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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Immortal Moment, by May Sinclair
+
+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 Immortal Moment
+       The Story of Kitty Tailleur
+
+Author: May Sinclair
+
+Illustrator: C. Coles Phillips
+
+Release Date: February 27, 2010 [EBook #31416]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IMMORTAL MOMENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Iris Schimandle and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE IMMORTAL MOMENT
+
+
+
+
+Books by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+  The Helpmate
+  The Divine Fire
+  Two Sides of a Question
+  Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson
+  Etc., etc.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "Kitty's face ... pleaded with the other face in the
+glass."]
+
+
+
+
+THE IMMORTAL MOMENT
+
+The Story of Kitty Tailleur
+
+_By_
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+ILLUSTRATED AND DECORATED BY
+
+C. COLES PHILLIPS.
+
+  NEW YORK
+  DOUBLEDAY PAGE & CO.
+  1908
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1908 BY
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
+  INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING
+  THE SCANDINAVIAN
+
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE
+
+  THIS STORY APPEARS IN ENGLAND
+  UNDER THE TITLE "KITTY TAILLEUR"
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  "Kitty's face ... pleaded with the other face
+  in the glass"                                      FRONTISPIECE
+
+  "She stood there, strangely still ... before the
+  pitiless stare that went up to her appealing face"           10
+
+  "'You won't be tied to me a minute longer than
+  you like'"                                                  208
+
+  "'I want to make you loathe me ... never see me
+  again'"                                                     268
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE IMMORTAL MOMENT]
+
+
+
+
+THE IMMORTAL MOMENT
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+They came into the hotel dining-room like young persons making their
+first entry into life. They carried themselves with an air of subdued
+audacity, of innocent inquiry. When the great doors opened to them they
+stood still on the threshold, charmed, expectant. There was the magic of
+quest, of pure, unspoiled adventure in their very efforts to catch the
+head-waiter's eye. It was as if they called from its fantastic
+dwelling-place the attendant spirit of delight.
+
+You could never have guessed how old they were. He, at thirty-five, had
+preserved, by some miracle, his alert and slender adolescence. In his
+brown, clean-shaven face, keen with pleasure, you saw the clear,
+serious eyes and the adorable smile of seventeen. She, at thirty, had
+kept the wide eyes and tender mouth of childhood. Her face had a child's
+immortal, spiritual appeal.
+
+They were charming with each other. You might have taken them for bride
+and bridegroom, his absorption in her was so unimpaired. But their names
+in the visitors' book stood as Mr. Robert Lucy and Miss Jane Lucy. They
+were brother and sister. You gathered it from something absurdly alike
+in their faces, something profound and racial and enduring.
+
+For they combined it all, the youth, the abandonment, the innocence,
+with an indomitable distinction.
+
+They made their way with easy, unembarrassed movements, and seated
+themselves at a table by an open window. They bent their brows together
+over the menu. The head-waiter (who had flown at last to their high
+summons) made them his peculiar care, and they turned to him with the
+helplessness of children. He told them what things they would like,
+what things (he seemed to say) would be good for them. And when he went
+away with their order they looked at each other and laughed, softly and
+instantaneously.
+
+They had done the right thing. They both said it at the same moment,
+smiling triumphantly into each other's face. Southbourne was exquisite
+in young June, at the dawn of its season. And the Cliff Hotel promised
+what they wanted, a gay seclusion, a refined publicity.
+
+If you were grossly rich, you went to the big Hotel Metropole, opposite.
+If you were a person of fastidious tastes and an attenuated income, you
+felt the superior charm of the Cliff Hotel. The little house, the joy of
+its proprietor, was hidden in the privacy of its own beautiful grounds,
+having its back to the high road and its face to the open sea. They had
+taken stock of it that morning, with its clean walls, white as the
+Cliff it stood on; its bay windows, its long, green-roofed veranda,
+looking south; its sharp, slated roofs and gables, all sheltered by the
+folding Downs.
+
+They did not know which of them had first suggested Southbourne.
+Probably they had both thought of it at the same moment, as they were
+thinking now. But it was she who had voted for the Cliff Hotel, in
+preference to lodgings. She thought that in an hotel there would be more
+scope, more chance of things happening.
+
+Jane was always on the look-out for things happening. He saw her now,
+with her happy eyes, and her little, tilted nose, sniffing the air,
+scanning the horizon.
+
+He knew Jane and her adventures well. They were purely, pathetically
+vicarious. Jane was the thrall of her own sympathy. So was he. At a hint
+she was off, and he after her, on wild paths of inference, on perilous
+oceans of conjecture. Only he moved more slowly, and he knew the end of
+it. He had seen, before now, her joyous leap to land, on shores of
+manifest disaster. He protested against that jumping to conclusions. He,
+for his part, took conclusions in his stride.
+
+But Jane was always listening for a call from some foreign country of
+the soul. She was always entering surreptitiously into other people's
+feelings. They never caught her at it, never suspected her soft-footed,
+innocent intrusions.
+
+She was wondering now whether they would have to make friends with any
+of the visitors. She hoped not, because that would spoil it, the
+adventure. People had a way of telling her their secrets, and Jane
+preferred not to be told. All she wanted was an inkling, a clue; the
+slenderer the better.
+
+The guests as yet assembled were not conspicuously interesting.
+
+There was a clergyman dining gloomily at a table by himself. There was a
+gray group of middle-aged ladies next to him. There was Colonel Hankin
+and his wife. They had arrived with the Lucys in the hotel 'bus, and
+their names were entered above Robert's in the visitors' book. They
+marked him with manifest approval as one of themselves, and they looked
+all pink perfection and silver white propriety. There was the old lady
+who did nothing but knit. She had arrived in a fly, knitting. She was
+knitting now, between the courses. When she caught sight of the Lucys
+she smiled at them over her knitting. They had found her, before dinner,
+with her feet entangled in a skein of worsted. Jane had shown tenderness
+in disentangling her.
+
+It was almost as if they had made friends already.
+
+Jane's eyes roamed and lighted on a fat, wine-faced man. Lucy saw them.
+He teased her, challenged her. She didn't think, did she, she could do
+anything with him?
+
+No. Jane thought not. He wasn't interesting. There was nothing that you
+could take hold of, except that he seemed to be very fond of wine, poor
+old thing. But then, you had to be fond of something, and perhaps it was
+his only weakness. What did Robert think?
+
+Robert did not hear her. He was bending forward, looking beyond her,
+across the room toward the great doors. They had swung open again, with
+a flash of their glass panels, to give passage to a lady.
+
+She came slowly, with the irresistible motion of creatures that divide
+and trouble the medium in which they move. The white, painted wainscot
+behind her showed her small, eager head, its waving rolls and crowning
+heights of hair, black as her gown. She had a sweet face, curiously
+foreshortened by a low forehead and the briefest of chins. It was white
+with the same whiteness as her neck, her shoulders, her arms--a
+whiteness pure and profound. This face she kept thrust a little forward,
+while her eyes looked round, steadily, deliberately, for the place where
+she desired to be. She carried on her arm a long tippet of brown fur. It
+slipped, and her effort to recover it brought her to a standstill.
+
+The large, white room, half empty at this season, gave her up bodily to
+what seemed to Lucy the intolerable impudence of the public gaze.
+
+She was followed by an older lady who had the air of making her way with
+difficulty and vexation through an unpleasantly crowded space. This lady
+was somewhat oddly attired in a white dress cut high with a Puritan
+intention, but otherwise indiscreetly youthful. She kept close to the
+tail of her companion's gown, and tracked its charming evolutions with
+an irritated eye. Her whole aspect was evidently a protest against the
+publicity she was compelled to share.
+
+[Illustration: "She stood there, strangely still ... before the pitiless
+stare that went up to her appealing face."]
+
+Lucy was not interested in her. He was watching the lady in black who
+was now standing in the middle of the room. Her elbow touched the
+shoulder of a young man on her left. The fur tippet slipped again and
+lay at the young man's feet. He picked it up, and as he handed it to her
+he stared into her face, and sleeked his little moustache above a
+furtive, objectionable smile. His companion (Jane's uninteresting man),
+roused from communion with the spirit of Veuve Cliquot, fixed on the
+lady a pair of blood-shot eyes in a brutal, wine-dark face.
+
+She stood there, strangely still, it seemed to Lucy, before the pitiless
+stare that went up, right and left, to her appealing face. She was
+looking, it seemed to him, for her refuge.
+
+She moved forward. The Colonel, pinker than ever in his perfection,
+lowered his eyes as she approached. She paused again in her progress
+beside the clergyman on her right. He looked severely at her, as much as
+to say, "Madam, if you drop that thing in _my_ neighbourhood, I shall
+not attempt to pick it up."
+
+An obsequious waiter pointed out a table next to the middle-aged
+ladies. She shook her head at the middle-aged ladies. She turned in her
+course, and her eyes met Lucy's. He said something to his sister. Jane
+rose and changed her seat, thus clearing the way to a table that stood
+beside theirs, empty, secluded in the bay of the window.
+
+The lady in black came swiftly, as if to the place of her desire. The
+glance that expressed her gratitude went from Lucy to Jane and from Jane
+to Lucy, and rested on him for a moment.
+
+As the four grouped themselves at their respective tables, the lady in
+white, seated with her back to the window, commanded a front and side
+view of Jane. The lady in black sat facing Lucy.
+
+She put her elbows on the table and turned her face (her profile was
+remarkably pretty) to her companion.
+
+"Well," said she, "don't you want to sit here?"
+
+"Oh," said the older woman, "what does it matter where we sit?"
+
+She spoke in a small, crowing voice, the voice, Lucy said to himself, of
+a rather terrible person. She shivered.
+
+"Poor lamb, does it feel a draught down its little back?"
+
+The lady rose and put her fur tippet on the shivering shoulders. They
+shrank from her, and she drew it closer and fastened it with caressing
+and cajoling fingers. There was about her something impetuous and
+perverse, a wilful, ungovernable tenderness. Her hands had the swiftness
+of things moved by sweet, disastrous impulses.
+
+The white person (she was quite terrible) undid the fastening and shook
+her shoulders free of the fur. It slid to the floor for the third time.
+
+Lucy rose from his place, picked up the fur and restored it to its
+owner.
+
+The quite terrible person flushed with vexation.
+
+"You see," said the lady, "the trouble you've given that nice man."
+
+"Oh don't! he'll hear you."
+
+"If he does, he won't mind," said the lady.
+
+He did hear her. It was difficult not to hear, not to look at her, not
+to be interested in every movement that she made. Her charm, however,
+was powerless over her companion.
+
+Their voices, to Lucy's relief, sank low. Then suddenly the companion
+spoke.
+
+"Of course," said she, "if you _want_ all the men to look at you----"
+
+Lucy looked no more. He heard the lady draw in her breath with a soft,
+sharp sound, and he felt his blood running scarlet to the roots of his
+hair.
+
+"I believe" (the older lady spoke almost vindictively) "you like it."
+
+The head-waiter, opportune in all his approaches, brought coffee at that
+moment. Lucy turned his chair slightly, so that he presented his back
+to the speaker, and to the lady in black his side-face, shaded by his
+hand, conspicuously penitential.
+
+Jane tried to set everybody at their ease by talking in a clear, cool
+voice about the beautiful decorations, the perfect management of the
+hotel. The two drank their coffee hastily and left the table. In the
+doorway Lucy drew the head-waiter aside.
+
+"Who," said he, "is that lady in the window?"
+
+"The lady in the window, sir? Miss Keating, sir."
+
+"I mean--the other lady."
+
+The head-waiter looked reproachfully at Lucy and apologetically at Jane.
+
+"The lady in black, sir? You want to know her name?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Her _name_, sir, is Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+His manner intimated respectfully that Lucy would not like Mrs.
+Tailleur, and that, if he did, she would not be good for him.
+
+The brother and sister went out into the hotel garden. They strolled up
+and down the cool, green lawns that overhung the beach.
+
+Lucy smoked and was silent.
+
+"Jane," he said presently, "could _you_ see what she did?"
+
+"I was just going," said Jane, "to ask you that."
+
+"Upon my soul, I can't see it," said he.
+
+"Nor I," said Jane.
+
+"Could you see what _I_ did?"
+
+"What you did?"
+
+"Yes, I. _Did_ I look at her?"
+
+"Well, yes; certainly you looked at her."
+
+"And you think she minded?"
+
+"No; I don't think she minded very much."
+
+"Come, she couldn't have liked it, could she?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't think she noticed it. You see" (Jane was off on
+the adventure) "she's in mourning for her husband. He has been dead
+about two years. He wasn't very kind to her, and she doesn't know
+whether to be glad or sorry he's dead. She's unhappy and afraid."
+
+"I say, how do you know all that?"
+
+"I know," said Jane, "because I see it in her face; and in her clothes.
+I always see things."
+
+He laughed at that.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+They talked a long time as they paced the green lawns, linked arm in
+arm, keeping their own path fastidiously.
+
+Miss Keating, Mrs. Tailleur's companion, watched them from her seat on
+the veranda.
+
+She had made her escape from the great, lighted lounge behind her where
+the men were sitting. She had found a corner out of sight of its wide
+windows. She knew that Kitty Tailleur was in there somewhere. She could
+hear her talking to the men. At the other end of the veranda the old
+lady sat with her knitting. From time to time she looked up over her
+needles and glanced curiously at Miss Keating.
+
+On the lawn below, Colonel Hankin walked with his wife. They kept the
+same line as the Lucys, so that, in rhythmic instants, the couples made
+one group. There was an affinity, a harmony in their movements as they
+approached each other. They were all obviously nice people, people who
+belonged by right to the same group, who might approach each other
+without any impropriety.
+
+Miss Keating wondered how long it would be before Kitty Tailleur would
+approach Mr. Lucy. That afternoon, on her arrival, she had approached
+the Colonel, and the Colonel had got up and gone away. Kitty had then
+laughed. Miss Keating suspected her of a similar social intention with
+regard to the younger man. She knew his name. She had looked it up in
+the visitors' book. (She was always looking up people's names.) She had
+made with determination for the table next to him. Miss Keating, in the
+dawn of their acquaintance, had prayed that Mrs. Tailleur might not
+elect to sit next anybody who was not nice. Latterly she had found
+herself hoping that their place might not be in view of anybody who was.
+
+For three months they had been living in hotels, in horrifying
+publicity. Miss Keating dreaded most the hour they had just passed
+through. There was something terrible to her in their entry, in their
+passage down the great, white, palm-shaded, exotic room, their threading
+of the ways between the tables, with all the men turning round to stare
+at Kitty Tailleur. It was all very well for Kitty to pretend that she
+saved her by thus diverting and holding fast the public eye. Miss
+Keating felt that the tail of it flicked her unpleasantly as she
+followed in that troubled, luminous wake.
+
+It had not been quite so unbearable in Brighton, at Easter, when the big
+hotels were crowded, and Mrs. Tailleur was not so indomitably
+conspicuous. Or else Miss Keating had not been so painfully alive to
+her. But Southbourne was half empty in early June, and the Cliff Hotel,
+small as it was, had room for the perfect exhibition of Mrs. Tailleur.
+It gave her wide, polished spaces and clean, brilliant backgrounds,
+yards of parquetry for the gliding of her feet, and monstrous mirrors
+for reflecting her face at unexpected angles. These distances fined her
+grace still finer, and lent her a certain pathos, the charm of figures
+vanishing and remote.
+
+Not that you could think of Kitty Tailleur as in the least remote or
+vanishing. She seemed to be always approaching, to hover imminently and
+dangerously near.
+
+Mr. Lucy looked fairly unapproachable. His niceness, Miss Keating
+imagined, would keep him linked arm in arm with his sister, maintaining,
+unconsciously, inoffensively, his distance and distinction. He would
+manage better than the Colonel. He would not have to get up and go away.
+So Miss Keating thought.
+
+From the lounge behind the veranda, Kitty's voice came to her again.
+Kitty was excited and her voice went winged. It flew upward, touched a
+perilous height and shook there. It hung, on its delicate, feminine
+wings, dominating the male voices that contended, brutally, below. Now
+and then it found its lyric mate, a high, adolescent voice that followed
+it with frenzy, that broke, pitifully, in sharp, abominable laughter,
+like a cry of pain.
+
+Miss Keating shut her eyes to keep out her vision of Kitty's face with
+the look it wore when her voice went high.
+
+She was roused by the waiter bringing coffee. Kitty Tailleur had come
+out on to the veranda. She was pouring out Grace Keating's coffee, and
+talking to her in another voice, the one that she kept for children and
+for animals, and for all diminutive and helpless things. She was saying
+that Miss Keating (whom she called Bunny) was a dear little white
+rabbit, and she wanted to stroke her.
+
+"You see, you are so very small," said Kitty, as she dropped sugar into
+Miss Keating's cup. She had ordered cigarettes and a liqueur for
+herself.
+
+Miss Keating said nothing. She drank her coffee with a distasteful
+movement of her lips.
+
+Kitty Tailleur stretched herself at full length on a garden chair. She
+watched her companion with eyes secretly, profoundly intent under
+lowered lids.
+
+"Do you mind my smoking?" she said presently.
+
+"No," said Miss Keating.
+
+"Do you mind my drinking Kuemmel?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you mind my showing seven inches of stocking?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What do you mind, then?"
+
+"I mind your making yourself so very conspicuous."
+
+"I don't make myself conspicuous. I was born so."
+
+"You make me conspicuous. Goodness knows what all these people take us
+for!"
+
+"Holy Innocent! As long as you sit tight and do your hair like that,
+nobody could take you for anything but a dear little bunny with its ears
+laid back. But if you get palpitations in your little nose, and turn up
+your little white tail at people, and scuttle away when they look at
+you, you can't blame them if they wonder what's the matter with you."
+
+"With _me_?"
+
+"Yes; it's you who give the show away." Kitty smiled into her liqueur
+glass. "It doesn't seem to strike you that your behaviour compromises
+me."
+
+Miss Keating's mouth twitched. Her narrow, rather prominent front teeth
+lifted an instant, and then closed sharply on her lower lip. Her throat
+trembled as if she were swallowing some bitter thing that had been on
+the tip of her tongue.
+
+"If you think that," she said, and her voice crowed no longer, "wouldn't
+it be better for us not to be together?"
+
+Kitty shook her meditative head. "Poor Bunny," said she, "why can't you
+be honest? Why don't you say plump out that you're sick and tired of
+me? _I_ should be. I couldn't stand another woman lugging me about as I
+lug you."
+
+"It isn't _that_. Only--everywhere we go--there's always some horrible
+man."
+
+"Everywhere you go, dear lamb, there always will be."
+
+"Yes; but one doesn't have anything to do with them."
+
+"I don't have anything to do with them."
+
+"You talk to them."
+
+"Of course I do," said Kitty. "Why not?"
+
+"You don't know them."
+
+"H'm! If you never talk to people you don't know, pray how do you get to
+know them?"
+
+Kitty sat up and began playing with the matches till she held a bunch of
+them blazing in her hand. She was blowing out the flame as the Hankins
+came up the steps of the veranda. They had a smile for the old lady in
+her corner, and for Miss Keating a look of wonder and curiosity and
+pity; but they turned from Mrs. Tailleur with guarded eyes.
+
+"What do you bet," said Kitty, "that I don't make that long man there
+come and talk to me?"
+
+"If you do----"
+
+"I'll do it before you count ten. One, two, three, four. I shall ask him
+for a light----"
+
+"Sh-sh! He's coming."
+
+Kitty slid her feet to the floor and covered them with her skirt. Then
+she looked down, fascinated, apparently, by the shining tips of her
+shoes. You could have drawn a straight line from her feet to the feet of
+the man coming up the lawn.
+
+"Five, six, seven." Kitty lit her last match. "T-t-t! The jamfounded
+thing's gone out."
+
+The long man's sister came up the steps of the veranda. The long man
+followed her slowly, with deliberate pauses in his stride.
+
+"Eight, nine," said Kitty, under her breath. She waited.
+
+The man's eyes had been upon her; but in the approach he lowered them,
+and as he passed her he turned away his head.
+
+"It's no use," said Miss Keating; "you can't have it both ways."
+
+Kitty was silent. Suddenly she laughed.
+
+"Bunny," said she, "would you like to marry the long man?"
+
+Miss Keating's mouth closed tightly, with an effort, covering her teeth.
+
+Kitty leaned forward. "Perhaps you can if you want to. Long men
+sometimes go crazy about little women. And you'd have such dear little
+long babies--little babies with long faces. Why not? You're just the
+right size for him. He could make a memorandum of you and put you in his
+pocket; or you could hang on his arm like a dear little umbrella. It
+would be all right. You may take it from me that man is entirely moral.
+He wouldn't think of going out without his umbrella. And he'd be so nice
+when the little umbrellas came. Dear Bunny, face massage would do
+wonders for you. Why ever not? He's heaps nicer than that man at the
+Hydro, and you'd have married him, you know you would, if I hadn't told
+you he was a commercial traveller. Never mind, ducky; I dare say he
+wasn't."
+
+Kitty curled herself up tight on the long chair and smiled dreamily at
+Miss Keating.
+
+"Do you remember the way you used to talk at Matlock, just after I found
+you there? You _were_ such a rum little thing. You said it would be very
+much better if we hadn't any bodies, so that people could fall in love
+in a prettier way, and only be married spiritually. You said God ought
+to have arranged things on that footing. You looked so miserable when
+you said it. By the way, I wouldn't go about saying that sort of thing
+to people. That's how I spotted you. I know men think it's one of the
+symptoms."
+
+"Symptoms of what?"
+
+"Of that state of mind. When a woman comes to me and talks about being
+spiritual, I always know she isn't--at the moment. You asked me,
+Bunny--the second time I met you--if I believed in spiritual love, and
+all that. I didn't, and I don't. When you're gone on a man all you want
+is to get him, and keep him to yourself. I dare say it feels jolly
+spiritual--especially, when you're not sure of the man--but it isn't. If
+you're gone on him enough to give him up when you've got him, there
+might be some spirituality in _that_. I shall believe in it when I see
+it done."
+
+"Seriously," she continued, "if you'd been married, Bunny, you wouldn't
+have had half such a beastly time. You're one of those leaning, clinging
+little women who require a strong, safe man to support them. You ought
+to be married."
+
+Miss Keating smiled a little sad, spiritual smile, and said that was the
+last thing she wanted.
+
+"Well," said Kitty, "I didn't say it was the first."
+
+Kitty's smile was neither sad nor spiritual. She uncurled herself, got
+up, and stood over her companion, stroking her sleek, thin hair.
+
+Miss Keating purred under the caress. She held up her hand to Kitty who
+took it and gave it a squeeze before she let it go.
+
+"Poor Bunny. Nice Bunny," she said (as if Miss Keating were an animal).
+She stretched out her arms, turned, and disappeared through the lounge
+into the billiard-room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+It could not be denied that Kitty had a charm. Miss Keating was not
+denying it, even now, when she was saying to herself that Kitty had a
+way of attracting very disagreeable attention.
+
+At first she had supposed that this was an effect of Kitty's charm,
+disagreeable to Kitty. Then, even in the beginning, she had seen that
+there was something deliberate and perpetual in Kitty's challenge of the
+public eye. The public eye, so far from pursuing Kitty, was itself
+pursued, tracked down and captured. Kitty couldn't let it go. Publicity
+was what Kitty coveted.
+
+She had then supposed that Kitty was used to it; that she was, in some
+mysterious way, a personage. There would be temptations, she had
+imagined, for any one who had a charm that lived thus in the public eye.
+
+And Kitty had her good points, too. There was nobody so easy to live
+with as Kitty in her private capacity, if she could be said to have one.
+She never wanted to be amused, or read to, or sat up with late at night,
+like the opulent invalids Miss Keating had been with hitherto. Miss
+Keating owed everything she had to Kitty, her health (she was
+constitutionally anaemic), her magnificent salary, the luxurious gaiety
+in which they lived and moved (moved, perhaps, rather more than lived).
+The very combs in her hair were Kitty's. So were the gowns she wore on
+occasions of splendour and display. It struck her as odd that they were
+all public, these occasions, things they paid to go to.
+
+It had dawned on her by this time, coldly, disagreeably, that Kitty
+Tailleur was nobody, nobody, that is to say, in particular. A person of
+no account in the places where they had stayed. In their three months'
+wanderings they had never been invited to any private house. Miss
+Keating could not account for that air of ill-defined celebrity that
+hung round Kitty like a scent, and marked her trail.
+
+Not that any social slur seemed to attach to Kitty. The acquaintances
+she had made in her brief and curious fashion were all, or nearly all,
+socially immaculate. The friends (they were all men) who came to her of
+their own intimate accord, belonged, some of them, to an aristocracy
+higher than that represented by Mr. Lucy or the Colonel. And they had
+been by no means impervious to Kitty's charm.
+
+From the sounds that came from the billiard-room she gathered that
+Kitty's charm appealed also to her audience in there. Leaning her body
+forward so as to listen, Miss Keating became aware that Lucy had
+returned to the lounge, and was strolling about in it, as if he were
+looking for somebody. He strolled into the veranda.
+
+The garden was dark now, but a little light fell on the veranda from the
+open windows of the lounge. Lucy looked at Mrs. Tailleur's empty chair.
+He was about to sit in it when he saw that he was alone with Mrs.
+Tailleur's companion. He rose again for flight. Miss Keating rose also
+with the same intention.
+
+Lucy protested. "Please don't let me disturb you. I am not going to sit
+here."
+
+"But I am driving you in."
+
+"Not at all. I only thought you might object to my smoking."
+
+"But I don't object."
+
+"You don't, really?"
+
+"If I stay," said she, "will that prove it?"
+
+"Please do," said Lucy.
+
+Miss Keating pushed her chair as far as possible from his. She seated
+herself with a fugitive, sidelong movement; as much as to say she left
+him to the sanctuary he sought. He would please to observe the
+perfection of her withdrawal. The table with the match-stand on it stood
+between them.
+
+Lucy approached the match-stand tentatively. Miss Keating, averted and
+effaced, was yet aware of him.
+
+"I'm afraid there are no matches," said she. "Mrs. Tailleur has used
+them all." So effaced and so averted was Miss Keating that there was
+nothing left of her but a sweet, attenuated, disembodied voice. It was
+as if spirit spoke to spirit with the consecrated doors between.
+
+Lucy smiled. He paused at Mrs. Tailleur's chair.
+
+"Is your friend coming back again?" he asked.
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+It might have been an effect of her remoteness, but Miss Keating's tone
+conveyed to him ever so slight a repudiation of Mrs. Tailleur.
+
+He seated himself; and as he did so he searched his coat pockets. There
+were no matches there. He knew he would find some in the lounge. Perhaps
+he might find Mrs. Tailleur also. He would get up and look.
+
+Miss Keating (still disembodied) rose and withdrew herself completely,
+and Lucy thought better of his intention. He lay back and closed his
+eyes.
+
+A light tap on the table roused him. It was Miss Keating laying down a
+match-box. He saw her hand poised yet in the delicacy of its
+imperceptible approach.
+
+He stared, stupefied with embarrassment. He stuttered with it.
+"Really--I--I--I wish you hadn't." He did not take up the match-box all
+at once, lest he should seem prompt in accepting this rather
+extraordinary service.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur's companion slid back into her seat and sat there smiling
+to herself and to the incommunicative night.
+
+"I hope," she said presently, "you are not refraining from smoking
+because of me."
+
+She was very sweet and soft and gentle. But she had not struck him as
+gentle or soft or sweet when he had seen her with Mrs. Tailleur, and he
+was not prepared to take that view of her now.
+
+"Thank you," he said. He could not think of anything else to say. He lit
+his cigarette, and smoked in an innocent abstraction.
+
+A clock indoors struck ten. Miss Keating accounted for her continuance.
+"It is the only quiet place in the hotel," said she.
+
+He assented, wondering if this were meant for a conversational opening.
+
+"And the night air is so very sweet and pure."
+
+"I'm afraid you find this smoke of mine anything but----"
+
+"If you are so serious about it," said she, "I shall be afraid either to
+stay out or to go in."
+
+If there were any opening there he missed it. He had turned at the sound
+of a skirt trailing, and he saw that Mrs. Tailleur had come back into
+the lounge. He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he got up quietly and
+went in.
+
+He did not speak to her or look at her. He sat very still in a corner of
+the room where he could see her reflection in a big mirror. It did not
+occur to him that Mrs. Tailleur could see his, too.
+
+Outside in the veranda, Miss Keating sat shuddering in the night air.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Lucy's mind was like his body. Superficial people called it narrow,
+because the sheer length of it diverted their attention from its
+breadth. Visionary, yet eager for the sound impact of the visible, it
+was never more alert than when it, so to speak, sat still, absorbed in
+its impressions. It was the sport of young and rapid impulses, which it
+seemed to obey sluggishly, while, all the time, it moved with immense,
+slow strides to incredibly far conclusions. Having reached a conclusion
+it was apt to stay there. The very length of its stride made turning
+awkward for it.
+
+He had reached a conclusion now, on his third night in Southbourne. He
+must do something, he did not yet know what, for the protection of Mrs.
+Tailleur.
+
+Her face was an appeal to the chivalry that sat quiet in Lucy's heart,
+nursing young dreams of opportunity.
+
+Lucy's chivalry had been formed by three weeks of courtship and three
+years of wedded incompatibility. The incompatibility had hardly dawned
+on him when his wife died. Three years were too short a space for Lucy's
+mind to turn in; and so he always thought of her tenderly as dear little
+Amy. She had given him two daughters and paid for the younger with her
+life.
