for him quietly, in his eyes that look of the man who has
+gazed for long over the wide spaces of the earth.
+
+"I never married, sonny," he said, "because I had nothing to offer to the
+woman I cared for, and so--she never knew."
+
+"By gad, old chap, I'm sorry," said Piers impulsively.
+
+Crowther held out a steady hand. "I'm happy enough," he said simply.
+"I've got--all I want."
+
+"All?" echoed Piers incredulously.
+
+Crowther was smiling. He lifted his face to the night sky. "Yes,--thank
+God,--all!" he said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SWORD FALLS
+
+
+As Miss Whalley had predicted, Ina Rose's wedding was a very grand affair
+indeed. Everyone who was anyone attended it, and a good many besides. It
+took place in the midst of a spell of sultry weather, during which the
+sun shone day after day with brazen strength and the heat was intense.
+
+It was the sort of weather Piers revelled in. It suited his tropical
+nature. But it affected Avery very differently. All her customary energy
+wilted before it, and yet she was strangely restless also. A great
+reluctance to attend the wedding possessed her, wherefore she could not
+have said. But for some reason Piers was determined that she should go.
+He was even somewhat tyrannical on the subject, and rather than have a
+discussion Avery had yielded the point. For Piers was oddly difficult in
+those days. Crowther's visit, which had barely run into forty-eight
+hours, seemed to have had a disquieting effect upon him. There had
+developed a curious, new-born mastery in his attitude towards her, which
+she sometimes found it hard to endure. She missed the chivalry of the
+early days. She missed the sweetness of his boyish adoration.
+
+She did not understand him, but she knew that he was not happy. He never
+took her into his confidence, never alluded by word or sign to the change
+which he must have realized that she could not fail to notice. And Avery
+on her part made no further effort to open the door that was so
+strenuously locked against her. With an aching heart she gave herself to
+the weary task of waiting, convinced that sooner or later the nature of
+the barrier which he so stubbornly ignored would be revealed to her. But
+it was impossible to extend her full confidence to him. Moreover, he
+seemed to shrink from all intimate subjects. Instinctively and wholly
+involuntarily she withdrew into herself, meeting reserve with reserve.
+Since he had become master rather than lover, she yielded him obedience,
+and she hid away her love, not deliberately or intentionally, but rather
+with the impulse to protect from outrage that which was holy. He was not
+asking love of her just then.
+
+She saw but little of him during the day. He was busy on the estate, busy
+with the coming election, busy with a hundred and one matters that
+evidently occupied his thoughts very fully. The heat seemed to imbue him
+with inexhaustible energy. He never seemed tired after the most strenuous
+exertion. He never slacked for a moment or seemed to have a moment to
+spare till the day was done. He was generally late for meals, and always
+raced through them at a speed that Avery was powerless to emulate.
+
+He was late on the day of Ina Rose's wedding, so late that Avery, who had
+dressed in good time and was lying on the sofa in her room, began to
+wonder if he had after all abandoned the idea of going. But she presently
+heard him race into his own room, and immediately there came the active
+patter of Victor's feet as he waited upon him.
+
+She lay still, listening, wishing that the wedding were over, morbidly
+dreading the heat and crush and excitement which she knew awaited her and
+to which she felt utterly unequal.
+
+A quarter of an hour passed, then impetuously, without preliminary, her
+door opened and Piers stood on the threshold. He had the light behind
+him, for Avery had lowered the blinds, and so seeing him she was
+conscious of a sudden thrill of admiration. For he stood before her like
+a prince. She had never seen him look more handsome, more patrician, more
+tragically like that woman in the picture-frame downstairs who smiled so
+perpetually upon them both.
+
+He came to her with his light, athletic tread, stooped, and lifted her
+bodily in his arms. He held her a moment before he set her on her feet,
+and then in his hot, fierce way he kissed her.
+
+"You beautiful ghost!" he said.
+
+She leaned against him, breathing rather hard. "I wish--I wish we needn't
+go," she said.
+
+"Why?" said Piers.
+
+He held her to him, gazing down at her with his eyes of fiery possession
+that always made her close her own.
+
+"Because--because it's so hot," she said quiveringly. "There will be no
+one I know there. And I--and I--"
+
+"That's just why you are going," he broke in. "Don't you know it will be
+your introduction to the County? You've got to find your footing, Avery.
+I'm not going to have my wife overlooked by anyone."
+
+"Oh, my dear," she said, with a faint laugh, "I don't care two straws
+about the County. They've seen me once already, most of them,--in a ditch
+and covered with mud. If they want to renew the acquaintance they can
+come and call."
+
+He kissed her again with lips that crushed her own. "We won't stay longer
+than we can help," he said. "You ought to go out more, you know. It isn't
+good for you to stay in this gloomy old vault all day. We will really get
+to work and make it more habitable presently. But I've got such a lot on
+hand just now."
+
+"I know," she said quietly. "Please don't bother about me! Lunch is
+waiting for us. Shall we go?"
+
+He gave her a quick, keen look, as if he suspected her of trying to
+elude him; but he let her go without a word.
+
+They descended to lunch, and later went forth into the blazing sunshine
+where the car awaited them. Avery sank back into the corner and closed
+her eyes. Her head was aching violently. The sense of reluctance that had
+possessed her for so long amounted almost to a premonition of evil.
+
+"Avery!" Her husband's voice, curt, imperious, with just a tinge of
+anxiety broke in upon her. "Are you feeling faint or anything?"
+
+She looked at him. He was watching her with a frown between his eyes.
+
+"No, I am not faint," she said. "The heat makes my head ache,
+that's all."
+
+"You ought to see a doctor," he said restlessly. "But not that ass,
+Tudor. We'll go up to town to-morrow. Avery," his voice softened
+suddenly, "I'm sorry I dragged you here if you didn't want to come."
+
+She put out her hand to him instantly. It was the old Piers who had
+spoken, Piers the boy-lover who had won her heart so irresistibly, so
+completely.
+
+He held the hand tightly, and she thought his face quivered a little as
+he said: "I don't mean to be a tyrant, dear. But somehow--somehow, you
+know--I can't always help it. A man with a raging thirst will
+take--anything he can get."
+
+His eyes were still upon her, and her heart quickened to compassion at
+their look. They seemed to cry to her for mercy out of a depth of
+suffering that she could not bear to contemplate.
+
+She leaned swiftly towards him. "Piers,--my dear--what is it? What is
+it?" she said, under her breath.
+
+But in that instant the look vanished. The old fierce flare of passion
+blazed forth upon her, held her burningly, till finally she drew back
+before it in mute protest. "So you will forgive me," he said, in a tone
+that seemed to contain something of a jeering quality. "We are all human,
+what? You're looking better now. Egad, Avery, you're splendid!"
+
+Her heart died within her. She turned her face away, as one ashamed.
+
+The church at Wardenhurst was thronged with a chattering crowd of guests.
+Piers and Avery arrived late, so late that they had some difficulty in
+finding seats. Tudor, who was present and looking grimly disgusted with
+himself, spied them at length, and gave up his place to Avery.
+
+The bride entered almost immediately afterwards, young, lovely, with the
+air of a queen passing through her subjects. Dick Guyes at the altar was
+shaking with nervousness, but Ina was supremely self-possessed. She even
+sent a smile of casual greeting to Piers as she went.
+
+She maintained her attitude of complete _sang-froid_ throughout the
+service, and Piers watched her critically with that secret smile at the
+corners of his lips which was not good to see.
+
+He did not seem aware of anyone else in the church till the service was
+over, and the strains of the Wedding March were crashing through the
+building. Then very suddenly he turned and looked at his wife--with that
+in his dark eyes that thrilled her to the soul.
+
+A man's voice accosted him somewhat abruptly. "Are you Sir Piers Evesham?
+I'm the best man. They want you to sign the register."
+
+Piers started as one rudely awakened from an entrancing dream. An
+impatient exclamation rose to his lips which he suppressed rather badly.
+He surveyed the man who addressed him with a touch of hauteur.
+
+Avery surveyed him also, and as not very favourably impressed. He was a
+small man with thick sandy eyebrows and shifty uncertain eyes. He looked
+hard at Piers in answer to the latter's haughty regard, and Avery became
+aware of a sudden sharp change in his demeanour as he did so. He opened
+his eyes and stared in blank astonishment.
+
+"Hullo!" he ejaculated softly. "You!"
+
+"What do you mean?" demanded Piers.
+
+It was a challenge, albeit spoken in an undertone. He stood like a man
+transfixed as he uttered it. There came to Avery a quick hot impulse to
+intervene, to protect him from some hidden danger, she knew not what,
+that had risen like a serpent in his path. But before she could take any
+action, the critical moment was passed. Piers had recovered himself.
+
+He stepped forward. "All right. I will come," he said.
+
+She watched him move away in the direction of the vestry with that free,
+proud gait of his, and a great coldness came down upon her, wrapping her
+round, penetrating to her very soul. Who was that man with the shifty
+eyes? Why had he stared at Piers so? Above all, why had Piers stood with
+that stiff immobility of shock as though he had been stabbed in the back?
+
+A voice spoke close to her. "Lady Evesham, come and wait by the door!
+There is more air there."
+
+She turned her head mechanically, and looked at Lennox Tudor with eyes
+that saw not. There was a singing in her ears that made the crashing
+chords of the organ sound confused and jumbled.
+
+His hand closed firmly, sustainingly, upon her elbow.
+
+"Come with me!" he said.
+
+She went with him blindly, unconscious of the curious eyes that
+watched her go.
+
+He led her quietly down the church and into the porch. The air from
+outside, albeit hot and sultry, was less oppressive than within. She drew
+great breaths of relief as it reached her. The icy grip at her heart
+seemed to relax.
+
+Tudor watched her narrowly. "What madness brought you here?" he said
+presently, as she turned at last and mustered a smile of thanks.
+
+She countered the question. "I might ask you the same," she said.
+
+His eyes contracted behind the shielding glasses. "So you might," he said
+briefly. "Well,--I came on the chance of meeting you."
+
+"Of meeting me!" She looked at him in surprise.
+
+He nodded. "Just so. I want a word with you; but it can't be said here.
+Give me an opportunity later if you can!"
+
+His hand fell away from her elbow, he drew back. The bridal procession
+was coming down the church.
+
+Ina was flushed and laughing. Dick Guyes still obviously nervous, but,
+also obviously, supremely happy. They went by Avery into a perfect storm
+of rose-leaves that awaited them from the crowd outside. Yet for one
+moment the eyes of the bride rested upon Avery, meeting hers almost as if
+they would ask her a question. And behind her--immediately behind
+her--came Piers.
+
+His eyes also found Avery, and in an instant with a haughty disregard of
+Tudor, he had swept her forward with him, his arm thrust imperially
+through hers. They also weathered the storm of rose-leaves, and as they
+went Avery heard him laugh,--the laugh of the man who fights with his
+back to the wall.
+
+They were among the first to offer congratulations to the bride and
+bridegroom, and again Avery was aware of the girl's eyes searching hers.
+
+"I haven't forgotten you," she said, as they shook hands. "I knew you
+would be Lady Evesham sooner or later after that day when you kept the
+whole Hunt at bay."
+
+Avery felt herself flush. There seemed to her to be a covert insinuation
+in the remark. "I was very grateful to you for taking my part," she said.
+
+"It was rather generous certainly," agreed the bride coolly. "Dick, do
+get off my train! You're horribly clumsy to-day."
+
+The bridegroom hastened to remove himself to a respectful distance, while
+Ina turned her pretty cheek to Piers. "You may salute the bride," she
+said graciously. "It's the only opportunity you will ever have."
+
+Piers kissed the cheek as airily as it was proffered, his dark eyes
+openly mocking. "Good luck to you, Ina!" he said lightly. "I wish you the
+first and best of all that's most worth having."
+
+Her red lips curled in answer. "You are superlatively kind," she said.
+
+Other guests came crowding round with congratulations, and they moved on.
+
+Piers knew everyone there, and presented one after another to his wife
+till she felt absolutely bewildered. He did not present the best man, who
+to her relief seemed disposed to keep out of their way. She wondered
+greatly if anything had passed between him and Piers, though by the
+latter at least the incident seemed to be wholly forgotten. He was in his
+gayest, most sparkling mood, and she could not fail to see that he was
+very popular whichever way he turned. People kept claiming his attention,
+and though he tried to remain near her he was drawn away at last by the
+bridegroom himself.
+
+Avery looked round her then for a quiet corner where Tudor might
+find her if he so desired, but while she was searching she came upon
+Tudor himself.
+
+He joined her immediately, with evident relief. "For Heaven's sake, let
+us get away from this gibbering crowd!" he said. "They are like a horde
+of painted monkeys. Come alone to the library! I don't think there are
+many people there."
+
+Avery accompanied him, equally thankful to escape. They found the
+library deserted, and Tudor made her sit down by the window in the most
+comfortable chair the room contained.
+
+"You look about as fit for this sort of show as Mrs. Lorimer," he
+observed drily. "She had the sense to stay away."
+
+"I couldn't," Avery said.
+
+"For goodness' sake," he exclaimed roughly, "don't let that young ruffian
+tyrannize over you! You will never know any peace if you do."
+
+Avery smiled a little and was silent.
+
+"Why are you so painfully thin?" he pursued relentlessly. "What's
+the matter with you? When I saw you in church just now I had a
+positive shock."
+
+She put out her hand to him. "I am quite all right," she assured him,
+still faintly smiling. "I should have sent for you if I hadn't been."
+
+"It's high time you sent for me now," said Tudor.
+
+He looked at her searchingly through his glasses, holding her hand firmly
+clasped in his.
+
+"Are you happy?" he asked her suddenly.
+
+She started at the question, started and flushed. "Why--why do you ask me
+that?" she said in confusion.
+
+"Because you don't look it," he said plainly. "No, don't be vexed with
+me! I speak as a friend--a friend who desires your happiness more than
+anything else on earth. And do you know, I think I should see a doctor
+pretty soon if I were you. If you don't, you will probably regret it. Get
+Piers to take you up to town! Maxwell Wyndham is about the best man I
+know. Go to him!"
+
+"Thank you," Avery said. "Perhaps I will."
+
+It was at this point that a sudden uproarious laugh sounded from
+below the window near which they sat, Avery looked round startled,
+and Tudor frowned.
+
+"It's that little brute of a best man--drunk as a lord. He's some sort
+of cousin of Guyes', just home from Australia; and the sooner he goes
+back the better for the community at large, I should say."
+
+"Piers knows him!" broke almost involuntarily from Avery.
+
+And with that swiftly she turned her head to listen, for the man outside
+had evidently gathered to himself an audience at the entrance of a tent
+that had been erected for refreshments, and was declaiming at the top of
+his voice.
+
+"Eric Denys was the name of the man. He was a chum of mine. Samson we
+used to call him. This Evesham fellow killed him in the first round. I've
+never forgotten it. I recognized him the minute I set eyes on him, though
+it's years ago now. And he recognized me! I wish you'd seen his face."
+Again came the uncontrolled, ribald laughter. "A bully sort of squire,
+eh? I suppose he's a justice of the peace now, a law-giver, eh? Damn
+funny, I call it!"
+
+Tudor was on his feet. He looked at Avery, but she sat like a statue,
+making no sign.
+
+Another man was speaking in a lower tone, as though he were trying to
+restrain the first; but his efforts were plainly useless, for the best
+man had more to say.
+
+"Oh, I can tell you a Queensland crowd is no joke. He'd have been
+manhandled if he hadn't bolted. Mistaken? Not I! Could anyone mistake a
+face like that? Go and ask the man himself, if you don't believe me!
+You'll find he won't deny it!"
+
+"Shall we go?" suggested Tudor brusquely.
+
+Avery made a slight movement, wholly mechanical; but she did not turn her
+head. Her whole attitude was one of tense listening.
+
+"I think I'll go in any case," said Tudor, after a moment. "That fellow
+will make an exhibition of himself if someone doesn't interfere."
+
+He went to the door, but before he reached it Avery turned in her chair
+and spoke.
+
+"He has gone inside for another drink. You had better let him have it."
+
+There was that in her voice that he had never heard before. He stopped
+short, looking back at her.
+
+"Let him have it!" she reiterated. "Let him soak himself with it! You
+won't quiet him any other way."
+
+Even as she spoke, that horrible, half-intoxicated laugh came to
+them, insulting the beauty of the summer afternoon. Avery shivered
+from head to foot.
+
+"Don't go!" she said. "Please!"
+
+She rose as Tudor came back, rose and faced him, her face like death.
+
+"I think I must go home," she said. "Will you find the car? No, I am not
+ill. I--" She paused, seemed to grope for words, stopped, and suddenly a
+bewildered look came into her face. Her eyes dilated. She gave a sharp
+gasp. Tudor caught her as she fell.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE MASK
+
+
+The bride and bridegroom departed amid a storm of rice and good wishes,
+Ina's face still wearing that slightly contemptuous smile to the last.
+Piers, in the foremost of the crowd, threw a handful straight into her
+lap as the car started, but only he and Dick Guyes saw her gather it up
+with sudden energy and fling it back in his face.
+
+Piers dropped off the step laughing. "Ye gods! What fun for Dick
+Guyes!" he said.
+
+A hand grasped his shoulder, and he turned and saw Lennox Tudor.
+
+"Hullo!" he said, sharply freeing himself.
+
+"I want a word with you," said Tudor briefly.
+
+A wary look came into Piers' face on the instant. He looked at Tudor with
+the measuring eye of a fencer.
+
+"What about?" he asked.
+
+"I can't tell you here. Will you walk back with me? Lady Evesham has
+already gone in the car."
+
+Piers' black brows went up, "Why was that? Wasn't she well?"
+
+"No," said Tudor curtly.
+
+"But she will send the car back," said Piers, stubbornly refusing to
+betray himself.
+
+"No, she won't. I told her we would walk."
+
+"The devil you did!" said Piers.
+
+He turned his back on Tudor, and went into the house.
+
+But Tudor was undaunted. In a battle of wills, he was fully a match for
+Piers. He kept close behind.
+
+Eventually, Piers turned upon him. "Look here! I'll give you five minutes
+in the library. I'm not going to walk three miles with you in this
+blazing heat. It would be damned unhealthy for us both. Moreover, I've
+promised to spend the evening with Colonel Rose."
+
+It was the utmost he could hope for, and Tudor had the sense to accept
+what he could get. He followed him to the library in silence.
+
+They found it empty, and Tudor quietly turned the key.
+
+"What's that for?" demanded Piers sharply.
+
+"Because I don't want to be disturbed," returned Tudor.
+
+He moved forward into the middle of the room and faced Piers.
+
+"I have an unpleasant piece of news for you," he said, in a grim,
+emotionless voice. "That cousin of Guyes'--you have met him before, I
+think? He claims to know something of your past, and he has been
+talking--somewhat freely."
+
+"What has he been saying?" said Piers.
+
+He stood up before Tudor with the arrogance of a man who mocks defeat,
+but there was a gleam of desperation in his eyes--something of the
+cornered animal in his very nonchalance.
+
+A queer touch of pity moved Tudor from his attitude of cold informer.
+There was an undercurrent of something that was almost sympathy in his
+voice as he made reply.
+
+"The fellow was more or less drunk, but I am afraid he was rather
+circumstantial. He recognized in you a man who had killed some chum of
+his years ago, in Queensland."
+
+"Well?" said Piers.
+
+Just the one word, uttered like a command! Tudor's softer impulse passed.
+
+"He was bawling it out at the top of his voice. A good many people must
+have heard him. I was in this room with Lady Evesham. We heard also."
+
+"Well?" Piers said again.
+
+He spoke without stirring an eyelid, and again, involuntarily, Tudor was
+moved, this time with a species of unwilling admiration. The fellow was
+no coward at least.
+
+He went on steadily. "It was impossible not to hear what the beast said.
+He mentioned names also,--your name and the name of the man whom he
+alleged you had killed. Lady Evesham heard it. We both heard it."
+
+He paused. Piers had not moved. His face was like a mask in its
+composure, but it was a dreadful mask. Tudor had a feeling that it hid
+unutterable things.
+
+"What was the man's name?" Piers asked, after a moment.
+
+"Denys--Eric Denys."
+
+Piers nodded, as one verifying a piece of information. His next question
+came with hauteur and studied indifference.
+
+"Lady Evesham heard, you say? Did she pay any attention to these maudlin
+revelations?"
+
+"She fainted," said Tudor shortly.
+
+"Oh? And what happened then?"
+
+It was maddeningly cold-blooded; but it was the mask that spoke. Tudor
+recognized that.
+
+"I brought her round," he made answer. "No one else was present. She
+begged me to let her go home alone. I did so."
+
+"She also asked you to make full explanation to me?" came in measured
+tones from Piers.
+
+"She did." Tudor paused a moment as though he found some difficulty in
+forming his next words. But he went on almost at once with resolution.
+"She said to me at parting: 'I must be alone. I must think. Beg Piers to
+understand! Beg him not to see me again to-day! I will talk to him in
+the morning!' I promised to deliver the message exactly as she gave it."
+
+"Thank you," said Piers. He turned with the words, moved away to the
+window, and looked forth at the now deserted marquee.
+
+Tudor stood mutely waiting; he felt as if it had been laid upon
+him to wait.
+
+Suddenly Piers jerked his head round and glanced at the chair in which
+Avery had been sitting, then abruptly turned himself and looked at Tudor.
+
+"What were you--and my wife--doing in here?" he said.
+
+Tudor frowned impatiently at the question. "Oh, don't be a fool,
+Evesham!" he said with vehemence.
+
+"I'm not a fool." Piers left the window with the gait of a prowling
+animal; he stood again face to face with the other man. But though his
+features were still mask-like, his eyes shone through the mask; and they
+were eyes of leaping flame. "Oh, I am no fool, I assure you," he said,
+and in his voice there sounded a deep vibration that was almost like a
+snarl. "I know you too well by this time to be hoodwinked. You would come
+between us if you could."
+
+"You lie!" said Tudor.
+
+He did not raise his voice or speak in haste. His vehemence had departed.
+He simply made the statement as if it had been a wholly impersonal one.
+
+Piers' hands clenched, but they remained at his sides. He looked at Tudor
+hard, as if he did not understand him.
+
+After a moment Tudor spoke again. "I am no friend of yours, and I never
+shall be. But I am the friend of your wife, and--whether you like it or
+not--I shall remain so. For that reason, whatever I do will be in your
+interests as well as hers. I have not the smallest intention or desire to
+come between you. And if you use your wits you will see that I couldn't
+if I tried. Your marriage with her tied my hands."
+
+"What proof have I of that?" said Piers, his voice low and fierce.
+
+Tudor made a slight gesture of disgust. "I am dealing with facts, not
+proofs," he said. "You know as well as I do that though you obtained her
+love on false pretences, still you obtained it. Whether you will keep it
+or not remains to be seen, but she is not the sort of woman to solace
+herself with anyone else. If you lose it, it will be because you failed
+to guard your own property--not because anyone deprived you of it."
+
+"Damnation!" exclaimed Piers furiously, and with the word the storm of
+his anger broke like a fiery torrent, sweeping all before it, "are you
+taking me to task, you--you--for this accursed trick of Fate? How was I
+to know that this infernal little sot would turn up here? Why, I don't so
+much as know the fellow's name! I had forgotten his very existence! Where
+the devil is he? Let me find him, and break every bone in his body!" He
+whirled round to the door, but in a moment was back again. "Tudor! Damn
+you! Where's the key?"
+
+"In my pocket," said Tudor quietly. "And, Piers, before you go--since I
+am your ally in spite of myself--let me warn you to keep your head!
+There's no sense in murdering another man. It won't improve your case.
+There's no sense in running amok. Sit down for Heaven's sake, and review
+the situation quietly!"
+
+The calm words took effect. Piers stopped, arrested in spite of himself
+by the other's steady insistence. He looked at Tudor with half-sullen
+respect dawning behind his ungoverned fury.
+
+"Listen!" Tudor said. "The fellow has gone. I packed him off myself. It
+was a piece of sheer ill-luck that brought him home in time for this
+show. He starts for America _en route_ for Australia in less than a week,
+and it is utterly unlikely that either you or any of your friends will
+see or hear anything more of him. Guyes himself is by no means keen on
+him and only had him as best man because a friend failed him at the last
+minute. If you behave rationally the whole affair will probably pass off
+of itself. Everyone knows the fellow was intoxicated, and no one is
+likely to pay any lasting attention to what he said. Treat the matter as
+unworthy of notice, and you will very possibly hear no more of it! But if
+you kick up a row, you will simply court disaster. I am an older man than
+you are. Take my word for it,--I know what I am talking about."
+
+Piers listened in silence. The heat had gone from his face, but his eyes
+still gleamed with a restless fire.
+
+Tudor watched him keenly. Not by his own choice would he have ranged
+himself on Piers' side, but circumstances having placed him there he was
+oddly anxious to effect his deliverance. He was fighting heavy odds, and
+he knew it, but there was a fighting strain in his nature also. He
+relished the odds.
+
+"For Heaven's sake don't be a fool and give the whole show away!" he
+urged. "You have no enemies. No one will want to take the matter up if
+you will only let it lie. No one wants to believe evil of you. Possibly
+no one will."
+
+"Except yourself!" said Piers, with a smile that showed his set teeth.
+
+"Quite so." Tudor also smiled, a grim brief smile. "But then I happen to
+know you better than most. You gave yourself away so far as I am
+concerned that night in the winter. I knew then that once upon a time in
+your career--you had--killed a man."
+
+"And you didn't tell Avery!" The words shot out unexpectedly. Piers was
+plainly astonished.
+
+"I'm not a woman!" said Tudor contemptuously. "That affair was
+between us two."
+
+"Great Scott!" said Piers.
+
+"At the same time," Tudor continued sternly, "if I had known what I know
+now, I would have told her everything sooner than let her ruin her
+happiness by marrying you."
+
+Piers made a sharp gesture that passed unexplained. He had made no
+attempt at self-defence; he made none then. Perhaps his pride kicked at
+the idea; perhaps in the face of Tudor's shrewd grip of the situation it
+did not seem worth while.
+
+He held out his hand. "May I have that key?"
+
+Tudor gave it to him. He was still watching narrowly, but Piers' face
+told him nothing. The mask had been replaced, and the man behind it was
+securely hidden from scrutiny. Tudor would have given much to have rent
+it aside, and have read the thoughts and intentions it covered. But he
+knew that he was powerless. He knew that he was deliberately barred out.
+
+Piers went to the door and fitted the key into the lock. His actions were
+all grimly deliberate. The volcanic fires which Tudor had seen raging but
+a few seconds before had sunk very far below the surface. Whatever was
+happening in the torture-chamber where his soul agonized, it was certain
+that no human being--save possibly one--would ever witness it. What he
+suffered he would suffer in proud aloofness and silence. It was only the
+effect of that suffering that could ever be made apparent, when the soul
+came forth again, blackened and shrivelled from the furnace.
+
+Yet ere he left Tudor, some impulse moved him to look back.
+
+He met Tudor's gaze with brooding eyes which nevertheless held a faint
+warmth like the dim reflection of a light below the horizon.
+
+"I am obliged to you," he said, and was gone before Tudor could
+speak again.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GATES OF HELL
+
+
+Up and down, up and down, in a fever of restlessness, Avery walked. She
+felt trapped. The gloomy, tapestried room seemed to close her in like a
+prison. The whole world seemed to have turned into a monstrous place of
+punishment. One thing only was needed to complete the anguish of her
+spirit, and that was the presence of her husband.
+
+She could not picture the meeting with him. Body and soul recoiled from
+the thought. It would not be till the morning; that was her sole comfort.
+By the morning this fiery suffering would have somewhat abated. She would
+be calmer, more able to face him and hear his defence--if defence there
+could be. Somehow she never questioned the truth of the story. She knew
+that Tudor had not questioned it either. She knew moreover that had it
+been untrue, Piers would have been with her long ago in vehement
+indignation and wrath.
+
+No, the thing was true. He was the man who had wrecked her life at its
+beginning, and now--now he had wrecked it again. He was the man whose
+hands were stained with her husband's blood. He had done the deed in one
+of those wild tempests of anger with which she was so familiar. He had
+done the deed, possibly unintentionally, but certainly with murderous
+impulse; and then deliberately cynically, he had covered it up, and gone
+his arrogant way.
+
+He had met her, he had desired her; with a few, quickly-stifled qualms
+he had won her, trusting to luck that his sin would never find him out.
+And so he had made her his own, his property, his prisoner, the slave of
+his pleasure. She was bound for ever to her husband's murderer.
