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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40566 ***
+
+MOTH AND RUST
+
+
+
+
+  BY THE SAME AUTHOR.
+
+    RED POTTAGE.
+    DIANA TEMPEST.
+    SIR CHARLES DANVERS.
+    A DEVOTEE.
+    THE DANVERS' JEWELS.
+
+
+
+
+  MOTH AND RUST
+
+  TOGETHER WITH GEOFFREY'S
+  WIFE AND THE PITFALL
+
+
+  BY MARY CHOLMONDELEY,
+  AUTHOR OF "RED POTTAGE."
+
+
+  "Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array."
+                                   --CHRISTINA ROSSETTI.
+
+
+  LONDON
+  JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
+  1902
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+
+  ESSEX.
+
+  Not chance of birth or place has made us friends.
+
+
+
+
+  PREFACE
+
+
+    My best thanks are due to the Editor of
+    _The Graphic_ for his kind permission to
+    republish "Geoffrey's Wife," which appeared
+    originally in _The Graphic_.
+
+                            MARY CHOLMONDELEY.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                      PAGE
+  MOTH AND RUST          1
+  GEOFFREY'S WIFE      241
+  THE PITFALL          267
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+MOTH AND RUST
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+    "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and
+    rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."
+
+
+The Vicar gave out the text, and proceeded to expound it. The little
+congregation settled down peacefully to listen. Except four of their
+number, the "quality" in the carved Easthope pew, none of them had much
+treasure on earth. Their treasure for the greater part consisted of a
+pig, that was certainly being "laid up" to meet the rent at Christmas.
+But there would hardly be time for moth and rust to get into it before
+its secluded life should migrate into flitches and pork pies. Not that
+the poorest of Mr Long's parishioners had any fear of such an event, for
+they never associated his sermons with anything to do with themselves,
+except on one occasion when the good man had preached earnestly against
+drunkenness, and a respectable widow had ceased to attend divine service
+in consequence, because, as she observed, she was not going to be spoken
+against like that by any one, be they who they may, after all the years
+she had been "on the teetotal."
+
+Perhaps the two farmers who had driven over resplendent wives in
+dog-carts had treasure on earth. They certainly had money in the bank at
+Mudbury, for they were to be seen striding in in gaiters on market-day
+to draw it out. But then it was well known that thieves did not break
+through into banks and steal. Banks sometimes broke of themselves, but
+not often.
+
+On the whole, the congregation was at its ease. It felt that the text
+was well chosen, and that it applied exclusively to the four occupants
+of "the Squire's" pew.
+
+The hard-worked Vicar certainly had no treasure on earth, if you
+excepted his principal possessions, namely, his pale wife and little
+flock of rosy children, and these, of course, were only encumbrances.
+Had they not proved to be so? For his cousin had promised him the family
+living, and would certainly have kept that promise when it became
+vacant, if the wife he had married in the interval had not held such
+strong views as to a celibate clergy.
+
+The Vicar was a conscientious man, and the conscientious are seldom
+concise.
+
+    "He held with all his tedious might,
+      The mirror to the mind of God."
+
+There was no doubt he was tedious, and it was to be hoped that the
+portion of the Divine mind not reflected in the clerical mirror would
+compensate somewhat for His more gloomy attributes as shown therein.
+
+Mrs Trefusis, "Squire's" mother, an old woman with a thin, knotted face
+like worn-out elastic, sat erect throughout the service. She had the
+tight-lipped, bitter look of one who has coldly appropriated as her due
+all the good things of life, who has fiercely rebelled against every
+untoward event, and who now in old age offers a passive, impotent
+resistance to anything that suggests a change. She had had an easy,
+comfortable existence, but her life had gone hard with her, and her face
+showed it.
+
+Near her were the two guests who were staying at Easthope. The villagers
+looked at the two girls with deep interest. They had made up their minds
+that "the old lady had got 'em in to see if Squire could fancy one of
+'em."
+
+Lady Anne Varney, who sat next to Mrs Trefusis, was a graceful,
+small-headed woman of seven-and-twenty, delicately featured, pale,
+exquisitely dressed, with the indefinable air of a finished woman of the
+world, and with the reserved, disciplined manner of a woman accustomed
+to conceal her feelings from a world in which she has lived too much, in
+which she has been knocked about too much, and which has not gone too
+well with her. If Anne attended to the sermon--and she appeared to do
+so--she was the only person in the Easthope pew who did.
+
+No; the other girl, Janet Black, was listening too now and then,
+catching disjointed sentences with no sense in them, as one hears a few
+shouted words in a high wind.
+
+Ah me! Janet was beautiful. Even Mrs Trefusis was obliged to own it,
+though she did so grudgingly, and added bitterly that the girl had no
+breeding. It was true. Janet had none. But beauty rested upon her as it
+rests on a dove's neck, varying with every movement, every turn of the
+head. She was quite motionless now, her rather large, ill-gloved hands
+in her lap. Janet was a still woman. She had no nervous movements. She
+did not twine her muff-chain round her fingers as Anne did. Anne looked
+at her now and then, and wondered whether she--Anne--would have been
+more successful in life if she had entered the arena armed with such
+beauty as Janet's.
+
+There was a portrait of Janet in the Academy several years later, which
+has made her beauty known to the world. We have all seen that celebrated
+picture of the calm Madonna face, with the mark of suffering so plainly
+stamped upon the white brow and in the unfathomable eyes. But the young
+girl sitting in the Easthope pew hardly resembled, except in feature,
+the portrait that, later on, took the artistic world by storm. Janet was
+perhaps even more beautiful in this her first youth than her picture
+proved her afterwards to be; but the beauty was expressionless, opaque.
+The soul had not yet illumined the fair face. She looked what she was--a
+little dull, without a grain of imagination. Was it the dulness of want
+of ability, or only the dulness of an uneducated mind, of powers unused,
+still dormant?
+
+Without her transcendent beauty she would have appeared uninteresting
+and commonplace.
+
+    "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth."
+
+The Vicar had a habit of repeating his text several times in the course
+of his sermon. Janet heard it the third time, and it forced the entrance
+of her mind.
+
+Her treasure was certainly on earth. It consisted of the heavy,
+sleek-haired young man with the sunburnt complexion and the reddish
+moustache at the end of the pew--in short, "the Squire."
+
+After a short and ardent courtship she had accepted him, and then she
+herself had been accepted, not without groans, by his family. The groans
+had not been audible, but she was vaguely aware that she was not
+received with enthusiasm by the family of her hero, her wonderful fairy
+prince who had ridden into her life on a golden chestnut. George
+Trefusis was heavily built, but in Janet's eyes he was slender. His
+taciturn dulness was in her eyes a most dignified and becoming reserve.
+His inveterate unsociability proved to her--not that it needed
+proving--his mental superiority. She could not be surprised at the
+coldness of her reception as his betrothed, for she acutely felt her own
+great unworthiness of being the consort of this resplendent personage,
+who could have married any one. Why had he honoured her among all
+women?
+
+The answer was sufficiently obvious to every one except herself. The
+fairy prince had fallen heavily in love with her beauty; so heavily
+that, after a secret but stubborn resistance, he had been vanquished by
+it. Marry her he must and would, whatever his mother might say. And she
+had said a good deal. She had not kept silence.
+
+And now Janet was staying for the first time at Easthope, which was one
+day to be her home--the old Tudor house standing among its terraced
+gardens, which had belonged to a Trefusis since a Trefusis built it in
+Henry the Seventh's time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+    "On peut choisir ses amitiés, mais on subit l'amour."
+
+                                             --PRINCESS KARADJA.
+
+
+After luncheon George offered to take Janet round the gardens. Janet
+looked timidly at Mrs Trefusis. She did not know whether she ought to
+accept or not. There might be etiquettes connected with afternoon walks
+of which she was not aware. For even since her arrival at Easthope
+yesterday it had been borne in upon her that there were many things of
+which she was not aware.
+
+"Pray let my son show you the gardens," said Mrs Trefusis, with
+impatient formality. "The roses are in great beauty just now."
+
+Janet went to put on her hat, and Mrs Trefusis lay down on the sofa in
+the drawing-room with a little groan. Anne sat down by her. The eyes of
+both women followed Janet's tall, magnificent figure as she joined
+George on the terrace.
+
+"She dresses like a shop-girl," said Mrs Trefusis. "And what a hat!
+Exactly what one sees on the top of omnibuses."
+
+Anne did not defend the hat. It was beyond defence. She supposed, with a
+tinge of compassion, what was indeed the case, that Janet had made a
+special pilgrimage to Mudbury to acquire it, in order the better to meet
+the eyes of her future mother-in-law.
+
+All Anne said was, "Very respectable people go on the top of omnibuses
+nowadays."
+
+"I am not saying anything against her respectability," said poor Mrs
+Trefusis. "Heaven knows if there had been anything against it I should
+have said so before now. It would have been my duty."
+
+Anne smiled faintly. "A painful duty."
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Mrs Trefusis grimly. She never posed before
+Anne, nor, for that matter, did any one else. "But from all I can make
+out this girl is a model of middle-class respectability. Yet she comes
+of a bad stock. One can't tell how she will turn out. What is bred in
+the bone will come out in the flesh."
+
+"There are worse things than middle-class respectability. George might
+have presented you with an actress with a past. Lord Lossiemouth married
+his daughter's maid last week."
+
+"I don't know what I've done," said Mrs Trefusis, "that my only son
+should marry a pretty horse-breaker."
+
+"I thought it was her brother who was a horse-breaker."
+
+"So he is, and so is she. It was riding to hounds that my poor boy first
+met her."
+
+"She rides magnificently. I saw her out cub-hunting last autumn, and
+asked who she was."
+
+"Her brother is disreputable. He was mixed up with that case of drugging
+some horse or other. I forget about it, but I know it was disgraceful.
+He is quite an impossible person, but I suppose we shall have to know
+him now. The place will be overrun with her relations, whom I have
+avoided for years. Things like that always happen to me."
+
+This was a favourite expression of Mrs Trefusis'. She invariably spoke
+as if a curse had hung over her since her birth.
+
+"What does it matter who one knows?" said Anne.
+
+Mrs Trefusis did not answer. The knots in her face moved a little. She
+knew what country life and country society were better than Anne. She
+had all her life lived in the upper of the two sets which may be found
+in every country neighbourhood. She did what she considered to be her
+duty by the secondary set, but she belonged by birth and by inclination
+to the upper class. It was at first with bewildered surprise, and later
+on with cold anger, that she observed that her only son, bone of her
+bone, very son of herself and her kind dead husband, showed a natural
+tendency to gravitate towards the second-rate among their neighbours.
+
+Why did he do it? Why did he bring strange, loud-voiced, vulgar men to
+Easthope, the kind of men whom Mr Trefusis would not have tolerated? She
+might have known that her husband would die of pneumonia just when her
+son needed him most. She had not expected it, but she ought to have
+expected it. Did not everything in her lot go crooked, while the lives
+of all those around her went straight? What was the matter with her son,
+that he was more at ease with these undesirable companions than with the
+sons of his father's old friends? Why would he never accompany her on
+her annual pilgrimage to London?
+
+George was one of those lethargic, vain men who say they hate London.
+Catch them going to London! Perhaps if efforts were made to catch them
+there, they might repair thither. But in London they are nobodies;
+consequently to London they do not go. And the same man who eschews
+London will generally be found to gravitate in the country to a society
+in which he is the chief personage. It had been so with George. Fred
+Black, the disreputable horse-breaker, and his companions, had
+sedulously paid court to him. George, who had a deep-rooted love of
+horse-flesh, was often at Fred's training stables. There he met Janet,
+and fell in love with her, as did most of Fred's associates. But unlike
+them, George had withdrawn. He knew he should "do" for himself with "the
+county" if he married Janet. And he could not face his mother. So he
+sulked like a fish under the bank, half suspicious that he is being
+angled for. So ignorant of his fellow-creatures was George that there
+actually had been a moment when he suspected Janet of trying to "land
+him," and he did not think any the worse of her.
+
+Then, after months of sullen indecision, he suddenly rushed upon his
+fate. That was a week ago.
+
+Anne left her chair as Mrs Trefusis did not answer, and knelt down by
+the old woman.
+
+"Dear Mrs Trefusis," she said, "the girl is a nice girl, innocent and
+good, and without a vestige of conceit."
+
+"She has nothing to be conceited about that I can see."
+
+"Oh! yes. She might be conceited about marrying George. It is an amazing
+match for her. And she might be conceited about her beauty. I should be
+if I had that face."
+
+"My dear, you are twenty times as good-looking, because you look what
+you are--a lady. She looks what she is--a----" Something in Anne's
+steady eyes disconcerted Mrs Trefusis, and she did not finish the
+sentence. She twitched her hands restlessly, and then went on: "And she
+can't come into a room. She sticks in the door. And she always calls you
+'Lady Varney.' She hasn't called a girl a 'gurl' yet, but I know she
+will. I had thought my son's wife might make up to me a little for all
+I've gone through--might be a comfort to me--and then I am asked to put
+up with a vulgarian."
+
+Anne went on in a level voice: "Janet is not in the least vulgar,
+because she is unpretentious. Middle-class she may be, and is: so was my
+grandmother; but vulgar she is not. And she is absolutely devoted to
+George. He is in love with her, but she really loves him."
+
+"So she ought. He is making a great sacrifice for her, and, as I
+constantly tell him, one he will regret to his dying day."
+
+"On the contrary, he is only sacrificing his own pride and yours
+to--himself. He is considering only himself. He is marrying only to
+please himself, not----" Anne hesitated--"not to please Janet."
+
+"Now you are talking nonsense."
+
+"Yes, I think I am. It felt like sense, but by the time I had put it
+into words, it turned into nonsense. The little things you notice in
+Janet's dress and manner can be mitigated, if she is willing to learn."
+
+"She won't be," said Mrs Trefusis, with decision. "Because she is
+stupid. She will be offended directly she is spoken to. All stupid
+people are. Now come, Anne! Don't try and make black white. It doesn't
+help matters. You must admit the girl is stupid."
+
+Anne's gentle, limpid eyes looked deprecatingly into the elder woman's
+hard, miserable ones.
+
+"I am afraid she is," she said at last, and she coloured painfully.
+
+"And obstinate."
+
+"Are not stupid people always obstinate?"
+
+"No," said Mrs Trefusis. "I am obstinate, but no one could call me
+stupid."
+
+"It does not prevent stupid people being always obstinate, because
+obstinate people are not always stupid."
+
+"You think me very obstinate, Anne?" There were tears in the stern old
+eyes.
+
+"I think, dear, you have got to give way, and as you must, I want you to
+do it with a good grace, before you estrange George from you, and before
+that unsuspecting girl has found out that you loathe the marriage."
+
+"If she were not as dense as a rhinoceros, she would see that now."
+
+"How fortunate, in that case, that she is dense. It gives you a better
+chance with her. Make her like you. You can, you know. She is worth
+liking."
+
+"All my life," said Mrs Trefusis, "be they who they may, I have hated
+stupid people."
+
+"Oh! no. That is an hallucination. You don't hate George."
+
+Mrs Trefusis shot a lightning glance at her companion, and then smiled
+grimly. "You are the only person who would dare to say such a thing to
+me."
+
+"Besides," continued Anne meditatively, "is it so certain that Janet is
+stupid? She appears so because she is unformed, ignorant, and because
+she has never reflected, or been thrown with educated people. She has
+not come to herself. She will never learn anything by imagination or
+perception, for she seems quite devoid of them. But I think she might
+learn by trouble or happiness, or both. She can feel. Strong feeling
+would be the turning-point with her, if she has sufficient ability to
+take advantage of it. Perhaps she has not, and happiness or trouble may
+leave her as they found her. But she gives me the impression that she
+_might_ alter considerably if she were once thoroughly aroused."
+
+"I can't rouse her. I was not sent into the world to rouse pretty
+horse-breakers."
+
+If Anne was doubtful as to what Mrs Trefusis had been sent into this
+imperfect world for, she did not show it.
+
+"I don't want you to rouse her. All I want is that you should be kind to
+her." Anne took Mrs Trefusis' ringed, claw-like hand between both hers.
+"I do want that very much."
+
+"Well," said Mrs Trefusis, blinking her eyes, "I won't say I won't try.
+You can always get round me, Anne. Oh! my dear, dear child, if it might
+only have been you. But of course, just because I had set my heart upon
+it, I was not to have it. That has been my life from first to last. If I
+might only have had you. You think me a cross, bitter old woman, and so
+I am: God knows I have had enough to make me so. But I should not have
+been so to you."
+
+"You never are so to me. But you see my affections are--is not that the
+correct expression?--engaged."
+
+"But you are not."
+
+"No. I am as free as air. That is where the difficulty comes in."
+
+"Where is the creature now?"
+
+"In Paris. The _World_ chronicles his movements. That is why I take in
+the _World_. If he had been in London this week, I should not--be here
+at this moment."
+
+"I suppose he is enormously run after?"
+
+"Oh yes! By others as well as by me; by tons of others younger and
+better looking than I am."
+
+"Now, Anne, I am absolutely certain that you have never run a yard after
+him."
+
+"I have never appeared to do so," said Anne, with her faint, enigmatical
+smile. "The proprieties have been observed. At least by me they have.
+But I have covered a good deal of ground, nevertheless."
+
+"I don't know what he is made of."
+
+"Well, he is made of money for one thing, and I have not a shilling. He
+knows that."
+
+"He ought to be only too honoured by your being willing to think of him.
+In my young days a man of his class would not have had a chance."
+
+"Millionaires get their chance nowadays."
+
+"Then why doesn't he take it?"
+
+"Because," said Anne, her lip quivering, "he thinks I like him for his
+money. He has got that firmly screwed into his head."
+
+"As if a woman like you would do such a thing."
+
+"Women extremely like me are doing such things all the time. How is he
+to know I am different?"
+
+"He must be a fool."
+
+"He does not look like one."
+
+"No," said Mrs Trefusis meditatively, "I must own he does not. He has a
+bullet head. I saw him once at the Duchess of Dundee's last summer. He
+was pointed out to me as the biggest thing in millionaires since
+Barnato. But I must confess he was the very last person in the world
+whom I should have thought you would have looked at--for himself, I
+mean."
+
+"That is what he thinks."
+
+"He is so very unattractive."
+
+"He is an ugly, forbidding-looking man of forty," said Anne, who had
+become very pale.
+
+"I should not go as far as that," said Mrs Trefusis, somewhat
+disconcerted.
+
+"Oh! I can for you!" said Anne, her quiet eyes flashing. "He is all
+these things. He is exactly what I would rather not have married. And I
+think he knows that instinctively, poor man! But in spite of all that,
+in spite of everything that repels me, I know that we belong to each
+other. He did not choose to like me, or I to like him. I never had any
+choice in the matter. When I first saw him I recognised him. I had known
+him all my life. I had been waiting for him always without knowing it. I
+never really understood anything till he came. I did not fall in love
+with him; at least, not in the way I see others do, and as I once did
+myself years ago. I am not attracted towards him. I am him. And he is
+me. One can't fall in love with oneself. He is my other self. We are
+one. We may live painfully apart as we are doing now--he may marry some
+one else: but the fact remains the same."
+
+Mrs Trefusis did not answer. Love is so rare that when we meet it we
+realise that we are on holy ground.
+
+"You and he will marry some day," she said at last.
+
+Her thoughts went back to her own youth, and its romantic love and
+marriage. There was no romance here as she understood it, nothing but a
+grim reality. But it almost seemed as if love could go deeper without
+romance.
+
+"I do not see how a misunderstanding can hold together between you."
+
+"You forget mother," said Anne.
+
+Mrs Trefusis had momentarily forgotten her closest friend, the Duchess
+of Quorn, that notorious match-making mother of a quartette of pretty,
+well-drilled daughters, all of whom were now advantageously married
+except Anne--the eldest. And if Anne was not at this moment wedded to
+George Trefusis it was not owing to want of zeal on the part of both
+mothers. Mrs Trefusis was irrevocably behind the scenes in Anne's
+family.
+
+"Mother ought by nature to have been a man and a cricketer," said Anne,
+"instead of the mother of many daughters. She is 'game' to the last,
+she is a hard hitter, and she will run till she drops on the chance of
+any catch. But her bowling is her strong point. Young men have not a
+chance with her. Her style may not be dignified, but her eye is
+extraordinary. Harry Lestrange did his silly, panic-stricken best,
+but--he is married to Cecily now."
+
+"Did he really try to get out of it?"
+
+"He did. He liked Cecily a little; he had certainly flirted with her
+when she came in his way, but he never made the least effort to meet
+her, and he did not want to marry her."
+
+"And Cecily?"
+
+"Cecily did not dislike him. She was only nineteen, and she had--so she
+told me--always hoped for curly hair; and of course Harry's is quite
+straight, what little there is of it. She shed a few tears about that,
+but she did as she was told. They are a nice-looking young couple. They
+write quite happily. I daresay it will do very well. But, you see,
+unfortunately, Harry was a friend of Mr Vanbrunt's, and I know Harry
+consulted him as to how to get out of it. Well, directly mother's
+attention was off Harry, she found out about Mr Vanbrunt; how I don't
+know, but she did. Poor mother! she has a heart somewhere. It is her
+sporting instincts which are too strong for her. When she found out, she
+came into my room and kissed me, and cried, and said love was
+everything, and what did looks matter, and, for her part, if a man was a
+good man, she thought it was of no importance if he had not had a
+father. Think of mother's saying that, after marrying poor father? But
+she was quite sincere. Mother never minds contradicting herself. There
+is nothing petty about her. She cried, and I cried too. We seemed to be
+nearer to each other than we had been for years. I was the last daughter
+left at home, and she actually said she did not want to part with me. I
+think she felt it just for the moment, for she had had a good deal of
+worry with some of the sons-in-law, especially Harry. But after a
+little bit she came to herself, and she gave me such advice. Oh, such
+advice! Some of it was excellent--that was the worst of it--but it was
+all from the standpoint of the woman stalking the man. And she asked me
+several gimlet questions about Mr Vanbrunt. She said I had not made any
+mistake so far, but that I must be very careful. She was like a tiger
+that has tasted blood. She said it was almost like marrying
+royalty--marrying such wealth as that. I believe he has a property in
+Africa rather larger than England. But she said that I was her dear
+child, and she thought it might be done. I implored her not to do
+anything--to leave him alone. But the truth is, mother had been so
+successful that she had got rather beyond herself, and she fancied she
+could do anything. Father had often prophesied that some day she would
+overreach herself. However, nothing would stop her. So she settled down
+to it. You know what mother's bowling is. It did for Harry--but this
+time it did for me."
+
+"Mr Vanbrunt saw through it?"
+
+"From the first moment. He saw he was being hunted down. He bore it at
+first, and then he withdrew. I can't prove it, but I am morally certain
+that mother cornered him and had a talk with him one day, and told him I
+cared for him, and thought him very handsome. Mother sticks at nothing.
+After that he went away."
+
+"Poor man!"
+
+"She asked him in May to stay with us in Scotland in September, but he
+has refused. I found she had given a little message from me which I
+never sent. Poor, poor mother, and poor me!"
+
+"And poor millionaire! Surely if he has any sense he must see that it is
+your mother and not you who is hunting him."
+
+"He is aware that Cecily did as she was told. He probably thinks I could
+be coerced into marrying him. He may know a great deal about finance,
+and stocks, and all those weary things, but he knows very little about
+women. He has not taken much account of them so far."
+
+"His day will come," said Mrs Trefusis. "What a nuisance men are! I wish
+they were all at the bottom of the sea."
+
+"If they were," said Anne, with her rueful little smile, "mother would
+order a diving-bell at once."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+    "O mighty love, O passion and desire,
+        That bound the cord."
+
+                                             --_The Heptameron._
+
+
+Janet's mother had died when Janet was a toddling child. It is
+observable in the natural history of heroines that their mothers almost
+invariably do die when the heroines to whom they have given birth are
+toddling children. Had Di Vernon a mother, or Evelina, or Jane Eyre, or
+Diana of the Crossways, or Aurora Leigh? Dear Elizabeth Bennett
+certainly had one whom we shall not quickly forget--but Elizabeth is an
+exception. She only proves the rule for the majority of heroines.
+Fathers they have sometimes, generally of a feeble or callous
+temperament, never of any use in extricating their daughters from the
+entanglements that early beset them. And occasionally they have
+chivalrous or disreputable brothers.
+
+So it is with a modest confidence in the equipment of my heroine that I
+now present her to the reader denuded of both parents, and domiciled
+under the roof of a brother who was not only disreputable in the
+imagination of Mrs Trefusis, but, as I hate half measures, was so in
+reality.
+
+If Janet had been an introspective person, if she had ever asked herself
+whence she came and whither she was going, if the cruelty of life and
+nature had ever forced themselves upon her notice, if the apparent
+incompleteness of this pretty world had ever daunted her, I think she
+must have been a very unhappy woman. Her surroundings were vulgar,
+coarse, without a redeeming gleam of culture, even in its crudest
+forms, without a spark of refined affection. Nevertheless her life grew
+up white and clean in it, as a hyacinth will build its fragrant bell
+tower in the window of a tavern, in a stale atmosphere of smoke and beer
+and alcohol. Janet was self-contained as a hyacinth. She unfolded from
+within. She asked no questions of life. That she had had a happy,
+contented existence was obvious; an existence spent much in the open
+air, in which tranquil, practical duties well within her reach had been
+all that had been required of her. Her brother Fred, several years older
+than herself, had one redeeming point. He was fond of her and proud of
+her. He did not understand her, but she was what he called "a good
+sort."
+
+Janet was one of those blessed women--whose number seems to diminish,
+while that of her highly-strung sisters painfully increases--who make no
+large demand on life, or on their fellow-creatures. She took both as
+they came. Her uprightness and integrity were her own, as was the
+simple religion which she followed blindfold. She expected little of
+others, and exacted nothing. She had, of course, had lovers in plenty.
+She wished to be married and to have children--many children. In her
+quiet ruminating mind she had names ready for a family of ten. But until
+George came she had always said "No." When pressed by her brother as to
+why some particularly eligible _parti_--such as Mr Gorst, the successful
+trainer--had been refused, she could never put forward any adequate
+reason, and would say at last that she was very happy as she was.
+
+Then George came, a different kind of man from any she had
+known, at least different from any in his class who had offered
+marriage. He represented to her all that was absent from her own
+surroundings--refinement, culture. I don't know what Janet can have
+meant by culture, but years later, when she had picked up words like
+"culture" and "development," and scattered them across her conversation,
+she told me he had represented all these glories to her. And he was a
+little straighter than the business men she associated with, a good deal
+straighter than her brother. Perhaps, after all, that was the first
+attraction he had for her. Janet was straight herself. She fell in love
+with George.
+
+"L'amour est une source naïve." It was a very naïve spring in Janet's
+heart, though it welled up from a considerable depth; a spring not even
+to be poisoned by her brother's outrageous delight at the engagement, or
+his congratulations on the wisdom of her previous steadfast refusal of
+the eligible Mr Gorst.
+
+"This beats all," he said; "I never thought you would pull it off,
+Janet. I thought he was too big a fish to land. And to think you will
+queen it at Easthope Park."
+
+Janet was not in the least perturbed by her brother's remarks. She was
+accustomed to them. He always talked like that. She vaguely supposed she
+should some day "queen it" at Easthope. The expression did not offend
+her. The reflection in her mind was: "George must love me very much to
+have chosen me, when all the most splendid ladies in the land would be
+glad to have him."
+
+And now, as she walked on this Sunday afternoon in the long, quiet
+gardens of Easthope, she felt her cup was full. She looked at her
+affianced George with shy adoration from under the brim of her violent
+new hat, and made soft answers to him when he spoke.
+
+George was not a great talker. He trusted mainly to an occasional
+ejaculation, his meaning aided by pointing with a stick.
+
+A covey of partridges ran with one consent across the smooth lawn at a
+little distance.
+
+"Jolly little beggars," said George, with explanatory stick.
+
+She liked the flowers best, but he did not, so he took her down to the
+pool below the rose garden, where the eager brook ran through a grating,
+making a little water prison in which solemn, portly personages might be
+seen moving.
+
+"See 'em?" said George, pointing as usual.
+
+"Yes," said Janet.
+
+"That's a three-pounder."
+
+"Yes."
+
+That was all the stream said to them.
+
+She lingered once more in the rose-garden when he would have drawn her
+onwards towards the ferrets, and George, willing to humour her, got out
+his knife and chose a rose for her. Has any woman really lived who has
+not stood once in silence in the June sunshine with her lover, and
+watched him pick for her a red rose which is not as other roses, a rose
+which understands? Amid all the world of roses, did the raiment of God
+touch just that one, as He walked in His garden in the cool of the
+evening? And did the Divine love imprisoned in it reach forth towards
+the human love of the two lovers, and blend them for a moment with
+itself?
+
+"You are my rose," said George, and he put his arm round her, and drew
+her to him with a rough tenderness.
+
+"Yes," said Janet, not knowing to what she said "yes," but vaguely
+assenting to him in everything. And they leaned together by the
+sun-dial, soft cheek against tanned cheek, soft hand in hard hand.
+
+Could anything in life be more commonplace than two lovers and a rose?
+Have we not seen such groups portrayed on lozenge-boxes, and on the
+wrappers of French plums?
+
+And yet, what remains commonplace if Love but touch it as he passes?
+
+Let Memory open her worn picture-book, where it opens of itself, and
+make answer.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anne saw the lovers, but they did not see her, as she ran down the steps
+cut in the turf to the little bridge across the trout stream. She had
+left Mrs Trefusis composed into a resigned nap, and she felt at liberty
+to carry her aching spirit to seek comfort and patience by the brook.
+
+Anne, the restrained, disciplined, dignified woman of the world, threw
+herself down on her face in the short, sun-warm grass.
+
+Is the heart ever really tamed? As the years pass we learn to keep it
+behind bolts and bars. We marshal it forth on set occasions, to work
+manacled under our eyes, and then goad it back to its cell again. But is
+it ever anything but a caged Arab of the desert, a wild fierce prisoner
+in chains, a captive Samson with shorn locks which grow again, who may
+one day snap his fetters, and pull down the house over our heads.
+
+Anne set her teeth. Her passionate heart beat hard against the kind
+bosom of the earth. How we return to her, our Mother Earth, when life is
+too difficult or too beautiful for us! How we fling ourselves upon her
+breast, upon her solitude, finding courage to encounter joy, insight to
+bear sorrow. First faint foreshadowing of the time when we, "short-lived
+as fire, and fading as the dew," shall go back to her entirely.
+
+Anne lay very still. She did not cry. She knew better than that. Tears
+are for the young. She hid her convulsed face in her hands, and
+shuddered violently from time to time.
+
+How long was she to bear it? How long was she to drag herself by sheer
+force through the days, endless hour by hour? How long was she to hate
+the dawn? How long was she to endure this intermittent agony, which
+released her only to return? Was there to be no reprieve from the
+invasion of this one thought? Was there no escape from this man? Was not
+her old friend the robin on his side? The meadowsweet feathered the
+hedgerow. The white clover was in the grass, together with the little
+purple orchid. Were they not all his confederates? Had he bribed the
+robin to sing of him, and the scent in the white clover against her
+cheek to goad her back to acute remembrance of him, and the pine-trees
+to speak continually of him?
+
+"He is rich enough," said poor Anne to herself, with something between a
+laugh and a sob.
+
+But he had not bribed the brook. Tormented spirits ere now have walked
+in dry places, seeking rest and finding none. But has any outcast from
+happiness sought rest by running water, and found it not?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+    "I have not sinned against the God of Love."
+
+                                                 --EDMUND GOSSE.
+
+
+When Anne returned to the house an hour or two later she heard an alien
+voice and strident laugh through the open door of the drawing-room as
+she crossed the hall, and she crept noiselessly upstairs towards her own
+room. She felt as if she were quite unable to bear so soon again the
+strain of that small family party. But halfway up the stairs her
+conscience pricked her. Was all well in the drawing-room? She sighed,
+and went slowly downstairs again.
+
+All was not well there.