+
+Five years of fatherhood finished his training in the school of
+chivalry. He had been profoundly moved by little Amy's sacrifice to the
+powers of life, and he was further touched by the heartrending spectacle
+of Jane. Jane doing all she knew for him; Jane, so engaging in her
+innocence, hiding her small, childlike charm under dark airs of assumed
+maternity; Jane, whose skirts fluttered wide to all the winds of dream;
+Jane with an apron on and two little girls tied to the strings of it;
+Jane, adorable in disaster, striving to be discreet and comfortable and
+competent.
+
+He had a passionate pity for all creatures troubled and unfortunate. And
+Mrs. Tailleur's face called aloud to him for pity. For Lucy Mrs.
+Tailleur's face wore, like a veil, the shadow of the incredible past and
+of the future; it was reminiscent and prophetic of terrible and tragic
+things. Across the great spaces of the public rooms his gaze answered
+her call. Then Mrs. Tailleur's face would become dumb. Like all hurt
+things, she was manifestly shy of observation and pursuit.
+
+Pursuit and observation, perpetual, implacable, were what she had to
+bear. The women had driven her from the drawing-room; the men made the
+smoke-room impossible. A cold, wet mist came with the evenings. It lay
+over the sea and drenched the lawns of the hotel garden. Mrs. Tailleur
+had no refuge but the lounge.
+
+To-night the wine-faced man and his companion had tracked her there.
+Mrs. Tailleur had removed herself from the corner where they had hemmed
+her in. She had found an unoccupied sofa near the writing-table. The
+pursuer was seized instantly with a desire to write letters. Mrs.
+Tailleur went out and shivered on the veranda. His eyes followed her. In
+passing she had turned her back on the screened hearth-place where Lucy
+and his sister sat alone.
+
+"Did you see that?" said Lucy.
+
+"I did indeed," said Jane.
+
+"It's awful that a woman should be exposed to that sort of thing. What
+can her people be thinking of?"
+
+"Her people?"
+
+"Yes; to let her go about alone."
+
+"I go about alone," said Jane pensively.
+
+"Yes, but she's so good looking."
+
+"Am _I_ not?"
+
+"You're all right, Jenny; but you never looked like that. There's
+something about her----"
+
+"Is that what makes those men horrid to her?"
+
+"Yes, I suppose so. The brutes!" He paused irritably. "It mustn't happen
+again."
+
+"What's the poor lady to do?" said Jane.
+
+"She can't do anything. _We_ must."
+
+"We?"
+
+"I must. You must. Go out to her, Janey, and be nice to her."
+
+"No, you go and say I sent you."
+
+He strode out on to the veranda. Mrs. Tailleur sat with her hands in her
+lap, motionless, and, to his senses, unaware.
+
+"Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+She started and looked up at him.
+
+"My sister asked me to tell you that there's a seat for you in there, if
+you don't mind sitting with us."
+
+"But won't you mind me?"
+
+"Not--not," said Lucy (he positively stammered), "not if you don't mind
+us."
+
+Mrs. Tailleur looked at him again, wide eyed, with the strange and
+pitiful candour of distrust. Then she smiled incomprehensibly.
+
+Her eyelids dropped as she slid past him to the seat beside Jane. He
+noticed that she had the sudden, furtive ways of the wild thing aware of
+the hunter.
+
+"May I really?" said Mrs. Tailleur.
+
+"Oh, _please_," said Jane.
+
+As she spoke the man at the writing-table looked up and stared. Not at
+Mrs. Tailleur this time, but at Jane. He stared with a wonder so
+spontaneous, so supreme, that it purged him of offence.
+
+He stared again (with less innocence) at Lucy as the young man gave way,
+reverently, to the sweep of Mrs. Tailleur's gown. Lucy's face intimated
+to him that he had made a bad mistake. The wretch admitted, by a violent
+flush, that it was possible. Then his eyes turned again to Mrs.
+Tailleur. It was as much as to say he had only been relying on the
+incorruptible evidence of his senses.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur sat down and breathed hard.
+
+"How sweet of you!" Her voice rang with the labour of her breast.
+
+Lucy smiled as he caught the word. He would have condemned the stress of
+it, but that Mrs. Tailleur's voice pleaded forgiveness for any word she
+chose to utter. "Even," he said to himself, "if you could forget her
+face."
+
+He couldn't forget it. As he sat there trying to read, it came between
+him and his book. It tormented him to find its meaning. Kitty's face was
+a thing both delicate and crude. When she was gay it showed a blurred
+edge, a fineness in peril. When she was sad it wore the fixed look of
+artificial maturity. It was like a young bud opened by inquisitive
+fingers and forced to be a flower. Some day, the day before it withered,
+the bruised veins would glow again, and a hectic spot betray, like a
+bruise, the violation of its bloom. At the moment, repose gave back its
+beauty to Kitty's face. Lucy noticed that the large black pupils of her
+eyes were ringed with a dark blue iris, spotted with black. There was no
+colour about her at all except that blue, and the delicate red of her
+mouth. In her black gown she was a revelation of pure form. Colour would
+have obscured her, made her ineffectual.
+
+He sat silent, hardly daring to look at her. So keen was his sense of
+her that he could almost have heard the beating of her breast against
+her gown. Once she sighed, and Lucy stirred. Once she stirred slightly,
+and Lucy, unconsciously responsive, sighed. Then Kitty's glance lit on
+him. He turned a page of his book ostentatiously, and Kitty's glance
+slunk home again. She closed her eyes and opened them to find Lucy's
+eyes looking at her over the top of his book. Poor Lucy was so perturbed
+at being detected in that particular atrocity that he rose, drew his
+chair to the hearth, and arranged himself in an attitude that made
+these things impossible.
+
+He was presently aware of Jane launching herself on a gentle tide of
+conversation, and of Mrs. Tailleur trembling pathetically on the brink
+of it.
+
+"Do you like Southbourne?" he heard Jane saying.
+
+Then suddenly Mrs. Tailleur plunged in.
+
+"No," said she; "I hate it. I hate any place I have to be alone in, if
+it's only for five minutes."
+
+Lucy felt that it was Jane who drew back now, in sheer distress. He
+tried to think of something to say, and gave it up, stultified by his
+compassion.
+
+The silence was broken by Jane.
+
+"Robert," said she, "have you written to the children?"
+
+Mrs. Tailleur's face became suddenly sombre and intent.
+
+"No; I haven't. I clean forgot it."
+
+He went off to write his letter. When he came back Mrs. Tailleur had
+risen and was saying good night to Jane.
+
+He followed her to the portiere and drew it back for her to pass. As she
+turned to thank him she glanced up at the hand that held the portiere.
+It trembled violently. Her eyes, a moment ago dark under her bent
+forehead, darted a sudden light sidelong.
+
+She paused, interrogative, expectant. Lucy bowed.
+
+As Mrs. Tailleur passed out she looked back over her shoulder, smiling
+again her incomprehensible smile.
+
+The portiere dropped behind her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Five days passed. The Lucys had now been a week at Southbourne. They
+knew it well by that time, for bad weather kept them from going very far
+beyond it. Jane had found, too, that they had to know some of the
+visitors. The little Cliff Hotel brought its guests together with a
+geniality unknown to its superb rival, the Metropole. Under its roof, in
+bad weather, persons not otherwise incompatible became acquainted with
+extraordinary rapidity. People had begun already to select each other.
+Even Mr. Soutar, the clergyman, had emerged from his lonely gloom, and
+dined by preference at the same table with the middle-aged ladies--the
+table farthest from the bay window. The Hankins, out of pure kindness,
+had taken pity on the old lady, Mrs. Jurd. They had made advances to
+the Lucys, perceiving an agreeable social affinity, and had afterward
+drawn back. For the Lucys were using the opportunity of the weather for
+cultivating Mrs. Tailleur.
+
+It was not easy, they told themselves, to get to know her. She did not
+talk much. But as Jane pointed out to Robert, little things came out,
+things that proved that she was all right. Her father was a country
+parson, very strait-laced, they gathered; and she had little sisters,
+years younger than herself. When she talked at all it was in a pretty,
+innocent way, like a child's, and all her little legends were, you could
+see, transparently consistent. They had, like a child's, a quite funny
+reiterance and simplicity. But, like a child, she was easily put off by
+any sort of interruption. When she thought she had let herself go too
+far, she would take fright and avoid them for the rest of the day, and
+they had to begin all over again with her next time.
+
+The thing, Lucy said, would be for Jane to get her some day all alone.
+But Jane said, No; Mrs. Tailleur was ten times more afraid of her than
+of him. Besides, they had only another week, and they didn't want, did
+they, to see _too_ much of Mrs. Tailleur? At that Lucy got very red, and
+promised his sister to take her out somewhere by themselves the next
+fine day.
+
+That was on Wednesday evening, when it was raining hard.
+
+The weather lifted with the dawn. The heavy smell of the wet earth was
+pierced by the fine air of heaven and the sea.
+
+Jane Lucy leaned out of her bedroom window and looked eastward beyond
+the hotel garden to the Cliff. The sea was full of light. Light rolled
+on the low waves and broke on their tops like foam. It hung quivering on
+the white face of the Cliff. It was like a thin spray thrown from the
+heaving light of the sea.
+
+At breakfast Jane reminded Robert of his promise to take her for a sail
+on the first fine day. They turned their backs on the hotel and went
+seaward. On their way to the boats they passed Mrs. Tailleur sitting on
+the beach in the sun.
+
+Neither of them enjoyed that expedition. It was the first of all the
+things they had done together that had failed. Jane wondered why. If
+they were not enjoying themselves on a day like that, when, she argued,
+would they enjoy themselves? The day remained as perfect as it had
+begun. There was nothing wrong, Robert admitted, with the day. They
+sailed in the sun's path and landed in a divine and solitary cove.
+Robert was obliged to agree that there was nothing wrong with the cove,
+and nothing, no nothing in the least wrong with the lunch. There might,
+yes, of course there might, be something very wrong with him.
+
+Whatever it was, it disappeared as they sighted Southbourne. Robert,
+mounting with uneasy haste the steps that led from the beach to the
+hotel garden, was unusually gay.
+
+They were late for dinner, and the table next theirs was empty. Outside,
+on the great green lawn in front of the windows, he could see Mrs.
+Tailleur walking up and down, alone.
+
+He dined with the abstraction of a man pursued by the hour of an
+appointment. He established Jane in the lounge, with all the magazines
+he could lay his hands on, and went out by the veranda on to the lawn
+where Mrs. Tailleur was still walking up and down.
+
+The Colonel and his wife were in the veranda. They made a low sound of
+pity as they saw him go.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur seemed more than ever alone. The green space was bare
+around her as if cleared by the sweep of her gown. She moved quietly,
+with a long and even undulation, a yielding of her whole body to the
+rhythm of her feet. She had reached the far end of the lawn as Lucy
+neared her, and he looked for her to turn and face him.
+
+She did not turn.
+
+The lawn at this end was bounded by a gravel walk. The walk was fenced
+by a low stone wall built on the edge of the Cliff. Mrs. Tailleur paused
+there and seated herself sideways on the wall. Her face was turned from
+Lucy, and he judged her unaware of his approach. In his eyes she gained
+a new enchantment from the vast and simple spaces of her background, a
+sea of dull purple, a sky of violet, divinely clear. Her face had the
+intense, unsubstantial pallor, the magic and stillness of flowers that
+stand in the blue dusk before night.
+
+She turned at the sound of the man's footsteps on the gravel. She smiled
+quietly, as if she knew of his coming, and was waiting for it there. He
+greeted her. A few words of no moment passed between them, and there was
+a silence. He stood by the low wall with his face set seaward, as if all
+his sight were fixed on the trail of smoke that marked the far-off
+passage of a steamer. Mrs. Tailleur's face was fixed on his. He was
+aware of it.
+
+Standing beside her, he was aware, too, of something about her alien to
+sea and sky; something secret, impenetrable, that held her, as it were,
+apart, shut in by her own strange and solitary charm.
+
+And she sat there in the deep quiet of a woman intent upon her hour. He
+had no ear for the call of her silence, for the voice of the instincts
+prisoned in blood and brain.
+
+Presently she rose, shrugging her shoulders and gathering her furs about
+her.
+
+"I want to walk," she said; "will you come?"
+
+She led the way to the corner where the low wall was joined by a high
+one, dividing the hotel garden from the open down. There was a gate
+here; it led to a flight of wooden steps that went zig-zag to the beach
+below. At the first turn in the flight a narrow path was cut on the
+Cliff side. To the right it rose inland, following the slope of the
+down. To the left it ran level under the low wall, then climbed higher
+yet to the brow of the headland. There it ended in a square recess, a
+small white chamber cut from the chalk and open to the sea and sky. From
+the floor of the recess the Cliff dropped sheer to the beach two hundred
+feet below.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur took the path to the left. Lucy followed her.
+
+The path was stopped by the bend of the great Cliff, the recess roofed
+by its bulging forehead. There was a wooden seat set well back under
+this cover. Two persons who found themselves alone there might count on
+security from interruption.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur and Lucy were alone.
+
+Lucy looked at the Cliff wall in front of them.
+
+"We must go back," said he.
+
+"Oh no," said she; "don't let's go back."
+
+"But if you want to walk----"
+
+"I don't," said she; "do you?"
+
+He didn't, and they seated themselves. In the charm of this intimate
+seclusion Lucy became more than ever dumb. Mrs. Tailleur waited a few
+minutes in apparent meditation.
+
+All Lucy said was "May I smoke?"
+
+"You may." She meditated again.
+
+"I was wondering," said she, "whether you were ever going to say
+anything."
+
+"I didn't know," said Lucy simply, "whether I might. I thought you were
+thinking."
+
+"So I was. I was thinking of what you were going to say next. I never
+met anybody who said less and took so long a time to say it in."
+
+"Well," said Lucy, "I was thinking too."
+
+"I know you were. You needn't be so afraid of me unless you like."
+
+"I am not," said he stiffly, "in the least afraid of you. I'm
+desperately afraid of saying the wrong thing."
+
+"To me? Or everybody?"
+
+"Not everybody."
+
+"To me, then. Do you think I might be difficult?"
+
+"Difficult?"
+
+"To get on with?"
+
+"Not in the least. Possibly, if I may say so, a little difficult to
+know."
+
+She smiled. "I don't usually strike people in that light."
+
+"Well, I think I'm afraid of boring you."
+
+"You couldn't if you tried from now to midnight."
+
+"How do you know what I mightn't do?"
+
+"That's it. I don't know. I never _should_ know. It's only the people
+I'm sure of that bore me. Don't they you?"
+
+He laughed uneasily.
+
+"The people," she went on, "who are sure of _me_; who think I'm so easy
+to know. They don't know me, and they don't know that I know them. And
+they're the only people I've ever, ever met. I can tell what they're
+going to say before they've said it. It's always the same thing.
+It's--if you like--the inevitable thing. If you can't have anything but
+the same thing, at least you like it put a little differently. You'd
+think, among them all, they might find it easy to put it a little
+differently sometimes; but they never do; and it's the brutal monotony
+of it that I cannot stand."
+
+"I suppose," said Lucy, "people _are_ monotonous."
+
+"They don't know," said she, evidently ignoring his statement as
+inadequate, "they don't know how sick I am of it--how insufferably it
+bores me."
+
+"Ah! there you see--that's what _I'm_ afraid of."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Of saying the wrong thing--the--the same thing."
+
+"That's it. You'd say it differently, and it wouldn't be the same thing
+at all. And what's more, I should never know whether you were going to
+say it or not."
+
+"There's one thing I'd like to say to you if I knew how--if I knew how
+you'd take it. You see, though I think I know you----" he hesitated.
+
+"You don't really? You don't know who I am? Or where I come from? Or
+where I'm going to? I don't know myself."
+
+"I know," said Lucy, "as much as I've any right to. But unluckily the
+thing I want to know----"
+
+"Is what you haven't any right to?"
+
+"I'm afraid I haven't. The thing I want to know is simply whether I can
+help you in any way."
+
+She smiled. "Ah," said she, "you _have_ said it."
+
+"Haven't I said it differently?"
+
+"I'm not sure. You looked different when you said it; that's something."
+
+"I know I've no right to say it at all. What I mean is that if I could
+do anything for you without boring you, without forcing myself on your
+acquaintance, I'd be most awfully glad. You know you needn't recognise
+me afterward unless you like. Have I put it differently now?"
+
+"Yes; I don't think I've ever heard it put quite that way before."
+
+There was a long pause in which Lucy vainly sought for illumination.
+
+"No," said Mrs. Tailleur, as if to herself; "I should never know what
+you were going to say or do next."
+
+"Wouldn't you?"
+
+"No; I didn't know just now whether you were going to speak to me or
+not. When I said I wanted to walk I didn't know whether you'd come with
+me or not."
+
+"I came."
+
+"You came; but when I go----"
+
+"You're not going?"
+
+"Yes; to-morrow, perhaps, or the next day. When I go I shall give you my
+address and ask you to come and see me; but I shan't know whether you'll
+come."
+
+"Of course I'll come."
+
+"There's no 'of course' about you; that's the charm of it. I shan't know
+until you're actually there."
+
+"I shall be there all right."
+
+"What? You'll come?"
+
+"Yes; and I'll bring my sister."
+
+"Your sister?" She drew back slightly. "Turn round, please--this
+way--and let me look at you."
+
+He turned, laughing. Her eyes searched his face.
+
+"Yes; you meant that. Why do you want to bring your sister?"
+
+"Because I want you to know her."
+
+"Are you sure--quite--quite sure--you want her to know me?"
+
+"Quite--quite sure. If you don't mind--if she won't bore you."
+
+"Oh, she won't bore me."
+
+"You're not afraid of that monotony?"
+
+She turned and looked long at him. "You are very like your sister," she
+said.
+
+"Am I? How? In what way?"
+
+"In the way we've been talking about. I suppose you know how remarkable
+you are?"
+
+"No; I really don't think I do."
+
+"Then," said Mrs. Tailleur, "you are all the more remarkable."
+
+"Don't you think," she added, "we had better go back?"
+
+They went back. As they mounted the steps to the garden door they saw
+Miss Keating approaching it from the inside. She moved along the low
+wall that overlooked the path by which they had just come. There was no
+crunching of pebbles under her feet. She trod, inaudibly, the soft edge
+of the lawn.
+
+Lucy held the door open for Miss Keating when Mrs. Tailleur had passed
+through; but Miss Keating had turned suddenly. She made the pebbles on
+the walk scream with the vehemence of her retreat.
+
+"Dear me," said Lucy, "it must be rather painful to be as shy as that."
+
+"Mustn't it?" said Mrs. Tailleur.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+The next day it rained, fitfully at first, at the will of a cold wind
+that dragged clouds out of heaven. A gleam of sunshine in the afternoon,
+then wild rain driven slantwise by the gusts; and now, at five o'clock,
+no wind at all, but a straight, soaking downpour.
+
+The guests at the Cliff Hotel were all indoors. Colonel Hankin and his
+wife were reading in a corner of the lounge. Mr. Soutar, the clergyman,
+was dozing over a newspaper by an imaginary fire. The other men drifted
+continually from the bar to the billiard-room and back again.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur and Lucy were sitting in the veranda, with rugs round
+them, watching the rain, and watched by Colonel and Mrs. Hankin.
+
+Jane had gone into the drawing-room to write letters. There was nobody
+there but the old lady who sat in the bay of the window, everlastingly
+knitting, and Miss Keating isolated on a sofa near the door.
+
+Everybody in the hotel was happy and occupied, except Miss Keating. Her
+eyes followed the labour of Miss Lucy's pen, watching for the stroke
+that should end it. She had made up her mind that she must speak to her.
+
+Miss Keating was subject to a passion which circumstances were
+perpetually frustrating. She desired to be interesting, profoundly,
+personally interesting to people. She disliked publicity partly because
+it reduced her to mournful insignificance and silence. The few moments
+in her life which counted were those private ones when she found
+attention surrendered wholly to her service. She hungered for the
+unworn, unwearied sympathy of strangers. Her fancy had followed and
+fastened on the Lucys, perceiving this exquisitely virgin quality in
+them. And now she was suffering from an oppression of the nerves that
+urged her to a supreme outpouring.
+
+Miss Lucy seemed absorbed in her correspondence. She felt that Miss
+Keating's eyes were upon her, and as she wrote she planned a dexterous
+retreat. It would, she knew, be difficult, owing to Miss Keating's
+complete occupation of the sofa by the door.
+
+She had made that lady's acquaintance in the morning, having found her
+sitting sad and solitary in the lounge. She had then felt that it would
+be unkind not to say something to her, and she had spent the greater
+part of the morning saying it. Miss Keating had tracked the thin thread
+of conversation carefully, as if in search of an unapparent opportunity.
+Jane, aware of the watchfulness of her method, had taken fright and left
+her. She had had an awful feeling that Miss Keating was about to bestow
+a confidence on her; somebody else's confidence, which Miss Keating had
+broken badly, she suspected.
+
+Jane had finished her letters. She was addressing the envelopes. Now she
+was stamping them. Now she was crossing the room. Miss Keating lowered
+her eyes as the moment came which was to bring her into communion with
+the Lucys.
+
+Jane had made her way very quietly to the door, and thought to pass
+through it unobserved, when Miss Keating seemed to leap up from her sofa
+as from an ambush.
+
+"Miss Lucy," she said, and Jane turned at the penetrating sibilants of
+her name.
+
+Miss Keating thrust toward her a face of tragic and imminent appeal. A
+nervous vibration passed through her and communicated itself to Jane.
+
+"What is it?" Jane paused in the doorway.
+
+"May I speak to you a moment?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+But Miss Keating did not speak. She stood there, clasping and
+unclasping her hands. It struck Jane that she was trying to conceal an
+eagerness of which she was more than half ashamed.
+
+"What is it?" she said again.
+
+Miss Keating sighed. "Will you sit down? Here--I think." She glanced
+significantly at the old lady who was betraying unmistakable interest in
+the scene. There was no place where they could sit beyond her range of
+vision. But the sofa was on the far side of it, and Miss Keating's back
+protested against observation.
+
+She bent forward, her thin arms stretched out to Jane, her hands locked,
+as if she still held tight the confidence she offered.
+
+"Miss Lucy," she said, "you were so kind to me this morning, so kind and
+helpful."
+
+"I didn't know it."
+
+"No, you didn't know it." Miss Keating looked down, and she smiled as if
+at some pleasant secret of her own. "I think when we are really helping
+each other we don't know it. You couldn't realise what it meant to me,
+your just coming up and speaking to me that way."
+
+"I'm very glad," said Jane; and thought she meant it.
+
+Miss Keating smiled again. "I wonder," she said, "if I might ask you to
+help me again?"
+
+"If I can."
+
+"You look as if you could. I'm in a great difficulty, and I would like
+you--if you would--to give me your advice."
+
+"That," said Jane, "is a very dangerous thing to give."
+
+"It wouldn't be in this case. If I might only tell you. There's no one
+in the hotel whom I can speak to."
+
+"Surely," said Jane, "there is Mrs. Tailleur, your friend."
+
+"My friend? Yes, she is my friend; that's why I can't say anything to
+her. She _is_ the difficulty."
+
+"Indeed," said Jane coldly. Nothing in Miss Keating appealed to the
+spirit of adventurous sympathy.
+
+"I have received so much kindness from her. She _is_ kind."
+
+"Evidently," said Jane.
+
+"That makes my position so very delicate--so very disagreeable."
+
+"I should think it would."
+
+Miss Keating felt the antipathy in Miss Lucy's tone. "You _do_ think it
+strange of me to come to you when I don't know you?"
+
+"No, no; people are always coming to me. Perhaps because they don't know
+me."
+
+"Ah, you see, you make them come."
+
+"Indeed I don't. I try to stop them."
+
+"Are you trying to stop me?"
+
+"Yes; I think I am."
+
+"Don't stop me, please."
+
+"But surely it would be better to consult your own people."
+
+Miss Keating paused. Miss Lucy had suggested the obvious course, which
+she had avoided for reasons which were not obvious even to herself.
+
+"My own people?" she murmured pensively. "They are not here."
+
+It was not her fault if Miss Lucy jumped to the conclusion that they
+were dead.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if you see my difficulty?"
+
+"I see it plainly enough. Mrs. Tailleur has been very kind to you, and
+you want to leave her. Why?"
+
+"I'm not sure that I ought to stay."
+
+"You must be the best judge of your obligations."
+
+"There are," said Miss Keating, "other things; I don't know that I'm a
+good judge of _them_. You see, I was brought up very carefully."
+
+"Were you?"
+
+"Yes. I'm not sure that it's wise to be as careful as all that--to keep
+young girls in ignorance of things they--things they must, sooner or
+later----" she paused staring as if at an abyss.
+
+"What things?" asked Jane bluntly.
+
+"I don't know what things. I don't _know_ anything. I'm afraid. I'm so
+innocent, Miss Lucy, that I'm like a child in the dark. I think I want
+some one to hold my hand and tell me there's nothing there."
+
+"Perhaps there isn't."
+
+"Yes, but it's so dark that I can't see whether there is or isn't. I'm
+just like a little child. Except that it imagines things and I don't."
+
+"Don't you? Are you sure you don't let your imagination run away with
+you sometimes?"
+
+"Not," said Miss Keating, "not on this subject. Even when I'm brought
+into contact"--her shoulder-blades obeyed the suggestion of her brain,
+and shuddered. "I don't know whether it's good or bad to refuse to face
+things. I can't help it. All that side of life is so intensely
+disagreeable to me."
+
+"It's not agreeable to me," said Jane. "And what _has_ it got to do with
+Mrs. Tailleur?"
+
+Miss Keating smiled queerly. "I don't know. I wish I did."
+
+"If you mean you think she isn't nice, I can tell you I'm sure you're
+mistaken."
+
+"It's not what _I_ think. It's what other people think."
+
+"What people?"
+
+"The people here."
+
+Little Jane lifted her head superbly.
+
+"_We_ think the people here have behaved abominably to Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+She lifted her voice too. She didn't care who heard her. She rose,
+making herself look as tall as possible.
+
+"And if you're her friend," said she, "you ought to think so too."
+
+She walked out of the room, still superbly. Miss Keating was left to a
+painful meditation on misplaced confidence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+She had had no intention of betraying Kitty. Kitty, she imagined, had
+sufficiently betrayed herself. And if she hadn't, as long as Kitty chose
+to behave like a dubious person, she could hardly be surprised if
+persons by no means dubious refused to be compromised. She, Miss
+Keating, was in no way responsible for Kitty Tailleur. Neither was she
+responsible for what other people thought of her. That was all, in
+effect, that she had intimated to Miss Lucy.
+
+She did not say what she herself precisely thought, nor when she had
+first felt that uncomfortable sensation of exposure, that little shiver
+of cold and shame that seized her when in Kitty Tailleur's society. She
+had no means of measuring the lengths to which Kitty had gone and might
+yet go. She was simply possessed, driven and lashed by her vision of
+Kitty as she had seen her yesterday; Kitty standing at the end of the
+garden, on the watch for Mr. Lucy; Kitty returning, triumphant, with the
+young man at her heels.
+
+She had seen Kitty with other men before, but there was something in
+this particular combination that she could not bear to think of. All the
+same, she had lain awake half the night thinking of it. She had Kitty
+Tailleur and Mr. Lucy on her nerves.
+
+She had desired a pretext for approaching Miss Lucy, and poor Kitty was
+a pretext made to her hand. Nothing could be more appealing than the
+spectacle of helpless innocence struggling with a problem as terrible as
+Kitty. Miss Keating knew all the time that as far as she was concerned
+there was no problem. If she disliked being with Kitty she had nothing
+to do but to pack up and go. Kitty had said in the beginning that if she
+didn't like her she must go.
+
+That course was obvious but unattractive. And the most obvious and most
+unattractive thing about it was that it would not have brought her any
+further with the Lucys. It would, in fact, have removed her altogether
+from their view.
+
+But she had done for herself now with the Lucys. She should have kept
+her nerves to herself, rasped, as they were to a treacherous tenuity.
+And as the state of her nerves was owing to Kitty, she held Kitty
+responsible for the crisis. She writhed as she thought of it. She
+writhed as she thought of Mr. Lucy. She writhed as she thought of Kitty;
+and writhing, she rubbed her own venom into her hurt.
+
+Of course she would have to leave Kitty now.
+
+But, if she did, the alternatives were grim. She would have either to go
+back to her own people, or to look after somebody's children, or an
+invalid. Her own people were not interested in Miss Keating. Children
+and invalids demanded imperatively that she should be interested in
+them. And Miss Keating, unfortunately, was not interested in anybody
+but herself.
+
+So interested was she that she had forgotten the old lady who sat
+knitting in the window, who, distracted by Miss Lucy's outburst, had let
+her ball roll on to the floor. It rolled away across the room to Miss
+Keating's feet, and there was a great tangle in the wool. Miss Keating
+picked up the ball and brought it to the old lady, winding and
+disentangling it as she went.
+
+"Thank you; my wool is a nuisance to everybody," said the old lady. And
+she began to talk about her knitting. All the year round she knitted
+comforters for the deep-sea fishermen, gray and red and blue. When she
+was tired of one colour she went to another. It would be red's turn
+next.
+
+Miss Keating felt as if she were being drawn to the old lady by that
+thin thread of wool. And the old lady kept looking at her all the time.
+
+"Your face is familiar to me," she said. (Oddly enough, the old lady's
+face was familiar to Miss Keating.) "I have met you somewhere; I cannot
+think where."
+
+"I wonder," said Miss Keating, "if it was at Wenden, my father's
+parish?"
+
+The old lady's look was sharper. "Your father is the vicar of Wenden?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought so."
+
+"Do you know him?" The ball slipped from Miss Keating's nervous fingers
+and the wool was tangled worse than ever.
+
+"No, no; but I could tell that you were----" she hesitated. "It was at
+Ilkley that I met you. It's coming back to me. You were not then with
+Mrs. Tailleur, I think? You were with an invalid lady?"
+
+"Yes; I was until I broke down."