+
+Again body and soul shrank in quivering horror from the thought, and a
+wild revolt awoke within her. She could not bear it. She must break free.
+The bare memory of his passion sickened her. For the first time in her
+life hatred, fiery, intense, kindled within her. The thought of his touch
+filled her with a loathing unutterable. He had become horrible to her, a
+thing unclean, abominable, whose very proximity was pollution. She felt
+as if the blood on his hands had stained her also--the blood of the man
+she had once loved. For a space she became like a woman demented. The
+thing was too abhorrent to be endured.
+
+And then by slow degrees her brain began to clear again. She grew a
+little calmer. Monstrous though he was, he was still human. He was, in a
+fashion, at her mercy. He had sinned, but it was in her hands that his
+punishment lay.
+
+She was stronger than he. She had always known it. But she must keep her
+strength. She must not waste it in futile resentment. She would need it
+all. He had entered her kingdom by subtlety; but she would drive him
+forth in the strength of a righteous indignation. To suffer him to remain
+was unthinkable. It would be to share his guilt.
+
+Her thoughts tried to wander into the future, but she called them
+resolutely back. The future would provide for itself. Her immediate duty
+was all she now needed to face. When that dreaded interview was over,
+when she had shut him out finally and completely then it would be time
+enough to consider that. Probably some arrangement would have to be made
+by which they would meet occasionally, but as husband and wife--never,
+never more.
+
+It was growing late. The dinner-gong had sounded, but she would not go
+down. She rang for Victor, and told him to bring her something on a tray.
+It did not matter what.
+
+He looked at her with keen little eyes of solicitude, and swiftly obeyed
+her desire. He then asked her if the dinner were to be kept for _Monsieur
+Pierre_, who had not yet returned. She did not know what to say, but lest
+he should wonder at her ignorance of Piers' doings, she answered in the
+negative, and Victor withdrew.
+
+Then, again lest comment should be made, she forced herself to eat and
+drink, though the food nauseated her. A feeling of sick suspense was
+growing upon her, a strange, foreboding fear that hung leaden about her
+heart. What was Piers doing all this time? What effect had that message,
+delivered by Tudor, had upon him? Why had he not returned?
+
+Time passed. The evening waned and became night. A full moon rose red and
+wonderful out of a bank of inky cloud, lighting the darkness with an
+oddly tropical effect. The night was tropical, breathless, terribly
+still. It seemed as if a storm must be upon its way.
+
+She began to undress at last there in the moonlight. The heat was too
+intense to veil the windows, and she would not light the candles lest
+bats or moths should be attracted. At another time the eerieness of the
+shadowy room would have played upon her nerves, but to-night she was not
+even aware of it. The shadows within were too dark, too sinister.
+
+A great weariness had come upon her. She ached for rest. Her body felt
+leaden, and her brain like a burnt-out furnace. The very capacity for
+thought seemed to have left her. Only the horror of the day loomed
+gigantic whichever way she turned, blotting out all beside. Prayer was an
+impossibility to her. She felt lost in a wilderness of doubt, forsaken
+and wandering, and terribly alone.
+
+If she could rest, if she could sleep, she thought that strength might
+return to her--the strength to grapple with and overthrow the evil that
+had entered into and tainted her whole life. But till sleep should come
+to her, she was impotent. She was heavy and numb with fatigue.
+
+She lay down at length with a vague sense of physical relief beneath her
+crushing weight of trouble. How unutterably weary she was! How tired--how
+tired of life!
+
+Time passed. The moon rose higher, filling the room with its weird cold
+light. Avery lay asleep.
+
+Exhaustion had done for her what no effort of will could have
+accomplished, closing her eyes, drawing a soft veil of oblivion across
+her misery.
+
+But it was only a temporary lull. The senses were too alert, too fevered,
+for true repose. That blessed interval of unconsciousness was all too
+short. After a brief, brief respite she began to dream.
+
+And in her dream she saw a man being tortured in a burning, fiery
+furnace, imprisoned behind bars of iron, writhing, wrestling, agonizing,
+to be free. She saw the flames leaping all around him, and in the flames
+were demon-faces that laughed and gibed and jested. She saw his hands all
+blistered in the heat, reaching out to her, straining through those cruel
+bars, beseeching her vainly for deliverance. And presently, gazing with a
+sick horror that compelled, she saw his face....
+
+With a gasping cry she awoke, started up with every nerve stretched and
+quivering, her heart pounding as if it would choke her. It was a
+dream--it was a dream! She whispered it to herself over and over again,
+striving to control those awful palpitations. Surely it was all a dream!
+
+Stay! What was that? A sound in the room beyond--a movement--a step! She
+sprang up, obeying blind impulse, sped softly to the intervening door,
+with hands that trembled shot the bolt. Then, like a hunted creature,
+almost distracted by the panic of her dream, she slipped back to the
+gloomy four-poster, and cowered down again.
+
+Lying there, crouched and quivering, she began to count those hammering
+heart-beats, and wondered wildly if the man on the other side of the door
+could hear them also. She was sure that he had been there, sure that he
+had been on the point of entering when she had shot the bolt.
+
+He would not enter now, she whispered to her quaking heart. She would not
+have to meet him before the morning. And by then she would be strong. It
+was only her weariness that made her so weak to-night!
+
+She grew calmer. She began to chide herself for her senseless panic--she
+the bearer of other people's burdens, who prided herself upon her steady
+nerve and calmness of purpose. She had never been hysterical in her life
+before. Surely she could muster self-control now, when her need of it was
+so urgent, so imperative.
+
+And then, just as a certain measure of composure had returned to her,
+something happened. Someone passed down the passage outside her room and
+paused at the outer door. Her heart stood still, but again desperately
+she steadied herself. That door was bolted also.
+
+Yes, it was bolted, but there was a hand upon it,--a hand that felt
+softly for the lock, found the key outside, softly turned it.
+
+Then indeed panic came upon Avery. Lying there, tense and listening, she
+heard the quiet step return along the passage and enter her husband's
+room, heard that door also close and lock, and knew herself a prisoner.
+
+"Avery!"
+
+Every pulse leapt, every nerve shrank. She started up, wide-eyed,
+desperate.
+
+"I will talk to you in the morning, Piers," she said, steadying her voice
+with difficulty. "Not now! Not now!"
+
+"Open this door!" he said.
+
+There was dear command in his voice, and with it the old magnetic force
+reached her, quick, insistent, vital. She threw a wild look round, but
+only the dazzling moonlight met her eyes. There was no escape for
+her--no escape.
+
+She turned her face to the door behind which he stood. "Piers, please,
+not to-night!" she said beseechingly.
+
+"Open the door!" he repeated inexorably.
+
+Again that force reached her. It was like an electric current suddenly
+injected into her veins. Her whole body quivered in response. Almost
+before she knew it, she had started to obey.
+
+And then horror seized her--a dread unutterable. She stopped.
+
+"Piers, will you promise--"
+
+"I promise nothing," he said, in the same clear, imperious voice, "except
+to force this door unless you open it within five seconds."
+
+She stood in the moonlight, trembling, unnerved. He did not sound like a
+man bereft of reason. And yet--and yet--something in his voice appalled
+her. Her strength was utterly gone. She was just a weak, terrified woman.
+
+"Avery," his voice came to her again, short and stern, "I don't wish to
+threaten you; but it will be better for us both if I don't have to force
+the door."
+
+She forced herself to speak though her tongue felt stiff and dry. "I
+can't let you in now," she said. "I will hear what you have to say in
+the morning."
+
+He made no reply. There was an instant of dead silence. Then there came a
+sudden, hideous shock against the panel of the door. The socket of the
+bolt gave with the strain, but did not wholly yield. Avery shrank back
+trembling against the shadowy four-poster. She felt as if a raging animal
+were trying to force an entrance.
+
+Again came that awful shock. The wood splintered and rent, socket and
+bolt were torn free; the door burst inwards.
+
+There came a brief, fiendish laugh, and Piers broke in upon her.
+
+He recovered himself with a sharp effort, and stood breathing heavily,
+looking at her. The moonlight was full upon him, showing him deadly pale,
+and in his eyes there shone the red glare of hell.
+
+"Did you really think--a locked door--would keep me out?" he said,
+speaking with an odd jerkiness, with lips that twitched.
+
+She drew herself together with an instinctive effort at self-control. "I
+thought you would respect my wish," she said, her voice very low.
+
+"Did you?" said Piers. "Then why did you lock the door?"
+
+He swung it closed behind him and came to her.
+
+"Listen to me, Avery!" he said. "You are not your own any longer--to give
+or to take away. You are mine."
+
+She faced him with all the strength she could muster, but she could not
+meet those awful eyes that mocked her, that devoured her.
+
+"Piers," she said, almost under her breath, "remember,--what happens
+to-night we shall neither of us ever forget. Don't make me hate you!"
+
+"Haven't you begun to hate me then?" he demanded. "Would you have locked
+that door against me if you hadn't?"
+
+She heard the rising passion in his voice, and her heart fainted within
+her. Yet still desperately she strove for strength.
+
+"I don't want to do anything violent or unconsidered. I must have time to
+think. Piers, you have me at your mercy. Be merciful!"
+
+He made a sharp movement. "Are you going to be merciful to me?" he said.
+
+She hesitated. There was something brutal in the question, yet it
+pierced her. She knew that he had divined all that had been passing
+within her during that evening of misery. She did not answer him, for she
+could not.
+
+"Listen!" he said again. "What has happened has happened by sheer
+ill-luck. The past is nothing to you. You have said so yourself. The
+future shall not be sacrificed to it. If you will give me your solemn
+promise to put this thing behind you, to behave as if it had never been,
+I will respect your wishes, I will do my utmost to help you to forget.
+But if you refuse--" He stopped.
+
+"If I refuse--" she repeated faintly.
+
+He made again that curious gesture that was almost one of helplessness.
+"Don't ask for mercy!" he said.
+
+In the silence that followed there came to her the certain knowledge that
+he was suffering, that he was in an inferno of torment that goaded him
+into fierce savagery against her, like a mad animal that will wreak its
+madness first upon the being most beloved. It was out of his torment that
+he did this thing. She saw him again agonizing in the flames.
+
+If he had had patience then, that divine pity of hers might have come to
+help them both; but he read into her silence the abhorrence which a
+little earlier had possessed her soul; and the maddening pain of it drove
+him beyond all bounds.
+
+He seized her suddenly and savagely between his hands. "Are you any the
+less my wife," he said, speaking between his teeth, "because you have
+found out what manner of man I am?"
+
+She resisted him, swiftly, instinctively, her hands against his breast,
+pressing him back. "I may be your wife," she said gaspingly. "I am
+not--your slave."
+
+He laughed a fiendish laugh. Her resistance fired him. He caught her
+fiercely to him. He covered her face, her throat, her arms, her hands,
+with kisses that burned her through and through, seeming to sear her
+very soul.
+
+He crushed her in a grip that bruised her, that suffocated her. He
+pressed his lips, hot with passion, to hers.
+
+"And now!" he said. "And now!"
+
+She lay in his arms spent and quivering and helpless. The cruel triumph
+of his voice silenced all appeal.
+
+He went on deeply, speaking with his lips so close that she felt his
+breath scorch through her like the breath of a fiery furnace.
+
+"You are bound to me for better--for worse, and nothing will ever set
+you free. Do you understand? If you will not be my wife, you shall
+be--my slave."
+
+Quiveringly, through lips that would scarcely move she spoke at last. "I
+shall never forgive you."
+
+"I shall never ask your forgiveness," he said.
+
+So the gates of hell closed upon Avery also. She went down into the
+unknown depths. And in an agony of shame she learned the bitterest lesson
+of her life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A FRIEND IN NEED
+
+
+"Why, Avery dear, is it you? Come in!" Mrs. Lorimer looked up with a
+smile of eager welcome on her little pinched face and went forward almost
+at a run to greet her.
+
+The brown holland smock upon which she had been at work fell to the
+ground. It was Avery who, after a close embrace, stooped to pick it up.
+
+"Who is this for? Baby Phil? You must let me lend a hand," she said.
+
+"Ah, my dear, I do miss you," said Mrs. Lorimer wistfully. "The village
+girl who comes in to help is no good at all at needlework, and you know
+how busy Nurse always is. Jeanie does her best, and is a great help in
+many ways. But she is but a child. However," she caught herself up, "I
+mustn't start grumbling the moment you enter the house. Tell me about
+yourself, dear! You are looking very pale. Does the heat try you?"
+
+"A little," Avery admitted.
+
+She was spreading out the small garment on her knee, looking at it
+critically, with eyes downcast. She certainly was pale that morning. The
+only colour in her face seemed concentrated in her lips.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer looked at her uneasily. There was something not quite normal
+about her, she felt. She had never seen Avery look so statuesque. She
+missed the quick sweetness of her smile, the brightness and animation of
+her glance.
+
+"It is very dear of you to come and see me," she said gently, after a
+moment. "Did you walk all the way? I hope it hasn't been too much for
+you."
+
+"No," Avery said. "It did me good."
+
+She was on the verge of saying something further, but the words did not
+come.
+
+She continued to smooth out the little smock with minute care, while Mrs.
+Lorimer watched her anxiously.
+
+"Is all well, dear?" she ventured at last.
+
+Avery raised her brows slightly, but her eyes remained downcast. "I went
+to the wedding yesterday," she said, after a momentary pause.
+
+"Oh, did you, dear? Stephen went, but I stayed at home. Did you see him?"
+
+"Only from a distance," said Avery.
+
+"It was a very magnificent affair, he tells me." Mrs. Lorimer was
+becoming a little nervous. She had begun to be conscious of something
+tragic in the atmosphere. "And did you enjoy it, dear? Or was the heat
+too great?"
+
+"It was hot," Avery said.
+
+Again she seemed to be about to say something more, and again she failed
+to do so. Her lips closed.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer remained silent also for several seconds. Then softly she
+rose, went to Avery, put her arms about her.
+
+"My darling!" she said fondly.
+
+That was all. No further questioning, no anxious probing, simply her love
+poured out in fullest measure upon the altar of friendship! And it moved
+Avery instantly and overwhelmingly, shattering her reserve, sweeping away
+the stony ramparts of her pride.
+
+She turned and hid her face upon Mrs. Lorimer's breast in an anguish of
+tears.
+
+It lasted for several minutes, that paroxysm of weeping. It was the pent
+misery of hours finding vent at last. All she had suffered, all the
+humiliation, the bitterness of desecrated love, the utter despair of her
+soul, was in those tears. They shook her being to the depths. They seemed
+to tear her heart asunder.
+
+At last in broken whispers she began to speak. Still with those scalding
+tears falling between her words, she imparted the whole miserable story;
+she bared her fallen pride. There was no other person in the world to
+whom she could thus have revealed that inner agony, that lacerating
+shame. But Mrs. Lorimer, the despised, the downtrodden, was as an angel
+from heaven that day. A new strength was hers, born of her friend's utter
+need. She held her up, she sustained, her, through that the darkest hour
+of her life, with a courage and a steadfastness of which no one had ever
+deemed her capable.
+
+When Avery whispered at length, "I can never, never go back to him!" her
+answer was prompt.
+
+"My dear, you must. It will be hard, God knows. But He will give you
+strength. Oh Avery, don't act for yourself, dear! Let Him show the way!"
+
+"If He will!" sobbed Avery, with her burning face hidden against her
+friend's heart.
+
+"He will, dearest, He will," Mrs. Lorimer asserted with conviction. "He
+is much nearer to us in trouble than most of us ever realize. Only let
+Him take the helm; He will steer you through the storm."
+
+"I feel too wicked," whispered Avery, "too--overwhelmed with evil."
+
+"My dear, feelings are nothing," said the Vicar's wife, with a decision
+that would have shocked the Reverend Stephen unspeakably. "We can't help
+our feelings, but we can put ourselves in the way of receiving help. Oh,
+don't you think He often lets us miss our footing just because He wants
+us to lean on Him?"
+
+"I don't know," Avery said hopelessly. "But I think it will kill me to
+go back. Even if--if I pretended to forgive him--I couldn't possibly
+endure to--to go on as if nothing had happened. Eric--my first
+husband--will always stand between us now."
+
+"Dear, are you sure that what you heard was not an exaggeration?" Mrs.
+Lorimer asked gently.
+
+"Oh yes, I am sure." There was utter hopelessness in Avery's reply. "I
+have always known that there was something in his past, some cloud of
+which he would never speak openly. But I never dreamed--never guessed--"
+She broke off with a sharp shudder. "Besides, he has offered no
+explanation, no excuse, no denial. He lets me believe the worst, and he
+doesn't care. He is utterly callous--utterly brutal. That is how I know
+that the worst is true." She rose abruptly, as if inaction had become
+torture to her. "Oh, I must leave him!" she cried out wildly. "I am
+nothing to him. My feelings are less than nothing. He doesn't really want
+me. Any woman could fill my place with him equally well!"
+
+"Hush!" Mrs. Lorimer said. She went to Avery and held her tightly, as if
+she would herself do battle with the evil within. "You are not to say
+that, Avery. You are not to think it. It is utterly untrue. Suffering may
+have goaded him into brutality, but he is not wicked at heart. And, my
+dear, he is in your hands now--to make or to mar. He worships you
+blindly, and if his worship has become an unholy thing, it is because the
+thought of losing you has driven him nearly distracted. You can win it
+back--if you will."
+
+"I don't want to win it back!" Avery said. She suffered the arms about
+her, but she stood rigid in their embrace, unyielding, unresponding. "His
+love is horrible to me! I abhor it!"
+
+"Avery! Your husband!"
+
+"He is a murderer!" Avery cried passionately. "He would murder me too
+if--if he could bring himself to do without me! He hates me in his soul."
+
+"Avery, hush! You are distraught. You don't know what you are saying."
+Mrs. Lorimer drew her back to her chair with tender insistence. "Sit
+down, darling! And try--do try--to be quiet for a little! You are worn
+out. I don't think you can have had any sleep."
+
+"Sleep!" Avery almost laughed, and then again those burning, blinding
+tears rushed to her eyes. "Oh, you don't know what I've been through!"
+she sobbed. "You don't know! You don't know!"
+
+"God knows, darling," whispered Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+Minutes later, when Avery was lying back exhausted, no longer sobbing,
+only dumbly weeping, there came a gentle knock at the door.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer went to it quickly, and met her eldest daughter upon the
+point of entering. Jeanie looked up at her enquiringly.
+
+"Is anyone here?"
+
+"Yes, dear. Avery is here. She isn't very well this morning. Run and
+fetch her a glass of milk!"
+
+Jeanie hastened away. Mrs. Lorimer returned to Avery.
+
+"My darling," she said, "do you know I think I can see a way to help
+you?"
+
+Avery's eyes were closed. She put out a trembling hand. "You are very
+good to me."
+
+"I wonder how often I have had reason to say that to you," said Mrs.
+Lorimer softly. "Listen, darling! You must go back. Yes, Avery, you must!
+You must! But--you shall take my little Jeanie with you."
+
+Avery's eyes opened. Mrs. Lorimer was looking at her with tears in her
+own.
+
+"I know I may trust her to you," she said. "But oh, you will take care
+of her! Remember how precious she is--and how fragile!"
+
+"But, my dear--you couldn't spare her!" Avery said.
+
+"Yes, I can,--I will!" Mrs. Lorimer hastily rubbed her eyes and smiled--a
+resolute smile. "You may have her, dear. I know she will be happy with
+you. And Piers is so fond of her too. She will be a comfort to you--to
+you both, please God. She comforts everyone--my little Jeanie. It seems
+to be her _role_ in life. Ah, here she comes! You shall tell her, dear.
+It will come better from you."
+
+"May I come in?" said Jeanie at the door.
+
+Her mother went to admit her. Avery sat up, and pushed her chair back
+against the window-curtain.
+
+Jeanie entered, a glass of milk in one hand and a plate in the other.
+"Good morning, dear Avery!" she said, in her gentle, rather tired voice.
+"I've brought you a hot cake too--straight out of the oven. It smells
+quite good." She came to Avery's side, and stood within the circle of her
+arm; but she did not kiss her or look into her piteous, tearstained face.
+"I hope you like currants," she said. "Baby Phil calls them flies. Have
+you seen Baby Phil lately? He has just cut another tooth. He likes
+everybody to look at it."
+
+"I must see it presently," Avery said, with an effort.
+
+She drank the milk, and broke the cake, still holding Jeanie pressed
+to her side.
+
+Jeanie, gravely practical, held the plate. "I saw Piers ride by a little
+while ago," she remarked. "He was on Pompey. But he was going so fast he
+didn't see me. He always rides fast, doesn't he? But I think Pompey likes
+it, don't you?"
+
+"I don't know." There was an odd frozen note in Avery's voice. "He has to
+go--whether he likes it or not."
+
+"But he is very fond of Piers," said Jeanie. "And so is Caesar." She gave
+a little sigh. "Poor Mikey! Do you remember how angry he used to be when
+Caesar ran by?"
+
+Avery suppressed a shiver. Vivid as a picture flung on a screen, there
+rose in her brain the memory of that winter evening when Piers and Mike
+and Caesar had all striven together for the mastery. Again she seemed
+to hear those savage, pitiless blows. She might have known! She might
+have known!
+
+Sharply she wrenched herself back to the present. "Jeanie darling," she
+said, "your mother says that you may come and stay at the Abbey for a
+little while. Do you--would you--like to come?"
+
+Her voice was unconsciously wistful. Jeanie turned for the first time and
+looked at her.
+
+"Oh, Avery!" she said. "Stay with you and Piers?"
+
+Her eyes were shining. She slid a gentle arm round Avery's neck.
+
+"You would like to?" Avery asked, faintly smiling.
+
+"I would love to," said Jeanie earnestly. She looked across at her
+mother. "Shall you be able to manage, dear?" she asked in her
+grown-up way.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer stifled a sigh. "Oh yes, Jeanie dear. I shall do all right.
+Gracie will help with the little ones, you know."
+
+Jeanie smiled at that. "I think I will go and talk to Gracie," she said,
+quietly releasing herself from Avery's arm.
+
+But at the door she paused. "I hope Father won't mind," she said. "But he
+did say I wasn't to have any more treats till my Easter holiday-task was
+finished."
+
+"I will make that all right, dear," said Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+"Thank you," said Jeanie. "Of course I can take it with me. I expect I
+shall get more time for learning it at the Abbey. You might tell him
+that, don't you think?"
+
+"I will tell him, darling," said Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+And Jeanie smiled and went her way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE GREAT GULF
+
+
+"Hullo!" said Piers. "Has the Queen of all good fairies come to call?"
+
+He strode across the garden with that high, arrogant air of his as of one
+who challenges the world, and threw himself into the vacant chair by the
+tea-table at which his wife sat.
+
+The blaze of colour that overspread her pale face at his coming faded
+as rapidly as it rose. She glanced at him momentarily, under
+fluttering lids.
+
+"Jeanie has come to stay," she said, her voice very low.
+
+His arm was already round Jeanie who had risen to meet him. He pulled her
+down upon his knee.
+
+"That is very gracious of her," he said. "Good Heavens, child! You are as
+light as a feather! Why don't you eat more?"
+
+"I am never hungry," explained Jeanie. She kissed him and then drew
+herself gently from him, sitting down by his side with innate dignity.
+"Have you been riding all day?" she asked. "Isn't Pompey tired?"
+
+"Caesar and Pompey are both dead beat," said Piers. "And I--" he looked
+deliberately at Avery, "--am as fresh as when I started."
+
+Again, as it were in response to that look, her eyelids fluttered; but
+she did not raise them. Again the colour started and died in her cheeks.
+
+"Have you had anything to eat?" she asked.
+
+"Nothing," said Piers.
+
+He took the cup she offered him, and drained it. There was a fitful gleam
+in his dark eyes as of a red, smouldering fire.
+
+But Jeanie's soft voice intervening dispelled it. "How very hungry you
+must be!" she said in a motherly tone. "Will bread and butter and cake be
+enough for you?"
+
+"Quite enough," said Piers. "Like you, Jeanie, I am not hungry." He
+handed back his cup to be filled again. "But I have a lively
+thirst," he said.
+
+"It has been so hot to-day," observed Avery.
+
+"It is never too hot for me," he rejoined. "Hullo! Who's that?"
+
+He was staring towards the house under frowning brows. A figure had just
+emerged upon the terrace.
+
+"Dr. Tudor!" said Jeanie.
+
+Again Piers' eyes turned upon his wife. He looked at her with a
+sombre scrutiny. After a moment she lifted her own and resolutely
+returned the look.
+
+"Won't you go and meet him?" she said.
+
+He rose abruptly, and strode away.
+
+Avery's eyes followed him, watching narrowly as the two men met. Lennox
+Tudor, she saw, offered his hand, and after the briefest pause, Piers
+took it. They came back slowly side by side.
+
+Again, unobtrusively, Jeanie rose. Tudor caught sight of her almost
+before he saw Avery.
+
+"Hullo!" he said. "What are you doing here?"
+
+Jeanie explained with her customary old-fashioned air of responsibility:
+"I have come to take care of Avery, as she isn't very well."
+
+Tudor's eyes passed instantly and very swiftly to Avery's face. He bent
+slightly over the hand she gave him.
+
+"A good idea!" he said brusquely. "I hope you will take care of
+each other."
+
+He joined them at the tea-table, and talked of indifferent things. Piers
+talked also with that species of almost fierce gaiety with which Avery
+had become so well acquainted of late. She was relieved that there was no
+trace of hostility apparent in his manner.
+
+But, notwithstanding this fact, she received a shock of surprise when at
+the end of a quarter of an hour he got up with a careless: "Come along,
+my queen! We'll see if Pompey has got the supper he deserves."
+
+Even Tudor looked momentarily astonished, but as he watched Piers saunter
+away with his arm round Jeanie's thin shoulders his expression changed.
+He turned to her abruptly. "How are you feeling to-day?" he enquired. "I
+had to come in and ask."
+
+"It was very kind of you," she answered.
+
+He smiled in his rather grim fashion. "I came more for my own
+satisfaction than for yours," he observed. "You are better, are you?"
+
+She smiled also. "There is nothing the matter with me, you know."
+
+He gave her a shrewd look through his glasses. "No," he said. "I know."
+
+He said no more at all about her health, nor did he touch upon any other
+intimate subject, but she had a very distinct impression that he did not
+cease to observe her closely throughout their desultory conversation. She
+even tried to divert his attention, but she knew she did not succeed.
+
+He remained with her until they saw Piers and Jeanie returning, and then
+somewhat suddenly he took his leave. He joined the two on the lawn, sent
+Jeanie back to her, and walked away himself with his host.
+
+What passed between them she did not know and could not even conjecture,
+for she did not see Piers again till they met in the hall before dinner.
+Jeanie was with her, looking delicately pretty in her white muslin frock,
+and it was to her that Piers addressed himself.
+
+"Come here, my queen! I want to look at you."
+
+She went to him readily enough. He took her by the shoulders.
+
+"Are you made of air, I wonder? I should be ashamed of you, Jeanie, if
+you belonged to me."
+
+Jeanie looked up into the handsome, olive face with eyes that smiled
+love upon him. "I expect it's partly because you are so big and
+strong," she said.
+
+"No, it isn't," said Piers. "It's because you're so small and weak. Avery
+will have to take you away to the sea again, what? You'd like that."
+
+"And you too!" said Jeanie.
+
+"I? Oh no, you wouldn't want me. Would you, Avery?"
+
+He deliberately addressed her for the first time that day. Over the
+child's head his eyes flashed their mocking message. She felt as if he
+had struck her across the face.
+
+"Would you?" he repeated, with arrogant insistence.
+
+She tried to turn the question aside. "Well, as we are not going--"
+
+"But you are going," he said. "You and Jeanie. How soon can you start?
+To-morrow?"
+
+Avery looked at him in astonishment. "Are you in earnest?"
+
+"Of course I'm in earnest," he said, with a frown that was oddly boyish.
+"You had better go to Stanbury Cliffs. It suited you all right in the
+spring. Fix it up with Mrs. Lorimer first thing in the morning, and go
+down in the afternoon!"
+
+He spoke impatiently. Opposition or delay always set him chafing.
+
+Jeanie looked at him with wonder in her eyes. "But you, Piers!" she
+said. "What will you do?"
+
+"I? Oh, I shall be busy," he said. "I've got a lot on hand just now.
+Besides," again the gibing note was in his voice, "you'll get along much
+better without me. Avery says so."