+
+Mrs Trefusis was sitting frozen upright in her high-backed chair,
+listening with congealed civility to the would-be-easy conversation,
+streaked with nervous laughter, of a young man. Anne saw at a glance
+that he must be Janet's brother, and she instinctively divined that, on
+the strength of his sister's engagement, he was now making, unasked, his
+first call on Mrs Trefusis.
+
+Fred Black was a tall, sufficiently handsome man seen apart from Janet.
+He could look quite distinguished striding about in well-made breeches
+among a group of farmers and dealers on market-day. But taken away from
+his appropriate setting, and inserted suddenly into the Easthope
+drawing-room, in Janet's proximity, he changed like a chameleon, and
+appeared dilapidated, in spite of being over-dressed, irretrievably
+second-rate, and unwholesome-looking. He was so like his sister that a
+certain indefinable commonness, not of breeding but of character, and a
+suggestion of cunning and insolence observable in him, were thrown into
+high relief by the strong superficial resemblance of feature between
+them.
+
+Janet was sitting motionless and embarrassed before the tea-table,
+waiting for the tea to become of brandied strength. Mrs Trefusis,
+possibly mindful of Anne's appeal, had evidently asked her future
+daughter-in-law to pour out tea for her. And Janet, to the instant
+annoyance of the elder woman, had carefully poured cream into each empty
+cup as a preliminary measure.
+
+George was standing in sullen silence by the tea-table, vaguely aware
+that something was wrong, and wishing that Fred had not called.
+
+The strain relaxed as Anne entered.
+
+Anne came in quickly, with a gentle expectancy of pleasure in her grave
+face. She gave the impression of one who has hastened back to congenial
+society.
+
+If this be hypocrisy, Anne was certainly a hypocrite. There are some
+natures, simple and patient, who quickly perceive and gladly meet the
+small occasions of life. Anne had come into the world willing to serve,
+and she did not mind whom she served. She did gracefully, even gaily,
+the things that others did not think worth while. This was, of course,
+no credit to her. She was made so. Just as some of us are so
+fastidiously, so artistically constituted as to make the poor souls who
+have to live with us old before their time.
+
+Mrs Trefusis' face became less knotted. Janet gave a sigh of relief.
+George said: "Hi, Ponto! How are ye?" and affably stirred up his
+sleeping retriever with his foot.
+
+Anne sat down by Janet, advised her that Mrs Trefusis did not like
+cream, and then, while she swallowed a cup of tea sweetened to nausea,
+devoted herself to Fred.
+
+His nervous laugh became less strident, his conversation less pendulous
+between a paralysed constraint and a galvanized familiarity. Anne loved
+horses, but she did not talk of them to Fred, though, from his
+appearance, it seemed as if no other subject had ever occupied his
+attention.
+
+Why is it that a passion for horses writes itself as plainly as a
+craving for alcohol on the faces of the men and women who live for them?
+
+Anne spoke of the Boer war in its most obvious aspects, mentioned a few
+of its best-known incidents, of which even he could not be ignorant.
+Janet glanced with fond pride at her brother, as he declaimed against
+the Government for its refusal to buy thousands of hypothetical Kaffir
+ponies, and as he posted Anne in the private workings of the mind of her
+cousin, the Prime Minister. Fred had even heard of certain scandals
+respecting the hospitals for the wounded, and opined with decision that
+war could not be conducted on rose-water principles, with a bottle of
+eau-de-Cologne at each man's pillow.
+
+"Fine woman that!" said Fred to Janet afterwards, as she walked a few
+steps with him on his homeward way. "Woman of the world. Knows her way
+about. And how she holds herself! A little thin perhaps, and not much
+colour, but shows her breeding. Who is she?"
+
+"Lady Varney."
+
+"Married?"
+
+"N--no."
+
+"H'm! Look here, Janet. You suck up to her. And you look how she does
+things, and notice the way she talks. She reads the papers, takes an
+interest in politics. That's what a man likes. You do the same. And
+don't you knock under to that old bag of bones too much. Hold your own.
+We are as good as she is."
+
+"Oh, no, Fred; we're not."
+
+"Oh! it's all rot about family. It's not worth a rush. We are just the
+same as them. A gentleman's a gentleman whether he lives in a large
+house or a small one, and the real snobs are the people who think
+different. Does it make you less of a lady because you live in an
+unpretentious way? Not a bit of it. Don't talk to me."
+
+Janet remained silent. She felt there was some hitch in her brother's
+reasoning, which, until to-day, had appeared to her irrefutable, but she
+could not see where the hitch lay.
+
+"You must stand up to the old woman, I tell you. I don't want you to be
+rude, but you let her know that she is the dowager. Don't give way.
+Didn't you see how I tackled her?"
+
+"I'm not clever like you."
+
+"Well, you are a long sight prettier," said her brother proudly. "And
+I've brought some dollars with me for the trousseau. You go to the
+Brands to-morrow, don't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, don't pay for anything you can help. Tell them to put it down.
+Get this Lady Varney or Mrs Brand to recommend the shops and
+dressmakers, and then they will not dun us for money."
+
+"Oh, Fred! Are you so hard up?"
+
+"Hard up!" said Fred, his face becoming suddenly pinched and old. "Hard
+up!" He drew in his breath. "Oh! I'm all right. At least, yes, just for
+the moment I'm a bit pressed. Look here, Janet. You and Mrs Brand are
+old pals. Get Brand," his voice became hoarse, "get Brand to wait a bit.
+He has my I O U, and he has waited once, but he warned me he would not
+again. He said it was against his rules; as if rules matter between
+gentlemen. He's as hard as nails. The I O U falls due next week, and I
+can't meet it. I don't want any bother till after you are spliced. You
+and Mrs Brand lay your heads together, and persuade him to wait till you
+are married, at any rate. He hates me, but he won't want to stand in
+your light."
+
+"I'll ask him," said Janet, looking earnestly at her brother, but only
+half understanding why his face was so white and set. "But why don't you
+take my two thousand and pay him back? I said you could borrow it. I
+think that would be better than speaking again to Mr Brand, who will
+never listen."
+
+"No, it wouldn't," said Fred, his hand shaking so violently that he gave
+up attempting to light a cigarette. He knew that that two thousand,
+Janet's little fortune, existed only in her imagination. It had existed
+once; he had had charge of it, but it was gone.
+
+"Ask Brand," he said again. "A man with any gentlemanly feeling cannot
+refuse a pretty woman anything. I can't. You ask Brand--as if it was to
+please you. You're pretty enough to wheedle anything out of men. He'll
+do it."
+
+"I'll ask him," said Janet again, and she sighed as she went back alone
+to the great house which was one day to be hers. She did not think of
+that as she looked up at the long lines of stone-mullioned windows. She
+thought only of her George, and wondered, with a blush of shame, whether
+Fred had yet borrowed money from him.
+
+Then, as she saw a white figure move past the gallery windows, she
+remembered Anne, and her brother's advice to her to make a friend of
+"Lady Varney." Janet had been greatly drawn towards Anne, after she had
+got over a certain stolid preliminary impression that Anne was "fine."
+And Janet had immediately mistaken Anne's tactful kindness to herself
+for an overture of friendship. Perhaps that is a mistake which many
+gentle, commonplace souls make, who go through life disillusioned as to
+the sincerity of certain other attractive, brilliant creatures with whom
+they have come in momentary contact, to whom they can give nothing, but
+from whom they have received a generous measure of delicate sympathy and
+kindness, which they mistook for the prelude of friendship; a friendship
+which never arrived. It is well for us when we learn the difference
+between the donations and the subscriptions of those richer than
+ourselves, when we realize how broad is the way towards a person's
+kindness, and how many surprisingly inferior individuals are to be met
+therein; and how strait is the gate, how hard to find, and how doubly
+hard, when found, to force it, of that same person's friendship.
+
+Janet supposed that Anne liked her as much as she herself liked Anne,
+and, being a simple soul, she said to herself, "I think I will go and
+sit with her a little."
+
+A more experienced person than my poor heroine would have felt that
+there was not marked encouragement in the civil "Come in" which answered
+her knock at Anne's door.
+
+But Janet came in smiling, sure of her welcome. Every one was sure of
+their welcome with Anne.
+
+She was sitting in a low chair by the open window. She had taken off
+what Janet would have called her "Sunday gown," and had wrapped round
+her a long, diaphanous white garment, the like of which Janet had never
+seen. It was held at the neck by a pale green ribbon, cunningly drawn
+through lace insertion, and at the waist by another wider green ribbon,
+which fell to the feet. The spreading lace-edged hem showed the point of
+a green morocco slipper.
+
+Janet looked with respectful wonder at Anne's dressing-gown, and a
+momentary doubt as to whether her presence was urgently needed vanished.
+Anne must have been expecting her. She would not have put on that
+exquisite garment to sit by herself in.
+
+Janet's eyes travelled to Anne's face.
+
+Even the faint, reassuring smile, which did not come the first moment it
+was summoned, could not disguise the fatigue of that pale face, though
+it effaced a momentary impatience.
+
+"You are very tired," said Janet. "I wish you were as strong as me."
+
+Janet's beautiful eyes had an admiring devotion in them, and also a
+certain wistfulness, which appealed to Anne.
+
+"Sit down," she said cordially. "That is a comfortable chair."
+
+"You were reading. Shan't I interrupt you?" said Janet, sitting down
+nevertheless, and feeling that tact could no further go.
+
+"It does not matter," said Anne, closing the book, but keeping one
+slender finger in the place.
+
+"What is your book called?"
+
+"'Inasmuch.'"
+
+"Who wrote it?"
+
+"Hester Gresley."
+
+"I think I've heard of her," said Janet cautiously. "Mrs Smith, our
+Rector's wife, says that Mr Smith does not approve of her books; they
+have such a low tone. I think Fred read one of them on a visit once. I
+haven't time myself for much reading."
+
+Silence.
+
+"I should like," said Janet, turning her clear, wide gaze upon Anne, "I
+should like to read the books you read, and know the things you know. I
+should like to--to be like you."
+
+A delicate colour came into Anne's face, and she looked down embarrassed
+at the volume in her hand.
+
+"Would you read me a little bit?" said Janet. "Not beginning at the
+beginning, but just going on where you left off."
+
+"I am afraid you might not care for it any more than Mr Smith does."
+
+"Oh! I'm not deeply read like Mr Smith. Is it poetry?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I'm glad it isn't poetry. Is it about love?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I used not to care to read about love, but now I think I should like it
+very much."
+
+A swift emotion passed over Anne's face. She took up the book, and
+slowly opened it. Janet looked with admiration at her slender hands.
+
+"I wish mine were white like hers," she thought, as she looked at her
+own far more beautiful but slightly tanned hands, folded together in her
+lap in an attitude of attention.
+
+Anne hesitated a moment, and then began to read:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I had journeyed some way in life, I was travel-stained and weary, when
+I met Love. In the empty, glaring highway I met him, and we walked in
+it together. I had not thought he fared in such steep places, having
+heard he was a dweller in the sheltered gardens, which were not for me.
+Nevertheless he went with me. I never stopped for him, or turned aside
+out of my path to seek him, for I had met his counterfeit when I was
+young, and I distrusted strangers afterwards. And I prayed to God to
+turn my heart wholly to Himself, and to send Love away, lest he should
+come between me and Him. But when did God hearken to any prayer of mine?
+
+"And Love was grave and stern. And as we walked he showed me the dew
+upon the grass, and the fire in the dew, the things I had seen all my
+life and had never understood. And he drew the rainbow through his hand.
+I was one with the snowdrop and with the thunderstorm. And we went
+together upon the sea, swiftly up its hurrying mountains, swiftly down
+into its rushing valleys. And I was one with the sea. And all fear
+ceased out of my life, and a great awe dwelt with me instead. And Love
+wore a human face. But I knew that was for a moment only. Did not Christ
+the same?
+
+"And Love showed me the hearts of my brothers in the crowd. And, last of
+all, he showed me myself, with whom I had lived in ignorance. And I was
+humbled.
+
+"And then Love, who had given me all, asked for all. And I gave
+reverence, and patience, and faith, and hope, and intuition, and
+service. I even gave him truth. I put my hands under his feet. But he
+said it was not enough. So I gave him my heart. That was the last I had
+to give.
+
+"And Love took it in a great tenderness and smote it. And in the anguish
+the human face of Love vanished away.
+
+"And afterwards, long years afterwards, when I was first able to move
+and look up, I saw Love, who, as I thought, was gone, keeping watch
+beside me. And I saw his face clear, without the human veil between me
+and it. And it was the Face of God. And I saw that Love and God are
+one, and that, because of His exceeding glory, He had been constrained
+to take flesh even as Christ took it, so that my dim eyes might be able
+to apprehend Him. And I saw that it was He and He only who had walked
+with me from the first."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anne laid down the book. She looked fixedly out across the quiet
+gardens, with their long shadows, to the still, sun-lit woods beyond.
+Her face changed, as the face of one who, in patient endurance, has long
+rowed against the stream, and who at last lets the benign, constraining
+current take her whither it will. The look of awed surrender seldom seen
+on a living face, seldom absent from the faces of the newly dead, rested
+for a moment on Anne's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I don't think," said Janet, "I quite understand what it means, because
+I was not sure whether it was a lady or a gentleman that was speaking."
+
+Anne started violently, and turned her colourless face towards the
+voice. It seemed to recall her from a great distance. She had forgotten
+Janet. She had been too far off to hear what she had said.
+
+"I like the bit about giving Love our hearts," said Janet tentatively.
+"It means something the same as the sermon did this morning, doesn't it,
+about not laying up our treasure upon earth?"
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"Yes," said Anne gently, her voice and face quivering a little, "perhaps
+it does. I had not thought of it in that way till you mentioned it, but
+I see what you mean."
+
+"That we ought to put religion first."
+
+"Y-yes."
+
+"I am so glad you read that to me," continued Janet comfortably,
+"because I had an idea that you and I should feel the same about"--she
+hesitated--"about love. I mean," she corrected herself, "you would, if
+you were engaged."
+
+"I have never been engaged," said Anne, in the tone of one who gently
+but firmly closes a subject.
+
+"When you are," said Janet, peacefully pursuing the topic, and looking
+at her with tender confidence, "you will feel like me, that it's--just
+everything."
+
+"Shall I?"
+
+"I don't know any poetry, except two lines that George copied out for
+me--
+
+    'Don't love me at all,
+    Or love me all in all.'"
+
+Anne winced, but recovered herself instantly.
+
+"It's like that with me," continued Janet. "It's all in all. And then I
+am afraid that _is_ laying up treasures on earth, isn't it?"
+
+"Not if you love God more because you love George."
+
+Janet ruminated. You could almost hear her mind at work upon the
+suggestion, as you hear a coffee-mill respond to a handful of coffee
+berries.
+
+"I think I do," she said at last, and she added below her breath, "I
+thank God all the time for sending George, and I pray I may be worthy
+of him."
+
+Anne's eyes filled with sudden tears--not for herself.
+
+"I hope you will be very happy," she said, laying her hand on Janet's.
+It seemed to Anne a somewhat forlorn hope.
+
+Janet's hand closed slowly over Anne's.
+
+"I think we shall," she said. "And yet I sometimes doubt, when I
+remember that I am not his equal. I knew that in a way from the first,
+but I see it more and more since I came here. I don't wonder Mrs
+Trefusis doesn't think me good enough."
+
+"Mrs Trefusis does not take fancies quickly."
+
+"It is not that," said Janet. "There's two ways of not being good
+enough. Till now I have only thought of one way, of not being good
+enough _in myself_, like such things as temper. I'm not often angry, but
+if I am I stay angry. I don't alter. I was once angry with Fred for a
+year. I've thought a great deal about that since I've cared for George.
+And sometimes I fancy I'm rather slow. I daresay you haven't noticed
+it, but Mrs Smith often remarks upon it. She always has something to say
+on any subject, just like you have; but somehow I haven't."
+
+"I don't know Mrs Smith."
+
+"I wish you did. She's wonderful. She says she learnt it when she went
+out so much in the West End before her marriage."
+
+"Indeed!"
+
+"But since I've been here I see there's another way I'm not good enough,
+which sets Mrs Trefusis against me. I don't think she would mind if I
+told lies and had a bad temper, and couldn't talk like Mrs Smith, if I
+was good enough in _her_ way--I mean if I was high-born like you."
+
+The conversation seemed to contain as many pins as a well-stocked
+pincushion. The expression "high-born" certainly had a sharp point, but
+Anne made no sign as it was driven in. She considered a moment, and then
+said, as if she had decided to risk something: "You are right. Mrs
+Trefusis would have been pleased if you had been my sister. You perhaps
+think that very worldly. I think it is very natural."
+
+"I wish I were your sister," said Janet, who might be reckoned on for
+remaining half a field behind.
+
+Anne sighed, and leaned back in her chair.
+
+"If I were your sister," continued Janet, wholly engrossed in getting
+her slow barge heavily under way, "you would have told me a number of
+little things which--I don't seem to know."
+
+"You could easily learn some of them," said Anne, "and that would
+greatly please Mrs Trefusis."
+
+"Could you tell me of anything in especial?"
+
+"Well! For instance--I don't mind myself in the least--but it would be
+better not to call me 'Lady Varney.'"
+
+"I did not know you would like me to call you 'Anne.'"
+
+"You are quite right. We do not know each other well enough."
+
+"Then what ought I to call you?"
+
+"My friends call me 'Lady Anne.'"
+
+"Dear me!" said Janet, astonished. "There's Lady Alice Thornton. She
+married Mr Thornton, our member. Fred sold him a hunter. And she is
+sometimes called 'Lady Alice Thornton' and sometimes 'Lady Thornton.'
+Mrs Smith says----"
+
+"Then," continued Anne, who seemed indisposed to linger on the subject,
+"it would please Mrs Trefusis if you came into a room with more
+courage."
+
+Janet stared at her adviser round-eyed.
+
+"It is shy work, isn't it?" said Anne. "I always had a great difficulty
+in getting into a room myself when I was your age. (O Anne! Anne!) I
+mean, in getting well into the middle. But I saw I ought to try, and not
+to hesitate near the door, because, you see, it obliges old ladies, and
+people like Mrs Trefusis, who is rather lame, to come nearly to the door
+to meet us. And we young ones ought to go up to them, even if it makes
+us feel shy."
+
+"I never thought of that," said Janet. "I will remember those two things
+always. Mrs Smith always comes in very slow, but then she's a married
+woman, and she says she likes to give people time to realise her. I will
+watch how you come in. I will try and copy you in everything. And if I
+am in doubt, may I ask you?"
+
+Anne laughed, and rose lightly.
+
+"Do," she said, "if you think I could be of any use on these trivial
+matters. I live among trivialities. But remember always that they _are_
+trivial. The only thing that is of any real importance in this uphill
+world is to love and be loved. You will know that when you are my age."
+
+And Anne put her arm round the tall young figure for a moment, and
+kissed her. And then suddenly, why she knew not, Janet discovered, even
+while Anne stood smiling at her, that the interview was over.
+
+It seemed a pity, for, when Janet had reached her own room, she
+remembered that she had intended to consult Anne as to the advisability
+of cutting her glorious hair into a fringe, like Mrs Smith's.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anne and Janet travelled together to London next day, and on the journey
+Janet laid before Anne, in all its bearings, the momentous question of
+her hair. Fred had said she would never look up to date till she cut a
+fringe. George had opined that her hair looked very nice as it was,
+while Mrs Smith had asseverated that it was impossible to mix in good
+society, or find a hat to suit the face, without one.
+
+Anne settled once and for all that Janet's hair, parted and waving
+naturally, like the Venus of Milo's, was not to be touched. She became
+solemnly severe on the subject, as she saw Janet was still wavering. And
+she even offered to help Janet with her trousseau, to take her to
+Vernon, her own tailor, and to her own hatter and dressmaker. Janet
+had no conception what a sacrifice of time that offer meant to a person
+of endless social engagements like Anne, who was considered one of the
+best-dressed women in London.
+
+But to Anne's secret amusement and thankfulness, this offer was
+gratefully declined in an embarrassed manner.
+
+Janet's great friend, Mrs Macalpine Brand, to whose flat in Lowndes
+Mansions she was now on her way, had offered to help her with her
+trousseau. Did Lady Var--Anne know Mrs Macalpine Brand? She went out a
+great deal in London, so perhaps she might have met her. And she was
+always beautifully dressed.
+
+Anne remembered vaguely a certain over-dressed, would-be-smart,
+insufferable Mrs Brand, who had made bare-faced but fruitless attempts
+to scrape acquaintance with herself when she and Anne had been on the
+same committee.
+
+"I have met a very pretty Mrs Brand," she said, "when I was working with
+Mrs Forrester. She had an excellent head for business--and had she not
+rather a peculiar Christian name?"
+
+"Cuckoo."
+
+"Yes, that was it. She helped Mrs Forrester's charity most generously
+when it was in debt."
+
+"She is my greatest friend," said Janet, beaming. "I shall be staying
+with her all this next fortnight. May I bring her with me when I come to
+tea with you?"
+
+Anne hesitated half a second before she said, "Do."
+
+She was glad afterwards that she had said it, for it pleased Janet, and
+poor little Mrs Macalpine Brand never took advantage of it. Even at that
+moment as they spoke of her, she was absorbed, to the shutting out even
+of plans for social advancement, in more pressing subjects.
+
+The two girls parted at Victoria, and the last time Anne saw Janet's
+face, in its halo of happiness, was as Janet nodded to her through the
+window of the four-wheeler, which bore her away to her friend Mrs
+Brand.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+     "Tous les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux, bavards,
+     hypocrites, orgueilleux, ou lâches, méprisables et sensuels:
+     toutes les femmes sont perfides, artificieuses, vaniteuses,
+     curieuses et dépravées: ... mais il y a au monde une chose
+     sainte et sublime, c'est l'union de deux de ces êtres si
+     imparfaits et si affreux."
+
+                                             --ALFRED DE MUSSET.
+
+
+As the four-wheeler neared Lowndes Square the traffic became blocked,
+not by carriages, but by large numbers of people on foot. At last the
+cabman drew to the side, uncorked himself from the box, and came to the
+window.
+
+"Is it Lowndes Mansions as you're a-asking for?" he said.
+
+"Yes," said Janet.
+
+"Why, it's there as the fire was yesterday."
+
+"The fire!"
+
+"Yes! The top floors is mostly burnt out. You can't get a wehicle near
+it."
+
+"Were any lives lost?" said Janet. The Brands lived on one of the upper
+floors.
+
+"No, miss," said a policeman, approaching, urbane, helpful, not averse
+to imparting information.
+
+Janet explained that she was on her way to stay in the Mansions, and the
+policeman, who said that other "parties" had already arrived with the
+same object but could not be taken in, advised her to turn back and go
+with her luggage to one of the private hotels in Sloane Street, until
+she could, as he expressed it, "turn round."
+
+Janet did as she was bid, and half an hour later made her way on foot
+through the crowd to the entrance of Lowndes Mansions.
+
+The hall porter recognised her, for she had frequently stayed with the
+Brands, and Janet's face was not quickly forgotten. He bade the
+policeman who barred the entrance let her pass.
+
+The central hall, with its Oriental hangings and sham palms, was crowded
+with people. Idle, demoralized housemaids belonging to the upper
+floors, whose sphere of work was gone, stood together in whispering
+groups watching the spectacle. Grave men in high hats and over-long
+buttoned-up frock-coats greeted each other silently, and then produced
+passes which admitted them to the jealously guarded iron staircase. The
+other staircase was burnt out at the top, though from the hall it showed
+no trace of anything but of the water which yesterday had flowed down it
+in waves, and which still oozed from the heavy pile stair-carpet, which
+the salvage men were beginning to take up.
+
+The hall porter and the unemployed lift man stood together, silent,
+stupefied, broken with fatigue, worn out with answering questions.
+
+"Are Mr and Mrs Brand all right?" gasped Janet, thrilled by the
+magnitude of the unseen disaster above, which seemed to strike roots of
+horror down to the basement.
+
+"Every one is all right," said the lift man automatically.
+"No lives lost. Two residents shook. One leg broke hamong the
+hemployees--compound fracture."
+
+"Mrs Brand was shook," said the hall porter callously. "She had a fall."
+
+"Where is she now?" enquired Janet.
+
+The hall porter looked at her apathetically, and continued: "Mr Brand
+was taking 'orse exercise in the Park. Mrs Brand was still in her
+bedroom. The fire broke out, cause unbeknownst, at ten o'clock yesterday
+morning precisely. Ten by the barracks clock it was. The hemployees
+worked the hose until the first hingine arrived at quarter past."
+
+"Twenty past," corrected the lift man.
+
+"And Mrs Brand?" said Janet again.
+
+"Mrs Brand must 'ave been dressing, for she was in her dressing-gown,
+and she must ha' run down the main staircase afore it got well alight;
+at least, she was found unconscious-like three flights down. Some say as
+she was mazed by the smoke, and some say as she fell over the
+banisters."
+
+"The banisters is gone," said the lift man.
+
+"Where is she now? Where is Mr Brand? I must see him at once," said
+Janet, at last realizing that the history of the fire would go on for
+ever.
+
+"Mrs Brand was took into the billiard-room," said the lift man. "Mr
+Brand is with her, and the doctor. There! The doctor is coming out now."
+
+A grey-haired man shot out through the crowd, ran down the steps, and
+disappeared into a brougham privileged to remain at the entrance.
+
+"Take me to Mr Brand this instant," said Janet, shaking the hall porter
+by the arm.
+
+The man looked as if he would have been surprised at her vehemence if
+there were any spring of surprise left in him, but it had obviously run
+down from overwinding. He slowly led the way through a swing door, and
+down a dark passage lit by electric light. At a large ground-glass door
+with "Billiard-Room" on it he stopped, and tapped.
+
+There was no answer.
+
+Janet opened the door, went in, and closed it behind her.
+
+She almost stumbled against Mr Brand, who was standing with his back
+towards her, his face to the wall, in the tiny antechamber, bristling
+with empty pegs, which led into the billiard-room.
+
+It was dark save for the electric light in the passage, which shone
+feebly through the ground-glass door.
+
+Mr Brand turned slowly as Janet almost touched him. His death-white face
+was the only thing visible. He did not speak. Janet gazed at him
+horror-struck.
+
+Gradually, as her eyes became accustomed to the dim light, she saw the
+little dapper, familiar figure, with its immaculate frock-coat, and
+corseted waist, and the lean, sallow, wrinkled face, with its retreating
+forehead and dyed hair, and waxed, turned-up moustaches. One of the
+waxed ends had been bent, and drooped forlornly, grotesquely. It was
+perhaps inevitable that the money-lender should be nicknamed "Monkey
+Brand," a name pronounced by many with a sneer not devoid of fear.
+
+"How is she?" said Janet at last.
+
+"She is dying," said Monkey Brand, his chin shaking. "Her back is
+broken."
+
+A nurse in cap and apron silently opened the inner door into the
+billiard-room.
+
+"Mrs Brand is asking for you, sir," she said gently.
+
+"I will come," he said, and he went back into the billiard-room.
+
+The nurse looked enquiringly at Janet.
+
+"I am Mrs Brand's friend," said Janet. "She is expecting me."
+
+"She takes it very hard now, poor thing," said the nurse; "and she was
+so brave at first."
+
+And they both went into the billiard-room, and remained standing at the
+further end of it.
+
+It was a large, gaudily-decorated room, adorned with sporting prints,
+and lit by a skylight, on to which opaque bodies, evidently fallen from
+a height, lay in blots, starring the glass.
+
+The billiard-table was littered with doctors' appliances, and at the end
+near the door the nurse had methodically arranged a line of towels and
+basins, with a tin can of hot water and a bucket swathed in flannel with
+ice in it.
+
+The large room, with its glaring upper light, was hot and still, and
+smelt of stale smoke and chloroform.
+
+At the further end, on an improvised bed of mattresses and striped sofa
+cushions, a white, rigid figure was lying, the eyes fixed on the
+skylight.
+
+Monkey Brand knelt down by his wife, and bending over her, kissed,
+without raising it, one of the pale clenched hands.
+
+"Cuckoo," he said, and until she heard him speak it seemed to Janet that
+she had never known to what heights tenderness can reach.
+
+His wife turned her eyes slowly upon him, and looked at him. In her
+eyes, dark with coming death, there was a great yearning towards her
+husband, and behind the yearning an anguish unspeakable. Janet shrank
+before it. The fear of death never cut so deep as that.
+
+A cry, uncouth, terrible, as of one pushed past the last outpost of
+endurance to the extremity of agony, rent the quiet room.
+
+"I cannot bear it," she wailed. And she, who could not raise her hands,
+to which death had come already, raised them once above her head.
+
+They fell heavily, lifelessly, striking her husband's face.
+
+"I would die for you if I might," said Monkey Brand, and he hid his face
+against the hand that had struck him.
+
+Cuckoo looked at the bowed, blue-black head, and her wide eyes wandered
+away past it, set in the vacancy of despair. They fell on Janet.
+
+"Who is that?" she said suddenly.
+
+The nurse brought Janet forward.
+
+"You remember me, Cuckoo?" said Janet gently, her calm smile a little
+tremulous, her face white and beautiful as that of an angel.
+
+"It is Janet. Thank God!" said Cuckoo, and she suddenly burst into
+tears.
+
+They passed quickly.
+
+"I have no time for tears," said Cuckoo, smiling faintly at her husband,
+as he wiped them away with a shaking brown hand. "Janet is come. I must
+speak to her a little quite alone."
+
+"You would not send me from you?" said Monkey Brand, his face twitching.
+"You would not be so hard on me, Cuckoo?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "I would."
+
+The pretty, vulgar, dying face, under its crooked fringe, was
+illuminated. A sort of shadow of Cuckoo's hard little domineering manner
+had come back to her.
+
+"I must be alone with Janet for a little bit, quite alone. You and the
+nurse will go outside, and wait till Janet comes to you. And then," she
+looked at her husband with tender love, "you will come back to me, and
+stay with me to the last."
+
+He still hesitated.
+
+"Go now, Arthur," she said, "and take nurse with you."
+
+The habit of obedience to her whim, her fancy, her slightest wish, was
+ingrained years deep in him. He got upon his feet, signed to the nurse,
+and left the room with her.
+
+"Is the door shut?" said Cuckoo.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Go and make sure."
+
+Janet went to the door, and came back.
+
+"It is shut."
+
+"Kneel down by me. I can't speak loud."
+
+Janet knelt down.
+
+"Now listen to me. I'm dying. I'm not going to die this minute, because
+I won't; but all the same it's coming. I can't hold on. There is no time
+for being surprised, or for explanations. There's no time for anything,
+except for you to listen to me, and do something for me quickly. Will
+you do it?"
+
+"Yes," said Janet.
+
+Cuckoo looked for a moment at the innocent, fair face above her, and a
+faint colour stained her cheek. But she remembered her husband, and
+summoned her old courage. She spoke quickly, with the clearness and
+precision which had made her such an excellent woman of business, so
+invaluable on the committees of fashionable charities.
+
+"I am a bad woman, Janet. I have concealed it from you, and from every
+one. Arthur--has never guessed it. Don't shudder. Don't turn away.
+There's not time. Keep all that for later--when I'm gone. And don't
+drive me to distraction by thinking this is a dying hallucination. I
+know what I am saying, and I, who have lied so often, am driven to speak
+the truth at last."
+
+"Don't," said Janet. "If it's true, don't say it, but let it die with
+you. Don't break Mr Brand's heart now at the last moment."
+
+Cuckoo's astute eyes dwelt on Janet's face. How slow she was! What a
+blunt instrument had Fate vouchsafed to her.
+
+"I speak to save him," she said. "Don't interrupt again, but listen. It
+all goes back a long way. I was forced into marrying Arthur. I disliked
+him, for I was in love with some one else--some one, as I see now, not
+fit to black his boots. I was straight when I married Arthur, but--I did
+not stay straight afterwards. Arthur is a hard man, but he was good and
+tender to me always, and he trusted me absolutely. I deceived him--for
+years. The child is not Arthur's. Arty is not Arthur's. I never was
+really sorry until a year ago, when he--the other--left me for some one
+else. He said he had fallen in love with a good woman--a snowflake."