+
+"May I ask if you knew Mrs. Tailleur before you came to her?"
+
+"No. I knew nothing of her. I know nothing now."
+
+"Oh," said the old lady. It was as if she had said: that settles it.
+
+The wool was disentangled. It was winding them nearer and nearer.
+
+"Have you been with her long?"
+
+"Not more than three months."
+
+There were only five inches of wool between them now. "Do you mind
+telling me where you picked her up?"
+
+Miss Keating remembered with compunction that it was Kitty who had
+picked _her_ up. Picked her up, as it were, in her arms, and carried her
+away from the dreadful northern Hydropathic where she had dropped,
+forlorn and exhausted, in the trail of her opulent invalid.
+
+"It was at Matlock, afterward. Why?"
+
+"Because, my dear--you must forgive me, but I could not help hearing
+what that young lady said. She was so very--so very unrestrained."
+
+"Very ill-bred, I should say."
+
+"Well, I should not have said that. You couldn't mistake the Lucys for
+anything but gentlepeople. Evidently I was meant to hear. I've no doubt
+she thinks us all very unkind."
+
+"Unkind? Why?"
+
+"Because we have--have not exactly taken to Mrs. Tailleur; if you'll
+forgive my saying so."
+
+Miss Keating's smile forgave her. "People do not always take to her. She
+is more a favourite, I think, with men." She gave the ball into the old
+lady's hands.
+
+The old lady coughed slightly. "Thank you, my dear. I dare say _you_
+have thought it strange. We are such a friendly little community here;
+and if Mrs. Tailleur had been at all possible----"
+
+"I believe," said Miss Keating, "she is very well connected. Lord
+Matcham is a most intimate friend of hers."
+
+"That doesn't speak very well for Lord Matcham, I'm afraid."
+
+"I wish," said Miss Keating, "you would be frank with me."
+
+"I should like to be, my dear."
+
+"Then, please--if there's anything you think I should be told--tell me."
+
+"I think you ought to be told that we all are wondering a little at your
+being seen with Mrs. Tailleur. You are too nice, if I may say so, and
+she is--well, not the sort of person you should be going about with."
+
+Miss Keating's mouth opened slightly.
+
+"Do you know anything about her?"
+
+"I know less than you do. I'm only going by what Colonel Hankin says."
+
+"Colonel Hankin?"
+
+"Mrs. Hankin, I should say; of course I couldn't speak about Mrs.
+Tailleur to _him_."
+
+"Has he ever met her?"
+
+"Met her? In society? My dear!--he has never met her anywhere."
+
+"Then would he--would he really know?"
+
+"It isn't only the Colonel. All the men in the hotel say the same thing.
+You can see how they stare at her."
+
+"Oh, those men!"
+
+"You may depend upon it, they know more than we do."
+
+"How can they? How--how do they tell?"
+
+"I suppose they see something."
+
+Miss Keating saw it, too. She shuddered involuntarily. Her knees shook
+under her. She sat down.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what it is," said the old lady.
+
+"Nor I," said Miss Keating faintly.
+
+"They say you've only got to look at her----"
+
+A dull flush spread over Miss Keating's face. She was breathing hard.
+Her mouth opened to speak; a thick sigh came through it, but no words.
+
+"I've looked," said the old lady, "and I can't see anything about her
+different from other people. She dresses so quietly; but I'm told they
+often do. They're very careful that we shouldn't know them."
+
+"They? Oh, you don't mean that Mrs. Tailleur--is----"
+
+"I'm only going by what I'm told. Mind you, I get it all from Mrs.
+Hankin."
+
+Miss Keating, who had been leaning forward, sat suddenly bolt upright.
+Her whole body was shaking now. Her voice was low but violent.
+
+"Oh--oh--I knew it--I knew. I always felt there was something about
+her."
+
+"I'm sure, my dear, you didn't _know_."
+
+"I didn't. I didn't think it was that; I only thought she wasn't nice. I
+thought she was fast, or she'd been divorced, or something--something
+terrible of that sort."
+
+She still sat bolt upright, gazing open-eyed, open-mouthed at the
+terror. She was filled with a fierce excitement, a sort of exultation.
+Then doubt came to her.
+
+"But surely--surely the hotel people would know?"
+
+"Hotel people never know anything that isn't their interest to know. If
+there were any complaint, or if any of the guests were to leave on
+account of her, Mrs. Tailleur would have to go."
+
+"And has there been any complaint?"
+
+"I believe Mr. Soutar--the clergyman--has spoken to the manager."
+
+"And the manager?"
+
+"Well, you see, Mr. Soutar is always complaining. He complained about
+the food, and about his bedroom. He has the cheapest bedroom in the
+hotel."
+
+Miss Keating was thinking hard. Her idea was that Kitty Tailleur should
+go, and that she should remain.
+
+"Don't you think if Colonel Hankin spoke to the manager----"
+
+"He wouldn't. He's much too kind. Besides, the manager can't do anything
+as long as she behaves herself. And now that the Lucys have taken her
+up----. And then, there's you. Your being with her is her great
+protection. As she very well knew when she engaged you."
+
+"I was engaged for _that_?"
+
+"There can be very little doubt of it."
+
+"Oh! then nobody thinks that I knew it? That I'm like her?"
+
+"Nobody _could_ think that of you."
+
+"What am I to do? I'm so helpless, and I've no one to advise me. And
+it's not as if we really knew anything."
+
+"My dear, I think you should leave her."
+
+"Of course I shall leave her. I can't stay another day. But I don't know
+how I ought to do it."
+
+"Would you like to consult Colonel Hankin?"
+
+"Oh no; I don't think I could bear to speak about it to him."
+
+"Well--and perhaps he would not like to be brought into it, either."
+
+"Then what reason can I give her?"
+
+"Of course you cannot tell her what you've heard."
+
+Miss Keating was silent.
+
+"Or if you do, you must please not give me as your informant."
+
+"I will not do that."
+
+"Nor--please--Colonel and Mrs. Hankin. We none of us want to be mixed up
+with any unpleasant business."
+
+"You may trust me," said Miss Keating. "I am very discreet."
+
+She rose. The old lady held her with detaining eyes.
+
+"What shall you do when you have left her?"
+
+"I suppose I shall have to look for another place."
+
+"You are not going home, then?"
+
+Miss Keating's half-smile hinted at renunciation. "I have too many
+younger sisters."
+
+"Well, let me see. I shall be going back to Surbiton the day after
+to-morrow. How would it be if you were to come with me?"
+
+"Oh, Mrs.--Mrs.----" The smile wavered, but it held its place.
+
+"Mrs. Jurd. If we suited each other you might stay with me, at any rate
+for a week or two. I've been a long time looking out for a companion."
+
+Miss Keating's smile was now strained with hesitation. Mrs. Jurd was not
+an invalid, and she was interested in Miss Keating. These were points in
+her favour. On the other hand, nobody who could do better would choose
+to live with Mrs. Jurd and wind wool and talk about the deep-sea
+fishermen.
+
+"I am living," said Mrs. Jurd, "with my nephew at Surbiton. I have to
+keep his house for him."
+
+"Then do you think you would really need any one?"
+
+"Indeed I do. My nephew isn't a companion for me. He's in the city all
+day and out most evenings, or he brings his friends in and they get
+smoking."
+
+Miss Keating's smile was now released from its terrible constraint. A
+slight tremor, born of that deliverance, passed over her face, and left
+it rosy. But having committed herself to the policy of hesitation she
+had a certain delicacy in departing from it now.
+
+"Are you quite sure you would care to have _me_?"
+
+"My dear, I am quite sure that I don't care to have any one who is not a
+lady; and I am quite sure that I am talking to a lady. It is very seldom
+in these days that one can be sure."
+
+Miss Keating made a little bow and blushed.
+
+After a great deal of conversation it was settled that she should
+exchange the Cliff Hotel for the Metropole that night, and that she
+should stay there until she left Southbourne for Surbiton, with Mrs.
+Jurd.
+
+When Colonel and Mrs. Hankin looked in to report upon the weather, this
+scheme was submitted to them as to supreme judges in a question of
+propriety.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur was not mentioned. Her name stood for things that decorous
+persons do not mention, except under certain sanctions and the plea of
+privilege. The Colonel might mention them to his wife, and his wife
+might mention them to Mrs. Jurd, who might pass them on with
+unimpeachable propriety to Miss Keating. But these ladies were unable to
+discuss Mrs. Tailleur in the presence of the Colonel. Still, as none of
+them could do without her, she was permitted to appear in a purified
+form, veiled in obscure references, or diminished to an innocent
+abstraction.
+
+Miss Keating, Mrs. Jurd said, was not at all satisfied with her--er--her
+present situation.
+
+The Colonel lowered his eyes for one iniquitous instant while Mrs.
+Tailleur, disguised as Miss Keating's present situation, laughed through
+the veil and trailed before him her unabashed enormity.
+
+He managed to express, with becoming gravity, his approval of the
+scheme. He only wondered whether it might not be better for Miss Keating
+to stay where she was until the morning, that her step might not seem so
+precipitate, so marked.
+
+Miss Keating replied that she thought she had been sufficiently
+compromised already.
+
+"I don't think," said the Colonel, "that I should put it that way."
+
+He felt that by putting it that way Miss Keating had brought them a
+little too near what he called the verge, the verge they were all so
+dexterously avoiding. He would have been glad if he could have been kept
+out of this somewhat perilous debate, but, since the women had dragged
+him into it, it was his business to see that it was confined within the
+limits of comparative safety. Goodness knew where they would be landed
+if the women lost their heads.
+
+He looked gravely at Miss Keating.
+
+That look unnerved her, and she took a staggering step that brought her
+within measurable distance of the verge.
+
+The Colonel might put it any way he liked, she said. There must not be a
+moment's doubt as to her attitude.
+
+Now it was not her attitude that the Colonel was thinking of, but his
+own. It had been an attitude of dignity, of judicial benevolence, of
+incorruptible reserve. Any sort of unpleasantness was agony to a man who
+had the habit of perfection. It was dawning on him that unless he
+exercised considerable caution he would find himself mixed up in an
+uncommonly disagreeable affair. He might even be held responsible for
+it, since the dubiousness of the topic need never have emerged if he had
+not unveiled it to his wife. So that, when Miss Keating, in her
+unsteadiness, declared that there must not be a moment's doubt as to her
+attitude, the Colonel himself was seized with a slight vertigo. He
+suggested that people (luckily he got no nearer it than that)--people
+were, after all, entitled to the benefit of any doubt there might be.
+
+Then, when the danger was sheer in front of them, he drew back. Miss
+Keating, he said, had nobody but herself to please. He had no more light
+to throw on the--er--the situation. Really, he said to himself, they
+couldn't have hit on a more serviceable word.
+
+He considered that he had now led the discussion to its close, on lines
+of irreproachable symbolism. Nobody had overstepped the verge. Mrs.
+Tailleur had not once been mentioned. She might have disappeared behind
+the shelter provided by the merciful, silent decencies. Colonel Hankin
+had shown his unwillingness to pursue her into the dim and undesirable
+regions whence she came.
+
+Then suddenly Miss Keating cried out her name.
+
+She had felt herself abandoned, left there, all alone on the verge, and
+before any of them knew where they were she was over it. Happily, she
+was unaware of the violence with which she went. She seemed to herself
+to move, downward indeed, but with a sure and slow propulsion. She
+believed herself challenged to the demonstration by the Colonel's
+attitude. The high distinction of it, that was remotely akin to Mr.
+Lucy's, somehow obscured and degraded her. She conceived a dislike to
+this well-behaved and honourable gentleman, and to his visible
+perfections, the clean, silver whiteness and the pinkness of him.
+
+His case was clear to her. He was a man, and he had looked at Kitty
+Tailleur, and his sympathies, like Mr. Lucy's, had suffered an
+abominable perversion. His judgment, like Mr. Lucy's, had surrendered to
+the horrible charm. She said to herself bitterly, that she could not
+compete with _that_.
+
+She trembled as she faced the Colonel. "Very well, then," said she, "as
+there is no one to help me I must protect myself. I shall not sleep
+another night under the same roof as Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+The three winced as if the name had been a blow struck at them. The
+Colonel's silver eyebrows rose bristling. Mrs. Hankin got up and went
+out of the room. Mrs. Jurd bent her head over her knitting. None of
+them looked at Miss Keating; not even the Colonel, as he spoke.
+
+"If you feel like that about it," said he, "there is nothing more to be
+said."
+
+He rose and followed his wife.
+
+Upstairs, when their bedroom door had closed on them, he reproved her
+very seriously for her indiscretion.
+
+"You asked me," said he, "what I thought of Mrs. Tailleur, and I told
+you; but I never said you were to go and hand it on. What on earth have
+you been saying to those women?"
+
+"I didn't say anything to Miss Keating."
+
+"No, but you must have done to Mrs. What's-her-name?"
+
+"Not very much. I don't like talking about unpleasant subjects, as you
+know."
+
+"Well, somebody's been talking about them. I shouldn't wonder, after
+this, if poor Mrs. Tailleur's room were wanted to-morrow."
+
+"Oh, do you think they'll turn her out?"
+
+She was a kind woman and she could not bear to think it would come to
+that.
+
+The Colonel was silent. He was sitting on the bed, watching his wife as
+she undid the fastenings of her gown. At that moment a certain brief and
+sudden sin of his youth rose up before him. It looked at him pitifully,
+reproachfully, with the eyes of Mrs. Tailleur.
+
+"I wish," said Mrs. Hankin, "we hadn't said anything at all."
+
+"So do I," said the Colonel. But for the life of him he couldn't help
+saying something more. "If she goes," he said, "I rather think that
+young fellow will go, too."
+
+"And the sister?"
+
+"Oh, the sister, I imagine, will remain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Kitty was dressed. She was calling out to her companion, "Bunny, hurry
+up, you'll be late." No answer came from the adjoining room. She tapped
+at the door and there was no answer. She tried to open the door. It was
+locked on the inside. "Bunny," she cried, "are you there?" She laid her
+ear to the panel. There was the sound of a box being dragged across the
+floor.
+
+"You _are_ there, are you? Why don't you answer? I can't hear you. Why
+can't you open the door?"
+
+Miss Keating unlocked the door. She held it ajar and spoke through the
+aperture.
+
+"Be good enough," she said, "to leave me alone."
+
+"All right; but you'll be awfully late for dinner."
+
+"I am not coming down to dinner."
+
+Miss Keating shut the door, but she did not lock it.
+
+Kitty gave a cry of distress.
+
+"Bunny, what _is_ the matter? Let me in--do let me in."
+
+"You can come in if you like."
+
+Kitty opened the door. But instead of going in, she stood fixed upon the
+threshold, struck dumb by what she saw.
+
+The room was in disorder. Clothes littered the bed. More clothes were
+heaped on the floor around an open trunk. Miss Keating was kneeling on
+the floor seizing on things and thrusting them into the trunk. Their
+strangled, tortured forms witnessed to the violence of her mood.
+
+"What _are_ you doing?"
+
+"You can see what I'm doing. I am packing my things."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I am going away."
+
+"Have you had bad news? Is--is anybody dead?"
+
+"I wouldn't ask any questions if I were you."
+
+"I must ask some. You know, people _don't_ walk off like this without
+giving any reason."
+
+"I am surprised at your asking for my reason."
+
+"Sur--prised," said Kitty softly. "Are you going because of me?"
+
+Miss Keating did not answer.
+
+"I see. So you don't like me any more?"
+
+"We won't put it that way."
+
+Kitty came and stood beside Miss Keating and looked down at her.
+
+"Bunny, have I been a brute to you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Have I ever been a brute to any one? Have you ever known me do an
+unkind thing, or say an unkind word to any one?"
+
+"N--no."
+
+"Then why do you listen when people say unkind things about me?"
+
+Miss Keating stooped very low over the trunk. Her attitude no doubt
+accounted for the redness of her face which Kitty noticed. "I think I
+know what they've been saying. Did you or did you not listen?"
+
+"Listen?"
+
+"Yes. I don't mean behind doors and things. But you let them talk to
+you?"
+
+"You cannot stop people talking."
+
+"Can't you? I'd have stopped them pretty soon if they'd talked to me
+about you. What did they say?"
+
+"You've said just now you knew."
+
+"Very well. Who said it?"
+
+"You've no reason to assume that anybody has said anything."
+
+"Was it Mr. Lucy, or his sister?"
+
+Miss Keating became agitated.
+
+"I have never discussed you with Mr. Lucy. Or his sister." There was a
+little click in Miss Keating's throat where the lie stuck.
+
+"I know you haven't. They wouldn't let you."
+
+Kitty smiled. Miss Keating saw the smile. She trembled. Tears started to
+her eyes. She rose and began sorting the pile of clothing on the bed.
+
+Something in her action inspired Kitty with an intolerable passion of
+wonder and of pity. She came to her and laid her hand on her hair,
+lightly and with a certain fear.
+
+Miss Keating had once purred under Kitty's caresses. Now she jerked back
+suddenly and beat off the timid hand.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't touch me."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because it makes me loathe you."
+
+Kitty sat down on the bed. She had wrapped her hand in her
+pocket-handkerchief as if it had been hurt.
+
+"Poor Bunny," she said; "are you feeling as bad as all that? You must
+want dreadfully to marry that long man. But you needn't loathe me. I'm
+not going to make him marry _me_."
+
+"Can you not think of anything but that?"
+
+"I can _think_ of all sorts of things. At present I'm thinking of that.
+It does seem such an awful pity that you haven't married. A dear little,
+sweet little, good little thing like you--for you _are_ good, Bunny.
+It's a shame that you should have to live in rage and fury, and be very
+miserable, and--and rather cruel, just because of that."
+
+"If every word you said of me was true, I'd rather be myself than you,
+Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+"That, Miss Keating, is purely a matter of taste. Unhappiness is all
+that's the matter with you. You'd be quite a kind woman if it wasn't for
+that. You see, I do understand you, Bunny. So it isn't very wise of you
+to leave me. Think what an awful time you'll have if you go and live
+with somebody who doesn't understand and won't make allowances. And
+you're not strong. You never will be as long as you're miserable. You'll
+go and live with ill old ladies and get into that state you were in at
+Matlock. And there won't be anybody to look after you. And, Bunny,
+you'll never marry--never; and it'll be simply awful. You'll go getting
+older and older and nervier and nervier, till you're _so_ nervy that
+even the old ladies won't have you any more. Bad as I am, you'd better
+stop with me."
+
+"Stop with you? How can I stop with you?"
+
+"Well, you haven't told me yet why you can't."
+
+"I can't tell you. I--I've written you a letter. It's there on the
+dressing-table."
+
+Kitty went to the dressing-table.
+
+"I am returning you my salary for the quarter I have been with you."
+
+Kitty took up the letter.
+
+"I'd rather you did not read it until after I am gone."
+
+"That's not fair, Bunny."
+
+"Please--I've written what I had to say because I wished to avoid a
+scene."
+
+"There won't be any scene. I'm not going to read your beastly letter."
+
+She opened the envelope and removed the notes and laid them on the
+dressing-table. Then she tore up the letter and the envelope together
+and tossed them into the grate.
+
+"And I'm not going to take those notes."
+
+"Nor am I."
+
+"You'll have to." She found her companion's purse and tucked the notes
+inside it. Miss Keating turned on her. "Mrs. Tailleur, you shall not
+thrust your money on me. I will not take it."
+
+"You little fool, you've got to."
+
+Miss Keating closed her eyes. It was a way she had. "I can't. And you
+must please take back the things you've given me. They are all there; in
+that heap on the bed."
+
+Kitty turned and looked at them. They were all there; everything she had
+ever given to her, the dresses, the combs, the little trinkets. She took
+some of these and stared at them as she held them in her hand.
+
+"Won't you keep anything?"
+
+"I won't keep a thing."
+
+"Not even the little chain I gave you? Oh, Bunny, you liked your little
+chain."
+
+Miss Keating took the chain from her and laid it with the rest.
+
+"Please leave me to pack."
+
+"Presently. Bunny--look at me--straight. Why are you doing this?"
+
+"I wish to be spared the unpleasantness of speaking."
+
+"But you've got to speak. Out with it. What have I done?"
+
+"You know better than I do what your life has been."
+
+"My life? I should think I did. Rather."
+
+Kitty crossed the room to the bell.
+
+"What time does your train go?"
+
+"My----? I--must leave this at seven-thirty."
+
+Kitty rang the bell. A housemaid appeared.
+
+"I want a fly at seven-thirty. Please see that Miss Keating's luggage is
+downstairs by then. Her room will not be wanted."
+
+Miss Keating's face was livid.
+
+"You wish," said she, "the hotel people to think that it is you who have
+given _me_ notice?"
+
+"You poor thing. I only wanted the fly to go down to my account."
+
+"You expect me to believe that?"
+
+"I don't expect anything of you--now. I suppose it's Colonel Hankin who
+has been talking about my life? It wasn't Mr. Lucy, though you'd like to
+make me think so."
+
+"There's no need for anybody to talk. Do you suppose I don't know what
+you are? You can't hide what's in you. You're--you're full of it. And
+you've no shame about it. You can stand there, knowing that I know, and
+ask me what you've done. How do I know what you've done? I don't want to
+know it. It's bad enough to know what you are. And to know that I've
+been living with it for three months. You got hold of me, an innocent
+woman, and used me as a cover for your evil life. That's all you wanted
+me for."
+
+"Whatever I've done, I've done nothing to deserve that."
+
+"You think not? Have you any idea what you've done--to me?"
+
+"No; I haven't. What have I done?"
+
+"I'm going to tell you. You've never ceased casting it up to me that I'm
+not married, that I haven't your attractions--I thank heaven I have
+not--I am not the sort of woman you take me for. I never have wanted to
+be married, but if--if ever I had, I shouldn't want it now. You've
+spoilt all that for me. I shall never see a man without thinking of
+_you_. I shall hate every man I meet because of you."
+
+"Well, hate them, hate them. It's better than loving them. Let me strap
+that box. You'll tear your poor heart out."
+
+Miss Keating wrenched the strap from Kitty's hands.
+
+"Ah, how you hate me! Hate the men, dear, that can't do you any harm;
+but don't hate the other women. At my worst I never did that."
+
+Miss Keating shrugged her shoulders, for she was putting on her coat.
+Kitty looked at her and sighed.
+
+"Bunny," said she, "I want to make it quite clear to you why you're
+going. You think it's because you know something horrible about me. But
+it isn't. You don't know anything about me. You've only been listening
+to some of the people in the hotel. They don't know anything about me
+either. They've never met me in their lives before. But they've been
+thinking things and saying things, and you've swallowed it all because
+you wanted to. You're so desperately keen on making out there's
+something bad about me. Of course, you might have made it out; you might
+have proved all sorts of things against me. But you haven't. That's my
+whole point. You haven't proved a thing, have you? If you were my
+husband, and wanted to get rid of me, you'd have to trump up some
+evidence, wouldn't you?"
+
+"There is no need to trump up evidence. I'm acting on my instinct and
+belief."
+
+"Oh, I know you believe it all right."
+
+"I can't help what I believe."
+
+"No, you can't help it. You can't help what you want. And you wouldn't
+have wanted it if you hadn't been so furiously unhappy. I was furiously
+unhappy myself once. That's why I understand you."
+
+"It is five-and-twenty minutes past seven, Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+"And in five minutes you'll go. And you won't hear a word in my defence?
+You won't? Why, if I'd murdered somebody and they were going to hang me,
+they'd let me defend myself before they did it. All I was going to say
+was--supposing everything you said was true, I think _you_ might have
+made allowances for me. You can't? I was harder driven than you."
+
+"No two cases could well be more different."
+
+"Once they were the same. Only it was worse for me. All your temptations
+are bottled up inside you. Mine rushed at me from inside and outside
+too. I've had all the things you had. I had a strait-laced parson for my
+father--so had you. I was poked away in a hole in the country--so were
+you. I had little sisters--so had you. My mother sent me away from home
+for fear I should harm them." Her voice shook. "I wouldn't have harmed
+them for the world. I was sent to live with an old lady--so were you. I
+was shut up with her all day, till I got ill and couldn't sleep at
+night. I never saw a soul but one or two other old ladies. They were
+quite fond of me--I made them. I should have died of it if it hadn't
+been for that. Then--do listen, Bunny--something happened, and I broke
+loose, and got away. You never had a chance to get away, so you don't
+know what it feels like. Perhaps, I think, when it came to the point,
+you'd have been afraid, or something. I wasn't. And I was young. I'm
+young still. You can't judge me. Anyhow, I know what you've been
+through. That's what made me sorry for you. Can't you be a little sorry
+for me?"
+
+Miss Keating said nothing. She was putting on her hat, and her mouth at
+the moment was closed tight over a long hat-pin. She drew it out slowly
+between her shut lips. Meeting Kitty's eyes she blinked.
+
+"You needn't be sorry," said Kitty. "I've had things that you haven't."
+
+Miss Keating turned to the looking-glass and put on her veil. Her back
+was toward Kitty. The two women's faces were in the glass, the young and
+the middle-aged, each searching for the other. Kitty's face was tearful
+and piteous; it pleaded with the other face in the glass, a face furtive
+with hate, that hung between two lifted arms behind a veil.
+
+Miss Keating's hands struggled with her veil.
+
+"I mayn't tie it for you?" said Kitty.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+There was a knock at the door, and Miss Keating started.
+
+"It's the men for your boxes. Come into my room and say good bye."
+
+"I prefer to say good bye here, if it's all the same to you. Good bye."
+
+"You won't even shake hands with me? Well, if you won't--why should
+you?"
+
+"I am holding out my hand. If you won't take it----"
+
+"No, no. I don't want to take it."
+
+Kitty was crying.
+
+"I must let those men in," said Miss Keating. "You are not going to make
+a scene?"
+
+"I? Oh Lord, no. You needn't mind me. I'll go."
+
+She went into her own room and flung herself, face downward, on to her
+pillow, and slid by the bedside, kneeling, to the floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+At eight o'clock Mrs. Tailleur was not to be found in her room, or in
+any other part of the hotel. By nine Lucy was out on the Cliff-side
+looking for her. He was not able to account for the instinct that told
+him she would be there.
+
+The rain had ceased earlier in the evening. Now it was falling again in
+torrents. He could see that the path was pitted with small, sharp
+footprints. They turned and returned, obliterating each other.
+
+At the end of the path, in the white chamber under the brow of the
+Cliff, he made out first a queer, irregular, trailing black mass, then
+the peak of a hood against the wall, and the long train of a woman's
+gown upon the floor, and then, between the loops of the hood, the edge
+of Mrs. Tailleur's white face, dim, but discernible. She sat sideways,
+leaning against the wall, in the slack, childlike attitude of exhausted
+misery.
+
+He came close. She did not stir at the sound of his feet trampling the
+slush. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open; she breathed, like a child,
+the half-suffocated breath that comes after long crying. He stood
+looking at her, tongue-tied with pity. Every now and then her throat
+shook like a child's with guileless hiccoughing sobs.
+
+He stooped over her and called her name.
+
+"Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+She turned from him and sank sidelong into the corner, hiding her face.
+The long wings of her cloak parted and hung back from her cowering body.
+Her thin garments, beaten smooth by the rain, clung like one tissue to
+the long slope above her knees. Lucy laid his hand gently on her gown.
+She was drenched to the skin. It struck through, cold and shuddering, to
+his touch. She pushed his hand away and sat up.
+
+"I think," she said, "you'd better go away."
+
+"Do you want me to go?"
+
+"I don't want you to see me like this. I'm--I'm not pretty to look at."
+
+"That doesn't matter in the very least. Besides, I can hardly see you in
+this light."
+
+He drew her cloak about her and fastened it. He could feel, from the
+nearness of her flushed mouth, the heat and the taste of grief. She
+flung her head back to the wall away from him. Her hood slipped, and he
+put his arm behind her shoulders and raised it, and drew it gently
+forward to shelter her head from the rough wall. His hand was wet with
+the rain from her loose hair.
+
+"How long have you been walking about in the rain before you came here?"
+
+She tried to speak, and with the effort her sobs broke out in violence.
+It struck him again, and with another pang of pity, how like a child she
+was in the completeness of her abandonment! He sat down beside her,
+leaning forward, his face hidden in his hands. He felt that to hide his
+own face was somehow to screen her.
+
+Her sobbing went on, and her hand, stretched toward him unawares,
+clutched at the top of the wooden seat.
+
+"Would you like me to go away and come back again?" he said presently.
+
+"No!" she cried. And at her own cry a terrible convulsion shook her. He
+could feel her whole body strain and stiffen with the effort to control
+it. Then she was calm.
+
+"I beg your pardon," she said. "I told you, didn't I, that you'd better
+go away?"
+
+"Do you suppose that I'm going to leave you here? Just when I've found
+you?"
+
+"Miss Keating's left me. Did you know?"
+
+"Yes, I heard. Is it--is it a great trouble to you?"
+
+"Yes." She shook again.
+
+"Surely," he began, and hesitated, and grew bold. "Surely it needn't be?
+She wasn't, was she, such a particularly amiable person?"
+
+"She couldn't help it. She was so unhappy."
+
+His voice softened. "You were very fond of her?"
+
+"Yes. How did you know she'd gone?"
+
+It was too dark in there for him to see the fear in her eyes as she
+turned them to him.
+
+"Oh," he said, "we heard she'd left. I suppose she had to go."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Tailleur, "she had to go."
+
+"Well, I shouldn't distress myself any more about it. Tell me, have you
+been walking about in the rain ever since she left?"
+
+"I--I think so."
+
+"And my little sister was looking for you everywhere. She wanted you to
+dine with us. We thought you would, perhaps, as you were free."
+
+"That was very good of you."
+
+"We couldn't find you anywhere in the hotel. Then I came out here."
+
+"What made you come?"