+
+"She didn't!" exclaimed Jeanie, with a sudden rare touch of indignation.
+
+"All right. She didn't," laughed Piers. "My mistake!" He flicked the
+child's cheek teasingly, and then abruptly stooped and kissed it. "Don't
+be angry, Queen of the fairies! It isn't worth it."
+
+She slipped her arm round his neck on the instant. "I'm not, dear Piers.
+I'm not angry. But we shouldn't want to go away and leave you alone. We
+shouldn't really."
+
+He laughed again, carelessly, without effort. "No, but you'd get on all
+right without me. You and Avery are such pals. What do you say to it,
+Avery? Isn't it a good idea?"
+
+"I think perhaps it is," she said slowly, her voice very low.
+
+He straightened himself, and looked at her, and again that vivid, painful
+blush covered her face and neck as though a flame had scorched her. She
+did not meet his eyes.
+
+"Very well then. It's settled," he said jauntily. "Now let's go and have
+some dinner!"
+
+He kept up his light attitude throughout the meal, save that once he
+raised his wine-glass mockingly to the woman on the wall. But his mood
+was elusive. Avery felt it. It was as if he played a juggling game on the
+edge of the pit of destruction, and she watched him with a leaden heart.
+
+She rose from the table earlier than usual, for the atmosphere of the
+dining-room oppressed her almost unbearably. It was a night of heavy
+stillness.
+
+"You ought to go to bed, dear," she said to Jeanie.
+
+"Oh, must I?" said Jeanie wistfully. "I never sleep much on these hot
+nights. One can't breath so well lying down."
+
+Avery looked at her with quick anxiety, but she had turned to Piers and
+was leaning against him with a gentle coaxing air.
+
+"Please, dear Piers, would it tire you to play to us?" she begged.
+
+He looked down at her for a moment as if he would refuse; then very
+gently he laid his hand on her head, pressing back the heavy, clustering
+hair from her forehead to look into her soft eyes.
+
+"What do you want me to play?" he said.
+
+She made a wide gesture of the hands and let them fall. "Something big,"
+she said. "Something to take to bed with us and give us happy dreams."
+
+His lips--those mobile, sensitive lips--curved in a smile that made Avery
+avert her eyes with a sudden hot pang. He released Jeanie, and turned
+away to the door.
+
+"I'll see what I can do," he said. "You had better go into the
+garden--you and Avery."
+
+They went, though Jeanie looked as if she would have preferred to
+accompany him to the music-room. It was little cooler on the terrace than
+in the house. The heat brooded over all, dense, black, threatening.
+
+"I hope it will rain soon," said Jeanie, drawing her chair close
+to Avery's.
+
+"There will be a storm when it does," Avery said.
+
+"I like storms, don't you?" said Jeanie.
+
+Avery shook her head. "No, dear."
+
+She was listening in tense expectancy, waiting with a dread that was
+almost insupportable for the music that Piers was about to make. They
+were close to the open French window of the music-room, but there was no
+light within. Piers was evidently sitting there silent in the darkness.
+Her pulses were beating violently. Why did he sit so still? Why was
+there no sound?
+
+A flash of lightning quivered above the tree-tops and was gone. Jeanie
+drew in her breath, saying no word. Avery shrank and closed her eyes. She
+could hear her heart beating audibly, like the throbbing of a distant
+drum. The suspense was terrible.
+
+There came from far away the growl and mutter of the rising storm. The
+leaves of the garden began to tremble. And then, ere that roll of
+distant thunder had died away, another sound came through the
+darkness--a sound that was almost terrifying in its suddenness, and the
+grand piano began to speak.
+
+What music it uttered, Avery knew not. It was such as she had never heard
+before. It was unearthly, it was devilish, a fiendish chorus that was
+like the laughter of a thousand demons--a pandemonium that shocked her
+unutterably.
+
+Just as once he had drawn aside for her the veil that shrouded the Holy
+Place, so now he rent open the gates of hell and showed her the horrors
+of the prison-house, forcing her to look upon them, forcing her to
+understand.
+
+She clung to Jeanie's hand in nightmare fear. The anguish of the
+revelation was almost unendurable. She felt as if he had caught her
+quivering soul and was thrusting it into an inferno from which it could
+never rise again. Through and above that awful laughter she seemed to
+hear the crackling of the flames, to feel the blistering heat that had
+consumed so many, to see the red glare of the furnace gaping wide
+before her.
+
+She cried out without knowing it, and covered her face. "O God," she
+prayed wildly, "save us from this! Save us! Save us!"
+
+The man at the piano could not have heard her cry. Of that she was
+certain. But their souls were in more subtle communion than any
+established by bodily word or touch. He must have known, have fathomed
+her anguish. For quite suddenly, as if a restraining hand had been
+laid upon him, he checked that dread torrent of sound. A few bitter
+chords, a few stray notes that somehow spoke to her of a spirit
+escaped and wandering alone and naked in a desert of indescribable
+emptiness, and then silence--a crushing, fearful silence like the
+ashes of a burnt-out fire.
+
+"And in hell he lift up his eyes." ... Why did those words flash
+through her brain as though a voice had uttered them? She bowed her head
+lower, lower, barely conscious of Jeanie's enfolding arms. She was as one
+in the presence of a vision, hearing words that were spoken to her alone.
+
+"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments...."
+
+She waited quivering. Surely there was more to come. She listened for it
+even while she shrank in every nerve.
+
+It came at length slowly, heavily, like a death-sentence uttered within
+her. "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which
+would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that
+would come from thence."
+
+The words were spoken, the vision passed. Avery sat huddled in her chair
+as one stricken to the earth, rapt in a trance of dread foreboding from
+which Jeanie was powerless to rouse her.
+
+The lightning flashed again, and the thunder crashed above them like the
+clanging of brazen gates. From the room behind them came the sound of a
+man's laugh, but it was a laugh that chilled her to the soul.
+
+Again there came the sound of the piano,--a tremendous chord, then a
+slow-swelling volume of harmony, a muffled burst of music like the coming
+of a great procession still far away.
+
+Avery sprang upright as one galvanized into action by an electric force.
+"I cannot bear it!" she cried aloud, "I cannot bear it!"
+
+She almost thrust Jeanie from her. "Oh, go, child, go! Tell him--tell
+him--" Her voice broke, went into a gasping utterance more painful than
+speech, finally dropped into hysterical sobbing.
+
+Jeanie sprang into the dark room with a cry of, "Piers, oh, Piers!"--and
+the music stopped, went out utterly as flame extinguished in water.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Piers.
+
+His voice sounded oddly defiant, almost savage. But Jeanie was too
+precipitate to notice it.
+
+"Oh, please, will you go to Avery?" she begged breathlessly. "I think she
+is frightened at the storm."
+
+Piers left the piano with a single, lithe movement that carried him to
+the window in a second. He passed Jeanie and was out on the terrace
+almost in one bound.
+
+He discerned Avery on the instant, as she discerned him. A vivid flash of
+lightning lit them both, lit the whole scene, turned the night into
+sudden, glaring day. Before the thunder crashed above them he had caught
+her to him. They stood locked in the darkness while the great
+reverberations rolled over their heads, and as he held her he felt the
+wild beating of her heart against his own.
+
+She had not resisted him, she did not resist him. She even convulsively
+clung to him. But her whole body was tense against his, tense and
+quivering like a stretched wire.
+
+As the last of the thunder died, she raised her head and spoke.
+
+"Piers, haven't you tortured me enough?"
+
+He did not speak in answer. Only she heard his breath indrawn sharply as
+though he checked some headlong word or impulse.
+
+She stifled a great sob that took her unawares, and even as she did so
+she felt his arms slacken. He set her free.
+
+"There is nothing to be afraid of," he said. "Better come indoors before
+the rain begins."
+
+They went within, Jeanie pressing close to Avery in tender solicitude.
+
+They turned on the lights, but throughout the frightful storm that
+followed, Piers leaned against the window-frame sombrely watching.
+
+Avery sat on a sofa with Jeanie, her throbbing head leaning against the
+cushions, her eyes closed.
+
+Nearly half an hour passed thus, then the storm rolled sullenly away; and
+at last Piers turned.
+
+As though his look pierced her, Avery's eyes opened. She looked back at
+him, white as death, waiting for him to speak.
+
+"Hadn't you better send Jeanie to bed?" he said.
+
+Jeanie rose obediently. "Good-night, dear Avery."
+
+Avery sat up. Her hand was pressed hard upon her heart. "I am coming with
+you," she said.
+
+Piers crossed the room to the door. He held it open for them.
+
+Jeanie lifted her face for his kiss. An unaccustomed shyness seemed to
+have descended upon her. "Good-night," she whispered.
+
+He bent to her. "Good-night, Jeanie!"
+
+Her arms were round his neck in a moment. "Piers, thank you for your
+music, but--but--"
+
+"Good-night, dear!" said Piers again gently, but with obvious decision.
+
+"Good-night!" said Jeanie at once.
+
+She would have passed out instantly, but Avery paused, detaining her.
+
+Her eyes were raised steadily to her husband's face. "I will say
+good-night, too," she said. "I am spending the night with Jeanie. She is
+not used to sleeping alone, and--the storm may come back."
+
+She was white to the lips as she said it. She looked as if she
+would faint.
+
+"Oh, but--" began Jeanie, "I don't mind really. I--"
+
+With a brief, imperious gesture Piers silenced her for the second
+time. He looked over her head, straight into Avery's eyes for a long,
+long second.
+
+Then: "So be it!" he said, and with ironical ceremony he bowed her out.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+SANCTUARY
+
+
+"Hullo, sonny! You!"
+
+Edmund Crowther turned from his littered writing-table, and rose to greet
+his visitor with a ready smile of welcome.
+
+"Hullo!" said Piers. "How are you getting on? I was in town and thought
+I'd look you up. By Jove, though, you're busy! I'd better not stay."
+
+"Sit down!" said Crowther.
+
+He took him by the shoulders with kindly force and made him sit in his
+easy-chair. "I'm never too busy to be pleased to see you, Piers," he
+said.
+
+"Very decent of you," said Piers.
+
+He spoke with a short laugh, but his dark eyes roved round restlessly.
+There was no pleasure in his look.
+
+The light from Crowther's unshaded lamp flared full upon him. In his
+faultless evening dress he looked every inch an aristocrat. That air of
+the old-Roman patrician was very strong upon him that night. But there
+was something behind it that Crowther was quick to note, something that
+reminded him vividly of an evening months before when he had fought hand
+to hand with the Evesham devil and had with difficulty prevailed.
+
+He pushed his work to one side and foraged in his cupboard for drinks.
+
+Piers watched him with an odd, half-scoffing smile about his lips. "Do
+you never drink when you are by yourself?" he asked.
+
+"Not when I'm working," said Crowther.
+
+"I see! Work is sacred, what?"
+
+Crowther looked at him. The mockery of the tone had been scarcely veiled;
+but there was no consciousness of the fact in Crowther's quiet reply.
+"Yes; just that, sonny."
+
+Piers laughed again, a bitter, gibing laugh. "I suppose it's more to you
+than your own soul--or anyone else's," he said.
+
+Crowther paused in the act of pouring out. "Now what do you mean?" he
+said.
+
+His eyes, direct and level, looked full at Piers. They held no anger, no
+indignation, only calm enquiry.
+
+Piers faced the look with open mockery. "I mean, my good friend," he
+said, "that if I asked you to chuck it all and go round the world with
+me--you'd see me damned first."
+
+Crowther's eyes dropped gravely to the job in hand. "Say when!" he said.
+
+Piers made a restless movement. "Oh, that's enough! Strong drink is not
+my weakness. Why don't you answer my question?"
+
+"I didn't know you asked one," said Crowther.
+
+He set the tumbler in front of Piers and began to help himself.
+
+Piers watched him for a couple of seconds longer, then leapt impulsively
+to his feet. "Oh, I'm going!" he said. "I was a fool to come!"
+
+Crowther set down the decanter and straightened himself. He did not seem
+to move quickly, but he was at the door before Piers reached it.
+
+He stood massively before him, blocking the way. "You've behaved
+foolishly a good many times in your life, my lad," he said. "But I
+shouldn't call you a fool. Why do you want me to go round the world with
+you? Tell me that!"
+
+His tone was mild, but there was a certain grimness about him
+notwithstanding. He looked at Piers with a faint smile in his eyes that
+had in it a quality of resolution that made itself felt. Piers stood
+still before him, half-chafing, half-subdued.
+
+"Tell me!" Crowther said again.
+
+"Oh, what's the good?" With a defiance that was oddly boyish Piers flung
+the question. "I see I've applied in the wrong quarter. Let me go!"
+
+"I will not," Crowther said. Deliberately he raised a hand and pointed to
+the chair from which Piers had just sprung. "Sit down again, sonny, and
+we'll talk."
+
+Piers swung round with an impatient gesture and went to the window. He
+threw it wide, and the distant roar of traffic filled the quiet room like
+the breaking of the sea.
+
+After a distinct pause Crowther followed him. They stood together gazing
+out over the dim wilderness of many roofs and chimneys to where the crude
+glare of an advertisement lit up the night sky.
+
+Piers was absolutely motionless, but there was a species of violence in
+his very stillness, as of a trapped animal preparing to make a wild rush
+for freedom. His attitude was feverishly tense.
+
+Suddenly and very quietly Crowther's hand came forth and linked itself in
+his arm. "What is it, lad?" he said.
+
+Piers made a jerky movement as if to avoid the touch, but the hand closed
+slowly and steadily upon him. He turned abruptly and met Crowther's eyes.
+
+"Crowther," he said, "I've behaved like a cur. I--broke that promise I
+made to you."
+
+He ground out the words savagely, between clenched teeth. Yet his look
+was defiant still. He held himself as a man defying shame.
+
+Crowther's eyes never varied. They looked straight back with a wide
+kindliness greater than compassion, wholly devoid of reproach.
+
+"All right, Piers," he said simply.
+
+Piers stared at him for a moment as one in blank amazement, then very
+strangely his face altered. The hardness went from it like a mask
+suddenly rent away. He made an inarticulate sound and turned from the
+open window.
+
+A second later he was sunk in Crowther's chair with his head in his
+hands, sobbing convulsively, painfully, uncontrollably, in an agony that
+tore like a living thing at the very foundations of his being.
+
+A smaller man than Crowther might have been at a loss to deal with such
+distress, but Crowther was ready. He had seen men in extremities of
+suffering before. He knew how to ease a crushing burden. He sat down on
+the arm of the chair and thrust a strong hand over Piers' shoulder,
+saying no word.
+
+Minutes passed ere by sheer violence that bitter anguish wore itself out
+at last. There came a long, piteous silence, then Piers' hand feeling
+blindly upwards. Crowther's grip encompassed it like a band of iron, but
+still for a space no word was spoken.
+
+Then haltingly Piers found his voice. "I'm sorry--beastly sorry--to have
+made such an ass of myself. You're jolly decent to me, Crowther."
+
+To which Crowther made reply with a tenderness as simple as his own soul.
+"You're just a son to me, lad."
+
+"A precious poor specimen!" muttered Piers.
+
+He remained bowed for a while longer, then lifted at length a face of
+awful whiteness and leaned back upon Crowther's arm, still fast holding
+to his hand.
+
+"You know, you're such an awfully good chap," he said, "that one gets
+into the way of taking you for granted. But I won't encroach on your
+goodness much longer. You're busy, what?" He smiled a quivering smile,
+and glanced momentarily towards the littered table.
+
+"It will keep," said Crowther quietly.
+
+"No, it won't. Life isn't long enough. On my soul, do you know it's like
+coming into sanctuary to enter a place like this? I feel as if I'd shut
+my own particular devil on the other side of the door. But he'll wait for
+me all right. We shan't lose each other on that account."
+
+He uttered a laugh that testified more to the utter weariness of his soul
+than its bitterness.
+
+"Where are you staying?" said Crowther.
+
+"At Marchmont's. At least I've got a room there. I haven't any definite
+plans at present."
+
+"Unless you go round the world with me," said Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes travelled upwards sharply. "No, old chap. I didn't mean it. I
+wouldn't have you if you'd come. It was only a try-on, that."
+
+"Some try-ons fit," said Crowther gravely. He turned towards the table,
+and reached for the drink he had prepared for Piers. "Look here, sonny!
+Have a drink!"
+
+Piers drank in silence, Crowther steadily watching.
+
+"You would have to be back by March," he said presently.
+
+"What?" said Piers.
+
+It was like a protest, the involuntary startled outcry of the patient
+under the probe. Crowther's hand grasped his more closely. "I'll go with
+you on that understanding, Piers," he said. "You'll be wanted then."
+
+Piers groaned. "If it hadn't been for--that," he said, "I'd have ended
+the whole business with a bullet before now."
+
+"No, you wouldn't," said Crowther quietly. "You don't know yourself, boy,
+when you talk like that. You've given up Parliament for the present?"
+
+"For good," said Piers. He paused, as if bracing himself for a great
+effort. "I went to Colonel Rose yesterday and told him I must withdraw.
+He had heard the rumours of course, but he advised me to hold on. I told
+him--I told him--" Piers stopped and swallowed hard, then forced himself
+on,--"I told him there was truth in it, and then--he let me go."
+
+There fell a painful silence, broken by Crowther. "How did this rumour
+get about?"
+
+"Oh, that was at Ina Rose's wedding." Piers' words came more freely now,
+as if the obstruction were passed. "A cousin of Guyes', the bridegroom,
+was there. He came from Queensland, had been present that night when I
+fought and killed Denys, and he recognized me. Then--he got tight and
+told everybody who would listen. It was rotten luck, but it had to
+happen." He paused momentarily; then: "I wasn't enjoying myself,
+Crowther, before it happened," he said.
+
+"I saw that, sonny." Crowther's arm pressed his shoulder in sympathy.
+It was characteristic of the man to display understanding rather than
+pity. He stood ever on the same level with his friends, however low
+that level might be.
+
+Again Piers looked at him as if puzzled by his attitude. "You've done
+me a lot of good," he said abruptly. "You've made me see myself as you
+don't see me, dear old fellow, and never would. Well, I'm going.
+Thanks awfully!"
+
+He made as if he would rise, but Crowther restrained him. "No, lad. I'm
+not parting with you for to-night. We'll send round for your traps. I'll
+put you up."
+
+"What? No, no, you can't! I shall be all right. Don't worry about me!"
+
+Piers began to make impulsive resistance, but Crowther's hold only
+tightened.
+
+"I'm not parting with you to-night," he reiterated firmly. "And look
+here, boy! You've come to me for help, and, to the best of my ability,
+I'll help you. But first,--are you sure you are justified in leaving
+home? Are you sure you are not wanted?"
+
+"Wanted! I!" Piers looked at him from under eye-lids that quivered a
+little. "Yes," he said, after a moment, with a deliberation that sounded
+tragically final. "I am quite sure of that, Crowther."
+
+Crowther asked no more. He patted Piers' shoulder gently and rose.
+
+"Very well," he said. "I'll take that six months' trip round the world
+with you."
+
+"But you can't!" protested Piers. "I never seriously thought you could! I
+only came to you because--" he halted, and a slow, deep flush mounted to
+his forehead--"because you've saved me before," he said. "And I was
+so--so horribly near--the edge of the pit this time."
+
+He spoke with an odd boyishness, and Crowther's lips relaxed in a smile
+that had in it something of a maternal quality. "So long as I can help
+you, you can count on me," he said.
+
+"You're the only man in the world who can help me," Piers said
+impulsively. "At least--" he smiled himself--"I couldn't take it from
+anyone else. But I'm not taking this from you, Crowther. You've got your
+own pet job on hand, and I'm not going to hinder it."
+
+Crowther was setting his writing-table in order. He did not speak for
+a few seconds. Then: "I am a man under authority, sonny," he said. "My
+own pet job, as you call it, doesn't count if it isn't what's wanted
+of me. It has waited twenty-five years; it'll keep--easy--for another
+six months."
+
+Piers got up. "I'm a selfish brute if I let you," he said, irresolutely.
+
+"You can't help yourself, my son." Crowther turned calm eyes upon him.
+"And now just sit down here and write a line home to say what you are
+going to do!"
+
+He had cleared a space upon the table; he pulled forward a chair.
+
+"Oh, I can't! I can't!" said Piers quickly.
+
+But Crowther's hand was on his shoulder. He pressed him down. "Do it,
+lad! It's got to be done," he said.
+
+And with a docility that sat curiously upon him, Piers submitted. He
+leaned his head on his hand, and wrote.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE FALLING NIGHT
+
+
+"You ought to rest, you know," said Tudor. "This sort of thing is
+downright madness for you."
+
+They were walking together in the February twilight along the long, dark
+avenue of chestnuts that led to Rodding Abbey. Avery moved with lagging
+feet that she strove vainly to force to briskness.
+
+"I don't think I do too much," she said. "It isn't good for me to be
+idle. It makes me--it makes me mope."
+
+The involuntary falter in the words spoke more eloquently than the words
+themselves, but she went on after a moment with that same forced
+briskness to which she was trying to compel her dragging limbs. "I only
+ran down to the Vicarage after lunch because it is Jeanie's birthday. It
+is no distance across the Park. It seemed absurd to go in state."
+
+"You are not wise," said Tudor in a tone that silenced all argument.
+
+Avery gave a little sigh and turned from the subject. "I thought Jeanie
+looking very fragile. Mrs. Lorimer has promised that she may come to me
+again just as soon as I am able to have her."
+
+"Ah! Jeanie is a comfort to you?" said Tudor.
+
+To which she answered with a catch in her breath, "The greatest comfort."
+
+They reached the great grey house and entered. A letter lay on the table
+by the door. Avery took it up with a sharp shiver.
+
+"Prom Piers?" asked Tudor abruptly.
+
+She bent her head. "He writes--every week."
+
+"When is he coming home?" He uttered the question with a directness that
+sounded almost brutal, but Avery caught the note of anxiety behind it and
+understood.
+
+She opened the letter in silence, and read it by the waning light of the
+open door. The crackling of the fire behind her was the only sound
+within. Without, the wind moaned desolately through the bare trees. It
+was going to rain.
+
+Slowly Avery raised her head at last and gazed out into the
+gathering dark.
+
+"Come inside!" said Tudor peremptorily.
+
+His hand closed upon her arm, he almost compelled her. "How painfully
+thin you are!" he said, as she yielded. "Are you starving yourself of
+food as well as rest?"
+
+Again she did not answer him. Her eyes were fixed, unseeing. They
+focused their gaze upon the fire as he led her to it. She sat down in
+the chair he placed for her and then very suddenly she began to shiver
+as if with an ague.
+
+"Don't!" said Tudor sharply.
+
+He bent over her, his hands upon her shoulders, holding her.
+
+She controlled herself, and leaned back. "Do sit down, doctor! I'm afraid
+I'm very rude--very forgetful. Will you ring for tea? Piers is in town.
+He writes very kindly, very--very considerately. He is only just back
+from Egypt--he and Mr. Crowther. The last letter was from Cairo. Would
+you--do you care to see what he says?"
+
+She offered him the letter with the words, and after the faintest
+hesitation Tudor took it.
+
+"I have come back to be near you." So without preliminary the letter ran.
+"You will not want me, I know, but still--I am here. For Heaven's sake,
+take care of yourself, and have anything under the sun that you need.
+Your husband, Piers."
+
+It only covered the first page. Tudor turned the sheet frowningly and
+replaced it in its envelope.
+
+"He always writes like that," said Avery. "Every week--all through the
+winter--just a sentence or two. I haven't written at all to him though
+I've tried--till I couldn't try any more."
+
+She spoke with a weariness so utter that it seemed to swamp all feeling.
+Tudor turned his frowning regard upon her. His eyes behind their glasses
+intently searched her face.
+
+"How does he get news of you?" he asked abruptly.
+
+"Through Mrs. Lorimer. She writes to him regularly, I believe,--either
+she or Jeanie. I suppose--presently--"
+
+Avery stopped, her eyes upon the fire, her hands tightly clasped
+before her.
+
+"Presently?" said Tudor.
+
+She turned her head slightly, without moving her eyes. "Presently there
+will have to be some--mutual arrangement made. But I can't see my way
+yet. I can't consider the future at all. I feel as if night were falling.
+Perhaps--for me--there is no future."
+
+"May I take your pulse?" said Tudor.
+
+She gave him her hand in the same tired fashion. He took it gravely,
+feeling her pulse, his eyes upon her face.
+
+"Have you no relations of your own?" he asked her suddenly.
+
+She shook her head. "No one near. My parents were both only children."
+
+"And no friends?" he said.
+
+"Only Mrs. Lorimer. I lost sight of people when I married. And then--"
+Avery halted momentarily "after my baby girl died, for a long time I
+didn't seem to care for making new friends."
+
+"Ah!" said Tudor, his tone unwontedly gentle. "You will soon have another
+child to care for now."
+
+She made a slight gesture as of protest. "Do you know I can't picture
+it? I do not feel that it will be so. I believe one of us--or
+both--will die."
+
+She spoke calmly, so calmly that even Tudor, with all his experience, was
+momentarily shocked. "Avery!" he said sharply. "You are morbid!"
+
+She looked at him then with her tired eyes. "Am I?" she said. "I really
+don't feel particularly sad--only worn out. When anyone has been
+burnt--badly burnt--it destroys the nerve tissues, doesn't it? They don't
+suffer after that has happened. I think that is my case."
+
+"You will suffer," said Tudor.
+
+He spoke brutally; he wanted to rouse her from her lethargy, to pierce
+somehow that dreadful calm.
+
+But he failed; she only faintly smiled.
+
+"I can bear bodily suffering," she said, "particularly if it leads to
+freedom and peace."
+
+He got up as if it were he who had been pierced. "You won't die!" he said
+harshly. "I won't let you die!"
+
+Her eyes went back to the fire, as if attracted thereto irresistibly.
+"Most of me died last August," she said in a low voice.
+
+"You are wrong!" He stood over her almost threateningly. "When you hold
+your child in your arms you will see how wrong. Tell me, when is your
+husband coming back to you?"
+
+That reached her. She looked up at him with a quick hunted look.
+"Never!" she said.
+
+He looked back at her mercilessly. "Never is a long time, Lady Evesham.
+Do you think he will be kept at arm's length when you are through your
+trouble? Do you think--whatever his sins--that he has no claim upon
+you? Mind, I don't like him. I never did and I never shall. But you--you
+are sworn to him."
+
+He had never spoken so to her before. She flinched as if he had struck
+her with a whip. She put her hands over her face, saying no word.
+
+He stood for a few moments stern, implacable, looking down at her. Then
+very suddenly his attitude changed. His face softened. He stooped and
+touched her shoulder.
+
+"Avery!" His voice was low and vehement; he spoke into her ear. "When you
+first kicked him out, I was mean enough to feel glad. But I soon
+saw--that he took all that is vital in you with him. Avery,--my
+dear,--for God's sake--have him back!"
+
+She did not speak or move, save for a spasmodic shuddering that shook her
+whole frame.
+
+He bent lower. "Avery, I say, can't you--for the baby's sake--anyway
+consider it?"
+
+She flung out her hands with a cry. "The child is cursed! The child will
+die!" There was terrible conviction in the words. She lifted a tortured
+face. "Oh, don't you see," she said piteously, "how impossible it is for
+me? Don't--don't say any more!"
+
+"I won't," said Tudor.
+
+He took the outflung hands and held them closely, restrainingly,
+soothingly.
+
+"I won't," he said again. "Forgive me for saying so much! Poor girl!
+Poor girl!"
+
+His lips quivered a little as he said it, but his hold was full of
+sustaining strength. She grew gradually calmer, and finally submitted to
+the gentle pressure with which he laid her back in her chair.
+
+"You are always so very good to me," she said presently. "I sometimes
+wonder how I ever came to--to--" She stopped herself abruptly.
+
+"To refuse me?" said Tudor quietly. "I always knew why, Lady Evesham. It
+was because you loved another man. It has been the case for as long as I
+have known you."
+
+He turned from her with the words wholly without emotion and took up his
+stand on the hearth-rug.
+
+"Now may I talk to you about your health?" he said professionally.
+
+She leaned forward slowly. "Dr. Tudor, first will you make me a promise?"
+
+He smiled a little. "I don't think so. I never do make promises."
+
+"Just this once!" she pleaded anxiously. "Because it means a great
+deal to me."
+
+"Well?" said Tudor.
+
+"It is only--" she paused a moment, breathing quickly--"only that you
+will not--whatever the circumstances--let Piers be sent for."
+
+"I can't promise that," said Tudor at once.