+Even now Cuckoo set her teeth at the remembrance of that speech. But she
+hurried on. "That was the time I fell ill. And Arthur nursed me. You
+don't know what Arthur is. I never seemed to have noticed before. Other
+people fail, but Arthur never fails. And I seemed to come to myself. I
+could not bear him out of my sight. And ever since I have loved him, as
+I thought people only loved in poetry books. I saw he was the only one.
+And I thought he would never know. If he did, it would break his heart
+and mine, wherever I was."
+
+Cuckoo waited a moment, and then went on with methodical swiftness:
+
+"But I never burnt the--the other one's letters. I always meant to, and
+I always didn't. It has been in my mind ever since I was ill to burn
+them. I never thought I should die like this. I put it off. The truth
+is, I could not bear to look at them, and remember how I'd--but I meant
+to do it. I knew when I came to myself at the foot of the stairs that I
+was dying, but I did not really mind--except for leaving Arthur, for he
+told me all our flat was burnt and everything in it, and I only grieved
+at leaving him. But this morning, when the place was cold enough for
+people to go up, Arthur told me--he thought it would please me--that my
+sitting-room, and part of the other rooms, were still standing with
+everything in them, and he heard that my picture was not even touched.
+It hangs over the Italian cabinet. But when I heard it I thought my
+heart would break, for the letters are in the Italian cabinet, and I
+knew that some day when I am gone--perhaps not for a long time, but some
+day--Arthur would open that cabinet--my business papers are in it,
+too--and would find the letters."
+
+Cuckoo's weak, metallic voice weakened yet more.
+
+"And he would see I had deceived him for years, and that Arty is not his
+child. Arthur was so pleased when Arty was born."
+
+There was an awful silence; the ice dripped in the pail.
+
+"I don't mind what happens to me," said Cuckoo, "or what hell I go to,
+if only Arthur might stay loving me when I'm gone, as he always
+has--from the very first."
+
+"What do you want me to do?" said Janet.
+
+"I want you to go up to the flat without being seen, and burn those
+letters. Try and go up by the main staircase. They may let you if you
+bluff them; I could do it;--and it may not be burnt out at the top as
+they say. If it really is burnt out, you must go up by the iron
+staircase. If they won't let you pass, bribe the policeman: you must go
+up all the same. The letters are in the lowest left-hand drawer of the
+Italian cabinet. The key--O my God! The key! Where is the key?"
+
+Cuckoo's mind, brought to bay, rose unflinching.
+
+"The key is on the pearl chain that I wear every day. But where is the
+chain? Let me think. I had it on. I know I had it on. I wear the pearls
+against my neck, under my gown. I was in my dressing-gown. Then I had it
+on. Look on the billiard-table."
+
+Janet looked.
+
+"Look on the mantelpiece. I saw the nurse put something down there which
+she took off me."
+
+Janet looked. "There is a miniature of Arty on a ribbon."
+
+"I had it in my hand when the alarm reached me. Look on me. Perhaps I
+have got it on still."
+
+Janet unfastened the neck of the dressing-gown, which, though lacerated
+by the nurse's scissors, still retained the semblance of a garment.
+After an interminable moment she drew out a pearl chain.
+
+"Thank God!" said Cuckoo. "Don't raise my head; I might die if you did,
+and I can't die yet. Break the chain. There! Now the key slips off. Take
+it, go up, and burn the letters. There are a good many, but you will
+know them because they are tied with my hair. The lowest left-hand
+drawer, remember. You will burn them--there are some matches on the
+mantelpiece behind Arthur's photograph--and wait till they are really
+burnt. Will you do this, Janet?"
+
+"I will."
+
+"And will you promise me that, whatever happens, you will never tell any
+one that you have burnt anything?"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"You swear it?"
+
+"I swear it."
+
+"Let me see; you must have some reason for going, in case you are seen.
+If you are asked, say I sent you to see if my picture was uninjured. I
+am a vain woman. Anyone will believe that. Stick to that if you are
+questioned. And now go. Go at once. And throw away the key when you have
+locked up the cabinet. I shall not be able to be alone with you again,
+Janet. Arthur won't leave me a second time. When you come back, stand
+where I can see you; and if you have destroyed everything put your hand
+against your forehead. I shall understand. I shall not be able to thank
+you, but I shall thank you in my heart, and I shall die in peace. Now
+go, and tell Arthur to come back to me."
+
+Janet found Monkey Brand in the antechamber, his ashen, ravaged face
+turned with dog-like expectancy towards the billiard-room door, waiting
+for it to open. Without a word, he went back to his wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+        "... a strong man from the North,
+    Light-locked, with eyes of dangerous grey."
+
+
+It was a little after twelve as Janet entered the central hall, and the
+salvage men were coming down for their dinner. A cord had been stretched
+across the foot of the grand staircase, and a policeman guarded it. As
+Janet hesitated, a young man and woman came boldly up to him, and
+demanded leave to pass.
+
+"I can't let you up, sir," said the policeman. "It ain't safe."
+
+"I have the right to go up to my own flat on the fourth floor," said the
+man. "Here is my card. You will observe my address of these Mansions is
+printed on it."
+
+"Yes, my lord; certainly, my lord," said the policeman, looking at the
+card with respect. "The fire ain't touched anything lower than the fifth
+floor; but we have to keep a sharp look-out, as a many strange
+characters are about trying to get up, to see what they can lay hands
+on."
+
+Janet had drawn up close behind the young couple, and when the cord was
+withdrawn went upstairs as if with them. They did not even see her. They
+were talking eagerly to each other. When they reached the first landing
+she slackened her pace, and let them go on in front.
+
+The fire had broken out on the seventh floor of the great block of
+buildings, and had raged slowly downwards to the sixth and fifth. But at
+first, as Janet mounted the sodden staircase, there was hardly any trace
+of the devastation save in the wet, streaked walls, and the constant
+dropping of water from above.
+
+But the fourth floor bore witness. The ceilings were scored with great
+cracks. The plaster had fallen in places, and everything--walls,
+ceilings, doors, and passages--was blackened as if licked by great
+tongues of smoke.
+
+The young couple were standing at the further end of a long empty
+passage, trying to open a door. As Janet looked, she saw the man put his
+shoulder to it. Then she turned once more to the next flight of the
+staircase. It was strewn with wreckage. The bent iron banisters, from
+which the lead hung in congealed drops, supported awkwardly the
+contorted remains of the banisters from above, which had crashed down
+upon them. The staircase had ceased to be a staircase. It was a steep,
+sliding mass of fallen _débris_, down which the demon of fire had
+hurled, as into a well, the ghastly entrails of the havoc of his torture
+chambers above.
+
+Janet looked carefully at the remnants of the staircase. The heat had
+reached it, but not the fire. She climbed half way up it, securing a
+foothold where she could among the _débris_. But, halfway, the banisters
+from above blocked her passage, tilted crazily towards her,
+insurmountable. She dared not touch them for fear of bringing them, and
+an avalanche of piled rubbish behind them, down upon her. She turned
+back a few steps, deliberately climbed, in her short country skirt, over
+the still standing banisters, and, holding firmly by them, went up the
+remainder of the flight, cautious step by step, as she and Fred had done
+as children, finding a foothold where she could, and not allowing her
+eyes to look down into the well below her. At the next landing she
+climbed over the banisters again, felt them for a sickening moment give
+under her weight, and stopped to take breath and look round her.
+
+She was on the fifth floor.
+
+Even here the fire had not actually been, but the heaps of sodden ashes,
+the gaping, burst panels, the seared doors, the blackness of the
+disfigured passages, the long, distraught wires of the electric
+lighting, showed that heat had been here; blinding, scorching,
+blistering heat.
+
+The Brands' flat was on the sixth floor.
+
+Janet looked up once more, and even her steady eyes were momentarily
+daunted.
+
+The staircase was gone. A raging fire had swept up its two last flights
+as up a chimney, and had carried all before it. What the fire had
+refused it had flung down, choking up the landing below. Nothing
+remained of the staircase save the iron supports, sticking out of the
+wall like irregular, jagged teeth, and marking where each step of the
+stairs had been.
+
+Higher still a zinc bath remained sticking against the charred, naked
+wall. The bathroom had fallen from it. The bath and its twisted pipes
+remained. And above all the blue sky peered down as into a pit's mouth.
+
+Janet looked fixedly at the iron supports, and measured them with her
+eye. Her colour did not change, nor her breath quicken. She felt her
+strength in her. Then, hugging the black wall till it crumbled against
+her, and shading her eyes till they could see only where to tread, she
+went swiftly up those awful stairs, and reached the sixth floor.
+
+Then her strength gave way, and she sank down upon something soft, and
+shuddered. A faint sound made her look back.
+
+One of the supports, loosened by her footstep, stirred, and then fell.
+It fell a long way.
+
+Even her marvellous inapprehensiveness was shaken. But her still courage
+returned to her, the quiet confidence that enabled her to break in
+nervous horses with which her recklessly foolhardy brother could do
+nothing.
+
+Janet rose slowly to her feet, catching them as she did so in something
+soft. Stamped into the charred grime of the concrete floor by the feet
+of the firemen were the remains of a sable cloak, which, as her foot
+touched it, showed a shred of rose-coloured lining. A step further her
+foot sank into a heap of black rags, evidently hastily flung down by one
+in headlong flight, through the folds of which gold embroidery and a
+pair of jewelled clasps gleamed faintly.
+
+Janet stood still a moment in what had been the heart of the fire. The
+blast of the furnace had roared down that once familiar passage, leaving
+a charred, rent hole, half filled up and silted out of all shape by
+ashes. Nevertheless her way lay down it.
+
+She crept stumbling along it with bent head. Surely the Brands' flat was
+exactly here, on the left, near the head of the staircase. But she could
+recognise nothing.
+
+She stopped short at a gaping cavity that had once been a doorway, and
+looked through it into what had once been a bedroom. The fire had swept
+all before it. If there had once been a floor and walls, and ceiling and
+furniture, all was gone, leaving a seared, egg-shaped hole. From its
+shelving sides three pieces of contorted iron had rolled into the
+central puddle--all that was left of the bed.
+
+Could _this_ be the Brands' flat?
+
+Janet passed on, and peered through the next doorway. Here the flames
+had not raged so fiercely. The blackened semblance of a room was still
+there, but shrunk like a mummy, and ready to crumble at a touch. It must
+have been a servant's bedroom. The chest of drawers, the bed, were still
+there in outline, but all ashes. On pegs on the wall hung ghosts of
+gowns and hats, as if drawn in soot. On the chest of drawers stood the
+effigy of a bedroom candlestick, with the extinguisher over it.
+
+Yes, it was the Brands' flat. The outer door and little entrance hall
+had been wiped out, and she was inside it. This evidently had been the
+drawing-room. Here were signs as of some frightful conflict, as if the
+room had resisted its fate to the death, and had only been overpowered
+after a hideous struggle.
+
+The wall-paper hung in tatters on the wall. Remnants of furniture were
+flung about in all directions. The door was gone. The windows were gone.
+The bookcase was gone, leaving no trace, but the books it had contained
+had been thrown all over the room in its downfall, and lay for the most
+part unscorched, pell-mell, one over the other. Among the books crouched
+an agonised tangle of wires--all that was left of Cuckoo's grand piano.
+The pictures had leapt wildly from the walls to join in the conflict. A
+few pieces of strewed gilding, as if torn asunder with pincers, showed
+their fate. Horror brooded over the place as over the dead body of one
+who had fought for his life, and died by torture, whom the destroyer had
+not had time to mutilate past recognition.
+
+Had the wind changed, and had the fiend of fire been forced to obey it,
+and leave his havoc unfinished? Yes, the wind must have changed, for at
+the next step down the passage, Janet reached Cuckoo's boudoir.
+
+The door had fallen inward, and by some miracle the whole strength of
+the flames had rushed down the passage, leaving even the door unburnt.
+Janet walked over the door into the little room and stood amazed.
+
+The fire had passed by on the other side. Everything here was untouched,
+unchanged. The yellow china cat with an immensely long neck was still
+seated on its plush footstool on the hearthrug. On the sofa lay an open
+fashion paper, where Cuckoo had laid it down. On every table photographs
+of Cuckoo smiled in different attitudes. The gaudy room, with its damask
+panels, bore no trace of smoke, nor even of heat, save that the two
+palms in tubs, and the hydrangeas in the fireplace, were shrivelled up,
+and in the gilt bird-cage in the window was a tiny, motionless form,
+with outstretched wings, that would fain have flown away.
+
+For a moment Janet forgot everything except the bullfinch--the piping
+bullfinch that Monkey Brand had given to his wife. She ran to the cage,
+brushing against the palms, which made a dry rustling as she passed, and
+bent over the little bird.
+
+"Bully," she said. "Bully!" For that was the name which, after much
+thought, Monkey Brand had bestowed upon it.
+
+But "Bully" did not move. He was pressed against the bars of his Chinese
+pagoda, with his head thrown back and his beak open. "Bully" had known
+fear before he died.
+
+Janet suddenly remembered the great fear which some one else was
+enduring, to whom death was coming, and she turned quickly from the
+window.
+
+De Rivaz's extraordinary portrait of Cuckoo smiled at Janet from the
+wall, in all its shrewd, vulgar prettiness. The hard, calculating blue
+eyes, which could stare down the social ladder so mercilessly, were
+mercilessly portrayed. The careful touch of rouge on the cheek and
+carmine on the lip were faithfully rendered. The manicured, plebeian
+hands were Cuckoo's, and none but Cuckoo's. The picture was a studied
+insult, save in the eyes of Monkey Brand, who saw in it the reflection,
+imperfect and inadequate, but still the reflection of the one creature
+whom, in his money-getting life, he had found time to love.
+
+Janet never could bear to look at it, and she turned her eyes away.
+
+Directly underneath the picture stood the Italian cabinet, with its
+ivory figures let into ebony. It was untouched, as Cuckoo had feared.
+The mermaid was still tranquilly riding a whale on the snaffle, in the
+midst of a sea with a crop of dolphins' tails sticking up through it.
+
+Janet fitted the key into the lock, and then instinctively turned to
+shut the door. But the door lay prone upon the floor. She stole into the
+passage and listened.
+
+There were voices somewhere out of sight. Human voices seemed strangely
+out of place in this cindered grave. They came nearer. A tall,
+heavily-built man came stooping round the corner, with another shorter,
+slighter one behind him.
+
+"The floors are concrete; it's all right," said the first man.
+
+Janet retreated into the room again, to wait till they had passed. But
+they were in no hurry. They both glanced into the room, and, seeing her,
+went on.
+
+"Here you have one of the most extraordinary effects of fire," said the
+big man, stopping at the next doorway. "This was once a drawing-room. If
+you want to paint a realistic picture, here is your subject."
+
+"I would rather paint an angel in the pit's mouth," said the younger man
+significantly, leaning his delicate, artist hand against the charred
+doorpost. "Do you think, Vanbrunt, this is a safe place for angels
+without wings to be going about alone? You say the floors are safe, but
+are they?"
+
+Stephen Vanbrunt considered a moment.
+
+Then he turned back to the room where Janet was. He did not enter it,
+but stood in the doorway, nearly filling it up--a tall,
+powerfully-built, unyouthful-looking man with shaggy eyebrows and a
+grim, clean-shaved face and heavy jaw. You may see such a face and
+figure any day in the Yorkshire mines or in a stone-mason's yard.
+
+The millionaire took off his hat with a large blackened hand, and said
+to Janet: "I trust the salvage men have warned you that the passages on
+your right are unsafe?" He pointed towards the way by which she had
+come. It was evidently an effort to him to speak to her. He was a shy
+man.
+
+His voice was deep and gentle. It gave the same impression of strength
+behind it that a quiet wave does of the sea. He stood with his head
+thrown slightly back, an austere, massive figure, not without a certain
+dignity. And as he looked at Janet, there was just room in his narrow,
+near-sighted slits of eyes for a stern kindliness to shine through.
+Children and dogs always made a bee-line for Stephen.
+
+As Janet did not answer, he said again.
+
+"I trust you will not attempt to go down the passage to your right. It
+is not safe."
+
+"No," said Janet, and she remembered her instructions. "I am only here
+to see if De Rivaz' picture of Mrs Brand is safe."
+
+"Here is De Rivaz himself," said Stephen. "May we come in a moment and
+look at it? I am afraid I came in without asking last night, with the
+police inspector."
+
+"Do come in," said Janet.
+
+The painter came in, and glanced at the picture.
+
+"It's all right," he said indifferently. "Not even a lick of smoke.
+But," he added, looking narrowly at Janet, "if Mr Brand wishes it I will
+send a man I can trust to revarnish it."
+
+"Thank you," said Janet.
+
+"Here is my card," he continued, still looking at her.
+
+"Thank you," said Janet again, wondering when they would go.
+
+"You are, no doubt, a relation of the Brands?" he continued desperately.
+
+"I am a friend."
+
+"I will come and see Mr Brand about the picture," continued the young
+man, stammering. "May I ask you to be so kind as to tell him so?"
+
+"I will tell him," said Janet; and she became very pale. While this man
+was manufacturing conversation Cuckoo was dying--was dying, waiting with
+her eyes on the door. She turned instinctively to Stephen for help.
+
+But he had forgotten her. He was looking intently at the dead bird in
+the cage, was touching its sleek head with a large gentle finger.
+
+"You are well out of it, my friend," he said below his breath. "It is
+not good to be afraid, but it was a short agony. And it is over. You
+will not be afraid again. You are well out of it. No more prison bars.
+No more stretching of wings to fly with that may never fly. No more
+years of servitude for a cruel woman's whim. You are well out of it."
+
+He looked up and met Janet's eyes.
+
+"We are trespassers," he said instantly. "We have taken a mean advantage
+of your kindness in letting us come in. De Rivaz, I will show you a
+background for your next picture a few yards further on. Mr Brand knows
+me," he continued, producing a card in his turn. "We do business
+together. He is my tenant here. Will you kindly tell him I ventured to
+bring Mr De Rivaz into the remains of his flat to make a sketch of the
+effects of fire?"
+
+"I will tell him," said Janet, only half attending, and laying the card
+beside De Rivaz'. Would they never go?
+
+They did go immediately, Stephen peremptorily aiding the departure of
+the painter.
+
+When they were in the next room De Rivaz leaned up against the blackened
+wall, and said hoarsely: "Vanbrunt, did you see her?"
+
+"Of course I saw her."
+
+"But I must paint her. I must know her. I shall go back and ask her to
+sit to me."
+
+"You will do no such thing. You will immediately apply yourself to this
+scene of desolation, or I shall take you away. Look at this
+charnel-house. What unchained devils have raged in it! It is jealousy
+made visible. What is the use of a realistic painter like yourself, who
+can squeeze all romance out of life till the whole of existence is as
+prosaic as a string of onions; what is the use of a wretched worm like
+you making one of your horrible portraits of that beautiful, innocent
+face?"
+
+"I shall paint her if I live," said De Rivaz, glaring at his friend. "I
+know beauty when I see it."
+
+"No, you don't. You see everything ugly, even beauty of a high order.
+Look at your picture of me."
+
+Both men laughed.
+
+"I will paint her," said De Rivaz. "Half the beauty of so-called
+beautiful women is loathsome to me because of the sordid or frivolous
+soul behind it. But I will paint a picture of that woman which will show
+to the world, and even to rhinoceros-hided sceptics like you, Vanbrunt,
+that I can make the beauty of the soul shine through even a beautiful
+face, as I have made mean souls shine through lovely faces. I shall fall
+damnably in love with her while I do it, but that can't be helped. And
+the picture will make her and me famous."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+    "Doch wenn du sagst, 'Ich liebe dich,'
+      Dann muss Ich weinen bitterlich."
+
+
+Janet listened to the retreating footsteps, and then flew to the
+cabinet.
+
+The key would not turn, and for one sickening moment, while she wrenched
+clumsily at it, she feared she was not going to succeed in opening the
+cabinet. Janet had through life a great difficulty in all that involved
+delicate manipulation, except a horse's mouth. If a lock resisted, she
+used force, generally shooting it; if the hinge of a door gave, she
+jammed it. But in this instance, contrary to her usual experience, the
+lock did turn at last, and the whole front of the cabinet, dolphins and
+mermaid and all, came suddenly forwards towards her, disclosing within a
+double tier of ebony drawers, all exquisitely inlaid with ivory, and
+each having its tiny, silver-scrolled lock.
+
+Some water had dripped on to the cabinet from a damp place in the
+ceiling, and a few drops had penetrated down to the inner drawers,
+rusting the silver of the lowest drawer--the left-hand one.
+
+Janet fitted the key into it. It turned easily, but the drawer resisted.
+It came out a little way, and then stuck. It was quite full. Janet gave
+another pull, and the narrow, shallow drawer came out, with
+difficulty--but still, it did come out.
+
+On the top, methodically folded, were some hand-written directions for
+fancy work. Cuckoo never did any needlework. Janet raised them, and
+looked underneath. Where was the packet tied with hair? It was nowhere
+to be seen. There were a quantity of letters loosely laid together.
+Could these be they? Evidently they had not been touched for a long
+time, for the grime of London air and fog had settled on them. Janet
+wiped the topmost with her handkerchief, and a few words came clearly
+out: "My darling. My treasure." Her handkerchief had touched something
+loose in the corner of the drawer. Could this dim, moth-fretten lock
+have once been Cuckoo's yellow hair? Even as she looked, out of it came
+a moth, dragging itself slowly over the face of the letter, opening its
+unused wings. It crawled up over the rusted silver scroll-work, and flew
+away into the room.
+
+Yes. These must be the letters. They had been tied once, and the moth
+had eaten away the tie. She took them carefully up. There were a great
+many. She gathered them all together, as she thought; looked again at
+the back of the drawer to make sure, and found a few more, with a little
+gilt heart rusted into them. Then she replaced the needlework
+directions, pushed to the drawer--which resisted again, and then went
+back into its place--locked it, extracted the key, locked the cabinet,
+and threw the key out of a broken pane of the window. She saw it light
+on the roof lower down, and slide into the safe keeping of the gutter.
+
+Then she moved away the shrivelled hydrangeas which stood in the
+fire-place, and put the letters into the empty grate. Once more she went
+to the door and listened. All was quite still. She came back. On the
+chimney-piece stood a photograph of Monkey Brand grinning smugly through
+its cracked glass. Behind it was a silver match-box with a pig on it,
+and "Scratch me" written on it. Cuckoo affected everything she called
+"quaint."
+
+Janet struck a match, knelt down, and held it to the pile of letters.
+
+But love-letters never yet burned easily. Perhaps they have passed
+through the flame of life, and after that no feebler fire can reach them
+quickly. The fire shrank from them, and match after match went out,
+flame after flame wavered, and refused to meddle with them.
+
+After wasting time in several exactly similar attempts when one failure
+would have been sufficient, Janet opened and crumpled some of them to
+let the air get to them. The handwriting was strangely familiar. She
+observed the fact without reasoning on it. Then she sprinkled the
+remainder of the letters on the top of the crumpled ones, and again set
+the pile alight.
+
+The fire got hold now. It burned up fiercely, bringing down upon itself
+the upper letters, which toppled into the heart of the miniature
+conflagration much as the staircase must have toppled on to the stairs
+below, in the bigger conflagration of yesterday. How familiar the
+handwriting was! How some of the sentences shone out as if written in
+fire on black sheets: "Love like ours can never fade." The words faded
+out at once, as the dying letters gave up the ghost--the ghost of dead
+love. Janet gazed fascinated. Another letter fell in, opening as it
+fell, disclosing a photograph. Fred's face looked full at Janet for a
+moment out of the little greedy flames that licked it up. Janet drew
+back trembling, suddenly sick unto death.
+
+Fred's face! Fred's writing!
+
+She trembled so violently that she did not notice that the smoke was no
+longer going up the chimney, but was filling the room. The chimney was
+evidently blocked higher up.
+
+She was so paralysed that she did not notice a light footfall in the
+passage, and a figure in the doorway. Janet was not of those who see
+behind their backs. The painter, alarmed by the smoke, stood for a
+moment, brush in hand, looking fixedly at her. Then his eye fell on the
+smoking papers in the grate, and he withdrew noiselessly.
+
+It was out now. The second fire was out. What violent passions had been
+consumed in it! That tiny fire in the grate seemed to Janet more black
+with horror than the appalling scene of havoc in the next room. She
+knelt down and parted the hot films of the little bonfire. There was no
+scrap of paper left. The thing was done.
+
+Then she noticed the smoke, and her heart stood still.
+
+She pushed the cinders into the back of the grate with her hands,
+replaced the hydrangeas in the fire-place, and ran to the window. But
+the wood-work was warped by the heat. It would not open. She wasted
+time trying to force it, and then broke the glass and let in the air.
+But the air only blew the smoke out into the passage. It was like a bad
+dream. She seized the prostrate door, and tried to raise it. But it was
+too heavy for her.
+
+She stood up panting, watching the telltale smoke curl lightly through
+the doorway.
+
+More steps in the passage.
+
+She went swiftly into the next room, and stood in the doorway. The lift
+man came cautiously down the passage, accompanied by an alert,
+spectacled young man, notebook in hand. The lift man bore the
+embarrassed expression of one whose sense of duty has succumbed before
+too large a tip. The young man had the decided manner of one who intends
+to have his money's worth.
+
+"Where are we now?" he said, scribbling for dear life, his spectacles
+turning all ways at once. "I don't like this smoke. Can the beastly
+place be on fire still?"
+
+But the lift man had caught sight of Janet, and the sight of her was
+obviously unwelcome.
+
+"The floors ain't safe here," he said confusedly. "There's a deal more
+damage to be seen in the left wing."
+
+"Is there?" said the young man drily. "We'll go there next"; and he went
+on peering and scribbling.
+
+A voice in the distance shouted imperiously, "Number Two, where does
+this smoke come from?"
+
+There was a plodding of heavy, hastening feet above.
+
+In an instant the young man and the lift man had disappeared round the
+corner.
+
+Janet ran swiftly down the black passage along which they had come,
+almost brushing against the painter in her haste, without perceiving
+him. She flew on, recognising by instinct the once familiar way to the
+central hall on each landing. Here it was at last. She paused a moment
+by the gaping lift, and then walked slowly to the head of the iron outer
+staircase.
+
+A policeman was speaking austerely to a short, stout, shabbily-dressed
+woman of determined aspect, who bore the unmistakable stamp of those
+whose unquenchable desire it is to be where their presence is not
+desired, where it is even deprecated.
+
+"Only ladies and gents with passes is admitted," the policeman was
+saying.
+
+"But how can I get a pass?"
+
+"I don't precisely know," said the policeman cautiously, "but I know it
+must be signed by Mr Vanbrunt or Mr Brown."
+
+"I am the Duchess of Quorn, and I am an intimate friend of Mr Vanbrunt."
+
+Janet passed the couple with a beating heart. But apparently there were
+no restrictions about persons going out, only about those trying to get
+in. The policeman made way for her at once, and she went down
+unchallenged.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the billiard-room time was waxing short; was obviously running out.
+
+The child had arrived from the country with his nurse. Monkey Brand
+took him in his arms at the door, and knelt down with him beside Cuckoo.
+
+"Arty has come to say 'good-morning' to Mammy," he said, in a strangled,
+would-be cheerful voice.
+
+Cuckoo looked at the child wildly for a moment, as the little laughing
+face came within the radius of her fading sight. She suffered the cool,
+flower-like cheek to touch hers, but then she whispered to her husband,
+"Take him away. I want only you."
+
+He took Arty back to his nurse, holding him closely to him, and returned
+to her.
+
+Death seemed to have advanced a step nearer with the advent of the
+child.
+
+They both waited for it in silence.
+
+"Don't kneel, Arthur," said Cuckoo at last. "You will be so tired."
+
+He obediently drew up a little stool, and crouched hunched up upon it,
+her cold hand between his cold hands.
+
+"Is there any one at the door?" she asked, after an age of silence.
+
+"No one, dearest; we are quite alone."
+
+"I should like to see Janet to say 'good-bye.'"
+
+"Must I go and look for her?"
+
+"No. I sent her to see if my picture was really safe. It is all you will
+have to remember me by. She will come and tell me directly."
+
+"I do not want any picture of you, Cuckoo."
+
+Another silence.
+
+"I can't wait much longer," said Cuckoo below her breath; but he heard
+it. "Are you sure there is no one at the door, Arthur?"
+
+"No one."
+
+Silence again.
+
+"Ask God to have pity on me," said Cuckoo faintly. "Isn't there some one
+coming in now?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"Ask God to have pity on us both," said Cuckoo again. "Pray so that I
+can hear."
+
+But apparently Monkey Brand could not pray aloud.
+
+"Say something to make the time pass," she whispered.
+
+"The Lord is my Shepherd," said Monkey Brand brokenly, his mind throwing
+back thirty years; "I shall not want. He leadeth me beside the still
+waters. He----"
+
+"I seem to hear steps," interrupted Cuckoo.
+
+"He leadeth me beside the still waters. Yea, though I walk"--the voice
+broke down--"though I walk in the valley of the shadow of----"
+
+"Some one is coming in now," said Cuckoo, in a faint, acute voice.
+
+"It is Janet."
+
+"I can't see her plainly. Tell her to come nearer."
+
+He beckoned to Janet.
+
+"I can see her now," said Cuckoo, the blindness of death in her wide
+eyes, which stared vacantly where Janet was not; "at least, I see some
+one. Isn't she holding her hand to her forehead?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The last tears Cuckoo was destined to shed stood in her blind eyes.
+
+"Good-bye, dear Janet," she gasped.
+
+"Good-bye, Cuckoo."
+
+"Send her away. Is she quite gone, Arthur?"
+
+"Yes, dearest."
+
+"I must go too. I don't know how to leave you, but I must. I cannot see
+you, but you are with me in the darkness. Take me in your arms and let
+me die in them. Is that your cheek against mine? How cold it is! Hold
+your dear hands to my face that I may kiss them too. They have been
+kind, kind hands to me. How my poor Arthur trembles! You were too good
+for me, Arthur. You have been the only real friend I've ever had in the
+world. More than father and mother to me. More than any one."
+
+"You did love me, little one?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Only me?"
+
+"Only you."
+
+He burst into a passion of tears.
+
+"Forgive me for having doubted you," he said hoarsely.
+
+"Did you ever doubt me?"
+
+"Yes, once. I ought to have known better. I can't forgive myself.
+Forgive me, my wife."
+
+Cuckoo was silent. Death was hard upon her, heavy on voice and breath.
+
+"Say, 'Arthur, I forgive you,'" whispered her husband through the
+darkness.
+
+"Arthur, I forgive you," said Cuckoo with a sob. And her head fell
+forward on his breast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+    "But it was even thou, my companion, my guide,
+            and mine own familiar friend."
+
+
+It was not until Janet was sitting alone in the room she had taken at an
+hotel that her dazed mind began to recover itself. It did not recoil in
+horror from the remembrance of that grim ascent to the flat. It did not
+dwell on Cuckoo's death.
+
+Janet said over and over again to herself, in tearless anguish, "Cuckoo
+and Fred! Cuckoo and Fred!"
+
+The shock had succeeded to a great strain, and she succumbed to it.
+
+She sat on her box in the middle of the room hour after hour in the
+stifling heat. The afternoon sun beat in on her, but she did not pull
+down the blind. There was an armchair in the corner, but Janet
+unconsciously clung to the box, as the only familiar object in an
+unfamiliar world. Late in the afternoon, when Anne found her, Janet was
+still sitting on it, gazing in front of her, with an untasted cup of tea
+beside her, which the chambermaid had brought her.
+
+Anne sat down on the box and put her arms round her.
+
+"My dear," she said; "my dear."
+
+And Janet said no word, but hid her convulsed face on Anne's shoulder.
+
+Janet had a somewhat confused remembrance of what happened after that.
+Anne ordered, and she obeyed, and there was another journey in a cab,
+and presently she was sitting in a cool, white bedroom leading out of
+Anne's room; at least Anne said it did. Anne came in and out now and
+then, and forced her to drink a cup of milk, and smoothed her hair with
+a very tender hand. But Janet made no response.
+
+Anne was of those who do not despise the little things of life. She saw
+that Janet was suffering from a great shock, and she sent for the only
+child there was in the great, dreary London house--the vulgar kitchen
+kitten belonging to the cook.
