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diff --git a/old/42012.txt b/old/42012.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 283e3c7..0000000 --- a/old/42012.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,9961 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Paths of Judgement, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: Paths of Judgement - -Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -Release Date: February 4, 2013 [EBook #42012] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHS OF JUDGEMENT *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - -PATHS OF JUDGEMENT - - -POPULAR 6/-NOVELS - -=Sir Mortimer.= By MARY JOHNSTON, Author of "Audrey," "By Order of the -Company," "The Old Dominion." - -=Incomparable Bellairs.= By AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE, Authors of "The Star -Dreamer," "Young April," etc. Illustrated by FRED PEGRAM. - -=Turnpike Travellers.= By ELEANOR HAYDEN, Author of "From a Thatched -Cottage." - -=Broke of Covenden.= By J. C. SNAITH, Author of "Mistress Dorothy Marvin," -"Fierceheart the Soldier," etc. - -=The Imperialist.= By SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN (Mrs. Everard Cotes), Author -of "Those Delightful Americans," etc. - -=Dorothea: A Story of the Pure in Heart.= By MAARTEN MAARTENS, Author of -"My Poor Relations, "God's Fool," etc. - -=The Bindweed.= By NELLIE K. BLISSETT, Author of "The Concert Director," -etc. - -=Enid.= By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL, Author of "Said the Fisherman." - -=Veranilda.= By GEORGE GISSING, Author of "The Private Papers of Henry -Ryecroft," "New Grub Street," etc. - -=Belchamber.= By HOWARD STURGIS, Author of "Tim" and "All that was -Possible." - -=The Ladder of Tears.= By G. COLMORE, Author of "The Strange Story of -Hester Wynne," etc. - -=Jewel: A Chapter in Her Life.= By CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM. - -=The Tutor's Love Story.= By WALTER FRITH, Author of "In Search of Quiet," -etc. - -=Angelo Bastiani.= By LIONEL CUST. Illustrated by FRANK MASON. - -=Magnus Sinclair.= A Border Historical Novel. By HOWARD PEASE. - -A. CONSTABLE & CO. LTD. LONDON - - - - -PATHS OF JUDGEMENT - -By -ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK - -(_Author of "The Rescue" "The Confounding of Camilia" etc_) - -LONDON -ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO Ltd -1904 - -BUTLER & TANNER, -THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS. -FROME, AND LONDON. - - - - -_PART I_ - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick, erect in her shining dogcart, watched the stout -pony's indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance. The road -was steep and the day hot. - -Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle -valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the -dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime -and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness. - -Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the -wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy -of her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the -hill-top was a grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and -trees of an orderly dulness, that didn't even make Constable effects, to -look at, below there, about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes -resolutely from the unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and -a minute's quick trot brought her to her destination. - -Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond -the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the -south-western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant -summer woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the -house, though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with -contented serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the -beech-woods, the rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon -the other to the splendid line of the horizon. - -So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the -half-clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers -about it. The independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs. -Merrick thought, as she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house, -too large for a cottage, too classic, with its pillared door-way and -balanced proportions, for its diminutiveness. It made one think of a -tiny Greek temple incongruously placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it -symbolized an attitude that had always bewildered and irritated her. The -garden, too, irritated her and made her envious. Even at this late -summer season its beauty was abundant. Her well-trained gardener at -Trensome Hall, with the two boys under him, produced no such effects -with all his wide opportunities. Her garden was like an official report; -this was like a poem. Mrs. Merrick did not use the simile; she merely -felt, as before, irritating comparisons. - -Flowers grew in long lines from the house to the garden wall, eddying -into broad pools of colour. In the delicate green shadow of the limes -were Canterbury-bells, frail bubbles, purple and white, making in the -shade a soft radiance, as though they held light within them. Beds of -white pansies, thickly growing, looked like cream poured upon the -ground; near them nasturtiums, a disordered host, dashed waves of colour -against the wall. - -As Mrs. Merrick sat looking, with some visible sourness, at the garden, -a girl, carrying a spade and a watering-pot came round the corner of the -house. She was dressed in a white cotton dress and wore, over smooth but -loosened hair, a flapping white hat. She gave one an impression of at -once flower-like freshness and most human untidiness. The black ribbon -at her neck was half untied, her hat was battered; her dress was askew -and dabbled with water. Unabashed by these infelicities, she set down -her burdens, drew off her heavy gloves, and advanced through the purple -and white and flame; smiling indifferently. - -Mrs. Merrick's smile as she put out her hand was obviously decorative. -She presented an amusing contrast to the graceful disarray that greeted -her. Her thin dry face was flushed above a rigid collar; a sharply -tonged fringe and a netted miracle of twists and convolutions seemed -appendages of the sailor hat--tilted forward and fastened to her head by -a broad elastic band, a spotted veil and two accurate pins. She could -but sit erect; her meagre body in its tightly buttoned bodice, was -box-like. Her figure was her chief vanity; its "neatness" her aim, and -the word with her signified a careful, unrelaxing compression. - -"Gardening, Felicia?" she asked, glancing down at her niece's -earth-dogged shoes. - -Felicia Merrick's father and her own husband were brothers. - -"Yes; digging all morning; weeding and watering most of the afternoon." -Felicia was thinking that to-day her aunt looked more funnily than ever -like a collection of parcels strapped together for postal delivery. She -was mentally tying a stamped label to her hat; the circle of the curl -between the eyebrows was already a post-mark. - -"Doesn't Thomas do the digging? It must, I know, be hard to manage with -one boy, but surely he could do the digging." - -"He does, unless I want to." - -"People can see you from the road--not that any one passes by here -often." - -"Not often," Felicia assented. - -"I want to know if you can come down to us to-morrow for a week," said -Mrs. Merrick, allowing the antagonistic moment to pass, and after a -slight hesitation Felicia answered, "Yes, thanks." - -Mrs. Merrick had often suspected that Felicia's gratitude on these -occasions was not up to the mark of the opportunities they gave her, and -now, emphasizing the present opportunity, she went on, "You can't fail -to enjoy yourself. Lady Angela Bagley is with us. You have heard of her. -I met her in London this Spring; we took a great fancy to each other. -She is a wonderful woman--really wonderful. Such intellect, such soul, -such world polish, and with it such saintliness. Everybody feels that -about her; it helps one to know that there are such people in the -world," said Mrs. Merrick, sighing as she flicked the pony--"people who -have everything the world can give, and who care nothing for it." -Felicia wondered from which of her recent guests her aunt had picked up -these phrases which came oddly from her anxious materialism. - -"I have often seen her picture in the ladies' papers," she replied; "it -will be nice to see her." She dimly remembered a narrow face, a mist of -hair, a long, yearning throat, and she at once decided that she would -not like Lady Angela and her soul. - -"Yes, it will be nice for you. She takes an interest in everybody. Of -course your father must come, too. There are some interesting men whom -he will like meeting. Mr. Daunt, the young M.P., is a cousin of Lady -Angela--the comet of the season, my dear;--most wonderful speech in the -House--you probably heard of it; Imperialism--national prestige;--and a -friend of his, Mr. Wynne, a most captivating person. He writes essays, -he paints, he plays the violin; people are quite mad about him in -London. You mustn't fall in love with him, Felicia, for, charming as he -is, he has no money." - -Felicia, her arms leaning on the wall, picked at a flake of loosened -stone with only a dim smile of acknowledgment for this jest. - -"And old Mr. Jones, the scholar, from Oxford; your father, I feel sure, -will be eager to meet him. How is your father, Felicia? Plunged in -books, I suppose. Is he writing?" - -"Yes. He is well." - -"He will get ideas, I think, from Mr. Jones. I spoke of his book to Mr. -Jones; he had never heard of it. I gave it to him; he looked through it -last night. Of course, as he said, it is quite out of date by now." - -Felicia picked off another flake, and said nothing. - -"So," Mrs. Merrick went on more briskly--her niece had the faculty of -disconcerting her even in the midst of apparent triumphs--"So it will be -nice for him to talk things over with Mr. Jones. Here is Austin now. I -thought that he would see or hear me." - -Mr. Austin Merrick came down the garden path at a sauntering pace, his -hands in his pockets, breathing in the sunlit air as though the -afternoon's balmy radiance, rather than sight or sound of his -sister-in-law, had lured him from his studies. - -He was a tall man, with a stout, easy, indolent body and a handsome -head. His eyes were of a vague but excitable blue; his thick grey hair -haloed a clean-shaven face, delicate in feature, the nose finely -aquiline, the lips full, slightly pursed, as if in a judicial weighing -of his own impressions; his cheeks were rosy and a trifle pendulous. -Loosely fitting clothes, a fluttering green neck-tie, a Panama hat, -placed at the back of his head with a certain recklessness, carried out -the impression of ease and of indifference. - -"Ah! Kate," he said. He approached the gate and gave her his large, -white hand. His eyes passed over her face, and wandered contemplatively -away to the landscape behind it, a glance that made Mrs. Merrick -irritably wonder whether she had put too much powder on her nose. - -"You and Felicia are coming to me for a week," she said, again flicking -her whip, and smiling with a touch of eagerness. "I mustn't let you get -rusty up here." - -If Miss Merrick had a faculty for disconcerting her aunt, her aunt had -an equal faculty for "drawing" her father. His eye did not turn from the -landscape, but it became more fixed and more pleasant as he said, "Ah, -my dear Kate, rust, you know, is a matter of environment, and without my -good little whetstone here I don't fancy that the combined efforts of -our not highly intelligent country people could save me from it--when I -go among them. A mental fog, a stagnant dulness, you know, affect one in -spite of one's resolve to keep one's steel bright. Up here we have our -own little space of dry, bracing air--we keep one another sharpened, -don't we, Felicia? Rather uncomfortably sharpened, we sometimes find, -when we come down from our tiny Parnassus." - -Smiling, speaking in his most leisurely tones, Mr. Merrick laid his arm -around his daughter's shoulders. She did not emphasize the effectiveness -of the caress by returning it, or even by looking up, though her slight -smile seemed to claim for his speech a jocular intention, while -disavowing its magnificent complacency. - -Mrs. Merrick's sudden flush made evident her nose's amelioration. "It is -well to have the gift of idealization, Austin--it makes life far more -comfortable. Will you risk rust, then, in coming to us, for a week?" The -irony of her tone was not easy. - -"One moment, Kate." Mr. Merrick, still leaning on his daughter's -shoulder, stretched out a demonstrative forefinger. "Do you see that -quite delightful effect--that group of trees melting against the sky--" -It was to Felicia alone that he spoke, naming a French painter of whom -Mrs. Merrick had never heard. "He could do it; it's like one of his -smiling bits." His eye still dwelt upon it as he said, "I am rather busy -just now, Kate. I have a great deal of reading on hand. I am studying a -rather obscure phase of that most obscure thing--German idealism; what -caves they creep into, poor fellows! Any depth rather than face the sun, -the unpleasant sun;--I can't leave just now." - -"But a holiday would do you good." Mrs. Merrick was forced to some -urgency. Much as she wished this exasperating brother-in-law of hers to -feel that she dispensed favours, she seldom met him in one of these -sourly suave contests without being made to feel that she was receiving -one. Indeed, her odd sceptical, scoffing brother-in-law, his solitude, -his disdain, and his pagan-looking house as a background, was a figure -she could not afford to miss from her parties--parties often so -painfully scraped together--painfully commonplace when scraped. This -year her party was surprisingly significant, but even in its midst -Austin would count well as her appendage--would certainly redeem her -from her husband's heavy conformity, that simply counted for nothing. He -impressed her, and she imagined that he must impress other people. - -"I have a really interesting group," she said, and she recited the list, -adding, "Mr. Jones particularly wants to meet you. He found your book so -suggestive--" Mrs. Merrick, in pinching circumstances, was careless of -consistency; she had no appearances to keep up before Felicia. - -"Jones? Ah, yes," Mr. Merrick repeated with benignity. - -"A clever man, you know." - -"Not bad," Mr. Merrick owned, indulgent in discriminating gravity. "That -little book of his on Comte wasn't half bad; you remember it, Felicia?" - -Mrs. Merrick had not heard of the book on Comte; it was an added -discomfiture. "You will come, then?" She gathered up her reins. - -"May we leave it open, Kate? I can, I know, give you a day or two, but -may I leave the time and number open? Felicia shall go to you to-morrow, -and I will join you as soon as may be." His face had regained its full -serenity, and Mrs. Merrick was forced to accept the galling concession. - -When she had driven off, Felicia picked up her spade and resumed her -digging. Her father stood in the path watching her. - -"Could one of Spenser's heroines be imagined digging?" he mused. "The -day, the flowers--you among them--bring Spenser to my mind." - -"I could imagine Britomart gardening if she had nothing bigger on hand -to do," said Felicia. "But I am not a Britomart type." - -"And yet you are not unbelligerent, Felicia;--an indolent, unroused -Britomart. But I don't see you in armour. Charming, that white dress -drenched with sunlight." - -"And with water. I saw Aunt Kate disapproving; no wonder. I suppose we -must go to her? Aren't you sometimes rather tired of Aunt Kate and her -parties?" - -"My dear child, selfishness is the besetting danger of a congenial -isolation such as ours. We must think of her and of your uncle. And -then"--Mr. Merrick paused as his daughter made no reply--"it is well -that you should have these distractions." - -"How refuse, when we have only German idealism as an excuse?" Felicia -remarked. - -"A very good one were we self-centred enough to urge it. But you may -find these people interesting, Felicia; I really wonder that Kate -managed to get people as interesting to come to her. Young Daunt is a -very clever fellow. He speaks well and keeps a position of quite -extraordinary independence." - -"What is he?--a Liberal?" - -"Really, my dear Felicia--your ignorance of politics!" Her father -laughed, half approving the indifference to the world's loud drums such -ignorance betokened. "Daunt, like all ambitious young men nowadays, is -on the winning side; he is a Conservative; an under-secretary in the -Admiralty." - -"Personally ambitious, do you mean?" - -"When does one see any ambition other than personal, my dear?" Mr. -Merrick asked mournfully, taking off his hat and rubbing his thick but -delicate hand through his hair. "Devotion to an idea, self-immolation if -need be, is no longer to be found in British public life." - -Felicia was stooping low to pick weeds, and her father seemed to be -addressing himself to the landscape in general, as much as to her vague -attention. "He is clever, as a man poor and determined on worldly -success, and bound to succeed, is clever. It's a cloddish cleverness, -after all. This Wynne, now, is of an appealingly contrasted type. I've -read a little volume of his somewhere; slight but sensitive, subtle, -ironic; bound by no outworn faiths and making use of none for his own -advancement; an observer merely, not a scrambler." - -Her head among her irises, Felicia observed, "Scrambling must be nice, I -should think." - -She continued her weeding, when her father with an indulgent laugh had -walked off to the house, and she smiled a little to herself as she -worked; it was, for the youth of the face, a mature smile; a smile that -recognized and accepted irony and yet kept a cheerful kindness. Her -father made her wince when he faced the world. Alas! Aunt Kate, the -world! - -The most inappropriate Britomart simile lingered and saddened her as her -thought rested on it. It was true, though, that all her life long she -had burnished weapons, sharpened her sword and kept her heart high. Now, -it was as if with that sad smile and a shrug for the miscalculation of -past energy, she leaned on the useless sword and watched the triviality -of life go by. How find deep meanings in such muddy shallows? Of what -avail was the striving urgency of growth? Where were great objects for -armed faiths? She stood ready, waiting for lions; and only jackasses -strayed by. But though she could laugh at herself, and see the Britomart -attitude as sadly funny, her hand had not slackened--she still held her -sword. If a lion did come, so much the better for her--and for life. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Only one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that -afternoon--the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little -Gothic church--where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in his negative, never went, -and whose spire pointed upward, from the woodland below, a delicate and -derisive finger at the culprit. The spire was the first thing Felicia -saw every morning, and, under a sky of dawn, she loved it, perversely -perhaps, for all the things it did not seem to say to the merely -decorous well-being of the lives it guarded. It symbolized, to her, -wings that would fly to risks, a faith that could be won only by -fighting. And as Felicia found irony in most things, she found it every -morning in her own uplifted contemplation of the symbol that rejected -her. - -Mr. Godersham, also, symbolized to her meanings more pleasant than those -of their formal intercourse. He wasn't at all a jackass, and he probably -thought her father one, and as Felicia's place was beside her father the -barrier was effectual. He was a well-favoured, good-hearted, sane and -smiling man of fifty, vexed only by the extreme ugliness of numerous -daughters to whom he was devoted and by the hostility of Mr. Austin -Merrick. He would have been glad to smoke or play whist with Mr. -Merrick, tolerantly indifferent to his defiant infidelity; he would -have cheerfully waived the relationship of parson for that of mere -neighbour; and he did not ask Mr. Merrick to listen to his sermons; he -knew that they were poor; he counted for more as man than as parson; but -the personality of this recalcitrant, wandering sheep, his vanity and -patronizing superiority of manner made even a neighbourly tolerance -difficult. It was with an impersonal courtesy that he bowed to Mr. -Merrick's daughter as he rode by. - -Soon after Felicia went in to give her father his tea. He was sitting in -the small room that was, at once, library and drawing-room. Above -book-filled shelves the walls were whitewashed, and against this -background tall porcelains and bronzes showed their delicate outlines, -and some fine mezzotints after Reynolds and Gainsborough their harmonies -of golden-greys and blacks. In a corner stood an ivory-coloured cast of -the Flying Victory of Samothrace, and above it the thoughtful bust of -Marcus Aurelius looked down upon its arrested swiftness, its still and -glorious strength. From open windows, where white curtains flapped -softly, one looked over the garden and pinewoods and valleys to the sky -of luminous gold. - -One note, only, jarred; a charcoal drawing of a woman's head, hung -prominently. Feebly ill-drawn, its over life-size exaggerated its -absurdity; the eyes monstrously large, not well matched, all beaming -high light and sentimental eyelash; the nose and mouth showing a rigid, -a cloying sweetness. This production was the result of one of Mr. -Merrick's rare fits of active self-expression, and, excellent judge of -art though he was, he was completely blind to the grotesqueness of the -caricature of his dead wife. He had drawn it, many years ago, from life, -and claimed to see in it a subtle and exquisite likeness. Felicia -suffered, though with the silent and humorous resignation characteristic -of her, from living with it, even when a photograph of her mother, -standing near, corrected its travesty of her charming countenance. - -Mr. Merrick was sitting in a deep armchair, his attitude of complete -ease harmonizing with the tranquil room, though his eyes, as he looked -up from the review he was reading, were irate. "The modern recrudescence -of mysticism is truly disheartening, Felicia," he said. "Have you read -this article?" - -Felicia, on her way to the tea-table, glanced at the title he held out, -and nodded. - -"How long will the human race, like an ostrich, hide its head from truth -and, in the darkness, find revelation?" - -"Why shouldn't they make themselves comfortable in any way they can?" -Felicia asked, measuring her tea into the teapot. - -"Comfort at the cost of truth is a despicable immorality." - -"Well--what is truth? How is the poor ostrich to find it out? Besides, -papa, you are comfortable, and the truths you believe in aren't." Her -smile at him was one of the comforts Mr. Merrick most securely counted -on. Felicia, in every way, made him comfortable, even when she argued -with him, and by half-droll opposition called out his refutations. - -"My dear child," he now said, "your logic is truly feminine. I have -never shirked an intellectual consequence. If, for the moment, I enjoy -certain satisfactions, I never forget that my position is that of the -condemned prisoner." - -"We certainly have a nicely furnished cell." - -"Your mind evades the realities of the bars," said Mr. Merrick, -selecting, after a hesitation in the choice, a cake from the plate she -handed him. "Once you have seen an ugly fact you turn your back upon -it." - -"What better thing can one do with an ugly fact? What claim has truth or -logic upon anybody in a world of atoms and their concussions? The only -thing to do is to make oneself comfortable--with tea or mysticism as the -case may be." - -Mr. Merrick received this flippancy with calm, convinced of an essential -chime under superficial janglings. "You are, I am glad to say, Felicia, -a woman who can think." - -"We do a lot of thinking," Felicia assented. "How little else!" she -could not repress. That her thinking had been for the most part lonely -she was glad that her father never suspected, nor did he suspect a -Puck-like fun she found in turning his own theories against him. He ate -slowly now, his eyes raised in a train of thought that even his -intelligent daughter, he felt, could hardly have followed. His own -detachment from the shows of life was its theme. Suddenly, however, this -contemplation was shaken by a more intimate, more stirring realization. -"My dear Felicia," he exclaimed, glancing rapidly at the tea-table and -at the stand of eatables, "is not this the day for the frosted cake?" - -"Grant forgot it, papa; you shall have it to-morrow." - -"There are only the small cakes, then?" - -"And bread and butter." - -"It is really very careless of Grant, very careless. She should not have -forgotten," said Mr. Merrick, flushed, and as seriously aggrieved as a -child. "Pray, speak sharply to her about it. I looked forward to the -frosted cake to-day, freshly baked, warm, as I like it. It is very -annoying. You are sure that she has not made it?" - -"Sadly sure; I hoped you would not notice it." Felicia looked at him -with a touch of placid severity. "Have another of the small ones." - -"No--no, I thank you. I don't care for them." He had eaten three. The -distressing episode curdled his mood for the rest of the day. A tactful -and unexpected _hors d'oeuvre_ at dinner effaced the grievance. It was -with a species of tender, maternal malice that Felicia resorted to these -cajoleries, herself making the peace-offering. And after dinner when he -smoked, and she read _Leopardi_ aloud to him, the frosted cake was quite -forgotten. - -When Felicia went up to her room her mind was running in a melancholy -current that often underlay her surface ripple. She stood at her window -looking out at the monotones of the night, and she sighed deeply. -Self-pity caught her. This life of repression, of appreciation, of -theory, how weary she was of it, how lonely she was in it! How wonderful -it would be--she had a swift smile at herself for the turn of -thought--to love, to be loved. She stood dreaming of this deliverance, -this awakening. - -Felicia's ideas of love, despite the severely realistic literature and -pessimistic theories that had nourished her youth, were as white, as -gracious and as lofty as the shining crescent of the moon that hung in -beauty over the pine-woods. She smiled, but with a little fear, -analyzing the feminine waiting for a fairy prince, facing the fact that -she was really ready to fall in love with the first nice person who -presented himself for idealization. He must, of course, be possible; -idealization had been impossible with the stupid men she had met at -Trensome Hall; or the curate with his short legs and rabbit head. He -must be possible--he must be delightful; and would he ever come? -"Beware, Felicia," she thought. "You are young; you are lonely; you are -sentimental and idle; that's a basis for mistakes and tragedies." She -laughed at herself, but as she leaned there and looked out, all the -yearning, all the sadness and solemnity of the pine-woods, the moon and -the sky, found an echo in her untried heart. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -Austin Merrick had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an -unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a -younger son should be, neither industrious, nor independent, nor even -anxious to please those who might help his disadvantages. He was -helpless, and he would not recognize the fact; would ask for no help. He -had loitered through college, fitting himself for no career, talking -vaguely of a literary life and of a philosophic pursuit of truth. He was -still pursuing it, very placidly, not at all chagrined, indeed quite the -contrary, by the fact that his pursuit implied that other people's -apparent attainments rested on a highly illusory basis. Austin Merrick's -attitude had always been what it now was--a calm down-smiling from a -hill-top upon other people's dulness. - -After travelling for some years, during which he published in the lesser -reviews a few little articles of incoherent scepticism--the one book, as -sceptical and even more incoherent, was of later date--Austin married a -pretty American girl, who had a very small fortune. - -Felicia Grey came from a little New England town, and after the death of -a sternly practical father, a passionately transcendental mother, she -seized upon an aunt, colourless and submissive, and came to Europe to -see life. - -She was highly educated and vastly ignorant. She intended to see life -steadily, and to see it whole. The steadiness she certainly attained; -she was fearless, eager, full of faith. - -Austin Merrick met her at a Paris _pension_ and his essentially -irresolute soul was stirred by Miss Grey's resolute eyes, eyes large and -clear, like a boy's. He stayed on at the _pension_ and made Miss Grey's -acquaintance, an easy matter, for she had little conception of risks or -of formalities, and regarded all individuals as offering deeply -interesting experiences. The aunt sat reading _Flaubert_, with a -dictionary, in her bedroom, finding the duty dimly alarming, and -refreshing it by reversions to Emerson, while her niece went -sight-seeing with the young Englishman whom the elder Miss Grey -described in home letters as "very cultivated and high-minded," adding -that she imagined him to belong to an "aristocratic family." - -Felicia Grey's crudeness, crisp and sparkling, Austin did not recognize; -he thought wonderful in her what was only derivation, the absolute -impartiality and courage of her outlook. She was startlingly indifferent -to conventional claims, seriously uninfluenced by the world's weights -and measures. Austin, conscious in his inmost soul of being anything but -indifferent and uninfluenced, leaned upon the support of her ignorant -valour. She was as serene and strong as he pretended to be. - -With her serenity and her indifference, she was immensely enthusiastic -about the things she cared for. Humanity, Freedom, Progress,--these -words with capital letters--that he already felt it to be the fashion to -scoff at a little if one wanted to keep abreast of the latest -scorn--were burning realities to Miss Grey, and as he was already in -love with her, he did not dare to laugh at them. Indeed, Miss Grey had -not much sense of humour, and did not understand subtle scorns. He was -in love, glorying in the abandonment of the feeling, and very sincerely -unaware that had Miss Grey not been modestly equipped with dollars he -would not so have abandoned himself. It was, indeed, a very modest -equipment, but with his own tiny allowance, that didn't do at all--he -was always in debt--would lift him above the material restrictions that -had so long irked him. His indifference might really, then, equal hers. - -He never had a more horrid shock than when one day she proved the -reality of her indifference, terribly proved it, by speaking -contemplatively of devoting her money to the cause of Russian freedom, -and of making her own living by teaching. "It seems to me that one would -face life more directly--more truly--like that," remarked Miss Grey. - -He controlled the demonstration of his dismay and for several days -argued with her on the duties of even such small wealth as hers, its -responsibilities and opportunities. He always impressed Miss Grey; she -was the least arrogant of beings, and in spite of her steady seeing of -life, took people exactly at their own valuation. She, too, thought Mr. -Merrick very "cultivated and high-minded"; she equipped him further with -a "great soul," and, unconsciously to her maiden heart, thought him, -too, very beautiful in his wise persuasiveness. - -He persuaded her that a larger, richer, more helpful life was to be -lived with money than without it, and, a few days later, that that life -should be lived with him. - -So Miss Grey went to England as Mrs. Austin Merrick, and she and her -husband built the Greek temple on the bit of hill-top land that came to -Austin through his mother, and in the Greek temple, under the rather -pinched conditions that its erection left them in, Mrs. Austin passed -fourteen very perplexed, helpless, and unhappy years. - -She never recovered from the perplexity. Trying always to see great -meanings, only small ones met her eyes. Not only was the mollusc-like -routine of the life about her bewildering, for it was a dull -country-side, but her husband's character. She never doubted the great -soul, but she never seemed clearly to see it. He was loving and devoted; -he thought her perfect, as he thought all his possessions; she did not -know that it was her echo of his imaginary self that he prized, that she -was the living surety of his own worth, never felt that the key-note of -his character was an agile vanity that sprang to defend him from any -attack that might mean self-revelation. He was always clever enough to -see her worth, but not clever enough to see that her intelligence grew -blurred and groping when it turned its light upon the objects of her -affection. - -Her husband's idleness bewildered Mrs. Merrick; not that she so saw it, -or his shrinking from the test of action; but his life, in spite of its -pompous premisses, had, in reality, little more actual significance than -the lives of any of the neighbouring squires--if as much. What did she -and Austin _do_ in the world? her thoughts fumbled with the knife-like -question. - -She still saw in him the lofty thinker; but Austin Merrick's mind was a -lazy one, unfit for constructive affirmation; and as he happened to be -surrounded by minds as lazy, unfit for any effort of destructive -criticism, he found the attitude of superiority more attainable by -opposition. He did most of his thinking in youth, when the current of -scientific agnosticism caught him; he had gone with it, not helping it -in any way, merely borne along, and he had gone no farther than it had -gone, drifting into a sleepy backwater of its once flowing tide, unable -to follow it into deepened channels. His mental development had stopped -at an epoch newly conscious of the inflexibility of natural law and the -ruin of the dogmas that seemed to contradict it, and Mr. Merrick had -not, in reality, advanced beyond this first crude negation. The -largeness of his doubts was the result not of deep thinking, but of a -lazy lack of thought. His pessimism was caused more by the ignorant -optimism he saw about him than by any thwarted spiritual demand of his -own nature. He was, indeed, in the position, dubiously fortunate for -him, of being twenty years behind the best thought of his time and fifty -ahead of that of his neighbours, to many of whom Darwinism was still a -looming, half-ludicrous monkey-monster, to be dispatched at the hands of -a vigorous clergy, and naturalistic determinism an hypothesis that did -not even remotely impinge upon the outskirts of their consciousness. But -with all his complacencies, indolences, and attitudes, Austin Merrick -was intelligent, dependent and affectionate, soured only by -indifference, angered only by ridicule, and his wife in her relation to -him knew nothing worse than that abiding sense of perplexity. She saw -with difficulty the ironic side of life; the deepest draught of -bitterness was spared her. She only dimly felt that life was tragic. Her -small daughter surmised very early that it was grotesque as well as -tragic. Felicia was thirteen when her mother died, leaving her with a -radiant, pathetic memory. She always thought of her as a very young -girl, and indeed Mrs. Austin with her clear gaze, rounded cheek, thick -braids of hair coiled in school-girl fashion at the back of her head, -looked hardly more than twenty when she died. - -Felicia remembered the gaze, so funnily astonished in its tenderness, -with which she watched her daughter, the gaze of a school-girl who had -never quite grasped the fact of her own maternity. She was very tender, -very loving, and poured all the baffled energies of her life into the -uprearing of her daughter, who had been treated with the gentleness due -to a child, the Emersonian reverence due to a human soul. Felicia -remembered the naively sententious aphorisms with which she armed her. -"In this life to fail is to triumph," was one, and the pathos to Felicia -was in seeing that the aphorism was an unrealized truth in her mother's -own life. She had indeed "carried her soul like a white bird," through -the painful deserts of disillusion, a disillusion that only her daughter -apprehended. - -She left life ardent, loving and perplexed. The young Felicia was also -ardent and loving, but not at all perplexed. Her clearness of vision did -not trouble her steadfastness. She was very fond of her father, and she -thought him very foolish; she resented keenly the fact that people more -foolish than he should criticize him. She never mistook jackasses for -lions, and her only title to commendation in her own eyes was that she, -at all events, did not bray. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -Mrs. Merrick sent a cart for her niece's box next morning, and Felicia -set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome Hall, happy -in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy day. She responded easily to sunshine -and buoyancy, and, in spite of her pessimistic education, easily -expected happiness. Sometimes it seemed that it might be waiting for her -behind every bush, for youth and an ardent temperament are more potent -mood-makers than rational reflection. And, indeed, it did lurk, smiling, -behind all the bushes to-day, for Felicia's mood was happy. She saw it -in the blue and white of the high summer sky, in the sun-dappled woods, -in the wild-flowers of the hedge-row; she heard it in the mazurka-like -song of a bird hidden in green mysteries of shade; she felt it in the -warm, fresh breeze that swayed light shadows across the road. It was -only an intensifying of the sense of response when, at a turning of the -road, she met a young man, who seemed quite magically to personify the -breeziness, the brightness, the mazurka-like element of the day. Coming -thus upon each other, both smiling to themselves, both looking, -listening, and, as it were, expectant, it seemed only natural that -their eyes should dwell upon each other with frank interest. Their steps -slackened, a mute, pleased query passed between them, and the young man, -doffing his hat, and giving Felicia as he did so a vivid impression of -sunlit auburn hair, said, "I beg your pardon, but I am sure that you are -Miss Merrick." - -"And you are Mr. Wynne," said Felicia, for she was quite sure he was not -the ambitious politician. Their certainty about one another was as -natural as all the rest. - -"I came to meet you," said Mr. Wynne. "I heard that you were arriving -this afternoon, and that you lived on top of a hill and had a wonderful -garden; and as I love gardens and hill-tops I thought I would try to -meet you as near them as possible." - -Maurice Wynne was also telling himself that he loved meeting Miss -Merrick. - -Felicia on this day was dressed in white. Her hat had a wreath of white -roses, and, tying under her chin, shaded her thick, smooth hair--hair -the colour of sandal-wood--and her pale face. He would have climbed any -number of hills to see the face--so significant, so resolute, so -delicate. - -Her small, square chin, narrowing suddenly from rounded cheeks, her -wide, firm lips, her nose and forehead, and the broad sweep of her -eye-brows, had all this quality of resolute delicacy. In the pale yet -vivid tints of her face her clear grey eyes seemed dark, and her -eyelashes slanted across them like sunshine on deep pools of woodland -water. Maurice was seeing all this, delightedly,--and that through the -child-like moulding of the cheek, the lips' sweetness, the eyes' -tranquillity, ran a latent touch of mischievous gaiety--a dryad laughing -a little at her own new soul. - -"You have missed the climb and the garden in meeting me," said Felicia, -"unless you follow this road straight on, and that will lead you to -them----" - -"Perhaps you will show me both on some other day," said Maurice, "since -I haven't missed you." He had turned to walk beside her, and Felicia, -also making inner comments, reflected that a person so assured of his -own graceful intentions could hardly be anything but graceful. His -looks, his words, implied happy things with as much conviction as the -bird still sang on behind them. - -"It isn't in any way an unusual garden, though the view from it is -unusual." - -"I am sure that your garden is unusual--just as this first stage of my -journey towards it has been. It is very unusual to meet a Watteau figure -in a Watteau landscape." - -"If you had started a little earlier," Felicia said, smiling, "and met -me on the hill-side, I shouldn't have been so in harmony. There the -pine-woods are very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been -incongruous." - -"Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual," he returned; "there -would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I -may tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in -the shadow and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite -bewilderingly radiant and charming?" - -Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say -it, so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once -more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed -as inevitable as the bird's song. She could hardly feel that his rights -were only those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he -would like, and a person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So, -if he would, he might say that she was like a Watteau and had made a -picture. She had experienced, for her part, something of the same -sensation. Maurice had been a radiant and delightful apparition. - -He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made. Hair, -small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his -lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink -and white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had -not their blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy, -his smile, claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response -and understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of -sparkling emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He -was so much an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to -have walked with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale--into a -veritable Watteau landscape, at all events, where happiness was the -only natural thing in the world. - -As they approached the lodge-gates--they had been talking without pause -of music, books, pictures, even about life--he asked her how she had -guessed that he was Maurice Wynne--"Because there is only one of -you--but there are several of _us_--Mrs. Merrick's guests, I mean." - -"She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one of -them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the -other." - -"Poor Geoffrey!" Maurice ejaculated with a laugh, "how you have guessed -at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is a -tremendous friend of mine." - -"Is he? I hope you don't mind my flippancy; it was founded on the merest -scrap of conjecture." - -"It isn't flippancy; it's intuition. Geoffrey _is_ that, only he is -more. I don't mind a bit--I wouldn't mind flippancy, only I feel bound -to testify. Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been -since our boyhood." His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of -character than his charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool -approval to the stately friend. - -"I suppose you have heard about the others, too," Maurice went on; -"Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will -strike you. You must tell me--even if it's flippant. She is clever, too; -at all events, she is very effective." - -"Do you think they are the same thing?" - -"Effectiveness is the only test of cleverness, isn't it?" - -"If the people one affects are clever, one must be clever to affect -them, I suppose." - -"But if they are stupid?" smiled Maurice, "and such heaps of people are, -aren't they?" - -"Yet it is clever to take that into account and to make what one wants -out of their stupidity." - -"Ah, exactly; that is what Geoffrey does," said Maurice. It was what she -had imagined of him. "And such cleverness is, to you, a very ugly -thing," he added. - -"Oh; I don't know." Felicia flushed a little, realizing that they were -going rather far since it was of his friend they were talking. "It would -depend, wouldn't it, on what he wanted to get out of their stupidity?" - -"He wants to get power." - -"Well, there again, for what end?" - -"Isn't power an end in itself?" - -"I should think it ought to have an aim." - -"Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the masses? all that -sort of thing?" - -"It is the part of the powerful person to say that." - -Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. "You won't like Geoffrey," -he observed. "But though he hasn't ideals I will say of him that he is -dear of the usual reproach of the politician--he claims none. Now Lady -Angela does," he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that -rather alarming sense of sudden intimacy. "She lives under tremendously -high pressure, you know." They had passed down the uninteresting avenue, -its trees marking sections of flat, green country, and as the house was -reached Felicia felt the moment deferred for learning more precisely in -what this pressure consisted. - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -Mrs. Merrick's drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such -intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle -Victorian warred with Morris and final, disconcerting notes of _Art -Nouveau_. Circular plush seats enclosed lofty palms; sofas and chairs -weirdly suggested vegetable forms; on walls and draperies was an -obsession of pattern. Photographs, in heavy silver frames, in frames of -painted glass, in screens and in hanging fan-shaped receptacles, swarmed -like a pest of locusts. Mrs. Merrick's painfully acquired taste had not -had the courage of its new convictions; there were accretions, no -eliminations, and the room seemed gasping with surfeit. - -She sat among her possessions, near the tea-table, her head and -shoulders dark against a window. Felicia, on entering the ugly room, -always felt the sense of latent hostility; to-day it was more than ever -apparent, perhaps in contrast to the new, warm sympathy beside her. Mrs. -Merrick gave her a cold kiss, one or two cool questions, and a tepid cup -of tea, and left her to dispose of herself as best she might, while she -herself turned her quick, tight smile on Maurice Wynne. Carrying her -tea-cup, Felicia went across the room to a solitary seat under the -tallest palm, amused as usual by her own contrast to the tropics above -her and the upholstered respectability beneath. She put her cup on a -small and intricately hideous table, perforated, heavily inlaid, with -distorted bandy legs--a table, Felicia thought, that seemed to totter up -to one, winking and leering with all its decorations--and drawing off -her gloves, she looked about her, interested in the latest turn of her -aunt's kaleidoscope. - -Near Mrs. Merrick sat a stately young man; Felicia had felt that her -adjective had found its subject on first entering the room, even before -he had been named to her, and had risen gravely, tea-cup in hand; a -young man of really oppressive good looks. His expression was not -arrogant, showing, as he suavely surveyed his hostess, only a calm -vacancy; but his profile was arrogantly perfect. One sought face and -figure in vain for some humanizing defect, some deviation from Olympian -completeness. He had the air, radiant and inflexible, of a sun-god. His -height, too, was Olympian; his legs, terminating in long, slender shoes, -were stretched out before him to quite a startling distance. Felicia's -quickened sense of latent hostility found nothing hostile in this young -man; he was merely magnificently indifferent. Her genial maliciousness -found him, too, rather funny; not even a sun-god had a right to be so -magnificent. - -An obvious cause for that quickened sense met her eyes as they left Mr. -Daunt and turned to a dim corner on the other side of the room, a -corner from which all hint of Mid-Victorian had ebbed, leaving Liberty -hangings and deep cushions, inviting to pensiveness, in full possession. -The presence among the cushions was, she felt, Lady Angela, and she and -Lady Angela were bound to dislike one another; a glance told her that. -Mr. Daunt amused her, but Lady Angela made her uncomfortable. - -She was leaning back, her arms folded, talking to a small, pallid -man--Mr. Jones, Felicia placed him--and in appearance she was very long -and curiously incorporeal. It was difficult to define the woman in the -swathing lines of her diaphanous black gown that seemed to trail like a -shadow across the cushions. Strange ornaments gleamed dimly on her; -clasps of turquoise and opal, sombre rings, a chain of heavy gems that -curved among the curves of her laces. Her head seemed to hold forward -the melancholy smile of her half-parted lips; her eyes were pale, -shadowed to mysterious depths by long eyelids; soft dust-coloured hair -haloed a narrow face and a long throat, the face so narrow that all the -delicate features looked disproportionately large. There was an almost -spectre-like effect in this emphasis of the means of expression and the -meagreness of setting, and the expression itself, thought Felicia, was -like a cosmetic, cunningly applied. A "touched-up" spectre. Lady Angela -certainly did not please--nor amuse her either. Their eyes met more than -once while she drank her tea, and each time Lady Angela's seemed to rest -on hers with a more insistent, more gentle pathos; they almost seemed -to be consoling her for her isolation in a roomful of strangers, yet -making her more conscious of isolation. It was with a sense of quick -relief, pleasure, and, funnily, almost triumph, that she saw Maurice -Wynne approaching her, his tea-cup in one hand, a plate of sandwiches in -the other. - -"You are being starved after your walk. I have been waiting for my -opportunity to bring you something." His eyes smiling steadily, as if -over the new bond they had found, said to her, "You don't like your -aunt--nor do I. You are out of your _milieu_ here. Nobody here is -capable of appreciating you; but I appreciate you." The smile was so -infinitely more delicate than any such words that it flattered no vanity -in her, only made her happy afresh in that new reliance on an almost -comrade. - -As Maurice joined her, Mr. Geoffrey Daunt's head turned towards them, -and he looked at the young lady in white under the palm tree, looked as -though she had been another but more interesting palm-tree. He received -a more perturbing impression than his imperturbable glance implied. He -was displeased that Maurice should not be sitting beside Lady Angela, -and displeased that the girl beside whom he was sitting should be so -freshly young and pretty; and this dissatisfaction worked in him until -he presently got up and went across the room to Lady Angela, -interrupting her _tete-a-tete_ with such an air of evident purpose that -Mr. Jones arose and wandered away. - -Daunt dropped into the vacant seat. "What have you been doing this -afternoon?" he asked. - -From his new position he could directly survey Felicia and Maurice; his -eyes were upon them as he spoke. - -"Writing to my friends," Angela answered in a soft voice. She was a -great correspondent, and it was quite understood by their fortunate -recipients that her letters were to be preserved; future publication was -a probability; Angela looked upon herself as destined to influence her -time, after as well as before her death, and her friends were of the -same opinion. - -That Geoffrey Daunt, however, did not share this conviction of her -significance was shown by his next placid question, "What about?"--quite -implying that an alternative of souls or satin was equally interesting -to him. - -Angela had long ago told herself that she must not expect to be -understood by this worldly relative. It was with the mildness of an -intelligent forbearance that, as softly as before, she answered, "About -how I feel life--theirs and mine." - -"You feel a good many things about it--don't you?" Geoffrey smiled, -though not mockingly, indeed, with a cool kindness. Both smile and -kindness were keenly offensive to Angela, but with greater mildness, "I -believe in feeling," she returned. - -"You and Maurice are alike in that." - -"Yes; with a difference; Maurice is a subjectivist; his feeling is an -end; mine is a means." - -"For the good of others?" Geoffrey asked, and his tone denoted a -perception of shades and meanings that his mask-like serenity did not -imply. To be disturbed by the sinister smile of a Mona Lisa is one -thing, but to suspect that the meditatively inclined head of a marble -Hermes is gently quizzing one is a peculiarly baffling experience; it -was one that Geoffrey often gave her. He was one of the few people, she -told herself, who almost made her angry. She flushed now, ever so -slightly, at the tone. Yet with a sweet patience that he should have -felt as the turning of the other cheek, she answered, "I own that I try -to live for others." - -"And Maurice for himself. So that the difference between you is that he -is selfish and you unselfish; that, I own, is a great difference." - -Leaning her arm on the back of the sofa, Angela arranged the laces at -her wrist. - -"You have a talent for misinterpretation, Geoffrey;--wilful, isn't -it?--perhaps a habit caught in the scuffles of debate. But certain -attitudes make misinterpretations by some people inevitable. One accepts -it." - -"Misinterpret you, my dear Angela?" Geoffrey inquired, raising his -eyebrows and looking not at her but at the young couple under the -palm-tree. "I hope not. Surely I am right in assuming that to live for -others is unselfish, and that you recognize it as being so." - -"I have owned to an aim--not to an attainment. Why is it that those who -do not aim cannot forgive those who do?--try always to smirch the -effort in the eyes of those who make it? I hope that I am not -self-righteous, Geoffrey--I frankly recognize your intimation--why not -make it as frankly?" - -Geoffrey at this was silent for a moment or two, evidently not at all -abashed by her discerning humility, and evidently thinking it over very -lightly, as he would have thought over any unimportant fact put before -him. Looking round at her and again smiling, he observed, "I am sure -that you are very clever, and I am sure that you are sure that you are -very good. I confess that I like to test your conviction by teasing you -a little." - -"It would be better, Geoffrey, if, instead of ridiculing people, you -were to sometimes try to help them by a little faith in them. Nothing is -more maiming to an ideal not yet strong than ridicule; mine, happily, is -strong, though I myself am weak." - -Geoffrey looked down at his shoe, turning his foot a little as though to -observe the hue of his silk sock. He was silent, placidly silent; but it -was now as if his thought had passed away from her and her words, and -his abrupt change of the subject when he again spoke, as of a large mind -turning from a trivial encounter with a small one, was anything but -flattering. "Who is that girl?" he inquired. - -Angela's eyes followed his to Maurice and Felicia. She knew that -Geoffrey's interest in her, his relative, was only because of his -interest in Maurice, his friend; knew that the match which for some -years had seemed so imminent, and that by her friends was regarded as -the quite disastrously bad match for her, was merely regarded by -Geoffrey as the good match for Maurice. Angela had always hoped that -Geoffrey saw the delay in final measures as caused by her own -hesitation; and that at times he had tried to urge her to a decision, -she had fancied more than once, and always with a soothing sense of -sustainment. He knew Maurice so well; the hesitation, then, could not be -Maurice's, although to her weariness it so often seemed Maurice's -indecision and not his fear of hers that kept them apart. Looking now at -the girl under the palm--the obvious link that Geoffrey had turned the -talk to--she said vaguely, "A niece--a cousin--I forget which Mrs. -Merrick said. A poor relation; this her one yearly peep at the -world--the world to her. Quaint, isn't it?" - -"I shouldn't like to be a poor relation of Mrs. Merrick's," Geoffrey -observed. "An ugly woman," he went on, adding, "The niece doesn't look -provincial." - -"No; oddly she doesn't; not physically; but provincial in soul I should -think. A curious little face, Geoffrey; ignorant, empty of all but a -shallow joy in life. It hasn't suffered, isn't capable of much -suffering. She looks like a soulless, sylvan creature; mocking, elusive, -alluring." - -Geoffrey passed over the question of soul and body, reflecting that it -was natural that Angela should show this funny spite. Maurice was -clearly allured. - -"Her dress isn't provincial either," he said; "its simplicity is -extremely sophisticated. The dryad has found a dressmaker in her woods. -She is a young lady who knows, at all events, how to dress." - -"And how to eat," mused Angela. "Dear child, it's really delightful to -see such frank enjoyment of opportunity. That is her fourth sandwich." - -"I beg your pardon, it is her fifth." - -"You share Maurice's interest." - -"Is Maurice so interested?" - -"Isn't he?" - -"While I automatically count her sandwiches he meditates making a sketch -of her." - -Again there was silence between them, and it was Angela who broke it -with, "Why did you come here, Geoffrey?" - -"Because Maurice came; I was glad of the chance of being with him in a -quiet place where one can rest." - -"And why did Maurice come?" - -Geoffrey responded promptly. "To see you--in a quiet place where he -_can_ see you." - -She let the assertion pass, forestalling a possible retort with-- - -"And I came for you and for Maurice and for Mrs. Merrick. I am fond of -Mrs. Merrick." - -"Of ugly Mrs. Merrick? Really?" - -"Really indeed. My likings are not founded on alluring faces or -sophisticated gowns. I saw a good deal of her in London. She is -interested in many of my objects. She is trying to grow." - -"And you are down here to help her. I hope that your efforts will bring -something out. I confess that to me the plant looks dry and thorny." - -"Ah! that is because she is in such an arid soil. I can help her. She -made me feel that, and I never refuse help." - -Her smile braved ironic retorts, but his answering smile was purely -playful. - -"Pray let me believe that you came solely for old friendship's sake," he -said, "rather than for Mrs. Merrick's." And Angela was unable to repress -an assenting though superficial lightness. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Geoffrey and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his -mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an -obscure country solicitor, who, through a combination of happy -inheritances, was able to aspire to and attain a marriage with an -heiress of good family. Their wealth, his eagerness for advancement, her -greater intelligence and more wily ambitions, signified power, and under -the wife's guidance they rose rapidly. He bought an old country estate, -a seat in Parliament, and, since his vote was unvaryingly at the -Government's disposal, an Irish peerage soon rewarded him. He cringed -and bullied his way to success; his wife schemed, coaxed and coquetted -in the extremest forms of the latter term, if contemporary scandals were -at all veracious. - -Such an alliance was bound to prosper. Their wealth grew; their house in -London was a social centre; their sons all well-placed, their daughters -all well-married, inherited the father's heavy determination, the -mother's nimble and remorseless dexterity. An English peerage crowned -the edifice raised with such efforts, and the Earls of Glaston took -their place among the more tawdry great names of England. They never -distinguished the name, and after the first swift climb aspired to no -further heights. They were wealthy, worldly, weighty. They held what -they had, and held it firmly. - -Angela's father was a lazy, well-mannered man; nothing further could be -said of him. Her mother had been pretentious, ambitious, and -sentimental. She had quarrelled with her husband to the verge of open -rupture; flirted with anybody of any importance to the verge of open -scandal, and written a flimsy political novel interesting only from its -thinly veiled personalities; she long posed as the typical _femme -incomprise_, and just before her death she became fervently religious. - -Angela had scorned her mother, and had avoided her as much as possible, -finding in her later epochs grotesque echoes of her own sublimities. She -could never bear to look into the distorting mirror that her mother's -character seemed absurdly to hold up to her. - -Geoffrey's strain of Bagley blood, on the other hand, had reached to no -such heights. His mother, descended from the first Lord Glaston, and -connected again, by various unimportant intermarriages, with the elder -branch, married a country parson, and her abilities had chafed against -all manner of restrictions. - -The Rev. John Daunt had been a scholar, almost a saint, and all his -wife's tenacious worldliness had been unable to extract material success -from these baffling qualities. But Mrs. Daunt, in spite of her Bagley -blood, possessed the family characteristics in no petty or personal -forms. The strain, in passing through the two or three generations of -simple and dignified squires who had been her un-illustrious forbears, -had run itself dear of its more vulgar elements. Mrs. Daunt had been as -proud as she was eager. She would fight, but she would never cringe. She -lived first in the hope of seeing her gentle husband rise to high -places, and when, with not unkindly scorn, she realized his incapacity -for self-advancement, she transferred her passionate and patient hopes -to her son. For him she saved, slaved and battled. Geoffrey never -learned, until shortly after his father's death, that his own -opportunities were won not only by his mother's battlings, but by his -father's martyrdom. - -John Daunt, in the midst of a life of service to God and man, found, in -a time of darkness and dismay, that his faith, in any orthodox sense, -had deserted him. His was not the mind that could combine Christian -ethics with a genial scepticism as to the Articles of the Church he -belonged to. With sad and tender dignity he opened his heart to his -wife. He accepted her amazed indignation. Mrs. Daunt would as little -have dreamed of questioning the Articles of the Christian faith as of -thinking about them--they were part of the ecclesiastical machinery that -one accepted as one accepted the other probably irrational bases of -life. He bowed before her scorn of his weakness; but he was not -prepared for her absolute refusal to further his intention of leaving -the Church. - -How were they to live, pray? The Rev. John had hardly thought of that. -His own private income was barely sufficient for his lesser charities. -His wife owned a small property, and when the practical question was put -before him, he supposed that they could manage to live on that, and he -would find something to do. - -"Find something to do? You? You will merely sink in the world, and we -will all sink with you. What of Geoffrey?" Mrs. Daunt's eyes flashed -fire as she asked this stinging question. Geoffrey was just entering the -University, the honours of Eton thick upon him. He wished to ruin their -child, then? The questions lashed him. He adored their child. She swept -on: He, forsooth, would seek downfall for some morbid whim when men of -ten times his significance managed to keep the peace between their -conscience and their vows. And Mrs. Daunt was too clever to use the lash -only; she turned to the ethical side of the question, the side on which -alone he had looked, with such self-tormenting indecision. His -influence; the love of his people for him; the light he held up among -them;--what difference did the lamp make that held the flame?--the -wrecking of others' faiths involved in his abandonment of a leaking -ship--she would not say that it did leak; but if it did, was it the -place of a captain to desert his crew because he could not see through -the storm? And he yielded, as much to his own self-doubt as to her; -yielded, and yet afterwards, in an undercurrent of anguish beneath the -flow of unchanged life, felt himself a traitor. - -Mrs. Daunt one day, after the father's death, told her son of the -spiritual crisis that might have ruined his career, triumphant, though -very tender towards her husband's memory, in the strength that had saved -them all from his weakness. - -Geoffrey, a silent, undemonstrative young man, grew white. "It shouldn't -have happened had I known," he said; "I could have made my way." - -"Made your way, my dear child!" cried Mrs. Daunt, angry in a moment, and -yet more wounded than angered by this ingratitude. "Do your realize, I -wonder, what it cost us to make you?--cost me, rather, for I did it all. -Do you know how I have scraped and struggled? Do you know that every -stick and stave I possess is mortgaged? You might have made your way, -but it would not be the way you are in now. The height one starts from -determines the height one attains." - -"No; only the time one takes to get there. I would rather have taken -longer. I will pay off the mortgages as soon as possible," said -Geoffrey. - -He was ungrateful, though never unkind. Even now, after this shock, for -he had loved his father with the cold depth characteristic of him, he -regained in a moment the decorous kindness due to a mother who had done -an ugly thing for his sake; but he knew that it was decorous only. - -Mrs. Daunt had never appealed for his tenderness, or worked for it; but -when Geoffrey, after a merely stop-gap reading for the Bar, entered -Parliament, and she saw all her desires for him realizing themselves, it -was the lack of tenderness that, though she was scarcely conscious of -it, poisoned all her happiness. - -Living with him, laying the foundations of his effectiveness more -firmly, seeing him, young as he was, a man of power and repute, she -never recognized herself as a deeply loving mother, so absorbed were all -her energies in the rapacities of maternity; but when she died it was -with a dim yet bitter sense of failure; for Geoffrey had seen the -rapacities only. - -Apart from this essential failure, Mrs. Daunt knew only one other. - -The match she had hoped for between Geoffrey and his cousin Angela could -not be effected. She had not traced the causes of this failure further -than a mutual indifference, almost an antagonism. - -Even as a boy Geoffrey had said, when she probed him once as to his -sentiments towards this significant young relative, "I don't like her. -She is an unpleasant girl, I think. I wish you wouldn't ask her here any -more." - -Mrs. Daunt had hoped that ambition, if not affection, would overcome -this blunt, boyish aversion, for with Angela's fortune to back him, -Geoffrey's career was sure of utmost brilliancy; but neither motive -seemed forthcoming. - -She died before seeing that Angela's affections were centred on Maurice -Wynne. She could hardly have suspected Angela of such folly, seeing -Maurice as a charming young nobody, a mere satellite of Geoffrey's, who -had known him at Oxford and Eton, travelled with him, and was devoted to -him, a devotion unresented by the mother, a charming relaxation in her -eyes towards the lesser man. Maurice was poor, indolent, distinguished -only by his air of distinction and a few trivial sallies into various -fields of art; he had no other claims. She could never have seen in him -the barrier to her hopes. - -At present, three years after his mother's death, Geoffrey's position in -the House was conspicuous, if somewhat insecure. He was the foremost of -a group of clever young men, independent and given to exquisite -impertinence; but though the group was impertinent, their chief was -grave; he needed no small weapons. Insecurity did not menace his -constituency; his voters were completely under his thumb, and he let -them see that they were. He chaffed them loftily, never flattered them, -and showed an assurance that was completely contagious; the average man -became sheep-like before its conviction of leadership by right of real -supremacy. - -The insecurity lay in his poverty. It had not yet pinched him. His small -income sufficed for the bread and butter of existence, and Lord Glaston, -the decorative director of various companies, was glad to lend a hand to -his brilliant young relative. Sagacious speculation, and even his -winnings at cards and at racing formed no inconsiderable part of his -resources. Towards these rather undignified methods of replenishment he -had an air of dignified indifference that was not at all assumed. -Ingrained in Geoffrey's nature was the sense that power was his, and -that money, the mere fuel of life, was a small matter upon which he -could always count. This inflexible young man had a perfect faith in his -own strength and in the plasticity of outward circumstance, a faith that -had been thoroughly justified, as such faiths usually are, by his -experience of life. He was ambitious, personally ambitious, yet the -personality was no mean one. He believed in his own significance and in -the beneficent ends that that significance, endued with power, could -attain. The might of his will mocked at the minor aims for which smaller -men might struggle. He intended to use the world for his own ends, and -held, with all the ethics of evolution to back him--though Geoffrey did -not appeal to these dubious sanctions--that in a great man's ends the -world also found its best. - -He had no humanitarian ideals to weaken his self-regarding purposes. He -was highly sceptical as to the merits, or even the potentialities, of -humanity; recognized self-interest as its ruling motive, and was never -blinded by this motive's various disguises--idealistic, aesthetic, or -philanthropic. That the disguises often deceived their wearers he quite -owned; his kindness consisted in such cynical taking for granted; but he -was keen to see the eternal greedy animal under the fine apparel, and -tolerant towards the brother brute. He wished him well; thought it by -all means advisable that he should wear fine apparel and be dull of -sight; but his own gift of clear, dispassionate vision justified him, he -would have said, had he ever sought to justify himself, in feeling -towards the hoodwinked as towards tools that he could put to no better -use than in using them for his own interest and for his nation's -interest. He and his nation, on the whole, were fittest, and he intended -that each should survive to the best of its ability. - -So far only outer circumstances had opposed him--and been walked -through. He knew no inner antagonists. He was neither sensitive nor -sentimental. His imagination pointed out pitfalls, but laid no snares -for him. - -Cooly critical of women, they aroused no illusions in him. Their -feathers and furbelows in the way of feelings were often finer than the -masculine decorations; but he suspected the little animal underneath of -even meaner though more labyrinthine egotisms. Such a little animal, -most exquisitely furbelowed--he granted her good taste in spiritual -trappings--he considered Angela to be, and he was anxious that his -friend should profit by her trappings, material as well as spiritual. - -Oddly enough, he had never applied the animal simile to Maurice; this -affection was boxed off, as it were, in a secure bit of heart, safely -out of reach of reason, though he and Maurice had little in common. Art -was Maurice's object; his attitude that of the spectator at the drama of -life. Geoffrey observed only that he might act; though not altogether -inappreciative, art was to him the decoration only of life, the -arabesque on the blade with which one fought; one might contemplate the -arabesque in moments of leisure. - -Maurice did not fight beside him; but he was an affectionate troubadour, -who looked on at the combat and chanted it, often with friendly irony. -He was much like a dependent and devoted younger brother. Geoffrey did -not argue about him, and was fonder of him than of anything else in the -world. He was glad of the restful week after a fatiguing session, and -looked to see Maurice's future settled, the arabesque engraved upon a -good, solid blade of prosperity, before he left Trensome Hall. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -Felicia was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she -made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about -the last evening. An altogether novel one in her experience. - -She had never before been conscious of being interested in so many -people, and, especially, she had never before been conscious of -interesting anybody. Now she was almost sure that last night she had -much interested one person. The brightest spot in this consciousness had -been after her own performance at the piano. Various young women played -and sang; Felicia's place among them was an unimportant one. Miss -Bulmer, as usual, distinguished herself in a passionate ballad, her eyes -fixed on the cornice, her meagre white satin form swayed by emotions -strangely out of keeping with the appearance of the singer. Miss -Bulmer's shouts of despair and yearning stirred, as usual, all the -enthusiasm of which her audience was capable; and Felicia, when she sat -down to the piano, was accustomed to the subsequent torpor, to the -undercurrent of talk while she played, and to having Miss Bulmer, -flushed and generous in her own triumph, lean over her and watch her -fingering with an air of much benignity. But it was a new experience -when she rose, among cool expressions of pleasure, while Miss Bulmer -said, "You really do improve so much," to have some one, some one who -knew, and that some one Maurice Wynne, come forward all radiant with -recognition, clapping his hands and crying, "Magnificent, simply -magnificent! Where did you learn to play Brahms like that? I didn't know -that you really were a musician--I thought you merely played the piano!" - -He stood, excited, delighted, smiling at her, and his enthusiasm went, -an uncomprehended thrill round the room. Every eye turned on Felicia -with a new discernment. - -"But you mustn't stop," said Maurice; "she mustn't stop, must she, Mrs. -Merrick? Why didn't you prepare us for this treat? You never told us -that your niece was a genius." - -Mrs. Merrick, her square of pale mauve bosom, in its frame of yellow -satin, deepening its tint, hastened to add her urgency to Maurice's. "Is -she not wonderful? We expect great things of her," she said, for Mrs. -Merrick was quick at adjustments. - -Felicia's placid eyes dwelt on her for a moment. - -Maurice had taken Miss Bulmer's place, for even Miss Bulmer felt that -benignity was misapplied, and had looked at Felicia, not at her -fingering, while she played. - -It had been to Felicia a delightful, almost a bewildering experience. - -Now when she was dressed she went to the window and leaned out. This -view from Trensome Hall--the lawns frosted with dew, the near trees -framing a long strip of sky, the early sunlight sparkling on jewel-like -bands of flowers--was sweet and intimate. And hardly had she breathed in -the chill freshness of the young day when her eyes met Maurice Wynne's. - -He was strolling below, finding evidently her own enjoyment. He waved -his hand, smiling his good-morning, and Felicia, leaning out to smile at -him, white among the creepers, felt the picturesque fitness of this -beginning to a day, surely to be a happy one. - -"Come down," said Maurice. "How good of you to be up early. Let us have -a walk before breakfast; we have heaps of time." - -Felicia needed no urging. She had intended to walk by herself, but a -walk with this companion would be as different from ordinary walks as -playing to him had been from playing to her accustomed audience. He was -waiting for her at the small side-door, and they crossed the wet lawns -and the glittering shrubberies, and left formality behind them in the -deep lanes that led to the woods and that smelt of the damp, sweet -earth. As they went he talked, mainly about himself, with an altogether -un-English ease and equally without awkwardness or vanity. He talked of -his work, of his friends, of his travels and point of view--as far as he -could be said to have one. He seemed to be turning under her eyes the -pages of a tender, whimsical, very modern book; counting so wonderfully -upon her understanding. He took things very easily, at least thought -most things only worth easy taking; yet there was something in that -reckless eye, a restlessness, and, under its caressing smile, a -melancholy, that made her think that something, perhaps, he might take -hard. - -"Do you ever have moods of despondency--despair?" he asked her, as they -went through a winding path among the woods. Despair and despondency -were black and alien things to speak of here, where the very shadows -were happy, and where there was ecstasy in the sunlit vault of blue seen -far above, beyond the sparkling green. - -"Moods? No; I don't think so," said Felicia; "but I am sometimes -horribly discontented--and when I am I can't imagine anything that would -content me." - -"Not anything?" - -"Not anything--except everything. I mean being sure that everything is -significant, worth while." - -"But it is worth while as long as it lasts." - -"But it doesn't last!" She smiled round at him, for she was leading the -way in the narrow path, and the white flounces of her dress brushed wet -grasses on either side. "The sense of impermanence often poisons the -worth." She added, "Do you have moods?" - -"Oh! frightful fits of the blues. It's funny that I should talk to you -about it; no, not funny that I should talk about it to you, but that -there should be a you that made it possible. No one suspects me of blues -except Geoffrey. I give him a glimpse now and then. That is really the -way our friendship began. I was in a frightful state of mind one term at -Eton, sinking in depths of scepticism and horror, and Geoffrey hauled me -out, put me on my feet, and, once I'd done gasping, set me running, as -it were, got up my circulation. He didn't argue; but he wonderfully -understood, and he promptly acted." - -"And do you have them, the moods, because things don't last?" Felicia -asked, looking ahead into the wood's translucent green. - -"No; not so much that as that things don't come. I want so much more -than I ever get. I want to feel everything--to the uttermost. I never -get a chance to exercise my capacity for feeling. It is lack, you see, -rather than loss that I dread." - -They had come to the edge of the wood where, beyond a stile, were -meadows of tall grasses. Larks sang overhead. Maurice vaulted over the -stile and held out his hand to her. Her eyes, looking down at him, -showed a gravity, a little perplexity. "You don't understand that?" he -asked, when she stepped down beside him. - -"No; I dread both." - -"I am awfully human," said Maurice; "and I want the whole human -gamut--but that's all I ask." - -"But what is the human gamut?" - -"That question from your father's daughter! Your father, I hear, is a -great positivist." - -"Well, his daughter asks the question." - -They walked on through the meadow, white with the lacey disks of tall -field flowers. - -"Do you know," he asked, "how, after this, I shall always personify -faith to myself?" - -"Faith?" - -"Yes. I shall see her as a smiling girl dressed in white, and walking -among white flowers in the sunlight. I have guessed you, you see. The -key-note of your life is a question." - -"Do you call the asking of a question, faith?" Felicia smiled. - -"It's faith to think it worth asking." - -Geoffrey Daunt was strolling in front of the house when they reached it. -He looked at the two young people as they approached him with his -observant, impersonal gaze. Felicia, in a mingled state of mind, happy, -yet touched, even troubled, felt, as she met his gaze, a quick leap of -almost antagonism. There was no criticism in it, no surprise or -displeasure, yet her intuition told her that something in it commented -unfavourably upon her companionship with Maurice. And with the intuition -came a delightful throb of power. He was her friend, and she would keep -him so. Already this first step into life seemed to have brought her -among dumb contests. She would stand staunch and keep what was hers. -Really, Mr. Daunt's head, so high against the blue sky, with its classic -white and gold, was ridiculously handsome. She nodded a smiling _au -revoir_ to Maurice and left them. - -The two young men walked slowly along the gravel path towards the -garden. Maurice was silent. With his head thrown back, his hands clasped -behind him, he smiled as though over some grave, delightful secret. -Reticence was an unusual symptom in Maurice. - -"That's a very pretty girl," Geoffrey observed, reflecting on the -symptom. - -Maurice's shoulders drew together with a gesture of irritable -repudiation. - -"Pretty! Don't be so trivial!" - -"Well--what was it Angela called her yesterday?--alluring, elusive?" - -"Only as outdoor nature is. On Angela's lips the terms would savour too -much of a boudoir atmosphere; lace tea-gowns and languor. This child is -a wild rose open to the sky, dewy, _un peu sauvage_; anything less -alluring in Angela's sense of the word was never seen." - -Geoffrey, who had heard a multitude of wild-rose raptures, received this -one with composure. - -"I assure you, Geoffrey," Maurice went on, growing the more confidential -for his momentary reticence, "I assure you that if I could afford it I -would fall in love with that enchanting girl." - -"And since you can't afford it, pray do nothing so nonsensical. -Meanwhile, what of Angela?" - -"You are really rather gross, my dear Geoffrey. Why meanwhile? Why drag -in Angela?" - -"Because, to speak grossly, she can afford to fall in love with you. -Don't flirt with this girl and risk trying Angela's affection too far." - -Maurice again shrugged his shoulders irritably. - -"My dear Geoffrey, Miss Merrick isn't that sort. One flirts in the -boudoir--not in the breezes of a heath. And then there is nothing to -risk; I have no right to suppose that I have Angela's affection." - -"Rot! my dear Maurice. You have done your best to win it. What has this -last year of dallying meant?" - -"Dallying, pure and simple, to both of us." - -"Yet you came down here----?" - -"To go on dallying. I own it. But I've never yet made up my mind to find -my culminating romance in Angela, and I haven't any reason to believe -that she hopes to find hers in me. We both enjoy dallying. We both do it -rather nicely." Maurice spoke now with his recovered light gaiety, and -as though by holding the matter at arm's length he were keeping it from -the crude touch of bad taste with which Geoffrey threatened it. - -The latter's composure remained unruffled, but after a pause he said, -"Frankly, Maurice, you will be a great ass if you don't find the -culminating romance in Angela. You know the importance of material -considerations as well as I do, so I'll not urge them, but add to them -the fact that for some years you have been more or less in love with -Angela and have led her and everybody else to suppose it--and they -might help a very hard-up young man like yourself to a decision." - -"Not at all; they confuse all decisions. Don't show me the nuggets under -the flowers. The flowers alone must be the attraction--must charm me -into forgetfulness of the nuggets. There might be some reason in my -urging you to marry for money. Poverty in your life is a drag that my -Bohemianism can throw off. You do want a rich wife badly; and treating -marriage as an unemotional business episode wouldn't jar upon you as it -would upon me. When it's got to be done I want to do it thoroughly; to -fall in love so completely that I shan't be able to write a sonnet about -it. Now, I've written several sonnets to Angela." - -Geoffrey, who received these remarks imperturbably, now looked at his -watch and observed that they must be going in to breakfast, adding, "I -don't urge an unemotional episode upon you. Your feeling for Angela is, -I am quite sure, more than that. I only suggest that you don't allow an -emotional episode to interfere with more important matters. You've had -quite enough of these experiments in feeling." - -"Ah! but suppose--suppose," laughed Maurice, happy excitement in the -laugh, again throwing back his head, again clasping his hands behind -him, "suppose that this were the permanent emotion." - -"In that case," Geoffrey answered, "I should be very sorry for you, and -for Angela and for the wild rose." - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - - -"You and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia," Mrs. Merrick said -to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and -magazines on a small table in more even rows, the occupation a cover for -a conversation significant, Felicia felt at once, but feigning -desultoriness. Mrs. Merrick's mind was of the order that infers -matrimonial projects from the smallest indications, and to her vision -the indications here were not small. Walks, talks, practisings on piano -and violin--whatever Mr. Wynne's projects, Felicia ought not to count -upon them. Mrs. Merrick felt a certain acrid interest in her niece's -worldly welfare. A too sumptuous match might, indeed, have distressed -her more deeply than a disastrous one; but Mr. Wynne was in no sense a -good match, although he might be a luxury to which Lady Angela could -treat herself. Marriage for Felicia must be a more serious matter, not -quite of bread and butter, but of, at all events, a decent and secure -establishment. - -These were Mrs. Merrick's thoughts while she sorted the papers and -remarked upon the rapid friendship. - -"You know," she said, laying the one magazine upon the other, "that he -is very poor. I fancy he has no settled income at all." - -It had come, the inevitable grunt in the midst of the pastoral. Even in -her displeasure, Felicia could feel some amusement in the sudden simile -that suggested Aunt Kate as the unobserved pig in its pig-sty among the -orchards and rose-hedges where she had been happily strolling. She could -almost see a flexible, inquiring snout pushing between the palings, -above it the scrutiny of an observant eye. The simile so softened the -displeasure that her voice had all its indolent mildness as she asked, -"What has his poverty got to do with his friendship, Aunt Kate?" After -all, it was easy to lean over the palings, and with a stick, indulgently -to scratch the creature's back. - -"Ah! nothing--nothing at all, no doubt, especially since it is said that -he is all but engaged to Lady Angela. He has admired her for years." - -"And what then? Are any of his friendships a menace to his engagement do -you think?" - -"Of course not, Felicia. You jump at such odd conclusions. And I did not -say that he was engaged, merely that he had admired her for years. It's -improbable that Lady Angela would accept him." - -"At all events, a friendship of two days' standing can hardly be -affected by anything you may or may not have heard. _You_ mustn't jump -at odd conclusions, Aunt Kate." Felicia could not repress this as she -put her book under her arm and stepped from the window on to the lawn. -In spite of the lightness of her tone, the grunt had come as an ugly -interruption in a melodious mood. To hear such things did affect the two -days' friendship, though she did not believe them. She had known him for -only two days, but the two days had been hers so exclusively that any -other "admiration" must mean very little. Not that the two days meant -much to either of them, she assured herself. They had only strolled -among rose-hedges. A pity, though, that the pig-sty had to be faced. - -On the lawn coming towards her were Angela, Maurice and Geoffrey. They -personified the new life into which she seemed to have entered. To see -them together pushed her back once more into the place of spectator. -Felicia had time to recognize her own hurt and almost angry mood as she -approached them and smiled at them in passing. But Angela, with a -winning hand held out, detained her. "You are so fond of walking. Won't -you come with us? Just about the grounds?" she said. She drew Felicia's -hand within her arm. "I am not very strong, so I can't make magnificent -expeditions as you do--Maurice tells me--with him before breakfast. But -even a little walk has twice the value if it's a talking walk, don't you -think?" - -"I suppose it has," said Felicia, feeling a slight confusion as she -walked between them. - -"Though a silent walk, with a companion one cares for, has even more, -perhaps," Angela added. "Don't you love silence?" - -"I have had so much of it," said Felicia. - -"So much silence; how exquisite! Isn't that a picture, Maurice, that she -makes for us! Much silence ought to mean much peace, much happiness, -much growth. You and your father on your hill-top; Maurice has told me -of it." Again she smiled from him to Felicia, the gentle link between -them. "Do you understand one another so well that you need talk very -little?" - -"Oh! we talk a good deal, though we understand one another, I hope. I -only meant that there was no one else to talk to, and that one could -have so much silence as not to care much about it." - -Lady Angela made her feel immature and irritable; and could the -shrinking irritability be simply--she asked it of herself with quite a -pang of self-disgust--a latent sense of contrast, of jealousy? But it -was prior to, deeper than, any possible jealousy; she could exonerate -herself from the pettiness, though wondering if the deeper cause were -more creditable. What creditable cause could there be for disliking Lady -Angela, so exquisite, so tender, holding her hand so closely within hers -as they walked? Yet she knew that she wanted, like a rude child, to push -her away; and though that rudimentary instinct must be controlled, her -eye in going over her went with something of a child's large coldness. - -Angela wore, on the hot summer afternoon, a trailing dress of white. A -scarf of gauze and lace fell from her shoulders to her feet. Her arms -and breast glimmered through dim old laces. Enfolded as she was with -transparent whiteness, she looked exquisitely undressed--a wan -Aphrodite rising through faint foam. Ridiculous, indeed, Felicia -thought, that this spiritual creature should arouse in her a Puritanic -rigour, so that she was glad of the crisp creak of her own linen frock, -stiff with much laundering, quite badly cut, she