+
+She clasped her hands beseechingly. "You must--please--you must!"
+
+He shook his head. "I can't. I will undertake that he shall not come to
+you against your will. I can't do more than that."
+
+"Do you suppose you could keep him out?" Avery said, a note of quivering
+bitterness in her voice.
+
+"I am quite sure I can," Tudor answered steadily. "Don't trouble
+yourself on that head! I swear that, unless you ask for him, he shall
+not come to you."
+
+She shivered again and dropped back in her chair. "I shall never do
+that--never--never--so long as I am myself!"
+
+"Your wishes--whatever they are--shall be obeyed," Tudor promised
+gravely.
+
+And with that gently but very resolutely he changed the subject.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE DREAM
+
+
+How many times had he paced up and down the terrace? Piers could not have
+said. He had been there for hours, years, half a lifetime,
+waiting--waiting eternally for the summons that never came.
+
+Could it have been only that morning that Mrs. Lorimer's urgent telegram
+had reached him? Only that morning that he had parted from Crowther for
+the first time in six months? It seemed aeons ago. And yet here he was in
+the cold grey dusk, still waiting to be called to his wife's side.
+
+The night was fast approaching--a bitter, cheerless night with a driving
+wind that seemed to promise snow. It was growing darker every moment.
+Only her window shone like a beacon in the gloom. How long would he have
+to wait? How long? How long?
+
+He had brought a doctor with him in obedience to Mrs. Lorimer's message,
+transmitting Tudor's desire. Tudor was not satisfied. He wanted Maxwell
+Wyndham, the great surgeon--a man still comparatively young in years but
+high in his profession--a man in whose presence--so it was said--no
+patient ever died. That of course was an exaggeration--some hysterical
+woman's tribute to his genius. But genius he undoubtedly possessed and
+that of a very high order.
+
+If anyone could save her, it would be Maxwell Wyndham. So Piers told
+himself each time he turned in his endless pacing and looked at that
+lighted window. Tudor believed in him. And--yes, he believed in him also.
+There had been something in the great man's attitude, something of
+arrogant self-assurance that had inspired him with confidence almost
+against his will. He had watched him saunter up the stairs with his hands
+thrust into his pockets and an air of limitless leisure pervading his
+every movement, and he had been exasperated by the man's deliberation and
+subtly comforted at the same time. He was thankful that he had been able
+to secure him.
+
+Ah, what was that? A cry in the night! The weird, haunting screech of an
+owl! He ridiculed himself for the sudden wild thumping of his heart. But
+would they never call him? This suspense was tearing at the very roots of
+his being.
+
+Away in the distance a dog was barking, fitfully, peevishly--the bark of
+a chained animal. Piers stopped in his walk and cursed the man who had
+chained him. Then--as though driven by an invisible goad--he pressed on,
+walking resolutely with his back turned upon the lighted window, forcing
+himself to pace the whole length of the terrace.
+
+He had nearly reached the further end when a sudden fragrance swept
+across his path--pure, intoxicating, exquisitely sweet. Violets! The
+violets that grew in the great bed under the study-window! The violets
+that Sir Beverley's bride had planted fifty years ago!
+
+The thought of his grandfather went through him like a stab through the
+heart. He clenched his hands and held his breath while the spasm passed.
+Never since the night Victor had summoned Avery to comfort him, had he
+felt so sick a longing for the old man's presence. For a few lingering
+seconds it was almost more than he could bear. Then he turned about and
+faced the chill night-wind and that lighted window, and the anguish of
+his vigil drove out all other griefs. How long had he yet to wait? How
+long? How long?
+
+There came a low call behind him on the terrace. He wheeled, strangling a
+startled exclamation in his throat. A man's figure--a broad, powerful
+figure--lounged towards him. He seemed to be wearing carpet slippers, for
+he made no sound. It was Maxwell Wyndham, and Piers' heart ceased to
+beat. He stood as if turned to stone. All the blood in his body seemed to
+be singing in his ears. His head was burning, the rest of him cold--cold
+as ice. He would have moved to meet the advancing figure, but he could
+not stir. He could only stop and listen to that maddening tarantella
+beating out in his fevered brain.
+
+"I say, you know--" the voice came to him out of an immensity of space,
+as though uttered from another world--"it's a bit too chilly for this
+sort of thing. Why didn't you put on an overcoat?"
+
+A man's hand, strong and purposeful, closed upon his arm and impelled him
+towards the house.
+
+Piers went like an automaton, but he could not utter a word. His mouth
+felt parched, his tongue powerless.
+
+Avery! Avery! The woman he had wronged--the woman he worshipped so
+madly--for whom his whole being mental and physical craved desperately,
+yearning, unceasingly,--without whom he lived in a torture that was never
+dormant! Avery! Avery! Was she lying dead behind that lighted window? If
+so, if so, those six months of torment had been in vain. He would end his
+misery swiftly and finally before it turned his brain.
+
+Maxwell Wyndham was guiding him towards the conservatory where a dim
+light shone. It was like an altar-flame in the darkness--that place where
+first their lips had met. The memory of that night went through him like
+a sword-thrust. Oh, Avery! Oh, Avery!
+
+"Now look here," said Maxwell Wyndham, in his steady, emotionless voice;
+"you're wanted upstairs, but you can't go unless you are absolutely sure
+of yourself."
+
+Wanted! His senses leapt to the word. Instinctively he pulled himself
+together, collecting all his strength. He spoke, and found to his
+surprise that speech was not difficult.
+
+"She has asked for me?"
+
+"Yes; but," Wyndham's tone was impressive, "I warn you, she is not
+altogether herself. And--she is very desperately ill."
+
+"The child?" questioned Piers.
+
+"The child never breathed." Curt and cold came the answer. "I have had to
+concentrate all my energies upon saving the mother's life, and--to be
+open with you--I don't think I have succeeded. There is still a chance,
+but--" He left the sentence unfinished.
+
+They had reached the conservatory, and, entering, it was Piers who led
+the way. His face, as they emerged into the library, was deathly, but he
+was absolute master of himself.
+
+"I believe there is a meal in the dining-room," he said. "Will you help
+yourself while I go up?"
+
+"No," said Wyndham briefly. "I am coming up with you."
+
+He kept a hand upon Piers' arm all the way up the stairs, deliberately
+restraining him, curbing the fevered impetuosity that urged him with a
+grim insistence that would not yield an inch to any chafing for freedom.
+
+He gave utterance to no further injunctions, but his manner was eloquent
+of the urgent need for self-repression. When Piers entered his wife's
+room, that room which he had not entered since the night of Ina's
+wedding, his tread was catlike in its caution, and all the eagerness was
+gone from his face.
+
+Then only did the doctor's hand fall from him, so that he
+advanced alone.
+
+She was lying on one side of the great four-poster, straight and
+motionless as a recumbent figure on a tomb. Her head was in deep shadow.
+He could see her face only in vaguest outline.
+
+Softly he approached, and Mrs. Lorimer, rising silently from a chair
+by the bedside, made room for him. He sat down, sinking as it were
+into a great abyss of silence, listening tensely, but hearing not so
+much as a breath.
+
+The doctor took up his stand at the foot of the bed. In the adjoining
+room sat Lennox Tudor, watching ceaselessly, expectantly, it seemed to
+Piers. Behind him moved a nurse, noiselessly intent upon polishing
+something that flashed like silver every time it caught his eye.
+
+Suddenly out of the silence there came a voice. "If I go down to
+hell,--Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning--the wings
+of the morning--" There came a pause, the difficult pause of
+uncertainty--"the wings of the morning--" murmured the voice again.
+
+Piers leaned upon the pillow. "Avery!" he said.
+
+She turned as if some magic moved her. Her hands came out to him,
+piteously weak and trembling. "Piers,--my darling!" she said.
+
+He gathered the poor nerveless hands into a tight clasp, kissing them
+passionately. He forgot the silent watcher at the foot of the bed, forgot
+little Mrs. Lorimer hovering in the shadows, and Tudor waiting with the
+nurse behind him. They all slipped into nothingness, and Avery--his
+wife--alone remained in a world that was very dark.
+
+Her voice came to him in a weak whisper. "Oh, Piers, I've
+been--wanting you so!"
+
+"My own darling!" he whispered back. "I will never leave you again!"
+
+"Oh yes, you will!" she answered drearily. "You always say that, but you
+are always gone in the morning. It's only a dream--only a dream!"
+
+He slipped his arms beneath her and drew her to his breast. "It is not a
+dream, Avery," he told her very earnestly. "I am here in the flesh. I am
+holding you."
+
+"I know," she said. "It's always so."
+
+The weary conviction of her tone smote cold to his heart. He gathered her
+closer still. He pressed his lips to her forehead.
+
+"Avery, can't you feel me?" he said.
+
+Her head sank against his shoulder. "Yes--yes," she said. "But you have
+always done that."
+
+"Done what, darling?"
+
+"Imposed your will on mine--made me feel you." Her voice quivered; she
+began to cry a little, weakly, like a tired child. "Do you remember--what
+you said--about--about--the ticket of leave?" she said. "You leave your
+dungeon--my poor Piers. But you have to go back again--when the leave has
+expired. And I--I am left alone."
+
+The tears were running down her face. He wiped them tenderly away.
+
+"My dearest, if you want me--if you need me,--I will stay," he said.
+
+"But you can't," she said hopelessly. "Even to-night--even to-night--I
+thought you were never coming. And I went at last to look for you--behind
+your iron bars. But, oh, Piers, the agony of it! And I couldn't reach you
+after all, though I tried so hard--so hard."
+
+"Never mind, my darling!" he whispered. "We are together now."
+
+"But we shan't be when the morning comes," sobbed Avery. "I know it is
+all a dream. It's happened so many, many times."
+
+He clasped her closer, hushing her with tender words, vowing he would
+never leave her, while the Shadow of Death gathered closer about them,
+threatening every instant to come between.
+
+She grew calmer at last, and presently sank into a state of
+semi-consciousness lying against his breast.
+
+Time passed. Piers did not know how it went. With his wife clasped in his
+arms he sat and waited, waited--for the falling of a deeper night or the
+coming of the day--he knew not which. His brain felt like a stopped
+watch; it did not seem to be working at all. Even the power to suffer
+seemed to have left him. He felt curiously indifferent, strangely
+submissive to circumstances,--like a man scourged into the numbness of
+exhaustion. He knew at the back of his mind that as soon as his vitality
+reasserted itself the agony would return. The respite could not last, but
+while it lasted he knew no pain. Like one in a state of coma, he was not
+even aware of thought.
+
+It might have been hours later, or possibly only minutes, that
+Maxwell Wyndham came round to his side and bent over him, a quiet
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"You had better lay her down," he said. "She won't wake now."
+
+"What?" said Piers sharply.
+
+The words had stabbed him back to understanding in a second. He glared at
+the doctor with eyes half-savage, half-frightened.
+
+"No, no!" said Wyndham gently. "I don't mean that. She is asleep. She is
+breathing. But she will rest better if you lay her down."
+
+The absolute calmness with which he spoke took effect upon Piers. He
+yielded, albeit not very willingly, to the mandate.
+
+They laid her down upon the pillow between them, and then for many
+seconds Wyndham stood, closely watching, almost painfully intent. Piers
+waited dumbly, afraid to move, afraid to speak.
+
+The doctor turned to him at last. "What about that meal you spoke of?
+Shall we go down and get it?"
+
+Piers stared at him. "I am not leaving her," he said in a quick whisper.
+
+Wyndham's hand was on his shoulder again--a steady, compelling hand. "Oh
+yes, you are. I want to talk to you," he said. "She is sleeping
+naturally, and she won't wake for some time. Come!"
+
+There was nothing peremptory about him, yet he gained his end. Piers
+rose. He hung for a moment over the bed, gazing hungrily downwards upon
+the shadowy, motionless form, then in silence turned.
+
+Tudor had risen. He met them in the doorway, and between him and the
+London doctor a few words passed. Then the latter pushed his hand through
+Piers' arm, and drew him away.
+
+They descended the wide oak stairs together and entered the dining-room.
+Piers moved like a man dazed. His companion went straight to the table
+and poured out a drink, which he immediately held out to Piers, looking
+at him with eyes that were green and very shrewd.
+
+"I think we shall save her," he said.
+
+Piers drank in great gulps, and came to himself. "I say, I'm beastly
+rude!" he said, with sudden boyishness. "For goodness' sake, help
+yourself! Sit down, won't you?"
+
+Maxwell Wyndham seated himself with characteristic deliberation of
+movement. He had fiery red hair that shone brazenly in the lamplight.
+
+"I can't eat by myself, Sir Piers," he remarked, after a moment. "And it
+isn't particularly good for you to drink without eating either, in your
+present frame of mind."
+
+Piers sat down, his attitude one of intense weariness. "You really think
+she'll pull through?" he said.
+
+"I think so," Wyndham answered. "But it won't be a walk over. She will be
+ill for a long time."
+
+"I'll take her away somewhere," said Piers. "A quiet time at the sea
+will soon pick her up."
+
+Maxwell Wyndham said nothing.
+
+Piers glanced at him with quick impatience. "Don't you advise that?"
+
+The green eyes countered his like the turn of a swordblade. "Certainly
+quiet is essential," said Wyndham enigmatically.
+
+Piers made a chafing movement. "What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean," very calmly came the answer, "that if you really value your
+wife's welfare, you will let someone else take her away."
+
+It was a straight thrust, and it went home. Piers flinched sharply. But
+in a moment he had recovered himself. He was on guard. He looked at
+Wyndham with haughty enquiry.
+
+"Why do you say that?"
+
+"Because her peace of mind depends upon it." Wyndham's answer came with
+brutal directness. "You will find, when this phase of extreme weakness
+is past, that your presence is not desired. She may try to hide it from
+you. That depends upon the kind of woman she is. But the fact will
+remain--does remain--that for some reason best known to yourself, she
+shrinks from you. I am not speaking rashly without knowledge. When a
+woman is in agony she can't help showing her soul. I saw your wife's
+soul to-day."
+
+Piers was white to the lips. He sat rigid, no longer looking at the
+doctor, but staring beyond him fixedly at a woman's face on the wall that
+smiled and softly mocked.
+
+"What did she say to you?" he said, after a moment.
+
+"She said," curtly Wyndham made reply,--"it was at a time when she
+could hardly speak at all--'Even if I ask for my husband, don't
+send--don't send!'"
+
+"Yet you fetched me!" Piers' eyes came swiftly back to him; they shone
+with a fierce glint.
+
+But Wyndham was undismayed. "I fetched you to save her life," he said.
+"There was nothing else to be done. She was in delirium, and nothing else
+would calm her."
+
+"And she wanted me!" said Piers. "She begged me to stay with her!"
+
+"I know. It was a passing phase. When her brain is normal, she will have
+forgotten."
+
+Piers sprang to his feet with sudden violence. "But--damn it--she is my
+wife!" he cried out fiercely.
+
+Maxwell Wyndham leaned across the table. "She is your wife--yes," he
+said. "But isn't that a reason for considering her to the very utmost?
+Have you always done that, I wonder? No, don't answer! I've no right to
+ask. Only--you know, doctors are the only men in the world who know just
+what women have to put up with, and the knowledge isn't exactly
+exhilarating. Give her a month or two to get over this! You won't be
+sorry afterwards."
+
+It was kindly spoken, so kindly that the flare of anger died out of Piers
+on the instant, and the sweetness dormant in him--that latent sweetness
+that had won Avery's heart--came swiftly to the surface.
+
+He threw himself down again, looking into the alert, green eyes with
+an oddly rueful smile. "All right, doctor!" he said. "I shan't go to
+her if she doesn't want me. But I've got to make sure she doesn't,
+haven't I? What?"
+
+There was a wholly unconscious note of pathos in the last word that sent
+the doctor's mouth up at one corner in a smile that was more pitying than
+humorous. "I should certainly do that," he said. "But I'm afraid you'll
+find I've told you the beastly truth."
+
+"For which I am obliged to you," said Piers, with a bow.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE HAND OF THE SCULPTOR
+
+
+During the week that followed, no second summons came to Piers from his
+wife's room. He hung about the house, aimless, sick at heart, with hope
+sinking ever lower within him like a fire dying for lack of
+replenishment.
+
+He could neither sleep nor eat, and Victor watched him with piteous
+though unspoken solicitude. Victor knew the wild, undisciplined
+temperament of the boy he had cherished from his cradle, and he lived in
+hourly dread of some sudden passionate outburst of rebellion, some
+desperate act that should lead to irremediable disaster. He had not
+forgotten that locked drawer in the old master's bureau or the quick
+release it contained, and he never left Piers long alone in its vicinity.
+
+But he need not have been afraid. Piers' thoughts never strayed in that
+direction. If his six months in Crowther's society had brought him no
+other comfort, they had at least infused in him a saner outlook and
+steadier balance. Very little had ever passed between them on the subject
+of the tragedy that had thrown them together. After the first bitter
+outpouring of his soul, Piers had withdrawn himself with so obvious a
+desire for privacy that Crowther had never attempted to cross the
+boundary thus clearly defined. But his influence had made itself felt
+notwithstanding. It would have been impossible to have lived with the man
+for so long without imbibing some of that essential greatness of soul
+that was his main characteristic, and Piers was ever swift to feel the
+effect of atmosphere. He had come to look upon Crowther with a reverence
+that in a fashion affected his daily life. That which Crowther regarded
+as unworthy, he tossed aside himself without consideration. Crowther had
+not despised him at his worst, and he was determined that he would show
+himself to be not despicable. He was moreover under a solemn promise to
+return to Crowther when he found himself at liberty, and in very
+gratitude to the man he meant to keep that promise.
+
+But, albeit he was braced for endurance, the long hours of waiting were
+very hard to bear. His sole comfort lay in the fact that Avery was making
+gradual progress in the right direction. It was a slow and difficult
+recovery, as Maxwell Wyndham had foretold, but it was continuous. Tudor
+assured him of this every day with a curt kindliness that had grown on
+him of late. It was his own fashion of showing a wholly involuntary
+sympathy of which he was secretly half-ashamed, and which he well knew
+Piers would have brooked in no other form. It established an odd sort of
+truce between them of which each was aware the while he sternly ignored
+it. They could never be friends. It was fundamentally impossible, but at
+least they had, if only temporarily, ceased to be enemies.
+
+Little Mrs. Lorimer's sympathy was also of a half-ashamed type. She did
+not want to be sorry for Piers, but she could not wholly restrain her
+pity. The look in his eyes haunted her. Curiously it made her think of
+some splendid animal created for liberty, and fretting its heart out in
+utter, hopeless misery on a chain.
+
+She longed with all her motherly heart to comfort him, and by the irony
+of circumstance it fell to her to deal the final blow to what was left of
+his hope. She wondered afterwards how she ever brought herself to the
+task, but it was in reality so forced upon her that she could not evade
+it. Avery, lying awake during the first hours of a still night, heard her
+husband's feet pacing up and down the terrace, and the mischief was done.
+She was thrown into painful agitation and wholly lost her sleep in
+consequence. When Mrs. Lorimer arrived about noon on the following day,
+she found her alarmingly weak, and the nurse in evident perplexity.
+
+"I am sure there is something worrying her," the latter said to Mrs.
+Lorimer. "I can't think what it is."
+
+But directly Mrs. Lorimer was alone with Avery, the trouble came out. For
+she reached out fevered hands to her, saying, "Why, oh, why did you
+persuade me to come back here? I knew he would come if I did!"
+
+Again the emergency impelled Mrs. Lorimer to a display of common-sense
+with which few would have credited her.
+
+"Oh, do you mean Piers, dear?" she said. "But surely you are not afraid
+of him! He has been here all the time--ever since you were so ill."
+
+"And I begged you not to send!" groaned Avery.
+
+"My dear," said Mrs. Lorimer very gently, "it was his right to be here."
+
+"Then that night--that night--" gasped Avery, "he really did come to
+me--that night after the baby was born."
+
+"My darling, you begged for him so piteously," said Mrs. Lorimer
+apologetically.
+
+Avery's lip quivered. "That was just what I feared--what I wanted to make
+impossible," she said. "When one is suffering, one forgets so."
+
+"But surely it was the cry of your heart, darling," urged Mrs. Lorimer
+tremulously. "And do you know--poor lad--he looks so ill, so miserable."
+
+But Avery's face was turned away. "I can't help it," she said. "I
+can't--possibly--see him again. I feel as if--as if there were a curse
+upon us both, and that is why the baby died. Oh yes, morbid, I know;
+perhaps wrong. But--I have been steeped in sin. I must be free for a
+time. I can't face him yet. I haven't the strength."
+
+"Dearest, he will never force himself upon you," said Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+Avery's eyes went instinctively to the door that led into the room that
+Piers had occupied after his marriage. The broken bolt had been removed,
+but not replaced. A great shudder went through her. She covered her face
+with her hands.
+
+"Oh, beg him--beg him to go away," she sobbed, "till I am strong enough
+to go myself!"
+
+Argument was useless. Mrs. Lorimer abandoned it with the wisdom born of
+close friendship. Instead, she clasped Avery tenderly to her and gave
+herself to the task of calming her distress.
+
+And when that was somewhat accomplished, she left her to go sadly in
+search of Piers.
+
+She found him sitting on the terrace with the morning-paper beside him
+and Caesar pressed close to his legs, his great mottled head resting on
+his master's knee.
+
+He was not reading. So much Mrs. Lorimer perceived before with a sharp
+turn of the head he discovered her. He was on his feet in a moment, and
+she saw his boyish smile for an instant, only for an instant, as he came
+to meet her. She noted with a pang how gaunt he looked and how deep were
+the shadows about his eyes. Then he had reached her, and was holding both
+her hands almost before she realized it.
+
+"I say, you're awfully good to come up every day like this," he said. "I
+can't think how you make the time. Splendid sun to-day, what? It's like a
+day in summer, if you can get out of the wind. Come and bask with me!"
+
+He drew her along the terrace to his sheltered corner, and made her sit
+down, spreading his newspaper on the stone seat for her accommodation.
+Her heart went out to him as he performed that small chivalrous act. She
+could not help it. And suddenly the task before her seemed so monstrous
+that she felt she could not fulfil it. The tears rushed to her eyes.
+
+"What's the matter?" said Piers gently. He sat down beside her, and
+slipped an encouraging hand through her arm. "Was it something you came
+out to say? Don't mind me! You don't, do you?"
+
+His voice was softly persuasive. He leaned towards her, his dark
+eyes searching her face. Mrs. Lorimer felt as if she were about to
+hurt a child.
+
+She blew her nose, dried her eyes, and took the brown hand very tightly
+between her own. "My dear, I'm so sorry for you--so sorry for you
+both!" she said.
+
+A curious little glint came and went in the eyes that watched her. Piers'
+fingers closed slowly upon hers.
+
+"I've got to clear out, what?" he said.
+
+She nodded mutely; she could not say it.
+
+He was silent awhile; then: "All right," he said. "I'll go this
+afternoon."
+
+His voice was dead level, wholly emotionless, but for a few seconds his
+grip taxed her endurance to the utmost. Then, abruptly, it relaxed.
+
+He bent his black head and kissed the nervous little hands that were
+clasped upon his own.
+
+"Don't you fret now!" he said, with an odd kindness that was to her more
+pathetic than any appeal for sympathy. "You've got enough burdens of your
+own to bear without shouldering ours. How is Jeanie?"
+
+Mrs. Lorimer choked down a sob. "She isn't a bit well. She has a cold and
+such a racking cough. I'm keeping her in bed."
+
+"I'm awfully sorry," said Piers steadily. "Give her my love! And look
+here, when Avery is well enough, let them go away together, will you? It
+will do them both good."
+
+"It's dear of you to think of it," said Mrs. Lorimer wistfully. "Yes, it
+did do Jeanie good in the autumn. But Avery--"
+
+"It will do Avery good too," he said. "She can take that cottage at
+Stanbury Cliffs for the whole summer if she likes. Tell her to! And look
+here! Will you take her a message from me?"
+
+"A written message?" asked Mrs. Lorimer.
+
+He pulled out a pocket-book. "Six words," he said. He scrawled them, tore
+out the leaf and gave it to her, holding it up before her eyes that she
+might read it.
+
+"Good-bye till you send for me. Piers."
+
+"That's all," he said. "Thanks awfully. She'll understand that. And
+now--I say, you're not going to cry any more, are you?" He shook his head
+at her with a laugh in his eyes. "You really mustn't. You're much too
+tender-hearted. I say, it was a pity about the baby, what? I thought the
+baby might have made a difference. But it'll be all the same presently.
+She's wanting me really. I've known that ever since that night--you
+know--ever since I held her in my arms."
+
+He spoke with absolute simplicity. She had never liked him better than at
+that moment. His boyishness had utterly disarmed her, and not till later
+did she realize how completely he had masked his soul therewith.
+
+She parted with him with a full heart, and had a strictly private little
+cry on his account ere she returned to Avery. Poor lad! Poor lad! And
+when he wasn't smiling, he did look so ill!
+
+The same thought struck Crowther a few hours later as Piers sat with him
+in his room, and devoted himself with considerable adroitness to making
+his fire burn through as quickly as possible, the while he briefly
+informed him that his wife was considered practically out of danger and
+had no further use for him for the present.
+
+Crowther's heart sank at the news though he gave no sign of dismay.
+
+"What do you think of doing, sonny?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+"I? Why, what is there for me to do?" Piers glanced round momentarily.
+"I wonder what you'd do, Crowther," he said, with a smile that was
+scarcely gay.
+
+Crowther came to his side, and stood there massively, while he filled his
+pipe. "Piers," he said, "I presume she knows all there is to know of that
+bad business?"
+
+Piers rammed the poker a little deeper into the fire and said nothing.
+
+But Crowther had broken through the barricade of silence at last, and
+would not be denied.
+
+"Does she know, Piers?" he insisted. "Did you ever tell her how the
+thing came to pass? Does she know that the quarrel was forced upon
+you--that you took heavy odds--that you did not of your own free will
+avoid the consequences? Does she know that you loved her before you knew
+who she was?"
+
+He paused, but Piers remained stubbornly silent, still prodding at the
+red coals.
+
+He bent a little, taking him by the shoulder. "Piers, answer me!"
+
+Again Piers' eyes glanced upwards. His face was hard. "Oh, get away,
+Crowther!" he growled. "What's the good?" And then in his winning way
+he gripped Crowther's hand hard. "No, I never told her anything," he
+said. "And I made it impossible for her to ask. I couldn't urge
+extenuating circumstances because there weren't any. Moreover, it
+wouldn't have made a ha'porth's difference if I had. So shunt the
+subject like a good fellow! She must take me at my worst--at my worst,
+do you hear?--or not at all."
+
+"But, my dear lad, you owe it to her," began Crowther gravely.
+
+Piers cut him short with a recklessness that scarcely veiled the pain in
+his soul. "No, I don't! I don't owe her anything. She doesn't think any
+worse of me than I am. She knows me jolly well,--better than you do, most
+worthy padre-elect. If she ever forgives me, it won't be because she
+thinks I've been punished enough, but just because she is my mate,--and
+she loves me." His voice sank upon the words.
+
+"And you are going to wait for that?" said Crowther.
+
+Piers nodded. He dropped the poker with a careless clatter and stretched
+his arms high above his head. "You once said something to me about the
+Hand of the Sculptor," he said. "Well, if He wants to do any shaping so
+far as I am concerned, now is His time. I am willing to be shaped."
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes were half-closed, and there was a drawn look about the lids
+as of a man in pain. "I mean, my good Crowther," he said, "that the mire
+and clay have ceased to attract me. My house is empty--swept and
+garnished,--but it is not open to devils at present. You want to know my
+plans. I haven't any. I am waiting to be taken in hand."
+
+He spoke with a faint smile that moved Crowther to deep compassion. "You
+will have to be patient a long while, maybe, sonny," he said.
+
+"I can be patient," said Piers. He shifted his position slightly,
+clasping his hands behind his head, so that his face was in shadow. "You
+think that is not much like me, Crowther," he said. "But I can wait for a
+thing if I feel I shall get it in the end. I have felt that--ever since
+the night after I went down there. She was so desperately ill. She wanted
+me--just to hold her in my arms." His voice quivered suddenly. He stopped
+for a few seconds, then went on in a lower tone. "She wasn't--quite
+herself at the time--or she would never have asked for me. But it made a
+difference to me all the same. It made me see that possibly--just
+possibly--there is a reason for things,--that even misery and iron
+may have their uses--that there may be something behind it
+all--what?--Something Divine."