+
+Anne silently held the warm, sleepy kitten against Janet's cheek. It
+purred when it was touched, and then fell asleep, a little ball of
+comfort against Janet's neck. The white, over-strained face relaxed.
+Anne's gentle touch and presence had not achieved that, but the kitten
+did. Two large tears rolled down into its fur.
+
+The peace and comfort and physical well-being of feeling a little life
+warm--asleep, pressed close against you, is perhaps not new. Perhaps it
+goes back as far as the wilderness, which ceased to be a wilderness when
+Eve brought forth her firstborn in it. I think she must have forgotten
+all about her lost Garden of Eden when she first heard the breathing of
+her sleeping child against her bosom. The brambles and the thorns would
+prick very little after that.
+
+Later on, when Anne came in softly, Janet was asleep, with the kitten on
+her shoulder.
+
+An hour later Anne came in once more in a wonderful white gown, and
+stood a moment watching Janet. Anne was not excited, but a little tumult
+was shaking her, as a summer wind stirs and ripples all the surface of a
+deep-set pool. She knew that she would meet Stephen to-night at the
+dinner-party for which she was already late, and that knowledge, though
+long experience had taught her that it was useless to meet him, that he
+would certainly not speak to her if he could help it, still the
+knowledge that she should see him caused a faint colour to burn in her
+pale cheek, a wavering light in her grave eyes, a slight tremor of her
+whole delicate being. She looked, as she stood in the half-light, a
+woman to whose exquisite hands even a poet might have entrusted his
+difficult, double-edged love, much more a hard man of business such as
+Stephen.
+
+Janet's face, which had been so wan, was flushed a deep red. She stirred
+uneasily, and began speaking hoarsely and incoherently.
+
+"All burnt," she said, over and over again. "All burnt. Nothing left."
+
+Anne laid down the fan she held in her hand, and drew a step nearer.
+
+Janet suddenly sat up, opened her eyes to a horrible width, and stared
+at her.
+
+"I have burnt them all, Fred," she said, looking full at Anne.
+"Everything. There is nothing left. I promised I would, and I have. But
+oh! Fred, how could you do it? How could you, could you, do it?" And she
+burst into a low cry of anguish.
+
+Anne took her by the arm.
+
+"You are dreaming, Janet," she said. "Wake up. Look! You are here with
+me, Anne--your friend."
+
+Janet winced, and her eyelids quivered. Then she looked round her
+bewildered, and said in a more natural voice: "I don't know where I am.
+I thought I was at home with Fred."
+
+"I have sent for your brother, and he will come and take you home
+to-morrow."
+
+"Something dreadful has happened," said Janet. "It is like a stone on my
+head. It crushes me, but I don't know what it is."
+
+Anne looked gravely at Janet, and half unconsciously unclasped the thin
+chain, with its heavy diamond pendant, from her neck. Her hand trembled
+as she did it. She was not thinking of Janet at that moment. "I shall
+not see him to-night," she was saying to herself. And the delicate
+colour faded, the hidden tumult died down. She was calm and practical
+once more. She wrote a note, sent it down to the waiting carriage to
+deliver, got quickly out of the flowing white gown into a
+dressing-gown, and returned to Janet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fred came to London the following day. Even his mercurial nature was
+distressed at Cuckoo's sudden death, and at Janet's wan, fixed face. But
+he felt that if his sister must be ill, she could not be better placed
+than in that ducal household. A good many persons among Fred's
+acquaintances heard of Janet's illness during the next few days, and of
+the kindness of the Duke and Duchess of Quorn.
+
+The Duke and Duchess really were kind. The benevolence of so
+down-trodden and helpless a creature as the Duke--who was of no
+importance except in affairs of the realm, where he was a power--his
+kindness, of course, was of no account. But the Duchess rose to the
+occasion. She was one of those small, square, kind-hearted, determined
+women, with a long upper lip, whose faces are set on looking upwards,
+who can make life vulgarly happy for struggling, middle-class men, if
+they are poor enough to give their wives scope for an unceasing energy
+on their behalf. She was a _femme incomprise_, misplaced. By birth she
+was the equal of her gentle-mannered husband, but she was one of
+Nature's vulgarians all the same, and directly the thin gilt of a
+certain youthful prettiness wore off--she had been a plump, bustling
+little partridge at twenty--her innate commonness came obviously to the
+surface; in fact, it became the surface.
+
+    "Age could not wither her, nor custom stale
+        Her infinite vulgarity."
+
+There was no need for her to push, but she pushed. She made embarrassing
+jokes at the expense of her children. In society she was familiar where
+she should have been courteous, openly curious where she should have
+ignored, gratuitously confidential where she should have been reticent.
+She never realized the impression she made on others. She pursued her
+discomfortable objects of pursuit, namely, eligible young men and
+endless charities, with the same total disregard of appearances, the
+same ungainly agility, which an elderly hen will sometimes suddenly
+evince in chase of a butterfly.
+
+Some one had nicknamed her "the steam roller," and the name stuck to
+her.
+
+She was--perhaps not unnaturally--annoyed when Anne brought a stranger
+back to the house with her in the height of the season, and installed
+her in one of the spare rooms, while she herself was absent, talking
+loudly at a little musical tea-party. But when she saw Janet next day
+sitting in one of Anne's dressing-gowns in Anne's sitting-room, she
+instantly took a fancy to her; one of those heavy, prodding fancies
+which immediately investigate by questions--the Duchess never hesitated
+to ask questions--all the past life of the victim, as regards illnesses,
+illnesses of relations, especially if obscure and internal, cause of
+death of parents, present financial circumstances, etc. Janet, whose
+strong constitution rapidly rallied from the shock that had momentarily
+prostrated her, thought these subjects of conversation natural and even
+exhilarating. She was accustomed to them in her own society. The first
+time the Smiths had called on her at Ivy Cottage, had they not enquired
+the exact area of her little drawing-room? She found the society of the
+Duchess vaguely delightful and sympathetic, a welcome relief from her
+own miserable thoughts. And the Duchess told Janet in return about a
+very painful ailment from which the Duke suffered, and which it
+distressed him "to hear alluded to," and all about Anne's millionaire.
+When, a few days later, Janet was able to travel, the Duchess parted
+from her with real regret, and begged her to come and stay with them
+again after her marriage.
+
+Anne seemed to have receded from Janet during these last days. Perhaps
+the Duchess had elbowed her out. Perhaps Anne divined that Janet had
+been told all about her unfortunate love affair. Anne's patient dignity
+had a certain remoteness in it. Her mother, whose hitherto thinly-draped
+designs on Stephen were now clothed only in the recklessness of
+despair, made Anne's life well-nigh unendurable to her at this time, a
+constant mortification of her refinement and her pride. She withdrew
+into herself. And perhaps also Anne was embarrassed by the knowledge
+that she had inadvertently become aware, when Janet's mind had wandered,
+of something connected with the burning of papers which Janet was
+concealing, and which, as Anne could see, was distressing her more even
+than the sudden death of Mrs Brand.
+
+Fred took charge of his sister in an effusive manner when she was well
+enough to travel. She was very silent all the way home. She had become
+shy with her brother, depressed in his society. She had always known
+that evil existed in the world, but she had somehow managed to combine
+that knowledge with the comfortable conviction that the few people she
+cared for were "different." She observed nothing except what happened
+under her actual eyes, and then only if her eyes were forcibly turned in
+that direction.
+
+She knew Fred drank only because she had seen him drunk. The shaking
+hand, and broken nerve, and weakly-violent temper, the signs of
+intemperance when he was sober, were lost upon her. She dismissed them
+with the reflection that Fred was like that. Cause and effect did not
+exist for Janet. And those for whom they do not exist sustain heavy
+shocks.
+
+Cuckoo her friend, and Fred her brother!
+
+The horror of that remembrance never left her during these days. She
+could not think about it. She could only silently endure it.
+
+Poor Janet did not realize even now that the sole reason why Cuckoo had
+made friends with her was in order to veil the intimacy with her
+brother. The hard, would-be smart woman would not, without some strong
+reason, have made much of so unfashionable an individual as Janet in the
+first instance, though there was no doubt that in the end Cuckoo had
+grown fond of Janet for her own sake. And her genuine liking for the
+sister had survived the rupture with the brother.
+
+The dog-cart was waiting for Fred and Janet at Mudbury, and, as they
+drove in the dusk through the tranquil country lanes, Janet drew a long
+breath.
+
+"You must not take on about Mrs Brand's death too much," said Fred at
+last, who had also been restlessly silent for the greater part of the
+journey.
+
+Janet did not answer.
+
+"We must all die some day," continued Fred. "It's the common lot. I did
+not like Mrs Brand as much as you did, Janet. She was not my sort--but
+still--when I heard the news----"
+
+"I loved her," said Janet hoarsely. "I would have done anything for
+her."
+
+"You must cheer up," said Fred, "and try and look at the bright side.
+That was what the Duke was saying only yesterday when I called to thank
+him. He was in such a hurry that he hardly had a moment to spare, but I
+took a great fancy to him. No airs and soft sawder, and a perfect
+gentleman. I shall call again when next I am in London. I shan't forget
+their kindness to you."
+
+Again no answer.
+
+"It is your duty to cheer up," continued Fred. "George is coming over to
+see you to-morrow morning."
+
+"I think, don't you think, Fred," said Janet suddenly, "that George is
+good--really good, I mean?"
+
+"He is all right," said Fred. "Not exactly open-handed. You must lay
+your account for that, Janet. You'll find him a bit of a screw, or I'm
+much mistaken."
+
+Janet was too dazed to realize what Fred's discovery of George's
+meanness betokened.
+
+Silence again.
+
+They were nearing home. The lights of Ivy Cottage twinkled through the
+violet dusk. Janet looked at them without seeing them.
+
+Cuckoo her friend, and Fred her brother!
+
+"I suppose, Janet," said Fred suddenly, "you were not able to ask Mrs
+Brand--no--of course not----But perhaps you were able to put in a word
+for me to Brand about that--about waiting for his money?"
+
+"I never said anything to either of them," said Janet. "I never thought
+of it again. I forgot all about it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+    "Yea, each with the other will lose and win,
+    Till the very Sides of the Grave fall in."
+
+                                                 --W. E. HENLEY.
+
+
+It was a summer night, hot and still, six weeks later, towards the end
+of July. Through the open windows of a house in Hamilton Gardens a
+divine voice came out into the listening night:--
+
+    "She comes not when Noon is on the roses--
+          Too bright is day.
+    She comes not to the Soul till it reposes
+          From work and play.
+    But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
+          Roll in from Sea,
+    By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
+          She comes to me."
+
+Stephen sat alone in Hamilton Gardens, a massive figure under a Chinese
+lantern, which threw an unbecoming light on his grim face and heavy
+brows, and laid on the grass a grotesque boulder of shadow of the great
+capitalist.
+
+I do not know what he was thinking about, as he sat listening to the
+song, biting what could only by courtesy be entitled his little finger.
+Was he undergoing a passing twinge of poetry? Did money occupy his
+thoughts?
+
+His impassive face betrayed nothing. When did it ever betray anything?
+
+He was not left long alone. Figures were pacing in the half-lit gardens,
+two and two.
+
+Prose rushed in upon him in the shape of a small square body,
+upholstered in grey satin, which trundled its way resolutely towards
+him.
+
+The Duchess feared neither God nor man, but if fear had been possible to
+her, it would have been for that dignified, yet elusive, personage, whom
+she panted to call her son-in-law.
+
+She sat down by him with anxiety and determination in her eyes.
+
+"By starlight, and by candlelight, and dreamlight she comes to me," said
+Stephen to himself, with a sardonic smile. "Also by daylight, and when
+noon is on the roses, and when I am at work and at play. In short, she
+always comes."
+
+"What a perfect night!" said the Duchess.
+
+"Perfect."
+
+"And that song--how beautiful!"
+
+"Beautiful."
+
+"I did not know you cared for poetry?"
+
+"I don't."
+
+Stephen added to other remarkable qualities that of an able and
+self-possessed liar. In business he was considered straight even by
+gentlemen, foolishly strait-laced by men of business. But to certain
+persons, and the Duchess was one of them, he never spoke the truth. He
+was wont to say that any lies he told he did not intend to account for,
+in this world or the next; and that the bill, if there was one, would
+never be sent in to him. He certainly had the courage of his
+convictions.
+
+"I want you to think twice of the disappointment you have given us all
+by not coming to us in Scotland this autumn. The Duke was really quite
+put out. He had so reckoned on your coming."
+
+Stephen did not answer. He had a colossal power of silence when it
+suited him. He had liked the Duke for several years before he had made
+the acquaintance of his family. The two men had met frequently on
+business, understood each other, and had almost reached friendship when
+the Duchess intervened, to ply her "savage trade." Since then a shade of
+distant politeness had tinged the Duke's manner towards Stephen, and the
+self-made man, sensitive to anything that resembled a sense of
+difference of class, instinctively drew away from him. Yet, if Stephen
+had but known it, the change in the Duke's manner was only owing to the
+unformulated suspicion that the father sometimes feels for the man,
+however eligible, whom he suspects of filching from him his favourite
+daughter.
+
+"We are _all_ disappointed," continued the Duchess, and her power of
+hitting on the raw did not fail her, for her victim winced--not
+perceptibly. She went on: "Do think of it again, Mr Vanbrunt. If you
+could see Larinnen in autumn--the autumn tints, you know--and no party.
+Just ourselves. And I am sure from your face you are a lover of Nature."
+
+"I hate Nature," said Stephen. "It bores me. I am very easily bored."
+
+He was longing to get away from London, to steep his soul in the
+sympathy of certain solitary woodland places he knew of, shy as himself;
+where perhaps the strain on his aching spirit might relax somewhat,
+where he could lie in the shade for hours, and listen to running water,
+and forget that he was a plain, middle-aged millionaire, whom a
+brilliant, exquisite creature could not love for himself.
+
+"When I said no party I did not mean quite alone," said the Duchess,
+breathing heavily, for a frontal attack is generally also an uphill one.
+"A few cheerful friends. How right you are! One does not see enough of
+one's real friends. Anne often says that. She said to me only yesterday,
+when we were talking of you----"
+
+The two liars were interrupted by the advance towards them of Anne and
+De Rivaz. They came silently across the shadowy grass, into the little
+ring of light thrown by the Chinese lantern.
+
+De Rivaz was evidently excited. His worn, cynical face looked boyish in
+the garish light.
+
+"Duchess," he said, "I have only just heard by chance from Lady Anne,
+that the unknown divinity whom I am turning heaven and earth to find, in
+order that I may paint her, has actually been staying under your roof,
+and that you intend to ask her again."
+
+"Mr De Rivaz means Janet Black," said Anne to her mother.
+
+"I implore you to ask me to meet her," said the painter.
+
+"But she is just going to be married," said the Duchess, with genuine
+regret. Here was an opportunity lost.
+
+"I know it; it breaks my heart to know it," said De Rivaz. "But married
+or not, maid, wife, or widow, I must paint her. Give me the chance of
+making her acquaintance."
+
+"I will do what I can," said the Duchess, gently tilting forward her
+square person on to its flat white satin feet, and looking with
+calculating approval at her daughter. Surely Anne had never looked so
+lovely as at this obviously propitious moment.
+
+"Take a turn with me, young man," continued the Duchess, "and I will see
+what I can do. And Anne," she said with a backward glance at her
+daughter, "try and persuade Mr Vanbrunt to come to us in September."
+
+"I will do my best," said Anne, and she sat down on the bench.
+
+Stephen, who had risen when she joined them, looked at her with shy,
+angry admiration.
+
+It was a new departure for Anne so openly to abet her mother, and it
+wounded him.
+
+"Won't you sit down again?" said Anne, meeting his eyes firmly. "I wish
+to speak to you."
+
+He sat down awkwardly. He was always awkward in her presence. Perhaps it
+was only a moment, but it seemed to him an hour while she kept silence.
+
+The same voice sang across the starlit dark:
+
+    "Some souls have quickened, eye to eye,
+    And heart to heart, and hand in hand;
+    The swift fire leaps, and instantly
+            They understand."
+
+Neither heard it. Nearer than the song, close between them some mighty
+enfolding presence seemed to have withdrawn them into itself. There is a
+moment when Love leaves the two hearts in which He dwells, and stands
+between them revealed.
+
+So far it has been man and woman and Love--three persons met painfully
+together, who cannot walk together, not being agreed. But the hour comes
+when in awe the man and woman perceive, what was always so from the
+beginning, that they twain are but one being, one foolish creature who,
+in a great blindness, thought it was two, mistook itself for two.
+
+Perhaps that moment of discovery of our real identity in another is the
+first lowest rung of the steep ladder of love. Does God, who flung down
+to us that nearest empty highway to Himself, does He wonder why so few
+travellers come up by it; why we go wearily round by such bitter
+sin-bogged, sorrow-smirched by-paths, to reach Him at last?
+
+There may be much love without that sense of oneness, but when it comes
+it can only come to two, it can only be born of a mutual love. Neither
+can feel it without the other. Anne knew that. By her love for him she
+knew he loved her. He was slower, more obtuse; yet even he, with his
+limited perceptions and calculating mind, even he nearly believed,
+nearly had faith, nearly asked her if she could love him.
+
+But the old self came to his perdition, the strong, shrewd, iron-willed
+self that had made him what he was, that had taught him to trust few, to
+follow his own judgment, that in his strenuous life had furnished him
+with certain dogged conventional ready-made convictions regarding women.
+Men he could judge, and did judge. He knew who would cheat him, who
+would fail him at a pinch, whom he could rely on. But of women he knew
+little. He regarded them as apart from himself, and did not judge them
+individually, but collectively. He knew how one of Anne's sisters,
+possibly more than one of them, had been coerced into marriage. He did
+not see that Anne belonged to a different class of being. His
+shrewdness, his bitter knowledge of the seamy side of a society to which
+he did not naturally belong, its uncouth passion for money, blinded him.
+
+He had become very pale while he sat by her, while poor Anne vainly
+racked her brain to remember what it was she wished to say to him. The
+overwhelming impulse to speak, to have it out with her, the thirst for
+her love was upon him. When was it not upon him? He looked at her
+fixedly, and his heart sank. How could she love him--she in her
+wand-like delicacy and ethereal beauty? She was not of his world, she
+was not made of the same clay. No star seemed so remote as this still
+dark-eyed woman beside him. How could she love him? No, the thing was
+impossible.
+
+A very ugly emotion laid violent momentary hold on him. Let him take her
+whether she cared for him or not. If money could buy her, let him buy
+her.
+
+He glanced sidelong at her, and then moved nearer to her. She turned
+her head, and looked full at him. She had no fear of him. The fierce,
+harsh face did not daunt her. She understood him, his stubborn humility,
+his blind love, this momentary hideous lapse, and knew that it was
+momentary.
+
+"Lady Anne," he said hoarsely, "will you marry me?"
+
+It had come at last, the word her heart had ached for so long. She did
+not think. She did not hesitate. She, who had so often been troubled by
+the mere sight of him across a room, was calm now. She looked at him
+with a certain gentle scorn.
+
+"No, thank you," she said.
+
+"I love you," he said, taking her hand. "I have long loved you."
+
+It was his hand that trembled. Hers was steady as she withdrew it.
+
+"I know," she said.
+
+"Then could not you think of me? I implore you to marry me."
+
+"You are speaking on impulse. We have hardly exchanged a word with each
+other for the last three months. You had no intention of asking me to
+marry you when you came here this evening."
+
+"I don't care what intentions I may or may not have had," said Stephen,
+his temper, always quick, rising at her self-possession. "I mean what I
+say now, and I have meant it ever since I first saw you."
+
+"Do you think I love you?"
+
+"I love you enough for both," he said with passion. "You are in my heart
+and my brain, and I can't tear you out. I can't live without you."
+
+"In old days, when you were not quite so rich, and not quite so
+worldly-wise, did you not sometimes hope to marry for love?"
+
+"I hope to marry for love now. Do you doubt that I love you?"
+
+"No, I don't. But have you never hoped to marry a woman who would care
+for you as much as you did for her?"
+
+"I can't expect that," said the millionaire. "I don't expect it. I'm
+not--I'm not the kind of man whom women easily love."
+
+"No," said Anne, "you're not."
+
+"But when I care, I care with my whole heart. Will you think this over,
+and give me an answer to-morrow?"
+
+"I have already answered you."
+
+"I beg you to reconsider it."
+
+"Why should I reconsider it?"
+
+"I would try to make you happy. Let me prove my devotion to you."
+
+She looked long at him, and she saw, without the possibility of
+deceiving herself, that if she told him she loved him he would not
+believe it. It was the conventional answer when a millionaire offers
+marriage, and he had a rooted belief in the conventional. After marriage
+it would be the same. He would think duty prompted it, her kiss, her
+caress. Oh! suffocating thought. She would be farther from him than ever
+as his wife.
+
+"I think we should get on together," he faltered, her refusal reaching
+him gradually, like a cold tide rising round him. "I had ventured to
+hope that you did not dislike me."
+
+"I do not dislike you," said Anne deliberately. "You are quite right.
+The thing I dislike is a mercenary marriage."
+
+He became ashen white. He rose slowly to his feet, and drawing near to
+her looked steadily at her, lightning in his eyes.
+
+"Do I deserve that insult?" he said, his voice hardly human in its
+suppressed rage.
+
+He looked formidable in the uncertain light.
+
+She confronted him unflinching.
+
+"Yes," she said, "you do. You calmly offer me marriage while you are
+firmly convinced that I don't care for you, and you are surprised--you
+actually dare to be surprised--when I refuse you. Those who offer
+insults must accept them."
+
+"I intended none, as you well know," he said, drawing back a step. He
+felt his strength in him, but this slight woman, whom he could break
+with one hand, was stronger than he.
+
+"Why should I marry you if I don't love you?" she went on. "Why, of
+course because you are Mr Vanbrunt, the greatest millionaire in
+England. Your choice has fallen on me. Let me accept with gratitude my
+brilliant fate, and if I don't actually dislike you, so much the better
+for both of us."
+
+Stephen continued to look hard at her, but he said nothing. Her beauty
+astonished him.
+
+"And what do we both lose," said Anne, "in such a marriage--you as well
+as I? Is it not the _one_ chance, the one hope of a mutual love? Is it
+so small a thing in your eyes that you can cast the possibility from you
+of a love that will meet yours and not endure it, the possibility of a
+woman somewhere, who might be found for diligent seeking, who might walk
+into your life without seeking, who would love you as much as"--Anne's
+voice shook--"perhaps even more than you love her;--to whom you--you
+yourself--stern and grim as you seem to many--might be the whole world?
+Have you always been so busy making this dreadful money, which buys so
+much, that you have forgotten the things that money can't buy? No; no.
+Do not let us lock each other out from the only thing worth having in
+this hard world. We should be companions in misfortune."
+
+She held out her hands to him with a sudden beautiful gesture, and
+smiled at him through her tears.
+
+He took her hands in his large grasp, and in his small quick eyes there
+were tears too.
+
+"We have both something to forgive each other," she said, trembling like
+a reed. "I have spoken harshly, and you unwisely. But the day will come
+when you will be grateful to me that I did not shut you out from the
+only love that could make you, of all men, really happy--the love that
+is returned."
+
+He kissed each hand gently, and released them. He could not speak.
+
+She went swiftly from him through the trees.
+
+"May God bless her," said Stephen. "May God in heaven bless her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+    "Thine were the weak, slight hands
+    That might have taken this strong soul, and bent
+    Its stubborn substance to thy soft intent."
+
+                                               --WILLIAM WATSON.
+
+
+It was hard on Stephen that when he walked into a certain drawing-room
+the following evening he should find Anne there. It was doubly hard that
+he should have to take her in to dinner. Yet so it was. There ought to
+have been a decent interval before their next meeting. Some one had
+arranged tactlessly, without any sense of proportion. Though he had not
+slept since she left him in the garden, still it seemed only a moment
+ago, and that she was back beside him in an instant, without giving him
+time to draw breath.
+
+She met him as she always met him, with the faint enigmatical smile,
+with the touch of gentle respect never absent from her manner to him,
+except for one moment last night. He needed it. He had fallen in his
+own estimation during that sleepless night. He saw the sudden impulse
+that had goaded him into an offer of marriage--the kind of offer that
+how many men make in good faith--in its native brutality--as he knew she
+had seen it. When he first perceived her in the dimly-lighted room, and
+he was aware of her presence before he saw her, he felt he could not go
+towards her, as a man may feel that he cannot go home. Home for Stephen
+was wherever Anne was, even if the door were barred against him.
+
+But after a few minutes he screwed his "courage to the sticking-place,"
+and went up to her.
+
+"I am to take you in to dinner," he said. "It is your misfortune, but
+not my fault."
+
+"I am glad," she said. "I came to you last night because I had something
+urgent to say to you. I shall have an opportunity of saying it now."
+
+The constraint and awkwardness he had of late felt in her presence fell
+from him. It seemed as if they had gone back by some welcome short cut
+to the simple intercourse of the halcyon days when they had first met.
+
+He cursed himself for his mole-like obtuseness in having thought last
+night that she was playing into her mother's hands. When had she ever
+done so? Why had he suspected her?
+
+In the meanwhile the world was
+
+              "At rest with will
+    And leisure to be fair."
+
+The Duchess was not there, suddenly and mercifully laid low by that
+occasional friend of society--influenza. The Duke, gay and _débonnaire_
+in her absence, was beaming on his hostess whom he was to take into
+dinner, and to whom he was sentimentally linked by a mild flirtation in
+a past decade, a flirtation so mild that it had no real existence,
+except in the imaginative remembrance of both.
+
+Presently Anne and Stephen were walking in to dinner together. It was a
+large party, and they sat together at the end of the table.
+
+Anne did not wait this time. She began to talk at once.
+
+"I am anxious about a friend of mine," she said, "who is, I am afraid,
+becoming entangled in a far greater difficulty than she is aware. But it
+is a long story. Do you mind long stories?"
+
+"No."
+
+Stephen turned towards her, becoming a solid block of attention.
+
+"My friend is a Miss Black, a very beautiful woman, whom Mr De Rivaz is
+dying to paint. You may recollect having seen her where he saw her
+first, the day after the fire in Lowndes Mansions, in the burnt-out flat
+of that unfortunate Mrs Brand."
+
+"I saw her. I remember her perfectly. I spoke to her about the dangerous
+state of the passages. I thought her the most beautiful creature, bar
+none, I had ever seen."
+
+Stephen pulled himself up. He knew it was most impolitic to praise one
+woman to another. They did not like it. It was against the code. He
+must be more careful, or he should offend her again.
+
+Anne looked at him very pleasantly. Her eyes were good to meet. She was
+evidently not offended. Dear me! Mysterious creatures, women! It struck
+him, not for the first time, that Anne was an exception to the whole of
+her sex.
+
+"Isn't she beautiful!" said the exception warmly. "But I am afraid she
+is not quite as wise as she is beautiful. She is in a great difficulty."
+
+"What about?"
+
+"It seems she burned something when she was alone in the flat. At least
+she is accused by Mr Brand of burning something. A very valuable
+paper--an I O U for a large sum which her brother owed Mr Brand, and
+which became due a month ago--is missing."
+
+"She did burn something," said Stephen. "I was on the floor above at the
+time, and smelt smoke, and came down, and De Rivaz told me it was
+nothing; only the divinity burning some papers. He was alarmed, and
+left his sketch to find where the smoke came from. He saw her burn
+them."
+
+"He said that to you," said Anne, "but to no one else. I talked over the
+matter with him last night, and directly he heard Miss Black was in
+trouble, he assured me that he had thoughtlessly burnt a sheet of
+drawing-paper himself. That was what caused the smoke. And he said he
+would tell Mr Brand so."
+
+"H'm! Brand is not made up of credulity."
+
+"No. He seems convinced Miss Black destroyed that paper."
+
+"And does she deny it?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"She can't deny that she burned something."
+
+"Yes, she does. She sticks to it that she burned nothing."
+
+"Then she must be a fool, because three of us know she did. De Rivaz
+knows it, I know it, and I see you know it."
+
+"And it turns out the lift man knows it; at least he was reprimanded for
+being on the upper floors without leave, and he said he only went there
+because there was a smoke, and he was anxious; and the smoke came from
+the Brands' sitting-room, which Miss Black left as he came up. He told
+Mr Brand this, who put what he thought was two and two together. Fred
+Black, it seems, would have been ruined if Mr Brand had enforced
+payment, and he believes Miss Black got hold of the paper at her
+brother's instigation and destroyed it."
+
+"Well! I suppose she did," said Stephen.
+
+"If you knew her you would know that that is impossible."
+
+Stephen looked incredulous.
+
+"I've known a good many unlikely things happen about money," he said
+slowly. "I daresay she did it to save her brother."
+
+"She did not do it," said Anne.
+
+"If she didn't, why doesn't she say what she did burn, and why? What's
+the use of sticking to it that she burned nothing when Brand knows
+that's a lie? A lie is a deadly stupid thing unless it's uncommonly well
+done."
+
+"She has had very little practice in lying. I fancy this is her first."
+
+"The only possible course left for her to take is to admit that she
+burned something, and to say what it was. Why doesn't she see that?"
+
+"Because she is a stupid woman, and she does not see the consequences of
+her insane denial, and the conclusions that must inevitably be drawn
+from it. When the room was examined, ashes were found in the grate that
+had been paper."
+
+"How does she explain that?"
+
+"She does not explain it. She explains nothing. She just sets her teeth
+and repeats her wretched formula that she burned nothing."
+
+"What took her up to the flat at all then, just when her friend was
+dying?"
+
+"She says Mrs Brand sent her up to see if her portrait was safe. But Mr
+Brand does not believe that either, as he says he had already told his
+wife that it was uninjured."
+
+"This Miss Black is a strong liar," said Stephen. "I should not have
+guessed it from her face. She looked as straight and innocent as a
+child; but one never can tell."
+
+"I imagine I do not look like a liar. But would you say if I also were
+accused of lying that you never can tell?"
+
+Stephen was taken aback. He bit his little finger and frowned at the
+wonderful roses in front of him.
+
+"I know you speak the truth," he said, "because you have spoken it to
+me. I should believe what you said--always--under any circumstances."
+
+"You believe in my truthfulness from experience. Do you never believe by
+intuition?"
+
+"Not often."
+
+"When first I saw Miss Black I perceived that she was a perfectly
+honest, upright woman. I did not wait till she had given me any proof of
+it. I saw it."
+
+"I certainly thought the same. To say the truth, I am surprised at her
+duplicity."
+
+"In my case you judged by experience. In her case I want you to go by
+intuition, by your first impression, which I know is the true one. I
+would stake my life upon it."
+
+"I don't see how my intuitions would help her."
+
+"Oh! yes, they will. Mr Brand is aware from the lift man, who saw you,
+that you were on the spot directly before he smelt smoke. Mr Brand will
+probably write to you."
+
+"He has written already. He has asked me to see him on business
+to-morrow morning. He does not say what business."
+
+"He is certain to try and find out from you what Miss Black was doing
+when you saw her in his flat. It seems you and Mr De Rivaz both left
+your cards on the table--why I can't think--but it shows you were both
+there. He came up himself next day and found them."
+
+"We both sent messages to Brand by Miss Black."
+
+"It seems she never gave them. She says now she forgot all about them."
+
+Stephen shook his head.
+
+"If Brand comes I shall be obliged to tell him the truth," he said.
+
+"That was why I was so bent on seeing you. I am anxious you _should_
+tell him the truth."
+
+Stephen looked steadily at her.
+
+"What truth?" he said.
+
+"Whatever you consider will disabuse his mind of the suspicion that she
+burned her brother's I O U. Mr De Rivaz' view of the truth is that the
+smoke came from a burnt sheet of his own drawing-paper."
+
+"I am not accountable for De Rivaz. He can invent what he likes. That is
+hardly my line."
+
+He coloured darkly. It was incredible to him that Anne could be goading
+him to support her friend's fabric of lies by another lie. He would not
+do it, come what might. But he felt that Fate was hard on him. He would
+have done almost anything at that moment to please her. But a lie--no.