+
+"I came to look for you."
+
+"To look for me?"
+
+"Yes. You don't mind, do you?"
+
+"How did you know I should be here?"
+
+"I didn't. It was the last place I tried. Do you know it's past nine
+o'clock? You must come in now."
+
+"I--can't."
+
+"Oh yes," he said, "you can. You're coming back with me."
+
+He talked as he would to a frightened child, to one of his own children.
+
+"I'm afraid to go back."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because of Bunny. She told me people were saying dreadful things about
+me. That's why she left. She couldn't bear it."
+
+Lucy ground his teeth. "_She_ couldn't bear it? That shows what she was,
+doesn't it? But you--you don't mind what people say?"
+
+"No," she said, "I don't mind."
+
+"Well----"
+
+"Yes!" she cried passionately. "I do mind. I've always minded. It's just
+the one thing I can't get over."
+
+"It's the one thing," said Lucy, "we have to learn to get over. When
+you've lived to be as old as I am, you'll see how very little it matters
+what people say of us. Especially when we know what other people think."
+
+"Other people?"
+
+"Friends," he said, "the people who really care."
+
+"Ah, if we only could know what they think. That's the most horrible
+thing of all--what they think."
+
+"Is that why you don't want to go back?"
+
+Lucy's voice was unsteady and very low.
+
+"Yes," she whispered.
+
+There was a brief silence.
+
+"But if you go back with _me_," he said, "it will be all right, won't
+it?"
+
+The look in her eyes almost reached him through the darkness, it was so
+intense.
+
+"No," she said out loud, "it won't. It will be all wrong."
+
+"I don't agree with you. Anyhow, I'm going to take you back. Come."
+
+"No," she said, "not yet. Mayn't we stay here a little longer?"
+
+"No, we mayn't. You've got your death of cold as it is."
+
+"I'm not cold, now. I'm warm. Feel my hands."
+
+She held them out to him. He did not touch them. But he put his arm
+round her and raised her to her feet. And they went back together along
+the narrow Cliff-path. It was dangerous in the perishing light. He took
+her hands in his now, and led her sidelong. When her feet slipped in the
+slimy chalk, he held her up with his arm.
+
+At the little gate she turned to him.
+
+"I was kind to Bunny," she said, "I was really."
+
+"I am sure," he said gently, "you are kind to everybody."
+
+"That's something, isn't it?"
+
+"I'm not sure that it isn't everything."
+
+They went up the side of the garden, along the shrubbery, by a path that
+led to the main entrance of the hotel. A great ring of white light lay
+on the wet ground before the porch, thrown from the electric lamps
+within.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur stepped back into the darkness by the shrubbery. "Look
+here," she said, "I'm going in by myself. You are going round another
+way. You have not seen me. You don't know where I am. You don't know
+anything about me."
+
+"I know," said Lucy, "you are coming in with me."
+
+She drew farther back. "I'm not thinking of myself," she said, "I'm
+thinking of you."
+
+She was no longer like a child. Her voice had suddenly grown older.
+
+"Are you?" he said. "Then you'll do what I ask you." He held her with
+his arm and drew her, resisting and unresisting, close to him.
+
+"Ah," she cried, "what are you going to do with me?"
+
+"I am going," he said, "to take you to my sister."
+
+And he went with her, up the steps and into the lighted vestibule, past
+the hall-porter and the clerk in his bureau and the manager's wife in
+hers, straight into the lounge, before the Colonel and his wife, and he
+led her to Jane where she sat in her place beside the hearth.
+
+"It isn't half such a bad night as it looks," said he in a clear voice.
+"Is it, Mrs. Tailleur?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Five minutes later Lucy was talking to Colonel and Mrs. Hankin, with
+genial unconcern. They never knew that he knew what they had been
+saying, or how their tongues had scourged Mrs. Tailleur out into the
+lash of the rain. They never knew that the young man who conversed with
+them so amiably was longing to take the Colonel by his pink throat and
+throttle him, nor that it was only a higher chivalry that held him from
+this disastrous deed. The Colonel merely felt himself in the presence of
+an incomparable innocence; but whether it was Lucy who was innocent, or
+Mrs. Tailleur, or the two of them together, he really could not say.
+
+Upstairs, in Mrs. Tailleur's bedroom, Jane Lucy was talking to Mrs.
+Tailleur. They were sitting by the hearth while Kitty, clothed in warm
+garments, shook out her drenched hair before the fire. She had just told
+Jane how Miss Keating had left her, and she had become tearful again
+over the telling.
+
+"Need you mind so much? Is she worth it?" said Jane, very much as Robert
+had said.
+
+"I don't mind her leaving. I can get over that. But you don't know the
+awful things she said."
+
+"No, I don't; but I dare say she didn't mean half of them."
+
+"Didn't she though! I'll show you."
+
+Kitty got up and opened the door into the other room. It was as Miss
+Keating had left it.
+
+"Look there," she said, "what she's done."
+
+Jane looked. "I'm not surprised. You did everything for her, so I
+suppose she expected you to pack and send her things after her."
+
+"It isn't that. Don't you see? It's--it's the things I gave her. She
+flung them back in my face. She wouldn't take one of them. See, that's
+the white frock she was wearing, and the fur-lined coal (she'll be so
+cold without it), and look, that's the little chain I gave her on her
+birthday. She wouldn't even keep the chain."
+
+"Well, I dare say she would feel rather bad about it after she's behaved
+in this way."
+
+"It isn't that. It's because they were mine--because I wore them." Kitty
+began to sob.
+
+"No, no, dear Mrs. Tailleur----"
+
+"Yes, yes. She--she thought they'd c--c--contaminate her."
+
+Kitty's sobs broke into the shrill laugh of hysteria. Jane led her to
+the couch and sat beside her. Kitty leaned forward, staring at the
+floor. Now and then she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth, stifling.
+Suddenly she looked up into Jane's face.
+
+"Would _you_ mind wearing a frock I'd worn?"
+
+"Of course I wouldn't."
+
+Kitty's handkerchief dropped on to her lap, a soaked ball, an
+insufficient dam.
+
+"Oh," she cried, "the beast!--the little, little beast!"
+
+She looked again at Jane, but with a glance half cowed, half candid;
+like a child that has proved, indubitably, its predestined naughtiness.
+
+"I didn't mean to use that word."
+
+"I want to use it myself," said Jane. "It's not a bit too much."
+
+"I didn't mean it."
+
+She added softly, reminiscently. "She was such a little thing."
+
+"Much too little for you to care about."
+
+"That's why I cared. I know it was. She was just like a little, lonely
+child; and she clung to me at first."
+
+"She certainly seems to have clung."
+
+"That's why it's so awful to think that she couldn't bear it--couldn't
+bear to live with me."
+
+"We wondered how you could bear to live with her."
+
+"Did you?"
+
+"Yes. Why did you have her?"
+
+"You see, I had to have some one; and she was nice."
+
+"I don't think she was nice at all."
+
+"Oh yes," said Kitty, solemnly, "you could see _that_."
+
+"I suppose you mean she was a lady?"
+
+"Ye--es." Kitty was not by any means certain that that was what she did
+mean. It was so difficult to find words for what she meant.
+
+"That," said Jane, "is the least you can be."
+
+"Anyhow, she _was_."
+
+"Well, if you take a charitable view of her. Her people are probably
+nicer than she is. Perhaps that's why she doesn't live with them."
+
+"Her father," said Kitty, "is the vicar of Wenden. I suppose that's all
+right."
+
+"Probably; but _we_ don't care what peoples' fathers are like, provided
+they're nice themselves."
+
+"Do you think I'm nice?"
+
+Jane laughed. "Yes, as it happens, I do."
+
+"Ah, _you_--_you_----"
+
+"We both do," said Jane boldly.
+
+"You're the first nice woman I've known who hasn't been horrid to me.
+And he----" Kitty had been playing with a button of her dressing-gown.
+Her fingers now began tearing, passionately, convulsively, at the
+button. "He is the first nice man who--who hasn't been what men are."
+
+"You don't mean that," said Jane calmly. She was holding Mrs. Tailleur's
+hand in hers and caressing it, soothing its pathetic violence.
+
+"I do. I do. That's why I like you so."
+
+"I'm glad you like us."
+
+"I'd give anything to know what you really think of me."
+
+"May I say what I think?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think you're too good to be so unhappy."
+
+"That's a new view of me. Most people think I'm too unhappy to be very
+good."
+
+"You _are_ good; but if you'd been happier you'd have known that other
+people are what you call good, too."
+
+"That's what I said to Bunny. _She_ was unhappy."
+
+"Never mind her. If you'd been happier you'd have known, for instance,
+that my brother isn't an exception. There are a great many men like him.
+All the men I've known have been more or less like Robert."
+
+"They would be, dear; all the men _you've_ known. But, you see,
+something happened. Nothing ever happened to you."
+
+"No. Nothing very much has happened to me. Nothing very much ever will."
+
+"You never wanted things to happen, did you?"
+
+"I don't know. Perhaps I'm interested most in the things that happen to
+other people."
+
+"You dear! If I'd been like you----"
+
+"I wish," said Jane, "you'd known Robert sooner."
+
+Mrs. Tailleur's lips parted, but no voice came through them.
+
+"Then," said Jane, "whatever happened never would have happened,
+probably."
+
+"I wonder. What do you suppose happened?"
+
+"I don't know. I've no business to know."
+
+"What do you think? Tell me--tell me!"
+
+"I think you've been very badly handled."
+
+"Yes. You may think so."
+
+"When you were young--too young to understand it."
+
+"Ah, I was never too young to understand. That's the difference between
+you and me."
+
+"That makes it all the worse, then."
+
+"All the worse! So that's what you think? How does it make you feel to
+me?"
+
+"It makes me feel that I want to take you away, and warm you and wrap
+you round, so that nothing could ever touch you and hurt you any more."
+
+"That's how it makes you feel?"
+
+"That's how it makes us both feel."
+
+"_He_ takes it that way, too?"
+
+"Of course he does. Any nice man would."
+
+"If _I_ were nice----"
+
+"You _are_ nice."
+
+"You don't know, my child; you don't know."
+
+"Do you suppose Robert doesn't know?"
+
+Mrs. Tailleur rose suddenly and turned away.
+
+"I was nice once," she said, "and at times I can be now."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Colonel Hankin was mistaken. Mrs. Tailleur's room was not wanted the
+next day. The point had been fiercely disputed in those obscure quarters
+of the hotel inhabited by the management. The manager's wife was for
+turning Mrs. Tailleur out on the bare suspicion of her impropriety. The
+idea in the head of the manager's wife was that there should be no
+suspicion as to the reputation of the Cliff Hotel. The manager, on his
+side, contended that the Cliff Hotel must not acquire a reputation for
+suspicion; that any lady whom Miss Lucy had made visibly her friend was
+herself in the position so desirable for the Cliff Hotel; that, in any
+case, unless Mrs. Tailleur's conduct became such as to justify an
+extreme step, the scandal of the ejection would be more damaging to the
+Cliff Hotel than her present transparently innocent and peaceful
+occupation of the best room in it. He wished to know how a scandal was
+to be avoided when the place was swarming with old women. And, after
+all, what had they got against Mrs. Tailleur except that she was better
+looking by a long chalk, and better turned-out, than any of 'em? Of
+course, he couldn't undertake to say--offhand--whether she was or wasn't
+any better than she should be. But, in the absence of complaints, he
+didn't consider the question a profitable one for a manager to go into
+in the slack season.
+
+All the manager's intelligence was concentrated in the small commercial
+eye which winked, absurdly, in the solitude of his solemn and enormous
+face. You must take people as you found them, said he, and for his part
+he had always found Mrs. Tailleur----
+
+But how the manager had found Mrs. Tailleur was never known to his wife,
+for at this point she walked out of the private sitting-room and shut
+herself into her bureau. Her opinion, more private even than that
+sitting-room, consecrated to intimate dispute, was that where women were
+concerned the manager was a perfect fool.
+
+The window of the bureau looked out on to the vestibule and the big
+staircase. And full in sight of the window Mrs. Tailleur was sitting on
+a seat set under the stair. She had her hat on and carried a sunshade in
+her hand, for the day was fine and warm. She was waiting for somebody.
+And as she waited she amused herself by smiling at the little
+four-year-old son of the management who played in the vestibule, it
+being the slack season. He was running up and down the flagged floor,
+dragging a little cart after him. And as he ran he never took his eyes
+off the pretty lady. They said, every time, with the charming vanity of
+childhood, "Look at me!" And Kitty looked at him, every time, and made,
+every time, the right sort of smile that says to a little boy, "I see
+you." Just then nobody was there to see Kitty but the manager's wife,
+who stood at the window of the bureau and saw it all. And as the little
+boy was not looking in the least where he was going, his feet were
+presently snared in the rug where the pretty lady sat, and he would have
+tumbled on his little nose if Kitty had not caught him.
+
+He was going to cry, but Kitty stopped him just in time by lifting him
+on to her lap and giving him her watch to look at. A marvellous watch
+that was gold and blue and bordered with a ring of little sparkling
+stones.
+
+At that moment Robert Lucy came down the stairs. He came very quietly
+and leaned over the banister behind Kitty's back and watched her, while
+he listened shamelessly to the conversation. The pretty lady looked
+prettier than ever.
+
+"My daddy gave my mummy her watch on her birthday," said the little boy.
+"Who gave you your watch?"
+
+"It wasn't your daddy, dear."
+
+"Of course it wasn't my daddy."
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"My name is Mrs. Tailleur."
+
+"Mrs. Ty-loor. My name is Stanley. That gentleman's name is Mr. Lucy. I
+like him."
+
+Lucy came down and seated himself beside her. She made him a sign with
+her mouth, as much as to say she was under a charm and he wasn't to
+break it.
+
+"Do you like him, Mrs. Tyloor?"
+
+"Well--what do you think?"
+
+"I think you like him very much."
+
+Mrs. Tailleur laughed softly.
+
+"What makes you laugh?"
+
+"You. You're so funny."
+
+"_You're_ funny. Your eyelashes curl up when you laugh, and your eyes
+curl, too. And your mouth!" he crowed with the joy of it. "Such a funny
+mouth."
+
+The mouth hid itself in the child's soft neck among his hair. The woman
+in the bureau saw that, and her face became curiously contracted.
+
+"I remember the day you came. My daddy said you was very pretty."
+
+"And what did your mummy say?"
+
+Kitty had caught sight of the fierce face in the window, and a little
+daring devil had entered into her.
+
+"Mummy said she couldn't tell if she wasn't allowed to look."
+
+"And why," said Lucy, "wasn't she allowed to look?"
+
+"Daddy said she wasn't to."
+
+"Of course he did," said Lucy. "It's very rude to look at people."
+
+"Daddy looked. I saw him."
+
+The door of the bureau opened and the manager's wife came out. She had a
+slight flush on her face and her mouth was tighter than ever.
+
+Mrs. Tailleur saw her coming and slipped the child from her lap. The
+manager's wife put out her hand to take him, but he turned from her and
+clung to the pretty lady.
+
+The woman seized him by the arm and tore him from her, and dragged him
+toward the apartments of the management. The child screamed as he went.
+
+"Women like that," said Lucy, "shouldn't be allowed to have children."
+
+Mrs. Tailleur turned to him though she had not heard him.
+
+"What have I done? What harm could I do the little thing?"
+
+"What have you done?" It was hard for him to follow the workings of her
+mind. "You don't mean to say you minded that?"
+
+"Yes, I minded. I minded awfully."
+
+"That dreadful woman?"
+
+"Do you think she really was dreadful?"
+
+"Quite terrible."
+
+"I don't know. I suppose," she said, "they're all like that. Yet they
+can't all be dreadful."
+
+Lucy laughed. He couldn't see her point. "I don't understand who 'they'
+are."
+
+"The women who are--the women who've got children."
+
+She stooped down and picked up something from the floor. It was the
+little man out of the cart that the child had been playing with, that
+lay there, smashed, at her feet. The manager's wife had stepped on it.
+Kitty set the little man upon the seat and smiled at him sadly. And Lucy
+smiled at her out of a great and sudden tenderness.
+
+He thought he saw it now.
+
+"I think," said he, "you must allow for a little maternal jealousy."
+
+"Jealousy? I can understand jealousy."
+
+"So can I," said Lucy.
+
+"And you think that was jealousy?"
+
+"Well, you know, that little boy was making barefaced love to you."
+
+She laughed. "I suppose," she said, "you _would_ feel like that about
+it."
+
+She got up and they went out, past the hotel front and down the lawn, in
+sight of the veranda, where at this hour everybody was there to see
+them. Lucy meant everybody to see. He had chosen that place, and that
+hour, also, which wore, appropriately, the innocence of morning. He knew
+her pitiful belief that he was defying public opinion in being seen with
+her; but from her ultimate consent, from her continuous trust in him,
+and from the heartrending way she clung to him, he gathered that she
+knew him, she knew that defiance, from him, would be a vindication of
+her.
+
+He did not yet know how dear she had become to him. Only, as he looked
+at her moving close beside him, so beautiful and so defenceless, he
+thanked God that he had kept his manhood clean, so that nothing that he
+did for her could hurt her.
+
+And so, holding himself very upright, and with his head in the air, he
+went slowly past the veranda and the Hankins, and, turning to Mrs.
+Tailleur, gave them the full spectacle of his gladness and his pride in
+her.
+
+"How good you are to me," she said. "I know why you did that."
+
+"Do you?"
+
+He smiled, guarding his secret, holding it back a little while longer.
+
+"Where are we going to?"
+
+"Anywhere you choose to take me."
+
+He took her through the gate that led them to the freedom of the Cliff.
+
+"Do you see that?" He pointed to the path which was now baked hard and
+white by the sun.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Your little footprints, and my great hoofmarks beside them. I believe
+nobody comes this way but you and me."
+
+"You see, it leads nowhere," said she.
+
+"Doesn't it?" said he.
+
+The little room in the Cliff-side was whiter than ever, burning white,
+it was, where the sun faced it. But the east side of it was in shadow,
+and they sat there, under the great forehead of the Cliff.
+
+They were both silent. Lucy was thinking of how he had found her there,
+and of the fear and trouble of last night. He vowed that if he could
+help it there should be no more fear and no more trouble for her. In
+their silence, voices thin and sweet with distance, came to them from
+below, where children played on the beach among the rocks that, washed
+by water-springs from the Cliff's forehead to its foot, lay heaped where
+they had fallen. She listened and laughed.
+
+She was happy now. He watched her as she stretched her adorable feet to
+the sun. A little wind came from the sea and played with her, taking
+from her a slight scent of violets for its salt. Every nerve in his body
+was aware of her nearness.
+
+Only last night he had seen her crouching just there, in the darkness,
+convulsed, her face wet with rain and tears. It was good that the place
+they had chosen should be changed and cleansed for them by sunlight and
+wind from the sea and the sweet voices of children.
+
+She did not break the silence. She only looked at him once with eyes
+whose pupils, black and dilated, narrowed the blue ring of the iris.
+
+Then he spoke. "I was going to say something to you last night, but I
+didn't. There was something I wanted to know first, something I wasn't
+quite sure about."
+
+She turned her face from him. The light struck it, and it quivered and
+grew white.
+
+"Well, do you know now?"
+
+"Yes," he said, "I know now."
+
+But her lips scarcely moved as she answered him. "Of course you know."
+
+She faced him with her sad white courage.
+
+"Everybody knows. I'd rather you knew. I--I meant you to."
+
+"Oh please"--he protested. "I wonder if I may say what it is?"
+
+"It's something about me?"
+
+"Yes. It's something about you. If I may say it."
+
+"You may say anything you please. You know that."
+
+"Well, I wanted very much to know whether--whether you were fond of
+children."
+
+"Oh----" She drew a long breath, as if released from torture. Then she
+laughed the indescribable half-sobbing laugh of a child tormented and
+suddenly set free.
+
+"Whether I were fond of children. Do you honestly mean it? Was that what
+you weren't sure of?"
+
+"Well, of course, in a way I knew--but I couldn't tell, you know, till
+I'd seen you with one."
+
+"Well, and so you can tell now?"
+
+"Yes. I can tell now."
+
+"And if I am fond of children, what difference does that make?"
+
+"It makes all the difference. You see, I've got two little girls----"
+
+"Two little girls." She repeated it after him smiling, as if she played
+with the vision of them.
+
+"You see--they've no mother. My wife----"
+
+"I know," she said softly.
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"I can't tell you."
+
+"My wife died five years ago when my youngest little girl was born."
+
+"And I thought," she said, "you were so young."
+
+"I'm thirty-five."
+
+"Still I was right. You're young. Very young."
+
+"Oh, well, don't you know, they say a woman's as young as she looks, and
+a man's as young as he feels. I _feel_ all right."
+
+"You dear." Her mouth and eyes said it without a sound.
+
+"Are you quite sure that's all you want to know?"
+
+"I had to know it."
+
+"It was so important?"
+
+"Yes. Because of _them_."
+
+"And now you know all about me?"
+
+"Yes. Now I know all about you."
+
+"Don't you want to know something about--about Mr. Tailleur?"
+
+Lucy's face hardened. "No, I don't think I want to know anything about
+him."
+
+He had made up his mind that Mr. Tailleur had been a brute to her.
+
+"He _is_ dead."
+
+"Well, yes. I supposed he would be."
+
+"He died four years ago. I was married very young."
+
+"I supposed that too."
+
+"You don't feel that he's important?"
+
+"Not in the very least."
+
+She laughed.
+
+"When I said that I knew all about you, I only meant that I knew--I'd
+the sense to see--what you were. You mustn't think that I take anything
+for granted."
+
+"Ah, Mr. Lucy, dear, I'm afraid you're taking everything for granted."
+
+"On my soul I'm not. I'm not that sort. There's one thing about you I
+don't know yet, and I'm afraid to ask, and it's the only thing I really
+want to know. It's the only thing that matters."
+
+"Then ask me, ask me straight, whatever it is, and let's get it over.
+Can't you trust me to tell you the truth?"
+
+"I trust you--to tell me the truth. I want to know where I am--where we
+are."
+
+"Is it for me to say?"
+
+"It's for you to say whether you think you can ever care for me."
+
+"Can't you see that I care for you?"
+
+"No, I'd give anything to see."
+
+"Ah, it's so like you not to. And I thought I'd shown you--everything."
+
+"You haven't shown me yet whether you care enough to--to----"
+
+He checked himself, while his love for her drew its first breath, as if
+it had been born but that instant, in an agony of desire and fear.
+
+"To do what?" she said. "Why won't you tell me?"
+
+"I'm afraid," he said simply.
+
+"Afraid of _me_! Why should you be?"
+
+"Because, if you really cared for me, I think you'd know what I want."
+
+"It's because I care so much that I don't know. Unless you tell me."
+
+She put her small fingers lightly on the sleeve of his coat; they slid
+till they found his hands that hung clenched before him.
+
+At her touch he trembled.
+
+"Don't you know," she said, "that there's nothing I wouldn't do for you?
+Tell me what you want me to do."
+
+He spoke so low that she strained to hear him.
+
+"To marry me--to be my wife."
+
+Her hand still lay on his, but she herself seemed to draw back and
+pause.
+
+"Your wife?" she said at last. "My dear, you've only known me ten days."
+
+"It makes no difference."
+
+He took her hand in his and kissed it, bowing his head.
+
+She twisted herself away from him, and drew back her face from his. They
+rose.
+
+"Ah," she said, "you're cold. You don't know how. Let me look at you.
+It's not me you want. You want a mother for your children."
+
+"Not I. I want you--you--for myself."
+
+She moved toward him with a low cry, and he took her in his arms and
+stood still by her without a word. And to his joy, she whom he held
+(gently, lest he should hurt her) laid her face to his face, and held
+him with a grip tighter than his own, as if she feared that he would
+loose himself and leave her. Her eyes closed as he kissed her forehead,
+and opened as her mouth found his.
+
+Then she drew herself slowly from him.
+
+"You love me then?" she said.
+
+"Yes, Kitty, I love you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The awkward thing was telling Jane about it. Jane had been his dead
+wife's friend before he married her, and she had known her better then
+than she knew Kitty. Yet he remembered, acutely, how he had gone to her
+eight years ago, and told her that he was going to marry Amy, and how
+she had kissed him and said nothing, and how, when he asked her if she
+had any objection, she had said "No, none. But isn't it a little
+sudden?"
+
+He wondered how Jane would look when he told her he was going to marry
+Kitty. That was bound to strike her as very sudden indeed.
+
+It was wonderful to him that this thing should have happened to him. He
+was aware that it was a new thing. Nothing in his previous experience
+had prepared him for it. He had been very young eight years ago, and a
+gayer, lighter-hearted chivalry had gone to his courtship of poor Amy.
+Poor Amy, though he would not own it, had been a rather ineffectual
+woman, with a prodigious opinion of her small self and a fretting
+passion for dominion. She had had a crowd of friends and relations whom
+she had allowed to come between them. Poor Amy had never understood him.
+There were heights and depths in him to which she had made no appeal.
+
+But Kitty--she had brought something out of him that had been hidden and
+unknown to him before. Something that answered to the fear with which
+she had drawn back from him and to the tremendous and tragic passion
+with which she had given herself to him at the last. Poor little Amy had
+never held him so. She had never loved him like that in all her poor
+little life. And so his very tenderness for Kitty had terror in it, lest
+he should fail her, lest he should in any way justify her prescience of
+disaster.
+
+Somebody was coming along the Cliff-path, somebody with a telegram for
+Mrs. Tailleur. She rose, moving away from Lucy as she opened it.
+
+"There is no answer," she said. And she came to him again and sat beside
+him, very still, with hands spread over the telegram that lay open in
+her lap.
+
+"Has anything happened?"
+
+She shook her head. He took the hand that she held out to him by way of
+reassurance and possession.
+
+"Then why do you look like that?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"Kitty--that was an unconvincing smile."
+
+"Was it? I'm sorry to say there's a tiresome man coming to see me."
+
+"Say you can't see him. Send him a wire."
+
+"I must. He's coming on business. I don't _want_ to see him."
+
+"Can't I see him for you, if you feel like that?"
+
+"No, dear. He must see me."
+
+"When is he due?"
+
+"At seven-thirty."
+
+"Oh--only in the evening. How long do you think he'll stay?"
+
+Kitty hardened her face. "Not a minute longer than I can help."
+
+"An hour? Two hours?"
+
+"I shall have to give him dinner. He's--he's that sort of man."
+
+"Two hours, probably. I think I'll take Janey for a stroll while he's
+here. You see, I've got to tell her, and I shall tell her then."
+
+She put her hands on his shoulders. "And what will--Janey--say?"
+
+"She'll say she's glad I'm going to be happy."
+
+He became thoughtful. "And there are the children," he said. "I've got
+to tell them, too."
+
+She was silent. She did not ask him as he had half expected, "What will
+_they_ say?"
+
+"I think," he said, "I'd better send for them and let them stay here a
+bit. Could you stand another week of Southbourne? You said you hated
+it."
+
+"Yes. I hated it. I shouldn't have stayed if it hadn't been for you."
+
+"Do you mind staying a little longer now?"
+
+"I don't mind staying anywhere where you are."
+
+"Well--just a little longer."
+
+She saw the workings of his mind. The people here had been saying awful
+things about her. If he took her away they would continue to say them.
+He couldn't stop them. He couldn't for instance, go up to Colonel Hankin
+before leaving, and tell him that he lied, and that Mrs. Tailleur,
+though appearances might be against her, was as innocent a lady as Mrs.
+Hankin. He couldn't even announce his engagement to her by way of
+accounting for their simultaneous departure. They were not accountable
+to these people. But, if they stayed on as if nothing had happened, he
+could demonstrate to everybody's satisfaction that he had no other
+intention with regard to Mrs. Tailleur than to make her his wife and a
+mother to his children. That was why he was sending for them. Evidently
+the idea he had--poor lamb--was that he could shelter her innocence with
+theirs.
+
+And so she told him that she adored Southbourne now and didn't care how
+long they stopped there.
+
+Lucy's idea had really gone more or less on those lines, though they
+remained rather more obscure to him than they were to Kitty.
+
+His scheme was so far successful that there were people in the Cliff
+Hotel who knew about his engagement before Jane did.
+
+It was clear to the management, at any rate, that some consecrating seal
+had been set to the very interesting relations of Mrs. Tailleur and Mr.
+Lucy. The manager was more inclined than ever to take a favourable view
+of Mrs. Tailleur. To begin with, Mrs. Tailleur had ordered a private
+sitting-room. Then Mr. Lucy presented himself at the bureau with Mrs.
+Tailleur and inquired whether he could have a room for his two little
+girls and their nurse. The manager's wife looked dubious. The best
+rooms, she said, were taken. And Mrs. Tailleur said, looking at Mr.
+Lucy, "How about poor Bunny's room? The one leading out of mine?"
+
+A fine flush appeared on Mr. Lucy's face as he said he would have that
+room.
+
+He then announced that he would wire for the little girls to come at
+once, and that they would arrive at four o'clock to-morrow. It was
+further arranged that they were to have their meals in Mrs. Tailleur's
+private sitting-room. And please, there was to be lots of jam for tea,
+Mrs. Tailleur said. The manager's wife looked humble before her lord as
+she booked that order.
+
+That was at twelve o'clock of the tenth day.
+
+Seven hours later Mrs. Tailleur was alone in her private sitting-room,
+preparing with some agitation for the appointment that she had.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+Her tense, flushed mind recorded automatically, and with acute
+vividness, every detail of the room; the pattern of the gray French
+wall-paper, with the watered stripe, and of the hot, velvet upholstery,
+buff on a crimson ground; the architecture of the stained walnut
+sideboard and overmantel, with their ridiculous pediments and little
+shelves and bevelled mirrors; the tapestry curtains, the palms in
+shining turquoise blue pots, and the engraved picture of Grace Darling
+over the sideboard.