+
+He stopped altogether, and pushed his chair further still into shadow.
+
+Crowther was smoking. He did not speak for several seconds, but smoked on
+with eyes fixed straight before him as though they scanned a far-distant
+horizon. At length: "I rather think the shaping has begun, sonny," he
+said. "You don't believe in prayer now?"
+
+"No, I don't," said Piers.
+
+Crowther's eyes came down to him. "Can't you pray without believing?" he
+said slowly.
+
+Piers made a restless movement. "What should I pray for?"
+
+Crowther was smiling slightly--the smile of a man who has begun to see,
+albeit afar off, the fulfilment of a beloved project.
+
+"Do you know, old chap," he said, "I expect I seem a fool to you; but
+it's the fools who confound the wise, isn't it? I believe a thundering
+lot in prayer. But I didn't always. I prayed without believing for a long
+time first."
+
+"That seems to me like offering an insult to God," said Piers.
+
+"I don't think He views it in that light," said Crowther, "any more than
+He blames a blind man for feeling his way. The great thing is to do
+it--to get started. You're wanting a big thing in life. Well,--ask for
+it! Don't be afraid of asking! It's what you're meant to do."
+
+He drew a long whiff from his pipe and puffed it slowly forth.
+
+There fell a deep silence between them. Piers sat in absolute stillness,
+gazing downwards into the fire with eyes still half-closed.
+
+Suddenly he jerked back his head. "It's a bit of a farce, what?" he said.
+"But I'll do it on your recommendation, I'll give it a six months' trial,
+and see what comes of it. That's a fair test anyhow. Something ought to
+turn up in another six months."
+
+He got to his feet with a laugh, and stood in front of Crowther with a
+species of challenge in his eyes. He looked as if he expected rebuke, and
+were prepared to meet it with arrogance.
+
+But Crowther uttered neither reproach nor admonition. He met the look
+with the utmost kindliness--the most complete understanding.
+
+"Something will turn up, lad," he said, with steady conviction. "But
+not--probably--in the way you expect."
+
+Piers' face showed a momentary surprise. "How on earth do you
+know?" he said.
+
+"I do know," Crowther made steadfast reply; but he offered no explanation
+for his confidence.
+
+Piers thrust out an impulsive hand. "You may be right and you may not;
+but you've been a brick to me, old fellow," he said, a note of deep
+feeling in his voice,--"several kinds of a brick, and I'm not likely to
+forget it. If you ever get into the Church, you'll be known as the parson
+who doesn't preach, and it'll be a reputation to be proud of."
+
+Crowther's answering grip was the grip of a giant. There was a great
+tenderness in the far-seeing grey eyes as he made reply. "It would be
+rank presumption on my part to preach to you, lad. You are made of
+infinitely finer stuff than I."
+
+"Oh, rats!" exclaimed Piers in genuine astonishment.
+
+But the elder man shook his head with a smile. "No; facts, Piers!" he
+said. "There are greater possibilities in you than I could ever
+attain to."
+
+"Possibilities for evil then," said Piers, with a very bitter laugh.
+
+Crowther looked him straight in the eyes. "And possibilities for good, my
+son," he said. "They grow together, thank God."
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE OPEN HEAVEN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE VERDICT
+
+
+"It's much better than learning by heart," said Jeanie, with her tired
+little smile. "Somehow, you know, I can't learn by heart--at least not
+long things. Father says it is because my brain is deficient. But Mother
+says hers is just the same, so I don't mind so much."
+
+"My dear, it will take you hours to read through all this," said
+Avery, surveying with dismay the task which the Vicar had set his
+small daughter.
+
+"Yes," said Jeanie. "I am to devote three hours of every day to it. I had
+to promise I would." She gave a short sigh. "It's very good for me, you
+know," she said.
+
+"Is it?" said Avery. She smoothed back the brown hair lovingly. "You
+mustn't overwork, Jeanie darling," she said.
+
+"I can't help it," said Jeanie quietly. "You see, I promised."
+
+That she would keep her promise, whatever the cost, was evidently a
+foregone conclusion; and Avery could say nothing against it.
+
+She left the child to work therefore, and wandered down herself to
+the shore.
+
+It was June. A soft breeze came over the sea, salt and pure, with the
+life-giving quality of the great spaces. She breathed it deeply,
+thankfully, conscious of returning strength.
+
+She and Jeanie had arrived only the week before, and she was sure their
+visit was going to do wonders for them both. Her own convalescence had
+been a protracted one, but she told herself as she walked along the beach
+towards the smiling, evening sea that she was already stronger than her
+companion. The old lassitude was evidently very heavy upon Jeanie. The
+smallest exertion seemed to tax her energies to the utmost. She had never
+shaken off her cough, and it seemed to wear her out.
+
+Avery had spoken to Lennox Tudor about her more than once, but he never
+discussed the subject willingly. He was never summoned to the Vicarage
+now, and, when they chanced to meet, the Vicar invariably reserved for
+him the iciest greeting that courtesy would permit. Tudor had defeated
+him once on his own ground, and he was not the man to forget it. So
+poor Jeanie's ailments were given none but home treatment to alleviate
+them, and it seemed to Avery that her strength had dwindled almost
+perceptibly of late.
+
+She pondered the matter as she strolled along the shore, debating with
+herself if she would indeed take a step that she had been contemplating
+for some time, and, now that Jeanie was in her care, take her up to town
+and obtain Maxwell Wyndham's opinion with regard to her. It was a project
+she had mentioned to no one, and she hesitated a good deal over putting
+it into practice. That Mrs. Lorimer would readily countenance such an act
+she well knew, but she was also aware that it would be regarded as a
+piece of rank presumption by the child's father which might easily be
+punished by the final withdrawal of Jeanie from her care. That was a
+contingency which she hardly desired to risk. Jeanie had become so
+infinitely precious to her in those days.
+
+Unconsciously her feet had turned towards their old haunt. She found
+herself halting by the low square rock on which Piers once had sat and
+cursed the sea-birds in bitterness of spirit. Often as she had visited
+the spot since, she had never done so without the memory of that spring
+morning flashing unbidden through her brain. It went through her now like
+a sharp dart of physical pain; the boyish figure, the ardent eyes, the
+black hair plastered wet on the wide, patrician brow. Her heart
+contracted. She seemed to hear again the eager, wooing words.
+
+He never wrote to her now. She believed he was in town, probably amusing
+himself as he had amused himself at Monte Carlo, passing the time in a
+round of gaieties, careless flirtations, possibly deeper intrigues.
+Crowther had probably kept him straight through the winter, but she did
+not believe that Crowther's influence would be lasting. There was a sting
+in the very thought of Crowther. She was sure now that he had always
+known the bitter secret that Piers had kept from her. It had been the
+bond between them. Piers had obviously feared betrayal, but Crowther had
+not deemed it his business to betray him. He had suffered the deception
+to continue. She recognized that his position had been a difficult one;
+but it did not soften her heart towards him. Her heart had grown hard
+towards all men of late. She sometimes thought that but for Jeanie it
+would have atrophied altogether. There were so few things nowadays that
+seemed to touch her. She could not even regret her lost baby. But yet the
+memory of Piers sitting on that rock at her feet pierced her oddly;
+Piers, the passionate, the adoring, the hot-blooded; Piers the
+invincible; Piers the prince!
+
+She turned from the spot with a wrung feeling of heart-break. She
+wished--how she wished--that she had died!
+
+In that moment she realized that she was no longer alone. A man's figure,
+thick-set and lounging, was sauntering towards her along the sand. He
+seemed to move with extreme leisureliness, yet his approach was but a
+matter of seconds. His hands were in his pockets, his hat rammed down
+over his eyes.
+
+There seemed to her to be something vaguely familiar about him, though
+wherein it lay she could not have told. She stood and awaited him with
+the certainty that he was coming with the express purpose of joining her.
+She knew him; she was sure she knew him, though who he was she had not
+the faintest idea.
+
+He reached her, lifted his cap, and the sun glinted on a head of fiery
+red hair. "I thought I was not mistaken, Lady Evesham," he said.
+
+She recognized him with an odd leap of the pulses, and in a moment held
+out her hand. "Dr. Wyndham!" she said. "How amazing!"
+
+"Why amazing?" said Wyndham. He held her hand for a second while his
+green eyes scanned her face. When he dropped it she felt that he had made
+a full and exhaustive inspection, and she was strangely disconcerted, as
+if in some fashion he had gained an unfair advantage over her.
+
+"Amazing that you should be here," she explained, with a flush of
+embarrassment.
+
+"Oh, not in the least, I assure you," he said. "I am staying at Brethaven
+for a couple of days with my wife's people. It's only ten miles away, you
+know. And I bicycled over here on the chance of seeing you."
+
+"But how did you know I was here?" she asked.
+
+"From your husband. I told him I was coming in this direction, and he
+suggested that I should come over and look you up." Very casually he made
+reply, and he could not have been aware of the flood of colour his words
+sent to her face, for he continued in the same cool fashion as he
+strolled by her side. "I was afraid you might consider it an unpardonable
+liberty, but he assured me you wouldn't. So--" the green eyes smiled upon
+her imperturbably--"as I am naturally interested in your welfare, I took
+my courage in both hands and, at the risk of being considered
+unprofessional,--I came."
+
+It was unexpected, but it was disarming. Avery found herself smiling
+in answer.
+
+"I am very pleased to see you," she said. "But your coming just at this
+time is rather amazing all the same, for I was thinking of you, wishing I
+could see you, only a few minutes ago."
+
+"What can I do for you?" said Maxwell Wyndham.
+
+She hesitated a little before the direct question; then as simply as he
+had asked she answered, laying the matter before him without reservation.
+
+He listened in his shrewd, comprehending way, asking one or two
+questions, but making no comments.
+
+"There need be no difficulty about it," he said, when she ended. "You say
+the child is tractable. Keep her in bed to-morrow, and say a medical
+friend of yours is coming over to see if he can do anything for her
+cough! Then if you'll ask me to lunch--I'll do the rest."
+
+He smiled as he ended, and thrust out his hand.
+
+"I'll be going now. I left my bicycle in the village and hope to find it
+still there. Now remember, Lady Evesham, my visit to-morrow is to be of a
+strictly unprofessional character. You didn't send for me, so I shall
+assume the privilege of coming as a friend. Is that understood?"
+
+He spoke with smiling assurance, and seeing that he meant to gain his
+point she yielded it.
+
+Not till he was gone did she come to ponder the errand that had brought
+him thither.
+
+She went back to Jeanie, and found her with aching eyes fixed resolutely
+on her book. Yes, she was a little tired, but she would rather go on,
+thank you. Oh no, she did not mind staying in bed to-morrow to please
+Avery, and she was sure she would like Avery's doctor though she didn't
+expect he would manage to stop the cough. She would have to do her task
+though all the same; dear Avery mustn't mind. You see, she had promised.
+But she would certainly stay in bed if Avery wished.
+
+And then came the tired sigh, and then that racking, cruel cough that
+seemed to rend her whole frame. No, she would not finish for another hour
+yet. Really she must go on.
+
+The brown head dropped on to the little bony hands, and Jeanie was
+immersed once more in her task.
+
+More than once in the night Avery awoke to hear that tearing, breathless
+cough in the room next to hers. It was no new thing, but in view of the
+coming ordeal it filled her with misgiving.
+
+When she rose herself in the morning she felt weighed down with anxious
+foreboding.
+
+Yet, when Maxwell Wyndham arrived in his sauntering, informal fashion at
+about noon, she was able to meet him with courage. There was something
+electric about his personality that seemed almost unconsciously to impart
+strength to the downhearted. He had drawn her back from the very Door of
+Death, and her confidence in him was absolute.
+
+They lunched alone together, and talked of many things. More than once,
+wholly incidentally, he mentioned her husband. She gathered that he did
+not know of their bitter estrangement. He talked of the polo-craze, with
+which it seemed Piers was badly bitten, and commented on his splendid
+horsemanship.
+
+"Yes, he is a wonderful athlete," Avery said.
+
+She wondered if he deemed her unresponsive, but decided that he set her
+coldness down to anxiety; for he finished his luncheon without lingering
+and declared himself ready for the business in hand.
+
+He became in fact strictly business-like from that moment, and throughout
+the examination that followed she had not the faintest notion as to what
+was passing in his mind. To Jeanie he was curtly kind, but to herself he
+was as utterly uncommunicative as if he had been a total stranger.
+
+The examination was a protracted one, and more painful than Avery had
+thought possible. It taxed poor Jeanie's powers of endurance to the
+uttermost, and long before it was finished she was weeping from sheer
+exhaustion. He was absolutely patient with her, but he insisted upon
+carrying the matter through, remaining when it was at last over until she
+had somewhat recovered from the ordeal.
+
+To Avery the suspense was well-nigh unbearable; but she dared not show
+the impatience that consumed her. She had a feeling that in some fashion
+the great doctor was depending upon her self-control, her strength of
+mind; and she was determined that he should not find her wanting.
+
+Yet, when she at length preceded him downstairs and into the little
+sitting-room she wondered if the hammering of her heart reached him, so
+tremendous were its strokes. They seemed to her to be beating out a
+death-knell in her soul.
+
+"You will tell me the simple truth, I know," she said, and waited,
+straining to catch his words above the clamour.
+
+He answered her instantly with the utmost quietness, the utmost kindness.
+
+"Lady Evesham, your own heart has already told you the truth."
+
+She put out a quick hand, and he took it and held it firmly,
+sustainingly, while he went on.
+
+"There is nothing whatever to be done. Give her rest, that's all;
+absolute rest. She looks as if she has been worked beyond her strength.
+Is that so?"
+
+Avery nodded mutely.
+
+"It must stop," he said. "She is in a very precarious state, and any
+exertion, mental or physical, is bound to hasten the end--which cannot,
+in any case, be very far off."
+
+He released Avery's hand and walked to the window, where he stood gazing
+out to sea with drawn brows.
+
+"The disease is of a good many months' standing," he said. "It has taken
+very firm hold. Such a child as that should have been sheltered and
+cosseted, shielded from every hardship. Even then--very possibly--this
+would have developed. No one can say for certain."
+
+"Can you advise--nothing?" said Avery in a voice that sounded oddly dull
+and emotionless even to herself.
+
+"Nothing," said Maxwell Wyndham. "No medical science can help in a case
+like this. Give her everything she wants, and give her rest! That is all
+you can do for her now."
+
+Avery came and stood beside him. The blow had fallen, but she had
+scarcely begun to feel its effects. There was so much to be
+thought of first.
+
+"Please be quite open with me!" she said. "Tell me how long you think she
+will live!"
+
+He turned slightly and looked at her. "I can tell you what I think,
+Lady Evesham," he said. "But, remember, that does not bring the end
+any nearer."
+
+"I know," she said.
+
+She looked straight back at him with eyes unflinching, and after a
+moment's thought he spoke.
+
+"I think that--given every care--she may live through the summer, but I
+do not consider it likely."
+
+Avery's face was very pale, but still she did not flinch. "Will she
+suffer?" she asked.
+
+He raised his brows at the question. "My dear lady, she has suffered
+already far more than you have any idea of. One lung is practically gone,
+wholly useless. The other is rapidly going the same way. She has probably
+suffered for a year or more, first lassitude, then shortness of breath,
+and pretty often actual pain. Hasn't she complained of these things?"
+
+"She is a child who never complains," Avery said. "But both her mother
+and I thought she was wasting."
+
+"She is mere skin and bone," he said. "Now--about her people, Lady
+Evesham; who is going to tell them? You or I?"
+
+She hesitated. "But I could hardly ask you to do that," she said.
+
+"You may command me in any way," he answered. "If I may presume to
+advise, I should say that the best course would be for me to go to
+Rodding, see the doctor there, and get him to take me to the Vicarage."
+
+"Oh, but they mustn't take her from me!" Avery said. "Let her mother come
+here! She can't--she mustn't--go back home!"
+
+"Exactly what I was going to say," he returned, in his quiet practical
+fashion. "To take her back there would be madness. But look here, Lady
+Evesham, you must have a nurse."
+
+"Oh, not yet!" said Avery. "I am quite strong now. I am used to nursing.
+I have--no other call upon me. Let me do this!"
+
+"None?" he said.
+
+His tone re-called her. She coloured burningly. "My husband--would
+understand," she said, with difficulty.
+
+He passed the matter by. "Will you promise to send me a message if you
+find night-nursing a necessity?"
+
+She hesitated.
+
+He frowned. "Lady Evesham, you must promise me this in fairness to the
+child as well as to yourself. Also, you will give me your word that you
+will never under any circumstances sleep with her."
+
+She saw that he would have his way, and she yielded both points rather
+than fight a battle which instinct warned her she could not win.
+
+"Then I will be going," he said.
+
+He turned back into the room, and again she was aware of his green eyes
+surveying her closely, critically. But he made no reference whatever to
+her health, and inwardly she blessed him for his forbearance.
+
+She did not know that as he rode away, he grimly remarked to himself:
+"The best tonics generally taste the bitterest, and she'll drink this one
+to the dregs, poor girl! But it'll help her in the end."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE TIDE COMES BACK
+
+
+"Give her everything she wants!" How often in the days that followed were
+those words in Avery's mind! She strove to fulfil them to the uttermost,
+but Jeanie seemed to want so little. The only trouble in her existence
+just then was her holiday-task, and that she steadily refused to
+relinquish unless her father gave her leave.
+
+A few days after Maxwell Wyndham's departure there came an agonized
+letter from Mrs. Lorimer. Olive had just developed scarlet fever, and as
+they could not afford a nurse she was nursing her herself. She entreated
+Avery to send her daily news of Jeanie and to telegraph at once should
+she become worse. She added in a pathetic postscript that her husband
+found it difficult to believe that Jeanie could be as ill as the great
+doctor had represented, and she feared he was a little vexed that Maxwell
+Wyndham's opinion had been obtained.
+
+It was exactly what Avery had expected of him. She wrote a soothing
+letter to Mrs. Lorimer, promising to keep her informed of Jeanie's
+condition, promising to lavish every care upon the child, and begging
+her to persuade Mr. Lorimer to remit the task which had become so
+heavy a burden.
+
+The reply to this did not come at once, and Avery had repeated the
+request twice very urgently and was contemplating addressing a protest
+to the Reverend Stephen in person when another agitated epistle arrived
+from Mrs. Lorimer. Her husband had decided to run down to them for a
+night and judge of Jeanie's state for himself.
+
+Avery received the news with dismay which, however, she was careful to
+conceal. Jeanie heard of the impending visit with as much perturbation as
+her tranquil nature would allow, and during the day that intervened
+before his arrival gave herself more sedulously than ever to her task.
+She had an unhappy premonition that he would desire to examine her upon
+what she had read, and she was guiltily aware that her memory had not
+retained very much of it.
+
+So for the whole of one day she strove to study, till she was so
+completely tired out that Avery actually took the book from her at last
+and declared that she should not worry herself any more about it. Jeanie
+yielded submissively, but a wakeful night followed, and in the morning
+she looked so wan that Avery wanted to keep her in bed.
+
+On this point, however, Jeanie was less docile than usual. "He will think
+I am shamming," she protested. "He never likes us to lie in bed unless we
+are really ill."
+
+So, since she was evidently anxious to get up, Avery permitted it, though
+she marked her obvious languor with a sinking heart.
+
+The Vicar arrived at about noon, and Avery saw at a glance that he was in
+no kindly mood.
+
+"Dear me, what is all this fuss?" he said to Jeanie. "You look to me
+considerably rosier than I have seen you for a long time."
+
+Jeanie was indeed flushed with nervous excitement, and Avery thought she
+had never seen her eyes so unnaturally bright. She endured her father's
+hand under her chin with evident discomfort, and the Vicar's face was
+somewhat severe when he finally released her.
+
+"I am afraid you are getting a little fanciful, my child," he said
+gravely. "I know that our kind friend, Lady Evesham--" his eyes twinkled
+ironically and seemed to slip inwards--"has always been inclined to
+indulge your whims. Now how do you occupy your time?"
+
+"I read," faltered Jeanie.
+
+"And sew, I presume," said the Vicar, who prided himself upon bringing up
+his daughter to be useful.
+
+"A little," said Jeanie.
+
+He opened his eyes upon her again with that suggestion of severity in his
+regard which Jeanie so plainly dreaded. "But you have done none since you
+have been here? Jeanie, my child, I detect in you the seeds of idleness.
+If your time were more fully occupied, you would find your general health
+would considerably improve. Now, do you rise early and go for a bathe
+before breakfast?"
+
+"No," said Jeanie, with a little shiver.
+
+He shook his head at her. "Then let us institute the habit at once! I
+cannot have you becoming slack just because you are away from home. If
+this indolence continue, I shall be compelled to have you back under my
+own eye. I clearly see that the self-indulgent life you lead here is
+having disastrous results. You will bathe with me to-morrow at
+seven-thirty, after which we will have half an hour of physical exercise.
+Then after a wholesome breakfast you will feel renewed and ready for the
+day's work."
+
+Avery, when this programme was laid before her, looked at him in
+incredulous amazement.
+
+"But surely Dr. Wyndham explained to you the serious condition she is
+in!" she exclaimed.
+
+Mr. Lorimer smiled his own superior smile. "He explained his point of
+view most thoroughly, my dear Lady Evesham." He always pronounced her
+name and title with satirical emphasis. "But that--very curious as it may
+appear to you--does not prevent my holding a very strong opinion of my
+own. And it chances to be in direct opposition to that expressed by Dr.
+Maxwell Wyndham. I know my own child,--her faults and her tendencies. She
+has been allowed to become extremely lax with regard to her daily duties,
+and this laxness is in my opinion the root of the evil. I shall therefore
+take my own measures to correct it, and if they are in any way resisted
+or neglected I shall at once remove the child from your care. I trust I
+have made myself quite explicit."
+
+He had. But Avery's indignation could not be contained.
+
+"You will kill her if you persist!" she said. "Even as it is--even as it
+is--her days are numbered."
+
+"The days of all of us are numbered," said the Reverend Stephen. "And it
+behoves us to make the very utmost of each one of them. I cannot allow
+my child's character to be ruined on account of a physical weakness
+which a little judicious discipline will speedily overcome. The spirit
+must triumph over the flesh, Lady Evesham. A hard rule for worldlings, I
+grant you, but one which must be observed by all who would enter the
+Kingdom of Heaven."
+
+Argument was futile. Avery realized it at the outset. He would have his
+way, whatever the cost, and no warning or entreaty would move him. For
+the rest of that day she had to stand by in impotent anguish, and watch
+Jeanie's martyrdom. During the afternoon he sat alone with her,
+conducting the intellectual examination which Jeanie had so dreaded,
+reprimanding, criticizing, scoffing at her ignorance. In the evening he
+took her for what he called a stroll upon which Avery was not allowed to
+accompany them. Mr. Lorimer playfully remarking that he wished to give
+his young daughter the benefit of his individual attention during the
+period of his brief sojourn with them.
+
+They returned from their expedition at eight. Avery was walking to and
+fro by the gate in a ferment of anxiety. They came by the cliff-road,
+and she went eagerly to meet them.
+
+Jeanie was hanging on her father's arm with a face of deathly whiteness,
+and looked on the verge of collapse.
+
+The Reverend Stephen was serenely satisfied with himself, laughed gently
+at his child's dragging progress, and assured Avery that a little
+wholesome fatigue was a good thing at the end of the day.
+
+Jeanie said nothing. She seemed to be speechless with exhaustion, almost
+incapable of standing alone.
+
+Mr. Lorimer recommended a cold bath, a brisk rub-down, and supper.
+
+"After which," he said impressively, "I shall hope to conduct a few
+prayers before we retire to rest."
+
+"That will be impossible, I am afraid," Avery rejoined. "Jeanie is
+overtired and must go at once to bed."
+
+She spoke with quiet decision, but inwardly she was quivering with fierce
+anger. She longed passionately to have the child to herself, to comfort
+and care for her and ease away the troubles of the day.
+
+But Mr. Lorimer at once asserted his authority. "Jeanie will certainly
+join us at supper," he said. "Run along, my child, and prepare for the
+meal at once!"
+
+Jeanie went up the stairs like an old woman, stumbling at every step.
+
+Avery followed her, chafing but impotent.
+
+At the top of the stairs Jeanie began to cough. She turned into her own
+room with blind, staggering movements and sank down beside the bed.
+
+The coughing was spasmodic and convulsive. It shook her whole frame. In
+the end there came a dreadful tearing sound, and she caught her
+handkerchief to her mouth.
+
+Avery knelt beside her, supporting her. She saw the white linen turn
+suddenly scarlet, and she called sharply to Mr. Lorimer to come to them.
+
+He came, and between them they got her on to the bed.
+
+"This is most unfortunate," said Mr. Lorimer. "Pray how did it happen?"
+
+And then Avery's pent fury blazed suddenly forth upon him. "It is your
+doing!" she said. "You--and you alone--are responsible for this!"
+
+He looked at her malignantly. "Pshaw, my dear Lady Evesham! You are
+hysterical!" he said.
+
+Avery was bending over the bed. "Go!" she said, without looking up. "Go
+quickly, and fetch a doctor!"
+
+And, very curiously, Mr. Lorimer obeyed her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE GAME
+
+
+Jeanie rallied. As though to comfort Avery's distress, she came back for
+a little space; but no one--not even her father--could doubt any longer
+that the poor little mortal life had nearly run out.
+
+"My intervention has come too late, alas!" said Mr. Lorimer.
+
+Which remark was received by Avery in bitter silence.
+
+She had no further fear of being deprived of the child. It was quite out
+of the question to think of moving her, and she knew that Jeanie was hers
+for as long as the frail cord of her earthly existence lasted.
+
+She was thankful that the advent of a nurse made it impossible for the
+Vicar to remain, and she parted from him with almost open relief.
+
+"We must bow to the Supreme Will," he said, with his heavy sigh.
+
+And again Avery was silent.
+
+"I fear you are rebellious," he said with severity.
+
+"Good-bye!" said Avery.
+
+Her heart bled more for Mrs. Lorimer than for herself just then. She knew
+by instinct that she would not be allowed to come to her child.
+
+The nurse was middle-aged and kindly, and both she and Jeanie liked her
+from the outset. She took the night duty, and the day was Avery's, a
+division that pleased them all.
+
+Mr. Lorimer had demurred about having a nurse at all, but Avery had
+swept the objection aside. Jeanie was in her care, and she would provide
+all she needed. Mr. Lorimer had conceded the point as gracefully as
+possible, for it seemed that for once his will could not be regarded as
+paramount. Of course, as he openly reflected, Lady Evesham was very much
+in their debt, and it was but natural that she should welcome this
+opportunity to repay somewhat of their past kindness to her.
+
+So, for the first time in her life, little Jeanie was surrounded with all
+that she could desire; and very slowly, like a broken flower coaxed back
+to life, she revived again.
+
+It could scarcely be regarded in the light of an improvement. It was
+just a fluctuation that deceived neither Avery nor the nurse; but to the
+former those days were infinitely precious. She clung to them hour by
+hour, refusing to look ahead to the desolation that was surely coming,
+cherishing her darling with a passion of devotion that excluded all
+other griefs.
+
+The long summer days slipped away. June passed like a dream. Jeanie lay
+in the tiny garden with her face to the sea, gazing forth with eyes that
+were often heavy and wistful but always ready to smile upon Avery. The
+holiday-task was put away, not because Mr. Lorimer had remitted it, but
+because Avery--with rare despotism--had insisted upon removing it from
+her patient's reach.
+
+"Not till you are better, darling," she said. "That is your biggest duty
+now, just to get back all the strength you can."
+
+And Jeanie had smiled her wistful, dreamy smile, and submitted.
+
+Avery sometimes wondered if she knew of the great Change that was drawing
+so rapidly near. If so, it had no terrors for her; and she thanked God
+that the Vicar was not at hand to terrify the child. The journey from
+Rodding to Stanbury Cliffs was not an easy one by rail, and parish
+matters were fortunately claiming his attention very fully just then. As
+he himself had remarked more than once, he was not the man to permit mere
+personal matters to interfere with Duty, and many a weak soul depended
+upon his ministrations.
+
+So Jeanie was left entirely to Avery's motherly care while the golden
+days slipped by.
+
+With July came heat, intense, oppressive, airless; and Jeanie flagged
+again. A copper-coloured mist rose every morning over the sea, blotting
+out the sky-line, veiling the passing ships. Strange voices called
+through the fog, sirens hooted to one another persistently.
+
+"They are like people who have lost each other," Jeanie said once, and
+the simile haunted Avery's imagination.