+
+"I fear your line would naturally be to tell the blackest lie that has
+ever been told yet, by repeating the damaging facts exactly as they are.
+If you do--to a man like him--not only will you help to ruin Miss Black,
+but you will give weight to this frightful falsehood which is being
+circulated against her. And if you, by your near-sighted truthfulness,
+give weight to a lie, it is just the same as telling one. No, I think
+it's worse."
+
+Stephen smiled grimly. This was straight talk. Plain speaking always
+appealed to him even when, as now, it was at his expense.
+
+"Are you certain that your friend did not burn her brother's I O U?" he
+said after a pause.
+
+"I am absolutely certain. Remember her face. Now, Mr Vanbrunt, think.
+Don't confuse your mind with ideas of what women generally are. Think of
+her. Are not you certain too?"
+
+"Yes," he said slowly, "I am. She is concealing something. She has done
+some folly, and is bolstering it up by a stupid lie. But the other,
+that's swindling--no, she did not do that."
+
+"Then help the side of truth," said Anne. "My own conviction is that she
+burned something compromising Mrs Brand, at Mrs Brand's dying request,
+under an oath of secrecy. And that is why her mouth is shut. But this is
+only a supposition. I ask you not to repeat it. I only mention it
+because you are so----" she shot a glance at him unlike any, in its
+gentle raillery, that had fallen to his lot for many a long day--"so
+stubborn."
+
+He was unreasonably pleased.
+
+"I should still be in a dry goods warehouse in Hull if I had not been
+what you call stubborn," he said, smiling at her.
+
+"May I ask you a small favour for myself?" she said. "So far I have only
+asked for my friend."
+
+"It seems hardly necessary to ask it. Only mention it."
+
+"If my mother talks to you, and she talks to you a great deal, do not
+mention to her our--our conversation of last night. It would be kinder
+to me."
+
+Stephen bowed gravely. He was surprised. It had not struck him that Anne
+had not told her mother. A brand-new idea occurred to him, namely that
+Anne and her mother were not in each other's confidence. H'm! That
+luminous idea required further thought.
+
+"And now," said Anne, "having got out of you all I want, I will
+immediately desert you for my other neighbour." And she spoke no more to
+Stephen that night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My dear," said the Duke of Quorn to Anne as they drove home, "it
+appeared to me that you and Vanbrunt were on uncommonly good terms
+to-night. Is there any understanding between you?"
+
+"I think he is beginning to have a kind of glimmering of one."
+
+"Really! Understandings don't as a rule lead to marriage.
+Misunderstandings generally bring about those painful dislocations of
+life. But the idea struck me this evening--I hope needlessly--that I
+might after all have to take that richly gilt personage to my bosom as
+my son-in-law."
+
+"Mr Vanbrunt asked me to marry him yesterday, and I refused him."
+
+The Duke experienced a slight shock, tinged with relief.
+
+"Does your mother know?" he said at last in an awed voice.
+
+"Need you ask?"
+
+"Well, if she ever finds out, for goodness' sake let her inform me of
+the fact. Don't give me away, Anne, by letting out that I knew at the
+time. If she thought I was an accomplice of the crime--your
+refusal--really if she once got that idea into her head---- But next
+time she tackles Vanbrunt, perhaps he will tell her himself. Oh,
+heavens!"
+
+"I asked him not to mention it to her."
+
+The Duke sighed.
+
+"And so he really did propose at last. I thought your mother had choked
+him off. Most men would have been. Well, Anne, I'm glad you did not
+accept him. I don't hold with mixed marriages. In these days people talk
+as if class were nothing, and the fact of being well-born of no account.
+And, of course, it's a subject one can't discuss, because certain
+things, if put into words, sound snobbish at once. But they are true all
+the same. The middle classes have got it screwed into their cultivated
+heads that education levels class differences. It doesn't, but one can't
+say so. Not that Vanbrunt is educated, as I once told him."
+
+"Oh! come, father. I am sure you did not."
+
+"You are right, my dear. I did not. He said himself one day, in a moment
+of expansion, that he regretted that he had never had the chance of
+going to a public school, or the University, and I said the sort of life
+he had led was an education of a high order. So it is. That man has
+lived. Really when I come to think of it, I almost--no, I don't--Ahem!
+Associate freely with all classes, but marry in your own. That is what
+I say when no one is listening. By no one I mean of course yourself, my
+dear."
+
+Anne was silent. There had been days when she had felt that difference
+keenly though silently. Those days were past.
+
+"Vanbrunt is a Yorkshire dalesman, with Dutch trading blood in him. It
+is extraordinary how Dutch the people look near Goole and Hull. I shall
+like him better now. I always have liked him till--the last few months.
+You would never say Vanbrunt was a gentleman, but you would never say he
+wasn't. He seems apart from all class. There is no hall-mark upon him.
+He is himself. So you would not have him, my little Anne? That's over.
+It's the very devil to be refused, I can tell you. I was refused once.
+It was some time ago, as you may imagine, but--I have not forgotten it.
+I learned what London looks like in the dawn, after walking the streets
+all night. So it's his turn to wear out the pavement now, is it! Poor
+man! He'll take it hard in a bottled-up way. When next I see him I
+shall say: 'Aha! money can't buy everything, Vanbrunt.'"
+
+"Oh! no, father. You won't be so brutal."
+
+"No, my dear, I daresay I shall not. I shall pretend not to know. Really
+I have a sort of regard for him. Poor Vanbrunt!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+    "C'est son ignorance qui fixe son malheur."
+
+                                                  --MAETERLINCK.
+
+
+Did you ever, as a child, see ink made? Did you ever watch, with
+wondering intentness, the mixing of one little bottle of colourless
+fluid--which you imagined to be pure water--with another equally
+colourless? No change. Then at last, into the cup of clear water, the
+omnipotent parent hand pours out of another tiny phial two or three
+crystal drops.
+
+The latent ink rushes into being at the contact of those few drops. The
+whole cup is black with it, transfused with impenetrable darkness,
+terrible to look upon.
+
+We are awed, partly owing to the exceeding glory of the magician with
+the Vandyke hand, who knows everything, and who can work miracles at
+will, and partly because we did not see the change coming. We were
+warned that it would come by that voice of incarnate wisdom. We were all
+eyes. But it was there before we knew. Some of us, as older children,
+watch with our ignorant eyes the mysterious alchemy in our little cup of
+life. We are warned, but we see not. We somehow miss the sign. The water
+is clear, quite clear. Something more is coming, straight from the same
+Hand. In a moment all is darkness.
+
+A wiser woman than Janet would perhaps have known, would at any rate
+have feared, that a certain small cloud on her horizon, no larger than a
+man's hand, meant a great storm. But until it broke she did not realize
+that that ever-increasing ominous pageant had any connection with the
+hurricane that at last fell upon her: just as some of us see the rosary
+of life only as separate beads, not noticing the divine constraining
+thread, and are taken by surprise when we come to the cross.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The cloud first showed itself, or rather Janet first caught sight of it,
+on a hot evening towards the end of June, when Fred returned from
+London, whither he had been summoned by Mr Brand, a fortnight after his
+wife's death.
+
+The days which had passed since Cuckoo's death had not had power to numb
+the pain at Janet's heart. The shock had only so far had the effect of
+shifting the furniture of her mind into unfamiliar, jostling positions.
+She did not know where to put her hand on anything, like a woman who
+enters her familiar room after an earthquake, and finds the contents
+still there, but all huddled together or thrown asunder.
+
+Her deep affection for her brother, and her friend Cuckoo, were wrenched
+out of place, leaving horrible gaps. She had always felt a vague
+repulsion to Monkey Brand, with his dyed hair and habit of staring too
+hard at her. The repulsion towards him had shifted, and had crashed up
+against her love for Fred, and Monkey Brand had acquired a kind of
+dignity, even radiance. Even her love for George had altered in the
+general dislocation. Its halo had been jerked off. Who was true? Who was
+good? She looked at him wistfully, and with a certain diffidence. She
+felt a new tenderness for him. George had noticed the change in her
+manner towards him since her return from London, and, not being an
+expert diver into the recesses of human nature, he had at first
+anxiously inquired whether she still loved him the same. Janet looked
+slowly into her own heart before she made reply. Then she turned her
+grave gaze upon him. "More," she said, as every woman, whose love is
+acquainted with grief must answer if she speaks the truth.
+
+It was nearly dark when Janet caught the sounds of Fred's dog-cart,
+driving swiftly along the lanes, too swiftly considering the darkness.
+He drove straight to the stables, and then came out into the garden,
+where she was walking up and down waiting for him. It was such a small
+garden, merely a strip out of the field in front of the house, that he
+could not miss her.
+
+He came quickly towards her, and even in the starlight she saw how white
+his face was. Her heart sank. She knew Fred had gone to London in
+compliance with a request from Mr Brand. Had Mr Brand refused to renew
+his bond, or to wait?
+
+Fred took her suddenly in his arms, and held her closely to him. He was
+trembling with emotion. His tears fell upon her face. She could feel the
+violent beating of his heart. She could not speak. She was terrified.
+She had never known him like this.
+
+"You have saved me," he stammered, kissing her hair and forehead. "Oh!
+my God! Janet, I will never forget this, never while I live. I was
+ruined, and you have saved me."
+
+She did not understand. She led him to the garden seat, and they sat
+down together. She thought he had been drinking. He generally cried when
+he was drunk. But she saw in the next moment that he was sober.
+
+"Will Mr Brand renew?" she said, though she knew he would not. Monkey
+Brand never renewed.
+
+Fred laughed. It was the nervous laugh of a shallow nature, after a
+hairbreadth escape.
+
+"Brand will not renew, and he will not wait," he said. "You know that as
+well as I do. Janet, I misjudged you. All these awful days, while I have
+been expecting the blow to fall--it meant ruin, sheer ruin, for you as
+well as me--all this time I thought you did not care what became of me.
+You seemed so different lately, so cold."
+
+"I did care."
+
+"I know. I know now. You are a brave woman. It was the only thing to do.
+If you had not burnt it he would have foreclosed. And of course I shall
+pay him back when I can. I said so. He knows I'm a gentleman. He has my
+word for it. A gentleman's word is as good as his bond. I shall repay
+him gradually."
+
+"I don't understand," said Janet, who felt as if a cold hand had been
+laid upon her heart.
+
+"Oh! You can speak freely to me. And to think of your keeping silence
+all this time--even to me. You always were one to keep things to
+yourself, but you might have just given me a hint. My I O U is not
+forthcoming, and Brand as good as knows you burned it. He knows you went
+up to his flat and burned something when his wife was dying. He wasn't
+exactly angry; he was too far gone for that, as if he couldn't care for
+anything one way or the other. He looks ten years older. But, of course,
+he's a business man, whether his wife is alive or dead, and I could see
+he was forcing himself to attend to business to keep himself from
+thinking. He said very little. He was very distant. Infernally distant
+he was. He is no gentleman, and he doesn't understand the feelings of
+one. If it hadn't been that he was in trouble, and well--for the fact
+that I had borrowed money of him--I would not have stood it for a
+moment. I'm not going to allow any cad to hector over me, be he who he
+may. He mentioned the facts. He said he had always had a high opinion of
+you, and that he should come down and see you on the subject next week.
+You must think what to say, Janet."
+
+"I never burned your I O U," said Janet in a whisper, becoming cold all
+over. It was a revelation to her that Fred could imagine she was capable
+of such a dishonourable action.
+
+"Why, Fred," she said, deeply wounded, "you know I could not do such a
+thing. It would be the same as stealing."
+
+"No, it wouldn't," said Fred, with instant irritation, "because you know
+I should pay him back. And so I will--only I can't at present. And, of
+course, you knew too, you must have guessed, that your two thousand----
+And as you are going to be married, that is important too. I should have
+been ruined, sold up, if that I O U had turned up, and you yourself
+would have been in a fix. You knew that when you got hold of it and
+burned it. Come, Janet, you can own to me you burned it--between
+ourselves."
+
+"I burnt nothing."
+
+Fred peered at her open-mouthed.
+
+"Janet, that's too thin. You must go one better than that when Brand
+comes. He knows you burnt something when you went up to his flat."
+
+"I burnt nothing," said Janet again. It was too dark to see her face.
+
+Did she realise that the first heavy drops were falling round her of the
+storm that was to wreck so much?
+
+"Well," said Fred, after a pause, "I take my cue from you. You burnt
+nothing then. I don't see how you are going to work it, but that's your
+affair.... But oh, Janet, if that cursed paper had remained! If you had
+known what I've been going through since you came home a fortnight ago,
+when my last shred of hope left me when I found you had not spoken to
+the Brands. It wasn't only the money--that was bad enough--it wasn't
+only that--but----"
+
+And Fred actually broke down, and sobbed with his head in his hands.
+Presently, when he recovered himself, he told her, in stammering,
+difficult words, that he had something on his conscience, that his life
+had not been what it should have been, but that a year ago he had come
+to a turning-point; he had met some one--even his light voice had a
+graver ring in it--some one who had made him feel how--in short, he had
+fallen in love, with a woman like herself, like his dear Janet--good and
+innocent, a snowflake; and for a long time he feared she could never
+think of him, but how at last she seemed less indifferent, but how her
+father was a strict man and averse to him from the first. And if he had
+been sold up, all hope--what little hope there was--would have been
+gone.
+
+"But, please God, now," said Fred, "I will make a fresh start. I've had
+a shock lately, Janet. I did not talk about it, but I've had a shock.
+I've thought of a good many things. I mean to turn round and do better
+in future. There are things I've done, that lots of men do and think
+nothing of them, that I won't do again. I mean to try from this day
+forward to be worthy of her, to put the past behind me; and if I ever do
+win her--if she'll take me in the end--I shall not forget, Janet, that I
+owe it to you."
+
+He kissed her again with tears.
+
+She was too much overcome to speak. Cuckoo had repented, and now Fred
+was sorry too. It was the first drop of healing balm which had fallen on
+that deep wound which Cuckoo's dying voice had inflicted how many
+endless days ago.
+
+"It is Venetia Ford," said Fred shyly, but not without triumph. "You
+remember her? She is Archdeacon Ford's eldest daughter."
+
+A recollection rose before Janet's mind of the eldest Miss Ford, with
+the pretty pink and white empty face, and the demure, if slightly
+supercilious, manner that befits one conscious of being an Archdeacon's
+daughter. Janet knew her slightly, and admired her much. The eldest Miss
+Ford's conversation was always markedly suitable. Her sense of propriety
+was only equalled by her desire to impart information. Her slightly
+clerical manner resembled the full-blown Archidiaconal deportment of her
+parent, as home-made marmalade resembles an orange. Archdeacon Ford was
+a pompous, much-respected prelate, with private means. Mrs Smith was
+distantly related to the Fords, and very proud of the connection. She
+seldom alluded to the eldest Miss Ford without remarking that Venetia
+was her ideal of what a perfect lady should be.
+
+"O Fred, I am so glad!" said Janet, momentarily forgetting everything
+else in her rejoicing that Fred should have attached himself seriously
+at last, and to a woman for whom she felt respectful admiration, who
+had always treated herself with the cold civility that was, in Janet's
+eyes, the hall-mark of social and mental superiority.
+
+"And does she like you?" she said, with pride. She could not see Fred
+any longer, but her mind's eye saw him--handsome, gay, irresistible. Of
+course she adored him.
+
+"Sometimes I think she does," said Fred, "and sometimes I'm afraid she
+doesn't." And he expounded at great length, garnished with abundant
+detail, his various meetings with her; how on one occasion she had
+hardly looked at him; on another she had spoken to him of Browning--that
+was the time when he had bought Browning's works; on a third, how there
+had been another man there--a curate--a beast, but thinking a lot of
+himself; on a fourth she had said that balls--the Mudbury ball where he
+had danced with her--were an innocent form of recreation, etc., etc.
+
+Janet drank in every word. It reminded her, she said, of "her and
+George." Indeed, there were many salient points of resemblance between
+the two courtships. The brother and sister sat long together hand in
+hand in the soft summer night. Only when she got up at last did the
+thought of the missing I O U return to Janet.
+
+"O Fred!" she said, as they walked towards the house, "supposing after
+all your I O U turns up? How dreadful! What would happen?"
+
+"It won't turn up," said Fred, with a laugh.
+
+When Janet was alone in her room she remembered again, with pained
+bewilderment, that Fred had actually believed that she had destroyed
+that missing paper. It did not distress her that Monkey Brand evidently
+believed the same. She would, of course, tell him that he was mistaken.
+_But Fred!_ He ought to have known better. Her thoughts returned
+speedily to her brother's future. He would settle down now, and be a
+good man, and marry the eldest Miss Ford. She felt happier about him
+than she had done since Cuckoo's death. Her constant prayer, that he
+might repent and lead a new life, had evidently been heard.
+
+As she closed her eyes she said to herself, "I daresay Fred and Venetia
+will be married the same day as George and me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Monkey Brand appeared at Ivy Cottage a few days later. Janet was in the
+field with Fred, taking the setter puppies for a run, when the "Trefusis
+Arms" dog-cart from Mudbury drove up, and Nemesis, in the shape of
+Monkey Brand, got slowly down from it, wrong leg first. Even in the
+extreme heat Monkey Brand wore a high hat and a long buttoned-up
+frock-coat and varnished boots. As he came towards them in the sunshine,
+there was a rigid, controlled desolation in his yellow lined face, which
+made Janet feel suddenly ashamed of her happiness in her own love.
+
+"I had better go," said Fred hurriedly. "I don't want to be uncivil to
+the brute in my own house."
+
+"Go!" said Janet. "But, of course, you must stop. Mr Brand has come
+down on purpose to see us."
+
+She went forward to meet him, and, as he took her hand somewhat stiffly,
+he met the tender sympathy in her clear eyes, and winced under it.
+
+His face became a shade less rigid. He looked shrunk and exhausted, as
+if he had undergone the extreme rigour of a biting frost. Perhaps he
+had.
+
+"I have come to see you on business," he said to Janet, hardly returning
+Fred's half nervous, half defiant greeting.
+
+Janet led the way into the little parlour, and they sat down in silence.
+Fred sat down near the door, and began picking at the rose in his
+buttonhole.
+
+Monkey Brand held his hat in his hand. He took off one black glove,
+dropped it into his hat, and looked fixedly at it.
+
+The cloud on Janet's horizon lay heavy over her whole sky. A single
+petal, loosened by a shaking hand, fell from Fred's rose on to the
+floor.
+
+"I am sure, Miss Black," said Monkey Brand, "that you will offer me an
+explanation respecting your visit to my flat when my wife was dying."
+
+"I went up at her wish," said Janet, breathing hard. She seemed to see
+again Cuckoo's anguished fading eyes fixed upon her.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"She asked me to go and see if her picture was safe."
+
+"I had already told her it was safe."
+
+Janet did not answer.
+
+The rose in Fred's buttonhole fell petal by petal.
+
+Monkey Brand's voice had hardened when he spoke again.
+
+"I am sure," he said, and for a moment he fixed his dull sinister eyes
+upon her, "that you will see the advisability, the necessity, of telling
+me why you burnt some papers when you clandestinely visited my flat."
+
+"I burnt nothing."
+
+He looked into his hat. Janet's bewildered eyes followed the direction
+of his, and looked into his hat too. There was nothing in it but a
+glove.
+
+"There were ashes of burnt papers in the grate," he continued. "The lift
+man saw you leave the room, which had smoke in it. A valuable paper,
+your brother's I O U is missing. I merely state established facts, which
+it is useless, which it is prejudicial, to you to contradict."
+
+"I burnt nothing," said Janet again, but there was a break in her voice.
+Her heart began to struggle like some shy woodland animal, which
+suddenly sees itself surrounded.
+
+Monkey Brand looked again at her. His wife had loved her. Across the
+material, merciless face of the money-lender a flicker passed of some
+other feeling besides the business of the moment; as if, almost as if he
+would not have been averse to help her if she would deal
+straightforwardly with him.
+
+"You were my wife's friend," he said after a moment's pause. "She often
+spoke of you with affection. I also regarded you with high esteem. A
+few days before you came to stay with us I was looking over my papers
+one evening, and I mentioned that your brother's I O U would fall due
+almost immediately. She said she believed it would ruin him if I called
+in the money then. I said I should do so, for I had waited once already
+against my known rules of business. I never wait. I should not be in the
+position which I occupy to-day if I had ever waited. She said, 'Wait at
+least till after Janet's wedding. It might tell against her if her
+brother went smash just before.' I replied that I should foreclose,
+wedding or none. She came across to me, and, by a sudden movement, took
+the I O U out of my hand before I could stop her. 'I won't have Janet
+distressed,' she said. 'I shall keep it myself till after the wedding,'
+and she locked it up before my eyes in a cabinet I had given her, in
+which she kept her own papers. I seldom yield to sentiment, but she--she
+recalled to me my own wedding--and in this instance I did so. It was the
+last evening we spent at home alone together. She went much to the
+theatre and into society, and I seldom had time to accompany her."
+
+Monkey Brand stopped a moment. Then he went on:
+
+"My wife saw you alone when she was dying. She was evidently anxious to
+see you alone. It was like her, even then, to think of others. If you
+tell me, on your word of honour, that she asked you to go up to the flat
+and burn that I O U, and that she told you where to find it--No; if she
+even gave you leave, as you were no doubt anxious on the subject,--if
+you assure me that she yielded to your entreaties, and that she even
+gave you leave to destroy it,--I will believe it. I will accept your
+statement. The last wish of my wife--if you say it _was_ her wish--is
+enough for me." Monkey Brand looked out of the window at the still
+noonday sunshine. "I would abide by it," he said, and his face worked.
+
+"She never spoke to me on the subject of the I O U," said Janet, two
+large tears rolling down her quivering cheeks. "She never gave me leave
+to burn it. I didn't burn it. I burnt nothing."
+
+"Janet," almost shrieked Fred, nearly beside himself. "Janet, don't you
+see that--that---- Confess. Tell him you did it. We both know you did
+it. Own the truth."
+
+Janet looked from one to the other.
+
+"I burnt nothing," she said, but her eyes fell. Her word had never been
+doubted before.
+
+Both men saw she was lying.
+
+Monkey Brand's face changed. It became once again as many poor wretches
+had seen it, whose hard-wrung money had gone to buy his wife's gowns and
+diamonds.
+
+He got up. He took his glove out of the crown of his hat, put on his hat
+in the room, and walked slowly out of the house. In the doorway he
+looked back at Janet, and she saw, directed at her for the first time,
+the expression with which she was to grow familiar, that which meets the
+swindler and the liar.
+
+The brother and sister watched in silence the rigid little departing
+figure, as it climbed back wrong leg first into the dog-cart and drove
+away.
+
+Then Fred burst out.
+
+"Oh! you fool, you fool!" he stammered, shaking from head to foot. "Why
+didn't you say Mrs Brand told you to burn it? His wife was his soft
+side. Oh! my God! what a chance, and you didn't take it. That man will
+ruin us yet. I saw it in his face."
+
+"But she didn't tell me to burn it."
+
+Janet looked like a bewildered, distressed child, who suddenly finds
+herself in a room full of machinery of which she understands nothing,
+and whose inadvertent touch, as she tries to creep away, has set great
+malevolent wheels whirring all round her.
+
+"I daresay she didn't," said Fred fiercely, and he flung out of the
+room.
+
+He went and stood a long time leaning over the fence into the paddock
+where his yearlings were.
+
+"It's an awful thing to be a fool," he said to himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+    "Il n'est aucun mal qui ne naisse, en dernière analyse--d'une
+    pensée étroite, ou d'un sentiment mediocre."
+
+                                                  --MAETERLINCK.
+
+
+The storm had fallen on Janet at last. She saw it was a storm, and met
+it with courage and patience, and without apprehension as to what so
+fierce a hurricane might ultimately destroy, what foundations its rising
+floods might sweep away. She suffered dumbly under the knowledge that
+Monkey Brand and Fred both firmly believed her to be guilty, suffered
+dumbly the gradual alienation of her brother, who never forgave her her
+obtuseness when a way of escape had been offered her, and who shivered
+under an acute anxiety as to what Monkey Brand would do next, together
+with a gnawing suspense respecting the eldest Miss Ford, who had become
+the object of marked attentions on the part of a colonial Bishop.
+
+Janet said to herself constantly in these days, "Truth will prevail."
+She did not believe in the principle, but in her version of it. Her
+belief in the power of truth became severely shaken as the endless July
+days dragged themselves along, each slower than the last. Truth did not
+prevail. The storm prevailed instead. Foundations began to crumble.
+
+How it came about it would be difficult to say, but the damning evidence
+against Janet, the suspicion, the almost certainty of her duplicity,
+reached Easthope.
+
+Mrs Trefusis seized upon it to urge her son to break with Janet. He
+resisted with stubbornness his mother's frenzied entreaties.
+Nevertheless after a time his fixity of purpose was undermined by a
+sullen, growing suspicion that Janet was guilty. Fred had hinted as
+much. Fred's evident conviction of Janet's action, and inability to see
+that it was criminal, his confidential assertion that the money would be
+repaid, pushed George slowly to the conclusion that Janet had been her
+brother's catspaw--perhaps not for the first time. George felt with deep
+if silent indignation, that with him, her future husband if with any
+one, Janet ought to be open, truthful. But she was not. She repeated her
+obvious lie even to him when at last he forced himself to speak to her
+on the subject. His narrow, upright nature abhorred crookedness, and,
+according to his feeble searchlight, he deemed Janet crooked.
+
+His mother's admonitions began to work in him like leaven. How often she
+had said to him, "She has lied to others. The day will come when she
+will lie to you." That day had already come. Perhaps his mother was
+right after all. He had heard men say the same thing. "What is bred in
+the bone will come out in the flesh." "Take a bird out of a good nest,"
+etc., etc.
+
+And George who, in other circumstances, would have defended Janet to the
+last drop of his blood, who would have carried her over burning deserts
+till he fell dead from thirst--George, who was capable of heroism on her
+behalf--weakened towards her.
+
+She had fallen in love with him in the beginning, partly because he was
+"straighter" than the men she associated with. Yet this very rectitude
+which had attracted her was now alienating her lover from her, as
+perhaps nothing else could have done. Strange back-blow of Fate, that
+the cord which had drawn her towards him should tighten to a noose round
+her neck.
+
+George weakened towards her.
+
+It seems to be the miserable fate of certain upright, closed natures,
+who take their bearings from without, always to fail when the pinch
+comes; to disbelieve in those whom they obtusely love when suspicion
+falls on them, to be alienated from them by their success, to be
+discouraged by their faults, incredulous of their higher motives,
+repelled by their enthusiasms.
+
+George would not have failed if the pinch had not come. Like many
+another man, found faithful because his faith had not been put to the
+test, he would have made Janet an excellent and loving husband, and they
+would probably have spent many happy years together--if only the pinch
+had not come. Anne early divined, from Janet's not very luminous
+letters, that George was becoming estranged from her. Anne came down for
+a Sunday to Easthope early in July, and quickly discovered the cause of
+this estrangement (which Janet had not mentioned) in the voluble
+denunciations of Mrs Trefusis, and the sullen unhappiness of her son.
+
+Mrs Trefusis had wormed out all the most damning evidence against Janet,
+partly from Fred's confidence to George, and partly from Monkey Brand,
+with whom she had had money dealings, and to whom she applied direct.
+She showed Anne the money-lender's answer, in its admirable restrained
+conciseness, with its ordered sequence of inexorable facts. Anne's heart
+sank as she read it, and she suddenly remembered Janet's words in
+delirium. "I have burnt them all. Everything. There is nothing left."
+
+The letter fell from her nerveless hand. She looked at it, momentarily
+stunned.
+
+"And this is the woman," said Mrs Trefusis, scratching the letter
+towards her with her stick, and regaining possession of it, "this is
+the woman whom you pressed me, only a month ago, to receive as my
+daughter-in-law. Didn't I say she came of a bad stock? Didn't I say that
+what was bred in the bone would come out in the flesh? George would not
+listen to me then, but my poor deluded boy is beginning to see now that
+I was right."
+
+Mrs Trefusis wiped away two small tears with her trembling claw-like
+hand. Anne could not but see that she was invincibly convinced of
+Janet's guilt.
+
+"You think I am vindictive, Anne," she said. "You may be right; I know I
+was at first, and perhaps I am still. I always hated the connection, and
+I always hated her. But--but it's not _only_ that now. It's my boy's
+happiness. I must think of him. He is my only son, and I can't sit still
+and see his life wrecked."
+
+"I am certain Janet did not do it," said Anne suddenly, her pale face
+flaming. "George and you may believe she did, if you like. I don't."
+
+Anne walked over to Ivy Cottage the same afternoon, and Janet saw her in
+the distance, and fled out to her across the fields and fell upon her
+neck. But even Anne's tender entreaties and exhortations were of no
+avail. Janet understood at last that her mechanically-repeated formula
+was ruining her with her lover. But she had promised Cuckoo to say it,
+and she stuck to it.
+
+"Why does not George believe in me even if appearances are against me?"
+said Janet at last. "I would believe in him."
+
+"That is different."
+
+"How different?"
+
+"Because you are made like that, and he isn't. It's a question of
+temperament. You have a trustful nature. He has not. You must take
+George's character into consideration. It is foolish to love a person
+who is easily suspicious, and then allow him to become suspicious. You
+have no right to perplex him. Just as some people who care for us must
+have it made easy to them all the time to go on caring for us. If there
+is any strain or difficulty, or if they are put to inconvenience, they
+will leave us."
+
+Janet was silent.
+
+"As you and George both love each other," continued Anne, "can't you say
+something to him? Don't you see it would be only right to say a few
+words to him, which will show him--what I am sure is the truth--that you
+are concealing something, which has led to this false suspicion falling
+on you?"
+
+Janet shook her head. "He ought to know it's false," she said.
+
+"Could not you say to _him_, even though you cannot say so to your
+brother or Mr Brand--that you burnt some compromising papers at Mrs
+Brand's dying request? He might believe that, for it is known that you
+_did_ burn papers, dearest, and it is also obvious that you must have
+burnt a good many. That one I O U does not account for the quantity of
+ashes."
+
+"I could not say that," said Janet, whitening. "And besides," she added
+hastily, "I have said so many times" (and indeed she had) "that I burnt
+nothing, that George would not know what to believe if I say first one
+thing and then another."
+
+"He does not know what to believe now. Unless you can say something to
+reassure his mind, you will lose your George."
+
+"You believe in me?"
+
+"Implicitly."
+
+"Then why doesn't George?" continued Janet, with the feminine talent for
+reasoning in a circle. "That is the only thing that is necessary. Not
+that I should say things I can't say, but that he should trust me. I
+don't care what other people think so long as he believes in me."
+
+She, who had never exacted anything heretofore, whose one object had
+been to please her George, now made one demand upon him. It was the
+first and last which she ever made upon her lover. And he could not meet
+it.
+
+"His belief is shaken."
+
+"Truth will prevail," said Janet stubbornly.
+
+"It will no doubt in the end, but in the meanwhile? And how if the
+truth is masked by a lie?"
+
+Janet did not answer. Perhaps she did not fully understand. She saw only
+two things in these days: one, that George ought to believe in her; and
+the other, that, come what might, she would keep the promise made to
+Cuckoo on her death-bed. She constantly remembered the rigid dying face,
+the difficult whisper: "Promise me that whatever happens you will never
+tell anyone that you have burnt anything."
+
+"I promise."
+
+"You swear it."
+
+"I swear it."
+
+That oath she would keep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Anne returned to London with a heavy heart. She left no stone unturned.
+She interviewed De Rivaz and Stephen on the subject, as we have seen.
+But her efforts were unavailing, as far as George was concerned. The
+affair of the burning of papers was hushed up, but it had reached the
+only person who had the power to wreck Janet's happiness.
+
+Some weeks after Anne's visit Janet one day descried the large figure of
+Stephen stalking slowly up across the fields. Janet tired her eyes daily
+in scanning the fields in the direction of Easthope, but a certain
+person came no more by that much frequented way.