unregretfully knew--a -frock simply, and in no sense an ornament. She was glad that she had not -put on her better dress, the white lawn, with its flutter and its charm. -Let the contrast be as obvious as possible--as unbecoming to herself as -possible. - -"You must let me come and see you on your hill-top some day when I am -here again," Angela went on; "may I? I can't tell you how people -interest me. I have always loved to look at other people's -lives--haven't I, Maurice?" Geoffrey walked a little apart, smoking; -none of her pretty appeals included him. - -"To meddle as well as look, you think--don't you?" and her smile was now -half sad in its humour. - -"Oh, you meddle quite nicely," Maurice said; "Let her meddle with you, -Miss Merrick, if she longs to; it will give her lots of pleasure and do -you no harm." - -"Rather scant encouragement for you!" laughed Angela, looking down, for -she was the taller of the two, at Felicia; "but may I? What I really -want of you is your help in a little general meddling here. I have been -talking with your aunt about the village people. There seems so much to -be done; and so much apathy, so much deadness. I am afraid it is a -struggle for your poor aunt, and of course she has not the gift, the -grace, the charm that you could bring to the struggle. What charities -are you interested in? What do you suggest? You mustn't think me a Don -Quixote--tilting at other people's windmills; but wherever I go I -confess I try to do something. I want to help people. What else is there -to live for?" - -"I don't help anybody," said Felicia, nerving herself to resoluteness, -for she disliked putting a smudge beside the flowing loveliness of Lady -Angela's signature; "I don't know anything about the charities here. We -never go to church, and the charities are connected with that. We are -quite the black sheep of the parish, and black sheep can't be of much -use, except as warnings, I suppose." - -It was ugly, it was uncouth; Lady Angela made her feel both; and after -the smudge was made there was silence for quite a long moment while they -turned among the laurels of the shrubbery, she, Angela and Maurice still -abreast, while Mr. Daunt and his cigar came behind them. - -The fragrance of the cigar was pleasant to Felicia, gave emphasis to her -reckless little sense of satisfaction in doing for herself in all their -eyes, if need be. After all, they were not her life, and for having -fancied herself a part, perhaps a rather important part, of one of their -lives she needed, no doubt, this smart little dose of self-mortification. - -But Angela, with a closer pressure of the hand, was speaking. "May I -help _you_, then, to be of more use?" she said; "I know how -circumstances--material circumstances--interfere. You live so far from -the village, and your father's interests, your interests, are -intellectual, not ethical. You haven't had an opportunity for thinking -about all the responsibilities of this difficult life of ours. I should -love to talk to you about it all--the giving of oneself, the life for -others, which is the only true living. You haven't seen the spiritual -and practical side of things--for practical and spiritual are one in -reality. We know, only to do." - -They had emerged once more upon the lawn, and Felicia was now between -Angela and Geoffrey Daunt, who still strolled a little apart, looking at -the tree-tops. Maurice smiled first at her and then at Angela, as though -finding a whimsical humour in the situation. He must sympathize with -Angela. How could he not? Did not she herself sympathize? Were not these -thoughts her own familiar thoughts? Yet her one impulse was to disown -them when put before her in that soft, rapt voice; she found herself -contemplating them with no sense of communion, with a dull, hard -indifference, rather. She almost thought that she preferred pigs behind -their palings to seraphs in laces. - -"I know very little," she said; "I certainly do nothing." - -"Oh, come now!" Maurice broke in. "You talk to your father; you make a -beautiful garden; you play magnificently. Do you call that doing -nothing? And you were telling me last evening of the teas you loved -giving in the garden to the village children--pets of yours. I have no -doubt your teas give more pleasure than heaps of highly organized -charities." - -"Ah! you do interest yourself then!" Angela turned on her a look of -bright reproach. "How can you say you do nothing? I am so _glad_ you -have the children--so glad that you don't shut yourself away in a palace -of art; nothing is more dangerous than that." - -"That's a hit at me," Maurice declared; "I inhabit the dangerous palace, -and don't intend to come out of it, either, although Angela is always -sounding her trumpet at its gate." - -Geoffrey, flicking the ash from his cigar, now asked, "Might not a -shrine, conceivably, be sometimes as dangerous as a palace?" - -The tide, Felicia felt, as far as it had a direction, was with her and -against Angela; but the fact only heightened her angry discomposure. She -would not be drawn into a contest with Angela; she would not bid for -approbation. That she seemed to have gained it made her angrier. Mr. -Daunt was a half-insolent coxcomb, and she did not want Maurice to -defend her motives. - -Angela's eyes turned in a long gaze upon Geoffrey, who had asked his -light question as casually as he blew smoke rings into the air. "My dear -Geoffrey," she said, "you say things at times that make me wonder -whether you have not very delicate perceptions as well as a ruthless -will. I don't quite know what, to your mind, your meaning may be, but to -mine it is deep. Any height that separates us from life is dangerous; is -that it? Yet may not the shrine be brought amidst the turmoil, the -suffering of life--so that those who see it may touch it and be healed?" - -"It depends upon what's in it, my dear Angela." Geoffrey watched his -last, and very perfect ring, float softly against the blue. - -"A shrine implies some sanctified presence." - -"I am afraid that I haven't much faith in miraculous healings." - -"In anything, Geoffrey?" - -"In no words," the Olympian answered. The sun glittered upon his golden -head as he turned to smile at Angela with, Felicia felt, implacable -indifference. Their walk had brought them near the house again. - -"I must go and finish my book," said Felicia; "after these shrines and -palaces I shall feel that I am creeping into a ditch when I return to -it. I hope that ditches aren't dangerous, too." - -"Why do you also pretend not to be clever?" Angela asked her softly, -suddenly, smiling closely into her eyes. "What is the book?" She bent -her head to the title, looking up at once gravely. "You like him?" - -"I said it was like creeping into a ditch. But there is a certain -splendour to be found even in ditches--he shows it to one, I think." - -Angela put a hand on her arm; "Don't read him. A lily should not look at -ditches." - -"I am going to crawl to the very end of mine--muddy ordeal though it -is," Felicia declared, trying to keep defiance from her smile, and aware -that the Olympian was looking at her and that she was flushing. Her -detached student's interest was probably branded in all their eyes with -some crude and ugly interpretation. Well, let them think what they liked -of her. She turned and went into the house. This had not been a -melodious afternoon. - -"Poor child!" sighed Angela, "poor child! What a _milieu_! An infidel -papa and decadent literature." - -"Well, it has raised a lily, you see," Maurice remarked. - -"Has it?" said Angela. "Poor child. I long to help her." - - - - -CHAPTER IX - - -Angela Bagley wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that -she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it -was an idealism purely intellectual, a husk that hardly touched her -inner life. Her thoughts dwelt upon lofty towers; her motives and -actions often scuffled in the dust. Her meagre, self-intent nature -grasped at power and prominence through the decorative spirituality, -like the clutch, from precious laces, of a covetous hand. The -scaffolding of her life had raised her above crude or coarse desires; -she did not need to scheme for social gains and recognitions; but her -sympathy, her tenderness, her claiming of highest aims were tools to -her--though she did not know that they were only tools--tools in a -complex modern world weary of hardness and cynicism; altruistic tools -used always for an egotistic end. - -In this quiet corner of the country there was no challenging of her -effectiveness, but another, perhaps a deeper need, seemed threatened. - -Angela was helplessly in love with Maurice Wynne. For years he had -charmed her, baffled her, wrung her heart. She told herself that she -would be the noblest influence in his life, not knowing that to gain -that influence she would abase herself to any ignobility. Again and -again she had almost thrown herself at his head--oh! ugly -phrase!--Angela did not use it--shown him her heart, rather, though with -a dexterity in the presentation of it that allowed her to feign only the -giving of deep friendship if other givings were ignored. Again and again -Maurice had retreated, though always with outstretched hands, hands that -kept the clasp of friendship, a smile that salved her pride by -recognizing only friendship in her smile. And now upon the devotion, the -self-immolation of this love--for Angela was well aware of its romantic -indifference to vulgar considerations--now when she was almost sure that -she and Maurice were upon the verge of a final understanding, almost -sure that at last she was to devote herself, immolate herself, and lift -and redeem Maurice in so doing, now came this fear warning her against -Felicia. - -She had seen Maurice through many flirtations, and she was able to tell -herself that this was no more than one; Maurice never concealed his -raptures; his very frankness had consoled; but a deep distrust now -whispered in her heart, and she armed herself. - -The girl was blunt; she could be made to appear rude; she was -ungracious, and could be made to appear ugly in her ungraciousness. And -while fully conscious of the nobility of her own attitude in its -stooping to the shallow little girl, in its rebuffed sweetness, she was -by no means conscious that she had armed herself and that the attitude -was her weapon. - -The weapon was suddenly sharpened by the arrival next morning of Mr. -Merrick. - -Angela saw at once, in her first glance at the man, that Mr. Merrick -might make his daughter appear very badly indeed. She saw it in his good -looks, his complacency, his self-reference; in Geoffrey's calm gaze at -him, in Maurice's kind, swift adapting of himself to the older man's -genial patronage--an adaptation, Angela knew, brimming with amusement; -she saw these things in relation to Felicia's attitude towards them, her -placing of herself in a position where she could evade no weapons. Any -that struck her father would strike her. She not only stood beside him, -she stood before him. Angela in a swift simile saw her so standing, a -funny, female, little Saint Sebastian, struck all over with shafts of -lightly feathered irony. She could not help the simile, though thrusting -away the satisfaction it gave her and lingering with a dissatisfaction -that she would not analyze upon the possible nobility of this target -attitude, a nobility that others, too, might see. Relief, as unanalyzed, -came with the thought that there would be no beauty in Felicia's -stubborn yet unemphatic fidelity; no claim for sympathy. She could rely -upon her to be thoroughly undecorative and without the glimmer of a -halo. - -"How kind you are, dear Mrs. Merrick," Angela said to her hostess; "I -see so the difficulty of your situation. Your brother-in-law is an -intelligent man, with an altogether out-of-date intelligence, petrified -in its funny pride. But what a character! What grotesque vanity! How he -must jar upon you and your husband--could I fail to see it? And yet how -kind you are to him and his untrained, untutored little girl. You are, I -suppose, their only outlook on life." - -Mrs. Merrick saw Austin collapsing into a foolish insignificance, and -where she had never before been able to feel him as insignificant was -now enabled to see him with Lady Angela's clearer vision. She saw -herself, too, as very kind indeed. - -To Maurice Angela spoke with a mere word and shrug. "What a type! That's -what isolation does to a shallow-pated egotist. Ballooned assurance! His -mind is a mince-meat of little scraps from all the lesser thinkers of -the century!" Since coming into the country she had not been so near -Maurice as when they laughed together over the new-comer. - -"He encouraged me magnificently this morning," Maurice in his mirth -confessed. Angela made no allusion to the daughter. Felicia, meanwhile, -understood it all, finding her own lightness in comprehension slipping -from her. The youthful indifference in which she used to seek refuge was -failing her; she couldn't tell herself with truth that she was -indifferent, nor turn angry scorn into a laugh. Her aunt's derivative -discrimination made anger seethe too fiercely for a laugh, and her new -little air of competent disapproval; her aunt, as incapable of judging -as of appreciating him. - -Felicia understood when Geoffrey Daunt, as her father took the floor--he -was always taking the floor--got up and strolled away, quite as if he -were in the House and a bore was speaking; understood Lady Angela's sad -and vacant eyes, and Maurice's deft turning of the talk. Yes, her father -was a bore, especially when he was treated as one; and, baffled by an -unfamiliar atmosphere, conscious of the presence of new standards, he -became flushed, foolish, sententious. In her feeling for her father was -the maternal, protective instinct, and she saw him, now, among those too -stupid to recognize his worth, too ungenerous to help his failings, a -child bewildered by cold eyes and alien voices; and like a child he -strutted, and shouted, and made himself lamentably conspicuous. - -Since the grunt from Aunt Kate, since that discomposing walk in the -garden, Felicia had avoided Maurice, though unsuccessfully, for the -sense of his pursuing comradeship enveloped her, the anger that repulsed -them all felt itself helpless, unjust, before his intently smiling eye -that, seeing through her evasions, said, "I understand everything. -Command me, you charming friend." To keep silence towards him, to escape -for solitary walks, or to shut herself into her room for her readings -was not to evade that sense of comradeship shining in the sudden gloom. - -It warmly irradiated gloom on the day after her father's arrival, while -at lunch she tried to talk about roses with Mr. Jones, and to hear her -father monologuing, almost haranguing, at the other end of the table. - -Uncle Cuthbert, rosy, good-tempered, loud-laughing, had succumbed to his -brother's vehemence, and watched him with an air of cheerful -immovability. Gloom was upon Felicia and beneath it that heave of anger, -ready to bubble up. - -Maurice's eyes meeting hers once or twice, was the one ray of light, -strong, gay, sustaining. He was, indeed he was with her, however much -against her all the rest. - -"It's an age of sham, of conformity," Mr. Austin announced. "There seem -no fighters left. The pseudo-believers have it all their own way, since -apparently there is no genuine belief to oppose them. The spectacle is -revolting. We have our political figure-heads cynically dissolving old -faiths into vaporous metaphors--metaphors accepted literally by the -masses. We have science tottering to a ruinous alliance with -metaphysics. We have a church engaged in a dignified tug of war over a -candlestick--the rival camps spattering one another with mud or holy -water!" His audience was silent and Mr. Merrick, pushing back his plate -and leaning his arm on the table as he sat sideways to it, continued in -even more impressive tones, "Don't, my dear Cuthbert, speak to me of -faith, blind faith. Faith is a sort of intellectual suicide. With a -fixed subjective faith one is cut off from all objective truth as, I -think, Guyau said." - -He might as well have been talking Greek as far as the cheerful squire -was concerned; had better, for tattered remnants of youthful learning -still lurked in his wholesomely disencumbered mind. - -"Ah well," said Mr. Cuthbert, "all that's beside the mark. One must have -custom, you know, one must have conformity to keep things from going to -pieces. Godersham gave us an excellent sermon on faith last week," he -added, looking genially around the table. - -"Ah yes; then you advise a good deal of cutting," Mr. Jones went on to -Felicia, after the patient pause with which he had allowed the thunder -of Mr. Merrick's denunciations to roll by. - -"Godersham on faith. I've no doubt of it." The thunder rolled again. -"You will always find material prosperity buttressed by conformity. As -for the country going to pieces, that's rubbish. It shrivels in its -stiff shell." - -"I have the greatest regard for Godersham--the very greatest," Mr. -Cuthbert said temperately. - -"I am not attacking individuals, my dear Cuthbert, but principles. You -don't follow me. I will put it as simply as may be. What I mean is that -I despise the man who tells me that he believes, putting his own facile -interpretation on the word, in the Thirty-nine Articles, who receives -the benefits that such beliefs confer, while possessing a good deal -less theism than Voltaire--let us say. I consider such a man morally -culpable, and a system that perpetuates such dishonesty I consider a -menace to the national welfare." - -Everybody was listening now, except, perhaps, Mr. Jones, whose mind -still ran on his roses, and who, seeing Felicia's attention turned from -him, waited for a lull, his head bowed, frowning a little at the -interruption. Lady Angela, leaning her brow on her hand, was smiling a -wan smile of weariness and softest disdain. Mrs. Merrick looked her acid -impatience. Maurice Wynne kept kindly eyes of comprehension upon Mr. -Merrick's flushed insistence. But it was Geoffrey Daunt's face that -arrested Felicia's attention. - -Leaning back in his chair, a long hand playing with his bread, he looked -at her father with a look of indifferent yet keenly observant sarcasm. -To Felicia the look was like a sudden slap upon her own cheek. She felt -herself grow pale with anger. After all, what her father said was true, -true, at all events, of most of those who heard him, comfortable -conformists who would bow to any creed that insured comfort. And she did -not care whether it were true or not. He was alone, and they were all -against him. In the pause, awkward and hostile, that followed his -tirade, she said, clearly, with a light defiance, tossing the words at -all of them. "Hear! hear! papa." She flung into the emptiness a flaming -little banner of revolt. Geoffrey looked swiftly from her father to her. -Her eyes had been on him while she spoke and now met his. In her face, -steely in its steadiness as a drawn sword, he saw the whole drama of her -thoughts and read the deeper defiance towards himself. It was at him the -sword was pointed. For a long moment they looked at each other across -the table. Geoffrey's hand continued automatically to break his bread. - -"Hear! hear! Miss Merrick." Maurice echoed; he leaned forward, drawing -her eyes from Geoffrey's. "I put your glove in my helmet. But really, -you know, Mr. Merrick--" his smile, graceful, healing, turned from the -almost ardour with which it had assured her of championship--"we shall -plunge into such metaphysical depths if we are going to argue about -faith." - -"Metaphysics!" Mr. Merrick ejaculated with impatience. He had glanced at -Felicia's banner rather fretfully, and saw now her banner, rather than -his own bomb-shells, attracting the general attention. Turning his -shoulder upon the trivial crew, he addressed himself once more to the -task of forcing a way into his brother's comprehension--overlaid with -"crusts of custom." - -"A shallow infidelity is a very foolish thing, Felicia," said Mrs. -Merrick. - -"Miss Merrick isn't an infidel; she's only a loyalist," said Maurice. - -Mrs. Merrick, not quite sure whether the highest culture as represented -by Lady Angela required of her belief or scepticism, continued-- - -"Don't you fancy, Lady Angela, that the Church will outlast all -attacks?" - -"I think more of the spirit than of the form, perhaps," said Angela, who -still leaned on her hand and still looked down; "but to me mere -disbelief, especially when founded on egotistic self-assertion, is more -repellent, since more crude and embittered, than the lowest forms of -belief. Any symbol, however rudimentary, that enables the self to lose -itself, is sacred to me." - -She was in the right, as she would always be in the right, Felicia felt; -yet as she sat silent now, and not looking at Angela, she knew that the -scorn she felt was not the impotent spite of mere wrongness. - -Mrs. Merrick, murmuring her gratitude for this enlightenment, rose, and -Lady Angela, her hand on her shoulder, walked beside her out on to the -lawn. Felicia went into the drawing-room. - -She could have wept with fury; but taking up a book, she read, intently, -clearly conscious of every word, turning swift pages. - -Presently she looked up. Angela had entered the room. Going to a desk -near Felicia, she sat down and wrote. They were alone. Felicia read on. -Suddenly, laying down her pen, smiling, Angela turned to her. "You -_were_ more a loyalist than an infidel--I understood. Only your father -pained me so. My faiths, you see, are deep. I did not, through my pain, -pain you?" - -Felicia looked up from her book to meet this speech. Her face, over -amazement, still kept the look of steely steadiness. "I am sorry that -any one should think my father crude or egotistic; but a stranger's -opinion of him could hardly give me pain." - -This, Angela felt, was not pleasant. It was not what she had expected. -She regretted her little speech at the table which, to quick -intelligence, might savour of meanness--a stroke under cover of -darkness; and Felicia must not suspect her of stooping to any contest; -indeed, Angela did not suspect herself. And now Felicia seemed to drag -her down into open warfare. It was not at all pleasant. - -"You count me a stranger, Miss Merrick?" There was a real quiver in her -voice. - -"Do you count me as more?" Felicia asked. - -"I want to count you as a great deal more." - -A rebuff, especially an open rebuff, was intolerable to Angela. She -smiled now in her determination to win allegiance, even if an unwilling -one, and, as she leaned across the desk, smiling, Geoffrey and Maurice -came in. The moment could not have been more propitious; her loveliness -of attitude and look must, she felt, contrast most advantageously with -Felicia's sullen stiffness. She let it tell for a moment and then -slipped over to Felicia's sofa, taking her hand and turning the smile, -now, on the two men. - -"I am telling Miss Merrick how splendid she was," she said; "we all -understood, didn't we?" - -Felicia, in dismayed astonishment, felt a net thrown round her. She -broke through it, regardless of rents. "_I_ don't understand," she -declared. She rose, drawing her hand from Angela's, confronting them. -"I think trivial things had best be left alone." With this, picking up -her hat, she went to a mirror and deliberately tied it on, feeling a -full composure over her hurry of angry thoughts. She did not care how -uncouth she seemed. Angela should not force her to seeming trust when -she felt only deepest distrust. Her eyes, in the mirror, met Maurice's. -Before she was conscious of the impulse she found that she had commanded -him as a woman commands the man of whose obedience she is assured. At -once he understood and answered. - -"May I come too?" he asked. - -"Do. I am going for a walk." - -This, then, must seem the reality that underlay it all; the struggle of -two women over a man. Felicia's face kept its hardness as she and -Maurice went out. She had never struggled, yet her certainty of him, the -fact that her departure with him had been a triumph, made her feel as if -she had. She did not like the triumph, and walking silently over the -lawn, Maurice beside her, she regretted the command. It implied a great -deal; it accepted all that his eyes had implied to her. Smarting under -this sense of humiliation, she could show no suavity to her companion, -and the acute young man suspected that he had served his purpose in -merely following her. - -Maurice's tact, as delicate as a woman's, forced no sympathy upon her by -an allusion to the scene they had just left. He talked lightly as they -went through the shrubberies into the garden, for Felicia, forgetting -the intention of her departure, did not speak of a long walk, and went -slowly along the flower-beds, past the warm walls where fruit was -ripening. She responded with grave smiles to his talk. - -"Do you know," he said presently, stopping before her in a narrow path -where small fruit-trees cast shadows upon them, "to-day you are not a -bit a Watteau, but a Romney? The shade your hat makes across your brows -and eyes is all Romney--Romney at his best. Do you mind being told that -you only remind me of beautiful things?" - -Felicia, finding him, for the first time, almost tactless, made no -reply. She picked a small pear from the tree beside her. "Now _do_ you -consider such a remark impertinent?" Maurice demanded. "You frighten me, -you know. I feel in you such a _farouche_ fastidiousness. Our idealist -in the drawing-room, now, can accept positively blaring compliments." - -"Well, your appreciation of the shadow my hat makes could hardly be -called that," said Felicia, biting into her pear; "I suppose I hardly -know how to accept compliments gracefully--never having had any made me -before." - -"It's too funny! But you know that I am incapable of blaring before you. -You know that, don't you?" - -"How can I tell? I have known you just five days." - -"Still--you do know me." - -"Doesn't Lady Angela know you too? and does she know that you consider -your compliments to her blaring?" Felicia, over her pear, was smiling at -him now with her dryad-like malice. - -"Ergo, if she is deceived in me you must be, and I am not at all -trustworthy." - -"No, no," Felicia protested. - -"No, no, indeed. Lady Angela doesn't know me as well as you do--in spite -of your nipping reference to five days--and for the simple reason that -she doesn't know herself; that inner blindness blurs all one's outer -vision, you know. I am fond of her, really fond of her--she is, on the -whole, a very good sort. But she seldom means what she thinks she -means--and that's so disconcerting. Now you always mean just what you -intend to mean." - -The memory of Aunt Kate's grunt, dimmed already, was effaced by this -frank analysis of his relation with Angela. Felicia hardly knew how deep -was her own relief, but only glad that she was wresting no possession -from anybody. When she came in after the subsequent talk, glancing and -desultory as it had superficially seemed, her perturbation was of a new -order. It was as if he had walked in upon her own particular -garden--finding, during her momentary confusion, its gate ajar--had made -its paths his own and, as it almost seemed, smoked a cigarette among its -roses. Yet, with the perturbation, there was something perversely -pleasing in the delicate desecration. - -This alien fragrance flattered and fluttered her. She was becoming very -intimate with Maurice Wynne, certainly not against her will, yet not -altogether with it. Her will did not seem to count. It was such a new -thing for her to talk about herself with somebody, her instinct was to -hide behind her hedges; but Maurice found her every time, and she felt -delight at being found. It seemed inevitable that she should like him, -should know that he liked her, and tell him anything he asked. - -And Felicia was becoming aware that there might be something more than -liking. She looked quickly away from the suggestion, yet it charmed, -intoxicated her a little to feel her power over this sympathetic young -man. She could not pause to ask herself whether he embodied her ideals, -whether, fundamentally, his meaning chimed with hers. His meaning seemed -all in his smile, his understanding; and his shaft of real light, strong -and sunny, made ideals pale, ineffectual. Life itself was hurrying her -on and there was no time to pause, to analyze, to weigh her heart. She -only surely knew that she was perplexed, happy, fascinated and a little -frightened. If this were the fairy-prince he was not the grave one she -had imagined, and if he were not the fairy-prince she would not in the -least break her heart over it. No depths were touched; yet the heart -might ache at the loss of the dear companion. - -Meanwhile, his feeling for her made of all life a new and vivid thing. - - - - -CHAPTER X - - -There must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted -with him, must recognize him as her champion, though championship might -endanger more than he could allow her to guess. He didn't much care what -it endangered. To shut out the future and keep the present moment golden -was Maurice's philosophy. - -He found Felicia in the library next morning, sitting high on the -library steps, a pile of dusty volumes on her knees. Mr. Merrick was -meditating an article on credulity and had asked her to find for him the -eighteenth-century deists, for whom she had looked through rows of long -undisturbed volumes. Felicia smiled somewhat grimly as she clapped -together the covers of Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Her father's -articles rarely got beyond this initial stage of the accumulation of -material. German idealism had been abandoned. "Why attack these castles -of sand?" said Mr. Merrick. - -From dust and the arid pages through which she glanced she looked down -at Maurice. - -"To-day you are not to escape me," he declared. "I claim all to-day. You -will practise?" - -"I will. Why do you say I escape you?" She had to smile at his -acuteness. - -"Since the other day--in the garden--you have. Angela irritated you, -Geoffrey irritated you, and I was included in the irritation. Isn't it a -little true?" He leaned against her steps, answering her smile. - -"Perhaps a little," Felicia owned. "I felt, perhaps, rather out of it." - -"So you are--out of it, with me." His words were light, too, but she -felt the underlying