+
+It was absolutely necessary that she should have this place to see him
+in, without Robert seeing him. Beyond that immediate purpose she
+discerned its use as a play-room for Robert's children.
+
+To-morrow, at four o clock, she would be waiting there for them. They
+had settled that, she and Robert. She was to have everything ready, and
+the table laid for tea. To-morrow they would all be sitting there, round
+the table. To-morrow she would see Robert's children, and hold them in
+her arms.
+
+Her heart gave a sudden leap, as if something had quickened in it. Her
+brain glowed. Her pulses throbbed with the race of the glad blood in her
+veins. Her whole being moved, trembling and yearning, toward an
+incredible joy. Till that moment she had hardly realised Robert's
+children. A strange unquietness, not yet recognised as fear, had kept
+her from asking him many questions about them. Even now, their forms
+were like the forms of children seen in the twilight of dreams, the
+dreams of women who have never had children; forms that hover and
+torture and pursue; that hide their faces, half seen; that will not come
+to the call, nor be held by the hand, nor gathered to the heart.
+
+That she should really see them, and hear their voices, and hold them in
+her arms, to-morrow, seemed to her a thing impossible, beyond
+credibility or dream. Then she said to herself that it all depended on
+what happened between to-morrow and to-day.
+
+It was not long past seven and she had still a good twenty minutes
+before her. She spent it in pacing up and down the room, and looking at
+the clock every time she turned and confronted it. At the half-hour she
+arranged herself on the sofa, with a book, in an attitude of
+carelessness as to the event. As a material appearance the attitude was
+perfect.
+
+She rose as the servant announced "Mr. Wilfrid Marston." She stood as
+she had risen, waiting for her visitor to advance. Her eyes were fixed
+on her book which she laid down, deliberately marking the page, and yet
+she was aware of his little pause at the door as it closed behind him,
+and of his little smile that took her in. She had no need to look at
+him.
+
+He was a man of middle size, who held himself so well that he appeared
+taller and slenderer than he was. You saw that he had been fair and
+florid and slender enough in his youth, and that all his good points had
+worn somewhat to hardness. His face was hard and of a fast-hardening,
+reddish-sallow colour, showing a light network of veins about the
+cheekbones. Hard, wiry wrinkles were about the outer corners of his
+eyes. He kept his small reddish-gold moustache close clipped, so that it
+made his mouth look extraordinarily straight and hard. People who didn't
+know him were apt to mistake him for a soldier. (He was in the War
+Office, rather high up.) He had several manners, his official manner to
+persons calling at the War Office; his social manner, inimitably devout
+to women whom he respected; and his natural manner, known only in its
+perfection to women whom he did not respect. And under both of these
+he conveyed a curious and disagreeable impression of stern sensuality,
+as if the animal in him had worn to hardness, too.
+
+"Kitty, my dear girl!" His voice, unlike the rest of him, could be thick
+and soft and fluid. He put his arm round her, and she offered him her
+mouth, curled forward, obedient but unsmiling. Her hand, surrendered to
+his, lay limp in the hard clasp of it. He raised it as if weighing the
+powerless, subservient thing.
+
+"Kitty," he said, "you're still getting thin. My last orders were, if
+you remember, that you were to put on another stone before I saw you
+again."
+
+He bared her wrist, pressing it slightly, to show how its round curves
+were sunken.
+
+"Do you call that putting on another stone?"
+
+She drew back her arm.
+
+"What have you been doing to yourself?" he said.
+
+"Nothing. There hasn't been anything to do. It's not very amusing
+being left all by yourself for weeks and weeks, you know."
+
+"All by yourself?"
+
+"Yes. Bunny doesn't count."
+
+"No, she certainly doesn't. Poor Kitten, you must have been very badly
+bored."
+
+He looked round the room.
+
+"Do they do you well at this place?"
+
+"It isn't _very_ comfortable. I think you'd be better off at the
+Metropole."
+
+"What possessed you to stay at the place if you're not comfortable?"
+
+"Well, you see, I didn't expect you for another week."
+
+"What's that got to do with it?"
+
+"I mean it did well enough for Bunny and me."
+
+"Where is that woman?"
+
+"She's gone. She left yesterday."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well, you know, Wilfrid, Bunny was very respectable."
+
+He laughed. "It's just as well she went, then, before I came, isn't it?
+I say, what have you done to your eyes? They used to be black, now
+they're blue. Bright blue."
+
+There was a look in them he did not understand.
+
+"I think," she said, "you would be much more comfortable at the
+Metropole."
+
+"Oh no; I'll try this place for one night." She veiled her eyes.
+
+"We can move on if I can't stand it. When are we going to dine?"
+
+"At eight. It's twenty to, now. You'd like it up here, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Rather. I say, where's my room?"
+
+She flushed and turned from him with an unaccountable emotion.
+
+"I--I don't know."
+
+"Didn't you order one for me?"
+
+"No; I don't think I did."
+
+"I suppose I can get one, can't I?"
+
+"I suppose so. But don't you think you'd better go over to the
+Metropole? You see, this is a very small hotel."
+
+He looked at her sharply.
+
+"I don't care how small it is."
+
+He summoned a waiter and inquired irascibly for his room.
+
+Kitty was relieved when the room was got for him, because he went to it
+instantly, and that gave her time. She said to herself that it would be
+all right if she could be alone for a minute or two and could think. She
+thought continuously through the act of dressing, and in the moment of
+waiting till he appeared again. He would be hungry, and his first
+thought would be for his dinner.
+
+It was. But his second thought was for Kitty, who refused to eat.
+
+"What's the matter with you?"
+
+"Nothing. I've got a headache."
+
+Again he looked sharply at her.
+
+"A headache, have you? It'll be better if you eat something."
+
+But Kitty shook her head.
+
+"What's the good of my sending you to Matlock and those places if you
+come back in this state? You know, if you once get really thin, Kitty,
+you're done for."
+
+"Am I?" Her mouth trembled, not grossly, but with a small, fine quiver
+of the upper lip. The man had trained her well. She knew better than to
+cry before him.
+
+The slender sign of emotion touched him, since it was not disfiguring.
+
+"How long have you been starving yourself?" he asked more gently.
+
+"I've not been starving myself. I've got a headache."
+
+He poured out some wine for her.
+
+"You must either eat _or_ drink."
+
+"I don't want any."
+
+"Nonsense."
+
+"I--I can't. I feel sick."
+
+He raised his eyebrows.
+
+"Need you mention it?"
+
+"I wouldn't if you hadn't teased me so."
+
+"I beg your pardon."
+
+She began playing with some salted almonds.
+
+"My _dear_ girl, I wouldn't eat those things if I were you."
+
+"I'm not eating them." She pushed the dish from her. "I'm afraid," said
+she, "it isn't a very nice dinner."
+
+He was looking at the _entree_ with interest and a slight suspicion.
+
+"What is this?"
+
+"Curried chicken."
+
+"Oh." He helped himself fastidiously to curried chicken, tasted it with
+delicate deliberation, and left it on his plate.
+
+"You are wise," said he. "There is a certain crude, unsatisfying
+simplicity about this repast."
+
+"Didn't I tell you?"
+
+"You did."
+
+"You see now why I said you'd better go to the Metropole?"
+
+"I do indeed."
+
+An admirable joint of mutton, cheese, coffee and a liqueur effaced the
+painful impression made by the _entree_. By nine o'clock Marston
+declared himself inured to the hardships of the Cliff Hotel.
+
+"How long can you stay?" she asked. The question had been burning in her
+for two hours.
+
+"Well, over the week end, I think."
+
+Her heart, that had fluttered like a bird, sank, as a bird sinks in
+terror with wings tight shut.
+
+"Have you got to go up to town to-morrow?"
+
+"I have, worse luck. How do the trains go from this godforsaken place?"
+
+"About every two hours. What sort of train do you want? An early one?"
+
+"Rather. Got to be at Whitehall by twelve."
+
+"Will the nine-fifteen do?"
+
+"Yes; that's all right."
+
+The wings of her heart loosened. It rose light, as if air, not blood,
+flowed from its chambers.
+
+The Lucys were never by any chance down before nine. Robert would not
+meet him.
+
+He sat down in the chair opposite her, with his eyes fixed on her as she
+leaned back in the corner of the sofa. He settled himself in comfort,
+crossing his legs and thrusting out one foot, defined under a delicate
+silk sock, in an attitude that was almost contemptuous of Kitty's
+presence.
+
+Kitty's face was innocent of any perception of these shades. He drew the
+long breath of ease and smiled at her again, a smile that intimated how
+thoroughly he approved of her personal appearance.
+
+"Ye--es," he said, "you're different, but I think you're almost as
+pretty as you were."
+
+"Am I?" she said. "What did you expect?"
+
+"I didn't expect anything. I never do. It's my scheme for avoiding
+disappointment. Is your head better?"
+
+"No; it's aching abominably."
+
+"Sorry. But it's rather hard lines for me, isn't it? I wish you _could_
+have chosen some other time to be ill in."
+
+"What does it matter whether I'm ill or not, if I'm not pretty?"
+
+He smiled again.
+
+"I don't mean, child, that you're ever not pretty."
+
+"Thank you. I know exactly how pretty I am."
+
+"Do you? How pretty do you think you are now?"
+
+"Not half as pretty as Dora Nicholson. You know exactly how pretty she
+is."
+
+"I do. And I know exactly how pretty she'll be in five years' time.
+That's the worst of those thin women with little, delicate, pink faces.
+You know the precise minute when a girl like Dora'll go off. You know
+the pinkness will begin to run when she's once past thirty. You can see
+the crows' feet coming, and you know exactly how far they'll have got by
+the time she's thirty-five. You know that when she's forty there'll be
+two little lines like thumb-nail marks beside her ears, just here, and
+you know that when she's forty-five the dear little lobes will begin to
+shrivel up, and that when she's fifty the corners of her mouth will
+collapse."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Then, if you're a wise man you don't know any more."
+
+"Poor little Dora. You _are_ a brute, Wilfrid."
+
+"I'm not a brute. I was going to say that the best of you, dear, is that
+I don't know how you'll look at fifty. I don't know how you'll look
+to-morrow--to-night. You're never the same for ten minutes together.
+When you get one of those abominable headaches you look perhaps as old
+as you are. You're twenty-seven, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I dare say you'll look twenty-seven when you are fifty. There's
+something awfully nice about that sort of prettiness. It leaves things
+delightfully vague. I can't _see_ you fifty."
+
+"Perhaps I never shall be."
+
+"Perhaps not. That's just it. You leave it open to me to think so. I
+don't seriously contemplate your ever being forty. In fact your being
+thirty is one of those melancholy and disastrous events that need not
+actually occur. It's very tactful of you, Kitty."
+
+"All the same, I'm not as pretty as Dora Nicholson."
+
+"Dora Nicholson!"
+
+"You can't say she isn't awfully pretty."
+
+"I don't say it." His voice rose to an excited falsetto. "She _is_
+awfully pretty--extravagantly, preposterously pretty. And she'll have to
+pay for it."
+
+"Oh--we all have to pay for it."
+
+"Sooner _or_ later."
+
+"Poor Dora----"
+
+"Poor Dora. Perhaps we have been rather brutal to her. She's good for
+another five years."
+
+"Only five years? And what will she do then?"
+
+"Oh, she'll be all right. She'll rouge a bit, and powder a bit, and
+dress like anything. You needn't be unhappy about Dora. I can tell you
+Dora isn't going to be unhappy about you. Unhappiness would be extremely
+unbecoming to her, and she knows it. It isn't particularly becoming to
+any woman. You would be less damaged by it than most perhaps."
+
+"You've never seen me unhappy."
+
+"I hope to God I never shall."
+
+"You needn't be afraid, Wilfrid, you never will."
+
+"I wish," she said presently, "I wish you liked Dora Nicholson."
+
+"I do like her."
+
+"I wish you liked her as much as me."
+
+"That's very noble of you, Kitty. But may I ask, why?"
+
+"Because it would make things simpler."
+
+"Simpler? I should have said myself that that was just where
+complications might occur. Supposing I liked Dolly better than you, what
+then?"
+
+"Oh, that would make it simpler still."
+
+"It certainly would be simpler than the other situation you suggest."
+
+"It would for both of us."
+
+"But why this sudden yearning for simplicity? And why Dora Nicholson?"
+
+"There isn't any why. Anybody else would do, provided you liked them
+better than me. It's only a question of time, you know. You're bound to
+tire of me sooner or later."
+
+"Later, Kitty, later. Barring jealousy. If you're going in for that, I
+may as well tell you at once that I shall tire of it very soon."
+
+"You think that's what's the matter with me?"
+
+"Well, something's the matter with you. I suppose it's that. I should
+drop it, Kitty. It really isn't worth while. It only makes you thin,
+and--and I can't be bored with it, d'you see?"
+
+"I don't want--to be bored--with it--either." She spoke very slowly. "If
+you wanted to leave me for Dora Nicholson, I should be a fool to try and
+keep you, shouldn't I?"
+
+"Well--you're not a fool."
+
+"You're not a fool either, Wilfrid."
+
+"If I am I take some pains to conceal it."
+
+"If a woman wanted to leave you for another man, would you try and keep
+her?"
+
+He looked at her attentively. "It depends on the woman, and on some
+other things besides. For instance, if I were married to her, I might
+make a considerable effort, not to keep _her_, but--to keep up
+appearances."
+
+"And if--you were not married to her?"
+
+"There again it would depend on the woman. I might take it that she'd
+left me already."
+
+"Yes, but if you knew she wasn't that sort--if you knew she'd always
+been straight with you?"
+
+"Well, then perhaps I might take the trouble to find out whether there
+really was another man. Or I might have reason to suppose she was only
+trying it on. In which case I should say to her 'My dear Kitty, you're a
+very clever woman and it's a brilliant idea you've got. But it's been
+tried before and it won't work. You can't draw me that way.'"
+
+"But, Wilfrid--if there _was_ another man?"
+
+"Well, it's possible that I might not consider it worth while to dispute
+his claim. That would depend altogether on the woman."
+
+"If you cared for her?"
+
+"If I cared enough for her I might be able to convince her that it would
+at any rate be prudent, from a worldly point of view, to stick to me.
+But _that_ would depend, wouldn't it, on the amount of the other
+fellow's income?"
+
+"And if all that didn't matter in the very least to her, if she didn't
+care a rap about anybody's income, if she cared for the other fellow
+more than she'd ever cared for you, if she didn't care for your caring,
+if she cared for nothing except _his_ caring, and nothing you could do
+could move her--what would you do then?"
+
+He paused to light another cigarette before he answered her. "I should
+probably tell her, first of all, that for all I cared she might go to
+the devil, I mean to the other fellow, and stay there as long as he
+wanted her."
+
+"Well"--she said placably.
+
+"That's what I should say first. Afterward, when we were both a little
+calmer--if I cared for her, Kitty--I should ask her to think a moment
+before she did anything rash, to be quite sure that she would really be
+happier with the other fellow. And I should point out to her very
+clearly that, in any case, if she once went, it would not be open to her
+to come back."
+
+"But you wouldn't try and keep her?"
+
+"I couldn't keep her, my dear child, by trying."
+
+"No--you couldn't keep her. Not for yourself. But, if you could keep her
+from the other man, would you?"
+
+"I dare say I should do my best."
+
+"Would you do your worst? No, Wilfrid, you've been very good to me--I
+don't believe you'd do your worst."
+
+"What do you mean," he said sharply.
+
+"You wouldn't tell him what she was, what she had been--if he didn't
+know it. Would you?"
+
+He was silent.
+
+"Would you?" she cried.
+
+"No, Kitty, I wouldn't do that. I'm not a cad."
+
+He pondered.
+
+"But my dear girl, do you suppose for a moment that he doesn't know?"
+
+"He doesn't know a thing."
+
+"Then what in heaven's name are you talking about?"
+
+"I'm trying to tell you. It isn't what you think. I--I'm going to be
+married."
+
+Marston took his cigarette out of his mouth, and stared at it. There was
+no expression in his face beyond that concentrated, attentive stare.
+
+"Good Lord. Why," he said, "couldn't you tell me that before I came
+down?"
+
+"I was going to. I was going to write to you and ask you not to come."
+
+"_Good_ God."
+
+He said it softly, and with calm incredulity rather than amazement.
+
+"Who is it, Kitty? Do I know him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you know him yourself?"
+
+She smiled. "Yes I know him."
+
+"Well--but how long?"
+
+"Ten days."
+
+"You met him here? In this hotel?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's why you were so anxious for me to go to the Metropole, was it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Look here. I don't want to be unkind, but it doesn't do to blink facts.
+Are you quite sure he means to marry you?"
+
+"Why shouldn't he?"
+
+"Well, these marriages do happen, but--I don't want to be unkind
+again--but you know they are, to say the least of it, a little unusual."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You've seen some of them?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you know, you know as well as I do, the sort of man who--who----"
+
+"Who marries the sort of woman I am? Yes, I know him, perfectly well.
+He's horrible."
+
+"There are exceptions, but he's generally pretty bad. You think he's
+horrible. You'll be miserable when you find yourself tied to him for
+life. You see, however awful he was, you wouldn't be exactly in a
+position to get rid of him."
+
+"Wilfrid," her voice was very low and tender, "he isn't like that. He's
+good----"
+
+"Good, is he?" He laughed.
+
+"Oh, don't laugh. He _is_ good."
+
+"Well, I don't say he isn't--only----" he smiled.
+
+"You forget," she said. "He doesn't know."
+
+"Are you quite sure he doesn't know?"
+
+"Quite--quite sure."
+
+"And you are not going to enlighten him?"
+
+She drew back before his penetrating gaze. "I can't. I couldn't bear him
+to know."
+
+"How do you propose to prevent his knowing? Do you think you're clever
+enough to keep him in the dark for ever?"
+
+"Why not? He hasn't seen things in the broad daylight, under his very
+nose. There were plenty of things to see."
+
+"You mean he's stupid?"
+
+"I mean I haven't been clever, if that's what you think. Once I did
+nearly tell him."
+
+"Supposing somebody else tells him?"
+
+"If they do it'll only be their word against mine. And he'd take my word
+against anybody's."
+
+"Poor devil!"
+
+He seemed to meditate, dispassionately, on the poor devil's case, and
+hers.
+
+"You little fool. It isn't a question of people's words. How are you
+going to get rid of the facts?"
+
+"He needn't know them."
+
+"You forget. I'm one of them. How are you going to get rid of me?"
+
+"Oh, Wilfrid--you're not going to tell him? You said you wouldn't."
+
+"Of course I said I wouldn't--I'd even be glad to get rid of myself to
+oblige you, Kitty, but I can't. Here I am. How are you going to account
+for me?"
+
+"I've thought of that. He needn't see you. It'll be all right, Wilfrid,
+if you'll go away."
+
+"No doubt. But I haven't gone away."
+
+He emphasised his point by rising and taking up a commanding position on
+the hearthrug.
+
+Some one knocked at the door, and she started violently.
+
+It was only a servant, bringing a note for her.
+
+She read it and handed it to Marston, looking piteously at him as he
+stood his ground.
+
+"Mr. Lucy can come up," she said. "We have finished all we had to say."
+
+"I think there are one or two points," he replied, "still unsettled."
+
+She turned to the servant.
+
+"Will you tell Mr. Lucy I'm engaged for the present. I will see him
+later."
+
+"No, my dear Mrs. Tailleur, not on my account. There's no reason why you
+shouldn't see Mr. Lucy now. No reason at all."
+
+She stood tortured with indecision.
+
+"Mrs. Tailleur will see Mr. Lucy now."
+
+"I will see him in ten minutes."
+
+"Very good, ma'am."
+
+The servant withdrew.
+
+Marston shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"There you are. Here we both are. Here we are all three in the same
+hotel. An uncomfortably small hotel. How are you--or rather, how is
+he--going to get over that?"
+
+"It would be all right if you'd only go. I've told him you were a man
+coming on business."
+
+"My dear Kitty, that was quite unworthy of you."
+
+"Well, what could I do? It's not as if I was in the habit of telling
+lies."
+
+"I won't criticise it if it was a first attempt. But in telling a lie,
+my child, it's as well to select one that bears some resemblance to the
+truth. Do I look like a man who comes on business?"
+
+"You will go before he comes, won't you?"
+
+"No, I don't think I will."
+
+"You have nothing," she said, "to gain by staying."
+
+"I suppose you think you have everything to gain by my going?"
+
+"Oh, Wilfrid, give me my chance."
+
+"I'm giving you your chance, you little fool. I wouldn't produce that
+pocket-handkerchief if I were you. It's quite the most damaging thing
+about you."
+
+She gave a hysterical laugh, and put the pocket-handkerchief away.
+
+"You are utterly unfit," he commented, "to manage your own affairs."
+
+They sat silent, while the clock ticked out the last minutes of her
+torture.
+
+"You'd better make up your mind what you're going to do when he
+arrives," he said finally.
+
+"I don't know," said Kitty, "what I'm going to do."
+
+"I'll tell you, then. You are going to introduce me as you would any
+ordinary man of your acquaintance."
+
+"By your own name?"
+
+"By my own name, of course."
+
+They waited. Lucy's stride was heard along the corridor. She looked up
+at her tormentor.
+
+"Is my nose red, Wilfrid?"
+
+"No," he said, smiling grimly, "my dear Mrs. Tailleur," he added as Lucy
+entered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+She came to meet him, keeping her back to Marston, her face thrust a
+little forward in the way it had, looking for the protection of Robert's
+kind eyes. Only when she had his hand in hers she turned.
+
+"May I introduce Mr. Wilfrid Marston?"
+
+The two men bowed, glancing at each other with eyes urbanely innocent of
+curiosity.
+
+"I'm sorry to have had to keep you waiting," said Kitty.
+
+"So am I," said Marston. "Our business took rather longer than we
+thought."
+
+"Business generally does," said Lucy.
+
+"It need not have taken quite so long if I could have persuaded Mrs.
+Tailleur to think a little of her own advantage."
+
+"I have," said Kitty, "an admirable adviser in Mr. Marston."
+
+"You are always kind. Even if you don't always act on my advice."
+
+"Sometimes you think you know your own affairs best."
+
+"And sometimes," said Lucy, "it's just possible you do."
+
+"Sometimes. I've been telling Mrs. Tailleur that she's incapable of
+managing her own affairs when it's a question of her own advantage. If
+you know anything of Mrs. Tailleur, you will agree with me there."
+
+"I certainly agree with you, if Mrs. Tailleur will forgive my saying so.
+I hope I've not come too soon."
+
+"Oh, no. Mr. Marston has missed the last train up."
+
+"And Mrs. Tailleur has been kind enough to ask me to stop the night."
+
+"If you don't prefer the Metropole. Mr. Lucy is not going. Don't--it's
+all right, Robert."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite sure. Our business is finished."
+
+"All except one or two details which we may perhaps arrange later," said
+Marston, who preserved a perfect suavity.
+
+"How much later?" said Kitty. "_I'm_ not going to arrange anything more
+to-night."
+
+"To-morrow night."
+
+"There won't be any to-morrow night--if you're going up to town."
+
+"Well, then, perhaps if Mr. Lucy will excuse us, you will give me a
+moment now. It seems a pity not to put things straight while you're
+about it."
+
+"You can't put things straight at eleven o'clock at night. My poor
+head's all muddled and aching abominably."
+
+"To-morrow morning, then."
+
+"There will be no time to-morrow morning. Robert, has Jane gone to bed?"
+
+"No, she's sitting up. She wants to speak to you."
+
+"Will you bring her to me, please?"
+
+He rose. When he had left the room she turned on Marston in a fury.
+
+"Wilfrid, you're a beast, a perfect beast."
+
+"A man of business, my dear Kitty, very often is. He's paid, you know,
+for doing beastly things."
+
+"They come easy to you."
+
+"Is that all the thanks I get for playing up to you? I gave you every
+point, too."
+
+She raged dumbly.
+
+"I can't congratulate you on your skill in the game. You'd have given
+yourself away ten times over--if I hadn't stopped you."
+
+"What are you waiting for now, then?"
+
+"I have not said good night to your friend Mr. Lucy, nor to you."
+
+"You can say good night to me now, and good bye. I shall not see you
+again."
+
+"Pardon me, you will see me to-morrow morning."
+
+"No. Never again. I've done with you."
+
+"My dear girl, you are absurd. Mr. Lucy is not going to marry you
+to-morrow morning, is he?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"And until he marries you, you haven't exactly done with me."
+
+"I see. You want to remind me that the clothes on my back belong to
+you."
+
+He flushed painfully.
+
+"I don't want to remind you of anything that may be unpleasant to you.
+I'm only suggesting that in the circumstances--until you marry him--you
+can hardly refuse to see me."
+
+"Why should I see you? It'll make no difference."
+
+"To me, none. To you it may possibly make a considerable difference.
+There are some points you have evidently not thought of, which it would
+be well for us to talk over before you think of marrying."
+
+She capitulated.
+
+"If I see you to-morrow, will you go now?"
+
+"I will go, my dear Kitty, the precise moment I see fit. If I were you I
+should wipe that expression from my face before Mr. Lucy comes in. He
+might not like it. The pocket-handkerchief might be used with advantage
+now--just there."
+
+In obedience to his indication she passed her hand over the flushed
+tear-stain. At that moment Lucy entered with his sister.
+
+Jane, less guarded than her brother, looked candidly, steadily at
+Marston, whose face instantly composed itself to reverence and devotion
+before her young half-spiritual presence.
+
+Kitty's voice was scarcely audible as she murmured the ritual of
+introduction.
+
+Lucy was aware of her emotion.
+
+"I think," said he, "as Mrs. Tailleur has owned to a bad headache, Mr.
+Marston and I had better say good night."
+
+Marston said it. There was nothing else left for him to say. And as he
+went through the door that Lucy opened for him, he cursed him in his
+heart.
+
+"Jane," said Kitty.
+
+But Jane was looking at the door through which Marston and Robert had
+just gone.
+
+"Robert did that very neatly," said she. "You wanted to get rid of him,
+didn't you, Kitty?"
+
+"I've been trying to get rid of Wilfrid Marston for the last three
+weeks."
+
+She had such wisdom, mothered by fierce necessity, as comes to the
+foolish at their call. She was standing over little Jane as she spoke,
+looking down into her pure, uplifted eyes.
+
+"You've been crying," she said.
+
+"Yes." Jane's eyes were very bright, new-washed with tears.
+
+"I know why. It's because of me."
+
+"Yes; but it's all right now, Kitty."
+
+She did not tell her that ten minutes ago she, too, had been out on the
+Cliff-side and had had a battle with herself there, and had won it. For
+little Jane there couldn't be a harder thing in the world than to give
+Robert up. Of course she had to do it, so there could be no virtue in
+that. The hard thing was to do it gracefully, beautifully.
+
+"What are you going to say to me, Janey? He told you?"
+
+"Yes; he told me."
+
+"Oh, don't look at me like that, dear. Say if you hate it for him."
+
+"I don't hate it. Only, oh, Kitty, dear, do you really love him?"
+
+"Yes; I love him."
+
+"But--you've only known him ten days. I don't think I could love a man
+I'd only known ten days."
+
+"It makes no difference."
+
+"That's what Robert said."
+
+"Yes; he said it to me. Ah, I know what you mean. You think it's all
+very well for him, because men are different. It's me you can't
+understand; you think I must be horrid."
+
+"Oh no, no. It's only--I think _I'm_ different, that's all."
+
+"_Is_ that all, Janey?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And will you love me a little if I love him a great deal? Or do you
+hate me for loving him?"
+
+"Kitty--you needn't be afraid. The more you love him the more I shall
+love you."
+
+"Did--did his wife love him? Oh, ought I to have asked you that?"
+
+Jane shook her head.
+
+"I'm not sure that I ought to tell you."
+
+"She didn't, then?"
+
+"Oh yes, she did, poor little thing. She loved him all she could."
+
+"And it wasn't enough?"
+
+"No, I don't think it was, quite. There was something wanting. But I
+don't think Robert ever knew it."
+
+"He knows it now," said Kitty. Her voice lifted with the pride of
+passion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Marston cancelled that appointment at Whitehall. Somebody else's
+business would have to wait another day, that was all. He was wont to
+settle affairs as they arose, methodically, punctually, in the order of
+their importance. At the moment his own affair and Kitty's was of
+supreme importance. Until it was settled he could not attend to anybody
+else.
+
+He was determined not to let her go. He meant to have her. He did not
+yet know precisely how he was to achieve this end, but as a first step
+to it he engaged a room indefinitely at the Metropole. There was nothing
+like being on the spot. He would consider himself defeated when Lucy had
+actually married her. Meanwhile, he was uplifted by his supreme distrust
+of the event.
+
+His rival had made a very favourable impression on him, with the
+curious effect of heightening Kitty's value in his eyes. Other causes
+contributed, her passion for Lucy, and the subtle purification it had
+wrought in her (a charm to which Marston was by no means unsusceptible),
+the very fact that his own dominion was uncertain and his possession
+incomplete.
+
+Up till now he had been unaware of the grip she had on him. He had never
+allowed for the possibility of permanence in his relations with her sex.
+The idea of marriage was peculiarly unsupportable to him. Even in his
+youth he had had no love affairs, avowed and sanctioned. Though Marston
+professed the utmost devotion to women like Miss Lucy, the women whom
+his mother and his sisters knew, he had noticed a little sadly that he
+soon wearied of their society, that he had no power of sustained
+communion with the good. The unfallen were for him the unapproachable.
+Therefore he had gravitated by taste and temperament to the women of
+the underworld. There his incurable fastidiousness drove him to the
+pursuit of a possible perfection, distinction within the limits, the
+inherent frailties of the type.