+
+The millionaire had a long interview with Janet, but his valuable time
+was wasted. He could not move her. He told her that he firmly believed
+the missing I O U would turn up, and that in the meanwhile he had paid
+Mr Brand, and that she might repay him at her convenience. He could
+wait. For a moment she was frightened, but a glance at Stephen's
+austere, quick eyes, bent searchingly upon her, reassured her. She
+trusted him at once. It was never known what he had said to Monkey
+Brand, as to his having seen Janet in the burnt flat, but Monkey Brand
+gained nothing from the discussion of that compromising fact--except his
+money.
+
+Fred was awed by the visit of Stephen, and by the amazing fact that he
+had paid Monkey Brand. Fred said repeatedly that it was the action of a
+perfect gentleman, exactly what he should have done if he had been in
+Stephen's place. He let George hear of it at the first opportunity. But
+the information had no effect on George's mind, except that it was
+vaguely prejudicial to Janet.
+
+Why had she accepted such a large sum from a man of whom she knew next
+to nothing, whom she had only seen once before for a moment, and that an
+equivocal one? Women should not accept money from men. _And why did he
+offer it?_
+
+He asked these questions of himself. To Fred he only vouchsafed a nod,
+to show that he had heard what Fred had waylaid him to say.
+
+Some weeks later still, in August, De Rivaz came to Ivy Cottage, hat in
+hand, stammering, deferential, to ask Janet to allow him to paint her.
+He would do anything, take rooms in the neighbourhood, make his
+convenience entirely subservient to hers if she would only sit to him.
+He saw with a pang that she was not conscious that they had met before.
+She had forgotten him, and he did not remind her of their first meeting.
+He knew that hour had brought trouble upon her. Her face showed it. The
+patient, enduring spirit was beginning to look through the exquisite
+face. Her beauty overwhelmed him. He trembled before it. He pleaded
+hard, but she would not listen to him. She said apathetically that she
+did not wish to be painted. She was evidently quite unaware of the
+distinction which he was offering her. His name had conveyed nothing to
+her. He had to take his leave at last, but, as he walked away in the
+rain, he turned and looked back at the house.
+
+"I will come back," he said, his thin face quivering.
+
+It was a wet August, and the harvest rotted on the ground. No one came
+to Ivy Cottage along the sodden footpath from Easthope. A slow anger was
+rising in Janet's heart against her lover, the anger that will invade
+at last the hearts of humble sincere natures, when they find that love
+and trust have not gone together.
+
+George never openly broke with Janet, never could be induced to write
+the note to her which, his mother told him, it was his duty to write.
+No. He simply stayed away from her, week after week, month after month.
+When his mother urged him to break off his engagement formally, he said
+doggedly that Janet could see for herself that all was over between
+them.
+
+The day came at last when Janet met him suddenly in the streets of
+Mudbury, on market day. He took off his hat in answer to her timid
+greeting, and passed on looking straight in front of him.
+
+Perhaps he had his evil hour that night, for Janet was very fair. Seen
+suddenly, unexpectedly, she seemed more beautiful than ever. And she was
+to have been his wife.
+
+After that blighting moment, when even Janet perceived that George was
+determined not to speak to her; after that Janet began to see that when
+foundations are undermined that which is built upon them will one day
+totter and--fall.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+    "The heart asks pleasure first,
+      And then, excuse from pain;
+    And then, those little anodynes
+      That deaden suffering;
+
+    And then, to go to sleep;
+      And then if it should be
+    The will of its Inquisitor,
+      The liberty to die."
+
+                                              --EMILY DICKINSON.
+
+
+There are long periods in the journey of life when "the road winds
+uphill all the way." There are also long periods when the dim plain
+holds us, endless day after day, till the last bivouac fires of our
+youth are quenched in its rains.
+
+But when we look back across our journey, do we not forget alike the
+hill and the plain? Do we not rather remember that one turn, exceeding
+sharp, of the narrow inevitable way, what time the light failed, and the
+ground yawned beneath our feet, and we knew fear?
+
+There is a slow descent, awful, step by step, into a growing darkness,
+which those know who have strength to make it. Only the strong are
+broken on certain wheels. Only the strong know the dim landscape of
+Hades, that world which underlies the lives of all of us.
+
+I cannot follow Janet down into it. I can only see her as a shadow,
+moving among shadows; going down unconsciously with tears in her eyes,
+taking, poor thing, her brave, loving unselfish heart with her, to meet
+anguish, desolation, desertion, and at last despair. If we needs must go
+down that steep stair we go alone, and who shall say how it fared with
+us? Nature has some appalling beneficent processes, of which it is not
+well to speak. Life has been taught at the same knee, out of the same
+book, and when her inexorable disintegrating hand closes over us, the
+abhorrent darkness, from which we have shrunk with loathing, becomes
+our only friend.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the following autumn and winter Janet slowly descended, inch by inch,
+step by step, that steep stair. She reached at last the death of love.
+She thought she reached it many times before she actually touched it.
+She believed she reached it when the news of George's engagement
+penetrated to her. But she did not in reality. No, she hoped against
+hope to the last day, to the morning of his wedding. She did not know
+she hoped. She supposed she had long since given up all thought of a
+reconciliation between her and her lover. But when the wedding was over,
+when he was really gone, then something broke within her--the last
+string of the lyre over which blind Hope leans.
+
+There are those who tell us that we have not suffered till we have known
+jealousy. Janet's foot reached that lowest step, and was scorched upon
+it.
+
+Only then she realised that she had never, never believed that he could
+really leave her. Even on his wedding morning she had looked out across
+the fields, by which she had so often seen him come, which had been so
+long empty of that familiar figure. She knew he was far away at the
+house of the bride, but nevertheless she expected that he would come to
+her, and hold her to his heart, and say: "But, Janet, I could never
+marry anyone but you. You know such a thing could never be. What other
+woman could part you and me, who cannot part?" And then the evil dream
+would fall from her, and she and George would look gravely at each
+other, and the endless, endless pain would pass away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wrapt close against the anguish of love there is always a word such as
+this with which human nature sustains its aching heart--poor human
+nature which believes that, come what come may, Love can never die.
+
+"Some day," the woman says to herself, half knowing that that day can
+never dawn, "some day I shall tell him of these awful months, full of
+days like years, and nights like nothing, please God, which shall ever
+be endured again. Some day--it may be a long time off--but some day I
+shall say to him: 'Why did you leave me?' And he will tell me his
+foolish reasons, and we shall lean together in tears. And surely some
+day I shall say to him: 'I always burnt your letters for fear I might
+die suddenly and others should read them. But see, here are the
+envelopes, every one. That envelope is nearly worn out. Do you remember
+what you said inside it? That one is still new. I only read the letter
+it had in it once. How could you--could you write it?'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Some day," the man says to himself, when the work of the day is
+done--"some day my hour will come. She thinks me harsh and cold, but
+some day, when these evil days are past, and she understands, I will
+wrap her round with a tenderness such as she has never dreamed of. I
+will show her what a lover can be. She finds the world hard, and its
+ways a weariness--let her; but some day she shall own to me, to me here
+in this room, that she did not know what life was, what joy and peace
+were, until she let my love take her."
+
+Yet he half knows she will never come, that woman whose coming seems
+inevitable as spring. So the heart comforts itself, telling itself fairy
+stories until the day dawns when Reality's stern, beneficent figure
+enters our dwelling, and we know at last that not one word of all we
+have spoken in imagination will ever be said. What we have suffered we
+have suffered. The one for whom it was borne will hear no further word
+from us.
+
+The moth and the rust have corrupted.
+
+The thieves have broken through and stolen.
+
+Then rise up, lay hold of your pilgrim's staff, and take up life with a
+will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+    "My river runs to thee:
+    Blue sea, wilt welcome me?"
+
+                                              --EMILY DICKINSON.
+
+
+The winter, that dealt so sternly with Janet, smiled on Anne. She spent
+Christmas in London, for the Duke was, or at least he said he was, in
+too delicate a state of health to go to his ancestral halls in the
+country, where the Duchess had repaired alone, believing herself to be
+but the herald of the rest of her family; and where she was expending
+her fearful energy on Christmas trees, magic-lanterns, ventriloquists,
+entertainments of all kinds for children and adults, tenants, inmates of
+workhouses, country neighbours, Sunday School teachers, Mothers' Unions,
+Ladies' Working Guilds, Bands of Hope, etc., etc. She was in her
+element.
+
+Anne and her father were in theirs. The Duke did not shirk the constant
+inevitable duties of his position, but by nature he was a recluse, and
+at Christmas-time he yielded to his natural bias. Anne also lived too
+much on the highway of life. She knew too many people, her sympathy had
+drawn towards her too many insolvent natures. She was glad to be for a
+time out of the pressure of the crowd. She and her father spent a
+peaceful Christmas and New Year together, only momentarily disturbed by
+the frantic telegrams of the Duchess, commanding Anne to despatch five
+hundred presents at one shilling suitable for schoolgirls, or forty
+ditto at half-a-crown for young catechists.
+
+The New Year came in in snow and fog. But it was none the worse for
+that. On this particular morning Anne stood a long time at the window of
+her sitting-room, looking out at the impenetrable blanket of the fog.
+The newsboys were crying something in the streets, but she could hear
+nothing distinctive except the word "city."
+
+Presently she took out of her pocket two letters, and read them slowly.
+There was no need for her to read them. Not only did she know them by
+heart, but she knew exactly where each word came on the paper. "Martial
+law" was on the left-hand corner of the top line of the second sheet.
+"Dependent on Kaffir labour" was in the middle of the third page. They
+were dilapidated-looking letters, possibly owing to the fact that they
+were read last thing every night and first thing every morning, and that
+they were kept under Anne's pillow at night, so that if she waked she
+could touch them. It is hardly necessary to add that they were in
+Stephen's small, cramped, mercantile handwriting.
+
+Stephen had been recalled to South Africa on urgent business early in
+the autumn. He had been there for nearly three months. During that time,
+after intense cogitation, he had written twice to Anne. I am under the
+impression that he was under the impression that those two documents
+were love letters. At any rate, they were the only two letters which
+Stephen ever composed which could possibly be classed under that
+heading. And their composition cost him much thought. In them he was so
+good as to inform Anne of the population of the town he wrote from, its
+principal industries, its present distress under martial law. He also
+described the climate. His nearest approach to an impulsive outburst was
+a polite expression of hope that she and her parents were well, and that
+he expected to be in England again by Christmas. Anne kissed the
+signature, and then laughed till she cried over the letter. Stephen did,
+as a matter of fact, indite a third letter, but it was of so bold a
+nature--it expressed a wish to see her again--that, after reading it
+over about twenty times, he decided not to risk sending it.
+
+When Anne was an old woman she still remembered the population of two
+distracted little towns in South Africa, and their respective
+industries.
+
+Stephen was as good as his word. His large foot was once more planted on
+English soil a day or two before Christmas. In spite of an overwhelming
+pressure of business, he had found time to dine with Anne and her father
+several times since he arrived. The Duke had met him at a directors'
+meeting, and quite oblivious of Anne's refusal of him, had pressed him
+to come back with him to dinner. The Duke asked him constantly to dine
+after that. The old attraction between the two men renewed its hold.
+
+These quiet evenings round the fire seemed to Stephen to contain the
+pith of life. The Duke talked well, but on occasion Stephen talked
+better. Anne listened. The kitchen cat, now alas! grown large and
+vulgar, with an unmodulated purr, was allowed to make a fourth in these
+peaceful gatherings, and had coffee out of Anne's saucer, sugared by
+Stephen, every evening.
+
+Then, for no apparent reason, Stephen ceased to come.
+
+Anne, who had endured so much suspense about him, could surely endure a
+little more. But it seemed she could not. For a week he did not come. In
+that one week she aged perceptibly. The old pain took her again, the
+old anger and resentment at being made to suffer, the old fierceness,
+"which from tenderness is never far." She had thought that she had
+conquered these enemies so often, that she had routed them so entirely,
+that they could never confront her again. But they did. In the ranks of
+her old foes a new one had enlisted--Hope; and Hope, if he forces his
+way into the heart where he has been long a stranger, knows how to
+reopen many a deep and barely healed wound, which will bleed long after
+he is gone.
+
+And where were Anne's patience, her old steadfastness and fortitude?
+Could they be worn out?
+
+As she stood by the window, trying to summon her faithless allies to her
+aid, her father came in, with a newspaper in his hand.
+
+"This is serious," he said, "about Vanbrunt."
+
+She turned upon him like lightning.
+
+The Duke tapped the paper.
+
+"I knew Vanbrunt was in difficulties," he said. "A week ago, when he
+was last here, he advised me sell out certain shares. It seems he would
+not sell out himself. He said he would see it through, and now the smash
+has come. I'm afraid he's ruined."
+
+A beautiful colour rose to Anne's face. Her eyes shone. She felt a
+sudden inrush of life. She became young, strong, alert.
+
+Her father was too much preoccupied to notice her.
+
+"Vanbrunt is a fine man," he said. "He had ample time to get out. But he
+stuck to the ship, and he has gone down with it. I'm sorry. I liked
+him."
+
+"Are you sure he is really ruined?"
+
+"The papers say so. They also say he can meet his liabilities." The Duke
+read aloud a paragraph which Anne did not understand. "That spells ruin
+even for him," he said.
+
+He took several turns across the room.
+
+"He has been working day and night for the last week," he said, "to
+avoid this crash. It might have been avoided. He told me a little when
+he was last here, but in confidence. He is straight, but others weren't.
+He has not been backed. He has been let in by his partners."
+
+The Duke sighed, and went back to his study on the ground floor.
+
+Anne opened the window with a trembling hand, and peered out into the
+fog.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Stephen was sitting in his inner room at his office in the City, biting
+an already sufficiently bitten little finger. His face bore the mark of
+the incessant toil of the last week. His eyes were fixed absently on the
+electric light. His mind was concentrated with unabated strength on his
+affairs, as a magnifying glass may focus its light into flame on a given
+point. He had fought strenuously, and he had been beaten--not by fair
+means. He could meet the claims upon him. He could, in his own language,
+"stand the racket;" but in the eyes of the financial world he was
+ruined. In his own eyes he was on the verge of ruin. But a man with an
+iron nerve can find a foothold on precipices where another turns giddy
+and loses his head. Stephen's courage rose to the occasion. He felt
+equal to it. His strong, acute, alert mind worked indefatigably hour
+after hour, while he sat apparently idle. He was not perturbed. He saw
+his way through.
+
+He heard the newsboys in the streets crying out his bankruptcy, and
+smiled. At last he drew a sheet of paper towards him, and became
+absorbed in figures.
+
+He was never visible to anyone when he was in this inner chamber. His
+head clerk knew that he must not on any pretext be disturbed. And those
+who knew Stephen discovered that he was not to be disturbed with
+impunity.
+
+He looked up at last, and rose to his feet, shaking himself like a dog.
+
+"I can carry through," he said. "They think I can't, but I can. But if
+the worst comes to the worst--which it shall not--I doubt if I shall
+have a shilling left."
+
+He took a turn in the room.
+
+"Wait a bit, you fools," he said half aloud; "if your cowardice does
+ruin me, wait a bit. I have made money not once, nor twice,--and I can
+make it again."
+
+A tap came to the door.
+
+He reddened with sudden anger. Did not Jones know that he was not to be
+interrupted till two, when he must meet, and, if possible, pacify
+certain half frantic, stampeding shareholders?
+
+The door opened with decision, and Anne came in. For a moment Stephen
+saw the aghast face of his head clerk behind her. Then Anne shut the
+door and confronted him.
+
+The image of Anne was so constantly with Stephen, her every little trick
+of manner, from the way she turned her head, to the way she folded her
+hands, was all so carefully registered in his memory, had become so
+entirely a part of himself, that it was no surprise to him to see her.
+Did he not see her always! Nevertheless, as he looked at her, all power
+of going forward to meet her, of speaking to her, left him. The blood
+seemed to ebb slowly from his heart, and his grim face blanched.
+
+"How did you come here?" he stammered at last, his voice sounding harsh
+and unfamiliar.
+
+"On foot."
+
+"In this fog?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who came with you?"
+
+"I came alone. I wished to speak to you. I hear you are ruined."
+
+"I can meet my liabilities," he said proudly.
+
+"Is it true that you have lost two millions?"
+
+"It is--possibly more."
+
+A moment of terror seemed to pass over Anne. The lovely colour in her
+cheek faded suddenly. She supported herself against the table, with a
+shaking gloved hand. Then she drew herself up, and said in a firm voice:
+
+"Do you remember that night in Hamilton Gardens when you asked me to
+marry you?"
+
+Stephen bowed. He could not speak. Even his great strength was only just
+enough.
+
+"I refused you because I saw you were convinced that I did not care for
+you. If I had told you I loved you then you would not have believed it."
+
+Stephen's hand gripped the mantelpiece. He was trembling from head to
+foot. His eyes never left her.
+
+"But now the money is gone," she said, becoming paler than ever,
+"perhaps, now the dreadful money is gone, you will believe me if I tell
+you that I love you."
+
+And so Stephen and Anne came home to each other at last--at last.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My dear," said the Duke to Anne the following day, "this is a very
+extraordinary proceeding of yours. You refuse Vanbrunt when he is rich,
+and accept him when he is tottering on the verge of ruin. It seems a
+reversal of the usual order of things. What will your mother say?"
+
+"I have already had a letter from her, thanking Heaven that I was not
+engaged to him. She says a good deal about how there is a Higher Power
+which rules things for the best."
+
+"I wish you would allow it freer scope," said the Duke. "All the same, I
+should be thankful if she were here. It will be my horrid, vulgar duty
+to ask Vanbrunt what he has got; what small remains there are of his
+enormous fortune. I hear on good authority that he is almost penniless.
+One is not a parent for nothing. I wish to goodness your mother were in
+town. She always did this sort of thing herself with a dreadful relish
+on previous occasions. You must push him into my study, my dear, after
+his interview with you. I will endeavour to act the heavy father. That
+is his bell. I will depart. I have letters to write."
+
+The Duke left the room, and then put his head in again.
+
+"It may interest you to know, Anne," he said, "that I've seen handsomer
+men, and I've seen better dressed men, and I've even seen men of rather
+lighter build, but I've not seen any man I like better than your
+ex-millionaire."
+
+Two hours later, after Stephen's departure, the Duke returned to his
+daughter's sitting-room, and sank exhausted into a chair.
+
+"Really I can't do this sort of thing twice in a lifetime," he said
+faintly. "Have you any salts handy? No--you--need not fetch them. I'm
+not seriously indisposed. How heartlessly blooming you are looking,
+Anne, while your parent is suffering. Now remember, if ever you want to
+marry again, don't send your second husband to interview me, for I won't
+have it."
+
+"Come, come, father. Didn't you tell me to push him into your study? And
+I thought you looked so impressive and dignified when I brought him in.
+Quite a model father."
+
+"I took a firm attitude with him," continued the Duke. "I saw he was
+nervous. That made it easier for me. Vanbrunt is a shy man. I was in the
+superior position. Hateful thing to ask a man for his daughter. I said,
+'Now look here, Vanbrunt, I understand you wish to marry my daughter. I
+don't wish it myself, but----'"
+
+"Oh! father, you never said that?"
+
+"Well, not exactly. I owned to him that I could put up with him better
+than with most, but that I could not let you marry to poverty. He asked
+me what I considered poverty. That rather stumped me. In fact, I did not
+know what to say. It was not his place to ask questions."
+
+"Father, you did promise me you would let me marry him on eight hundred
+a year."
+
+"Well, yes, I did. I don't like it, but I did say so. In short, I told
+him you had worked me up to that point."
+
+"And what did he say?"
+
+"He said he did not think in that case that any real difficulty about
+money need arise; that at one moment he had stood to lose all he had,
+and he had lost two millions, but that his affairs had taken an
+unexpected turn during the last twenty-four hours, and he believed he
+could count on an odd million or so, certainly on half a million. I
+collapsed, Anne. My attitude fell to pieces. It was Vanbrunt who scored.
+He had had a perfectly grave face till then. Then he smiled grimly, and
+we shook hands. He did not say much, but what he did say was to the
+point. I think, my dear, that while Vanbrunt lasts, his love for you
+will last. He has got it very firmly screwed into him. But these
+interviews annihilate me."
+
+The Duke raised the kitchen cat to his knee, and rubbed it behind the
+ears.
+
+"I made the match, Anne," he said; "you owe it all to me. I asked him to
+dinner when I met him at that first directors' meeting a fortnight ago.
+I had it in my mind then."
+
+"Father! You _know_ you had not."
+
+"Well, no. I had not. I did not think of it! I can't say I did. But
+still, I was a sort of bulwark to the whole thing. You had my moral
+support. I shall tell your mother so."
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+    "So passes, all confusedly
+    As lights that hurry, shapes that flee
+    About some brink we dimly see,
+        The trivial, great,
+    Squalid, majestic tragedy
+        Of human fate."
+
+                                                --WILLIAM WATSON
+
+
+I wish life were more like the stories one reads, the beautiful stories,
+which, whether they are grave or gay, still have picturesque endings.
+The hero marries the heroine, after insuperable difficulties, which in
+real life he would never have overcome: or the heroine creeps down into
+a romantic grave, watered by our scalding tears. At any rate, the story
+is gracefully wound up. There is an ornamental conclusion to it. But
+life, for some inexplicable reason, does not lend itself with docility
+to the requirements of the lending libraries, and only too frequently
+fails to grasp the dramatic moment for an impressive close. None of us
+reach middle age without having watched several violent melodramas,
+whose main interest lies further apart from their moral than we were
+led, in our tender youth, to anticipate. We have seen better plays off
+the stage than even Shakespeare ever put on. But Shakespeare finished
+his, and pulled down the curtain on them; while, with those we watch in
+life, we have time to grow grey between the acts; and we only know the
+end has come, when at last it does come, because the lights have been
+going out all the time, one by one, and we find ourselves at last alone
+in the dark.
+
+Janet's sweet melancholy face rises up before me as I think of these
+things, and I could almost feel impatient with her, when I remember how
+the one dramatic incident in her uneventful life never seemed to get
+itself wound up. The consequences went on, and on, and on, till all
+novelty and interest dropped inevitably from them and from her.
+
+Some of us come to turning-points in life, and don't turn. We become
+warped instead. It was so with Janet.
+
+Is there any turning-point in life like our first real encounter with
+anguish, loneliness, despair?
+
+I do not pity those who meet open-eyed these stern angels of God, and
+wrestle with them through the night, until the day breaks, extorting
+from them the blessings that they waylaid us to bestow. But is it
+possible to withhold awed compassion for those who, like Janet, go down
+blind into Hades, and struggle impotently with God's angels as with
+enemies? Janet endured with dumb, uncomplaining dignity she knew not
+what, she knew not why; and came up out of her agony, as she had gone
+down into it--with clenched empty hands. The greater hope, the deeper
+love, the wider faith, the tenderer sympathy--these she brought not back
+with her. She returned gradually to her normal life with her
+conventional ideas crystallised, her small crude beliefs in love and her
+fellow-creatures withered.
+
+That was all George did for her.
+
+The virtues of narrow natures such as George's seem of no use to anyone
+except possibly to their owner. They are as great a stumbling-block to
+their weaker brethren, they cause as much pain, they choke the spiritual
+life as mercilessly, they engender as much scepticism in unreasoning
+minds, as certain gross vices. If we are unjust, it matters little to
+our victim what makes us so, or whether we have prayed to see aright, if
+for long years we have closed our eyes to unpalatable truths.
+
+George's disbelief in Janet's rectitude, which grew out of a deep sense
+of rectitude, had the same effect on her mind as if he had deliberately
+seduced and deserted her. The executioner reached the gallows of his
+victim by a clean path. That was the only difference. So much the better
+for him. The running noose for her was the same. Unreasoning belief in
+love and her fellow-creatures was followed by an equally unreasoning
+disbelief in both.
+
+Janet kept her promise. She held firm. Amid all the promises of the
+world, made only to be broken, kept only till the temptation to break
+them punctually arrived, amid all that débris one foolish promise
+remained intact, Janet's promise to Cuckoo.
+
+George married. Then, shortly afterwards, Fred married the eldest Miss
+Ford, and found great happiness. His bliss was at first painfully
+streaked with total abstinence, but he gradually eradicated this
+depressing element from his new home life. And in time his slight
+insolvent nature reached a kind of stability, through the love of the
+virtuous female prig, the "perfect lady," to whom he was all in all.
+Fred changed greatly for the better after his marriage, and in the end
+he actually repaid Stephen part of the money the latter had advanced to
+Monkey Brand, for Janet's sake.
+
+Janet lived with the young couple at first, but Mrs Fred did not like
+her. She knew vaguely, as did half the neighbourhood, that Janet had
+been mixed up in something discreditable, and that her engagement had
+been broken off on that account. Mrs Fred was, as we know, a person of
+the highest principles; and high principles naturally shrink from
+contact with any less exalted. Several months after the situation
+between the two women had become untenable, Janet decided to leave home.
+She had nowhere to go, and no money; so, like thousands of other women
+in a similar predicament, she decided to support herself by education.
+She had received no education herself, but that was not in her mind any
+bar to imparting it. Anne, who had kept in touch with her, interfered
+peremptorily at this point, and when Janet did finally leave home, it
+was to go to Anne's house in London, till "something turned up."
+
+It was a sunny day in June when Janet arrived in London, for the first
+time since her ill-fated visit there a year ago. She looked up at
+Lowndes Mansions, as her four-wheeler plodded past them, towards Anne's
+house in Park Lane. Even now, a year after the great fire, scaffoldings
+were still pricking up against the central tower of the larger block of
+building. The damage caused by the fire was not even yet quite
+repaired. Perhaps some of it would never be repaired.
+
+Mrs Trefusis was sitting with Anne on this particular afternoon,
+confiding to her some discomfortable characteristics of her new
+daughter-in-law, the wife whom she had herself chosen for her son.
+
+"I am an old woman," said Mrs Trefusis, "and of course I don't march
+with the times, the world is for the young, I know that very well; but I
+must own, Anne, I had imagined that affection still counted for
+something in marriage."
+
+"I wonder what makes you think that."
+
+"Well, not the marriages I see around me, my dear, that is just what I
+say, though what has made you so cynical all at once, I don't know. But
+I ask you--look at Gertrude. She does not know what the word 'love'
+means."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that."
+
+"I am. She has been married to George three months, and it might be
+thirty years by the way they behave. And she seemed such a particularly
+nice girl, and exceedingly sensible, and well brought up. I should have
+thought she would at any rate _try_ to make my boy happy, after all the
+sorrow he has gone through. But they don't seem to have any real link to
+each other. It isn't that they don't get on. They do in a way. She is
+sharp enough for that. She does her duty by him. She is nice to him, but
+all her interests, and she has interests, seem to lie apart from
+anything to do with him."
+
+"Does he mind?"
+
+"I never really know what George minds or doesn't mind," said Mrs
+Trefusis. "It has been the heaviest cross of the many crosses I have had
+to bear in life, that he never confides in me. George has always been
+extremely reticent. Thoughtful natures often are. He will sit for hours
+without saying a word, looking----"
+
+"_Glum_ is the word she wants," said Anne to herself, as Mrs Trefusis
+hesitated.
+
+"Reserved," said Mrs Trefusis. "He does not seem to care to be with
+Gertrude. And yet you know Gertrude is very taking, and there is no
+doubt she is good-looking. And she sings charmingly. Unfortunately
+George does not care for music."
+
+"She is really musical."
+
+"They make a very handsome couple," said Mrs Trefusis plaintively. "When
+I saw them come down the aisle together I felt happier about him than I
+had done for years. It seemed as if I had been rewarded at last. And I
+never saw a bride smile and look as bright as she did. But somehow it
+all seems to have fallen flat. She didn't even care to see the
+photographs of George when he was a child, when I got them out the other
+day. She said she would like to see them, and then forgot to look at
+them."
+
+Anne was silent.
+
+"Well," said Mrs Trefusis, rising slowly, "I suppose the truth is that
+in these days young people don't fall in love as they did in my time. I
+must own Gertrude has disappointed me."
+
+"I daresay she will make him a good wife."
+
+"Oh! my dear, she does. She is an extremely practical woman, but one
+wants more for one's son than a person who will make him a good wife. If
+she were a less good wife, and cared a little more about him, I should
+feel less miserable about the whole affair."
+
+Mrs Trefusis sighed heavily.
+
+"I must go," she said, in the voice of one who might be persuaded to
+remain.
+
+But Anne did not try to detain her, for she was expecting Janet every
+moment, though she did not warn Mrs Trefusis of the fact, for the name
+of Janet was never mentioned between Anne and Mrs Trefusis. Mrs Trefusis
+had once diffidently endeavoured to reopen the subject with Anne, but
+found it instantly and decisively closed. If Janet had existed in a
+novel, she would certainly have been coming up Anne's wide white
+staircase at the exact moment that Mrs Trefusis was going down them,
+but, as a matter of fact, Mrs Trefusis was packed into her carriage, and
+drove away, quite half a minute before Janet's four-wheeler came round
+the corner.
+
+Anne's heart ached for Janet when she appeared in the doorway. She
+almost wished that Mrs Trefusis had been confronted with the worn white
+face of the only woman who had loved her son.
+
+Janet and Anne kissed each other.
+
+Then Janet looked at the wedding ring on Anne's finger, and smiled at
+her in silence.
+
+Anne looked down tremulously, for fear lest the joy in her eyes should
+make Janet's heart ache, as her own heart had ached one little year ago,
+when she had seen Janet and George together in the rose garden.
+
+"I am so glad," said Janet. "I did so wish that time at Easthope--do you
+remember?--that you could be happy too. It's just a year ago."
+
+"Just a year," said Anne.
+
+"I suppose you cared for him then," said Janet. "But I expect it was in
+a more sensible way than I did. You were always so much wiser than me.
+One lives and learns."
+
+"I cared for him then," said Anne, busying herself making tea for her
+friend. When she had made it she went to a side table, and took from it
+a splendid satin tea cosy, which she placed over the teapot. It had been
+Janet's wedding present to her.
+
+Janet's eyes lighted on it with pleasure.
+
+"I am glad you use it every day," she said. "I was so afraid you would
+only use it when you had company."
+
+Anne stroked it with her slender white hand. There was a kind of tender
+radiance about her which Janet had never observed in her before.
+
+"It makes me happy that you are happy," said Janet. "I only hope it will
+last. I felt last year that you were in trouble. Since then it has been
+my turn."
+
+"I wish happiness could have come to both of us," said Anne.
+
+"Do you remember our talk together," said Janet, spreading out a clean
+pocket-handkerchief on her knee, and stirring her tea, "and how
+sentimental I was? I daresay you thought at the time how silly I was
+about George. I see now what a fool I was."
+
+Anne did not answer. She was looking earnestly at Janet, and there was
+no need for her now to veil the still gladness in her eyes. They held
+only pained love and surprise.
+
+"And do you remember how the clergyman preached about not laying up our
+treasure on earth?"
+
+"I remember everything."
+
+"I've often thought of that since," said Janet, with a quiver in her
+voice, which brought back once more to Anne the childlike innocent
+creature of a year ago, whom she now almost failed to recognise, in her
+new ill-fitting array of cheap cynicism.
+
+"I did lay up my treasure upon earth," continued Janet, drawn
+momentarily back into her old simplicity by the presence of Anne. "I
+didn't seem able to help it. George was my treasure. I mustn't think of
+him any more because he's married. But I cared too much. That was where
+I was wrong."
+
+"One cannot love too much," said Anne, her fingers closing over her
+wedding ring.
+
+"Perhaps not," said Janet, "but then the other person must love too.
+George did not love me enough to carry through. When the other person
+cares, but doesn't care strong enough, I think that's the worst. It's
+like what the Bible says. The moth and rust corrupting. George did care,
+but not enough. Men are like that."
+
+"Some one else cares," said Anne diffidently--"poor Mr de Rivaz. He
+cares enough."
+
+"Yes," said Janet apathetically. "I daresay he does. We've all got to
+fall in love some time or other. But I don't care for him. I told him so
+months ago. I don't mean to care for any one again. I've thought a great
+deal about things this winter, Anne. It's all very well for you to
+believe in love. I did once, but I don't now."
+
+Janet got up, and, as she turned, her eyes fixed suddenly.