+
+And then one sunny day a pleasure-steamer passed quite near the shore
+with a band on board. They were playing _The Little Grey Home in the
+West_, and very oddly Jeanie's eyes filled with sudden tears.
+
+Avery did not take any notice for a few moments, but as the strains
+died-away over the glassy water, she leaned towards the child.
+
+"My darling, what is it?" she whispered tenderly.
+
+Jeanie's hand found its way into hers. "Oh, don't you ever want Piers?"
+she murmured wistfully. "I do!"
+
+It was the first time she had spoken his name to Avery since they had
+left him alone nearly a year before, and almost as soon as she had
+uttered it she made swift apology.
+
+"Please forgive me, dear Avery! It just slipped out."
+
+"My dear!" Avery said, and kissed her.
+
+There fell a long silence between them. Avery's eyes were on the thick
+heat-haze that obscured the sky-line. In her brain there sounded again
+those words that Maxwell Wyndham had spoken so short a time before. "Give
+her everything she wants! It's all you can do for her now."
+
+But behind those words was something that shrank and quivered like a
+frightened child. Could she give her this one thing? Could she?
+Could she?
+
+It would mean the tearing open of a wound that was scarcely closed. It
+would mean a calling to life of a bitterness that was hardly past. It
+would mean--it would mean--
+
+"Avery darling!" Softly Jeanie's voice broke through her agitated
+thoughts.
+
+Avery turned and looked at her,--the frail, sweet face with its shining
+eyes of love.
+
+"I didn't mean to hurt you," whispered Jeanie. "Don't think any more
+about it!"
+
+"Do you want him so dreadfully?" Avery said.
+
+Jeanie's eyes were full of tears again. She tried to answer, but her lips
+quivered. She turned her face aside, and was silent.
+
+The day waxed hotter, became almost insupportable. In the afternoon
+Jeanie was attacked by breathlessness and coughing, both painful to
+witness. She could find no rest or comfort, and Avery was in momentary
+dread of a return of the hemorrhage.
+
+It did not return, but when evening came at length and with it the
+blessed coolness of approaching night, Jeanie was so exhausted as to be
+unable to speak above a whisper. She lay white and still, scarcely
+conscious, only her difficult breathing testifying to the fluttering life
+that had ebbed so low.
+
+The nurse's face was very grave as she came on duty, but after an
+interval of steady watching, during which the wind blew in with
+rising freshness from the sea, she turned to Avery, saying, "I think
+she will revive."
+
+Avery nodded and slipped away.
+
+There was not much time left. She ran all the way to the post-office and
+scribbled a message there with trembling fingers.
+
+"Jeanie wants you. Will you come? Avery."
+
+She sent the message to Rodding Abbey. She knew they would forward it
+from there.
+
+Passing out again into the road, a sudden sense of sickness swept over
+her. What had she done? What uncontrolled force would that telegram
+unfetter? Would he come to her like a whirlwind and sweep her back into
+his own tempestuous life? Would he break her will once more to his? Would
+he drag her once more through the hell of his passion, kindle afresh for
+her the flame that had consumed her happiness?
+
+She dared not face the possibility. She felt as if an iron hand had
+closed upon her, drawing her surely, irresistibly, back towards those
+gates of brass through which she had escaped into the desert. That fiery
+torture would be infinitely harder to bear now, and she knew that the
+fieriest point of it all would be the desperate, aching longing to know
+again the love that had shone and burnt itself out in the blast-furnace
+of his sin. He had loved her once; she was sure he had loved her. But
+that love had died with his boyhood, and it could never rise again. He
+had trodden it underfoot and her own throbbing heart with it. He had
+destroyed that which she had always believed to be indestructible.
+
+She never wanted to see him again. She would have given all she had to
+have avoided the meeting. Her whole being recoiled from the thought of
+it. And yet--and yet--she saw again the black head laid against her knee,
+and heard the low, half-rueful words: "Oh, my dear, there is no other
+woman but you in all the world!"
+
+The vision went with her all through the night. She could not escape it.
+
+In the morning she rose with a sense of being haunted, and a terrible
+weariness that hung upon her like a chain.
+
+The day was cooler. Jeanie was better. She had had a nice sleep, the
+nurse said. But there could be no question of allowing her to leave her
+bed that day.
+
+"You are looking so tired," the nurse said, in her kind way to Avery. "I
+am not wanting to go off duty till this afternoon. So won't you go and
+sit down somewhere on the rocks? Please do!"
+
+She was so anxious to gain her point that Avery yielded. She felt too
+feverishly restless to be a suitable companion for Jeanie just then. She
+went down to her favourite corner to watch the tide come in. But she
+could not be still. She paced the shore like a caged creature seeking a
+way of escape, dreading each turn lest it should bring her face to face
+with the man she had summoned.
+
+The tide came in and drove her up the beach. She went back not
+unwillingly, for the suspense had become insupportable.
+
+Had he come? But surely not! She was convinced he would have followed her
+to the shore if he had.
+
+She entered the tiny hall. It was square, and served them as a
+sitting-room. Coming in from the glare without, she was momentarily
+dazzled. And then all suddenly her eyes lighted upon an unaccustomed
+object, and her heart ceased to beat. A man's tweed cap lay carelessly
+tossed upon the back of a chair!
+
+She stood quite still, feeling her senses reel, knowing herself to be on
+the verge of fainting, and clinging with all her strength to her
+tottering self-control.
+
+Gradually she recovered, felt her heart begin to beat again and the
+deadly faintness pass. There was a telegram on the table. She took it up,
+found it addressed to herself, opened it with fumbling fingers.
+
+"Tell Jeanie I am coming to-day. Piers."
+
+It had arrived an hour before, and she was conscious of a vague sense of
+thankfulness that she had been spared that hour of awful certainty.
+
+A door opened at the top of the stairs. A voice spoke. "I'll come back,
+my queen. But I've got to pay my respects, you know, to the mistress of
+the establishment, or she'll be cross. Do you remember the Avery
+symphony? We'll have it presently."
+
+A light step followed the voice. Already he was on the stairs. He came
+bounding down to her like an eager boy. For one wild moment she thought
+he was going to throw his arms about her. But he stopped himself before
+he reached her.
+
+"I say, how ill you look!" he said.
+
+That was all the greeting he uttered, and in the same moment she saw that
+the black hair above his forehead was powdered with white. It sent such a
+shock through her as no word or action of his could have caused.
+
+She stood for a moment gazing at him in stiff inaction. Then, still
+stiffly, she held out her hand. But she could not utter a word. She felt
+as if she were going to burst into tears.
+
+He took the hand. His dark eyes interrogated her, but they told her
+nothing. "It's all right," he said rapidly. "I'm Jeanie's visitor. I
+shan't forget it. It was decent of you to send. I say, you--you are not
+really ill, what?"
+
+No, she was not ill. She heard herself telling him so in a voice she did
+not know. And all the while she felt as if her heart were bleeding,
+bleeding to death.
+
+He let her hand go, and straightened himself with the old free arrogance
+of movement. "May I have something to eat?" he said. "Your message only
+got to me this morning. I was at breakfast, and I had to leave it to
+catch the train. So I've had practically nothing."
+
+That moved her to activity. She led the way into the little parlour
+where luncheon had been laid. He sat down at the table, and she waited
+upon him, almost in silence, yet no longer with embarrassment.
+
+"Aren't you going to join me?" he said.
+
+She sat down also, and took a minute helping of cold chicken.
+
+"I say, you're not going to eat all that!" ejaculated Piers.
+
+She had to laugh a little, though still with that horrified sense of
+tragedy at her heart.
+
+He laughed too his careless boyish laugh, and in a moment all the
+electricity of the past few moments had gone out of the atmosphere. He
+leaned forward unexpectedly and transferred a wing of chicken from his
+plate to hers.
+
+"Look here, Avery! You must eat. It's absurd. So fire away like a
+sensible woman!"
+
+There was no tenderness in his tone, but, oddly, she thrilled to its
+imperiousness, conscious of the old magnetism compelling her. She began
+to eat in silence.
+
+Piers ate too in his usual quick fashion, glancing at her once or twice
+but making no further comment.
+
+"Tell me about Jeanie!" he said, finally. "What has brought her to this?
+Can't we do anything--take her to Switzerland or somewhere?"
+
+Avery shook her head. "Can't you see?" she said, in a low voice.
+
+He frowned upon her abruptly. "I see lots," he said enigmatically. "It's
+quite hopeless, what? Wyndham told me as much. But--I don't believe in
+hopeless things."
+
+Avery looked at him, mystified by his tone. "She is dying," she said.
+
+"I don't believe in death either," said Piers, in the tone of one who
+challenged the world. "And now look here, Avery! Let's make the best of
+things for the kiddie's sake! She's had a rotten time all her days. Let's
+give her a decent send-off, what? Let's give her the time of her life
+before she goes!"
+
+He got up suddenly from his chair and went to the open window.
+
+Avery turned her head to watch him, but for some reason she could
+not speak.
+
+He went on vehemently, his face turned from her. "In Heaven's name don't
+let's be sorry! It's such a big thing to go out happy. Let's play the
+game! I know you can; you were always plucky. Let's give her everything
+she wants and some over! What, Avery, what? I'm not asking for myself."
+
+She did not know exactly what he was asking, but she did not dare to tell
+him so. She sat quite silent, feeling her heart quicken, striving
+desperately to be calm.
+
+He flung round suddenly, and came to her. "Will you do it?" he said.
+
+She raised her eyes to his. She was white to the lips.
+
+He made one of his quick, half-foreign gestures. "Don't!" he said
+harshly. "You make me feel such a brute. Can't you trust me--can't you
+pretend to trust me--for Jeanie's sake?" His hand closed fiercely on the
+back of her chair. He bent towards her. "It's only a hollow bargain.
+You'll hate it of course. Do you suppose I shall enjoy it any better? Do
+you suppose I would ask it of you for any reason but this?"
+
+Something in his face or voice pierced her. She felt again that dreadful
+pain at her heart, as if the blood were draining from it with every beat.
+
+"I don't know what to say to you, Piers," she said at last.
+
+He bit his lip in sheer impatience, but the next moment he controlled
+himself. "I'm asking a difficult thing of you," he said, forcing his
+voice to a quiet level. "It isn't particularly easy for me either;
+perhaps in a sense, it's even harder. But you must have known when you
+sent for me that something of the kind was inevitable. What you didn't
+know--possibly--was that Jeanie is grieving badly over our estrangement.
+She wants to draw us together again. Will you suffer it? Will you play
+the game with me? It won't be for long."
+
+His eyes looked straight into hers, but they held only a great darkness
+in which no flicker of light burned. Avery felt as if the gulf between
+them had widened to a measureless abyss. Once she could have read him
+like an open book; but now she had not the vaguest clue to his feelings
+or his motives. He had as it were withdrawn beyond her ken.
+
+"Is it to be only make-believe?" she asked at last.
+
+"Just that," he said, but she thought his voice rang hard as he said it.
+
+An odd little tremor went through her. She put her hand up to her throat.
+"Piers, I don't know--I am afraid--" She broke off in agitation.
+
+He leaned towards her. "Don't be afraid!" he said. "There is
+nothing so damning as fear. Shall we go up to her now? I promised I
+wouldn't be long."
+
+She rose. He was still standing close to her, so close that she felt the
+warmth of his body, heard the sharp indrawing of his breath.
+
+For one sick second she thought he would snatch her to him; but the
+second passed and he had not moved.
+
+"Shall we go?" he said again. "And I say, can you put me up? I don't care
+where I sleep. Any sort of shakedown will do. That sofa--" he glanced
+towards the one by the window upon which Jeanie had been wont to lie.
+
+"If you like," Avery said.
+
+She felt that the power to refuse him had left her. He would do as he
+thought fit.
+
+They went upstairs together, and she saw Jeanie's face light up as they
+entered. Piers was behind. Coming forward, he slipped a confident hand
+through Avery's arm. She felt his fingers close upon her warningly,
+checking her slight start; and she knew with an odd mixture of relief and
+dismay that this was the beginning of the game. She forced herself to
+smile in answer, and she knew that she succeeded; but it was one of the
+greatest efforts of her life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
+
+
+For a week after Piers' arrival, Jeanie was better, so much better that
+she was able to be carried downstairs and into the garden where she loved
+to lie. There was a piano in the sitting-room, and Piers would sit at it
+by the hour together, playing anything she desired. She loved his music,
+would listen entranced for any length of time while he led her through a
+world of delight that she had never explored before. It soothed her
+restlessness, comforted her in weariness, made her forget her pain. And
+then the summer weather broke. There came a spell of rainy days that made
+the garden impossible, and immediately Jeanie's strength began to wane.
+It went from her very gradually. She suffered but little, save when her
+breathing or her cough troubled her. But it was evident to them all that
+her little craft was putting out to sea at last.
+
+Piers went steadfastly on with the _role_ he had assigned to himself. He
+never by word or look reminded Avery of the compact between them. He
+merely took her support for granted, and--probably in consequence of
+this--it never failed him.
+
+The nurse declared him to be invaluable. He always had a salutary effect
+upon her patient. For even more than at the sight of Avery did Jeanie
+brighten at his coming, and she was always happy alone with him. It even
+occurred to Avery sometimes that her presence was scarcely needed, so
+completely were they at one in understanding and sympathy.
+
+One evening, entering the room unexpectedly, she found Piers on his knees
+beside the bed. He rose instantly and made way for her in a fashion she
+could not ignore; but, though Jeanie greeted her with evident pleasure,
+it was obvious that for the moment she was not needed, and an odd little
+pang went through her with the knowledge.
+
+Piers left the room almost immediately, and in a few moments they heard
+him at the piano downstairs.
+
+"May I have the door open?" whispered Jeanie.
+
+Avery opened it, and drawing up a chair sat down with her work at
+the bedside.
+
+And then, slowly rolling forth, there came that wonderful music with
+which he had thrilled her soul at the very beginning of his courtship.
+
+Wordless, magnificent, the great anthem swelled through the falling dusk,
+and like a vision the unutterable arose and possessed her soul. Her eyes
+began to behold the Land that is very far off.
+
+And then, throbbing through the wonder of that vision, she heard the
+coming of the vast procession. It was like a dream, and yet it was wholly
+real. As yet lost in distance, veiled in mystery, she heard the tread of
+the coming host.
+
+Her hands were fast gripped together; she forgot all beside. It was as if
+the eyes of her soul had been opened, and she looked upon the Infinite. A
+voice at her side began to speak, or was it the voice of her own heart?
+It was only a whisper, but every word of it pierced her consciousness.
+She listened with parted lips.
+
+"I saw Heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and He that sat upon him
+was called Faithful and True ... His Eyes were as a flame of fire and on
+His Head were many crowns.... And He was clothed with a vesture dipped in
+blood.... And the armies which were in Heaven followed Him upon white
+horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.... And He treadeth the
+wine-press.... He treadeth the wine-press...."
+
+The voice paused. Avery was listening with bated breath for more. But it
+did not come at once. Only the Veil began to lift, so that she saw the
+Opening Gates and the Glory behind them.
+
+Then, and not till then, the dream-voice spoke again. "Surely--surely He
+hath borne our griefs, and carried--our sorrows.... And the Lord hath
+laid on Him--the iniquity of us all." The music crashed into
+wonder-chords such as Avery had never heard before, swelled to a climax
+that reached the Divine, held her quivering as it were upon wings in a
+space that was more transcendent than the highest mountain-top;--then
+softly, strangely, died....
+
+"That is Heaven," whispered the voice by her side. "Oh, Avery, won't it
+be nice when we are all there together?"
+
+But Avery sat as one in a trance, rapt and still. She felt as if the
+spirit had been charmed out of her body, and she did not want to return.
+
+A little thin hand slid into hers and clasped it close, recalling her.
+"Wasn't it beautiful?" said Jeanie. "He said he would make me see the
+Kingdom of Heaven. You saw it too, dear Avery, didn't you?"
+
+Yes, Avery had seen it too. She still felt as if the earth were very far
+below them both.
+
+Jeanie's voice had grown husky, but she still spoke in a tremulous
+whisper. "Did you see the Open Gates, dear Avery? He says they are never
+shut. And anyone who can reach them will be let in,--it doesn't matter
+who. Do you know, I think Piers is different from what he used to be? I
+think he is learning to love God."
+
+Absolutely simple words! Why did they send such a rush of
+feeling--tumultuous, indescribable feeling--through Avery? Was this the
+explanation? Was this how it came to pass that he treated her with that
+aloof reverence day by day? Was he indeed learning the supreme lesson to
+worship God with love?
+
+She sat for a while longer with Jeanie, till, finding her drowsy, she
+slipped downstairs.
+
+Piers was sitting in the hall, deep in a newspaper. He rose at her
+coming with an abruptness suggestive of surprise, and stood waiting for
+her to speak.
+
+But curiously the only words that she could utter were of a trivial
+nature. She had come to him indeed, drawn by a power irresistible, but
+the moment she found herself actually in his presence she felt
+tongue-tied, helpless.
+
+"Don't you want a light?" she said nervously. "I am sure you can't
+see to read."
+
+He stood silent for a moment, and the old tormenting doubt began to rise
+within her. Would he think she desired to make an overture? Would he take
+for granted that because his magnetism had drawn her he could do with her
+as he would?
+
+And then very quietly he spoke, and she experienced an odd revulsion of
+feeling that was almost disappointment.
+
+"Have you been reading the papers lately?"
+
+She had not. Jeanie occupied all her waking thoughts.
+
+He glanced down at the sheet he held. "There is going to be a bust-up on
+the Continent," he said, and there was that in his tone--a grim
+elation--which puzzled her at the moment. "The mightiest bust-up the
+world has ever known. We're in for it, Avery; in for the very deuce of a
+row." His voice vibrated suddenly. He stopped as though to check some
+headlong force that threatened to carry him away.
+
+Avery stood still, feeling a sick horror of impending disaster at her
+heart. "What can you mean?" she said.
+
+He leaned his hands upon the table facing her, and she saw in his eyes
+the primitive, savage joy of battle. "I mean war," he said. "Oh, it's
+horrible; yes, of course it's horrible. But it'll bring us to our senses.
+It'll make men of us yet."
+
+She shrank from his look. "Piers! Not--not a European war!"
+
+He straightened himself slowly. "Yes," he said. "It will be that.
+But there's nothing to be scared about. It'll be the salvation of
+the Empire."
+
+"Piers!" she gasped again through white lips. "But modern warfare! Modern
+weapons! It's Germany of course?"
+
+"Yes, Germany." He stretched up his arms with a wide gesture and let them
+fall. "Germany who is going to cut out all the rot of party politics and
+bind us together as one man! Germany who is going to avert civil war and
+teach us to love our neighbours! Nothing short of this would have saved
+us. We've been a mere horde of chattering monkeys lately. Now--all thanks
+to Germany!--we're going to be men!"
+
+"Or murderers!" said Avery.
+
+The word broke from her involuntarily, she scarcely knew that she had
+uttered it until she saw his face. Then in a flash she saw what she had
+done, for he had the sudden tragic look of a man who has received his
+death-wound.
+
+He made her a curious stiff bow as if he bent himself with difficulty.
+His face at that moment was whiter than hers, but his eyes glowed red
+with a deep anger.
+
+"I shall remember that," he said, "when I go to fight for my country."
+
+With the words he turned to the door. But she cried after him, dismayed,
+incoherent.
+
+"Oh Piers, you know--you know--I didn't mean that!"
+
+He did not pause or look back. "Nevertheless you said it," he rejoined
+in a tone that made her feel as if he had flung an icy shower of water in
+her face; and the next moment she heard his quick tread on the garden
+path and realized that he was gone.
+
+It was useless to attempt to follow him. Her knees were trembling under
+her. Moreover, she knew that she must return to Jeanie. White-lipped,
+quivering, she moved to the stairs.
+
+He had utterly misunderstood her; she had but voiced the horrified
+thought that must have risen in the minds of thousands when first brought
+face to face with that world-wide tragedy. But he had read a personal
+meaning into her words. He had deemed her deliberately cruel, ungenerous,
+bitter. That he could thus misunderstand her set her heart bleeding
+afresh. Oh, they were better apart! How was it possible that there could
+ever be any confidence, any intimacy, between them again?
+
+Tears, scalding, blinding tears ran suddenly down her face. She bowed her
+head in her hands, leaning upon the banisters....
+
+A voice called to her from above, and she started. What was she doing,
+weeping here in selfish misery, when Jeanie--Swiftly she commanded
+herself and mounted the stairs. The nurse met her at the top.
+
+"The little one isn't so well," she said. "I thought she was asleep, but
+I am afraid she is unconscious."
+
+"Oh, nurse, and I left her!"
+
+There was a sound of such heart-break in Avery's voice that the nurse's
+grave face softened in sympathy.
+
+"My dear, you couldn't have done anything," she said. "It is just the
+weakness before the end, and we can do nothing to avert it. What about
+her mother? Can she come?"
+
+Avery shook her head in despair. "Not for a week."
+
+"Ah!" the nurse said; and that was all. But Avery knew in that moment
+that only a few hours more remained ere little Jeanie Lorimer passed
+through the Open Gates.
+
+She would not go to bed that night though the child lay wholly
+unconscious of her. She knew that she could not sleep.
+
+She did not see Piers again till late. The nurse slipped down to tell him
+of Jeanie's condition, and he came up, white and sternly composed, and
+stood for many minutes watching the slender, quick-breathing figure that
+lay propped among pillows, close to the open window.
+
+Avery could not look at his face during those minutes; she dared not. But
+when he turned away at length he bent and spoke to her.
+
+"Are you going to stay here?"
+
+"Yes," she whispered.
+
+He made no attempt to dissuade her. All he said was, "May I wait in your
+room? I shall be within call there."
+
+"Of course," she answered.
+
+"And you will call me if there is any change?"
+
+"Of course," she said again.
+
+He nodded briefly and left her.
+
+Then began the long, long night-watch. It was raining, and the night was
+very dark. The slow, deep roar of the sea rose solemnly and filled the
+quiet room. The tide was coming in. They could hear the water shoaling
+along the beach.
+
+How often Avery had listened to it and loved the sound! To-night it
+filled her soul with awe, as the Voice of Many Waters.
+
+Slowly the night wore on, and ever that sound increased in volume,
+swelling, intensifying, like the coming of a mighty host as yet far off.
+The rain pattered awhile and ceased. The sea-breeze blew in, salt and
+pure. It stirred the brown tendrils of hair on Jeanie's forehead, and
+eddied softly through the room.
+
+The nurse sat working beside a hooded lamp that threw her grave, strong
+face into high relief, but only accentuated the shadows in the rest of
+the room. Avery sat close to the bed, not praying, scarcely thinking,
+waiting only for the opening of the Gates. And in that hour she
+longed,--oh, how passionately!--that when they opened she also might be
+permitted to pass through.
+
+It was in the darkest hour of the night that the tide began to turn. She
+looked almost instinctively for a change but none came. Jeanie stirred
+not, save when the nurse stooped over her to give her nourishment, and
+each time she took less and less.
+
+The tide receded. The night began to pass. There came a faint greyness
+before the window. The breeze freshened.
+
+And very suddenly the breathing to which Avery had listened all the night
+paused, ceased for a second or two, then broke into the sharp sigh of one
+awaking from sleep.
+
+She rose quickly, and the nurse looked up. Jeanie's eyes dark, unearthly,
+unafraid, were opened wide.
+
+She gazed at Avery for a moment as if slightly puzzled. Then, in a faint
+whisper: "Has Piers said good-night?" she asked.
+
+"No, darling. But he is waiting to. I will call him," Avery said.
+
+"Quickly!" whispered the nurse, as she passed her.
+
+Swiftly, noiselessly, Avery went to her own room. But some premonition of
+her coming must have reached him; for he met her on the threshold.
+
+His eyes questioned hers for a moment, and then together they turned back
+to Jeanie's room. No words passed between them. None were needed.
+
+Jeanie's face was turned towards the door. Her eyes looked beyond Avery
+and smiled a welcome to Piers. He came to her, knelt beside her.
+
+"Dear Sir Galahad!" she said.
+
+He shook his head. "No, Jeanie, no!"
+
+She was panting. He slipped his arm under the pillow to support her. She
+turned her face to his.
+
+"Oh, Piers," she breathed, "I do--so--want you--to be happy."
+
+"I am happy, sweetheart," he said.
+
+But Jeanie's vision was stronger in that moment than it had ever been
+before, and she was not deceived. "You are not happy, dear Piers," she
+said. "Avery is not happy either."
+
+Piers turned slightly. "Come here, Avery!" he said.
+
+The old imperious note was in his voice, yet with a difference. He
+stretched his free hand up to her, drawing her down to his side, and as
+she knelt also he passed his arm about her, pressing her to him.
+
+Jeanie's eyes were upon them both, dying eyes that shone with a mystic
+glory. They saw the steadfast resolution in Piers' face as he held his
+wife against his heart. They saw the quivering hesitation with which
+she yielded.
+
+"You're not happy--yet," she whispered. "But you will be happy."
+
+Thereafter she seemed to slip away from them for a space, losing touch as
+it were, yet still not beyond their reach. Once or twice she seemed to be
+trying to pray, but they could not catch her words.
+
+The dawn-light grew stronger before the window. The sound of the waves
+had sunk to a low murmuring. From where she knelt Avery could see the
+far, dim line of sea. Piers' arm was still about her. She felt as though
+they two were kneeling apart before an Altar invisible, waiting to receive
+a blessing.
+
+Jeanie's breathing was growing less hurried. She seemed already beyond
+all earthly suffering. Yet her eyes also watched that far dim sky-line as
+though they waited for a sign.
+
+Slowly the light deepened, the shadows began to lift. Piers' eyes were
+fixed unswervingly upon the child's quiet face. The light of the coming
+Dawn was reflected there. The great Change was very near at hand.
+
+Far away to the left there grew and spread a wondrous brightness. The sky
+seemed to recede, turned from grey to misty blue. A veil of cloud that
+had hidden the stars all through the night dissolved softly into shreds
+of gold, and across the sea with a diamond splendour there shot the first
+great ray of sunlight.
+
+It was then that Jeanie seemed to awake, to rise as it were from the
+depths of reverie. Her eyes widened, grew intense; then suddenly
+they smiled.
+
+She sought to raise herself, and never knew that it was by Piers'
+strength alone that she was lifted. She gave a gasp that was almost a
+cry, but it was gladness not pain that it expressed.
+
+For a few panting moments she gazed out as one rapt in delight, gazing
+from a mountain-peak upon a wider view than earthly eyes could compass.
+
+Then eagerly she turned to Piers. "I saw Heaven opened ..." she said,
+and in her low voice there throbbed a rapture that could not be
+uttered in words.
+
+She would have said more, but something stopped her. She made a
+gesture as though she would clasp him round the neck, failed, and sank
+down in his arms.
+
+He held her closely to him, and so holding her, felt the last quivering
+breath slip from the little tired body....
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE DESERT ROAD
+
+
+"That is just where you make a mistake, my good Crowther. You're an
+awfully shrewd chap in some ways, but you understand women just about as
+thoroughly as I understand theology."
+
+Piers clasped his hands behind his head, and regarded his friend
+affectionately.
+
+"Do you think so?" said Crowther a little drily.
+
+Piers laughed. "Now I've trodden on your pet corn. Bear up, old chap!
+It'll soon be better."
+
+Crowther's own face relaxed, but he did not look satisfied. "I'm not
+happy about you, my son," he said. "I think you've missed a big
+opportunity."
+
+"You think wrong," said Piers, unmoved. "I couldn't possibly have stayed
+another hour. I was in a false position. So--poor girl!--was she. We
+buried the hatchet for the kiddie's sake, but it wasn't buried very deep.
+I did my best, and I think she did hers. But--even that last night--we
+kicked against it. There was no sense in pretending any longer. The game
+was up. So--I came away."
+
+He uttered the last words nonchalantly; but if Crowther's knowledge of
+women was limited, he knew his own species very thoroughly, and he was
+not deceived.
+
+"You didn't see her at all after the little girl died?" he asked.
+
+"Not at all," said Piers. "I came away by the first train I could
+catch."
+
+"And left her to her trouble!" Crowther's wide brow was a little drawn.
+There was even a hint of sternness in his steady eyes.
+
+"Just so," said Piers. "I left her to mourn in peace."
+
+"Didn't you so much as write a line of explanation?" Crowther's voice was
+troubled, but it held the old kindliness, the old human sympathy.