emphasis. "You see we feel things in the same way, -see them in the same way; that sets us apart. It was unkind of you to -bar me away from you--even for a day or two--and two days is a -frightfully long time in a mere week." His voice lifted itself from the -almost gravity to which it had sunken; happily and sweetly, differences -looked at and effaced, he went on. "I've something here I want you to -see and feel with me." He showed her the volume he held, -Maeterlinck--delightful dreamer. - -"At first he had nightmares, but now his dreams are sane; that's an -unusual quality for dreams. They seemed dreamed in sunlight, too, rather -than in darkness." - -"This isn't nightmare, but it's not a sunny dream either. Sad dawn -perhaps--or perhaps twilight; you must say." - -"I saw Mr. Daunt pass outside just then. He always spends the morning -here. Shall we read it somewhere else?" - -"Ah--let Geoffrey share it. I should rather like to see how Geoffrey -would take it." Maurice was reflecting that read to her alone the -twilight dream might carry him too far. "You dislike him? Really?" - -"Frankly, I don't like him--but I don't want to exclude him from the -reading. We are hostile elements, you see. Anything so self-assured -makes me feel frivolous, and yet, I do see something admirable in him. -He was walking on the lawn, in the moonlight, last night, and he made me -think, strange as it may seem, of Sir Galahad." - -"Ah!" Maurice beamed his delight at her perception. "You have seen the -best thing in Geoffrey--the single-minded directness of his quest--its -object is no Holy Grail; but his resolute advance has its beauty." - -"And he is very fond of you, I see that too. It's a touch of human -tenderness that makes him less chilling." - -"Yes, dear old Geoff; I think that I appeal to his one aesthetic fibre. -I think he feels towards me as though I were a bit of very nice Limoges -hanging on his wall. The colour pleases his eye. He would be sorry if I -got broken." - -"No, no; you touch a deeper fibre than the aesthetic. I don't believe he -has any aesthetic fibres at all, or sees the colour in anything. How -grey and rigid his life must be." Geoffrey walked in as she said it. - -Maurice greeted his friend gaily. "Just in time, Geoffrey, to hear a bit -of poetry. I'm going to try its effect on you and Miss Merrick at once." -He turned his pages. - -Geoffrey, laying down the morning paper he held in his hand, came to -Felicia's side. - -"You are fond of poetry, Miss Merrick?" - -Felicia had already observed his manner of humorous tolerance towards -women. He smiled and made a remark as though offering a child a -lollipop--and without consulting the child's preference as to size, -shape or colour. - -"Sometimes," she answered, looking down at him from her high seat on the -steps. Their eyes had not met since that look of the day before. "Not -too often." - -"I thought it could not be too often for the modern cultured young -woman. Surely you can't get too much of--Browning for instance?" and -Geoffrey smiled up at her. She felt that a very large bull's-eye was -being kindly offered. - -"Easily," she retorted; "but let's hear Maeterlinck, who has been -waiting for you." - -Maurice had found the page. Leaning his elbow on the steps, he read-- - - Et s'il revenait un jour, - Que faut-il lui dire? - --Dites-lui qu'on l'attendit - Jusqu'a s'en mourir-- - - Et s'il m'interroge encore - Sans me reconnaitre? - --Parlez-lui comme une soeur, - Il souffre peutetre-- - - Et s'il demande ou vous etes, - Que faut-il repondre? - --Donnez-lui mon anneau d'or - Sans rien lui repondre. - - Et s'il veut savoir pourquoi - La salle est deserte? - --Montrez-lui la lampe eteinte - Et la porte ouverte. - - Et s'il m'interroge alors - Sur la derniere heure? - --Dites-lui qui j'ai souri - De peur qu'il ne pleure. - -Felicia, bending over her lapful of books, her elbows on her knees, -looked at him, and Geoffrey looked at her. - -He would have liked her eyes to turn gently upon him. Her eyes were like -deep limpid water; they made him think of a still pool under sunny, -autumnal trees. Felicia's manner towards Maurice during these last days -had entirely allayed his anxieties on his friend's behalf. His newer -impressions of her removed her from any conceptions of wild-rose -flirtations. Her quiet air, now, of intelligent comradeship defined and -limited the unsubstantiality of Maurice's hopes. But that she smiled -upon Maurice, that Maurice pleased her, was evident. And Geoffrey was -sorry that he had not pleased her. She would not forget that silent -mischance of the day before. - -A vision of her father rose; a half-baked person; an absurd person; but -he was sorry that the daughter should have seen that he thought him so, -for he wanted the daughter to smile at him. He hardly knew that he -wanted it, hardly knew that he was sorry, hardly thought at all as he -stood, his hand on the shelf near Felicia's shoulder, vaguely listening -to pathetic words and looking at Felicia's half-averted profile. He was -conscious only of a curious feeling about Felicia, a feeling like the -soft stretch into the present of a distant memory, an awakening, dim and -touched. - -Once when he was a boy, rambling on a summer day in the woods, he had -come, rather torn and breathless, through a thicket, upon the sweetest, -sunny space, set round with tall, still trees, thick with deep grass and -open to the sky. He had flung himself down in the warm grass and lain -for long looking up at the far, blue sky with its calm, sailing -squadrons of clouds. Something in himself, some quality deep and -unrecognized, the quality that made him nearer to his saintly father -than to his mother with her worldly energy, had quietly arisen, had -seemed to mingle with all the peace and beauty, to draw him to the sky, -or to draw all the sky down into his own irradiated and happy heart. He -had never forgotten the sunny loneliness; and he had never found the -spot again. Felicia made him think of it, of the sweet grass and the -still trees and the sky. And when he looked at her he seemed to have -struggled through thickets to a sudden, an almost startling peace. But -the poem was finished, and she was still looking at Maurice. - -"Isn't that the very heart of love?" Maurice asked. - -She paused; she was touched; she did not wish to show how much. - -"I should have wanted him to cry," she said. - -"No; I think that if I loved a woman," Maurice turned the leaves of his -book, "I should want her to smile." - -"I don't believe it. I believe that you would rather she cried -dreadfully." - -"You don't think me capable of these heights of self-abnegation?" - -"I was thinking of the heart--as it is. Now, I might have said it -all--only, oh! how I should hope that he might be listening at the -door!" - -The slight tension in Maurice's voice and look yielded to her -swallow-like darts and skimmings; over deep waters perhaps. - -"Base girl!" he cried, laughing. - -"Base and natural. Isn't the heart of love the longing to be loved? How -could one miss such a chance--even if it meant more suffering for the -loved one? Besides, it would be better for him that he should suffer." - -But Maurice persisted, his eyes on his book, "If I were dying, and -suffering through her fault, I would rather she were ignorant of -it--rather she smiled." - -"But you would rob her then of her right to suffer--of her right to love -you more." Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey. "What would you wish? -Don't say that you are as inhumanly noble as Mr. Wynne." - -"I don't think we can in the least tell what we would wish." - -"So that my selfishness and Mr. Wynne's magnanimity may both be -illusory?" - -"You are nearer the truth, I imagine. The poem seems to me rather -mawkish," Geoffrey added. - -Felicia, laughing, stood up, handing her books to Maurice. "Papa goes -this morning and wants these; I must take them to him. You have cleared -the rather foggy atmosphere, Mr. Daunt, though I don't think the poem -mawkish." - -Before Geoffrey, Felicia might smile with reassuring composure, and -Maurice seem intent only on the psychology of a love poem; but to both -of them there had been deeper meanings, deeper recognitions under the -little scene. The sense of tension had strained at both hearts. In -Felicia was that more vivid sense of life--of an approaching crisis; in -Maurice an open owning to himself that he was desperately in love. More -desperately than he had ever been with anybody; and yet--what was he to -do about it? He knew that Felicia could bring him nothing, or next to -nothing; he himself was frightfully in debt, and unless some book or -picture would write or paint itself into astonishing remunerativeness he -could see no prospect of independence. Angela was certainly there; odd -to realize, and rather humiliating, how, in spite of all his talk -against marrying for money she had always been there, a comfortable -cushion in his thoughts for anxiety to flop on and find ease. But then -he had really been half in love with Angela; the refuge had never been a -distasteful one; only some inner impetus was needed to make it really -alluring; and it was with a new sense of insecurity that he realized -that falling desperately in love with Felicia made the refuge -impossible--as far as any real comfort in it went. There was an added -fear in the thought that a new attitude in Angela might have made the -refuge inaccessible. - -Angela must feel herself neglected, though neglected only for a -flirtation. Such a flirtation would leave their half-friendly, -half-sentimental intimacy untouched, leave the path to the refuge clear; -but did she guess that it was not a flirtation?--see that it was neither -so little nor so much? And might she not, her long patience exhausted, -marry somebody else? It was a painful thought. Maurice could hardly see -himself without that vision of the cushion to flop on. Robbed of that -final refuge, life offered ugly wastes of effort. - -He scorned himself as he turned from these thoughts, turned resolutely -to both the pain and joy of others. But Maurice could not dwell for long -looking at pain. He would not look so far. The mere present was -beautiful. If only one could keep it so; there was the difficulty; one -couldn't stand still; time shoved one, however unwilling, along, and at -the end of the sunny vista was--pain; the flowers and trees that led to -it could only bring a momentary forgetfulness. It would be base to make -serious love to Felicia; and would she enhance the present? would she -flirt? did he want her to flirt? The Watteau element in Felicia, her -colouring and manner of knotting her hair encouraged these futile -surmises as to whether the resemblance would extend to a permission of -half-artificial, half-sincere coquetries. If she would be the Dresden -shepherdess to his Dresden shepherd for the day or two remaining of -their companionship--but he shook off such vagrant fancies with a real -pang. Such fancies, after letting her know--she must know--that he would -suffer so that she might smile! A deeper note had sounded. It would not -in the least satisfy him to be her Dresden shepherd; she would never be -his shepherdess; the Watteau resemblance went no further than that -superficial frivolity. And the question that underlay all others was the -one he had no right seriously to ask: Did she--could she--love him? - - - - -CHAPTER XI - - -He had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently -and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such -thoughts. He received quite a solid cheque for an article he had -recently written--a cheque large enough to buy his boots for a whole -year--and Maurice was fastidious about his boots; but not therefore -logically large enough to make uncomfortable realities recede, as they -did, behind a golden haze. Maurice's moods easily alternated between -golden hazes and black fogs. - -Geoffrey went away on that morning--that, too, was the receding of an -uncomfortable reality, for Geoffrey seemed to hold him by the shoulders, -like a naughty, unreasonable child, and make him look at things he -didn't want to look at. He himself was to go on the next day. There was -a familiar element of recklessness in the mood as he practised the -violin with Felicia in the sunny, ugly morning-room. He was overstrung -and happy, and the music they played, by its sadness, made happiness -more blissful. - -"I sometimes think," he said, laying down his violin and leaning his arm -on the piano, while Felicia still sat in her place, "that sadness is -the most beautiful thing in life." - -In response to such moods Felicia usually became rather matter-of-fact, -as now, when she said, "To look at, to listen to, not to live, perhaps." - -"But we shouldn't be able to see or hear it if we hadn't lived it." - -"It only becomes beauty, then, when we've outlived it, not while we are -in it. People dress up their sorrows so," said Felicia, turning vaguely -the pages of the music before her; "they always remind me of the king in -the fairy-tale, who had clothes made of air and thought himself -sumptuously apparelled when he was really naked." - -"I believe you are right," laughed Maurice, "and that it is only when we -are happy that we enjoy looking at sadness." - -Felicia, though she smiled, was not feeling happy. She had waked to the -realization that this and the next were the last days with Maurice, and -there was a pang in the realization. She saw suddenly before her the -empty months. To re-enter the old monotony after this flashing week was -a prospect sad with a sadness that could not deck itself in illusion. -But she did not want Maurice to know that she was sad; indeed, was it -life or was it loss that made her so? She could not say. - -"And since it's a happy morning, shall we have some more sadness?" she -asked. - -"Not quite yet." Maurice still leaned near her and looked at her. The -golden haze was about them; it shut off everything else. She must love -him; only that would content him. Why not find out, and let the future -take care of itself? It probably would--her father could probably give -them something. He would take to portrait-painting in earnest, write a -lot of articles--very incoherent thoughts went through his mind as he -contemplated Felicia and hesitated. - -In the midst of this hesitation--_could_ he risk a cramping -poverty?--would it be base to find out whether she loved him--to make -her love him--with no intention of taking such a risk? Felicia raised -grave eyes to him. In their unconsciousness of such craven hesitations -they seemed to sweep them from him. The clouded intentness of his blue -eyes resolved itself--as if a wind had blown bare the sunny ardour of -the sky--into a gaze of frankest adoration. He smiled at her silently, -and the smile said, "I love you. You are near me. That is why I am -happy." - -But Felicia, feeling only a strange fear, looked away. - -"Felicia, dearest Felicia," said Maurice. He took her hand. "I do so -adore you. Tell me that you can love me?" - -Was it fear or rapture? She did not know. She confessed; - -"I suppose it must be that." - -"You do love me?" - -"I suppose I do." - -"Oh!--darling!" he exclaimed. He put his arms around her, and, while she -still kept her look of almost frightened gravity, he kissed at last his -Dresden shepherdess. - -It was altogether like an _Embarquement pour Cythere_, Maurice thought, -with the one little corner of his mind that could still see enhancing -similes. They were setting sail in the golden haze--what need to ask -where bound--to something happy it must be. And, flushed like a -wild-rose from his kiss, Felicia felt, too, that swift sailing away into -a sunny mist, felt, like the soft speeding through shining waves, relief -at the leaving of hostile shores, delightful ease, the soothing of the -ruffled frightened heart, afraid of life and of its own loneliness. -Life, then, was good, since he loved her. The deliciousness of being -loved, after that first shock of wonder--that slipping from the shore to -the unknown sea, sang through her like the sea about a prow. Her new -trust in life was like a wind bearing her on; with sails all set she -went to meet its meaning. - -"I almost felt that you loved me--I did not really guess it--but I felt, -though it seemed so strange," she said. She drew away from him a -little--her hands folded on his breast--so that she might look at him. - -"From the first moment I saw you; from the moment you came round that -turning in the lane. You can't claim any such pedigree of feeling!" He -put his hands over hers. Their looks were deep, under the light smiles -and the lightness of their words. - -"I can see no other beginning--unless just now is one." - -"You did not know--not one bit--until just now." - -"Can one fall in love so suddenly?" she wondered. - -"Yes, if one has been feeling love near one for so long." - -"And you really--really knew?" - -"From the meeting in the lane. Something inside me said: Here--here at -last she is. There was a bird singing near us--do you remember, darling? -The bird seemed to say it, too. I was like an awakened Siegfried." - -"Oh--dear Maurice, it is too beautiful," said Felicia, almost sighing. -"Is this my empty life suddenly brimming over?" - -She rose, leaving her hand in his, and they walked up and down the long -room. - -"Do you know you are the only person who has ever loved me?" she said. -"Does that make me seem of less value?" - -Maurice laughed his joyous laugh. "It only makes me seem of more; it is -my _metier_, that--to find, to recognize, to love rare and precious -things. Who that has ever known you _could_ have loved you, pray? Who -could even have recognized you? But, dearest, that is my only value, -that seeing it in others." - -The gravity, the wondering sweetness of her eyes were lifting him above -even the joyous mood. He paused in their walk, looking back at her with -a gravity almost sad. - -"Idealize me, always idealize me, and I shall perhaps grow into some -real value myself--for the reality now is so thin, so weak, so unstable. -Something in you almost frightens me, Felicia." And as he spoke she saw -in his eyes a strange and sudden darkness. - -"Something in me!" The appeal was too near and dear. It was she, now, -who put her arms about him, who kissed him, bending his forehead down to -her lips, saying, "Nothing in me shall ever frighten you. You will come -to me to lose your fears." - -It was then that the wonder left her; then, in that moment of sudden -appeal and her response to it, that she felt her own love as more than -the taking of joy, and understood that in him was some deep need of her, -and in herself the power to answer it. - -Later on they were able in their happiness to laugh over the ridiculous -suddenness of it all. Only a week! To fall in love in one week! What -could they know of one another? Felicia teasingly asked him. - -"What indeed!" Maurice retorted. They knew everything was the assurance -underlying these playful scepticisms. And Felicia also asked-- - -"You never did care for Lady Angela?" - -"Never--never--never!" said Maurice. In the light of his love for -Felicia, casting all past fancies into shadow, the words were sincere. -Not so sincere, but that could not be helped, was his answer to the next -question-- - -"Nor she for you--not really, I hope?" - -"Not really; not a scrap, really. She wants disciples, not lovers." - -Angela, watching them, her wan smile unchanged, through the last two -days--the days of the happy secret--wondered, a poignancy in the wonder, -if this were not less but more than a flirtation. A hateful supposition, -hateful too the thought that it was upon Maurice's common-sense only -that she could count. She asked Felicia in the afternoon to walk with -her about the garden, and she played her part with an exaltation that -made it almost a reality to Felicia as well as to herself. She would -love this girl who was rending her heart, and she would win her love. -Once or twice a sad little commentary on Maurice slipped out--the -emotionalism that made his moods independable, his purely aesthetic -standards. Such comments were quite sincere. These characteristics in -Maurice had often troubled her; she only hoped to lift this hard little -girl who had enchanted him to a higher point of view than that of mere -conquest--to see the responsibilities that followed it, to intimate, as -it was only kind to do, that such conquest could not well be permanent. -The bitter, unrecognized thought was that it might be Felicia who was -entrapped, not Maurice. She could talk with magnanimity to an inferior -nature, but candour and a pride more stainless than her own humility -Angela could not forgive--and did not know she could not. She talked -herself, however, into an almost tearful self-contentment, pressed -Felicia's unwilling hand, and told her how glad she was that they had -met. "I hope it will all bear fruit. I believe that anything real does, -you know." Felicia was left in a state of some perturbation and -confusion. She did not trust, but she was almost touched. It was after -this talk that she asked Maurice the question about Angela, a question -slightly tremulous; she felt that Angela might deserve pity. - -Angela went to her room and knelt down before the serene and beautiful -head of a Christ that she always carried with her. - -"I have lived to my highest!--oh! I have," she murmured; and at the -sound of her own rapt and suffering voice the tears, long repressed, -came. - -"This agony must lift us both. He is the instrument on which to try my -soul. Love must win, and I will win him; and keep him and redeem him; -and I will redeem that poor flippant child who is able, just because she -is so small, so blind, to blunder so among my heart-strings--to hurt me -so." - -The love that swelled her heart at this moment was self-love. She did -not know that she hated Felicia. - - - - -CHAPTER XII - - -Maurice and Felicia walked along the lane where they had first met; she -was going home and he to go that evening. It was a farewell walk. On the -hill-top, in the garden he was at last to see, they were to say -good-bye--good-bye for a little while. Felicia, in her new and blissful -confidence, did not even think of asking for how long, it seemed sure to -be so short. But Maurice was already asking himself the question, -battling creeping doubts with passionate asseverations. And better than -passionate asseverations was the meeting of such doubts by holding her -more closely in the deep, lonely lane, dispelling shadows from his mind -with a kiss. To hold her, to kiss her, was to keep alight a flame of joy -within him, a flame that drooped and flickered when those sad thoughts -blew over it; and without was sadness too; the fragrance of the white -traveller's-joy in the hedges seemed a sigh; the soft evening, the pale -clouded sky, were grey-habited nuns, whispering of the crumbling of -earthly hopes. - -That Felicia heard no such whispers, no such sighs, her pensive but -steadily gazing profile showed. The pensiveness was a dove brooding on a -secure peace; her eyes, gazing ahead, had the gravity of a child's -seeing happy visions. He felt a pang of envy. Or was it ignorance that -kept fear from her? Again he turned her face, white flower that it was, -to him, bending his lips to hers. Only so he found some of her peace, -her serenity. - -Felicia, after the kiss, still looked at him. "I would do anything for -you--suffer anything," she said. - -"I don't want you ever to suffer for me." - -"I would almost rather. It would make even deeper roots." - -"And if the suffering were poverty, grinding poverty?--I am very poor, -Felicia"--Maurice's voice hurried, broke a little--"I have nothing." - -"I should like showing you how little I mind. We can both work. I have -always thought that I might make something by giving lessons in -music--or translating; I am a good linguist." Her realism was a new -aspect of her. Her steadiness, then, had not faced mere visions. But -such realism perplexed, almost dismayed him. A laborious union had never -entered his mind. Her words conjured up a grey picture of unrelieved -effort, a wife striving beside him in obscurity. It hurt him more for -her than for himself, though for himself it gave a tremor of shrinking. - -"You work, darling! Absurd! Besides, London swarms with music-teachers, -with translators. No, no; something will turn up for me. I can put such -heaps of irons in the fire. I may suddenly become a popular -portrait-painter--charge a thousand apiece for my pictures; two or three -a year would keep us going beautifully. Or I may write a book." - -"Papa and I live on as many hundreds!" Felicia ejaculated, in her smile -a touch of maternal tolerance for such improbabilities. - -In his strong reaction from that grim picture she had so calmly drawn he -could laugh at the thought of the little hundreds. Yet that even those -base rungs of the ladder were not beneath his feet gave him a chill. - -Among the pines, as they began to climb, the wind sighed, and the sun, -far below and far away over the grey wastes of evening, made only a -sullenly smouldering line of embers on a cloud-barred horizon. They -paused to look back at it. - -"How one feels the autumn--almost like winter already," said Felicia, -leaning against him. "It is like our music of yesterday morning, isn't -it?--a sadness so beautiful to look at from our happiness." - -But already Maurice's momentary energy had crumbled. The melancholy of -the wind, the sunset, seized him like a presage. - -"Oh! Felicia," he exclaimed, holding her closely, "will you always love -me? You are so much stronger than I am." - -"But Maurice--dear--the only strong thing in me is my love for you." - -"No, no; not only that. You are not afraid so easily as I am. And this -parting--you can bear it--with such calm!" - -There was almost the sob of a reproach in his voice as he leaned his -cheek to hers for comfort. The echo--as of an alien knock at the doors -of her happiness, went through the peace, the radiance within. Tears -sprang to her eyes. - -"Why, Maurice!--calm! It's only that loving you--having you to love me -is so great, so wonderful, that even yet I can only feel the -thankfulness--the beauty. Don't you know that when you are gone my life -will be only a waiting?" The tremor of pain in her, her trust in him, -roused again a flare of his manliness. - -"Not for long, dearest. Waiting isn't a keen enough word for what I -shall feel. Longing, longing, until I see you again." - -"Oh! it will be keener than mere waiting with me, too." She felt dimly -that she must not shackle him in the fight he was going to make for her -by showing him what pain to her would be in the waiting. - -They walked on. As they neared the house Felicia said, in a voice that -had regained its quiet, "We must tell papa." - -Again in Maurice was that crumbling. The last embers of intoxication -seemed, as she spoke, to die, to leave him looking at ashen realities. -He would conquer poverty. Yes; but bind himself and her to face it--as -yet menacing and unconquered? That would be to wrong her more deeply -than she could understand. She must be free--free before the world; and -fidelity to him merely a matter of feeling. And, thinking of freedom, -his mind, with a pang of self-scorn, looked back for an ugly moment at -the forfeited refuge--at Angela--not yet openly forfeited. - -"No, dearest," he said, flushing in the twilight and feeling that, in -spite of its loss of intoxication, his love for her had never been so -strong as in its uprising over such thoughts, "Not yet. Let it be our -secret. My affairs are in such a mess--I must not go to your father -until they are really straightened. I really ought not to have told you -until they were straight; but I could not help that. It seemed almost -weak-spirited to go without telling you, for such a grubby little -reason--a reason that can't touch us--but that must shut out others. -Don't you think so? Darling, I have not hurt you--already?" - -Nothing in the bent, listening profile told him so; the fear came with a -sudden glimpse of a craven self, lest she should see it too. But the -eyes raised to his held, with a new patience, no new vision of him. Her -smile in its grave acceptance of burdens still found joy in the bearing -of burdens for their love's sake. "No; how could it hurt me? I see that -you are right. We will keep our secret to ourselves for a little while." -It was now her trust that seemed to him almost as terrible as the -dreaded lack of it had been. Cruel, he thought, that mere material -circumstance should toss one's helpless mind like a shuttlecock from one -fear to another. But--"Only a very little while," he said, nerving -himself to be what she thought him. - -Felicia, pushing open the garden gate, stepped inside; the gate swung -to. She held his hand over it. - -"So this is the garden. It is exquisite to leave you here among all -these flowers; to think of you loving me and waiting for me in all this -serenity." He smiled, looking quickly from her to the irises, the -pansies, the roses. But the smile faded. "Ah! but how can I wait!--how -can I bear to leave you!" His pain, his fear, surged up in the words. He -hid his face on her shoulder, longing for a strength that would banish -them; her trust in his strength hurt him too much to give it; but when -she kissed him fear was soothed. Only--how would it be when she was no -longer there to kiss him? - -Her hand for a long moment had pressed his head to her breast; then she -moved from him, saying, "You will be late for your train, dear Maurice, -and I shall be late for my dinner. Papa must be waiting." - -Maurice, to spend this last day with her, was to take an evening train -that would get him to London in time to catch the Scotch express. He -must go sandwiched but dinnerless. They had laughed over the sacrifice. -He had now, again, to laugh, brokenly. - -"How can you think of trains?" - -"I am thinking most of the train that will bring you back." Once more -her trust struck flame from him. "Ah!--soon! soon!" he said. They kissed -silently. He saw the tears in her eyes and adored her for the strength -that, for his sake, mastered pain and did not let her fear. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - - -The wonderful week seemed, as it receded into the past, to gain in -wonder, to irradiate the present with ever-deepening meaning. Everything -was beautiful; all relations beautified; for the unbeautiful ones she -could feel no longer any bitterness. And into the superficial monotony -of the old life Maurice's letters came like chimes of bells breaking the -stillness. He wrote constantly, letters of a quite recovered gaiety, -giving his impressions of the people, the places he saw, showing her -life as he saw it--as she some day should see it, beside him; and -through all went the ardour of his homage, his longing. - -Felicia, in answering, felt that she could with him be so entirely her -whole self that she need not show her whole self; it was easier for her -to give him her soul dressed in tender humour, beribboned with quizzical -freaks of fancy. It was his understanding of her, his consequent perfect -possession, that lifted her life into the new sense of power and -freedom, for was it not freedom and power when every faculty was -effective, bore fruit in his responsiveness? - -Not till late October was the beauty of the new life touched by a breath -of doubt or sadness. A dejection, then, showed itself in Maurice's -letters, a dejection that coincided with his return to London after his -round of country visits, coincided with his taking stock, as it were, -of his situation and looking his powers and resources in the face. The -letters then became at once more passionate and more infrequent. He must -not sadden his darling, and the analysis of his glooms could only sadden -her. He was working--it gave him less time for writing--luckily for her. -In her answers Felicia's courage steadily smiled, held out an -unfaltering hand to help him over the morass of melancholy; but the -melancholy, more and more, like a fog closing round him, seemed to shut -him from her. Her apprehensions from vague became cutting. She did not -know a touch of distrust, but the separation, the sadness, hurt too -much. "Come and see me; spend a day. We can walk in the woods. It will -give you strength and me too," she wrote. - -Maurice only sorrowfully answered, in a letter like the slow rolling of -big tears, that he must not; it wouldn't mean strength, it would mean -disablement. He must wait until he had more right to see her. He begged -her to love--love--love him. After the glory of golden days and -thoughts, of deep, glad breathing in a crystal air, this change was like -a labouring breath, and like the change in the year--the grey and -amethyst of late autumn. The old loneliness returned again and again, -but with a poignant stab that no former loneliness had known. -Bereavement seemed to hover near her. - -Gathering late roses in the garden one day she faced, for the first -time, her own fears--saw that they were fears. She had not heard for a -week from Maurice, and his last letter had been little more than a -plaintive sigh of self-pity. For the first time Felicia was asking -herself if joy was not to be a distant, a far distant thing. She saw -more clearly the forces against him--forces that her young ardour had -barely glanced at; she did not distrust his love--that would have been -too horrible a wrenching of the new doubled life, but she distrusted his -strength before such obstacles. - -The roses were fragrant, fragile, white, the outer petals streaked with -a hardy red. When she had filled her basket she went to the gate and -leaned over it, looking vaguely down the road. The thought of that -summer evening was with her, the life there had been in it--deep, -sweet life--in the pain, the trust. The facing of a long, blank -patience was almost death-like, almost like the shutting of the eyes, -a yielding of oneself to the earth, with a faith in final -resurrection--where?--when?--who knew?--for all light in a shrouded -present. Felicia shook off the simile, with a fear that Maurice's -plaintiveness was infecting her. He had more right to it--burdened -fighter. Her love a burden?--again her heart dropped. She bent her face -to the roses. Their sweetness went through her like a smile. She sighed, -her eyes closed, over the relief of her own gratitude for such smiles. -When she looked up again she saw a man's figure among the pines below. -It was only for a moment that her heart could stand still with joyous -questioning--joy so keen that it seemed to leave the heart it passed -from bleeding; for in another she saw that it was not Maurice, and -then, with a wholesome surprise, the staunching of the wound, that the -wayfarer was Geoffrey Daunt. In knee-breeches, shooting-cap and coat, he -looked a veritable Apollo straying, incongruously garbed, through a -landscape beautiful enough to match him. Felicia, finding still that -wholesome staunching in surprise, watched the nearing perfection -appreciatively for some time before definitely wondering what brought it -there. He himself, as he approached, showed no surprise. His eyes, as he -doffed his cap, met hers calmly. He had quite the air of having come to -find her and of having expected to find her leaning on the gate and -watching him. - -Felicia held out her hand. "Are you with Aunt Kate? Have you been -shooting? You haven't lost your way?" - -Geoffrey, while she asked these questions, held her hand over the gate -and, though as unperturbed as ever, seemed somewhat at a loss for an -answer. Dropping her hand, his eyes went from her to the house, the -garden and away to the hills. - -"You are high up here," he observed. "No, I haven't lost my way. I knew -this road led past you. Yes, I am with your aunt for the week-end. I -have been shooting." - -"It is rather good shooting, I believe. Uncle Cuthbert prides himself on -it, I know." - -"Very good," he answered, with still his vagueness. - -"Well, won't you come in and have some tea?" Felicia suggested, since -the pause that followed grew long, and it suddenly occurred to her that -however inimical she and Mr. Daunt might be there was yet a lack of even -conventional hospitality in this survey of him over a closed gate. - -"Thank you," said Geoffrey, pushing open the gate and coming in, quite -as if this, also, were what he had expected. As he walked beside her up -the path he made no customary remark on the charms of house and -garden--for the garden, with its Michaelmas-daisies and roses was still -charming. His lack of aesthetic appreciation she had guessed, and in his -quiet glance now was a business-like discrimination, as though he merely -recognized a certain oddity and were classifying it. Geoffrey, -meanwhile, was not wondering that he had come, for he had definitely -intended coming, but was wondering a little what, exactly, he had -intended in coming. To see Felicia Merrick. No further object was -defined in his definite mind, where objects were clear-cut. He therefore -turned from wonder and rested upon the attainment of his object, looking -now at Felicia, observing the details of her dress--her blue serge -frock, her narrow white lawn collar, the black bow under her -chin--observing the curves of her thick hair, the freshness of her -cheek--not as an artist would have done, with a keen consciousness of -the picture they made, but with a very vivid feeling about their -significance to himself. They meant that sense of charm; and, when her -eyes were raised to his, there came that sense of sudden peace. - -She paused before the door. "Would you like tea now, or shall I show you -our view? It's the proper routine--first view, then tea. There is a -wonderful view up there from the top of the hill." - -"You shall show me the view another day," said Geoffrey. - -There quickly darted into her mind a strange query. Had Maurice sent him -with some message? She said, summoning a smile, "Very well. And I don't -believe you care much about views, do you?" - -"I don't think I do; not much." - -She ushered him into the little hall. It was panelled in light wood, and -its faint woodland fragrance made him think of pagan incense in some -primitive temple. There was a leaping fire in the sitting-room, and the -white austerity trembled with rose and gold; branches of larch in tall -bronze vases glowed like a delicate mist of light. The freshness, the -fragrance, the simplicity, all spoke of Felicia. She rang for tea, and, -while she filled a bowl with her white roses, could not repress that -inner urgency. - -"It is long since I saw any of you. How are Lady Angela--Mr. Wynne?" - -Her eyes were on the roses; she spoke calmly, feeling hypocritical. -Geoffrey, standing near the fire, placidly replied that he had seen very -little of them. - -Her hypocrisy was successful; he could have surmised nothing. The -excitement died, and the lesser question of his meaning there hardly -stirred her indifference. He wanted tea; perhaps he even wanted to see -her, which was nice of him and very unexpected. A weariness was in her -as she joined him at the fire and held out her cold hands to the blaze. - -In the little silence the oddity of the situation perhaps struck him -too. Felicia, looking up from the fire, saw in his pre-occupied gaze at -her some inner cogitation. He hesitated a moment, and then with grave -courtesy asked, "Your father is well, I hope?" - -"Very well, thank you." She was still looking at him, and into both -minds there flashed the memory of that silent drama at the table, and, -seeing that he, too, remembered, Felicia was astonished, really touched, -to see the Olympian suddenly flush deeply. - -For a moment the dominating young man looked quite helplessly at her, -and in this little silence something else passed between them; it -refused analysis. Felicia could not have said whether pleasure or -compunction were uppermost in her consciousness, she was so sorry for -his discomposure, yet so pleased at his capacity for it. At all events -enmity was over. - -"About your caring for the view," she said, going to the tea-table and -busying herself with the spirit-lamp and kettle; "it doesn't make you -happy to look at beautiful things, does it? You haven't at all -cultivated your senses of seeing or hearing, have you?" - -Geoffrey took some moments to bring his mind back to this level. The -shock of his own emotion before that memory, his pain that it should be, -his desire that it should not count against him with her, were new -elements in himself that he contemplated with some bewilderment. "No; I -haven't had time for cultivating my senses," he said, after the evident -adjustment. "I hardly believe that they would be worth cultivating. Does -that seem a guilty negligence to you? You are awfully well up in all -that sort of thing; I could see it." - -"Indeed, I don't at all exaggerate the importance of that sort of -thing"; she smiled her amusement at the idea of finding his negligence -guilty. - -"Certainly there are more important things in the world," Geoffrey -answered, also with a smile. "I don't understand making -feelings--however exquisite--the object of life." - -"Nor do I--I hope you see that too." - -"Oh, yes; I see that." He had evidently seen a good deal, and with the -sense of groping for a new interpretation of him, Felicia asked-- - -"But what do you call the object of life?" - -He was prompt, his eye echoing her amusement. "To express oneself -actively; to do something; to succeed." - -"The artist may do all that." - -"The artist, yes; not the appreciator--the taster of life." - -"Well, as to doing something--does not that rather depend on what the -something is? It ought to be something for other people, oughtn't it?" - -"You can't do much for other people unless you have done a great deal -for yourself: you are of no use to them unless you have much personal -meaning. In doing all you can for yourself you probably do your best for -others." - -Facing her beside the fire, he still smiled, but it was no longer the -smile that offered a bull's-eye. He really waited to hear what she would -say. - -Felicia's eyes mused upon him for some silent moments; his cheerful -conviction exercised a rather dissolving force upon her thoughts. Like -sheep before the bark of a genial and business-like sheepdog she saw -them scattering. It required an effort to arrest the silly dispersal. - -"What wisdom and goodness the self should have that could dare say -that," she found, adding with a laugh for her own vagueness before his -certainty, "You seem like an embodiment of the cosmic process!" - -The tea was made, and as he sat down near the table, opposite her, -Geoffrey remarked: "In its merely phenomenal aspect you mean, I suppose; -the cosmic process in any other includes the ethical, you know." - -"Oh--I haven't called your wisdom and goodness into question." - -She had never before, Geoffrey realized, shown him at once her malice -and her kindness. Her smile, at last, was like the smiles at Maurice. He -had the sense of sunny playfulness--reminiscent of childhood, and the -big words they bandied were delightfully rebounding, gaily coloured -balls. - -"I must seem almost impertinent, I am afraid," Felicia went on, "but I -have to be--to keep up my courage. I never gave tea to a great man -before. I suppose that you are a great man--for I can't say that my -littleness has any means of knowing. Impudence is the privilege of -littleness, you see." - -"But not satire; that's the privilege of equality or superiority; you -have a perfect right to it. It's only potentially that I can be called a -great man." - -"Why, I see people reading whole columns of you--in the _Times_;--what -is greatness, pray, if that isn't?" - -"You never read my speeches?" - -"Never," she confessed; "besides, you have only made one or two, you -know, since I ever knew any thing about you." - -"Politics don't interest you?" - -"They might, if I came into any real contact with them. To read speeches -is to see the flag without knowing what battles are going on under it." - -"What _do_ you do?" he asked. - -"Since I don't read speeches? Not much, really. I am an embodiment of -the dullest thing in nature--inertia. I exist--like the trees outside. -Things happen to me; the seasons pass over me; perhaps I have a branch -lopped off now and then. I express nothing that I can think of except -indolent vegetation." She really liked him so much that she had allowed -her voice to gather a bitterness from her undercurrent of thought as she -went on. She laughed, though half sighing as she added, "I am matter, -you see--and you are motion. It must be nice to be a force." - -"Although you disapprove of the direction this force takes?" - -"But I know nothing about its direction!" Felicia protested. - -And presently, as from half-jesting their talk grew graver, she realized -that the "force" was taking her into its confidence. It was as if he -wanted to show her his direction--the battle under the flag. His whole -visit had been an enigma; it now almost amazed her. She guessed how -little sympathy was a necessity to him, and indeed he made no bid for -sympathy. He sketched for her the political situation, his own attitude -in it, the figures of his colleagues and their opponents, and calmly -unravelled all the rather wilful knots her questions presented. She -wondered, as his so unimpulsive frankness grew, whether he felt her at -all as an individual, whether she were not, rather, a mere comfortable -occasion on which he could take his ease and give himself the unwonted -relief of thinking aloud. Whatever her office, she liked the force. He -no doubt built with other people's ideals and intended himself to -inhabit the completed palace; yet she liked him. It was already late, -and he had been there for almost two hours, when Mr. Merrick came in. - -Felicia saw on her father's face a mingling of amazement and -gratification quickly composed into an over-emphatic dignity. - -"I liked him ever so much," said Felicia; when Geoffrey had taken his -departure; "he is so different from what I thought." - -Gratification at the testimony to his daughter's attractiveness warred -in Mr. Merrick with the repudiating dignity. He stood firmly on the -latter as he answered-- - -"I don't care for the type. He does well enough for you to study"; and -gratification rose again as he added: "That's the worth of our position. -We stand apart and let others come to us. We discriminate, judge, taste -the flavour of life." - -"We certainly do little else!" said Felicia. - -"Ah, my dear, what would you? What else for an awakened intelligence is -there to do? You wouldn't have me blindfold myself and rush into the -political arena like this young _ambitieux_?--poor automaton! The fly on -the wheel, fancying he drives the coach. We at least know that we are -flies, and watch the fated turnings of the wheel with an understanding -of our powerlessness." - -Felicia, wondering how he would manage such a rush, only murmured -vaguely that she refused to believe herself a fly, and her father, -tolerant of an accustomed flippancy, smiled, "Let us be duped by all -means, but, as our exquisite Renan says, let us be knowing dupes." He -settled Geoffrey, in the phrase, to his own satisfaction. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - - -While Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory -season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep -his spirits in the golden-haze atmosphere, and his letters to Felicia in -harmony with his spirits. The impression Felicia had made was deep -enough to carry him through several months at the same pitch of -determination, a determination more stable than any he had mustered when -in Felicia's presence; for Felicia made him face facts, and in these -pleasant houses where he was appreciated and made much of, he faced only -imaginations; it was easy to imagine himself potentially a rich man, -when a rich environment put itself at his disposal, and when Felicia was -no longer before him to make him feel that because he was not rich he -must part from her. It was with a positive sense of injury that he met, -when he came back to London, the brute facts. A terrific array of unpaid -bills, a disconcerting army of duns, made the difference between -actuality and imagination grotesquely apparent. He had to take several -very deep steps into further involvements before the present ones were -at all relieved, and present relief made a still more menacing future. -Economy was certainly the first necessity, and after that work. - -Maurice was quite convinced of his own willingness to dine off a chop -when he had no invitation for dinner, yet it seemed far more fitting, -when there was gold in his pocket, to think about an essay over a -delicate little dinner at a first-rate restaurant. He had never found -chops inspiring, and it was, though more costly, particularly inspiring -when a friend was asked to share the delicate little dinner with him. He -often thought of running down to Trensome Hall to see Felicia, but -restrained the impulse with a self-control he could but find very -magnanimous. It pained him still to write to her in a tone he felt to be -hypocritical, yet he could not bring himself to tell her that all -definiteness grew vaguer and vaguer, and that marriage was out of the -question, for who knew how long. He would not say so yet, for who knew -what might turn up? But what pained him most was to feel that the very -pain of not seeing her was losing its poignancy. The impression she had -made was deep, but it was being overlaid, effaced to a certain extent by -others, for in his crowded life impressions were many. His easy, -flexible, smiling nature followed almost inevitably the line of least -resistance, and though when he thought of Felicia it was often with -pangs of positively disintegrating gloom and self-reproach, he could but -associate her, now that realities were before him, with a grey, drudging -aspect of life that could certainly bring her no happiness. A -hand-to-mouth existence was endurable only when unshared. Far kinder, -for the present, to leave her dreaming of him on her lovely hill-top; -kinder? It was necessary. - -A few small orders momentarily padded the present, but the hard facts of -the future were looming with a peculiar menace in the week that Angela -came back to London in February. - -Lord Glaston and his daughter installed themselves in the Eaton Square -house that was part of Angela's large inheritance from her mother. - -Maurice never felt his environment so absolutely adapted to the needs of -his taste as in Angela's house, where nothing made bids for notice, and -where the charmed spirit melted into mere acquiescence with surrounding -harmony. He and Angela had together created much of the harmony, for the -house had come to her frowning with Mid-Victorian rigours. They had -sought furniture, pictures and porcelain together, and as he and Angela -sat in the boudoir, with its pale eighteenth century tints, its -subtly-carved furniture, and the mellow greys of its St. Aubins and -Eisens, he felt that after a period of tumult and turmoil he was once -more almost at home in an atmosphere all peace and suavity. A glance at -the realities that prowled outside made this inner bower the quieter, -and he could but remember that he had only to put out his hand to make -it part of his life; had had only to put out his hand; he amended the -slip loyally, yet lazily, too, as he leaned with Angela over a portfolio -of old prints. Angela was at her best; gentle, unemphatic, and also a -little lazy; not in her exalted mood that sometimes fatigued and made -him satirical. She did not speak at all of Trensome Hall. It might have -been a dream of no importance; it seemed indeed something like a dream -to Maurice as he sat there, and a dream in which he had played a foolish -and an ugly part--as one sometimes does in dreams. - -Angela was at her loveliest. Her delicate face most pleased him when -least serious, and now, as her long eyes glanced round at him, the dim -gold of her hair almost touched his cheek, he felt that it would be -curiously easy to slip an arm around her (her tea-gown, too, was -perfect, seemed to invite encircling)--kiss her and say "Let this go -on." Of course he would not do it; Maurice wrinkled his brows a little -as he looked at the print she held up. - -"Do you know," said Angela, again glancing at him, and seeing that he -was not thinking of the print, "I have a plan, Maurice. You have never -painted my portrait. I am going to give you an order. You must paint my -portrait. I want you to begin at once." - -"That will be delightful," said Maurice. From a pecuniary point of view -the order indeed was highly welcome; from other points of view not -exactly unwelcome, only a little disquieting. - -"You must come here to do it," Angela went on, patting the edges of the -prints into place and closing the portfolio. "There is an excellent -light in the music-room. I will wear white; I should like whiteness only -on the dark of mere distance, an emerging soft and radiant from gloom. I -do want you to make a success of it, Maurice; not only for my own sake, -but for yours. You know, I think the time has come for you to strike -some decisive blow. You diffuse yourself too much. You must write a -great book, or paint a great picture. I want to be the picture,--selfish -I!--I want to link myself, you see, with greatness." She still patted -the edges of her prints, speaking with candid sweetness. - -Maurice, as was often the case, was half-charmed into taking her at her -own valuation, as all candour, all sweetness, and, guessing at the -further feelings underlying the frankness, he felt it peculiarly -generous. After all, there was something coarse and petty in caution. -She claimed nothing; why imply that she did by any reticence on his -part? How ugly such a reticence would be! - -"Will you inspire the book too? It's my only chance for greatness," he -asked, smiling. - -"Who knows? Perhaps I may." Her answering smile was even lighter than -his own. "But it can't be consciously. You must find; I can't give." She -got up and walked to the fire, displaying a back flowing with faultless -lines from the sloping shoulders, their fragile, exaggerated grace, to -the curve of the long, lace train. Angela was intellectually ensconced -in mountain fastnesses, where any appeal not purely spiritual was -stonily regarded, but her very beautiful body was as keenly conscious of -itself, of its every pose and movement, as that of the crudest coquette. -Angela's coquetry was not crude; it wound itself through her mental -attitude as pervasively, but as delicately, as the narrow black ribbons -curved through the laces of her dress. It now said, "Look at me; follow -me," and Maurice, after the startled moment where he surveyed that queer -little speech as to his finding and her not giving--was it a very -clever, a very courageous, a very pathetic speech?--looked at her, and -followed, joined her at the fireplace, and as her hand rested on the -mantelpiece he put his, in an impulse he was hardly conscious of, -lightly upon it. - -Angela said nothing, but she lifted her appealing eyes to him. - -"If I could paint you so!" said Maurice, removing his hand and wondering -at himself. He did not go further than this, but the things that she -might well have expected him to say after it made him uncomfortable. - -Angela felt more than discomfort; it was a real anguish of baffled hope. -Yet she was almost sure, now, that he would go further. - -And by imperceptible degrees, during the mornings that followed in the -music-room, he did. - -He definitely determined nothing; the facts of life seemed to bear him -towards a definition over which his will had no control. There was the -past, the golden haze, the sweet golden haze, and sweet Felicia; but the -self that had wandered into it with her already seemed illusory. The -present self, its crushing necessities, its really tempting escape from -them, was too vivid a reality to make memory of much avail. - -Felicia had charmed him more deeply than Angela could ever charm; yet, -since the self which had so truly loved her was already dim, -unseizable, Angela's half real, half artificial attraction counted for -more than the dear impossible past. - -The passionate sadness of the letters he sent to Felicia was sincere, -for in writing to her he caught together all his memories, and they -pressed on his heart with a great weight of regret. He wrote of hope -deferred, of possible hopelessness, feeling courageous, and avoiding the -worst pang of all--that dread of playing an ugly part in Felicia's -eyes--that dread of her seeing cowardice instead of courage--by telling -himself that finally to renounce her would show the truest love for her. -From these crises of almost despair he drifted on to a long silence, a -kind silence surely, from which she must draw her own conclusions. She -would of course take time in doing so, give him the benefit--poor -darling!--of every doubt, and if, at the last moment, anything did turn -up he could still claim her and explain the impossibility of writing -when there was only despair to write of. - -During these weeks of drifting he saw little of Geoffrey, and when they -met, Felicia was as unmentioned as though, to both, she had been the -slightest, least significant of episodes. With all his confiding -tendency, Maurice could not well confide to Geoffrey that the wild-rose -flirtation had become a serious love affair, and, in the same breath -that the long dallying with Angela was on the verge of becoming serious -too. With all his hard common sense Geoffrey might look unpleasantly -askance at this taking on of a new love before the old was off, and -until there was no chance at all of the old love being on again, -Geoffrey might as well think him still engaged in undecisive dallying. -The very fact of long intimacy, of the taking for granted of a closeness -that made questionings unnecessary, kept their minds apart. - -But on a morning in early March, Maurice, while putting the finishing -touches to his portrait of Angela, was facing at once despair and an -aching freedom. The day before had unchained at his heels a pack of -howling debts; he had run before them to the only refuge; a letter, -after a month of silence, that practically set Felicia free. He had wept -in writing it, allowing the irrepressible tears to splash upon the -paper, bitterly smiling at himself for the craven little consolation he -recognized in this testimony to his grief. And, with the half appeal of -the tears for pity, was another appeal--a spontaneous clutch at the -brightness he must thrust from his life--for her love. - -He would not clearly see that in so clinging he set himself--rather than -Felicia--free. Heavy gloom had settled upon him, a gloom that filled the -letter with dismal sincerity. That it had been sincere he felt to be -proved by the fact that no sense of relief had followed its despatch. He -was free, but free in a black world, and he felt, as a result, even less -drawn to Angela than usual, even more unwilling to accept the now -inevitable escape. But with the new sense of freedom was a new sense of -recklessness, the sense that he had, in some untraceable way--(for what -could he have done, disasters crowding thick upon him?) made himself -only fit for the lower thing; so that, at all events, he might as well -make the most of it. - -Poor Angela! to be so accepted! The irony of it turned to pity for her -as he looked at her sitting there in her white dress, pale, and with an -air of deep weariness. She seemed to droop before him as she sat in the -keen spring light; to droop, to appeal, and yet to be very proud, ready -for resentment almost. Maurice saw all this, and his comprehension gave -a touch of real emotion to his pity and to his recklessness. Pity for -himself mingled with his pity for her. What a queer mess they were -in--poor things!