+
+"Why, that's the cabinet," she said below her breath. "Cuckoo's
+cabinet!" Her face quivered. She saw again the scorched room, the pile
+of smoking papers on the hearth, the flame which had burnt up her
+happiness with them.
+
+Anne did not understand.
+
+"Stephen gave me that cabinet a few days ago," she said.
+
+"It was Cuckoo's. It used to stand under her picture."
+
+"Don't you think it may be a replica?"
+
+"No, it is the same," said Janet, passing her hand over the mermaid and
+her whale. "There is the little chip out of the dolphin's tail."
+
+Then she shrank suddenly away from it, as if its touch scorched her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Where did you get the Italian cabinet?" said Anne to Stephen that
+evening, as he and De Rivaz joined her and Janet after dinner in her
+sitting-room.
+
+"At Brand's sale. He sold some of his things when he gave up his flat in
+Lowndes Mansions. He has gone to South Africa for his boy's health."
+
+Stephen opened it. Janet drew near.
+
+"I had to have a new key made for it," he said, letting the front fall
+forward on his careful hand. "Look, Anne! how beautifully the drawers
+are inlaid."
+
+He pulled out one or two of them.
+
+Janet slowly put out her hand, and pulled out the lowest drawer on the
+left-hand side. It stuck, and then came out. It was empty like all the
+rest.
+
+Stephen closed it, and then drew it forward again.
+
+"Why does it stick?" he said.
+
+He got the drawer entirely out, and looked into the aperture. Then he
+put in his hand, and pulled out something wedged against the slip of
+wood which supported the upper drawer, without reaching quite to the
+back of the cabinet. It was a crumpled, dirty sheet of paper. He tore it
+as he forced it out.
+
+"It must have been in the lowest drawer but one," he said, "and fallen
+between the drawer and its support."
+
+Janet was the first to see her brother's signature, and she pointed to
+it with a cry.
+
+It was the missing I O U.
+
+"I always said it would turn up," said Stephen gently.
+
+"But it's too late," said Janet hoarsely, "too late! too late! Oh! why
+didn't George believe in me!"
+
+"He will believe now."
+
+"It doesn't matter what he believes now. Why didn't he _know_ I had not
+burnt it?"
+
+"I believed in you," said De Rivaz, his voice shaking. "I knew you had
+not burnt it, though I saw you burning papers. Though I saw you with my
+own eyes, I did not believe."
+
+There was a moment's pause. Her three faithful friends looked at Janet.
+
+"I burnt nothing," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Janet married De Rivaz at last, but not until she had nearly worn him
+out. It was after their marriage that he painted his marvellous portrait
+of her, a picture that was the outcome of a deep love, wed with genius.
+
+She made him a good wife, as wives go, and bore him beautiful children,
+but she never cared for him as she had done for George. Later on her
+daughters carried their love affairs, not to their mother, but--to
+Anne.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GEOFFREY'S WIFE
+
+     "Oh, how this spring of love resembleth
+     Th' uncertain glory of an April day."
+
+
+Every one felt an interest in them. The mob-capped servants hung over
+the banisters to watch them go downstairs. Alphonse reserved for them
+the little round table in the window, which commanded the best view of
+the court, with its dusty flower-pots grouped round an intermittent
+squirt of water. Even the landlord, Monsieur Leroux, found himself often
+in the gateway when they passed in or out, in order to bow and receive a
+merry word and glance.
+
+Even the _concierge_, who dwelt retired, aloof from the contact of the
+outer world in his narrow, key-adorned shrine, even he unbent to them
+and smiled back when they smiled. It was a queer little old-fashioned
+hotel, rather out of the way. Nevertheless, young married couples _had_
+stayed there before. Their name, indeed, at certain periods of the year
+was Legion. There were other young married couples staying there at that
+very moment, but everybody felt that a peculiar interest attached to
+this young married couple. For one thing, they were so absurdly, so
+overwhelmingly happy. People, Monsieur Leroux himself, and others, had
+been happy in an early portion of their married lives, but not like this
+couple. People had had honeymoons before, but never one like this
+couple. Although they were English, they were so handsome and so sunny.
+And he was so well made and devoted, the chambermaids whispered. And,
+ah! how she was _piquante_, the waiters agreed.
+
+They had a little sitting-room. It was not the best sitting-room,
+because they were not very rich; but Geoffrey (she considered Geoffrey
+such a lovely name, and so uncommon) thought it the most delightful
+little sitting-room in the world when she was in it. And Mrs Geoffrey
+also liked it very much; oh! very much indeed.
+
+He had had hard work to win her. Sometimes, when he watched her tangling
+many-coloured wools over the mahogany back of one of the tight horsehair
+chairs, he could hardly believe that she was really his wife, that they
+were actually on that honeymoon for which he had toiled and waited so
+long. Beneath the gaiety and the elastic spirit of youth there was a
+depth of earnestness in Geoffrey which his little wife vaguely wondered
+at and valued as something beyond her ken, but infinitely heroic. He
+looked upon her with reverence and thanked God for her. He had never had
+much to do with womankind, and he felt a respectful tenderness for
+everything of hers, from her prim maid to her foolish little shoelace,
+which was never tired of coming undone, and which he was never tired of
+doing up. The awful responsibility of guarding such a treasure, and an
+overpowering sense of its fragility, were ever before his mind. He
+laughed and was gay with her, but in his heart of hearts there was an
+acute joy nigh to pain--a wonder that he should have been singled out
+from among the sons of men to have the one pearl of great price bestowed
+upon him.
+
+They had come to Paris, and to Paris only, partly because it was the
+year of the Exhibition, and partly because she was not very strong, and
+was not to be dragged through snow and shaken in _diligences_ like other
+ordinary brides. The bare idea of Eva in a _diligence_, or tramping in
+Switzerland, was not to be thought of. No; Geoffrey knew better than
+that. A quiet fortnight in Paris, the Opera, the Exhibition, Versailles,
+St Cloud, Notre Dame--these were dissipations calculated not to disturb
+the exquisite poise of a health of such inestimable value. He knew Paris
+well. He had seen it all in those foolish bachelor days, when he had
+rushed across the water with men companions, knowing no better, and
+enjoying himself in a way even then.
+
+And so he took her to St Cloud, and showed her the wrecked palace; and
+they wandered by the fountains and bought _gaufre_ cake, which he told
+her was called "_plaisir_," only he was wrong--but what did that matter?
+And they went down to Versailles, and saw everything that every one else
+had seen, only they saw it glorified--at least he did. And they sat very
+quietly in Notre Dame, and listened to a half divine organ and a wholly
+divine choir, and Geoffrey looked at the sweet, awed face beside him,
+and wondered whether he could ever in all his life prove himself worthy
+of her. And though of course, being a Protestant, he did not like to
+pray in a Roman Catholic Church, still he came very near it, and was
+perhaps none the worse.
+
+And now the fortnight was nearly over. Geoffrey reflected with pride
+that Eva was still quite well. Her mother, of whom he stood in great
+awe--her mother, who had an avowed disbelief in the moral qualities of
+second sons--even her mother would not be able to find any fault. Why,
+James himself, his eldest brother, whom she had always openly preferred,
+could not have done better than he had done. He who had so longed to
+take her away was now almost longing to take her back home, just for
+five minutes, to show her family how blooming she was, how trustworthy
+he had proved himself to be.
+
+The fortnight was over on Saturday, but at the last moment they decided
+to stay till Monday. Was it not Sunday, the night of the great
+illuminations? suggested Alphonse reproachfully. Were not the Champs
+Elysées to present a spectacle? Were not fires of joy and artifice to
+mount from the Bois de Boulogne? Surely Monsieur and Madame would stay
+for the illuminations! Was not the stranger coming from unknown
+distances to witness the illuminations? Were not the illuminations in
+honour of the Exhibition? It could not be that Monsieur would suffer
+Madame to miss the illuminations.
+
+Eva was all eagerness to stay. Two more nights in Paris. To go out in
+the summer evening, and see Paris _en fête_! Delightful! Geoffrey was
+not to say a single word! He did not want to! Well, never mind, he was
+not to say one; and she was going instantly, that very moment, to stop
+Grabham packing up, and he was to go instantly, that very moment, to let
+Monsieur Leroux know they intended to stay on.
+
+And they both went instantly, that very moment, and they stayed on. And
+he was very severe in consequence, and refused to allow her to tire
+herself on Saturday, and insisted on her resting all Sunday afternoon,
+as a preparation for the dissipation of the evening. They had met some
+English friends on Sunday morning, who had invited them to their house
+in the Champ Elysées in the course of the evening to see the
+illuminations from their balcony. And then towards night Geoffrey
+became more autocratic than ever, and insisted on a woollen gown instead
+of a muslin, because he felt certain that it would not be so hot towards
+the middle of the night as it then was. She said a great many very
+unkind things to him, and they sallied forth together at nine o'clock as
+happy as two pleasure-seeking children.
+
+"You will not be of return till the early morning. I see it well," said
+Monsieur Leroux, bowing to them. "Monsieur does well to take the little
+_châle_ for Madame for fear later she should feel herself fresh. But as
+for rain, will not Madame leave her umbrella with the _concierge_? No?
+Monsieur prefers? _Eh bien! Bon soir!_"
+
+It was a perfect night. It had been fiercely hot all day, but it was
+cooler now. The streets were already full of people, all bearing the
+same way toward the Champ Elysées. With some difficulty Geoffrey
+procured a little carriage, and in a few minutes they were swept into
+the chattering, idle, busy throng, and slowly making their way toward
+the Langtons' house. Every building was gay with coloured lanterns. The
+Place de la Concorde shone afar like a belt of jewelled light. The great
+stone lions glowed upon their pedestals. Clear as in noonday sunshine,
+the rocking sea of merry faces met Eva's delighted gaze; she beaming
+with the rest.
+
+And now they were driving down the Champs Elysées. The fountains leaped
+in coloured flame. The Palais de l'Industrie gleamed from roof to
+basement, built in fire. The Arc de Triomphe, crowned with light, stood
+out against the dark of the moonless sky, flecked by its insignificant
+stars.
+
+"Beautiful! Beautiful!" and Eva clapped her hands and laughed.
+
+And now it was the painful, the desolating duty of the driver to tell
+them he could take them no further. Carriages were not allowed beyond a
+certain hour, and either he must take them back or put them down.
+Geoffrey demurred. Not so Mrs Geoffrey. In a moment she had sprung out
+of the carriage, and was laughing at the novel idea of walking in a
+crowd. Geoffrey paid his man and followed. There was plenty of room to
+walk in comfort, and Eva, on her husband's arm, wished the Langtons'
+house miles away, instead of a few hundred yards. She said she must and
+would walk home. Geoffrey must relent a little, or she on her side might
+not be so agreeable as she had hitherto shown herself. She was quite
+certain that she should catch a cold if she drove home in the night air
+in an open carriage. What was that he was mumbling? That if he had known
+_that_ he would not have brought her? But she was equally certain that
+it would not hurt her to walk home. Walking was a very different thing
+from driving in open carriages late at night. An ignorant creature like
+him might not think so, but her mother would not have allowed her to do
+such a thing for an instant. Geoffrey quailed, and gave utterance to
+that sure forerunner of masculine defeat, that "he would see."
+
+It was very delightful on the Langtons' balcony, with its constellation
+of swinging Chinese lanterns. Eva leaned over and watched the people,
+and chatted to her friends, and was altogether enchanting--at least
+Geoffrey thought so.
+
+The night is darkening now. The streets blaze bright and brighter. The
+crowd below rocks and thickens and shifts without ceasing. Long lines of
+flame burn red along the Seine, and mark its windings as with a hand of
+fire. The great electric light from the Trocadéro casts heavy shadows
+against the sky. Jets of fire and wild vagaries of leaping stars rush up
+out of the Bois de Boulogne.
+
+And now there is a contrary motion in the crowd, and a low murmur
+swells, and echoes, and dies, and rises again. The torchlight procession
+is coming. That square of fire, moving slowly down from the Arc de
+Triomphe through the heart of the crowd, is a troop of mounted soldiers
+carrying torches. Hark! Listen to the low, sullen growl of the
+multitude, like a wild beast half aroused.
+
+The army is very unpopular in Paris just now. See, as the soldiers come
+nearer, how the crowd sweeps and presses round them, tossing like an
+angry sea. Look how the soldiers rear their horses against the people to
+keep them back. Hark again to that fierce roar that rises to the balcony
+and makes little Eva tremble; the inarticulate voice of a great
+multitude raised in anger.
+
+They have passed now, and the crowd moves with them. Look down the
+Champs Elysées, right down to the cobweb of light which is the Place de
+la Concorde. One moving mass of heads! Look up toward the Arc de
+Triomphe. They are pouring down from it on their way back from the Bois
+in one continuous black stream, good-humoured and light-hearted again as
+ever, now the soldiers have passed.
+
+It is long past midnight. Ices and lemonade and sugared cakes have
+played their part. It is time to go home. The summer night is soft and
+warm, without a touch of chill. The other guests on the Langtons'
+balcony are beginning to disperse. The Langtons look as if they would
+like to go to bed. The crowd below is melting away every moment. The
+play is over.
+
+Eva is charmed when she hears that a carriage is not to be had in all
+Paris for love or money. To walk home through the lighted streets with
+Geoffrey! Delightful! A few cheerful leave-takings, and they are in the
+street again, with another English couple who are going part of the way
+with them.
+
+"Come, wife, arm-in-arm," says the elder man; adding to Geoffrey, "I
+advise you to do the same. The crowd is as harmless as an infant, but it
+will probably have a little animal spirits to get rid of, and it won't
+do to be separated."
+
+So arm-in-arm they went, walking with the multitude, which was not dense
+enough to hamper them. From time to time little groups of _gamins_ would
+wave their hats in front of magisterial buildings and sing the
+prohibited Marseillaise, while other bands of _gamins_, equally
+good-humoured, but more hot-headed, would charge through the crowd with
+Chinese lanterns and drums and whistles.
+
+"Not tired?" asked Geoffrey regularly every five minutes, drawing the
+little hand further through his arm.
+
+Not a bit tired, and Geoffrey was a foolish, tiresome creature to be
+always thinking of such things. She should say she _was_ tired next time
+if he did not take care. In fact, now she came to think of it, she was
+_rather_ tired by having to walk in such a heavy woollen gown.
+
+"Don't say that, for Heaven's sake, if it is not true!" said the
+long-suffering husband, "for we have a mile in front of us yet."
+
+The other couple wished them good-night and turned off down a side
+street. Everywhere the houses were putting out their lights. Night was
+gaining the upper hand at last. As they entered the Place de la
+Concorde, Geoffrey saw a small body of mounted soldiers crossing the
+Place. Instantly there was a hastening and pushing in the crowd, and the
+low, deep growl arose again, more ominous than ever. Geoffrey caught a
+glimpse of a sudden upraised arm, he heard a cry of defiance, and
+then--in a moment there was a roar and shout from a thousand tongues,
+and an infuriated mob was pressing in from every quarter, was elbowing
+past, was struggling to the front. In another second the whole Place de
+la Concorde was one seething mass of excited people, one hoarse jangle
+of tongues, one frantic effort to push in the direction the soldiers had
+taken.
+
+Geoffrey, a tall, athletic Englishman, looked over the surging sea of
+French heads, and looked in vain for a quarter to which he could beat a
+retreat. He had not room to put his arm round his wife. She had given a
+little laugh, but she was frightened, he knew, for she trembled in the
+grasp he tightened on her arm. One rapid glance showed him there was no
+escape. The very lions at the corners were covered with human figures.
+They were in the heart of the crowd. Its faint, sickening smell was in
+their nostrils.
+
+"No, Eva," he said, answering her imploring glance, "we can't get out of
+this yet. We must just move quietly, with the rest, and wait till we get
+a chance of edging off. Lean on me as much as you can."
+
+She was frightened and silent, and nestled close to him, being very
+small and slight of stature, and by nature timid.
+
+Another deep roar, and a sudden rush from behind, which sent them all
+forward. How the people pushed and elbowed! Bah! The smell of a crowd!
+Who that has been in one has ever forgotten it?
+
+This was a dreadful ordeal for his hothouse flower.
+
+"How are you getting on?" he asked with a sharp anxiety, which he vainly
+imagined did not betray itself in his voice.
+
+She was getting on very well, only--only could not they get out?
+
+Geoffrey looked round yet again in despair. Would it be possible to edge
+a little to the left, to the right, anywhere? He looked in vain. A
+vague, undefined fear took hold on him. "We must have patience, little
+one," he said. "Lean on me, and be brave."
+
+His voice was cheerful, but he felt a sudden horrible sinking of the
+heart. How should he ever get her out of this jostling, angry crowd
+before she was quite tired out? What mad folly it had been to think of
+walking home! Poor Geoffrey forgot that there had been no other way of
+getting home, and that even his mother-in-law could not hold him
+responsible for a disagreement between the soldiers and the citizens.
+
+Another ten minutes! Geoffrey cursed within himself the illumination and
+the soldiers and his own folly, and the rough men and rougher women,
+whom, do what he would, he could not prevent pressing upon her.
+
+She did not speak again for some time, only held fast by his arm.
+Suddenly her little hands tightened convulsively on it, and a face pale
+to the lips was raised to his.
+
+"Geoffrey, I'm very sorry," with a half sob, "but I'm afraid I'm going
+to faint."
+
+The words came like a blow, and drove the blood from his face. The vague
+undefined fear had suddenly become a hideous reality. He steadied his
+voice and spoke quietly, almost sternly.
+
+"Listen to me, Eva," he said. "Make an effort and attend, and do as I
+tell you. The crowd will move again in a moment. I see a movement in
+front already. Directly the move comes the press will loosen for an
+instant. I shall push in front of you and stoop down. You will instantly
+get on my back. I insist upon it. I will do my best to help you up, but
+I can't get hold of you in any other way. The faintness will pass off
+directly you are higher up and can get a breath of air. Now do you
+understand?"
+
+She did not answer, but nodded.
+
+There was a moment's pause, and the movement came. Geoffrey flung down
+his stick, drew his wife firmly behind him, and pressing suddenly with
+all his might upon those in front, made room to stoop down. Two nervous
+hands were laid on his coat. Good God! she hesitated. A moment more, and
+the crowd behind would force him down, and they would both be lost.
+"Quick! Quick!" he shouted; but before the words had left his lips the
+trembling arms were clasped convulsively round his neck, and with a
+supreme effort he was on his legs again, shaking like a leaf with the
+long horror of that moment's suspense.
+
+But the tight clasp of the hands round his neck, the burden on his
+strong shoulders, nerved him afresh. He felt all his vitality and
+resolution return tenfold. He could endure anything which he had to
+endure alone, now that horrible anxiety for her was over. He could no
+longer tell where he was. He was bent too much to endeavour to do
+anything except keep on his feet. A long wait! Would the crowd never
+disperse? Moving, stopping, pushing, pressing, stopping again. Another
+pause, which seemed as if it would never end. A contrary motion now, and
+he had not room to turn! No. Thank Heaven! A tremor through the crowd,
+and then a fierce snarl and a rush. A violent push from behind. A
+plunge. Down on one knee. Good God! A blow on the mouth from some one's
+elbow. A wild struggle. A foot on his hand. Another blow. Up again. Up,
+only to strike his foot against a curbstone, and to throw all his weight
+away from a sudden pool of water on his left, into which he is being
+edged.
+
+The great drops are on his brow, and his breath comes short and thick.
+He staggers again. The weight on him and his fall are beginning to tell.
+But as his strength wanes a dogged determination takes its place. He
+steels his nerves and pulls himself together. It is only a question of
+time. He will and must hold out. His whole soul is centred on one thing,
+to keep his feet. Once down--and--he clenches his teeth. He will not
+suffer himself to think. He is bruised and aching in every limb with the
+friction of the crowd. Drums begin to beat in his temples, and his mouth
+is bleeding. There is a mist of blood and dust before his eyes. But he
+holds on with the fierce energy of despair. Another push. God in Heaven!
+almost down again! He can see nothing. A frantic struggle in the dark.
+The arms round his neck tremble, and he hears a sharp-drawn gasp of
+terror. Hands from out of the darkness clutch him up, and he regains his
+footing once more. "Courage, Monsieur," says a kind voice, and the hands
+are swept out of his. He tries to move his lips in thanks, but no words
+come. There is a noise in the crowd, but it is as a feeble murmur to the
+roar and sweep and tumult of many waters that is sounding in his ears.
+He cannot last much longer now. He is spent. But the crowd is thinning.
+If he can only keep his feet a few minutes more! The crowd is thinning.
+He catches a glimpse of ground in front of him. But it sways before him
+like the waves of the sea. One moment more. He stumbles aside where he
+feels there is space about him.
+
+There is a sudden hush and absence of pressure. _He is out of the
+crowd._ He is faintly conscious that the tramp of many feet is passing
+but not following him. The pavement suddenly rises up and strikes him
+down upon it. He cannot rise again. But it matters little, it matters
+little. It is all over. The fight is won, and she is safe. He tries to
+lift his leaden hand to unloose the locked fingers that hurt his neck.
+At his touch they unclasp, trembling. She has not fainted then. He
+almost thought she had. He raises himself on his elbow, and tries to
+wipe the red mist from his eyes that he may see her the more clearly.
+She slips to the ground, and he draws her to him with his nerveless
+arms. The street lamps gleam dull and yellow in the first wan light of
+dawn, and as his haggard eyes look into hers, her face becomes clear
+even to his darkening vision--and--_it is another woman!_ Another woman!
+A poor creature with a tawdry hat and paint upon her cheek, who tries to
+laugh, and then, dimly conscious of the sudden agony of the gray,
+blood-stained face, whimpers for mercy, and limps away into a doorway,
+to shiver and hide her worn face from the growing light.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was one of the English acquaintances of the night before who found
+him later in the day, still seeking, still wandering from street to
+street.
+
+His old friend Langton came to him and took him away from the hotel to
+his own house. Alphonse wept and the _concierge_ could not restrain a
+tear.
+
+"And have they found _her_ yet?" asked Mrs Langton that night of her
+husband when he came in late.
+
+His face was very white.
+
+"Yes," he said, and turned his head away. "I've been to--I've seen--no
+one could have told--you would not have known who it was. And all her
+little things, her watch and rings--they were all gone. But the maid
+knew by the dress. And--and I wanted to save a lock of hair, but"--his
+voice broke down.--"So I got one of the little gloves for him. It was
+the only thing I could."
+
+He pulled out a half-worn tan glove, cut and dusty with the tramp of
+many feet, which the new wedding ring had worn ever so slightly on the
+third finger. He laid it reverently on the table and hid his face in his
+hands.
+
+"If he could only break down," he said at last. "He sits and sits, and
+never speaks or looks up."
+
+"Take him the little glove," said his wife softly. And Langton took it.
+
+The sharpness of death had cut too deep for tears, but Geoffrey kept the
+little glove, and--he has it still.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE PITFALL
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+    "Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
+    Beset the Road I was to wander in."
+
+                                                 --OMAR KHAYYÁM.
+
+
+Lady Mary Carden sat near the open window of her blue and white boudoir
+looking out intently, fixedly across Park Lane at the shimmer of the
+trees in Hyde Park. It was June. It was sunny. The false gaiety of the
+season was all around her; flickering swiftly past her in the crush of
+carriages below her window; dawdling past her in the walking and riding
+crowds in the park. She looked at it without seeing it. Perhaps she had
+had enough of it, this strange conglomeration of alien elements and
+foreign bodies, this _bouille-à-baisse_ which is called "The Season."
+She had seen it all year after year for twelve years, varying as little
+as the bedding out of the flowers behind the railings. Perhaps she was
+as weary of society as most people become who take it seriously. She
+certainly often said that it was rotten to the core.
+
+She hardly moved. She sat with an open letter in her hand, thinking,
+thinking.
+
+The house was very still. Her aunt, with whom she lived, had gone early
+into the country for the day. The only sound, the monotonous whirr of
+the great machine of London, came from without.
+
+Mary was thirty, an age at which many women are still young, an age at
+which some who have heads under their hair are still rising towards the
+zenith of their charm. But Mary was not one of these. Her youth was
+clearly on the wane. She bore the imprint of that which ages--because if
+unduly prolonged it enfeebles--the sheltered life, a life centred in
+conventional ideas, dwarfed by a conventional religious code, a life
+feebly nourished on cut and dried charities sandwiched between petty
+interests and pettier pleasures. She showed the mark of her twelve
+seasons, and of what she had made of life, in the slight fading of her
+delicate complexion, the fatigued discontent of her blue eyes, the faint
+dignified dejection of her manner, which was the reflection of an
+unconscious veiled surprise that she of all women--she the gentle, the
+good, the religious, the pretty Mary Carden was still--in short was
+still Mary Carden.
+
+The onlooker would perhaps have shared that surprise. She was
+indubitably pretty, indubitably well bred, graceful, slender, with a
+delicate manicured hand, and fair waved hair. Her fringe, which seemed
+inclined to grow somewhat larger with the years, was nearly all her own.
+She possessed the art of dress to perfection. You could catalogue her
+good points. But somehow she remained without attraction. She lacked
+vitality, and those who lack vitality seldom seem to get or keep what
+they want, at any rate in this world.
+
+She was the kind of woman whom a man marries to please his mother, or
+because she is an heiress, or because he has been jilted and wishes to
+show how little he feels it. She was not a first choice.
+
+She was one of that legion of perfectly appointed women who at seventeen
+deplore the rapacity of the older girls in ruthlessly clutching up all
+the attention of the simpler sex; and who at thirty acidly remark that
+men care only for a pink cheek and a baby face.
+
+Poor Mary was thinking of a man now, of a certain light-hearted
+simpleton of a soldier with a slashed scar across his hand, which a
+Dervish had given him at Omdurman, the man as commonplace as herself, on
+whom for no particular reason she had glued her demure, obstinate,
+adhesive affections twelve years ago.
+
+Our touching faithfulness to an early love is often only owing to the
+fact that we have never had an adequate temptation to be unfaithful.
+Certainly with Mary it was so. The temptations had been pitiably
+inadequate. She had never swerved from that long-ago mild flirtation of
+a boy and girl in their teens, studiously thrown together by their
+parents. She had taken an unwearying interest in him. She had petitioned
+Heaven that he might pass for the Army, and he did just squeeze in. By
+the aid of fervent prayer she had drawn him safely through the Egyptian
+campaign, while other women's husbands and lovers fell right and left.
+He had not said anything definite before he went out, but Mary had found
+ample reasons for his silence. He could not bear to overshadow her life
+in case, etc., etc. But now he had been safely back a year, two years,
+and still he had said nothing. This was more difficult to account for.
+He was fond of her. There was no doubt about that. They had always been
+fond of each other. Every one had expected them to marry. His parents
+had wished it. Her aunt had favoured the idea with heavy-footed zeal.
+Her brother, Lord Rollington, when he had a moment to spare from his
+training-stable, had jovially opined that "Maimie" would be wise to
+book Jos Carstairs while she could, as if she was not careful she might
+outstand her market.
+
+Mary, who had for many years dreamed of gracefully yielding to Jos's
+repeated and urgent entreaties, had even begun to wonder whether it
+would not be advisable if one of her men relations were to "speak to
+Jos." Such things were done. As she had said to her aunt with dignity,
+"This sort of thing can't go on for ever," when her aunt--who yearned
+for the rest which, according to their own account, seems to elude stout
+persons--pleaded that difficulties clustered round such a course.
+
+The course was not taken, for Jos suddenly engaged himself to a girl of
+seventeen, a new girl whom London knew not, the only child of one of
+those ruinous unions which had been swallowed up in a flame of scandal
+seventeen years ago, which had been forgotten for seventeen years all
+but nine days.
+
+It was sedulously raked up again now. People whispered that Elsa Grey
+came of a bad stock; that Jos Carstairs was a bold man to marry a woman
+with such antecedents; a woman whose mother had slipped away out of her
+intolerable home years ago for another where apparently life had not
+been more tolerable.
+
+Jos brought his Elsa to see Mary, for he was only fit to wave his sword
+and say, "Come on, boys." He did not understand anything about anything.
+He only remembered that Mary was a tender, loving soul. Had she not
+shown herself so to him for years? So he actually besought Mary to be a
+friend to the beautiful young sombre creature whom he had elected to
+marry.
+
+Mary behaved admirably according to her code, touched Elsa's hand,
+civilly offered the address of a good dressmaker (not her best one), and
+hoped they should meet frequently. The girl looked at her once,
+wistfully, intently, with unfathomable lustrous eyes, as of some
+untamed, prisoned, woodland creature, and then took no further notice of
+her.
+
+That was a fortnight ago. They were to be married in three weeks.
+
+Mary sighed, and looked once again for the twentieth time at the letter
+in her hand. It was a long epistle from her bosom friend, Lady Francis
+Bethune, the electric tramways heiress, joylessly married to the
+handsomest man in London, the notorious Lord Francis Bethune.
+
+"My dear," said the letter, "men are always like that. They are brutes,
+and it is no good thinking otherwise. They will throw over the woman
+they have loved for years for a flower-girl. You are too good for him. I
+have always thought so. (So had Mary.) But the game is not up yet. I
+could tell him things about his Elsa that would surprise him, not that
+he ought to be surprised at anything in her mother's daughter. He is
+coming to me this afternoon to tea. He said he was busy; but I told him
+he must come as it was on urgent business, and so it is. He is my
+trustee, you know, and there really is something wrong. Francis has been
+at it again. After the business is over I shall tell him a few things
+very nicely about that girl. Now, my advice to you is--chuck the
+Lestrange's water-party this afternoon, and come in as if casually to
+see me. I shall leave you alone together, and you must do the rest
+yourself. You may pull it off yet, after what I shall say about Elsa,
+for Jos has a great idea of you. Wire your reply by code before midday."
+
+Mary got up slowly, and walked to the writing-table. Should she go and
+meet him? Should she not? She would go. She wrote a telegram quickly in
+code form. She knew the code so well that she did not stop to refer to
+it. She and Jos had played at code telegrams when he was cramming for
+the Army. She rang for the servant and sent out the telegram. Then she
+sat down and took up a book. It was nearly midday, and too hot to go
+out.
+
+But after a few minutes she cast it suddenly aside, and began to move
+restlessly about the room. What was the use of going, after all? What
+could she say to Jos if she did see him? How could she touch his heart?
+Like many another woman when she thinks of a man, Mary stopped before a
+small mirror, and looked fixedly at herself. Was she not pretty? Had she
+not gentle, appealing eyes? See her little hand raised to put back a
+strand of fair hair. Was not everything about her pretty, and refined,
+and good? The vision of Elsa rose suddenly before her, with her dark,
+mysterious beauty and her formidable youth. Mary's heart contracted
+painfully. "I love him, and she doesn't," she said to herself, with
+bitterness. But Jos would never give up Elsa. She would make him
+miserable, but--he would marry her. Oh! what was the use of going to
+waylay him to-day? Why had she lent herself to Lady Francis's idiotic
+plan? Why had she accepted from her help that was no help? She would
+telegraph again to say she would not come after all. No. She would
+follow up her own telegram, and tell her friend that on second thoughts
+she did not care to see Jos.
+
+She ran upstairs, put on her hat, and in a few minutes was driving in a
+hansom to Bruton Street. The Bethunes' footman knew her and admitted
+her, though Lady Francis was technically "not at home."
+
+Yes, her ladyship was in, but she was engaged with the doctor at the
+moment in the drawing-room. The footman hesitated. "They were a-tuning
+of the piano in her ladyship's boudoir," he said, and he tentatively
+opened the door of a room on the ground floor. It was Lord Francis'
+sitting-room.
+
+"Was his lordship in?"
+
+"No, his lordship had gone out early."
+
+"Then I will wait here," said Mary, "if you will let her ladyship know
+that I am here."
+
+The man withdrew.
+
+Mary's face reddened with annoyance. She disliked the idea of telling
+Lady Francis she had changed her mind, and the discussion of the
+subject. Oh! why had she ever spoken of the subject at all? Why had she
+telegraphed that she would come?
+
+The painful, reiterated stammering of the piano came to her from above.
+It seemed of a piece with her own indecision, her own monotonous
+jealousy.
+
+Suddenly the front door bell rang, and an instant later the footman came
+in with a telegram, put it on the writing-table, and went out again.