+
+In Kitty Tailleur he had found even more than he was looking for. Kitty
+had certain graces, reminiscent of the upper world; a heritage from
+presumably irreproachable parents, that marked her from the women of her
+class. She had, moreover, a way of her own, different from the charm of
+the unfallen, different, too, from the coarse lures of the underworld.
+Kitty was never rank, never insipid. She had a few light brains in her
+body, and knew how to use them, woman-like, for the heightening of her
+charm.
+
+There were other good points about Kitty. Marston disliked parting with
+his money, and he had found Kitty, so far, inexpensive, as women went.
+
+For these reasons, so many and so plausible that they disguised the true
+kind and degree of his subjection, he had before now returned to Kitty
+more than once after he thought that he had tired of her.
+
+Only three weeks ago, on her return from Matlock, he judged that he had
+come to the end of his passion for her; and here he was again at the
+very beginning of it. Instead of perishing it had thrived on absence. He
+found himself on the verge of a new and unforeseen adventure, with
+impulse sharpened by antagonism and frustration. Yet his only chance, he
+knew, was not to be impulsive, but cool rather, calculating and
+cautious. The fight he was in for would have to be fought with brains;
+his against hers.
+
+He sent a note to her early in the morning asking her to see him at
+nine. At nine she saw him.
+
+"I thought," she said, "you were going up to town early."
+
+"I'm not going up to town at all, as it happens, to-day."
+
+"Isn't it rather a pity to neglect your business?"
+
+"My business, dear Kitty, is not any business of yours."
+
+"I'm only trying to make you see that it isn't worth your while stopping
+out of town because of me."
+
+He was a little disconcerted at her divination of his motives, her
+awareness of her own power.
+
+"Well, you see, though the affairs of Whitehall are not your affairs,
+your affairs, unfortunately, are mine; and, since I have to attend to
+them, I prefer to do it at once and get it over. I had some talk with
+Lucy last night."
+
+She turned on him. "Ah, you _have_ given me away."
+
+"Did you ever know me give any one away?"
+
+She did not answer all at once.
+
+He was shocked at her suspicion; at the things she believed it possible
+for a man to do. In the upper world, in a set that discussed its women
+freely, he had never used his knowledge of a woman to harm her. He had
+carried the same scruple into that other world where Kitty lived, where
+he himself was most at home, where an amused, contemptuous tolerance
+played the part of chivalry. The women there trusted him; they found him
+courteous in his very contempt. He had connived at their small deceits,
+the preposterous hypocrisies wherewith they protected themselves. He
+accepted urbanely their pitiful imitations of the lost innocence. Kitty,
+moving reckless and high in her sad circle, had been scornful of her
+sisters' methods. Her soul was as much above them as her body, in its
+unique, incongruous beauty, was above their rouge and coloured raiment.
+It was this superiority of hers that had brought her to her present
+pass; caused her to be mistaken for an honest woman. In her contempt
+for the underworld's deceptions she had achieved the supreme deceit.
+
+Her deceit--that was his point.
+
+"Then," she said presently, "what _did_ you say to him?"
+
+"I said nothing, my dear child, in your disparagement. On the contrary,
+I congratulated him on his engagement. As I'm supposed to be acting as
+your agent, or solicitor, or whatever it is I am acting as, I imagine I
+did right. Is that so?"
+
+"Yes; if that's all you said."
+
+"It is not quite all. I sustained my character by giving him a hint, the
+merest hint, that in the event of your marriage your worldly position
+would be slightly altered. We must prepare him, you know, for the sudden
+collapse of your income."
+
+He rose and went to the mantelpiece, and lingered there over the
+lighting of a cigarette.
+
+"You hadn't thought of that?" he said as he seated himself again.
+
+"No; I hadn't thought of it."
+
+"Well, he didn't appear to have thought of it either."
+
+"What did he say, when you told him that?"
+
+"He said it didn't matter in the very least."
+
+"I knew he would."
+
+"He said, in fact, that nothing mattered."
+
+"What did you say then?"
+
+"Nothing. What could I say?"
+
+She looked at him, trying to see deep into his design, trusting him no
+further than she saw.
+
+"Look here, Kitty, I think you're making a mistake, even from your own
+point of view. You ought to tell him."
+
+"I--can't."
+
+"You must. He's such an awfully decent chap, you can't let him in for
+marrying you without telling him." That was his point and he meant to
+stick to it. "It's what you might call playing it low down on a
+guileless and confiding man. Isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, but I can't tell him."
+
+"It's the straight thing, Kitty."
+
+"I know. But it means giving him up."
+
+"Not at all. He'll respect you all the more for it. He won't go back on
+you."
+
+"He wouldn't if he'd only himself to think of."
+
+"He isn't bound to tell his people. That's another thing."
+
+"It isn't his people--it's--it's his children."
+
+Marston became suddenly attentive. "His children? He's got children, has
+he?"
+
+"Yes, two; two little girls."
+
+That strengthened his point.
+
+"Then, my dear girl, you can't--in common decency--not tell him. Hang it
+all, you've got to give the man a chance."
+
+"A chance to escape? You talk as if I'd set a trap for him."
+
+"My dear child, you haven't sense enough to set a trap. But, since there
+are spring-guns in his neighbourhood, I repeat that you ought to inform
+him of the fact. I dare say he wouldn't funk a spring-gun on his own
+account, but he may not want his children to be hurt."
+
+"I know. He'd be afraid I should contaminate them. I wouldn't, Wilfrid,
+I wouldn't. I wouldn't hurt them for the world."
+
+"I'm sure you wouldn't. But he might think you would. The fathers of
+little girls sometimes have strange prejudices. You see it's all very
+well as long as you can keep him in his beautiful innocence. But, if he
+finds out that you've deceived him, he--well, he might resent it."
+
+He never turned his eyes from that livid, vulnerable spot, striking at
+it with the sword-thrust of his point.
+
+"A man can forgive many things in a woman, but not that."
+
+"I must risk it. He mayn't find out for years and years. If I tell him I
+shall lose him now."
+
+"Not necessarily. Not if he cares for you as much as I should say he
+does."
+
+"It doesn't matter how much he cares. He'd never marry me."
+
+"No. He might make another and more sensible arrangement."
+
+"And then?" She faced him with it.
+
+"Then you'll be satisfied. You'll have had your fling."
+
+"And--when--I've--had it?" she said slowly.
+
+"Then, I suppose, I shall have to take you back."
+
+"I see. That's where you think you'll come in."
+
+"I wasn't thinking, at the moment, of myself. The suggestion was thrown
+out entirely on your behalf, and I may say his. I'm simply telling you
+what--knowing you as I do--I consider the wiser course, for both of
+you."
+
+"You don't know. And you don't know him. He wouldn't do it. He isn't
+that sort."
+
+She paused, brooding over it.
+
+"Besides, I couldn't bear it. I can't go back to that."
+
+"And how many years do you think you'll stand being proper and
+respectable, which is what you'll have to be as long as you're Mrs.
+Robert Lucy? It's a stiffish job, my child, for you to tackle. Just
+think of the practical difficulties. I've accounted for the sudden, very
+singular collapse of your income, but there are all sorts of things that
+you won't be able to account for. The disappearance, for instance, of
+the entire circle of your acquaintance."
+
+She smiled. "It would be _much_ more awkward if it didn't disappear."
+
+"True. Still, a female friend or two is an indispensable part of a
+married woman's outfit. The Lucys mayn't mind, but their friends may
+regard the omission as peculiar. Then--you have charming manners, I
+know--but your speech is apt, at times, to be a little, what shall I
+say? Unfettered. The other day, when you were annoyed with me, you
+called me a beast."
+
+"That's nothing. I might have called you something much worse."
+
+"You might. Happily, you did not. I've no objection to the word; it can
+be used as a delicate endearment, but in your mouth it loses any tender
+grace it might have had."
+
+"I'm sorry, Wilfrid."
+
+"Don't apologise. _I_ didn't mind. But if you call Lucy a beast he won't
+like it."
+
+"I couldn't. Besides, I shall be very careful."
+
+"You will have to be extremely careful. The Lucys live in Hampstead, I
+believe, and Hampstead enjoys the reputation of being the most
+respectable suburb of London. You've no idea of the sort of people
+you'll have to meet there. You'll terrify them, and they, my poor
+Kitten, will exterminate you. You don't know what respectability is
+like."
+
+"I don't care. I can stand anything."
+
+"You think you can. I _know_ that you won't be able to stand it for a
+fortnight. You'll find that the air of Hampstead doesn't agree with you.
+And wherever you go it'll be the same thing. You had very much better
+stick to me."
+
+"To you?"
+
+"You'll be safer and happier. If you'll stay with me----"
+
+"I never have--stayed--with you."
+
+"No, but I'd like you to."
+
+He was not going to make love to her. He was far too clever for that. He
+knew that with a woman like Kitty, in Kitty's state of mind, he had
+nothing to gain by making love. Neither did he propose to pit his will
+against hers. That course had answered well enough in the time of his
+possession of her. Passion, which was great in her, greater than her
+will, made his will powerless over her. His plan was to match the forces
+of her brain with superior, with overwhelming forces.
+
+He continued coldly. "I'm not satisfied with the present arrangement any
+more than you are. If you'll stay with me you shall live where you
+choose; only don't choose Park Lane, for I can't afford it. I'll give
+you any mortal thing I _can_ afford."
+
+"You think you can give me what Robert Lucy's giving me?"
+
+"I can give you a home, Kitty, as long as you'll live in it. I can give
+you the advantages of marriage without its drawbacks. You won't be tied
+to me a minute longer than you like. Whereas you can't leave Lucy
+without a scandal."
+
+"You think that a safe arrangement, do you? I can leave you when I want
+to."
+
+"You can leave me any day. So the chances are that you won't want to."
+
+"And when you're tired of me?"
+
+[Illustration: "'You won't be tied to me a minute longer than you
+like.'"]
+
+"That's it. I shan't be tired of you. I've a different feeling for you
+from any I've ever had for any other woman, for the simple reason that
+you're a different woman every time I see you. That's the secret of
+your fascination. Didn't you know it?"
+
+She shook her head, but she was not attending to him.
+
+"If you don't know it there's no harm in telling you that I'm very fond
+of you."
+
+"What earthly use is it, Wilfrid, being fond of me, as long as I'm not
+fond of you?"
+
+Ah, that was a mistake. He was on perilous ground. She was strong there.
+She matched his bloodless, unblushing candour with her throbbing,
+passionate sincerity.
+
+"That's all the better," he said. "It wouldn't pay you, Kitty, to be
+fond of me. If I thought you were fond of me to-day it would leave me
+with nothing to look forward to to-morrow. If you were as fond of me as
+you are of Lucy, it would bore me horribly. What's more, it would bore
+you. It would tire you out, and you'd bolt in a week's time. As, I can
+tell you, you'll bolt from him."
+
+"You think I shall do that. He doesn't. That's why I'm fond of him."
+
+"I wouldn't be too fond of him. It never pays. Either you'll tire of him
+in a week, or, if you go on being fond of him you'll end by being afraid
+of him. You need never be afraid of me."
+
+"I _am_ afraid of you."
+
+"Not you. I understand you, Kitty, and he doesn't."
+
+"You mean you know the worst of me?"
+
+"Precisely. What's more, I should condone what you call the worst of
+you, and he wouldn't."
+
+"I know you would. That's why I'm afraid of you. You only know the worst
+of me, and he--he knows, he understands, the rest. There's something in
+me that you've never seen; you couldn't see it; you wouldn't believe in
+it; you'd kill it if I stayed with you. It's no use talking, for I
+won't."
+
+"Why not?" he asked as if nothing she had said had been of any moment.
+
+"I've told you why not. But I don't expect you to understand it."
+
+"If there's anything in it I shall understand it in the end. I'm not a
+fool."
+
+"No, you're not a fool. I'll say that for you."
+
+"Unless it's folly to be as fond of you as I am."
+
+"Oh, no, that's not folly. You'll be fond of me just as long as I'm nice
+to look at; as long as it doesn't bore you to talk to me; as long as I
+don't give you any trouble."
+
+"Good God! Why, look at the trouble you're giving me now."
+
+"Yes, the trouble I'm giving you now, when I'm young and pretty and you
+can't have me. But when you _have_ had me; when I'm tired out and ill
+and--and thin; will you be fool enough to be fond of me then?"
+
+"You have been ill, you were ill last night, and--I've got over it."
+
+"You never came near me when I was ill at Matlock. You call that giving
+me what Robert Lucy gives me? Robert has seen me when I've been as ugly
+as sin, when my eyes have been bunged up with crying. And it made no
+difference. He'll love me when I'm thin and ill and old. When I'm dead
+he'll love me."
+
+He faced her passion as it flamed up before him, faced it with his cold,
+meditative smile.
+
+"That's just what makes it such a beastly shame."
+
+"My not giving him up? How _can_ I give him up?"
+
+"I see your point. You think you're exchanging a temporary affection for
+a permanent one. You admit that I shall love you as long as you're nice
+to look at. Very well. You'll be nice to look at for some considerable
+time. I shall therefore love you for some considerable time. Robert Lucy
+will love you just as long as he believes in you. How long will that
+be?"
+
+She did not answer.
+
+"You don't know. Have you calculated the probable effect of gradual
+enlightenment on our friend's mind?"
+
+"I've calculated nothing."
+
+"No. You are not a calculating woman. I just ask you to consider this
+point. I am not, as you know, in the least surprised at any of your
+charming little aberrations. But our friend Lucy has not had many
+surprises in his life. He'll come to you with an infinite capacity for
+astonishment. It's quite uncertain how he'll take--er--anything in the
+nature of a surprise. And, if you ask me, I should say he'd take it
+hard. Are you going to risk that?"
+
+He was returning to his point even when he feigned to have lost sight of
+it. Tortured and panting she evaded it with pitiful subterfuges. He
+urged her back, pressing her tender breast against the prick of it.
+
+"I'm going to risk everything," she said.
+
+"Risk it, risk it, then. Tie yourself for life to a man you don't know;
+who doesn't really know you, though you think he does; who on your own
+showing wouldn't marry you if he did know. You see what a whopping big
+risk it is, for he's bound to know in the end."
+
+She sickened and wearied. "He is not bound to know. Why is he?"
+
+"Because, my dear girl, you're bound to give yourself away some day.
+I know you. I know the perverse little devil that is in you. When
+you realise what you've let yourself in for you'll break loose,
+suddenly--like that." He threw out his arms as if he burst bonds
+asunder. "You can't help yourself. You simply can't live the life.
+You may yearn for it, but you can't live it."
+
+"I don't want to be respectable. It isn't that."
+
+"What is it then?"
+
+"Can't you see?"
+
+He looked at her closely, as if he saw it for the first time.
+
+"Are you so awfully gone on him?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "You _won't_ tell him? It'll kill me if he knows."
+
+"You think it will, but it won't."
+
+"I shall kill myself, then."
+
+"Oh no, you won't. You only think you will. It's Lucy I'm sorry for."
+
+"And it's me you're hard on. You were always hard. You say you condone
+things, but you condone nothing, and you're not good yourself."
+
+"No, I'm not good myself. But there is conduct and conduct. I can
+condone everything but the fraud you're practising on this innocent
+man." He rose. "It's--well--you see, it's such a beastly shame."
+
+It was to be a battle of brains, and she had foiled him with the
+indomitable stupidity of her passion. But his point--the one point that
+he stuck to--was a sword point for her passion.
+
+"You won't tell him? You won't? It would be a blackguardly thing to do."
+
+"If Lucy was a friend of mine I'm afraid the blackguardly thing would
+be to hold my tongue."
+
+"You'd tell him then?" she said. "You wouldn't think of me?"
+
+She came to him. She laid her arms upon his shoulders. Her hands touched
+him with dispassionate, deliberate, ineffectual caresses, a pitiful
+return to a discarded manner, an outrageous imitation of the old
+professional cajoleries. It was so poor a thing that it had no power to
+move him. What moved him was the look in her eyes, the look which his
+brain told him was the desperate, incredulous appeal of her unhappy
+soul.
+
+"I don't know, Kitty," he said. "Thank heaven, he's not a friend of
+mine."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+It was not from Marston, then, that she had to fear betrayal. Neither
+was she any more afraid of the rumours of the Cliff Hotel. She was aware
+that her engagement to Robert Lucy, unannounced but accepted for the
+simple fact it was, had raised her above censure and suspicion.
+
+It had come just in time to occupy Mrs. Jurd and Miss Keating on their
+way to Surbiton.
+
+When Kitty thought of Grace Keating she said to herself, "How will Bunny
+feel now?" But her mortal exultation was checked by her pity for poor
+Bunny, who would have been so happy if she had been married.
+
+Then there were the Hankins. She reflected sanely that they couldn't be
+dangerous, for they knew nothing. Still she did feel a little uneasy
+when she thought of the Hankins.
+
+She was thinking of them now as she and Robert sat on the Cliff, making
+the most of their last hour together before the arrival of the little
+girls.
+
+"Robert," she said, "the Hankins are probably sitting down there under
+the Cliff. Supposing they see us?"
+
+"They can't, we're over their heads."
+
+"But if they do what do you suppose they'll think?"
+
+"If they think at all, they'll have an inkling of the truth. But it
+isn't their business. The children will be here soon," he added.
+
+She looked at him intently. Was he trying, she wondered, to reassure her
+that the presence of his children would protect her? Or was he merely
+preoccupied with the thought of their arrival?
+
+"You don't mind," he said presently, "not coming to the station?"
+
+He had said that already twice before. Why ask, she said, when he knew
+perfectly well she didn't mind?
+
+Of course she didn't mind. She knew his idea, that they were not to be
+confronted with her suddenly. He meant to let her dawn on them
+beautifully, with the tenderest gradations. He would approach them with
+an incomparable cunning. He would tell them that they were going to see
+a very pretty lady. And when they were thoroughly inured to the idea of
+her, he would announce that the pretty lady was coming to stay with
+them, and that she would never go away.
+
+She looked at her watch.
+
+"We've got another half-hour before they come."
+
+"Kitty, I believe you're afraid of them?"
+
+"Yes, Robert, I'm afraid."
+
+"What? Of two small children?"
+
+"What are they like? I haven't asked you that."
+
+"Well, Janet's a queer, uncanny little person, rather long for her age
+and very thin----"
+
+"Like you?"
+
+"Like me. At first you think she's all legs. Then you see a little white
+face with enormous eyes that look at you as if she was wondering what
+you are."
+
+He smiled. His mind had gone off, away from her, to the contemplation of
+his little daughter.
+
+"I think she is clever, but one never knows. We have to handle her very
+carefully. Barbara's all right. You can pitch her about like anything."
+
+"What is Barbara like?"
+
+"Barbara? She's round and fat and going to be pretty, like----"
+
+"Like her mother?"
+
+"No, like Janey, if Janey was fat. They're both a little difficult to
+manage. If you reprove Barbara, she bursts out laughing in your face. If
+you even hint to Janet that you disapprove of her, she goes away
+somewhere and weeps."
+
+"Poor little thing. I'm afraid," said Kitty sadly, "they're not so very
+small."
+
+"Well, Janet, I believe, is seven, and Barbara is five."
+
+"Barbara is five. And, oh dear me, Janet is seven."
+
+"Is that such a very formidable age?"
+
+She laughed uneasily. "Yes. That's the age when they begin to take
+notice, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, no, they do that when they're babies. Even Barbara's grown out of
+that. I say, Kitty, what a lot you know."
+
+"Don't, Robert." She looked at him imploringly and put her hand in his.
+
+"I won't, if you'll only tell me what I'm not to do."
+
+"You're not to tease me about the things you think I don't know. I used
+to nurse my little sisters, when I wasn't very big myself. I can't nurse
+Janet, or Barbara, can I?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"They wouldn't let me. They're too old. It won't be the same thing at
+all."
+
+"Well," said Robert, and paused, hiding from her the thing that was in
+his mind.
+
+"Oh, Robert, I do wish, I do wish they were really small."
+
+"I'm sorry, Kitty. But perhaps----"
+
+He could not hide anything from Kitty.
+
+"No, Robert," she said, "I'm afraid there won't be any perhaps. That's
+one of the things I meant to tell you. But I'm not bothering about that.
+I meant--if they were little--little things, I shouldn't be so
+dreadfully afraid of them."
+
+"Why? What do you think they'll do to you, Kitty?"
+
+"I--don't--know."
+
+"You needn't be alarmed. I believe they're very well-behaved. Jane has
+brought them up quite nicely."
+
+"What is Jane going to do?"
+
+"Ah--that's what I wanted to ask you about."
+
+"You needn't ask me. You want her to stay and look after them just the
+same?"
+
+"No, not just the same. I want her to stay and she won't. She says it
+wouldn't be fair to you."
+
+"But--if she only would, that would make it all so easy. You see, I
+could look after you, and she could look after them."
+
+"You don't want to be bored with them?"
+
+"You know that isn't what I mean. I don't want them to suffer."
+
+"Why _should_ they suffer?" There was some irritation in his tone.
+
+"Because I don't think, Robert, I'm really fit to bring up children."
+
+"I think you are. And I don't mean anybody else to bring them up. If
+you're my wife, Kitty, you're their mother."
+
+"And they're to be mine as well as yours?"
+
+"As much yours as you can make them, dear."
+
+"Oh, how you trust me. That's what makes me so afraid. And--do you
+think they'll really love me?"
+
+"Trust _them_--for that."
+
+"You asked me if I could care for you, Robert; you never asked me if I
+could care for them. You trusted me for that!"
+
+"I could have forgiven you if you couldn't care for _me_."
+
+"But you couldn't forgive me if I didn't care for them? Is that it?"
+
+"No; I simply couldn't understand any woman not caring for them. I think
+you _will_ like the little things, when you've seen them."
+
+"I'll promise you one thing. I won't be jealous of them."
+
+"Jealous? Why on earth should you be?"
+
+"Some women are. I was afraid I might be that sort."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because--oh, because I care for you so awfully. But that's just it.
+That's why I can't be jealous of them. They're yours, you see. I can't
+separate them from you."
+
+"Well, well, let's wait until you've seen them."
+
+"Don't you believe me, Robert? Women _do_ love their children before
+they've seen them. I don't need to see them. I _have_ seen them. I saw
+them all last night."
+
+She looked away from him, brooding, as if she still saw them.
+
+"There's only one person I could be jealous of, and I'm not jealous of
+her any more."
+
+"Poor little Jane."
+
+"It wasn't Jane. It was their mother. I mean it was your wife."
+
+He turned and looked at her. There was amazement in his kind, simple
+face.
+
+"I suppose you think that's fiendish of me?"
+
+He did not reply.
+
+"But--Robert--I'm not jealous of her any more. I don't care if she was
+your wife."
+
+"Kitty, my dear child----"
+
+"I don't care if she had ten children and _I_ never had one. It's got
+nothing to do with it. She had you for--two years, wasn't it?"
+
+"Two years, Kitty."
+
+"Poor thing; and I shall have you all my life."
+
+"Yes. And so, if you don't mind, dear, I'd rather you didn't talk about
+that again."
+
+"I'm sorry. I won't ever again."
+
+She sat silent for a moment in a sort of penitential shame. Then she
+burst out--
+
+"I'm not jealous. But, Robert, if you were to leave me for another woman
+it would kill me. I daren't say that to any other man if I cared for
+him. It would just make him go and do it. But I believe somehow you'd
+think twice before you killed me."
+
+He only smiled at this, and spoke gently.
+
+"Yes, Kitty, you're right. I believe I _would_ think twice about it."
+
+He said to himself that this fierceness, her passionate perversity, all
+that was most unintelligible in her, was just Kitty's way--the way of a
+woman recklessly, adorably in love. It stirred in him the very depths of
+tenderness. When she was married (they must marry very soon) she would
+be happy; she would understand him; she would settle down.
+
+He looked at his watch. "I'm afraid I must be going."
+
+She glanced at the hands of the watch over his shoulder. "You needn't,"
+she said. "It isn't really time."
+
+"Well--five minutes."
+
+The five minutes went. "Time's up," he said.
+
+"Oh, no, Robert--not yet."
+
+"Kitty--don't you want to see them?"
+
+"I don't want you to go."
+
+"I'm coming back."
+
+"Yes, but it won't be the same thing. It never will be the same thing as
+now."
+
+"Poor Kitty--I say, I _must_ go and meet them."
+
+"Very well." She stood up. "Kiss me," she said.
+
+She took his kiss as if it were the last that would be given her.
+
+They went together to the hotel. Jane had started five minutes ago for
+the station.
+
+"It's all right," he said. "I'll catch her up."
+
+She followed to the gates and looked down the white road where Jane had
+gone.
+
+"Let me come with you--just a little way--to the first lamp-post on the
+station road."
+
+"Well, to the first lamp-post."
+
+At the lamp-post she let him go.
+
+She stood looking after him till he swung round the turn of the road,
+out of her sight. Then she went back, slowly, sad-eyed, and with a great
+terror in her heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+It was not the thing she had confessed to him, fear of his little unseen
+children, it was terror, unconfessed, uncomprehended, as it were
+foreknowledge of the very soul of destiny clothed for her in their
+tender flesh and blood.
+
+Up till now she had been careless of her destiny. She had been so
+joyous, so defiant in her sinning. By that charm of hers, younger than
+youth, indestructibly childlike, she had carried it through with the
+audacity of chartered innocence. She had propitiated, ignored, eluded
+the more feminine amenities of fate. Of course, she had had her bad
+moments. She had been sorry, sometimes, and she had been sick; but on
+the whole her powers had been splendidly recuperative. She had shown
+none of those naked tender spots that provoke destiny to strike. And
+with it all she had preserved, perhaps too scrupulously, the rules laid
+down for such as she. She had kept her own place. She had never
+attempted to invade the sanctuaries set apart for other women.
+
+It was Robert who had tempted her to that transgression. He had opened
+the door of the sanctuary for her and shut it behind her and put his
+back against it. He had made her believe that if she stayed in there,
+with him, it would be all right. She might have known what would happen.
+It was for such a moment, of infatuation made perfect, that destiny was
+waiting.
+
+Kitty had no very luminous idea of its intentions. But she bore in her
+blood forebodings, older and obscurer than the flashes of the brain; and
+her heart had swift immortal instincts, forerunners of the mortal hours.
+The powers of pain, infallibly wise, implacably just, would choose their
+moment well, striking at her through the hands of the children she had
+never borne.
+
+If Robert found out what she was before he married her, he would have
+to give her up because of them. She knew better than he did the hold she
+had over him. She had tried to keep him in ignorance of her power, so
+great was her terror of what it might do to him, and to her through him.
+Yet, with all her sad science, she remained uncertain of his ultimate
+behaviour. That was the charm and the danger of him. For fear of some
+undiscovered, uncalculated quality in him she had held herself back; she
+had been careful how she touched him, how she looked at him, lest her
+hands or her eyes should betray her; lest in his heart he should call
+her by her name, and fling her from him because of them. Whereas, but
+for them, she judged that whatever she was he would not give her up. She
+was not quite sure (you couldn't say _what_ a man like Robert would or
+wouldn't do), but she felt that if she could have had him to herself, if
+there had been only he and she, facing the world, then, for sheer
+chivalry, he simply couldn't have left her. Even now, once he was
+married to her it would be all right; he couldn't give her up or leave
+her; the worst he could do would be to separate her from them.
+
+There was really no reason then why she should be frightened. He was
+going to marry her very soon. She knew that, by her science, though he
+had not said so. She would be all right. She would be very careful. It
+wasn't as if she didn't want to be nice and to do all the proper things.
+
+And so Kitty cast off care.
+
+Only, as she waited in the room prepared for the children, she looked at
+herself in the glass, once, to make sure that there was nothing in her
+face that could betray her. No; Nature had spared her as yet and her
+youth was good to her. Her face looked back at her, triumphantly
+reticent, innocent of memory, holding her charm, a secret beyond the
+secrets of corruption, as her perfect body held the mystery and the
+prophecy of her power. Besides, her face was different now from what it
+had been. Wilfrid had intimated to her that it was different. It was the
+face that Robert loved; it had the look that told him that she loved
+him, a look it never wore for any other man. Even now as she thought of
+him it lightened and grew rosy. She saw it herself and wondered and took
+hope. "That's how I look when I'm happy, is it? I'm always happy when
+I'm with him, so," she reasoned, "he will always see me like that; and
+it will be all right."
+
+Anyhow, there would be no unhappiness about his pretty lady when he came
+back with them.
+
+She smiled softly as she went about the room, putting the touches of
+perfection to the festival. There were roses everywhere; on the table,
+on the mantelpiece; the room was sweet with the smell of them; there was
+a rose on each child's plate. The tremulous movements of her hands
+betrayed the immensity and the desperation of her passion to please.
+The very waiter was touched by her, and smiled secretly in sympathy as
+he saw her laying her pretty lures. When he had gone she arranged the
+table all over again and did it better. Then she stood looking at it,
+hovering round it, thinking. She would sit here, and the children there,
+Janet between her and Robert, Barbara between her and Jane.
+
+"Poor little things," she said, "poor little things." She yearned to
+them even in her fear of them, and when she thought of them sitting
+there her lips moved in unspoken, pitiful endearments.
+
+The light from the south-west streamed into the little room and made it
+golden. Everything in it shimmered and shone. The window, flung wide
+open to the veranda, framed the green lawn and the shining, shimmering
+sea. A wind, small and soft, stirred the thin curtains to and fro,
+fanning the warm air. The sunlight and heat oppressed her. She shut her
+eyes and put her hands over them to cool them with darkness. It was a
+trick she had when she was troubled.
+
+She sat by the window and waited in the strange, throbbing darkness of
+hot eyes closed in daylight, a darkness smitten by the sun and shot with
+a fiery fume.