--both of them. His mind, sick with self-analysis, -self-scorn and self-defence, lurched, exhausted, on to a longing for her -to comfort him, to show him, in loving him, that he was not base, only -fatally pursued by life. - -When she stepped down from the stand that had been put at the end of the -room, she did not, as usual, come to his side to see the progress he had -made. She went to the window, her hands clasped behind her, a rigidity -in the lines of her slender, half-swathed arms. Maurice painted for a -moment, then looked at her, added another touch, stared at his palette, -laid it down, and joined her. - -She did not turn her head to him, and suddenly he guessed that there -were tears in her eyes. His own grew wet again with that mingled pity. -Her hand fell to her side. He took it in his. Still she did not look at -him. She stood waiting, anything but proud, and yet ready in all the -humiliation of her helpless avowal, to flash suddenly into scorn and -anger. The something of splendour in this attitude gave Maurice the -final impetus. He was glad to yield at last to feeling alone, to almost -irresistible feeling. It was as though he had stood for long on the -shore waiting for the tide, and that its slow rising had culminated in -this sudden wave that just lifted him off his feet. Really she was -lovely; she was piteous; and she could console him for being forced to -take her. His arm went round her; he turned her head gently, saw the -tears, and kissed her. - -"Oh, Maurice!" her lips breathed under his, "how I love you!" - -"And I----" he stammered. "Angela--it has been--you understood--you are -so horribly rich, and I so horribly poor." He wanted her to console him -for the fact that had tarnished everything, and the longing was so great -that he grasped at this falsification of all his hesitation. It was -rapture to Angela. He was transfigured by the avowal; and her heart, -sick for so long with doubt, seemed to expand like a storm-beaten flower -in sunlight. She herself was transfigured; saw that the starved, -straining self she had known was a lower self, distorted, difficult to -read clearly; this happy self was real at last. His arms were around -her. She would be noble, beneficent to all the world. All who came near -her would be the happier for her happiness. How weak she really -was--who so needed love to lean on! - -"I understood--I hoped it was that," she said in a trembling voice. - -At a step outside they moved apart, yet not soon enough Maurice felt, -but for the significance of the situation to be very obvious to Lord -Glaston as he came briskly in. - -If Lord Glaston had ever felt dismayed by his daughter's vagary he had -long outworn the feeling. He was an easy-going man, cynical and -tolerant; he liked Maurice. Angela could suit herself. He now threw -Maurice a bright "Hullo!" hesitated for a moment, and, as nothing was -said, he sauntered into the room and looked at the portrait. "Capital, -really capital, Wynne," he asserted. "A little too thin and woe-begone, -perhaps." - -Maurice's mind was revolving like a kaleidoscope; the dominant thought -was that he could not yet make it an open engagement. And Angela would -understand that they must see one another again before admitting the -world to their new knowledge. He longed to escape, to think. He made his -farewells, smiled at Angela, and departed. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - - -Felicia received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the -weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the -exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst -part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel--perhaps faithless. -Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate. -She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with -nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her -morning duties were done, she went out--walked in her garden, in the -woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the -pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill, -radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that -the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to -think. She was afraid of sitting still alone. - -Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered -the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with -moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear, -shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow -limits, like the footpath, with its bordering of green, no doubt; she -could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after -that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its -bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one, -yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant -nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and -sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that -tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the -deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come -to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her -eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down -her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her. - -Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as -ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy -familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked -at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him -now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of -momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization. - -She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and -while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory -word or look. - -"How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate's?" she asked. - -Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched -her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with -as quiet a candour--imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!--and have taken it -for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his -reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them. - -He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, "No; I came down to -see you. Have you time for me?--time for a walk, I mean?" - -She said that she had come out for a walk, and that he could have all -the time he wanted, wondering if her changed looks struck him too -forcibly. She knew that during these past weeks she had come to look -very ghostly. Perhaps his way of turning his eyes from her now was part -of the reticence. - -"Where is the view you spoke of when I first came?" he asked. "You have -never showed it to me yet." - -She answered, "I am glad that you remember that there is a view. We can -reach it more quickly by going through the pine woods." - -They entered the grave, scented silences. - -Geoffrey had not seen her for a month, and, more than she could have -guessed, he found her changed. It had been with a conscious steadying of -his countenance that he met her tear-filled eyes, and now, as with bent -head she walked beside him, he looked at her fragile profile. - -She was horribly changed, and her smile had shocked him more than her -tears; it had the alien sweetness of death. What sudden sorrow had come -into her life? What had happened to her? The new wonder mingled with the -old one, the wonder that had been with him for months and that now knew -itself. - -The longing to help her grief and to speak his own new knowledge was -like a cry in him, but he did not speak as they walked upward through -the solemn aisles. He felt as if he and Felicia, she with her sorrow, he -with his wonderful knowledge, were walking in some sublime cathedral -where in their mutual ignorance they were yet secretly near each other. -In his hard, strong heart was a trembling sense of consecration. - -Suddenly, from the dimness, they were out upon the open hill-top. Pale -sunshine, an azure sky, swept them around. They were high above all the -surrounding country. Beneath them were the blue-black pine-woods, slopes -of pale dun and green, the shadow and sunlight of hill and valley, and -all the delicate tracery of tree and earth still unveiled. Among the -vague purples of the lower woods the roads ran like white ribbons. Here -on the hill-top the wind blew steadily, sadly, in spite of all the gold -and azure. Felicia's long black scarf fluttered against it, and she put -her hand to her hat, standing looking away to the horizon, a slender -silhouette of black, almost forgetting her companion, conscious only of -her aching bereavement. She turned at last to Geoffrey, and found from -the almost dreamy intentness of his gaze that he had been as absorbed -in her as she in her own sad consciousness. - -"How ill you look," he said. - -"I have been rather fagged this winter; sad; some branches have been -lopped off; do you remember?" She did not want to talk with any nearness -of her sadness; to speak of it, except at arm's length, would bring her -to the verge of tears. She owned to it frankly, yet with a lightness -that went like a bird, luring him from the nest where sadness was -hidden; but, unfalteringly, with no reticence now, he went toward it. - -"Do you know that I care, deeply, that you should be sad?" - -"I know how kind you are," she said, feeling herself at a loss before -the difference in voice and look. "So much kinder," she urged herself on -to say, grasping at her old rallying attitude, "than I had ever -suspected you of being. Do you know, I didn't imagine when I first met -you that you were very kind. But don't bother about my sadness. It's of -no importance." - -Under his eyes her lightness was lamentably out of tune. She paused with -the sense of graceless discord. - -"You don't at all know why I have come to-day, do you?" he said. A -tremor was in his voice, his look; the tremor, not of weakness, but of -intense strength nerving itself. His beautiful face against the clear -spring sky was white. He was not appealing; she felt in a moment that he -would never appeal; but all the Olympian had suddenly become human and -humanly shaken in its strength. - -In a flash of deep astonishment she knew why he had come, and in her -startled, gazing eyes he read her recognition. - -"You see--you see--what I have come to ask. Wait--don't answer. I don't -want to ask you anything yet. I want to tell you that you have changed -all my life. I don't mean that I care less about the things I have cared -for. I care more, only differently. - -"From the first, I felt you, hardly knowing what it was; you made me -feel things I had hardly believed in. I came back to you, hardly knowing -why I came, and then knowing that I loved you. Wait; let me say all -this: it's like breathing after stifling to tell you. Yes, it's like -light and air; you mean that to me. If you were my wife I could make -life great--for you--with you. It would be a new world with you beside -me. Wait, don't speak--I see that I hurt you. You don't care about -me--yet. Unless there is somebody else, you shall care. But I want you -to see, and believe that whether you love me or not, I shall always be -there. As long as I live I shall be there. You must always call upon me. -You must always trust me." - -He had spoken quickly, yet with a steadiness that had pushed aside the -protests of her wonder, her gratitude, her pain. And even in the pause -where he drew the long breath of his full avowal, his eyes on hers held -her to silence. - -"Now, will you tell me where I stand with you?" he said. - -"What can I say," she faltered. "You are so beautiful to me; I see it -all--I believe it all. I can only hurt you." - -His question flashed upon her faltering. "There is some one else?" - -"I love some one else." - -Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face. - -He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for -this abrupt defeat. - -"What can I say?" she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering -struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the -inarticulate anguish that his must hold. - -"Don't let us say anything," Geoffrey replied. "Let us walk on a -little." - -The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for -further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the -respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but -down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered -among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white -and gold. - -"One gets one's breath like this," said Geoffrey. He had not looked at -her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he -bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick -up again a weapon. A hope, stern in its determination, hardly concealed -itself. - -"Don't think me impertinent," he said; "you understand that one must -grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?" - -The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone. -She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her -despair--the seeing of it stripped to him--her self-control gave way. - -She leaned against a tree, hiding her face in her arm, and broke into -helpless sobs. "I am not engaged," she said. - -"Ah!--then----," She heard Geoffrey's voice near her, above her, a voice -whose compassion did not conceal a bird-of-prey quality--soaring, noble, -yet seeing from afar a triumph. - -That he should think her free because she was alone hurt her for him. -She must shoot down that soaring hope. - -And when she had said swiftly, on in-drawn breaths, "The some one is -Maurice--we cannot marry--we love each other," the silence near her was, -indeed, like a slow throbbing to death. - -She went on, monotonously, still with her hidden face: "Last autumn when -he was here, we became engaged. It was a secret. He was too poor, and I -have nothing. This morning I heard from him. He says that he is -hopeless. He sets me free." Her sobbing shook her again, and again the -thought of what Geoffrey's suffering must be smote too unendurably upon -her own wound. "Forgive me--I am selfish. But to have you ask me -that--this morning. I had hardly known what I felt until you asked me. -And I feel as if it must kill me. I cannot bear it. I cannot!" - -From her head, leaning against the tree, Geoffrey looked around at the -sunlit wood. Her strength had broken to emotion. The disintegrating -emotion that he had felt was rapidly solidifying into strength again. -And, oddly enough, after hearing who the some one was; above all, after -hearing--sharp on its indrawn breath--that "We love each other," not a -flutter of hope remained in him. The sincerity of her young, despairing -passion put insurmountable barriers between them. He was able, so shut -away from her, to think clearly of Maurice; Maurice's situation--verging -on the desperate as he well knew;--of Felicia; of their love for each -other; not consciously crushing back the thought of his own disaster, -but feeling it, under the thought for her, like the sea's deep moan in -caverns, far beneath the ground where he must tread firmly. - -Felicia wept on: "If I could only see him!--it's been so long. If I -could only appeal to him!--I know--I know it's for my sake; but if only -I could make him see that I would rather starve with him than go on -without him." - -Geoffrey looked back at her. Her hat and arm hid her face. The stillness -of her attitude strangely contrasted with the shaken, passionate protest -of her words. - -A strand of her hair had caught in the bark of the birch tree. Geoffrey -observed the shining loop for a moment while he thought. His love as -well as his Olympian quality was being rapidly humanized. He felt now in -her the weakness, the selfish recklessness of youthful love. Something -illusory in his own adoration made it already seem far away. Yet it was -hardly that he adored her less, but that he loved more nearly and with a -new understanding of the child in her, the childishness that made her in -her ignorance, her passion, dearer to him than when he had seen in her -only splendid truth and courage. - -Half automatically, seeing that she would hurt herself, he released the -strand of shining hair, so gently that she did not feel the touch. - -"That is pure fairy-tale, you know," he said. "People can't marry on -only the prospect of starvation. How could Maurice have spoken with only -that prospect to offer? I am not blaming him. I only want to -understand." - -"We fell in love. How could he help speaking? To look was enough. We -must have known that we adored each other. Oh, my poor Maurice! my -darling Maurice! What he has suffered, too, I know--it is part of my own -suffering--it aches and aches in me. But I would far rather suffer and -die of suffering than not have known--not have had him tell me. At least -now I have the memory. I know that we once were happy." - -Geoffrey did not wince. He was glad to feel her trust in her loss of all -reserve; but, with his new insight, he felt in it, too, the helpless -abandonment of a nervous break-down. She leaned against the tree -exhausted, hardly able to stand but for the support. - -"Sit down here," he said, indicating a fallen tree-trunk, a felled and -prostrate oak-tree whose shade had made the clearing where they stood. -"All this has been too much for you. You are ill. I can see it." - -She obeyed him blindly, stumbling to the seat, her hand before her face. - -He sat down beside her and, his hands clasped as he leaned forward, his -arms upon his knees, he stared at the ground. - -The distant fluting of a bird, reiterating with delicate precision its -little loop of clear, soft notes, the urgent rhythm of a brook, joyous, -melancholy, a shiver of bells in loneliness, were the only sounds. -Felicia dried her eyes and raised her head. - -How fresh and keen and hopeless all memory became in the midst of that -young renewal. Her longing was like a sword in her heart. To see -Maurice! If only she could see him! If only it were Maurice beside her. -Like yesterday, it seemed, that distant autumn evening; the dim flowers, -the sad sunset, and Maurice's sad face. - -The thought of the helpless longing near her, the useless love, brought -a sudden self-reproach; it mastered the torment of recollection. - -"See," she said, in a shaken but different voice, "the snowdrops; they -are all out." - -Geoffrey smiled. "I hadn't noticed them." He watched her as she stooped -to pick the fragile white and green from the wet, black ground. - -Her lovely, blighted face, pallid, wasted, looked among all the golden -shimmer of the woods like death in the midst of life. A horrible fear -went through him as she sat there, putting the snowdrops together, stem -by stem. He had discovered his own former ignorance of life, of what -feeling did to one. Could people die of disappointed love? With all his -cynical knowledge of the world he found himself here, face to face with -this broken-hearted love, a mere frightened boy, as ignorant as any boy -of the life of feeling he had entered, groping, perplexed and astonished -in his fear and adoration. Yet his man's training availed him. He could -have cast himself upon his knees, imploring her to live, to love him; at -all events not to torture him by suffering; but above this immature -aspect of his new self he kept all his air of resolute calm. - -She had made a little nosegay of her flowers, winding a long grass -around their stems, and now, turning to him, faintly smiling, she held -them to him. "Will you have them?" - -For a moment he held the hand and bent his head over it and the -snowdrops. She felt the kiss among the flowers. - -"I shall always think of you when I see them," she said, looking away -from him. "And you, when you remember to-day, don't let it be a memory -only of sadness; but of my gratitude--my wondering gratitude." She -paused, and as he made no reply, added gently, "I never dreamed you -cared for me." - -"It came slowly--the knowledge that without you the world would be -empty," said Geoffrey. - -"And is it empty now?" - -"Oh, no," he answered, raising his eyes to her; "you are here." - -Tremulously, afraid of hurting him, yet the longing to find comfort for -him--for herself--urging her, she asked, "But does loving me--knowing -how deeply you have made me care for you--does that keep the pain from -being too great?" - -Geoffrey again had his half smile. "Ah, if I don't talk about it, you -mustn't think it's not great. It would be less, too, if you were not so -miserable." - -"Do you mean that if I were happy--married to Maurice--you would be -happier too?" - -Geoffrey, looking away from her, did not speak for some moments. Her -question hardly required an answer. It was of its further suggestions he -was thinking. - -"Do you think that Maurice would make you happy?" he asked. - -"I wouldn't care. The word would mean such different things. Unhappiness -with him would be happiness." - -"You love him--you are sure--so much?" - -"You know; you must see." She leaned her face into her palms, not -weeping, with a weariness too deep for tears, and again her tragic -sincerity made her seem far from him. - -"You must have courage," said Geoffrey, after a little while. He had -taken out his pocket-book and laid the snowdrops neatly away within it. -"You are both young. Maurice has talent." - -"Ah; how can I have courage if he has none? See how that embitters it -all, even though I know that it is the truest courage in him to set me -free. How can I hope when he tells me not to? For months I have had -courage; for months I have hoped. Day after day when I woke I said to -myself, 'He will come to-day; he must come to-day!' How I waited--how I -hoped. And then came the time when the letters stopped. I don't know how -I lived. But now, in looking back, it all seems rapture; the time when I -could wait--and could hope." - -Her long sighing breaths shook Geoffrey more than her sobbing. - -"Ah! don't suffer so!" he pleaded. - -"But I want to suffer," said Felicia. "The time will come when I won't -mind. Haven't you that fear--the worst of all--that even the suffering -will go? One does outlive everything one cares about. After a time there -is only a dim regret. Life is so shrunken, that one can hardly remember -larger hopes." - -"No, no," said Geoffrey, as she raised her face; "you don't really -believe that. Perhaps you will suffer less, but it won't be because -you've grown littler. Things must come to you. You will keep things. -And," he went on, smiling, and seeing an answering smile, sad, -infinitely touched, dawn on her weary face, "you have your feeling for -beauty to help you; you read poetry. You play so wonderfully. You see -snowdrops." - -Her eyes were on him while he spoke, while he smiled at her. She had a -sense, startled, almost reverent, of losing herself in the contemplation -of his beauty. Her mind, racked to a languor, could not clearly see the -difference between her own passionately rebellious grief, self-centred -in its longing for lost happiness, and his sorrow that over its slain -hope knew a selfless suffering; but with the humility of dim -recognitions came a dim peace. Her soul, like a storm-beaten ship, -seemed entering a still harbour at evening. - -"How you think of me. How dear you are," she said softly. She had that -image of torn, drooping sails; of a deep, safe sea; quiet, encircling -shores, and the evening star. "You make me ashamed. I have thought only -of showing you my own unhappiness. I see you--really see you--for the -first time." - -She leaned toward him, and Geoffrey, in all the dreamy contemplation of -her face, saw a yearning impulse to comfort, to atone, that looked a -kiss, even guessed that in a moment she would kiss him; he had only to -let that inner, sobbing self glance mutely from his eyes. - -He rose, flushing a little. "Thanks," he said; "you won't forget me, I -know." - -She understood the abruptness; it awoke her to a sense of the greater -pain her unconsciousness might have given. Saying that now she must go -home, she, too, rose. - -Her thoughts, as she walked beside him, were grey, vague, peaceful like -an evening mist. All was dim; but the harbour was about her. The -tattered sails could sleep. - -They left the woods near Felicia's garden wall. - -"And now I go back to those scuffles that don't interest you," said -Geoffrey. - -"But they do now, because of you." - -"I may come again? I shall never trouble you--you know." - -"Come whenever you can. I care so much, so much for you. I trust you so -utterly. You are my dear friend." - -Her face, looking up at him, had the patient sweetness of a dead face. -He could not free his thoughts from that haunting fear of death, of a -world empty without her. And over the fear and pain of his broken heart -was the rising, resolute will that, whatever his sufferings, hers must -be helped. And helped soon. - -He had shrunken from her kiss. Now, as if in pledge of his resolve, -taking her head between his hands, he stooped to her and kissed her on -the forehead. - -Felicia, standing still, watched him walk rapidly down the hill. When -the turn in the road had taken him from sight, she went slowly into the -garden and leaned on the gate, as she had done for so many years in -moods of happy or of weary idleness, through child and girlhood; in -parting; in waiting; or in dreams as now. But this was so new a -dreaming, that from it all her life, yes, even the recent life of -anguish, seemed to fall into a long past. - -Geoffrey's kiss, Maurice's desolate, farewell face, were both far away. -Only a softly breathing self, bereft of a past, ignorant of a future, -stood in a strange place where sight, sound, even sadness, were veiled -in sleep. - - - - -CHAPTER XVI - - -Geoffrey, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see -him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a -Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free. - -Maurice had passed an afternoon of most acute depression. He had -accepted the finality of his position, even accepted the fact that -Angela was going to be very dear to him; but now, after months of -vagueness, Felicia's figure had again become vivid. He was pursued by -the thought of her. What cruel tricks one's brain played upon one, and -how little one could count upon the permanence of any mood. The -dream-like, half-forgotten Felicia had been a mood, then; but this -starting to life again of keenest memory might be more than another -flicker of feeling; might, perhaps, show something permanent; and in -such permanence what pain! Maurice had found, so far, that his -experiences of life fell soon into pictures; his own ego seemed -untouched by them once it had moulded them into aesthetic forms. -Sometimes to himself he seemed a mere capacity for feeling and knowing, -that passed through the symbols of life and kept nothing from the -transit. While he was in the seeming reality no one could feel more -keenly or apprehend more surely and delicately, but the self that had -felt and known became as illusory as the rest when the experience was -over. He had believed that he had passed through such an experience in -his love affair with Felicia; an experience brief and beautiful that, -for her as well as for him, would make a sad, sweet memory, a picture -that he could turn and look at without pain; a memory, after all, how -far more precious than the ugly crudities that life together would -probably have forced upon them. But for once his theories failed him. -This experience would not arrange itself into a picture; it horribly -started into life, smiled, appealed, made him agonizingly one with the -life he had broken with. He saw in his conduct the stringent law of -necessity--in Maurice's philosophy all past fact became necessity--and -not self-reproach so much as helpless longing tormented him. - -There was relief in the sight of Geoffrey; in his severe practical room, -with its rows of books, its piles of pamphlets and papers, its -incongruous yet, in ultimate effect, sober, decorations of old racing -and hunting prints, a mezzotint or two, some odd little landscapes from -his boyhood's home, sentimental rigid water-colours by grandmothers and -great-grandmothers. - -Maurice was feeling life so black and difficult that the air of sanity -and composure, Geoffrey's quiet glance and the undemonstrative nod with -which he greeted him, looking up from some papers as he sat at his -spacious and orderly writing table, steadied his nerves and made things -seem at once more normal and more superficial. After all, to be normal, -to live at all, one must keep on the surface, Maurice reflected. There -lay Geoffrey's strength. - -"Sit down, Maurice," said Geoffrey; "I want a talk with you." He still -held his papers, to which his eyes returned, and while he sorted them -into several drawers, Maurice was more than ever inclined to feel that -he had been feeble in giving way to such despondency. Things did adjust -themselves. He would no doubt find sweetness in life again. - -He wondered if he should speak of his engagement to Angela; it really -was hardly less. Maurice had felt that their new relation must be kept -secret, for a month or two at all events, for what could Felicia think -if its announcement followed at once his despairing letter of -renouncement, not of indifference, to her? But Geoffrey would keep -secrets--though he would not understand his necessity for secrecy--how -he should explain the necessity to Angela was already a perplexing -question; and when Geoffrey's matter was over, he might as well tell him -that the culminating romance had at last been achieved. - -The papers were arranged. Geoffrey locked a drawer, rose, and going to -the fireplace, stood there facing his friend. Maurice had just decided -that Angela herself could easily be drawn to a desire for secrecy; he -could take for granted her shrinking from the world's prying eyes; her -love of the sweet intimacy and mystery their knowledge of each other -surrounded by ignorance would give. In this more easy frame of mind he -leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands above his head, and looked -up at Geoffrey with an alertness partly affected, but also a relief. -Anything that took him out of himself was a relief. - -"Maurice," Geoffrey said deliberately, "I went to see Felicia Merrick -this morning." - -Maurice at once changed colour; he said nothing; he did not move; but -his gaze became a stare. Geoffrey, noting these indications of emotion, -and turning his eyes from them for a moment, went on. "I have seen her -several times this winter; I have gone down for the purpose of seeing -her. This morning I went to ask her to marry me." - -Maurice was aware, even in the instant of tumultuous sensation, that he -ought to feel relief at this announcement as at a solving of all the -strained situation; a healing irony for the swift resolving of the -sad-sweet love-story into purest commonplace, might follow such relief; -but, instead, his resentment and dismay were so overwhelming that he -could almost have burst into tears. Geoffrey to marry Felicia--_his_ -Felicia? He could say nothing, and his face took on a rigid look of -suspense. - -"I had not seen her for over a month. I was shocked when I saw her." -Geoffrey allowed another slight pause to intervene between his -sentences. "She is terribly changed. She looks to me as though she would -not live; but that, no doubt, is a temporary result of what she has -suffered. She told me, Maurice, that she could not marry me, and that -she loved you." - -Maurice was white to the lips. In the light of Felicia's faith his own -faithlessness, seen suddenly in all its craven ugliness, stopped the -beating of his heart. - -"She said that you loved her, and could not marry