+
+Piers shook his head, and stared upwards at the ceiling. "Really there
+was nothing to explain," he said. "She knows me--so awfully well."
+
+"I wonder," said Crowther.
+
+The dark eyes flashed him a derisive glance. "Better than you do,
+dear old man, though, I admit, I've let you into a few of my most
+gruesome corners. I couldn't have done it if I hadn't trusted you.
+You realize that?"
+
+Crowther looked him straight in the face. "That being so, my son," he
+said, "you needn't be so damned lighthearted for my benefit."
+
+A gleam of haughty surprise drove the smile out of Piers' eyes. He
+straightened himself sharply. "On my soul, Crowther--" he began; then
+stopped and leaned back again in his chair. "Oh, all right. I forgot. You
+say any silly rot you like to me."
+
+"And now and then the truth also," said Crowther.
+
+Piers' eyes fenced with his, albeit a faint smile hovered about the
+corners of his mouth. "I really am not such a humbug as you are pleased
+to imagine," he said, after a moment with an oddly boyish touch of pride.
+"I'm feeling lighthearted, and that's a fact."
+
+"Then you are about the only man in England today who is,"
+responded Crowther.
+
+"That may be," carelessly Piers made answer. "Nearly everyone is more or
+less scared. I'm not. It's going to be a mighty struggle--a Titanic
+struggle--but we shall come out on top."
+
+"At a frightful cost," Crowther said.
+
+Piers leapt to his feet. "We shan't shirk it on that account. See here,
+Crowther! I'll tell you something--if you'll swear to keep it dark!"
+
+Crowther looked up at the eager, glowing face and a very tender look came
+into his own. "Well, Piers?" he said.
+
+Piers caught him suddenly by the shoulders. "Crowther, Crowther, old
+chap, congratulate me! I took--the King's shilling--to-day!"
+
+"Ah!" Crowther said.
+
+He gripped Piers' arms tightly, feeling the vitality of him pulse in
+every sinew, every tense nerve. And before his mental sight there rose
+the dread vision of war--the insatiable--striding like a devouring
+monster over a whole continent. With awful clearness he saw the fields
+of slain...
+
+His eyes came back to Piers, splendid in the fire of his youth, flushed
+already with the grim joy of the coming conflict. He got up slowly, still
+looking into the handsome, olive face with its patrician features and
+arrogant self-confidence. And a cold hand seemed to close upon his heart.
+
+"Oh, boy!" he said.
+
+Piers frowned upon him, still half-laughing. "What? Are we down-hearted?
+Buck up, man! Congratulate me! I was one of the first."
+
+But congratulation stuck in Crowther's throat. "I wish this had
+come--twenty years ago!" was all he found to say.
+
+"Thank Heaven it didn't!" ejaculated Piers. "Why, don't you see it's
+the one thing for me--about the only stroke of real luck I've ever had
+in my life?"
+
+"And your wife doesn't know?" said Crowther.
+
+"She does not. And I won't have her told. Mind that!" Piers' voice was
+suddenly determined. "She knows I shan't keep out of it, and that's
+enough. If she wants me--which she won't--she can get at me through
+Victor or one of them. But that won't happen. Don't you worry yourself as
+to that, my good Crowther! I know jolly well what I'm doing. Don't you
+see it's the chance of my life? Do you think I'm going to miss it, what?"
+
+"I think you're going to break her heart," Crowther said gravely.
+
+"That's because you don't understand," Piers made steady reply. "Nothing
+will alter so long as I stay. But this war is going to alter everything.
+We shall none of us come out of it as we went in. When I come
+back--things will be different."
+
+He spoke sombrely. The boyish ardour had gone out of him. Something of
+fatefulness, something of solemn realization, of steadfast fortitude, had
+taken its place.
+
+"I tell you, Crowther," he said, "I am not doing this thing without
+weighing the cost. But--I haven't much to lose, and I've all to gain.
+Even if it doesn't do--what I hope, it'll steady me down, it'll make a
+man of me--and not--a murderer."
+
+His voice sank on the last word. He freed himself from Crowther's hold
+and turned away.
+
+Once more he opened the window to the roar of London's life; and so
+standing, with his back to Crowther, he spoke again jerkily, with obvious
+effort. "Do you remember telling me that something would turn up?
+Well,--it has. I'm waiting to see what will come of it. But--if it's any
+satisfaction to you to know it--I've got clear of my own particular hell
+at last. I haven't got very far, mind, and it's a beastly desert road I'm
+on. But I know it'll lead somewhere; so I shall stick to it now."
+
+He paused a moment; then flung round and faced Crowther with a certain
+air of triumph.
+
+"Meantime, old chap, don't you worry yourself about either of us! My
+wife will go to her friend Mrs. Lorimer till I come home again. Then
+possibly, with any luck, she'll come to me."
+
+He smiled with the words and came back to the table. "May I have a
+drink?" he said.
+
+Crowther poured one out for him in silence. Somehow he could not
+speak. There was something about Piers that stirred him too deeply for
+speech just then. He lifted his own glass with no more than a gesture
+of goodwill.
+
+"I say, don't be so awfully jolly about it!" laughed Piers. "I tell you
+it's going to end all right. Life is like that."
+
+His voice was light, but it held an appeal to which Crowther could not
+fail to respond.
+
+"God bless you, my son!" he said. "Life is such a mighty big thing that
+even what we call failure doesn't count in the long run. You'll win
+through somehow."
+
+"And perhaps a little over, what?" laughed Piers. "Who knows?"
+
+"Who knows?" Crowther echoed, with a smile.
+
+But he could not shake free from the chill foreboding that had descended
+upon him, and when Piers had gone he stood for a long time before his
+open window, wrestling with the dark phantom, trying to reason away a
+dread which he knew to be beyond all reasoning.
+
+And all through the night that followed, those words of Piers' pursued
+him, marring his rest: "It's a beastly desert road I'm on, but I know
+it'll lead somewhere." And the high courage of his bearing! The royal
+confidence of his smile!
+
+Ah, God! Those boys of the Empire, going forth so gallantly to the
+sacrifice!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE ENCOUNTER
+
+
+Piers was right. When Avery left Stanbury Cliffs she went back to her
+old life at Rodding Vicarage.
+
+Local gossip regarding her estrangement from her husband had practically
+exhausted itself some time before, and in any case it would have been
+swamped by the fevered anxiety that possessed the whole country during
+those momentous days.
+
+She slipped back into her old niche almost as if she had never left it.
+Mrs. Lorimer was ill with grief and overwork. It seemed only natural that
+Avery should take up the burden of her care. Even the Vicar could say
+nothing against it.
+
+Avery sometimes wondered if Jeanie's death had pierced the armour of his
+self-complacence at any point. If it had, it was not perceptible; but she
+did fancy now and then that she detected in him a shade more of
+consideration for his wife than he had been wont to display. He
+condescended to bestow upon her a little more of his kindly patronage,
+and he was certainly less severe in his dealings with the children.
+
+Of the blank in Mrs. Lorimer's life only Avery had any conception, for
+she shared it with her during every hour of the day. Perhaps her own
+burden weighed more heavily upon her than ever before at that time, for
+the anxiety she suffered was sometimes more than she could bear. For
+Piers had gone from her without a word. Straight from Jeanie's
+death-bed he had gone, without a single word of explanation or farewell.
+That she had wounded him deeply, albeit inadvertently, on that last day
+she knew; but with his arm closely clasping her by Jeanie's bedside she
+had dared to hope that he had forgiven the wound. Now she felt that it
+was otherwise. He had gone from her in bitterness of soul, and the
+barrier between them was such that she could not call him back. More and
+more the conviction grew upon her that those moments of tenderness had
+been no more than a part of the game he had summoned her to play for
+Jeanie's sake. He had called it a hollow bargain. He had declared that
+for no other reason would he have proposed it to her. And now that the
+farce was over, he had withdrawn from it. He had said that he had not
+found it easy. He had called it mere pretence. And now she had begun to
+think that he meant their separation to be final. If he had uttered one
+word of farewell, if he had but sent her a line later, she knew that she
+would have responded in some measure even though the gulf between them
+remained unbridged. But his utter silence was unassailable. The
+conviction grew upon her that he no longer desired to bridge the gulf.
+He meant to accept their estrangement as inevitable. He had left her,
+and he did not wish to return.
+
+Through the long weary watches of many nights Avery pondered his
+attitude, and sought in vain for any other explanation. She came at
+last to believe that the fierce flame of his passion had wholly burnt
+itself out, consuming all the love he had ever known; and that only
+ashes remained.
+
+So she could not call him back, and for a time she even shrank from
+asking news of him. Then one day she met Victor sorrowfully exercising
+Caesar along the confines of the Park, and stopped him when with a
+melancholy salute he would have passed her by.
+
+His eyes brightened a little at her action, but he volunteered no
+information and she decided later that he had obeyed orders in adopting
+this attitude. With an effort she questioned him. How was it he was not
+with his master?
+
+He spread out his hands in mournful protest. _Mais Monsieur Pierre_ had
+not required his services _depuis longtemps._ He was become very
+independent. But yes, he was engaged upon war work. In the Army? But yes
+again. Did not _Madame_ know? And then he became vague and sentimental,
+bemoaning his own age and consequent inactivity, and finally went away
+with brimming eyes and the dubiously expressed hope that _le bon Dieu_
+would fight on the right side.
+
+It was all wholly unsatisfactory, and Avery yearned to know more. But the
+pain of investigating further held her back. If that growing conviction
+of hers were indeed the truth, she shrank morbidly from seeming to make
+any advance. No one seemed to know definitely what had become of Piers.
+She could not bring herself to apply to outsiders for information, and
+there was no one to take up her case and make enquiries on her behalf.
+Lennox Tudor had volunteered for service in the Medical Corps and had
+been accepted. She did not so much as know where he was, though he was
+declared by Miss Whalley, who knew most things, to be on Salisbury Plain.
+She sometimes wondered with wry humour if Miss Whalley could have
+enlightened her as to her husband's whereabouts; but that lady's attitude
+towards her was invariably expressive of such icy disapproval that she
+never ventured to put the wonder into words.
+
+And then one afternoon of brilliant autumn she was shopping with Gracie
+in Wardenhurst, and came face to face with Ina Guyes.
+
+Dick Guyes had gone into the Artillery, and Ina had returned to her
+father's house. She and Avery had not met since Ina's wedding day more
+than a year before; but their recognition was mutual and instant.
+
+There was a moment of hesitation on both sides, a difficult moment of
+intangible reluctance; then Avery held out her hand.
+
+"How do you do?" she said.
+
+Ina took the hand perfunctorily between her fingers and at once
+relinquished it. She was looking remarkably handsome, Avery thought; but
+her smile was not conspicuously amiable, and her eyes held something that
+was very nearly akin to condemnation.
+
+"Quite well, thanks," she said, with her off-hand air of arrogance which
+had become much more marked since her marriage. "You all right?"
+
+Avery felt herself grow reticent and chilly as she made reply. The girl's
+eyes of scornful enquiry made her stiffen instinctively. She was prepared
+to bow and pass on, but for some reason Ina was minded to linger.
+
+"Has Piers come down yet?" she asked abruptly. "I saw him in town two
+nights ago. I've been up there for a day or two with Dick, but he has
+rejoined now. It's been embarkation leave. They're off directly."
+
+Off! Avery's heart gave a single hard throb and stood still. She looked
+at Ina wordlessly. The shop in which they stood suddenly lost all form
+and sound. It seemed to float round her in nebulous billows.
+
+"Good gracious!" said Ina. "Don't look like that! What's up? Aren't you
+well? Here, sit down! Or better still, come outside!"
+
+She gripped Avery's arm in a tense, insistent grasp and piloted her
+to the door.
+
+Avery went, hardly knowing what she did. Ina turned commandingly
+to Gracie.
+
+"Look here, child! You stay and collect the parcels! I'm going to
+take Lady Evesham a little way in the car. We'll come back for you in
+a few minutes."
+
+She had her own way, as she had always had it on every occasion, save
+one, throughout her life.
+
+When Avery felt her heart begin to beat again, she was lying back in a
+closed car with Ina seated beside her, very upright, extremely alert.
+
+"Don't speak!" the latter said, as their eyes met. "I'll tell you all I
+know. Dick and I have been stopping at Marchmont's for the last five
+days, and one night Piers walked in. Of course we made him join us. He
+was very thin, but looked quite tough and sunburnt. He is rather
+magnificent in khaki--like a prince masquerading. I think he talked
+without ceasing during the whole evening, but he didn't say a single word
+that I can remember. He expects to go almost any day now. He is in a
+regiment of Lancers, but I couldn't get any particulars out of him. He
+didn't choose to be communicative, so of course I left him alone. He is
+turning white about the temples; did you know?"
+
+Avery braced herself to answer the blunt question. There was something
+merciless about Ina's straight regard. It pierced her; but oddly she felt
+no resentment, only a curious sensation of compassionate sympathy.
+
+"Yes, I saw him--some weeks ago," she said.
+
+"You have not decided to separate then? Everyone said you had."
+
+Ina's tone was brutally direct, yet still, strangely, Avery felt no
+indignation.
+
+"We have not been--friends--for the last year," she said.
+
+"Ah! I thought not. And why? Just because of that story about your first
+husband's death that Dick's hateful cousin spread about on our
+wedding-day?"
+
+Ina looked at her with searching, challenging eyes, and Avery felt
+suddenly as if she were the younger and weaker of the two.
+
+"Was it because of that?" Ina insisted.
+
+"Yes," she admitted.
+
+"And you let such a thing as that come between you and--and--Piers!"
+There was incredulous amazement in Ina's voice. "You actually had
+the--the--the presumption!" Coherent words suddenly seemed to fail her,
+but she went on regardless, not caring how they came. "A man like
+Piers,--a--a--Triton like that,--such a being as is only turned out once
+in--in a dozen centuries! Oh, fool! Fool!" She clenched her hands, and
+beat them impotently upon her lap. "What did it matter what he'd done? He
+was yours. He worshipped you. And the worship of a man like Piers must
+be--must be--" She broke off, one hand caught convulsively to her throat;
+then swallowed hard and rushed on. "You sent him away, did you? You
+wouldn't live with him any longer? My God! Piers!" Again her throat
+worked spasmodically, and she controlled it with fierce effort. "He won't
+stay true to you of course," she said, more quietly. "You don't expect
+that, do you? You can't care--since you wouldn't stick to him. You've
+practically forced him into the mire. I sometimes think that one virtuous
+woman can do more harm in the world than a dozen of the other sort.
+You've embittered him for life. You've made him suffer horribly. I expect
+you've suffered too. I hope you have! But your sorrows are not to be
+compared with his. He has red blood in his veins, but you're too
+attenuated with goodness to know what real suffering means. You had the
+whole world in your grasp and you threw it away for a whim, just because
+you were too small, too contemptibly mean, to understand. You thought you
+loved him, I daresay. Well, you didn't. Love is a very different thing.
+Love never casts away. But of course you can't understand that. You are
+one of those women who keep down all the blinds lest the sunshine should
+fade their souls. You don't know even the beginnings of Love!"
+
+Passionately she uttered the words, but in a voice pitched so low that
+Avery only just caught them. And having uttered them almost in the same
+breath, she took up the speaking-tube and addressed the chauffeur.
+
+Avery sat quite still and silent. She felt as if she had been attacked
+and completely routed by a creature considerably smaller, but infinitely
+more virile, more valiant, than herself.
+
+Ina did not speak to her again for several minutes. She threw herself
+back against the cushion with an oddly petulant gesture, and leaned there
+staring moodily out.
+
+Then, as they neared their starting-point, she sat up and spoke again
+with a species of bored indifference. "Of course it's no affair of mine.
+I don't care two straws how you treat him. But surely you'll try and give
+him some sort of send-off? I wouldn't let even Dick go without that."
+
+Even Dick! There was a world of revelation in those words. Avery's heart
+stirred again in pity, and still her indignation slumbered.
+
+They reached the shop before which Gracie was waiting for them,
+and stopped.
+
+"Good-bye!" Avery said gently.
+
+"Oh, good-bye!" Ina looked at her with eyes half closed. "I won't get out
+if you don't mind. I must be getting back."
+
+She did not offer her hand, but she did not refuse it when very quietly
+Avery offered her own. It was not a warm hand-clasp on either side, but
+neither was it unfriendly.
+
+As she drove away, Ina leaned forward and bowed with an artificial smile
+on her lips. And Avery saw that she was very pale.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE PLACE OF REPENTANCE
+
+
+Like a prince masquerading! How vivid was the picture those words called
+up to Avery's mind! The regal pose of the body, the turn of the head, the
+faultless beauty of the features, and over all, that nameless pride of
+race, arrogant yet wholly unconscious--the stamp of the old Roman
+patrician, revived from the dust of ages!
+
+Aloof, yet never out of her ken, that picture hung before her all through
+the night, the centre-piece of every vision that floated through her
+weary brain. In the morning she awoke to a definite resolve.
+
+He had left her before she could stay him; but she would go to him now.
+Whether or not he wanted her,--yes, even with the possibility of seeing
+him turn from her,--she would seek him out. Yet this once more she would
+offer to him that love and faith which he had so cruelly sullied. If he
+treated her with cold contempt, she would yet offer to him all that she
+had--all that she had. Not because she had forgiven him or in any sense
+forgotten; but because she must; because neither forgiveness nor
+forgetfulness came into the matter, but only those white hairs above his
+temples that urged her, that drove her, that compelled her.
+
+There were no white hairs in her own brown tresses. Could it be that he
+had really suffered more than she? If so, God pity him! God help him!
+
+For the first time since their parting, the prayer for him that rose
+from her heart kindled within her a glow that burned as fire from the
+altar. She had prayed. She had prayed. But her prayers had seemed to
+come back to her from a void immeasurable that held nought but the
+echoes of her cry.
+
+But now--was it because she was ready to act as well as to pray?--it
+seemed to her that her appeal had reached the Infinite. And it was then
+that she began to learn that prayer is not only a passive asking, but the
+eager straining of every nerve towards fulfilment.
+
+It seemed useless to go to the Abbey for news. She would master her
+reluctance and go to Crowther. She was sure that he would be in a
+position to tell her all there was to know.
+
+Mrs. Lorimer warmly applauded the idea. The continued estrangement of the
+two people whom she loved so dearly was one of her greatest secret
+sorrows now. She urged Avery to go, shedding tears over the thought of
+Piers going unspeeded into the awful dangers of war.
+
+So by the middle of the morning Avery was on her way. It seemed to her
+the longest journey she had ever travelled. She chafed at every pause.
+And through it all, Ina's fierce words ran in a perpetual refrain through
+her brain: "Love never casts away--Love never casts away."
+
+She felt as if the girl had ruthlessly let a flood of light in upon her
+gloom, dazzling her, bewildering her, hurting her with its brilliance.
+She had forced aside those drawn blinds. She had pierced to the innermost
+corners. And Avery herself was shocked by that which had been revealed.
+It had never before been given to her to see her own motives, her own
+soul, thus. She had not dreamed of the canker of selfishness that lay at
+the root of all. With shame she remembered her assurance to her husband
+that her love should never fail him. What of that love now--Love the
+Invincible that should have shattered the gates of the prison-house and
+led him forth in triumph?
+
+Reaching town, she drove straight to Crowther's rooms. But she was met
+with disappointment. Crowther was out. He would be back in the evening,
+she was told, but probably not before.
+
+Wearily she went down again and out into the seething life of the streets
+to spend the longest day of her life waiting for his return. Looking back
+upon that day afterwards, she often wondered how she actually spent the
+time. To and fro, to and fro, this way and that; now trying to ease her
+soul by watching the soldiers at drill in the Park, the long, long khaki
+lines and sunburnt faces; now pacing the edge of the water and seeking
+distraction in the antics of some water-fowl; now back again in the
+streets, moving with the crowd, seeing soldiers, soldiers on every hand,
+scanning each almost mechanically with the vagrant hope of meeting one
+who moved with a haughty pride of carriage and looked like a prince in
+disguise. Sometimes she stood to see a whole troop pass by, splendid boys
+swinging along with laughter and careless singing. She listened to the
+tramping feet and merry voices with a heart that sank ever lower and
+lower. She had started the day with a quivering wonder if the end of it
+might find her in his arms. But ever as the hours passed by the certainty
+grew upon her that this would not be. She grew sick with the longing to
+see his face. She ached for the sound of his voice. And deep in the heart
+of her she knew that this futile yearning was to be her portion for many,
+many days. For over a year he had waited, and he had waited in vain. Now
+it was her turn.
+
+It was growing dusk when she went again in search of Crowther. He had not
+returned, but she could not endure that aimless wandering any longer. She
+went in to wait for him, there in the room where Piers had found
+sanctuary during some of the darkest hours of his life.
+
+She was too utterly wearied to move about, but sat sunk in the chair
+by the window, almost too numbed with misery and fatigue for coherent
+thought. The dusk deepened about her. The roar of London's life came
+vaguely from afar. Through it and above it she still seemed to hear the
+tread of the marching feet as the gallant lines swung by. And still
+with aching concentration she seemed to be searching for that one
+beloved face.
+
+What did it matter what he had done? He was hers. He was hers. And, O
+God, how she wanted him! How gladly in that hour would she have yielded
+him all--all that she had to offer!
+
+There came a quiet step without, a steady hand on the door. She started
+up with a wild hope clamouring at her heart. Might he not be there also?
+It was possible! Surely it was possible!
+
+She took a quick step forward. No conventional word would rise to her
+lips. They only stiffly uttered the one name, "Piers!"
+
+And Crowther answered her, just as though no interval of more than a
+year lay between them and the old warm friendship. "He left for the
+Front today."
+
+With the words he reached her, and she remembered later the
+sustaining strength with which his hands upheld her when she reeled
+beneath the blow.
+
+He put her down again in the chair, and knelt beside her, for she clung
+to him convulsively, scarcely knowing what she did.
+
+"He ought to have let you know," he said. "But he wouldn't be persuaded.
+I believe--right up to the last--he hoped he would hear something of you.
+But you know him, his damnable pride,--or was it chivalry this time? On
+my soul, I scarcely know which. He behaved almost as if he were under an
+oath not to make the first advance. I am very sorry, Avery. But my hands
+were tied."
+
+He paused, and she knew that he was waiting for a word from her--of
+kindness or reproach--some intimation of her feelings towards himself.
+But she could only utter voicelessly, "I shall never see him again."
+
+He pressed her icy hands close in his own, but he said no word of hope.
+He seemed to know instinctively that it was not the moment.
+
+"You can write to him," he said. "You can write now--tonight. The letter
+will reach him in a few days at most. He calls himself Beverley--Private
+Beverley. Let me give you some tea, and you can sit down and write
+straight away."
+
+Kindly and practical, he offered her the consolation of immediate action;
+and the crushing sense of loss began gradually to lose its hold upon her.
+
+"I am going to tell you everything--all I know," he said. "I told him I
+should do so if you came to me. I only wish you had come a little sooner,
+but that is beside the point."
+
+Again he paused. Her eyes were upon him, but she said nothing.
+
+Finding her hold had slackened, he got up, lighted a lamp, and sat down
+with its light streaming across his rugged face.
+
+"I don't know what you have been thinking of me all this time," he said,
+"if you have stooped to think of me at all."
+
+"I have often thought of you," Avery answered. "But I had a feeling that
+you--that you--" she hesitated--"that you could scarcely be in sympathy
+with us both," she ended.
+
+"I see." Crowther's eyes met hers with absolute directness. "But you
+realize that that was a mistake," he said.
+
+She answered him in the affirmative. Before those straight eyes of his
+she could not do otherwise.
+
+"I could not express my sympathy with you," he said. "I did not even
+know that it would be welcome, and I could not interfere without your
+husband's consent. I was bound by a promise. But--" he smiled faintly--"I
+told him clearly that if you came to me I should not keep that promise. I
+should regard it as my release."
+
+"What have you to tell me?" Avery asked.
+
+"Just this," he said. "It isn't a very long story, but I don't think you
+have heard it before. It's just the story of one of the worst bits of bad
+luck that ever befell a man. He was only a lad of nineteen, and he went
+out into the world with all his life before him. He was rich and
+successful in every way, full of promise, brilliant. There was something
+so splendid about him that he seemed somehow to belong to a higher
+planet. He had never known failure or disgrace. But one night an evil
+fate befell him. He was forced to fight--against his will; and--he killed
+his man. It was an absolutely unforeseen result. He took heavy odds, and
+naturally he matched them with all the skill at his command. But it was a
+fair fight. I testify to that. He took no mean advantage."
+
+Crowther's eyes were gazing beyond Avery. He spoke with a curious
+deliberation as if he were describing a vision that hung before him.
+
+"He himself was more shocked by the man's death than anyone I have ever
+seen. He accepted the responsibility at once. There is a lot of nobility
+at the back of that man's soul. He wanted to give himself up. But I
+stepped in. I took the law into my own hands. I couldn't stand by and see
+him ruined. I made him bolt. He went, and I saw no more of him for six
+years. That ends the first chapter of the story."
+
+He paused, as if for question or comment; but Avery sat in unbroken
+silence. Her eyes also were fixed as it were upon something very far
+away.
+
+After a moment, he resumed. "Six years after, I stopped at Monte Carlo
+on my way home, and I chanced upon him there. He was with his old
+grandfather, living a life that would have driven most young men crazy
+with boredom. But--I told you there was something fine about him--he
+treated the whole thing as a joke, and I saw that he was the apple of the
+old man's eye. He hailed me as an old friend. He welcomed me back into
+his life as if I were only associated with pleasant things. But I soon
+saw that he was not happy. The memory of that tragedy was hanging on him
+like a millstone. He was trying to drag himself free. But he was like a
+dog on a chain. He could see his liberty, but he could not reach it. And
+the fact that he loved a woman, and believed that he had won her love
+made the burden even heavier. So I gathered, though he had his intervals
+of reckless happiness when nothing seemed to matter. I didn't know who
+the woman was at first, but I urged him strongly to tell her the truth
+before he married her. And then somehow, while we were walking together
+one night, it came out--that trick of Fate; and in his horror and despair
+the boy very nearly went under altogether. It was just the fineness of
+his nature that kept him up."
+
+"And your help," said Avery quietly.
+
+His eyes comprehended her for a moment. "Yes, I did my best," he said.
+"But it was his own nobility in the main that gave him strength. Have you
+never noticed that about him? He has the greatness that only comes to
+most men after years of struggle."
+
+"I have noticed," Avery said, her voice very low.
+
+Crowther went on in his slow, steady way. "Well, after that, I left. And
+the next thing I knew was that the old man had died, and he was married
+to you. You didn't let me into the secret very soon, you know." He smiled
+a little. "Of course I realized that you had gone to him rather suddenly
+to comfort his loneliness. It was just the sort of thing I should have
+expected of you. And I thought--too--that he had told you all, and you
+had loved him well enough to forgive him. It wasn't till I came to see
+you that I realized that this was not so, and I had been in the house
+some hours even then before it dawned on me."
+
+Again he spoke as one describing something seen afar.
+
+"Of course I was sorry," he said. "I knew that sooner or later you were
+bound to come up against it. I couldn't help. I just waited. And as it
+chanced, I didn't have to wait very long. Piers came to me one night in
+August, and told me that the whole thing had come out, and that you had
+refused to live with him any longer. I understood your feelings. It was
+inevitable that at first you should feel like that. But I knew you loved
+him. I knew that sooner or later that would make a difference. And I
+tried to hearten him up. For he--poor lad!--was nearly mad with trouble."
+
+Avery's hands closed tightly upon each other in her lap. She sat in
+strained silence, still gazing straight before her.
+
+Gently Crowther finished his tale. "That's about all there is to tell,
+except that from the day he left you to this, he has borne his burden
+like a man, and he has never once done anything unworthy of you. He is a
+man, Avery, not a boy any longer. He is a man you can trust, for he will
+never deceive you again. If he hasn't yet found his place of repentance,
+it hasn't been for lack of the seeking. If you can send him a line of
+forgiveness, he will go into this war with a high heart, and you will
+have reason to be proud of him when you meet again."
+
+He got up and moved in his slow, massive way across the room.
+
+"Now you will let me give you some tea," he said. "I am sure you must
+be tired."
+
+Had he seen the tears rolling down her face as she sat there? If so he
+gave no sign. Quietly he busied himself with his preparations, and before
+he came back to her, she had wiped them away.
+
+He waited upon her with womanly gentleness, and later he went with her to
+the hotel at which Piers usually stayed, and saw her established there
+for the night.