+
+Her telegram! Then she was not too late to stop it. She need not explain
+after all.
+
+The drawing-room door opened, and Lady Francis' high metallic voice
+sounded on the landing.
+
+Mary seized up the pink envelope and crushed it in her hand! What? The
+drawing-room door closed again. The conference with the doctor was not
+quite over after all. She tore open the telegram and looked again at her
+foolish words before destroying them.
+
+Then her colour faded, and the room went round with her. Who had changed
+what she had said? Why was it signed "Elsa"?
+
+She looked at the envelope. It was plainly addressed--"Lord Francis
+Bethune." She had never glanced at the address till this moment. The
+contents were in code as hers had been, but it was the same code, and
+before she knew she had done so, she had read it.
+
+What did it mean? What _could_ it mean? Why should Elsa promise to meet
+him after the Speaker's Stairs--to-day--at Waterloo main entrance?
+
+Mary was not quick-witted, but after a few dazed moments she suddenly
+understood. Elsa was about to go away with Lord Francis. But what Elsa?
+Her heart beat so hard that she could hardly breathe. Could it be Elsa
+Grey?
+
+As we piece together all at once a puzzle that has been too simple for
+us, so Mary remembered in a flash Elsa's enigmatical face, and a certain
+ball where she had seen--only for a moment as she passed--- Lord Francis
+and Elsa sitting out together. Elsa had looked quite different then. It
+_was_ Elsa Grey. She knew it. Degraded creature, not fit to be an honest
+man's wife.
+
+Mary shook from head to foot under a climbing, devastating emotion,
+which seemed to rend her whole being. The rival was gone from her path.
+Jos would come back to her.
+
+As she stood stunned, half blind, trembling, a hansom dashed up to the
+door, and in a moment Lord Francis' voice was in the hall speaking to
+the footman.
+
+"Any letters or telegrams?"
+
+"One telegram on your writing-table, my lord."
+
+The servant went on to explain something, Lady Mary Carden, etc., but
+his master did not hear him. He was in the room in a second, and had
+closed the door behind him. Lord Francis' beautiful, thin, reckless face
+was pinched and haggard. He seemed possessed by some fierce passion
+which had hold of him and drove him before it as a storm holds and spins
+a leaf.
+
+Mary was frightened, paralysed. She had not known that men could be so
+moved. He did not even see her. He rushed to the writing-table, and
+swept his eye over it. Then he gave a sharp, low, hardly human cry of
+rage and anguish, and turned to ring the bell. As he turned he saw her.
+
+"I beg your pardon. I don't understand," he said hoarsely. "Why did my
+fool of a servant bring you in here?"
+
+Then he saw the open telegram in her hand, and his face changed. It
+became alert, cold, implacable. There was a deadly pause. From the room
+above came the acute, persistent stammer of the piano.
+
+He took the telegram from her nerveless hand, read it, and put it in his
+pocket. He picked up the envelope from the floor, and threw it into the
+waste-paper basket. Then he came close up to her, and looked her in the
+eyes. There was murder in his.
+
+"It was in cypher," he said.
+
+She was incapable of speech.
+
+"But you understood it? Answer me. By--did you understand it, or did you
+not?"
+
+"I did not." She got the words out.
+
+"You are lying. You did, you paid spy. Now listen to me. If you dare to
+say one word of this to any living soul I'll----"
+
+The door suddenly opened, and Lady Francis hurried in.
+
+"Sorry to keep you, my dear," said the high, unmodulated voice. "Old
+Carr was such a time. What! You here, Francis? I thought you had gone
+out."
+
+"I have been doing my best to entertain Lady Mary till you appeared," he
+said.
+
+"I came to say I'm engaged this afternoon," said Mary. "I can't go with
+you to your concert."
+
+The footman appeared with another telegram.
+
+Lord Francis opened it before it could reach his wife, and then tossed
+it to her.
+
+"For you," he said, and left the room.
+
+"Well, my dear," said Lady Francis, "in this you say you _will_ come,
+and now you say you _won't_, or am I reading it wrong? I don't
+understand."
+
+"I have changed my mind," said Mary feebly. "I mean I can't throw over
+the Lestranges. I only ran in to explain. I must be going back now."
+
+Lord Francis, who was in the hall, put her into her hansom and closed
+the doors. As he did so he leaned forward and said:
+
+"If you dare to interfere with me you will pay for it."
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+      "Ah! woe that youth should love to be
+    Like this swift Thames that speeds so fast,
+      And is so fain to find the sea,--
+    That leaves this maze of shadow and sleep,
+    These creeks down which blown blossoms creep,
+      For breakers of the homeless deep."
+
+                                                 --EDMUND GOSSE.
+
+
+The little river steamer, with its gay awning, was hitched up to the
+Speaker's Stairs. The Lestranges were standing at the gangway welcoming
+their guests. There was a crowd watching along the parapet of
+Westminster Bridge just above.
+
+"Are we all here? It is past four," said Captain Lestrange to his wife.
+
+Mrs Lestrange looked round. "Eighteen, twenty, twenty-four. Ah! Here is
+Lady Mary Carden, late as usual. She is the last. No. There is one more
+to come. Miss Grey."
+
+"Which Miss Grey?"
+
+"Why, the one Jos Carstairs is to marry. She is coming under my wing.
+And now she isn't here. What on earth am I to do? We can't wait for
+ever."
+
+A tall white figure was advancing slowly, as if dragged step by step,
+through the shadow of the great grey building.
+
+"She does not hurry herself," said Mrs Lestrange indignantly, and she
+did not welcome Elsa very cordially as she came on board. The youngest
+of the party had made all the rest of that distinguished gathering wait
+for her.
+
+Mary, in a gown of immaculate white serge stitched with black, was
+sitting under the awning when Elsa passed her on her way towards a
+vacant seat lower down. The two women looked fixedly at each other for
+a moment, and in that moment Mary saw that Elsa knew that she knew. Even
+in that short time Lord Francis had evidently warned the girl against
+her.
+
+Do what she would, Mary could not help watching Elsa. This was the less
+difficult, as no one ever talked for long together to Mary. The seat
+next her was never resolutely occupied. Her gentle voice was one of
+those which swell the time-honoured complaint, that in society you hear
+nothing but the same vapid small talk, the same trivial remarks over and
+over again. She was not neglected, but she awakened no interest. Her
+china blue eyes turned more and more frequently towards that tall figure
+with its lithe, panther-like grace sitting in the sun, regardless of the
+glare. Mary, whose care for her own soul came second only to her care
+for her complexion, wondered at her recklessness.
+
+Mrs Lestrange introduced one or two men to Elsa, but they seemed to find
+but little to say to her. She was _distraite_, indifferent to what was
+going on round her. After a time she was left alone, except when Mrs
+Lestrange came to sit by her for a few minutes. Yet she was a marked
+feature of the party. Wherever Elsa might be she could not be
+overlooked. Mysterious involuntary power which some women possess, not
+necessarily young and beautiful like Elsa, of becoming wherever they go
+a centre, a focus of attention whether they will or no.
+
+Married men looked furtively at her, and whispered to their approving
+wives that Carstairs was a bold man, that nothing would have induced
+_them_ to marry a woman of that stamp. The unmarried men looked at her
+too, but said nothing.
+
+At seventeen Elsa's beauty was mature. It was not the thin wild-flower
+beauty of the young English girl who emerges but slowly from her
+chrysalis. It was the splendid pale perfection of the magnolia which
+opens in a night. The body had outstripped the embryo spirit. Out of the
+exquisite face, with its mysterious foreshadowing of latent emotion,
+looked the grave inscrutable eyes of a child.
+
+Elsa appeared quite unconscious of the interest she excited. She looked
+fixedly at the gliding dwindling buildings, at the little alert
+brown-sailed eel-boats, and the solemn low-swimming hay barges, burning
+yellow in the afternoon sun, and dropping gold into the grey water as
+they went. Sometimes she looked up at the overhanging bridges, and past
+them to the sky. Presently a white butterfly came twinkling on toddling,
+unsteady wings across the water, and settled on the awning. Elsa's eyes
+followed it. "It is coming with us," she said to Captain Lestrange, who
+was standing near her. The butterfly left the awning. It settled for a
+moment on the white rose on Elsa's breast. Now it was off again, a
+dancing baby fairy between the sunny sky and sunny river. Then all in a
+moment some gust of air caught its tiny spread sails, and flung it with
+wings outstretched upon the swift water.
+
+Elsa gave a cry, and tearing the rose out of her breast, leaned far
+over the railing and flung it towards the butterfly. It fell short. The
+current engulfed butterfly and rose together.
+
+Captain Lestrange caught her by the arm as she leaned too far, and held
+her firmly till she recovered her balance.
+
+"That was rather dangerous," he said, releasing her gently.
+
+"I could not stand by and see it drown," said Elsa, shivering, and she
+turned her eyes back across the river, to where in the distance the
+white buildings of Greenwich stood almost in the water in the pearl
+haze.
+
+Who shall say what Elsa's thoughts were as she leaned against the
+railing, white hand against white rose cheek, and watched the tide which
+was sweeping them towards the sea? Did she realise that another current
+was bearing her whither she knew not, was hurrying her little barque,
+afloat for the first time, towards a surging line of breakers where
+white sails of maiden innocence and faith and purity might perchance go
+under? Did she with those wonderful melancholy eyes look across her
+youth and dimly foresee, what all those who have missed love learn in
+middle life, how chill is the deepening shadow in which a loveless life
+stands? Did she dimly see this, and shrink from the loveless marriage
+before her, which would close the door against love for ever? Did she in
+her great ignorance mistake the jewelled earthen cup of passion for the
+wine of love which should have brimmed it? Did she think to allay the
+thirst of the soul at the dazzling empty cup which was so urgently
+proffered to her? Who shall say what Elsa's thoughts were as the river
+widened to the sea.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were coming back at last, beating up slowly, slowly against the
+tide towards London, lying low and dim against an agony of sunset. To
+Mary it had been an afternoon of slow torture. Ought she to speak to
+Elsa? "After the Speaker's Stairs" the telegram had said. Then Elsa
+meant to join Lord Francis on her return _this evening_. Ought not she,
+Mary, to go to Elsa now, where she sat apart watching the sunset, and
+implore her to go home? Ought she not to tell her that Lord Francis was
+an evil man, who would bring great misery upon her? Ought she not to
+show her that she was steeping her young soul in sin, ruining herself
+upon the threshold of life? Something whispered urgently to Mary that
+she ought at least to try to hold Elsa back from the precipice,
+whispered urgently that perhaps Elsa, friendless as she was, might
+listen to her even at the eleventh hour. And Elsa knew she knew.
+
+Was it Mary's soul--dwarfed and starved in the suffocating bandages of
+her straitened life and narrow religion--which was feebly stirring in
+its shroud, was striving to speak?
+
+Mary clenched her little blue-veined hands.
+
+No, no. Elsa would never listen to her. Elsa knew very well what she was
+doing. Any girl younger even than she knew that it was wicked to allow a
+married man to make love to her. Elsa was a bad woman by temperament and
+heredity, not fit to be a good man's wife. Even if Mary could persuade
+her to give up her lover, still Elsa was guilty in thought, and that was
+as bad as the sin itself. Did not our Saviour say so? _Elsa was lost
+already._
+
+"No, no," whispered the inner voice. "She does not know what she is
+doing."
+
+She did know very well what she was doing--Mary flushed with anger--she
+was always doing things for effect, in order to attract attention. Look
+how she had made eyes at Captain Lestrange about that butterfly. If
+there is one thing more than another which exasperates a conventional
+person it is an impulsive action. The episode of the butterfly rankled
+in Mary's mind. Several silly men had been taken in by it. No. She,
+Mary, would certainly speak to Elsa; she would be only too glad to save
+a fellow-creature from deadly sin if it was any use speaking--but it was
+not. And she did not care to mix herself up with odious, disgraceful
+subjects unless she could be of use. She had always had a high standard
+of refinement. She had always kept herself apart from "that sort of
+thing." Perhaps, in her meagre life, she had also kept herself apart
+from all that makes our fellow-creatures turn to us.
+
+Lord Francis' last threat, spoken low and distinct across the hansom
+doors, came back to her ears--"If you dare to interfere with me you will
+pay for it."
+
+The river was narrowing. The buildings and wharves pushed up close and
+closer. The fretted outlines and towers of Westminster were detaching
+themselves in palest violet from the glow in the west.
+
+A river steamer passed them with a band on board. A faint music, tender
+and gay, came to them across the water, bringing with it the promise of
+an abiding love, making all things possible, illuminating with sudden
+distinctness the vague meaning of this mysterious world of sunset sky
+and sunset water, and ethereal city of amethyst and pearl; and then--as
+suddenly as it came--passing away down stream, and taking all its
+promises with it, leaving the twilight empty and desolate.
+
+The sunset burned dim like a spent furnace. The day lost heart and waned
+all at once. It seemed as if everything had come to an end.
+
+And as, when evening falls, jasmine grows white and whiter in the
+falling light, so Elsa's face grew pale and paler yet in the dusk.
+
+Once she looked across at Mary, and a faint smile, tremulous, wistful,
+stole across her lips. Tears shone in her eyes. "Is there any help
+anywhere?" the sweet troubled eyes seemed to say. But apparently they
+found none, for they wandered away again to the great buildings of
+Westminster rising up within a stone's throw over the black arch of
+Westminster Bridge.
+
+The steamer slowed and stopped once more against the Speaker's Stairs.
+
+The Lestranges put Elsa into a hansom before they hurried away in
+another themselves. All the guests were in a fever to depart, for there
+was barely time to dress for dinner--and they disappeared as if by
+magic. Mary, whose victoria was a moment late, followed hard on the
+rest. As she was delayed in the traffic she saw the hansom in front of
+her turn slowly round. She saw Elsa's face inside as it turned. Then the
+hansom went gaily jingling its bell over Westminster Bridge, and was
+lost in the crowd.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+      "Thou wilt not with Predestination round
+    Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?"
+
+                                                 --OMAR KHAYYÁM.
+
+
+The scandal smouldered for a day or two, and then raged across London
+like a fire. Mary stayed at home. She could not face the glare of it.
+She said she was ill. Her hand shook. She started at the slightest
+sound. She felt shattered in mind and body.
+
+"I could not have stopped her," she said stubbornly to herself a hundred
+times, lying wide-eyed through the long, terrifying nights. She
+besieged Heaven with prayers for Elsa.
+
+On the fourth day Jos came to her.
+
+She went down to her little sitting-room, and found him standing at the
+open window with his back to her. She came in softly, trembling a
+little. She would be very gentle and sympathetic with him. She would
+imply no reproach. As she entered he turned slowly and faced her. The
+first moment she did not recognise him. Then she saw it was he.
+
+Jos' face was sunk and pinched, and the grey eyes were red with tears
+fiercely suppressed by day, red with hard crying by night. Now as they
+met hers they were fixed, unflinching in their tearless, enduring agony,
+like those of a man under the surgeon's knife.
+
+"Oh! Jos, don't take it so hard," said Mary, laying her hand on his arm.
+
+She had never dreamed he would feel it like this. She had thought that
+he would see at once he had had a great escape.
+
+He did not appear to hear her. He looked vacantly at her, and then
+recollected himself, and sat down by her.
+
+"You saw her last," he said, biting his lips.
+
+Mary's heart turned sick within her.
+
+"The Lestranges saw her last," she said hastily. He made an impatient
+movement. He knew all that.
+
+"You were with her all the afternoon on the boat?"
+
+"Yes. But, of course, there were numbers of others. I had many friends
+whom I had to----"
+
+"Did you notice anything? Did you have any talk with her? Was she
+different to usual?"
+
+"She does not generally talk much. She was rather silent."
+
+"You did not think she looked as if she had anything on her mind."
+
+"I couldn't say. I know her so very slightly." Mary's voice was cold.
+
+"She did not care for me," said Jos. "I knew that all along," and he put
+his scarred hand over his mouth.
+
+"She was not worthy of you."
+
+He did not hear her. He took away his hand and clenched it heavily on
+the other.
+
+"I knew she didn't care," he said in a level, passionless voice. "But I
+loved her. From the first go-off I saw she was different to other women.
+And I thought--I know I'm only a rough fellow--but I thought perhaps in
+time ... I'm not up to much, but I would have made her a good
+husband--and at any rate, I would have taken her away from--her father.
+He said she was willing. I--I tried to believe him. He wanted to get rid
+of her--and--I wanted to have her. That was the long and the short of
+it. We settled it between us.... She hadn't a chance in that house. I
+thought I'd give her another--a home--where she was safe. She had never
+had a mother to tell her things. She had never had any upbringing at
+that French school. She had no women friends. She had never known a good
+woman, except her old nurse, till I brought her to you, Mary. I told her
+you were good and gentle and loving, and would be a friend to her; and
+that I had known you all my life, and she might trust you."
+
+"She never liked me," said Mary. It seemed to her that she must defend
+herself. Against what? Against whom?
+
+"If she had only confided in you," he said. "I knew she was in trouble,
+but I could not make out what it was. She was such a child, and I seemed
+a long way off her. I took her to plays and things after I had seen them
+first, to be sure they were all right; and she would cheer up for a
+little bit--she liked the performing dogs. I had thought of taking her
+there again; but she always sank back into low spirits. And I knew that
+sometimes young girls do feel shy about being married--it's a great
+step--a lottery--that is what it is, a lottery--so I thought it would
+all come right in time. I never thought. I never guessed." Jos' voice
+broke. "I see now I helped to push her into it--but--I didn't know....
+If only you had known that last afternoon, and could have pleaded with
+her ... if only you had known, and could have held her back--my white
+lamb, my little Elsa."
+
+He ground his heel against the polished floor. There was a long silence.
+
+Then he got up and went away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was not until the end of July that Mary saw him again. She heard
+nothing of him. She only knew that he had left London. He came in one
+evening late, and Mary's aunt discreetly disappeared after a few
+minutes' desultory conversation.
+
+He looked worn and aged, but he spoke calmly, and this time he noticed
+Mary's existence. "You look pulled down," he said kindly. "Has the
+season been too much for you?"
+
+"It is not that," she said. "I have been distressed because an old
+friend of mine is in trouble."
+
+He looked at her and saw that she had suffered. A great compunction
+seized him. He took her hand and kissed it.
+
+"You are the best woman in the world," he said. "Don't worry your kind
+heart about me. I'm not worth it." Then he moved restlessly away from
+her, and began turning over the knick-knacks on the silver table.
+
+"Bethune has been tackled," he said suddenly. "The Duke of ---- did it,
+and he has promised to marry her--if--if----"
+
+"If what?"
+
+"If his wife will divorce him. The Duke has got his promise in black and
+white."
+
+"I don't think Lady Francis will divorce him."
+
+"N-no. I've been with her to-day for an hour, but I couldn't move her.
+She doesn't seem to see that it's--life or death--for Elsa."
+
+"You would not expect her under the circumstances to consider Elsa."
+
+"Yes, I should," said the simpleton. "Why should not she help her? There
+are no children, and she does not care for Bethune. She never did. She
+ought to release him for the sake of--others."
+
+"I don't think she will."
+
+"I want you to persuade her, Mary." Mary's heart swelled. This then was
+what he had come about.
+
+"Aren't you her greatest friend? Do put it before her plainly. I'm a
+blundering idiot, and she seemed to think I had no right to speak to her
+on the subject. Perhaps I had not. I never thought of that. I only
+thought of----. But do you go to her, and bring her to a better mind."
+
+"I will try," said Mary.
+
+"I wish there were more women like you, Maimie," he said, using for the
+first time for years the pet name which he had called her by when they
+were boy and girl together.
+
+Mary went to Lady Francis next day, but she did not make a superhuman
+effort to persuade her friend. She considered that it was not desirable
+that Elsa should be reinstated. If there were no punishment for such
+misdemeanours, what would society come to? For the sake of others, as a
+warning, it was necessary that Elsa should suffer.
+
+All she said to Lady Francis was: "Are you going to divorce Lord
+Francis?"
+
+"No, my dear," said that lady with a harsh little laugh. "I am not. Not
+that I could not get a divorce. He has been quite brute enough, but if I
+did it would be forgotten in about a quarter of an hour, whether I had
+divorced him or he had divorced me. I have a right to his name, and I
+mean to stick to it. It's about all I've got out of my marriage. I don't
+intend to go about as a divorced woman under my maiden name of Huggins.
+The idea does not smile on me. Besides, I know Francis. He will come
+back to me. He did--before. He has not a shilling, and he is in debt. He
+can't get on without me. I was a goose to marry him; but still I am the
+goose that lays the golden eggs."
+
+Jos' parents sent Mary a pressing invitation to stay with them after the
+season. Mary went, and perhaps she tasted something more like happiness
+in that quiet old country house than she had known for many years. Jos'
+father and mother were devoted to her, with that devotion, artificial
+in its origin, but genuine in its later stages, of parents who have made
+up their minds that she was "the one woman" for their son. Mary played
+old Irish melodies in the evenings by the hour, and sang sweetly at
+prayers. She was always ready to listen to General Carstairs' history of
+the _fauna_ of Dampshire, and to take an interest in Mrs Carstairs'
+Sunday School. She had a succession of the simplest white muslin gowns
+(she could still wear white) and wide-brimmed garden hats. Mary in the
+country was more rural than those who abide in it all the year round.
+
+Jos was often there. There was no doubt about it. Jos was coming back to
+his early allegiance. Perhaps his parents, horrified by his single
+unaided attempt at matrimony, were tenderly pushing him back. Perhaps,
+in the entire exhaustion and numbness that had succeeded the shock of
+Elsa's defection, he hardly realised what others were planning round
+him. Perhaps when a man has been heartlessly slighted he turns
+unconsciously to the woman of whose undoubted love he is vaguely aware.
+
+Jos sat at Mary's feet, not metaphorically but literally, for hours
+together by the sundial in the rose-garden; hardly speaking, like a man
+stunned. Still he sat there, and she did her embroidery, and looked
+softly down at him now and then. The doors of the narrow, airless prison
+of her love were open to receive him. They would be married presently,
+and she should make him give up the Army, and become a magistrate
+instead. She would never let him out of her sight. A wife's place is
+beside her husband. She knew, for how many wives compact of experience
+had assured her during the evening hour of feminine confidence when the
+back hair is let down, that the perpetual presence of the wife was the
+only safeguard for the well-being of that mysterious creature of low
+instincts, that half-tamed wild animal, always liable to break away
+unless held in by feminine bit and bridle, that irresponsible babe,
+that slave of impulse--man. She would give him perfect freedom of
+course. She should encourage him to go into the Yeomanry, and she should
+certainly allow him to go out without her for the annual training. He
+would be quite safe in a tent, surrounded by his own tenantry; but, on
+other occasions, she, his wife, would be ever by his side. That was the
+only way to keep a man good and happy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in September Jos went away for a few days' shooting. Mary, who
+generally paid rounds of visits after the season at dull country houses
+(she was not greatly in request at the amusing ones), still remained
+with the Carstairs, who implored her to stay on whenever she suggested
+that she was paying them "a visitation."
+
+Jos was to return that afternoon, for General Carstairs was depending on
+him to help to shoot his own partridges on the morrow. But the afternoon
+passed, and Jos did not come. The next day passed, and still no Jos.
+And no letter or telegram. His father and mother were silently uneasy.
+They said, no doubt he had been persuaded to stay on where he was, and
+had forgotten the shoot at home. Mary said, "No doubt," but a reasonless
+fear gathered like thin mist across her heart. Where was he? The letters
+that had been forwarded to his last address all came back. A week
+passed, and still no Jos, and no answers to autocratic telegrams.
+
+Then suddenly Jos telegraphed from London saying he should return early
+that afternoon, and asking to be met at the station.
+
+When the time drew near, Mary established herself with a book in the
+rose-garden. He would come to her there, as he had so often done before.
+The roses were well-nigh over, but in their place the sweet white faces
+of the Japanese anemones were crowding up round the old grey sundial.
+The sunny windless air was full of the cawing of rooks. It was the time
+and the place where a desultory love might come by chance, and linger
+awhile, not where a desperate love, brought to bay, would wage one of
+his pitched battles. Peace and rest were close at hand. Why had she been
+fearful? Surely all was well, and he was coming back. He was coming
+back.
+
+She waited as it seemed to her for hours before she heard the faint
+sound of his dog-cart. She should see him in a moment. He would speak to
+his parents, and then ask where she was, and come out to her. Oh! how
+she loved him; but she must appear calm, and not too glad to see him.
+She heard his step--strong, light, alert, as it used to be of old, not
+the slow, dragging, aimless step of the last two months.
+
+He came quickly round the yew hedge and stood before her. She raised her
+eyes slowly from her book to meet his, a smile parting her lips.
+
+He was looking hard at her with burning scorn and contempt in his
+lightning grey eyes.
+
+The smile froze on her lips.
+
+"I have seen Elsa," he said. "I only came back here for half-an-hour
+to--speak to you."
+
+A cold hand seemed to be pressed against Mary's heart.
+
+"I found by chance, the merest chance, where she was," he continued. "I
+went at once. She was alone, for Bethune has gone back to his wife. I
+suppose you knew he had gone back. I did not. I found her----" He
+stopped as if the remembrance were too acute, and then went on firmly.
+"We had a long talk. She was in great trouble. She told me everything,
+and how he, that devil, had made love to her from the first day she came
+back from school, and how her father knew of it, and had obliged her to
+accept me. And she said she knew it was wrong to run away with him, but
+she thought it was more wrong to marry without love, and that the nearer
+the day came the more she felt she must escape, and she seemed hemmed
+in on every side, and she did love Bethune, and he had sworn to her that
+he would marry her directly he got his divorce, and that his wife did
+not care for him, and would be glad to be free, and that all that was
+necessary was a little courage on her part. So she tried to be
+brave--and--she said she did not think at the time it could be so very
+wicked to marry the person she really loved, for _you_ knew, and you
+never said a word to stop her. She said you had many opportunities of
+speaking to her on the boat, and she knew you were so good, you would
+certainly have told her if it was really so very wicked."
+
+"I knew it was no use speaking," said Mary, hoarsely.
+
+"You might have tried to save my wife for my sake," said Jos. "You
+might have tried to save her for her own. But you didn't. I don't
+care to know your reasons. I only know that--you did not do it. You
+deliberately--let--her--drown." His eyes flashed. The whole quiet,
+commonplace man seemed transfigured by some overmastering, ennobling
+emotion. "And I have come to tell you that I think the bad women are
+better than the good ones, and that I am going back to Elsa; to
+Elsa--betrayed, deserted, outcast, my Elsa, who, but for you, might
+still be like one of these." He touched one of the white anemones with
+his scarred hand. "I am going back to her--and if--in time she can
+forget the past and feel kindly towards me--I will marry her."
+
+And he did.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Mr MURRAY'S SIX SHILLING NOVELS
+
+
+  =TALES OF A FAR RIDING.= By OLIVER ONIONS, Author of "The Compleat
+      Bachelor."
+
+  =LESLIE FARQUHAR.= By ROSALINE MASSON, Author of "In Our Town."
+
+  =DANNY.= By ALFRED OLLIVANT, Author of "Owd Bob."
+
+  =THE VALLEY OF DECISION.= By EDITH WHARTON, Author of "A Gift from the
+      Grave," "Crucial Instances," etc.
+
+  =HIGH TREASON.= A Tale of the Days of George II.
+
+  =THE SHADOWY THIRD.= By HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL, Author of "John
+      Charity," etc.
+
+  =THE TRIAL OF MAN.= An Allegorical Romance.
+
+  =A MODERN ANTAEUS.= By the Writer of "An Englishwoman's Love-Letters."
+
+  =THE CAVALIER.= A Tale of Life and Adventures among the Confederates
+      during the Civil War in the United States. By G. W. CABLE.
+
+  =THE ROAD TO FRONTENAC.= A Novel of the Days of the French Occupation
+      of Canada. By SAMUEL MERWIN.
+
+  =TRISTRAM OF BLENT.= An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House. By
+      ANTHONY HOPE.
+
+  =THE SNARES OF THE WORLD.= By HAMILTON AÏDÉ.
+
+  =THE DOMINE'S GARDEN.= A Story of Old New York. By IMOGEN CLARK.
+
+  =ON PETER'S ISLAND.= A Story of Russian Life. By ARTHUR R. ROPES and
+      MARY E. ROPES.
+
+  =THE WOOING OF GREY EYES.= And other Stories. By RICCARDO STEPHENS.
+
+  =JOHN CHARITY.= A Tale of the Early Part of Her Majesty's Reign. By
+      HORACE ANNESLEY VACHELL, Author of "The Procession of Life," etc.
+
+  =A VIZIER'S DAUGHTER.= A Tale of the Hazara War. By LILLIAS HAMILTON,
+      M.D., sometime Medical Adviser to ABDUR RAHMAN, Amir of
+      Afghanistan. _With Illustrations._
+
+  =THE HEART'S HIGHWAY.= A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth
+      Century. By MARY E. WILKINS. With a Frontispiece by F. M. DU MOND.
+
+  =THE WORLDLINGS.= By LEONARD MERRICK, Author of "The Actor Manager,"
+      "One Man's View," etc.
+
+  =THE WISE MAN OF STERNCROSS.= By the Lady AUGUSTA NOEL, Author of
+      "From Generation to Generation."
+
+  =A GENTLEMAN.= By the Honble. Mrs WALTER FORBES, Author of "Blight."
+
+  =PARSON PETER.= By ARTHUR H. NORWAY.
+
+  =A PRINCESS OF ARCADY.= By ARTHUR HENRY.
+
+  =ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS.= Stories of the Secret Service in America
+      during the War of 1860-1. By JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS, Author of
+      "Uncle Remus."
+
+  =THE SWORD OF THE KING.= A Romance of the Time of William of Orange.
+      By RONALD MACDONALD.
+
+  =LESSER DESTINIES.= By SAMUEL GORDON, Author of "A Handful of
+      Exotics," and "In Years of Transition."
+
+  =UNDER THE SJAMBOK.= A Tale of the Transvaal. By GEORGE HANSLEY
+      RUSSELL.
+
+
+
+
+HALF-CROWN NET NOVELS.
+
+
+  =THE INN OF THE SILVER MOON.= By HERMAN K. VIELE.
+
+  =THE DREAM AND THE MAN.= By Mrs BAILLIE REYNOLDS. (G. M. ROBINS.)
+
+  =ANTONIA.= A Story of the Early Settlements on the Hudson River.
+      By JESSIE VAN ZILE BELDEN.
+
+  =THE GATHERING OF BROTHER HILARIUS.= A Romance of the Time of the
+      Great Pestilence in the 14th Century. By MICHAEL FAIRLESS.
+
+  =AN EPISODE ON A DESERT ISLAND.= By the Author of "Miss Molly."
+
+  =MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE.= By BOOTH TARKINGTON. With Illustrations and
+      Typographical Ornaments.
+
+  =MRS GREEN.= By EVELYN ELSYE RYND.
+
+  =THE COMPLEAT BACHELOR.= By OLIVER ONIONS.
+
+  =A GIFT FROM THE GRAVE.= By EDITH WHARTON.
+
+  =MONICA GREY.= By the Hon. Lady HELY HUTCHINSON.
+
+
+
+
+Three Shillings and Sixpence Net Novels
+
+
+  =THE RESCUE.= By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK, Author of "The Confounding of
+      Camelia."
+
+  =MISTRESS NELL.= A Merry Tale of a Merry Time. By GEORGE C. HAZELTON,
+      Junr.
+
+
+
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+
+  =THE PLEA OF PAN.= By HENRY W. NEVINSON. Small Crown 8vo. Ornamental
+      binding, with cover design by LAURENCE HOUSMAN. 5s. net.
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+  =THE VOYAGE OF ITHOBAL.= An Epic Poem. By Sir EDWIN ARNOLD, Author of
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+
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+
+      "This is a singularly delightful book.... Mr Carmichael has
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+      to-day, and writes no less than nobly when he is grave and no less
+      than graciously when he is gay."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+
+  LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+  PRINTED AT THE EDINBURGH PRESS
+  9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET.
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+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Moth and Rust, by Mary Cholmondeley
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40566 ***