+
+They were coming now. She heard feet on the gravel outside, round the
+corner; she heard Robert's voice and Janey's; and then little shuffling
+footsteps at the door, and two voices shrill and sweet.
+
+Robert came in first and the children with him. They stood all three on
+the threshold, looking at her. Robert was smiling, but the little girls
+(they were very little) were grave. His eyes drew her and she came
+toward them as she was used to come to the things of her desire, swift
+and shy, with a trailing, troubling movement; the way that he had seen
+her come, swayed by the rhythm of impulse.
+
+The children stood stock still as she stooped to them. Her fear of them
+made her supremely gentle. Little Barbara put up her round rose face
+with its soft mouth thrust forward in a premature kiss. Janet gave her a
+tiny hand and gazed at her with brooding, irresponsive eyes. Her little
+mouth never moved as Kitty's mouth touched it.
+
+But little Barbara held out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see.
+"Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles
+in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a
+divine superfluity of joy.
+
+Robert stood looking down from his tremendous height at Barbara,
+tenderly as one who contemplates a thing at once heartrending and
+absurd. Then his eyes turned to Kitty, smiling quietly as if they said,
+"Didn't I tell you to wait until you'd seen them?" Kitty's heart
+contracted with a sharp, abominable pang.
+
+Then Janey took the little girls to the room upstairs where their nurse
+was. Barbara looked back at Kitty as she went, but Kitty's eyes
+followed Janet.
+
+"Robert," she said, "will she always look at me like that? Shall I never
+know what she is thinking?"
+
+"None of us know what Janet's thinking."
+
+He paused.
+
+"I told you we had to be very careful of her."
+
+"Is she delicate?"
+
+"No. Physically, she's far stronger than Barbara. She's what you call
+morally delicate."
+
+She flushed. "What do you mean, Robert?"
+
+"Well--not able to bear things. For instance, we'd a small child staying
+with us once. It turned out that she wasn't a nice child at all. We
+didn't know it, though. But Janet had a perfect horror of her. It's as
+if she had a sort of intuition. She was so unhappy about it that we had
+to send the child away."
+
+His forehead was drawn into a frown of worry and perplexity.
+
+"I don't see how she's to grow up. It makes me feel so awfully
+responsible. The world isn't an entirely pretty place, you know, and it
+seems such a cruel shame to bring a child like that into it. Doesn't
+it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Somehow I think you'll understand her, Kitty."
+
+"Yes, Robert, I understand."
+
+She came to him. She laid her hand on the sleeve of his coat, and stood
+by him. Her eyes were shining through some dew that was not tears.
+
+"What is it, Kitty?"
+
+"Will you marry me soon?" she said. "Very soon?" she whispered. "I--I
+can't wait." She hid her face against his arm.
+
+He thought it was the motherhood in her that was moved, that pleaded,
+impatient for its hour.
+
+"Why should we wait? Do you suppose I want to?"
+
+"Hush!" she said. "They're coming."
+
+They came a little solemnly, as beseemed a festival. Janet, in her long
+white pinafore, looked more than ever the spiritual thing she was. Her
+long brown hair hung down her cheeks, straight and smooth as a parted
+veil, sharpening her small face, that flickered as a flame flickers in
+troubled air. Beside her little Barbara bloomed and glowed, with cheeks
+full-blown, and cropped head flowering into curls that stood on end in
+brown tufts, and tawny feathers, and little crests of gold. They took
+their places, pensively, at the table.
+
+They had beautiful manners, Robert's children; little exquisite, gentle
+ways of approaching and of handling things. They held themselves very
+erect, with a secure, diminutive distinction. Kitty's heart sank deeper
+as she looked at them. Even Barbara, who was so very young, carried her
+small perfections intact through all the spontaneities of her behaviour.
+
+All through tea-time little Barbara, pursued by her dream, talked
+incessantly of castles in the sand. And when she was tired of talking
+she began to sing.
+
+"Darling," said Jane, "we don't sing at tea-time."
+
+"_I_ do," said little Barbara, and laughed.
+
+Jane laughed too, hysterically.
+
+Then the spirit of little Barbara entered into Jane, and made her
+ungovernably gay. It passed into Kitty, and ran riot in her blood and
+nerves. Whenever Barbara laughed Kitty laughed, and when Kitty laughed
+Robert laughed too. Even Janet gave a little shriek now and then. The
+children thought it was all because they had had strawberries and cream
+for tea, and were going down to the sea to build castles in the sand.
+
+All afternoon, till dinner-time, Kitty laboured on the sands, building
+castles as if she had never done anything else in her life. The Hankins
+watched her from their seat on the rocks in the angle of the Cliff.
+
+"We were mistaken. She must be all right. How pretty she is, too, poor
+thing," said Mrs. Hankin to her husband.
+
+"How pretty she is, how absolutely lovable and good," said Robert to
+himself as he watched her, while Barbara, a tired little labourer, lay
+stretched in her lap. She was sitting on a rock under the Cliff, with
+the great brow of it for a canopy. Her eyes were lowered, and hidden by
+their deep lids. She was smiling at the child who leaned back in her
+arms, crushing a soft cheek against her breast.
+
+He threw himself down beside her. He had just finished a prodigious
+fortress, with earthworks and trenches extending to the sea.
+
+"Kitty, Kitty," he said, "you're only a child yourself, like Janey.
+She's perfectly happy building castles in the sand--so are you. You're a
+perfect baby."
+
+"We're all babies, Robert, building castles in the sand. And you're the
+biggest baby of the lot."
+
+"I don't care. I've built the biggest castle."
+
+"Look at Janet," said Kitty. "She'll be grown up before any of us."
+
+The child sat on a rock with Jane. But, from the distance that she kept,
+she looked at her father and Kitty from time to time. All afternoon
+Janet had clung to Jane. But when bed-time came Robert took her aside
+and whispered something to her. Going home she walked by Kitty, and put
+her hand in hers.
+
+"Daddy said I'm to be very kind to you."
+
+"Did he? That's very kind of daddy."
+
+"Daddy's always kind to people. Especially when they've not been very
+happy. Really and truly I'm going to be kind. But you won't mind if I
+don't love you _very_ soon, will you?"
+
+"Of course I won't. Only don't leave it too late, darling."
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Janet thoughtfully; "we've lots of time."
+
+"Have we?"
+
+"Heaps and heaps. You see, I love Auntie Janey, and it might hurt her
+feelings."
+
+"I see."
+
+"But I'm going to give you something," said Janet presently.
+
+"I don't want you to give me anything that belongs to Auntie Janey."
+
+"No," said Janet; "I shall give you something of my own."
+
+"Oh! And you can't tell me what it's going to be?"
+
+"I must think about it." The little girl became lost in thought.
+"Barbara likes kissing people. I don't."
+
+"So I see. It won't be kisses, then?"
+
+"No; it won't be kisses. It will," she reiterated, "be something of my
+own."
+
+She dropped Kitty's hand.
+
+"You won't mind if I go to Auntie Janey now?"
+
+Kitty told Janey about it afterward, as they sat alone in the lounge
+before dinner.
+
+"You mustn't mind, Kitty dear," said Jane. "It only means that she's a
+faithful little soul. She'll be just as faithful to you some day."
+
+"Some day."
+
+"Don't sigh like that, Kitty."
+
+"She's like Robert, isn't she?"
+
+"Very like Robert."
+
+She brooded.
+
+"Janey," she said, "let me have him to myself this evening."
+
+All evening she had him to herself, out on the Cliff, in the place where
+nobody came but they.
+
+"Well," he said, "what do you think of them?"
+
+"I think they're adorable."
+
+"Funny little beggars, aren't they? How did you get on with Janet?"
+
+She told him.
+
+"That's Janet's little way. To give you something of her own." He smiled
+in tender satisfaction, repeating the child's phrase.
+
+"It's all right, Kitty. She's only holding herself in. You're in for a
+big thing."
+
+She surveyed it.
+
+"I know, Robert. I know."
+
+"You're tired? Have the children been too much for you?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You're not to make yourself a slave to them, you know."
+
+She looked at him.
+
+"Was I all right, Robert?"
+
+"You were perfect."
+
+"You said I was only a child myself."
+
+"So you are. That's why I like you."
+
+She shook her head again.
+
+"It's all very well," she said, "but that isn't what you want,
+dear--another child."
+
+"How do you know what I want?"
+
+"You want somebody much nicer than I am."
+
+He was silent, looking at her as he had looked at Barbara, enjoying her
+absurdity, letting her play, like the child she was, with her
+preposterous idea.
+
+"Oh, Robert, you do _really_ think I'm nice?" She came nearer to him,
+crying out like a child in pain. He put his arm round her, and comforted
+her as best he could.
+
+"You child, do you suppose I'd marry you if I didn't think you nice?"
+
+"You might. You mightn't care."
+
+"As it happens, I do care, very much. Anyhow, I wouldn't ask you to be a
+mother to my children if I didn't think you nice. That's the test."
+
+"Yes, Robert," she repeated, "that's the test."
+
+They rose and went back to the hotel. From the lawn they could see the
+open window of the children's room. They looked up.
+
+"Would you like to see them, Kitty?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He took her up to them. They were asleep. Little Barbara lay curled up
+in the big bed, right in the middle of it where her dreams had tossed
+her. Janet, in the cot beside her, lay very straight and still.
+
+Robert signed to Kitty to come near, and they stood together and looked
+first at the children and then into each other's faces. Kitty was very
+quiet.
+
+"Do you like them?" he whispered.
+
+Her lips quivered, but she made no sign.
+
+He stooped over each bed, smoothing the long hair from Janet's forehead,
+folding back the blanket that weighed on Barbara's little body. When he
+turned, Kitty had gone. She had slipped into her own room.
+
+She waited till she heard Robert go away. The children were alone in
+there. The nurse, she knew, was in Jane's room across the passage. Jane
+was probably telling her that her master was to be married very soon.
+
+She looked out. The door of Jane's room was shut; so was the door of the
+children's room through which Robert had gone out. The other, the door
+of communication, she had left ajar. She went softly back through it and
+stood again by the children's beds. Janet was still sound asleep. Her
+fine limbs were still stretched straight and quiet under the blanket.
+Her hair was as Robert's hand had left it.
+
+Kitty was afraid of disturbing Janet's sleep. She was afraid of Janet.
+
+She stooped over little Barbara, and turned back the bedclothes from the
+bed. She laid herself down, half her length, upon it by Barbara's side,
+and folded her in arms that scarcely touched her at first, so light they
+lay on her. Then some perverse and passionate impulse seized her to wake
+the child. She did it gently, tenderly, holding back her passion,
+troubling the depths of sleep with fine, feather-like touches, with
+kisses soft as sleep.
+
+The child stirred under the caressing arms. She lay in her divine
+beauty, half asleep, half awake, opening her eyes, and shutting them on
+the secret of her dream. Then Kitty's troubling hand turned her from her
+flight down the ways of sleep. She lay on her back, her eyes glimmered
+in the lifting of their lids; they opened under Kitty's eyes that
+watched them, luminous, large and clear. Her mouth curled under Kitty's
+mouth, in drowsy kisses plucked from the annihilated dream. She drew up
+her rosy knees and held out her arms to Kitty's arms and smiled, half
+awake and half asleep.
+
+Kitty rose, lifting the child with her from the bed. She held her close,
+pressing the tender body close to her own body with quivering hands,
+stroking the adorable little face with her own face, closing her eyes
+under the touch of it as she closed them when Robert's face touched
+hers. She was aware that she had brought some passionate, earthly
+quality of her love for Robert into her love for Robert's child.
+
+She said to herself, "I'm terrible; there's something wrong with me.
+This isn't the way to love a child."
+
+She laid the little thing down again, freed her neck from the drowsy,
+detaining arms, and covered the small body up out of her sight.
+Barbara, thus abandoned, cried, and the cry cut through her heart.
+
+She went into her own room, and threw herself on her bed and writhed
+there, torn by many pangs. The pang of the heart and the pang of the
+half-born spirit, struggling with the body that held it back from birth;
+and through it all the pang of the motherhood she had thwarted and
+disowned. Out of the very soil of corruption it pierced, sharp and pure,
+infinitely painful. It was almost indiscernible from the fierce
+exultation of her heart that had found fulfilment, and from the passion
+of her body that yet waited for its own.
+
+She undressed herself, and crept into her bed and lay there, tortured,
+visited by many memories. She gazed with terrified, pitiful eyes into a
+darkness that was peopled for her with all the faces she had known in
+the short seasons of her sinning; men, and the women who had been her
+friends and her companions; and the strangers who had passed her by, or
+who had lingered and looked on. The faces of Robert and his children
+hung somewhere on the outskirts of her vision, but she could not fix
+them or hold them; they were trampled out, obliterated by that
+phantasmal procession of her shames. Some faces, more terrible than all,
+detached themselves and crowded round her, the faces of those who had
+pursued her, and of those whom her own light feet pursued; from the
+first who had found her and left her, to the last whom she herself had
+held captive and let go. They stood about her bed; they stretched out
+their hands and touched her; their faces peered into hers; faces that
+she had forgotten. She thrust them from her into the darkness and they
+came again. Each bore the same likeness to his fellow; each had the same
+looks, the same gestures that defied her to forget. She fell asleep; and
+the dreams, the treacherous, perpetually remembering, delivered her into
+their hands.
+
+She waked at dawn, with memory quickened by her dreams. She heard voices
+now, all the voices that had accused her. Her mother's voice spoke
+first, and it was very sad. It said, "I am sending you away, Kitty,
+because of the children." Then her father's voice, very stern, "No, I
+will not have you back. You must stay where you are for your little
+sisters' sake." And her mother's voice again--afterward--sad and stern,
+too, this time, "As you made your bed, Kitty, you must lie. We can't
+take you back."
+
+And there was a third voice. It said very softly, "You can't have it
+both ways." It cried out aloud in a fury, "I've always known it. You
+can't hide it. You're full of it." And yet another voice, deep and hard,
+"You can't _not_ tell him. It's a shame Kitty; it's an awful shame."
+
+She could not sleep again for listening to them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+It was morning. She dragged herself up and tried to dress. But her hands
+shook and her head ached violently. She stretched herself half-dressed
+upon her bed and lay there helpless, surrendered to the bodily pain that
+delivered her mercifully from the anguish of her mind.
+
+She saw no one, not even Jane Lucy.
+
+Outside, in the passage, and in the inner room she heard the footsteps
+of the children and their little shrill voices; each sound accentuated
+the stabbing pulse of pain. It was impossible to darken the room, and
+the insufferable sunlight poured in unchecked through the thin yellow
+blinds and plagued her brain, till the nerves of vision throbbed, beat
+for beat, with the nerves of torment. At noon she had only one sensation
+of brilliant surging pain.
+
+She dozed and her headache lifted. When she woke her body was weak as if
+it had had a fever, but her mind closed on reality with the impact of a
+force delayed.
+
+There was a thing not yet quite real to her, a thing that seemed to
+belong to the region of bodily pain, to be born there as a bad dream
+might be born; a thing that had been there last night among other
+things, that, as she stared at it, became more prominent, more poignant
+than they. And yet, though its air was so beckoning and so familiar, it
+was not among the number of things accomplished and irrevocable. It was
+simply the thing she had to do.
+
+It possessed her now; and under its dominion she was uplifted, carried
+along. Her mind moved toward it with a reckless rocking speed, the
+perilous certainty of the insane.
+
+At five o'clock she rang the bell and asked the servant to bring her
+some tea. She swallowed a little with a jerk of her throat, and put the
+cup down, shuddering. It brought her a sickening memory of yesterday.
+
+At five o'clock she got up and dressed herself and sent a message to
+Robert Lucy to see her downstairs in her sitting-room, alone. As she
+stood at her glass she said to herself, "How shocking I look. But he
+won't mind."
+
+At six he was with her.
+
+She drew her hand away from his as if his touch had hurt her. Her smile
+was the still, bloodless smile that comes with pain. She drew her chair
+back out of the sunlight, in the recess by the fireplace. He stood
+beside her then, looking at her with eyes that loved her the more for
+the sad hurt to her beauty. His manner recalled the shy, adolescent
+uncertainty of his first approaches.
+
+"Don't you think," he said, "you ought to have stayed in bed?"
+
+She shook her head and struggled to find her voice. It came
+convulsively.
+
+"No. I'm better. I'm all right now."
+
+"It was being out in that beastly hot sun yesterday--with those
+youngsters. You're not used to it."
+
+She laughed. "No. I'm not used to it. Robert--you haven't told them,
+have you?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"About you--and me?"
+
+"No. Not yet." He smiled. "I say, I shall have to tell them very soon,
+shan't I?"
+
+"You needn't."
+
+He made some inarticulate sound that questioned her.
+
+"I've changed my mind. I can't marry you."
+
+He had to bend his head to catch her low, indistinct murmur; but he
+caught it.
+
+He drew back from her, and leaned against the chimneypiece and looked at
+her more intently than before.
+
+"Do you mean," he said quietly, "because of _them_?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He looked down.
+
+"Poor Kitty," he said. "You think I'm asking too much of you?"
+
+She did not answer.
+
+"You're afraid?"
+
+"I told you I was afraid."
+
+"Yes. But I thought it was all right. I thought you liked them."
+
+She was silent. Tears rose to her eyes and hung on their unsteady
+lashes.
+
+"They like you."
+
+She bowed her head and the tears fell.
+
+"Is that what has upset you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I see. You've been thinking it over and you find you can't stand it. I
+don't wonder. You've let those little monkeys tire you out. You've
+nearly got a sunstroke and you feel as if you'd rather die than go
+through another day like yesterday? Well, you shan't. There'll never be
+another day like yesterday."
+
+"No. Never," she said; and her sobs choked her.
+
+"Why should there be? They'll have a governess. You don't suppose I
+meant you to have them on your hands all the time?"
+
+She went on crying softly. He sat on the arm of her chair and put his
+arm round her and dried her eyes.
+
+"Don't be unhappy about it, Kitty. I understand. You're not marrying
+them, dear; you're marrying me."
+
+She broke loose from him.
+
+"I can't marry you," she cried. "I can't give you what you want."
+
+"Do you mean that you can't care for me? Is that what you're trying to
+tell me all the time?"
+
+He moved and she cowered back into her chair.
+
+"I--I _can't_ tell you."
+
+He had turned from her. He was leaning his arms along the mantelshelf;
+he had bowed his head on them.
+
+They remained for some minutes so; she cowering back; he with his face
+hidden from her.
+
+"Do you mind telling me," he said presently, "if there's anybody else
+that you----"
+
+"That I care for? No, Robert, there's no one."
+
+"Are you quite sure? Quite honest. Think."
+
+"Do you mean Wilfrid Marston?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I certainly do not care for _him_."
+
+He raised his head at that; but he did not look at her.
+
+"Thank God!" he said.
+
+"Do you think as badly of him as all that?"
+
+"Don't ask me what I think of him."
+
+"Would you think badly of me if I'd married him?"
+
+"I--I couldn't have stood it, Kitty."
+
+"I am not going to marry him."
+
+"You haven't said yet that you don't care for me?"
+
+"No. I haven't."
+
+He turned and stooped over her, compelling her to look at him.
+
+"Say it then," he said.
+
+She drew back her face from his and put up her hands between them. He
+rose and stood before her and looked down at her. The blue of her eyes
+had narrowed, the pupils stared at him, black and feverish. Her mouth,
+which had been tight-shut, was open slightly. A thin flush blurred its
+edges. Her breath came through, short and sharp.
+
+"You're ill," he said. "You must go back to bed."
+
+"No," she said. "I've got to tell you something."
+
+"If you do I shan't believe it."
+
+"What won't you believe?"
+
+"That you don't care for me. I can't believe it."
+
+"You'd better, Robert."
+
+"I don't. There's something wrong. You must tell me what it is."
+
+"There's nothing wrong but that. I--I made a mistake."
+
+"You only thought you liked me? Or is it worse than that?"
+
+"It's worse, far worse."
+
+"I see. You tried to like me, and you couldn't?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"Poor child. I've been a selfish brute. I might have known you couldn't.
+You've hardly known me ten days. But if I wait, Kitty--if I give you
+time to think?"
+
+"If you give me ten years it would do no good."
+
+"I see," he said; "I see."
+
+He gripped the edge of the mantelpiece with both his hands; his tense
+arms trembled from the shoulders to the wrists; his hold relaxed. He
+straightened himself and hid his shaking hands in his coat pockets.
+There were tears at the edges of his eyelids, the small, difficult tears
+that cut their way through the flesh that abhors them.
+
+She saw them.
+
+"Ah, Robert--do you care for me like that?"
+
+"You know how I care for you."
+
+He stopped as he swung away from her, remembering that he had failed in
+courtesy.
+
+"Thank you," he said, simply, "for telling me the truth."
+
+He reached the door, and she rose and came after him. He shook his head
+as a sign to her not to follow him. She saw that he was going from her
+because he was tortured and dumb with suffering and with shame.
+
+Then she knew what she must do. She called to him, she entreated.
+
+"Robert--don't go. Come back--come back. I can't bear it."
+
+He came back at that cry.
+
+"I haven't told you the truth. I lied."
+
+"When?" he said sternly.
+
+"Just now. When I told you that I didn't care for you."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Sit down--here, on the sofa. I'll try and tell you."
+
+He sat down beside her, but not near. She leaned forward with her
+elbows on her knees, and her head propped on her clenched hands. She did
+not look at him as she spoke.
+
+"I said I didn't care, because I thought that was the easiest way out of
+it. Easiest for you. So much easier than knowing the truth."
+
+He smiled grimly.
+
+"Well, you see how easy it's been."
+
+"Yes." She paused. "The truth isn't going to be easy either."
+
+"Let's have it, all the same, Kitty."
+
+"You're going to have it." She paused again, breathing hard. "Have you
+never wondered why the people here avoided me? You know they thought
+things."
+
+"As if it mattered what they thought."
+
+"They were right. There _was_ something."
+
+She heard him draw a deep breath. He, too, leaned forward now, in the
+same attitude as she, as if he were the participator of her confession,
+and the accomplice of her shame. His face was level with hers, but his
+eyes looked straight past her, untainted and clear.
+
+"What if there was?" he said. "It makes no difference."
+
+She turned her sad face to his.
+
+"Don't you know, Robert? Don't you know?"
+
+He frowned impatiently.
+
+"No, I don't. I don't want to."
+
+"You'd rather think I didn't care for you?"
+
+His face set again in its tortured, dumb look.
+
+"You shan't think that of me."
+
+She leaned back again out of his sight, and he presented to her his
+shoulder, thrust forward, and his profile, immovable, dogged, and
+apparently unheeding.
+
+"It's because I cared for you that I couldn't tell you the truth. I
+tried and couldn't. It was so difficult, and you _wouldn't_ understand.
+Then Wilfrid Marston said I must--I had to tell you."
+
+He threw himself back and turned on her.
+
+"What had Marston to do with it?"
+
+Her voice and her eyes dropped.
+
+"You see, he knew."
+
+"I see."
+
+He waited.
+
+"I couldn't tell you."
+
+His silence conveyed to her that he listened since she desired it, that
+he left it to her to tell him as much or as little as she would, and
+that thus he trusted her.
+
+"I was afraid," she said.
+
+"What? Afraid of _me_, Kitty?"
+
+"I thought it would make you not care for me."
+
+"I don't think anything you can tell me will make any difference."
+
+"You said yourself it would. You said you wouldn't marry me if I wasn't
+nice."
+
+He looked up impatient and surprised.
+
+"But we've been through all that," he said.
+
+"No, we haven't. When I said I wasn't nice I meant there were things
+I----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I--I wasn't married to Charley Tailleur."
+
+He took it in silence; and through the silence she let it sink in.
+
+"Where is the fellow?" he asked presently.
+
+"He's dead. I told you _that_."
+
+"I'd forgotten."
+
+There was another silence.
+
+"Did you care for him very much, Kitty?"
+
+"I don't know. Yes. No, I don't know. It wasn't the same thing."
+
+"Never mind. It's very good of you to tell me."
+
+"I didn't mean to."
+
+"What made you tell me?"
+
+"Seeing the children. I thought I could go on deceiving you; but when I
+saw them I knew I couldn't."
+
+"I see." His voice softened. "You told me because of them. I'm glad you
+told me." He paused on that.
+
+"Well," he said, "we must make the best of it."
+
+"That makes no difference?"
+
+"No. Not now."
+
+She sighed.
+
+"How long ago was it?" he asked.
+
+"Five years. Charley Tailleur was the first."
+
+"What?"
+
+"The first. There were others; ever so many others. I'm--that sort."
+
+"I don't believe you."
+
+"You've got to believe me. You can't marry me, and you've got to see
+why."
+
+She also paused. Her silences were terrible to him.
+
+"I thought you did see once. It didn't seem possible that you couldn't.
+Do you remember the first time I met you?"
+
+He remembered.
+
+"I thought you saw then. And afterward--don't you remember how you
+followed me out of the room--another night?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought you understood, and were too shy to say so. But you didn't.
+_Then_--do you remember how I waited for you at the end of the
+garden?--and how we sat out on the Cliff? I was trying then--the way I
+always try. I thought I'd make you--and you--you wouldn't see it. You
+only wanted to help me. You were so innocent and dear. That's what made
+me love you."
+
+"Oh," he groaned. "Don't."
+
+But she went on. "And do you remember how you found me--that night--out
+on the Cliff?"
+
+She drew back her voice softly.
+
+"I was sure then that you knew, and that when you asked me to come back
+with you----"
+
+"Look here, Kitty, I've had enough of it."
+
+"You haven't, for you're fond of me still. You are, aren't you?"
+
+"Oh, my God! how do I know?"
+
+"_I_ know. It's because you haven't taken it in. What do you think of
+this? You've known me ten days, and ten days before that I was with
+Wilfrid Marston."
+
+[Illustration: "'I want to make you loathe me ... never see me again.'"]
+
+He had taken it in at last. She had made it real to him, clothed it in
+flesh and blood.
+
+"If you don't believe me," she said, "ask him. That's what he came to
+see me for. He wanted me to go back to him. In fact, I wasn't supposed
+to have left him."
+
+He put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to steady his mind
+to face the thing that stunned it.
+
+"And you're telling me all this because----" he said dully.
+
+"Because I want to make you loathe me, so that you can go away and be
+glad that you'll never see me again. And if it hurts you too much to
+think of me as I am, to think that you cared for me, just say to
+yourself that I cared for _you_, and that I couldn't have done it if I'd
+been quite bad."
+
+She cried out, "It would have been better for me if I had been. I
+shouldn't _feel_ then. It wouldn't hurt me to see little children. I
+should have got over that long ago; and I shouldn't have cared for you
+or them. I shouldn't have been able to. We get like that. And then--I
+needn't have let you care for me. That was the worst thing I ever did.
+But I was so happy--so happy."
+
+He could not look at her; he covered his face with his hands, and she
+knew that he cared still.
+
+Then she came and knelt down beside him and whispered. He got up and
+broke away from her and she followed him.
+
+"You can't marry me _now_," she said.
+
+And he answered, "No."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+He did not leave her. They sat still, separated by the length of the
+little room, staring, not at each other, but at some point in the
+distance, as if each brain had flung and fixed there the same
+unspeakable symbol of its horror.
+
+Her face was sharp with pain, was strangely purified, spiritualised by
+the immortal moment that uplifted her. His face, grown old in a moment,
+had lost its look of glad and incorruptible innocence.
+
+Not that he was yet in full possession of reality. His mind was sunk in
+the stupor that follows after torture. It kept its hold by one sense
+only, the vague discerning of profound responsibility, and of something
+profounder still, some tie binding him to Kitty, immaterial,
+indestructible, born of their communion in pain.
+
+It kept him by its intangible compulsion, sitting there in the same
+small room, divided from her, but still there, still wearing that
+strange air of participation, of complicity.
+
+And all the time he kept saying to himself, "What next?"
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+"It's Jane," he said. "I'll tell her not to come in." His voice sounded
+hoarse and unlike his own.
+
+"Oh, mayn't I see her?"
+
+He looked up with his clouded eyes. "Do you want to?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He considered. He hesitated.
+
+"Do you mind?"
+
+"Mind?" he repeated. As if, after what they had gone through, there
+could ever be anything to mind. It seemed to him that things would
+always henceforth be insubstantial, and events utterly unimportant. He
+tried with an immense effort to grasp this event of Jane's appearance
+and of Kitty's attitude to Jane.
+
+"I thought," he said, "perhaps she would bother you."
+
+The knock came again.
+
+"Robert," she said, "I don't want her to know--what I told you."
+
+"Of course not," he said. "Come in."
+
+Jane came in and closed the door behind her. She had a letter folded
+tightly in her hand. She stood there a moment, looking from one to the
+other. It was Kitty who spoke.
+
+"Come in, Janey," she said. "I want you."
+
+Jane came forward and stood between them. She looked at Robert who
+hardened his face, and at Kitty who was trembling.
+
+"Has anything happened?" she said.
+
+And Kitty answered, "No. Nothing will happen now. I've just told him
+that it can't."
+
+"You've given him up?"
+
+"Yes. I've--given--him up."
+
+She drew in her breath on the "Yes," so that it sounded like a sob. The
+other words came slowly from her, one by one, as if she repeated them by
+rote, without knowing what they meant.
+
+Jane turned to her brother. "And you've let her do it?"
+
+He was silent, still saying to himself, "What next?"
+
+"Of course he's let me. He knows it was the only thing I could do."
+
+"Kitty--what made you do it?"
+
+Kitty closed her eyes. Robert saw her and gave a low inarticulate sound
+of misery. Jane heard it and understood.
+
+"Kitty," she said, "have you made him believe you don't care for him?"
+
+She sat down on the couch beside her and covered her hands with her own.
+
+"It isn't true, Robert," she said. "She doesn't know what she's doing.