+
+It was not till the moment of parting that she found any words in which
+to express herself.
+
+Then, with her hand in his, she whispered chokingly, "I feel as if--as
+if--I had failed him--just when he needed me most. He was in prison,
+and--I left him there."
+
+Crowther's steady eyes looked into hers with kindness that was full of
+sustaining comfort. "He has broken out of his prison," he said. "Don't
+fret--don't fret!"
+
+Her lips were quivering painfully. She turned her face aside. "He will
+scarcely need me now," she said.
+
+"Write and ask him!" said Crowther gently.
+
+She made a piteous gesture of hopelessness. "I have got to find my own
+place of repentance first," she said.
+
+"It shouldn't wait," said Crowther. "Write tonight!"
+
+And so for half the night Avery sat writing a letter to her husband which
+he was destined never to receive.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE RELEASE OF THE PRISONER
+
+
+How long was it since the fight round the chateau? Piers had no idea. The
+damp chill of the autumn night was upon him and he was cold to the bone.
+
+It had been a desperate fight in which quarter had been neither asked nor
+given, hand to hand and face to face, with wild oaths and dreadful
+laughter. He had not noticed the tumult at the time, but the echoes of it
+still rang in his ears. A desperate fight against overwhelming odds! For
+the chateau had been strongly held, and the struggle for it had seemed
+Titanic, albeit only a detail of a rearguard action. There had been guns
+there that had harried them all the previous day. It had become a matter
+of necessity to silence those guns. So the effort had been made, a
+glorious effort crowned with success. They had mastered the garrison,
+they had silenced the guns; and then, within an hour of their victory,
+disaster had come upon them. Great numbers of the enemy had swept
+suddenly upon them, had surrounded them and swallowed them up.
+
+It was all over now. The tide of battle had swept on. The place was
+silent as the grave. He was the only man left, flung as it were upon a
+dust-heap in a corner of the world that had ceased to matter to anyone.
+
+He had lain for hours unconscious till those awful chills had awakened
+him. Doubtless he had been left for dead among his dead comrades. He
+wondered why he was not dead. He had a distinct recollection of being
+shot through the heart. And the bullet had gone out at his back. He
+vividly remembered that also--the red-hot anguish as it had torn its way
+through him, the awful emptiness of death that had followed.
+
+How had he escaped--if he had escaped? How had he returned from that
+great silence? Why had the dread Door shut against him only, imprisoning
+him here when all the rest had passed through? There seemed to be some
+mystery about it. He tried to follow it out. Death was no difficult
+matter. He was convinced of that. Yet somehow Death had eluded him. He
+was as a man who had lost his way in a fog. Doubtless he would find it
+again. He did not want to wander alone in this valley of dry bones. He
+wanted to get free. He was sure that sooner or later that searing,
+red-hot bullet would do its work.
+
+For a space he drifted back into the vast sea of unconsciousness in which
+he had been submerged for so long. Even that was bound to lead somewhere.
+Surely there was no need to worry!
+
+But very soon it ceased to be a calm sea. It grew troubled. It began to
+toss. He felt himself flung from billow to billow, and the sound of a
+great storm rose in his ears.
+
+He opened his eyes suddenly wide to a darkness that could be felt, and it
+was as though a flame of agony went through him, a raging thirst that
+burned him fiendishly.
+
+Ah! He knew the meaning of that! It was horribly familiar to him. He was
+back in hell--back in the torture-chamber where he had so often agonized,
+closed in behind those bars of iron which he had fought so often and so
+fruitlessly to force asunder.
+
+He stretched out his hands and one of them came into contact with the icy
+cold of a dead man's face. It was the man who had shot him, and who in
+his turn had been shot. He shuddered at the touch, shrank into himself.
+And again the fiery anguish caught him, set him writhing; shrivelled him
+as parchment is shrivelled in the flame. He went through it, racked with
+torment, conscious of nought else in all the world, so pierced and
+possessed by pain that it seemed as if all the suffering that those dead
+men had missed were concentrated within him. He felt as if it must
+shatter him, soul and body, dissolve him with its sheer intensity. And
+yet somehow his straining flesh endured. He came through his inferno,
+sweating, gasping, with broken prayers and the wrung, bitter crying of
+smitten strength!
+
+Again the black sea took him, bearing him to and fro, deadening his pain
+but giving him no rest. He tossed on the troubled waters for
+interminable ages. He watched a full moon rise blood-red and awful and
+turn gradually to a whiteness of still more appalling purity. For a
+long, long time he watched it, trying to recall something which eluded
+him, chasing a will-o'-the-wisp memory round and round the fevered
+labyrinths of his brain.
+
+Then at last very suddenly it turned and confronted him. There in the
+old-world garden that was every moment growing more distinct and
+definite, he looked once more upon his wife's face in the moonlight, saw
+her eyes of shrinking horror raised to his, heard her low-spoken words:
+"I shall never forgive you."
+
+The vision passed, blotted out by returning pain. He buried his head
+beneath his arms and groaned. . . .
+
+Again--hours after, it seemed,--the great cloud of his agony lifted. He
+came to himself, feeling deadly sick but no longer gripped by that
+fiendish torture. He raised himself on his elbows and faced the blinding
+moonlight. It seemed to pierce him, but he forced himself to meet it. He
+looked forth over the silent garden.
+
+Strange silhouettes of shrubs weirdly fashioned filled the place. At
+a little distance he caught the gleam of white marble, and there
+came to him the tinkle of a fountain. He became aware again of raging
+thirst--thirst that tore at the very root of his being. He gathered
+himself together for the greatest effort of his life. The sound of
+the water mocked him, maddened him. He would drink--he would
+drink--before he died!
+
+The man at his side lay with face upturned starkly to the moonlight. It
+gleamed upon eyes that were glazed and sightless. The ground all around
+them was dark with blood.
+
+Slowly Piers raised himself, feeling his heart pump with the effort,
+feeling the stiffened wound above it tear and gape asunder. He tried to
+hold his breath while he moved, but he could not. It came in sharp,
+painful gasps, sawing its way through his tortured flesh. But in spite of
+it he managed to lift himself to his hands and knees; and then for a
+long, long time he dared attempt no more. For he could feel the blood
+flowing steadily from his wound, and a deadly faintness was upon him
+against which he needed all his strength to fight.
+
+He thought it must have overwhelmed him for a time at least; yet when it
+began to lessen he had not sunk down again. He was still propped upon
+hands and knees--the only living creature in that place of dead men.
+
+He could see them which ever way he looked over the trampled
+sward--figures huddled or outstretched in the moonlight, all motionless,
+ashen-faced.
+
+He saw none wounded like himself. Perhaps the wounded had been already
+collected, perhaps they had crawled to shelter. Or perhaps he was the
+only one against whom the Door had been closed. He had been left for
+dead. He had nothing to live for. Yet it seemed that he could not die.
+
+He looked at the man at his side lying wrapt in the aloofness of Death.
+Poor devil! How horrible he looked, and how indifferent! A sense of
+shuddering disgust came upon Piers. He wondered if he would die as
+hideously.
+
+Again the fountain mocked him softly from afar. Again the fiery torment
+of his thirst awoke. He contemplated attempting to walk, but instinct
+warned him against the risk of a headlong fall. He began with infinite
+difficulty to crawl upon hands and knees.
+
+His progress was desperately slow, the suffering it entailed was
+sometimes unendurable. And always he knew that the blood was draining
+from him with every foot of ground he covered. But ever that maddening
+fountain lured him on...
+
+The night had stretched into untold ages. He wondered if in his
+frequent spells of unconsciousness he had somehow missed many days. He
+had seen the moon swing half across the sky. He had watched with
+delirious amusement the dead men rise to bury each other. And he had
+spent hours in wondering what would happen to the last of them. His
+head felt oddly light, as if it were full of air, a bubble of prismatic
+colours that might burst into nothingness at any moment. But his body
+felt as if it were fettered with a thousand chains. He could hear them
+clanking as he moved.
+
+But still that fountain with its marble basin seemed the end and aim of
+his existence. Often he forgot to be thirsty now, but he never forgot
+that he must reach the fountain before he died.
+
+Sometimes his thirst would come back in burning spasms to urge him on,
+and he always knew that there was a great reason for perseverance, always
+felt that if he slackened he would pay a terrible penalty.
+
+The fountain was very far away. He crawled along with ever-increasing
+difficulty, marking the progress of his own shadow in the strong
+moonlight. There was something pitiless about the moon. It revealed so
+much that might have been mercifully veiled.
+
+From the far distance there came the long roll of cannon, shattering the
+peace of the night, but it was a long way off. In the chateau-garden
+there was no sound but the tinkle of the fountain and the laboured,
+spasmodic breathing of a man wounded wellnigh unto death.
+
+Only a few yards separated him now from the running water. It sounded
+like a fairy laughter, and all the gruesome horrors of the place faded
+into unreality. Surely it was fed by the stream at home that flowed
+through the preserves--the stream where the primroses grew!
+
+Only a few more yards! But how damnably difficult it was to cover them!
+He could hardly drag his weighted limbs along. It was the old game. He
+knew it well. But how devilish to fetter him so! It had been the ruin of
+his life. He set his teeth, and forced himself on. He would win through
+in spite of all.
+
+The moonlight poured dazzlingly upon the white marble basin, and on the
+figure of a nymph who bent above it, delicately poised like a butterfly
+about to take wing. He wondered if she would flee at his approach, but
+she did not. She stood there waiting for him, a thing of infinite
+daintiness, the one object untouched in that ravaged garden. Perhaps
+after all it was she and not the fountain that drew him so irresistibly.
+He had a great longing to hear her speak, but he was afraid to address
+her lest he should scare her away. She was so slight, so spiritual, so
+exquisite in her fairy grace. She made him think of Jeanie--little Jeanie
+who had prayed for his happiness and had not lived to see her prayer
+fulfilled.
+
+He drew near with a certain stealthiness, fearing to startle her. He
+would have risen to his feet, but his strength was ebbing fast. He knew
+he could not.
+
+And then--just ere he reached the marble basin, the goal of that long,
+bitter journey--he saw her turn a little towards him; he heard her speak.
+
+"Dear Sir Galahad!"
+
+"Jeanie!" he gasped.
+
+She seemed to sway above the gleaming water. Even then--even then--he was
+not sure of her--till he saw her face of childish purity and the happy
+smile of greeting in her eyes!
+
+"How very tired you must be!" she said.
+
+"I am, Jeanie! I am!" he groaned in answer. "These chains--these iron
+bars--I shall never get free!"
+
+He saw her white arms reach out to him. He thought her fingers touched
+his brow. And he knew quite suddenly that the journey was over, and he
+could lie down and rest.
+
+Her voice came to him very softly, with a hushing tenderness through the
+miniature rush and gurgle of the water. As usual she sought to comfort
+him, but he heard a thrill of triumph as well as sympathy in her words.
+
+"He hath broken the gates of brass," she said. "And smitten the bars of
+iron in sunder."
+
+His fingers closed upon the edge of the pool. He felt the water splash
+his face as he sank down; and though he was too spent to drink he thanked
+God for bringing him thither.
+
+Later it seemed to him that a Divine Presence came through the garden,
+that Someone stooped and touched him, and lo, his chains were broken and
+his burden gone! And he roused himself to ask for pardon; which was
+granted to him ere that Presence passed away.
+
+He never knew exactly what happened after that night in the garden of the
+ruined chateau. There were a great many happenings, but none of them
+seemed to concern him very vitally.
+
+He wandered through great spaces of oblivion, intersected with terrible
+streaks of excruciating pain. During the intervals of this fearful
+suffering he was acutely conscious, but he invariably forgot everything
+again when the merciful unconsciousness came back. He knew in a vague way
+that he lay in a hospital-tent with other dying men, knew when they moved
+him at last because he could not die, suffered agonies unutterable upon
+an endless road that never seemed to lead to anywhere, and finally awoke
+to find that the journey had been over for several days.
+
+He tried very hard not to wake. Waking invariably meant anguish. He
+longed unspeakably for Death, but Death was denied him. And when someone
+came and stooped over him and took his nerveless hand, he whispered with
+closed eyes an earnest request not to be called back.
+
+"It's such--a ghastly business--" he muttered piteously--"this waking."
+
+"Won't you speak to a friend, Piers?" a voice said.
+
+He opened his eyes then. He had not heard his own name for months. He
+looked up into eyes that gleamed hawk-like through glasses, and a throb
+of recognition went through his heart.
+
+"You!" he whispered, striving desperately to master the sickening pain
+that that throb had started.
+
+"All right. Don't speak for a bit!" said Tudor quietly. "I think I can
+help you."
+
+He did help, working over him steadily, with the utmost gentleness, till
+the worst of the paroxysm was past.
+
+Piers was pathetically grateful. His high spirit had sunk very low in
+those days. No one that he could remember had ever done anything to ease
+his pain before.
+
+"It's been--so infernal," he whispered presently. "You know--I was
+shot--through the heart."
+
+Tudor's face was very grave. "Yes, you're pretty bad," he said. "But
+you've pulled through so far. It's in your favour, that. And look here,
+you must lie flat on your back always. Do you understand? It's about your
+only chance."
+
+"Of living?" whispered Piers. "But I don't want to live. I want to die."
+
+"Don't be a fool!" said Tudor.
+
+"I'm not a fool. I hate life!" A tremor of passion ran through the words.
+
+Tudor laid a hand upon him. "Piers, if ever any man had anything to live
+for, you are that man," he said.
+
+"What do you mean?" Piers' eyes, dark as the night through which he had
+come, looked up at him.
+
+"I mean just that. If you can't live for your own sake, live for hers!
+She wants you. It'll break her heart if you go out now."
+
+"Great Scott, man! You're not in earnest!" whispered Piers.
+
+"I am in earnest. I know exactly what I am saying. I don't talk at
+random. She loved you. She wants you. You've lived for yourself all your
+life. Now--you've got to live for her."
+
+Tudor's voice was low and vehement. A faint sparkle came into Piers' eyes
+as he heard it.
+
+"By George!" he said softly. "You're rather a brick, what? But haven't
+you thought--what might happen--if--if I went out after all? You used to
+be rather great--at getting me out of the way."
+
+"I didn't realize how all-important you were," rejoined Tudor, with a
+bitter smile. "You needn't go any further in that direction. It leads to
+a blank wall. You've got to live whether you like it or not. I'm going
+to do all I can to make you live, and you'll be a hound if you don't
+back me up."
+
+His eyes looked down upon Piers, dominant and piercingly intent.
+And--perhaps it was mere physical weakness, or possibly the voluntary
+yielding of a strong will that was in its own way as great as the
+strength to which it yielded--Piers surrendered with a meekness such as
+Tudor had never before witnessed in him.
+
+"All right," he said. "I'll do--my best."
+
+And so oddly they entered into a partnership that had for its sole end
+and aim the happiness of the woman they loved; and in that partnership
+their rivalry was forever extinguished.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HOLY GROUND
+
+
+"They say he will never fight again," said Crowther gravely. "He may
+live. They think he will live. But he will never be strong."
+
+"If only I might see him!" Avery said.
+
+"Yes, I know. That is the hardest part. But be patient a little longer!
+So much depends on it. I was told only this morning that any agitation
+might be fatal. No one seems to understand how it is that he has managed
+to live at all. He is just hanging on, poor lad,--just hanging on."
+
+"I want to help him," Avery said.
+
+"I know you do. And so you can--if you will. But not by going to him.
+That would do more harm than good."
+
+"How else can I do anything?" she said. "Surely--surely he wants
+to see me!"
+
+She was standing in Crowther's room, facing him with that in her eyes
+that moved him to a great compassion.
+
+He put his hand on her shoulder. "My dear, of course he wants to see you;
+but there will be no keeping him quiet when he does. He isn't equal to
+it. He is putting up the biggest fight of his life, and he wants all his
+strength for it. But you can do your part now if you will. You can go
+down to Rodding Abbey and make ready to receive him there. And you can
+send Victor to help me with him as soon as he is able to leave the
+hospital. He and I will bring him down to you. And if you will be there
+just in the ordinary way, I think there will be less risk of excitement.
+Will you do this, Avery? Is it asking too much of you?"
+
+His grey eyes looked straight down into hers with the wide friendliness
+that was as the open gateway to his soul, and some of the bitter strain
+of the past few weeks passed from her own as she looked back.
+
+"Nothing would be too much," she said. "I would do anything--anything.
+But if he should want me--and I were not at hand? If--if--he
+should--die--" Her voice sank.
+
+Crowther's hand pressed upon her. "He is not going to die," he said
+stoutly. "He doesn't mean to die. But he will probably have to go slow
+for the rest of his life. That is where you will be able to help him. His
+only chance lies in patience. You must teach him to be patient."
+
+Her lips quivered in a smile. "Piers!" she said. "Can you picture it?"
+
+"Yes, I can. Because I know that only patience can have brought him to
+where he is at present. They say it is nothing short of a miracle, and I
+believe it. God often works His miracles that way. And I always knew
+that Piers was great."
+
+Crowther's slow smile appeared, transforming his whole face. He held
+Avery's hand for a little, and let it go.
+
+"So you will do this, will you?" he said. "I think the boy would be just
+about pleased to find you there. And you can depend on me to bring him
+down to you as soon as he is able to bear it."
+
+"You are very good," Avery said. "Yes, I will go."
+
+But, as Crowther knew, in going she accepted the hardest part; and the
+weeks that she then spent at Rodding Abbey waiting, waiting with a sick
+anxiety, left upon her a mark which no time could ever erase.
+
+When Crowther's message came to her at last, she was almost too crushed
+to believe. Everything was in readiness, had been in readiness for weeks.
+She had prepared in fevered haste, telling herself that any day might
+bring him. But day had followed day, and the news had always been
+depressing, first of weakness, fits of pain, terrible collapses, and
+again difficult recoveries. Not once had she been told that any ground
+had been gained.
+
+And so when one day a telegram reached her earlier than usual, she
+hardly dared to open it, so little did she anticipate that the news
+could be good.
+
+And even when the words stared her in the face: "Bringing Piers this
+afternoon, Crowther," she could not for awhile believe them, and sought
+instinctively to read into them some sinister meaning.
+
+How she got through that day, she never afterwards knew. The hours
+dragged leaden-footed. There was nothing to be done. She would not leave
+the house lest by some impossible chance he might arrive before the
+afternoon, but she felt that to stay within its walls was unendurable. So
+for the most part she paced the terrace, breathing the dank, autumnal
+air, picturing every phase of his journey, but never daring to picture
+his arrival, praying piteous, disjointed prayers that only her own soul
+seemed to hear.
+
+The afternoon began to wane, and dusk came down. A small drifting rain
+set in with the darkness, but she was not even aware of it till David,
+very deferential and subdued, came to her and suggested that if she would
+wait in the hall Sir Piers would see her at once, as he had taken the
+liberty to turn on all the lights.
+
+She knew that the old man made the suggestion out of the goodness of his
+heart, and she fell in with it, realizing the wisdom of going within. But
+when she found herself in the full glare of the great hall, alone with
+those shining suits of armour that mounted guard on each side of the
+fireplace, the awful suspense came upon her with a force that nothing
+could alleviate. She turned with sick loathing from the tea-tray that
+David had placed for her so comfortingly close to the fire. Every moment
+that passed was an added torture. It was dark, it was late. The
+conviction was growing in her heart that when they came at last, they
+would bring with them only her husband's dead body.
+
+She rose and went to the open door. Where was his spirit now, she
+wondered? Had he leapt ahead of that empty, travelling shell? Was he
+already close--close--his arm entwined in hers? She covered her face
+with her hands. "Oh, Piers, I can't go on alone," she sobbed. "If you are
+dead--I must die too!"
+
+And then, as though in obedience to a voice that had spoken within her,
+she raised her head again and gazed forth. The rain had drifted away.
+Through scudding clouds of darkness there shone, serene and splendid, a
+single star. Her heart gave a great throb, and was still.
+
+"The Star of Hope!" she murmured wonderingly. "The Star of Hope!"
+
+And in that moment inexplicably yet convincingly she knew that her
+prayers that had seemed so fruitless had been heard, and that an answer
+was very near at hand....
+
+There came the sound of a horn from the direction of the lodge. They
+were coming.
+
+She turned her head and looked down the dark avenue. But she was no
+longer agitated or distressed by fear. She knew not what might be in
+store for her, but somehow, mystically, she had been endued with strength
+to meet it unafraid.
+
+She heard the soft buzz of a high-powered car, and presently two lights
+appeared at the further end. They came towards her swiftly, almost
+silently. It was like the swoop of an immense bird. And then in the
+strong glare shed forth by the hall-lamps she saw the huge body of an
+ambulance-car, and a Red Cross flared symbolic in the light.
+
+The car came to a stand immediately before her, and for a few moments
+nothing happened. And still she was not afraid. Still she was as it were
+guided and sustained and lifted above all turmoil. She seemed to stand on
+a mountain-top, above the seething misery that had for so long possessed
+her. She was braced to look upon even Death unshaken, undismayed.
+
+Steadily she moved. She went down to the car. Old David was behind her.
+He came forward and opened the door with fumbling, quivering hands. She
+had time to notice his agitation and to be sorry for him.
+
+Then a voice came to her from within, and a great throb went through her
+of thankfulness, of relief, of joy unspeakable.
+
+"Victor, you old ass, what are you blubbing for? Anyone would think--" A
+sudden pause, then in a low, eager tone, "Hullo,--Avery?"
+
+The incredulous interrogation of the words cut her to the heart. She went
+up the step and into the car as if drawn by an irresistible magnetism,
+seeing neither Crowther nor Victor, aware only of a prone, gaunt figure
+on a stretcher, white-haired, skeleton-featured, that reached a trembling
+hand to her and said again, "Hullo!"
+
+For one wild second she felt as if she were in the presence of old Sir
+Beverley, so striking was the likeness that the drawn, upturned face bore
+to him. Then Piers' eyes, black as the night, smiled up at her,
+half-imperious, half-pleading, and the illusion was gone.
+
+She stooped over him, that trembling hand fast clasped in hers; but she
+could not speak. No words would come.
+
+"Been waiting, what?" he said. "I hope not for long?"
+
+But still she could not speak. She felt choked. It was all so unnatural,
+so cruelly hard to bear.
+
+"I shan't be like this always," he said. "Afraid I look an awful guy just
+at present."
+
+That was all then, for Crowther came gently between them; and then he
+and Victor, with infinite care, lifted the stretcher and bore the master
+of the house into his own home.
+
+Half an hour later Avery turned from waving a farewell to Crowther, who
+had insisted upon going back to town with the car that had brought them,
+and softly shut out the night.
+
+She had had the library turned into a bedroom for Piers, and she crossed
+the hall to the door with an eagerness that carried her no further.
+There, gripping the handle, she was stayed.
+
+Within, she could hear Victor moving to and fro, but she listened in vain
+for her husband's voice, and a great shyness came upon her. She could not
+ask permission to enter.
+
+Minutes passed while she stood there, minutes of tense listening,
+during which she scarcely seemed to breathe. Then very suddenly she
+heard a sound that set every nerve a-quiver--a groan that was more of
+weariness than pain, but such weariness as made her own heart throb in
+passionate sympathy.
+
+Almost without knowing it, she turned the handle of the door, and opened
+it. A moment more, and she was in the room.
+
+He was lying flat in the bed, his dark eyes staring upwards out of deep
+hollows that had become cruelly distinct. There was dumb endurance in
+every line of him. His mouth was hard set, the chin firm as granite. And
+even then in his utter helplessness there was about him a greatness, a
+mute, unconscious majesty, that caught her by the throat.
+
+She went softly to the bedside.
+
+He turned his head at her coming, not quickly, not with any eagerness of
+welcome; but with that in his eyes, a slow kindling, that seemed to
+surround her with the glow of a great warmth.
+
+But when he spoke, it was upon no intimate subject. "Has Crowther
+gone?" he asked.
+
+His voice was pitched very low. She saw that he spoke with deliberate
+quietness, as if he were training himself thereto.
+
+"Yes," she made answer. "He wouldn't stay."
+
+"He couldn't," said Piers. "He is going to be ordained tomorrow."
+
+"Oh, is he?" she said in surprise. "He never told me!"
+
+"He wouldn't," said Piers. "He never talks about himself." He moved his
+hand slightly towards her. "Won't you sit down?"
+
+She glanced round. Victor was advancing behind her with a chair. Piers'
+eyes followed hers, and an instant later, turning back, she saw his quick
+frown. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers with the old imperious
+gesture, pointing to the door; and in a moment Victor, with a smile of
+peculiar gratification, put down the chair, trotted to it, opened it with
+a flourish, and was gone.
+
+Avery was left standing by the bed, slightly uncertain, wanting to smile,
+but wanting much more to cry.
+
+Piers' hand fell heavily. For a few seconds he lay perfectly still, with
+quickened breathing and drawn brows. Then his fingers patted the edge of
+the bed. "Sit down, sweetheart!" he said.
+
+It was Piers the boy-lover who spoke to her with those words, and,
+hearing them, something seemed to give way within her. It was as if a
+tight band round her heart had suddenly been torn asunder.
+
+She sank down on her knees beside the bed, and hid her face in his
+pillow. Tears--tears such as she had not shed since the beginning
+of their bitter estrangement--came welling up from her heart and
+would not be restrained. She sobbed her very soul out there beside
+him, subconsciously aware that in that hour his strength was
+greater than hers.
+
+Like an overwhelming torrent her distress came upon her, caught her
+tempestuously, swept her utterly from her own control, tossed her hither
+and thither, flung her at last into a place of deep, deep silence, where,
+still kneeling with head bowed low, she became conscious, strangely,
+intimately conscious, of the presence of God.
+
+It held her like a spell, that consciousness. She was as one who kneels
+before a vision. And even while she knelt there, lost in wonder, there
+came to her the throbbing gladness of faith renewed, the certainty that
+all would be well.
+
+Piers' hand was on her head, stroking, caressing, soothing. By no words
+did he attempt to comfort her. It was strange how little either of them
+felt the need of words. They were together upon holy ground, and in
+closer communion each with each than they had ever been before. Those
+tears of Avery's had washed away the barrier.
+
+Once, some time later, he whispered to her, "I never asked you to forgive
+me, Avery; but--"
+
+And that was the nearest he ever came to asking her forgiveness. For she
+stopped the words with her lips on his, and he never thought of uttering
+them again.
+
+
+
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+Christmas Eve and children's voices singing in the night! Two figures by
+the open window listening--a man and a woman, hand in hand in the dark!
+
+"Don't let them see us yet!" It was the woman's voice, low but with a
+deep thrill in it as of full and complete content. "I knew they were
+coming. Gracie whispered it to me this morning. But I wasn't to tell
+anyone. She was so afraid their father might forbid it."
+
+The man answered with a faint, derisive laugh that yet had in it an echo
+of the woman's satisfaction. He did not speak, for already through the
+winter darkness a single, boyish voice had taken up another verse:
+
+"He comes, the prisoners to release
+In Satan's bondage held;
+The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+The woman's fingers clung fast to his. "Love opens every door," she
+whispered.
+
+His answering grip was close and strong. But he said nothing while the
+last triumphant lines were repeated.
+
+"The gates of brass before Him burst,
+The iron fetters yield."
+
+The next verse was sung by two voices in harmony, very soft and hushed.
+
+"He comes the broken heart to bind,
+The bleeding soul to cure,
+And with the treasures of His grace
+To bless the humble poor."
+
+Then came a pause, while through the quiet night there floated the sound
+of distant bells.
+
+"Look!" said Piers suddenly.
+
+And Avery, kneeling beside him, raised her eyes.
+
+There, high above the trees, alone and splendid, there shone a great,
+quivering star.
+
+His arm slid round her neck. "The Star of Hope, Avery," he whispered.
+"Yours--and mine."
+
+She clung to him silently, with a closeness that was passionate.
+
+And so the last verse, very clear and strong, came to them out of
+the night.
+
+"Our glad hosannas, Prince of Peace,
+Thy welcome shall proclaim,
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name.
+And Heaven's eternal arches ring
+With Thy beloved Name."
+
+Avery leaned her head against her husband's shoulder. "I hear an angel
+singing," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ten minutes later, Gracie stood in the great hall with the red glow of
+the fire spreading all about her, her bright eyes surveying the master of
+the house who lay back in a low easy-chair with his wife kneeling beside
+him and Caesar the Dalmatian curled up with much complacence at his feet.
+
+"How very comfy you look!" she remarked.
+
+And, "We are comfy," said Piers, with a smile.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BARS OF IRON***
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