+Kitty, tell him it isn't true."
+
+The trembling hands broke loose from her. Kitty sobbed once and was
+still. At the sound Robert turned on Jane.
+
+"Leave her alone," he said, "she doesn't want to be bothered about it
+now."
+
+Kitty's hand moved back along the couch to Jane. "No," she said, "don't
+make her leave me. I'm going away soon."
+
+He started to that answer to his question, "What next?"
+
+"Tell me what made you do it?" said Jane again.
+
+"Whatever it was," he said, "she's doing perfectly right."
+
+"I know what she's doing. And I know why she's doing it. Can't you see
+why?"
+
+Robert, who had stood still looking at her helplessly, turned away at
+the direct appeal and walked up and down, up and down, the room. He was
+still saying to himself, "And if she goes, what next?"
+
+"She doesn't mean it, Robert. It's these wretched people who have driven
+her to it with the abominable things they've said and thought. You
+_can't_ let her give you up. Don't you see that it'll look as if you
+didn't believe in her? And he does believe in you, Kitty dear. He
+doesn't care what anybody says."
+
+Kitty spoke. "Leave it alone, Janey. You don't know what you're talking
+about. You don't even know what it is they say."
+
+"I do," said Jane. She rose and went to her brother and thrust the
+letter she held into his hand. "Look there, that came just now."
+
+He glanced at the letter, lit a match and set fire to it and dropped the
+ashes into the grate.
+
+"Look at him, Kitty, look at him," she cried triumphantly.
+
+"What was in that letter?"
+
+"Nothing that matters."
+
+"Who wrote it?"
+
+"Nobody who matters in the very least."
+
+"Was it Mr. Marston? Tell me."
+
+"No."
+
+"He wouldn't," said Kitty thoughtfully. "It's women who write letters.
+It must have been Grace Keating. She hates me."
+
+"I know she hates you. Do you see now why Kitty's giving you up?"
+
+"She has told me herself, Janey. She may have more reasons than you
+know."
+
+"She has none, none that I don't know. They're all there in that letter
+which you've burnt. Can't you see why it was written?"
+
+"Does it matter why?"
+
+"Yes, it does matter. It was written to make you give Kitty up. There's
+no reason why I should spare the woman who wrote it. She hates
+Kitty--because she wanted you for herself. Kitty knows that she's
+slandered her. She did it before she went, to her face, and Kitty
+forgave her. And now the poor child thinks that she'll let you go, and
+just creep away quietly and hide herself--from _that_. And you'll let
+her do it? You believe her when she says she doesn't care for you? If
+that isn't caring--Why it's _because_ she cares for you, and cares for
+your honour more than she does for her own, poor darling----"
+
+"I know, Janey. And she knows I know."
+
+"Then where's your precious honour if you don't stand up for her? She's
+got nobody but you, and if you don't defend her from that sort of
+thing----"
+
+She stood before him, flaming, and Kitty rose and put herself between
+them.
+
+"He can't defend me, Janey. It's the truth."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+She had left them to each other. It was eight o'clock. She had crept
+back again to the bed that was her refuge, where she had lain for the
+last hour, weeping to exhaustion. She had raised herself at the touch of
+a hand on her hot forehead. Jane was standing beside her.
+
+"Kitty," she said, "will you see Robert for a moment? He's waiting for
+you downstairs, in your room."
+
+Kitty dropped back again on her pillow with her arm over her face,
+warding off Jane's gaze.
+
+"No," she said, "I can't see him. I can't go through that again."
+
+"But, Kitty, there's something he wants to say to you."
+
+"There's nothing he can say. Nothing--nothing. Tell him I'm going away."
+
+"You mustn't go without seeing him."
+
+"I must. It's the only way."
+
+"For you--yes. How about him?"
+
+Kitty sighed. She stirred irresolutely on her pillow.
+
+"No, no," she said. "I've done it once. I can't do it all over again."
+
+"I suppose," said Jane, "it _is_ easier--not to see him."
+
+At that Kitty clenched her hands.
+
+"Easier?" she cried. "I'd give my soul to see him for one minute--one
+minute, Janey."
+
+She turned, stifling her sobs on her pillow. They ceased, and the
+passion that was in her had its way then. She lay on her face,
+convulsed, biting into the pillow; gripping the sheets, tearing at them
+and wringing them in her hands. Her whole body writhed, shaken and
+tormented.
+
+"Oh, go away!" she cried. "Go away. Don't look at me!"
+
+But Jane did not go. She stood there by the bedside.
+
+She had come to the end of her adventure. It was as if she had been
+brought there blindfold, carried past the border into the terrible,
+alien, unpenetrated lands. Her genius for exploration had never taken
+her within reasonable distance of them. She had turned back when the
+frontier was in sight, refusing all knowledge of the things that lay
+beyond. And here she was, in the very thick of it, at the heart of the
+unexplored, with her poor terrified eyes uncovered, her face held close
+to the thing she feared. And yet she had passed through the initiation
+without terror; she had held her hand in the strange fire and it had not
+hurt her. She felt only a great penetrating, comprehending,
+incorruptible pity for her sister who writhed there, consumed and
+tortured in the flame.
+
+She knelt by the bedside and stretched out her arm and covered her, and
+Kitty lay still.
+
+"You haven't gone?" she said.
+
+"No, Kitty."
+
+Kitty moved; she sat up and put her hands to her loosened hair.
+
+"I'll see him now," she said.
+
+Kitty slid her feet to the floor. She stood up, steadying herself by the
+bedside.
+
+Jane looked at her, and her heart was wrung with compassion.
+
+"No," she said, "wait till you're better. I'll tell him."
+
+But Kitty was before her at the door, leaning against it.
+
+"I shall never be better," she said. Her smile was ghastly. She turned
+to Jane on the open threshold. "He hasn't got the children with him, has
+he? I don't want to see them."
+
+"You won't see them."
+
+"Can't he come to me?"
+
+She peered down the passage and drew back, and Jane knew that she was
+afraid of being seen.
+
+"There's nobody about," she said, "they're all in the dining-room."
+
+Still Kitty hesitated.
+
+"Will you come with me?" she said.
+
+Then Jane took her hand and led her to the room where Robert was, and
+left her with him.
+
+He stood by the hearth, waiting for her. His head was bowed, but his
+eyes, as she entered, lifted and fixed themselves on her. There had gone
+from him that air of radiant and unconquerable youth, of innocence,
+expectant and alert. Instead of it he too wore the mark of experience,
+of initiation that had meant torture.
+
+"I hope," he said, "you are rested."
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+She stood there, weak and drooping, leaning her weight on one slender
+hand, spread palm downward on the table.
+
+He drew out a chair for her, and removed his own to the other side of
+the table, keeping that barrier between them. In his whole manner there
+was a terrible constraint.
+
+"You've eaten nothing," he said.
+
+Neither had he, she gathered, nor Jane. The trouble she had brought on
+them was jarring, dislocating, like the shock of bereavement. They had
+behaved as if in the presence of the beloved dead.
+
+And yet, though he held himself apart, she knew that he had not sent for
+her to cast her off; that he was yet bound to her by the mysterious,
+infrangible tie; that he seemed to himself, in some way, her partner and
+accomplice.
+
+Their silence was a link that bound them, and she broke it.
+
+"Well," she said, "you have something to say to me?"
+
+"Yes"--his hands, spread out on the table between them, trembled--"I
+have, only it seems so little----"
+
+"Does it? Well, of course, there isn't much to be said."
+
+"Not much. There aren't any words. Only, I don't want you to think that
+I don't realise what you've done. It was magnificent."
+
+He answered her look of stupefied inquiry.
+
+"Your courage, Kitty, in telling me the truth."
+
+"Oh, _that_. Don't let's talk about it."
+
+"I am not going to talk about it. But I want you to understand that what
+you told me has made no difference in my--in my feeling for you."
+
+"It must."
+
+"It hasn't. And it never will. And I want to know what we're going to do
+next."
+
+"Next?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes, next. _Now._"
+
+"I'm going away. There's nothing else left for me to do."
+
+"And I, Kitty? Do you think I'm going to let you go, without----"
+
+She stopped him.
+
+"You can't help yourself."
+
+"What? You think I'm brute enough to take everything you've given me,
+and to--to let you go like this?"
+
+His hands moved as if they would have taken hers and held them. Then he
+drew back.
+
+"There's one thing I can't do for you, Kitty. I can't marry you, because
+it wouldn't be fair to my children."
+
+"I know, Robert, I know."
+
+"I know you know. I told you nothing would ever make any difference. If
+it weren't for them I'd ask you to marry me to-morrow. I'm only giving
+you up as you're giving me up, because of them. But if I can't marry
+you, I want you to let me make things a little less hard for you."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Well, for one thing, I don't believe you've anything to live on."
+
+"What makes you think that?"
+
+"Marston told me that if you married you forfeited your income. I
+suppose that meant that you had nothing of your own."
+
+"It did."
+
+"You've nothing?"
+
+"My father would give me fifty pounds a year if I kept straight. But he
+can't afford it. It means that my little sisters go without dresses."
+
+"And you've no home, Kitty?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"They can't have me at home, you see."
+
+He sighed.
+
+"If I looked after you, Kitty, do you think you would keep straight? If
+I made a home for you, somewhere, where you won't be too unhappy?"
+
+"You mean you'd take care of me?"
+
+"Yes. As far as I can."
+
+Her face flushed deeply.
+
+"No," she said. "No. I mustn't let you do that."
+
+"Why not? It's nothing, Kitty. It's the least that I can do. And you'd
+be very lonely."
+
+"I would. I would be miserable--in between."
+
+"Between?"
+
+"When you weren't there."
+
+"Kitty, dear child, I can't be there."
+
+She shrank back, the flush died out of her face and left it white.
+
+"I see. You didn't mean that I was to live with you?"
+
+"Poor child--no."
+
+"I--I didn't understand."
+
+"No," he said gently, "no."
+
+"You see how hopeless I am?"
+
+"I see what my responsibility would be if I left you to yourself."
+
+"And--_what_ do you want to do?"
+
+"I want to provide for you and your future."
+
+"Dear Robert, you can't possibly provide--for either."
+
+"I can. I've got a little house in the country, if you'll take it, and I
+can spare enough out of my income."
+
+She smiled.
+
+"You can't afford it."
+
+"If I could afford to marry, I could afford that."
+
+"I see. It's a beautiful scheme, Robert. And in the little house where
+I'm to live, you will come sometimes, and see me?"
+
+"I think it would be better not."
+
+"And what am I to do, if--if things are too hard for me? And if you are
+the only one----?"
+
+"_Then_ you're to send for me."
+
+"I see. I've only to send for you and you'll come?"
+
+"Of course I'll come."
+
+"When I can't bear it any longer, am I to send for you?"
+
+"You're to send for me when you're in any trouble, or any difficulty--or
+any danger."
+
+"And the way out of the trouble--and the difficulty--and the danger?"
+
+"Between us we shall find the way."
+
+"No, Robert. Between us we shall lose it. And we shall never, never find
+it again."
+
+"You can't trust me, Kitty?"
+
+"I can't trust myself. I know how your scheme would work. I let you do
+this thing; I go away and live in the dear little house you'll give me;
+and I let you keep me there, and give me all my clothes and things. And
+you think that's the way to stop me thinking about you and caring for
+you? I shall be there, eating my heart out. What else can I do, when
+everything I put on or have about me reminds me of you, every minute of
+the day? I'm to look to you for everything, but never to see you until I
+can bear it no longer. How long do you think I shall bear it? A woman
+made like me? You know perfectly well what the trouble and the
+difficulty and the danger is. I shall be in it all the time. And some
+day I shall send for you and you'll come. Oh yes, you'll come; for
+you'll be in it, too. It won't be a bit easier for you than it is for
+me."
+
+She paused.
+
+"You'll come. And you know what the end of that will be."
+
+"You think no other end is possible between a man and a woman?"
+
+"If I do, it's men who have made me think it."
+
+"Have _I_, Kitty?"
+
+"No, not you. I don't say your plan wouldn't work with some other woman.
+I say it's impossible between you--and me."
+
+"Because you won't believe that I might behave differently from some
+other men?"
+
+"You _are_ different. And I mean to keep you so."
+
+She rose.
+
+"There's only one way," she said. "We must never see each other again.
+We mustn't even _think_. I shall go away, and you're not to come after
+me."
+
+"When?"
+
+"To-morrow. Perhaps to-night."
+
+"And where, Kitty?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"You shan't go," he said. "I'll go. You must stay here until we can
+think of something."
+
+She closed her eyes and drew a hard sigh, as if exhausted with the
+discussion.
+
+"Robert, dear, would you mind not talking any more to me? I'm very
+tired."
+
+"If I leave you will you go to bed and rest?"
+
+"I think so. You can say good night."
+
+He rose and came toward her.
+
+"No--don't say it!" she cried. "Don't speak to me!"
+
+She drew back and put her hands behind her as a sign that he was not to
+touch her.
+
+He stood for a moment looking at her. And as he looked at her he was
+afraid, even as she was. He said to himself that in that moment she was
+wise and had done well. For his heart hardly knew its pity from its
+passion, and its passion from its fear.
+
+And she, seeing that she stood between him and the door, turned aside
+and made his way clear for him.
+
+And so he left her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+She stared at her own face in the glass without seeing it. Her brain was
+filled with the loud, hurried ticking of the clock. It sounded somehow
+as if it were out of gear. She felt herself swaying slightly as she
+stood.
+
+She was not going to faint bodily. It seemed to her rather that the
+immaterial bonds, the unseen, subtle, intimate connections were letting
+go their hold. Her soul was the heart of the danger. It was there that
+the travelling powers of dissolution, accelerated, multiplying, had
+begun their work and would end it. Its moments were not measured by the
+ticking of the clock.
+
+She had remained standing as Lucy had left her, with her back to the
+door he had gone out by. She was thus unaware that a servant of the
+hotel had come in, that he had delivered some message and was waiting
+for her answer.
+
+She started as the man spoke to her again. With a great effort her brain
+grasped and repeated what he had said.
+
+"Mr. Marston."
+
+No; she was certainly not going to faint. There was no receding of
+sensation. It was resurgence and invasion, violence shaking the very
+doors of life. She heard the light, tremulous tread of the little pulses
+of her body, scattered by the ringing hammer strokes of her heart and
+brain. She heard the clock ticking out of gear, like the small,
+irritable pulse of time.
+
+She steadied her voice to answer.
+
+"Very well. Show him in."
+
+Marston's face, as he approached her, was harder and stiffer than ever;
+his bearing more uncompromisingly upright and correct. He greeted her
+with that peculiar deference that he showed to women whose acquaintance
+he had yet to make. Decency required that he should start on a fresh
+and completely purified footing with the future Mrs. Robert Lucy.
+
+"It's charming of you," he said, "to let me come in."
+
+"I wanted to see you, Wilfrid."
+
+Something in her tone made him glance at her with a look that restored
+her, for a moment, to her former place.
+
+"That is still more charming," he replied.
+
+"I've done what you told me. I've given him up."
+
+A heavy flush spread over his face and relaxed the hard tension of the
+muscles.
+
+"I thought you'd do it."
+
+"Well, I have done it." She paused.
+
+"That's all I had to say to you."
+
+Her voice struck at him like a blow. But he bore it well, smiling his
+hard, reticent smile.
+
+"I knew you'd do it," he repeated; "but I didn't think you'd do it quite
+so soon. Why did you?"
+
+"You know why."
+
+"I didn't mean to put pressure on you, Kitty. It was _your_ problem.
+Still, I'm glad you've seen it in the right light."
+
+"You think you made me see it?"
+
+"I should hope you'd see it for yourself. It was obvious."
+
+"What was obvious?"
+
+"The unsuitability of the entire arrangement. Was it likely you'd stick
+to it when you saw what you were in for?"
+
+"You think I tired of him?"
+
+"I think you saw possibilities of fatigue; and, like a wise child, you
+chucked it. It's as well you did it before instead of after. I say, how
+did Lucy take it?"
+
+She did not answer. His smile flickered and died under the oppression of
+her silence.
+
+"Have you done with him altogether? He didn't suggest--er--any
+compromise?"
+
+"He did not."
+
+"He wouldn't. Compromise is foreign to his nature."
+
+He sat leaning forward, contemplating, with apparent satisfaction, his
+own strong-grained, immaculate hands. From time to time he tapped the
+floor with a nervous movement of his foot.
+
+"Then," he said presently, "if that's so, there's no reason, is there,
+why you shouldn't come back to me?"
+
+"I can't come back to you. I told you so yesterday."
+
+"Since yesterday the situation has altered considerably; or rather, it
+remains precisely where it was before."
+
+"No, Wilfrid; things can never be as they were before."
+
+"Why not?--if I choose to ignore this episode, this little aberration on
+your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we
+may consider our relations uninterrupted."
+
+"Do you think I gave Robert Lucy up to go back to you?"
+
+"My dear Kitty, if I'm willing to take you back after you gave _me_ up
+for him, I think my attitude almost constitutes a claim."
+
+"A claim?"
+
+"Well, let's say it entitles me to a hearing. You don't seem to realise,
+in the least, my extreme forbearance. I never reproached you. I never
+interfered between you and Lucy. You can't say I didn't play the game."
+
+"I'm not saying it. I know you didn't betray me."
+
+"Betray you? My dear child, I helped you. I never dreamed of standing in
+your way as long as there was a chance of your marrying. Now that there
+is none----"
+
+"That has nothing to do with it. I told you that I wouldn't go back to
+you in any case."
+
+"Come, I don't propose to throw you over for any other woman. Surely it
+would be more decent to come back to me than to go off with some other
+man, heaven knows whom, which is what you must do--eventually?"
+
+"It's what I won't do. I'm not going back to _that_. Don't you see
+that's why I won't go back to you?"
+
+Her apathy had become exhaustion. The flat, powerless voice, dying of
+its own utterance, gave him a sense of things past and done with, sunk
+into the ultimate oblivion. No voice of her energy and defiance could
+have touched him so. Her indifference troubled him like passion; in its
+completeness, its finality, it stirred him to decision, to acceptance of
+its terms. She was ready to fall from his grasp by her own dead weight.
+There was only one way in which he could hold her.
+
+"Kitty," he said, "is that really why you won't come back?"
+
+"Yes; that's why. Anything--anything but that."
+
+"I see. You're tired of it? And you want to give it up? Well, I'm not
+sure that I don't want you to."
+
+"Then why," she moaned, "why won't you let me go?"
+
+"Simply because I can't. I've tried it, Kitty. I can't."
+
+He came and sat close to her. He leaned his face to hers and spoke
+thickly and low.
+
+"You can't give it up, dear. You're bound to go back."
+
+"No--no--no. Don't talk about it."
+
+"I won't. I won't ask you to go back; but I can't do without you."
+
+"Oh yes, you can. There are other women."
+
+"I loathe them all. I wouldn't do for one of them what I'll do for you."
+
+"What will you do for me?"
+
+"I'll marry you, Kitty."
+
+She laughed in her tired fashion. "You want to make an honest woman of
+me, do you?"
+
+"No. I think I'm endeavouring to make myself an honest man. If you give
+Lucy up for me I don't want you to lose by the transaction. You were to
+have been married; but for me perhaps, you would have been. Very well,
+I'll marry you."
+
+"And that," said she, "will make it all right?"
+
+"Well, won't it?"
+
+"No, it won't. How could it?"
+
+"You know how. It will help you to keep straight. That's what you want,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Oh yes, that's what I _want_. And you think I'll keep straight by
+marrying you?"
+
+"I won't swear to it. But I know it's ten to one that you'll go to the
+devil if you don't marry me. And you say you don't want to do that."
+
+"I don't want--to marry you."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps not; but even marrying me might be
+better than the other alternative."
+
+"It wouldn't," she cried. "It would be worse. If I married you I
+couldn't get away from you. I couldn't get away from _it_. You'd keep me
+in it. It's what you like me for--what you're marrying me for. You
+haven't married, all these years, because you can't stand living with a
+decent woman. And you think, if I marry you, it will make it all right.
+All right!"
+
+She rose and defied him. "Why, I'd rather be your mistress. Then I could
+get away from you. I shall get away now."
+
+She turned violently, and he leaped up and caught her in his arms. She
+struggled, beating upon his breast, and crying with a sad, inarticulate
+cry. She would have sunk to the floor if he had not kept his hold of
+her.
+
+He raised her, and she stood still, breathing hard, while he still
+grasped her tightly by the wrists.
+
+"Let me go," she said faintly.
+
+"Where are you going to?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"You've no money. If you're not going back what are you going to do?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Her eyelids dropped, and he saw mendacity in her eyes' furtive fleeing
+under cover. He held her tighter. His arm shook her, not brutally, but
+with a nervous movement that he was powerless to control.
+
+"You lie," he said. "You've been lying to me all the time. You _are_
+going back. You're going to that fellow Lucy."
+
+"No. I'm going--somewhere--where I shan't see him."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Abroad?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+"By yourself?"
+
+Her eyelids quivered, and she panted. "Yes."
+
+There was a knock at the door.
+
+"Let me go," she said again.
+
+He let her go.
+
+"You're going to live--by yourself--respectably--abroad?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"And how long do you think that will last?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+Jane Lucy's voice called her from the door. He swore under his breath.
+
+"Let her come in. I want her."
+
+He laid his hand upon the door.
+
+"What are you going to do?" he reiterated.
+
+"Oh, let her come to me."
+
+"You haven't answered my question."
+
+"Let me see her first. Leave me alone with her. Janey! Janey!" she
+called.
+
+"Very well," he said.
+
+He opened the door and bowed to Jane Lucy as she entered.
+
+"I shall come back," he said, "for my answer."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+"Did Robert send you?" she asked, when she was alone with Jane.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It's no good. I can't do what he wants."
+
+"What are you going to do, dear?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't care. The terrible thing is that I've had to hurt
+him. I must go away somewhere."
+
+"I'll come with you and see you through."
+
+Kitty shook her head.
+
+"Don't think about it now," said Jane.
+
+"No; I can't think. I'm too tired, and my head's hot. But if I go away
+you'll understand why I did it?"
+
+"Kitty"--Jane whispered it--"you won't go back?"
+
+"No. I won't go back. You won't have to think that of me."
+
+She had not looked at Jane as they talked. Now she turned to her with
+eyes of anguish and appeal.
+
+"Janey--think. I've been wicked for years and years. I've only been good
+for one moment. One moment--when I gave Robert up. Do you think it'll
+count?"
+
+"I think that, in the sight of God, such moments last forever."
+
+"And that's what you'll think of me by?"
+
+She lifted up her face, haggard and white, flame-spotted where her tears
+had scorched it. Jane kissed it.
+
+"Do you mind kissing me?"
+
+"My dear, my dear," said Jane, and she drew her closer.
+
+There was a sound of footsteps in the passage. Kitty drew back and
+listened.
+
+"Where's Robert?"
+
+"Upstairs with the children."
+
+"They'll be asleep by this time, won't they?"
+
+"Fast asleep."
+
+The footsteps came again, approaching the door. They paused outside it a
+moment and turned back.
+
+"Do you hear that?" said Kitty. "It's Wilfrid Marston walking up and
+down. He wants to get hold of me. I think he's mad about me. He asked me
+to marry him just now, and I wouldn't. He thinks I didn't mean it, and
+he's coming back for his answer. But I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
+I shall go out quietly by the window and slip away, and he won't find
+me. I want you to be here when he comes, and tell him that he can't see
+me. Would you mind doing that?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You'll stay here all the time, and you won't let him go out and look
+for me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Kitty listened again for the footsteps.
+
+"He's still there," she whispered.
+
+"And you'll go to bed, Kitty?"
+
+"Yes; of course I will."
+
+She went out through the window on to the veranda, and so on into the
+garden.
+
+It was cool out there and unutterably peaceful, with a tender, lucid
+twilight on the bare grass of the lawn; on the sea beyond it, and on the
+white gravel path by the low wall between. She saw it, the world that
+had held her and Robert, that, holding them, had taken on the ten days'
+splendour of their passion. It stood, divinely still in the perishing
+violet light, a world withdrawn and unsubstantial, yet piercingly,
+intolerably near.
+
+Indoors Jane waited. It was not yet the half-hour. She waited till the
+clock struck and Marston came for his answer.
+
+He looked round the room, and his face, under its deference, betrayed
+his sharp annoyance at finding himself alone with Miss Lucy.
+
+"Pardon me," he said, "I thought that Mrs. Tailleur was here."
+
+"Mrs. Tailleur asked me to tell you that she cannot see you. She has
+gone to her room."
+
+"To her room?"
+
+He stared at her, and his face loosened in a sudden incredulity and
+dismay.
+
+"Did she tell you she was going there?"
+
+"Yes. She was very tired."
+
+"But--she was here not half an hour ago. She couldn't have gone without
+my seeing her."
+
+"She went out," said Jane faintly, "by the window."
+
+"She couldn't get to her room without going through the hall. I've been
+there all the time on the seat by the stairs."
+
+They looked at each other. The seat by the stairs commanded all ways in
+and out, the entrance of the passage, and the door of the sitting-room,
+and the portiere of the lounge.
+
+"What do you think?" he said.
+
+"I think that she has not gone far. But if she goes, it is you who will
+have driven her away."
+
+"Forgive me if I remind you that it is not I who have given her up."
+
+"It was you," said Jane quietly, "who helped to ruin her."
+
+His raised eyebrows expressed an urbane surprise at the curious
+frankness of her charge. And with a delicate gesture of his hand he
+repudiated it and waved it away.
+
+"My dear lady, you are alarmed and you are angry, consequently you are
+unjust. Whatever poor Kitty may have done I am not responsible."
+
+"You are responsible. It's you, and men like you, who have dragged her
+down. You took advantage of her weakness, of her very helplessness.
+You've made her so that she can't believe in a man's goodness and trust
+herself to it."
+
+He smiled, still with that untroubled urbanity, on the small flaming
+thing as she arraigned him.
+
+"And you consider me responsible for that?" he said.
+
+Their eyes met. "My brother is here," said she. "Would you like to see
+him?"
+
+"It might be as well, perhaps. If you can find him."
+
+She left him, and he waited five minutes, ten minutes, twenty.
+
+She returned alone. All her defiance had gone from her, and the face
+that she turned to him was white with fear.
+
+"She is not here," she said. "She went out--by that window--and she has
+not come in. We've searched the hotel, and we can't find her."
+
+"And you have _not_ found your brother?"
+
+"He has gone out to look for her."
+
+She sat down by the table, turning her face away and screening it from
+him with her hand.
+
+Marston gave one look at her. He stepped out, and crossed the lawn to
+the bottom of the garden. The gate at the end of the path there swung
+open violently, and he found himself face to face with Robert Lucy.
+"What have you done with Mrs. Tailleur?" he said.
+
+Lucy's head was sunk upon his breast. He did not look at him nor answer.
+The two men walked back in silence up the lawn.
+
+"You don't know where she is?" said Marston presently.
+
+"No. I thought I did. But--she is not there."
+
+He paused, steadying his voice to speak again.
+
+"If I don't find her, I shall go up to town by the midnight train. Can
+you give me her address there?"
+
+"You think she has gone up to town?" Marston spoke calmly. He was
+appeased by Lucy's agitation and his manifest ignorance as to Kitty's
+movements.
+
+"There's nothing else she could do. I've got to find her. Will you be
+good enough to give me her address?"
+
+"My dear Mr. Lucy, there's really no reason why I should. If Mrs.
+Tailleur has not gone up to town, her address won't help you. If she
+has gone, your discreetest course by far, if I may say so----"
+
+"Is what?" said Lucy sternly.
+
+"Why, my dear fellow, of course--to let her go."
+
+Lucy raised his head. "I do not intend," he said, "to let her go."
+
+"Nor I," said Marston.
+
+"Then we've neither of us any time to lose. I won't answer for what she
+may do, in the state she's in."
+
+Marston swung slightly round, so that he faced Lucy with his
+imperturbable stare.
+
+"If you'd known Mrs. Tailleur as long as I have you'd have no sort of
+doubt as to what she'll do."
+
+Lucy did not appear to have heard him, so sunk was he in his own
+thoughts.
+
+"What was that?" said Marston suddenly.
+
+They listened. The gate of the Cliff path creaked on its hinges and fell
+back with a sharp click of the latch. Lucy turned and saw a small
+woman's figure entering the garden from the Cliff. He strode on toward
+the house, unwilling to be observed and overtaken by any guests of the
+hotel.
+
+Marston followed him slowly, pondering at each step of the way.
+
+He heard footsteps, quick stumbling footsteps, and a sound like a
+hoarse, half-suffocating breath behind him. Then a woman's voice, that
+sank, stumbling, like the footsteps, as it spoke.
+
+"Mr. Lucy," it said, "is it you?"
+
+Marston went on.
+
+Lucy was in the room with his sister. He was sitting with his back to
+the open window as Marston came in by it.
+
+The voice outside was nearer; it whispered, "Where is Mr. Lucy?"
+
+"Somebody's looking for you, Lucy," said Marston.
+
+And the three turned round.
+
+Mrs. Hankin stood in the window, holding on to the frame of it and
+trembling. Her face, her perfect face, was gray, like the face of an
+old woman. It was drawn and disfigured with some terrible emotion.
+
+Lucy went to her. She clung to his arm, and held him on the threshold.
+
+"Mrs. Tailleur," she said, "Mrs. Tailleur. We found her--down there.
+She's killed. She--she fell from the Cliff."
+
+The three stood still as she spoke to them.
+
+Then Jane rushed forward to her brother with a cry, and Mrs. Hankin
+stretched out her arms and barred the way.
+
+There were small spots of blood on her hands and on her dress where she
+had knelt.
+
+"Go back, child," she said. "They're carrying her in."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Immortal Moment, by May Sinclair
+
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