her, and had set her -free. Do you love her?" Geoffrey asked. - -"My God!" Maurice exclaimed, still staring at his friend. Suddenly -turning aside, he cast his arms upon the table, bent his head upon them, -and burst into loud weeping. - -Geoffrey looked at him for some minutes, then, turning away, he gazed -down into the fire. He steadily saw a mean desire, the only foothold his -hope had clung to, that Maurice's attitude would show some obvious -unworthiness, some triviality, a surprised and kindly consternation that -would make of Felicia's love a misplaced, girlish dream. He now seemed -to watch that desire shrivelling in the flames, Maurice, too, suffered. -There was simply no more hope. - -Presently in choked tones Maurice spoke: "I adore her; I have from the -beginning. Don't you remember?" Through his grief the resentment showed -itself. - -"Yes, I do. At the time I thought it was unimportant. Later on, even had -I not forgotten it, I should have thought it unimportant. You never -spoke of it again. And had she been as indifferent to you as I thought, -our friendship, yours and mine, Maurice, wouldn't have stood for a -moment between my wishes and her." Before this firmness Maurice's -resentment, convicted of helpless folly, resolved itself into sobs -again. - -"You adore her, and you give her up?" Geoffrey asked. - -"What can I do? Why do you ask? I am up to my neck in debt. I am worse -than penniless. How could I let her hope on? How can I ask her to marry -me?" - -"Why did you ask her?" - -"Don't turn the knife in the wound, Geoffrey. Don't be ungenerous. I was -a fool, a weak, cruel fool, no doubt; but I loved her, and I couldn't -help myself. I hoped that something might turn up." - -"Why don't you still hope?" - -"I can't, in the face of facts. I am unfit to earn my own living--far -more hers. The only atonement I could make for my cruelty to her was to -be crueller to myself, to set her free. You say that she is changed? -Looks terribly----?" - -Maurice had raised his head now, and with his arms still cast out upon -the table, turned haggard eyes upon his friend. - -"She looks terribly ill." - -"And she sticks to me, the little darling!" - -"She certainly stuck to you," said Geoffrey, still looking down into the -fire. He had almost a half laugh as he presently added, "You surely -would not have expected her not to! No, Maurice; you wouldn't be here -this evening if I had seen any hope of her not sticking." - -For any further meaning in these words as to his presence Maurice had no -ear; they too disagreeably emphasized that sense of contrast with which -his sorrowing mind was occupied. They made him involuntarily droop his -head as he sat shifting the pens and ink-pot. The thought of Angela went -with a shuddering sickness through him. In this silence came Geoffrey's -voice again, its mocking quality gone. Gravely now he said, "Maurice, do -you want to marry her?" - -At this Maurice started to his feet. "What are you talking towards, -Geoffrey? Why did you ask me to come here? You love her yourself. Tell -me the truth--do you hope to marry her?" - -"I told you that I wouldn't have asked you to come if I'd had any hope." - -"To marry her I'd sacrifice anything and everything," said Maurice, -altogether believing in what he said. At last he seemed to have seized -hold of a real self. He and Felicia; all the rest was a dream. - -Geoffrey still looked in the fire. He spoke musingly, with obviously no -consciousness of superiority in his claim. - -"To make her happy I would sacrifice a great deal. Maurice," he said; "I -will help you to marry her. That is the only way in which I can make her -happy." - -Maurice stood stricken with stupor. His delicate skin turned from red to -white. "Geoffrey," he gasped. - -"_Will_ you make her happy?" asked Geoffrey, now turning his eyes upon -him and looking at him steadily. A steadiness as great and, it seemed, -as sincere, leaped to meet it in the other man's responsive soul. - -"Before God I will," he said. - -In silence Geoffrey took his head and shook it. He went back to the -table and sat down at it again. "I can pay off your debts--I have made -some lucky hits lately on the Stock Exchange, and I can raise some money -on my property--its value has gone up a good deal in the last years. Out -of my income we can set aside enough to help support you and your wife; -what you have now, once it's free, will do the rest, and her father no -doubt can allow her something. If you are ever able with ease, to pay me -back, well and good; but don't bother over it. I shall get on well -enough on my official salary and the rest of my income. And I am always -lucky with my speculations; I shan't be pinched." - -"Do you mean it, Geoffrey?" All that was best in Maurice rose in the -solemn gratitude, the boyish, loving wonder of the question. - -With this possibility breaking in a sudden dawn upon him the -half-passionate, half-frivolous, half-tempted and half-unwilling -dallying of the past months lost its dubious enchantment. It was the -difference between Angela's boudoir and a country meadow in spring. -Freed from its pain, the thought of Felicia swept over him like music, -Felicia, who not only seemed to embody the dew and the earliest lark -and all things sweet and young, but Felicia, who called out all that was -really best in him--his courage, his manliness, his willingness to face -risks, Felicia so human, so dear, so understanding. Angela seemed an -orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded -spiritual poses, her conscious spontaneity, her looking-glass idealism. -He saw Angela as she was, with not even the glamour of her pathos to -veil her. - -Geoffrey had answered with an "Of course I mean it," while Maurice's -mind whirled with the ecstatic contrast. "But how--how can I accept all -this from you, Geoffrey?" he said at last; "it is splendid of you; it's -a magnificent thing to do. You are radiant and I am dingy. How can I -accept it?" - -"As I do it, my dear Maurice; and without any splendour on either -side--for her sake." - -"And not for mine a bit, dear old boy?" Maurice asked with a half-sad, -half-whimsical smile. - -"Perhaps a little for you. If I didn't care for you, didn't think you -worth her caring for, I wouldn't do it; but that would probably be for -her sake again. Candidly, I don't feel for you much just now, or think -much of you, except in your relation to her happiness. You understand -that, of course, in another lover." - -"But it's in another lover that I can hardly think of any of it. It is -that that stupefies me. And in you, Geoffrey! You are the last man I -should have thought capable of such self-immolating idealism." - -"It's the best thing I can do for myself, isn't it?" said Geoffrey, -with, again, his smile that made light of high motives. "I wouldn't do -it if I had any hope of winning her from you. It is only natural that I -would rather have her happy than miserable." - -"But, dearest Geoffrey"--the tears again rose to Maurice's eyes as the -wretchedness of a further possibility smote even his joy--"how can you -tell that--with time--you couldn't have hoped? People do outgrow their -griefs; I might have flopped down to some second-best thing--she would -have seen that I wasn't really worthy--and have recognized that you -were." That it was, apart from Felicia's future attitude, a fact -already, not a mere possibility, came as a truth to Maurice with his own -words. He saw Geoffrey sacrificing that possible future to an illusion; -for he, Maurice, was unworthy, if he had told Geoffrey of -Angela--ignoring, as he would have done, the love affair with -Felicia--this happiness would never have come to him. By a chance that -was half a cheat he had gained it, and a sob again rose in his throat, -breaking his voice. - -Geoffrey had winced at the words; he himself had thought of that future -possibility. He answered Maurice's inner fear and his own inner regret -with a brief "She might die before she outgrew it." - -The fact soothed Maurice's qualms. "Dear, dear old Geoffrey," he said -brokenly. "How we will both love you. It won't hurt you, I hope, to see -a lot of us." - -"I'm not such fragile material. I hope to see a great deal of you. But, -one thing more, Maurice, she must never know about this; it's between -you and me. I lend you the money, let us say; she need only think it a -lucky speculation, a legacy--what you will. Her father will expect -nothing definite from an uncertain genius like you. I've thought about -it, and this seems definitely best to me. There must be no bitterness in -her cup." He put his hand on Maurice's shoulder as the young man stood -beside him: "Come early to-morrow morning, and we will talk over -details. And, Maurice, the sooner you go to her the better." - - - - -CHAPTER XVII - - -And Angela? This was Maurice's first waking thought. In the bewildered -joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the -thankful reflection that Lord Glaston's opportune entrance had saved him -from actually proposing or actually being accepted. In this fact lay his -escape--and hers. But with the day Angela's personality unpleasantly -reasserted its claim. His pity could but turn from Felicia, who no -longer needed it, to Angela, an even greater pity, since the humiliation -of her position was incomparably greater than Felicia's had been. -Indeed, for Felicia there had been no real humiliation; she had always -had his heart, and only his poverty had prevented him from claiming her; -but the unhappy Angela had been more wooer than wooed and he must leave -her from motives infinitely more heart-rending to her than those of -material necessity. What he should say to her was the thought that now -harassed him; how tell her that for all his dallying he did not intend -to marry her? How tell her that, when, in reality, he had intended -marrying her, and she must have felt that he so intended? Above all, -how was he to add that he was going to marry the woman he had loved -since first seeing her? It was with a sickness of pity that he asked -himself these questions. His cheek burned when he thought of the figure -he would cut in Angela's eyes, for she would see too clearly that if he -loved Felicia he had behaved outrageously, only yesterday, to herself, -in kissing her, accepting her avowal. - -By the time that he went to Geoffrey's he had decided in a definite -recoil from the pain and humiliation--for both of them--that he simply -could not see Angela. He was, in reality, going to jilt her, and he must -not see her face to face when she learned the fact--this despite an -undefined resolution at the back of his mind that she must not know that -he had jilted her. She must be spared as much as possible. - -He clung now to the thought of her idealism and magnanimity; they had -never been very convincing qualities to him before, but he found himself -insisting upon them now; they would surely shield him from too much -scorn; she would understand and forgive. But what was she to understand? - -The hour with Geoffrey was like a poultice on his wound--so mild and -unemphatic was it. He left it with his prostrate fortunes set upon their -feet, and the assurance of a very small but secure income irradiating -the future. He suspected that Geoffrey's future, in consequence, had -become uncertain, but under the circumstances submission only was open -to him; besides, the Government was securely seated in the saddle; there -was no danger of Geoffrey's losing office. - -When Maurice was on the point of leaving--he had been slightly ill at -ease during the interview, and Geoffrey's calm perhaps a little -forced--the latter said, detaining him with a hand on his arm, "I wrote -to her last night. I wanted to make things easy for all of us. Here is -the copy." - -Maurice, flushing deeply, read-- - - -"MY DEAR MISS MERRICK,-- - - "I have seen Maurice. His affairs have suddenly taken the happiest - turn, and your days of misfortune are over. I told him of my - interview with you, as reticence on the subject might have been - awkward for all of us; we are all to be the best of friends, you - know. Everything, now, is all right. - -"Yours devotedly, -"G. DAUNT." - - - - -"I'll go at once," Maurice murmured, tears in his eyes. "My dear old -Geoff." - -"You mustn't make me ridiculous by your gratitude," said Geoffrey. "And, -my dear Maurice, I'm not altogether selfish. Your happiness does make me -happy." He looked at him as he spoke with the boyish, older-brother look -of affection that Maurice knew so well. - -But before he could go he must write to Angela. Yes, there was the wound -opening again as he drove away from Geoffrey's, and on reaching his -rooms he found himself confronted by an envelope, a familiar, small, -pale grey envelope, addressed in a familiar hand--Angela's oddly large -and demonstrative hand, that seemed to flourish banners of welcome or -appeal. Maurice looked at it as though it had been a viper coiled on his -mantelpiece. Its contents must, however, point out some decisive -attitude for him; he must bear the venom. He tore it open and read, -while a faint fragrance, like a sigh, rose from the delicate sheet-- - - -"DEAREST, DEAREST MAURICE (can one say -more than dearest?)-- - - "Will you not come to me this evening? Papa is going out, and you - and I will be quite alone together and talk of so much. I find now - how much I needed happiness. - -"Your ANGELA." - - - -Maurice stood stonily while reading this, and for some moments after its -quick perusal. Then he rang for a district messenger--for even in the -extremity of his difficulties, Maurice found these luxuries necessities, -and sat down to his loathsome task. In his blinding self-disgust, his -mind confused with pity for her and for himself, he almost wished that -Geoffrey had not been so generous nor Felicia so loveable, so loving. - -He took up the pen, feeling that no further delay was possible; at all -events he would not see her face; and-- - -"My dear Angela," he wrote; then, hesitating, thinking of the pathetic -trust of her "dearest," tore the sheet across, took another and began -again with-- - -"Dearest Angela, I cannot come to-night. I am sure of your sympathy and -comprehension in all things, and I must show what I feel for you by my -utter frankness with you. I am going to marry Felicia Merrick." Maurice -paused when he had written this, and the vision of yesterday -morning--Angela's tears, the kiss, the embrace--surged over him. "I did -not know this yesterday," he went on, writing rapidly. "We must forget -yesterday. You remember last autumn, at Trensome Hall, how immensely she -fascinated me. You know, alas! since you have watched my weaknesses for -so many years, my miserable impressionability. I find that I took my -irresponsible love-making more lightly than she did. I find that where I -thought I was behaving frivolously I was behaving abominably. She -doesn't take things lightly; she is a dear, simple little girl, and half -serious trifling is not to her what it is to us." - -Maurice's forehead burned as he wrote this. He was still thinking of -Angela. She, though not a "dear, simple little girl," did not take -things lightly either, transcending the worldly, the frivolous standard -by knowledge, not by ignorance; he knew that, and she knew that he knew -it. But she would accept the escape his dexterity offered her, would -see at once that in such acceptance lay the only escape from -humiliation; and that all she could do was to own that she, unlike -Felicia, had known half-serious trifling at its own worth and had known -that Maurice was incapable of more than momentary seriousness. But -having so smoothed her way--and at Felicia's expense--stabbed Maurice -with an intolerable sense of baseness. He stared for some moments at the -page, then took it, again to tear it. At the same moment he heard the -messenger's ring. The sound brought cold reason once more to the -surface. After all, Angela was the real sufferer. He laid down the sheet -and thought. What could he say? Would it be even true brutally to tell -her that he had loved Felicia all this time? Wasn't what he had said -really truer than that? Had not Felicia's dear image grown dim? Was it -not Felicia's feeling (darling Felicia!) that took him from Angela? Did -he not, after all, accept dependence and poverty for Felicia's sake? -Yes, it was ugly to think it, and only true on the surface, but if one -went below the surface, where indeed in life was any truth to be found? -He must face the ugliness of his own situation; and if in it he himself -were ugly, it was the situation that had rubbed off on him. When one was -in a sooty atmosphere one couldn't escape smudges. By degrees the deeper -truth would come to Angela; she would feel that his greatest love was, -had always been, for Felicia; but the realization would come quietly, -endurably; not in a hideous shock of awakening. And, for Felicia's sake, -he would be brutal enough, yes, he would--to intimate this even now. - -He took up his pen and went on doggedly, though his hand trembled. "You -must know that I should have allowed myself to be altogether serious had -she not been penniless, and I, a sorry beggar. But in looking back it is -difficult to see what one would have felt in different circumstances; I -judged her from my own trivial standard and did not know her capable of -a strength and gravity of feeling before which I am abashed. It is -Geoffrey who has revealed the truth to me, and Geoffrey who has removed -the obstacle of poverty that stood between us. Geoffrey has been -wonderful. He loves her, and has made her happiness his object, and I am -necessary to her happiness--perhaps to her very life. Geoffrey tells me -that she seems to him almost dying. I never dreamed she cared so much. I -am ashamed, bitterly ashamed, I am cured of triviality for ever. - -"Dear friend, you will read between these lines, and, with all your -goodness and understanding, feel for me, and know my sincerity when I -call myself - -"Ever your devoted friend, -"M. WYNNE. - -"PS.--Your sympathy for my hateful position will make you, I know, at -once destroy this record of it." - -Five hours afterwards he was walking up the hill that led to Felicia. -The journey had been a lethargy, and now, under the sweet spring sky, he -felt his spirits rise at every stride. He paused, with an almost -tremulous smile, at that turning in the lane where first they had met. -How he had hungered for a sight of her in all these months of parting; -he realized that now. After all, he could claim a little heroism for the -self-control that had kept him from her. Smudges and heroism!--how oddly -things got mixed in life! But smudges must be resolutely forgotten; he -would live them down; he had already lived them down in the very -determination never again to get smudged. In this environment that spoke -only of Felicia, the thought of Angela was far away. When it drew near -he turned from it with impatience--almost with resentment. - -In Felicia's garden the trees showed a frail web of green against the -sky. A slender almond tree, in bloom, looked to Maurice like a little -angel at the gates of Paradise. Life had exquisite, atoning moments; the -joy of this one in its poignancy seized his throat in a choking sob so -that he could scarcely breathe, and there was pain in the rapture. - -The maid told him that Miss Merrick was in the sitting-room. Maurice -pushed before her and entered, closing the door behind him. - -Felicia sat near the window. She had changed terribly; yet she was more -beautiful than ever. He understood her look of blankness; the greatness -of her emotion drew all expression from her face. - -A wave of adoration swept over him, and with it the thought of smudges, -of his unworthiness, of her love and suffering struck through him, -shattering his baser self. He stumbled forward and fell at her knees. - -They were together, and for her--for him--the past was forgotten. Yet as -Felicia leaned to him, happy with a gladness too deep for tears or -smiles, dimly there drifted over her that sense of a dream, and in it, -like a vivid start that comes in sleep, the thought of Geoffrey. It hurt -her, and, again like the striving in a dream to recall, to grasp at, a -meaning that sinks from us, she felt, dimly, for the hurt; was it for -him?--for herself? The love in Maurice's eyes drew her from dreams; yet -in clasping him, loving him, she seemed to clasp and love some other -cherished being; as a mother, holding her living child, feels in her -heart an aching, shrouded love for the child that died before it -breathed. - - - - -PART II - - - - -CHAPTER I - - -Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick looked about the little room with a scrutiny -cautious and acute. Almost a year had passed since Felicia's marriage, -but the summer and winter had been a prolonged honeymoon abroad, and the -young couple were only just installed in their new home. This was a -small, high flat in Chelsea, overlooking the river, and the smallness of -the flat, its height, and the rather sullen aspect of the farther shore -it overlooked satisfied Mrs. Merrick of a very limited income. Mr. -Wynne's income seemed wrapped in a Bohemian mystery; but the -drawing-room offended her, as Felicia's garden had done. She could -sympathize with a limited income, but to forgive the graceful ease -derived from it was, once more, a difficult task, so difficult that Mrs. -Merrick felt shrewd suspicions as to extravagance. An interior, fresh -and spotless as a white sea-shell, the austere suavity of -eighteenth-century furniture, old prints and old porcelain, were perhaps -Bohemian, but they were not economical. The drawing-room was crowded -with people too, and a further offence lay in the fact that Mrs. Merrick -surmised in the crowd a latent distinction. There was only a dubious -consolation in the dowdiness of some of Felicia's guests; Mrs. Merrick -knew that duchesses had disconcerting capacities for dowdiness; but at -all events, with one or two exceptions, the crowd could hardly be called -"smart." It was a word holding for Mrs. Merrick a significance at once -distressing and alluring, and she ate her sandwich with more -gratification after deciding that it did not apply here. - -Familiarity entered in the person of Geoffrey Daunt, who, after a pause -beside Maurice, made his way directly to Felicia's tea-table, and Mrs. -Merrick was glad to see that Felicia had at all events the good grace to -flush slightly as she greeted him. That Felicia had in all probability -been indifferent to this brilliant match was as much of an affront as -her furniture. Mrs. Merrick's brain had bubbled with conjecture during -those winter visits; she had found herself regarding Felicia with almost -a sense of awe, and springs of eager affection had sprung up to welcome -Geoffrey Daunt's potential bride. A certain contempt had replaced the -awe; only sheer love-sickness could have led to a refusal; a refusal -perhaps to be regretted when love-sickness wore off and reality grew -plain again; yet Mrs. Merrick felt herself at a disadvantage before the -bewildering indifference. At all events Felicia did flush. - -Shortly following Geoffrey, Lady Angela came, with her soft -unobtrusiveness that yet drew all eyes upon her, and, almost -over-setting her tea-cup in her eagerness to greet and claim her friend, -Mrs. Merrick sprang to meet her. - -"Yes, this is my first sight of them. Isn't it very charming, very -exquisite?" said Angela, looking vaguely about her. She had not flushed -in greeting Maurice; a smile, a clasp of the hand, and she had glided -past him. "Are they not a most fortunate young couple? I am so thankful -to have my dear Maurice so happily settled. His roving irresolutions -were a pain to me. Ah! Geoffrey is here already, I see. I had hoped, in -coming late, to find them alone; people are going. Are you for long in -London, dear Mrs. Merrick? Will you come and see me soon?" She detached -herself suavely, and Mrs. Merrick was presently joined by a dull country -neighbour who pinned her in a corner with tiresome church talk. - -People were going--only a group remained about Maurice at the other end -of the room, and in the midst of farewells to them, Geoffrey and -Felicia's first meeting since her marriage took place as episodically as -the departure of the least significant of guests. He was rather glad -that it should be so bulwarked by conventionality. He stood beside her -and watched her in her new character of wife and hostess. She was both -very girlishly; indeed she was little changed, though changed from the -death-like Felicia of the walk that seemed so long ago. She was the girl -he had first known, her face expressing only with more emphasis both its -old gaiety and a deeper gravity. She was the same, emphasized rather -than changed, and that her old air of easy indolence was touched now, as -she smiled and talked, and shook hands, by a little awkwardness and -abruptness was due, Geoffrey guessed, to her wish to have people gone, -really to see and speak to him. - -When Angela, among departing guests, appeared, Felicia had another, a -deeper flush. - -"Is this your first meeting, too?" asked Angela, looking from Geoffrey -to Felicia, as she held the latter's hand. "Geoffrey has become a -greater man than ever while you have been away, Mrs. Wynne; but you are -no doubt _au courant_ of all his news?" - -"Yes; he kept us posted," said Felicia. She and Geoffrey had written -regularly and a little perfunctorily, letters of pleasant friendliness, -making no allusion to depths. - -"He hasn't kept _me_ posted," said Angela, taking a chair beside -Felicia, and leaning forward over her tea-cup, her arm on her knee, in -an attitude habitual with her--an attitude at once sibylline and -saint-like. "I have seen so little of you, Geoffrey--only heard of you. -How are you?" - -"All right. And you?" - -"Wearing out my scabbard," she said with a fatigue that made no attempt -at lightness. "That is the fate of all of us who dedicate our lives to -anything, isn't it? It does one good to see these young people, doesn't -it, Geoffrey? Life smiles on them, doesn't it? It does one good," she -repeated, while her eyes went from him to Felicia. - -Angela always bored her cousin; to-day she irritated him, especially -when she took a chair and the sibylline attitude. His talk with Felicia -was obviously and indefinitely postponed. If not the irritation, the -boredom, at all events, showed itself in his "To be with people who -aren't wearing out their scabbards." - -"Yes,"--Angela did not look up from her tea-cup--"people who have in -their lives what one longs to put into everybody's life." - -"You mean that we are dedicated merely to happiness?" Felicia smiled, a -little disturbed, as she remembered she had long ago been, by Geoffrey's -manner of mild ridicule. - -"No, no; only that it has dedicated itself to you. You must let me come -often and look at you. You must let an old friendship like mine and -Maurice's be included in the new relationship. I am included, am I not? -just as Geoffrey, I feel sure, is. You, too, must think of me as an old -friend, Mrs. Wynne. You must make use of me if there are any things you -want to do, any people you want to meet. You must let me help you in -your quest. I can hand on to you a good many of the toys that make a -London season enjoyable." - -Felicia felt her old hostility rising; for the sake of a pathos she -surmised in Angela, she controlled it, asking, still lightly, as she -arranged her tea-cups, "What quest do you mean?" - -"Why, the quest of youth and happiness--success in life. It is a pity -that it should be seen as a toy before the time comes for a sad seeing -of things. I always think of you as the lover of life personified, -always see you crowned with roses and walking under sunny skies." - -Felicia, re-filling Geoffrey's cup and helping herself to a slice of -bread and butter, made no comment on this vision. But Geoffrey did not -let it pass. "What do you mean by life?" he asked. - -Angela still seemed to muse. "Oh, in this instance, I don't mean life in -its sense of expansion through self-sacrifice, of self-achievement -through renunciation, but in the happy, finite sense, the illusion -through which we must rise to reality, the rose and sunlight sense, the -bread-and-butter sense, in fact," she added, raising her eyes to Felicia -and smiling. - -"Why not _pate de foie gras_ sandwiches?" asked Felicia; "they are even -happier. Do have one." - -"Yes, the _pate de foie gras_ sense, too. My first impression of you was -that--None for me, thanks. Do you remember, Geoffrey, we first saw Mrs. -Wynne eating sandwiches?--five, I think you made the number--and isn't -it right and fitting that she should have sandwiches and roses? I want -her to let me give her all I may." - -Felicia now leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and fixed on -Angela a look both firm and gay. "Why do you think such things of me?" -she asked. - -"Things?--what things?" Angela's smile was neither firm nor gay. She -felt suddenly confronted, before a witness, too, and she remembered -Felicia's crude disposition for forcing issues just when one most -intended avoiding them. Geoffrey's cold, unvarying eye was upon her. It -was a married hostility she had before her, and, in the little moment of -confusion, she saw clearly her hatred of Maurice's wife. Yes, she was -again face to face with hate; but they pushed her to it; for she had -come as love personified, as a most magnanimous angel, and she had the -right to scorn both Maurice and his wife if Maurice's letter had spoken -the truth--if Felicia's love and Geoffrey's charity had forced him into -marriage. But had it spoken the truth? Had it? That question had beaten -in her brain for months. And the suspicion that Maurice, still talking -in his group at the other side of the room, avoided her, filled her with -an added bitterness which only an exaggeration of her outward self -enabled her to hide. - -"What things?" she repeated, conscious that she seemed to blink before -something blinding. - -"Horrid things!" Felicia decisively, though still gaily, answered. - -"My dear child!" Angela breathed with a long sigh. "What have you been -thinking of _me_? What do _you_ mean?" - -"I haven't set out on a quest for roses and sandwiches. I don't ask for -either. You don't really know me at all, so please don't talk about me -as if you did." - -Her manner, that put the episode on a half-playful footing, completed -Angela's discomfiture. Unless she showed her hate, what should she say? -Flight was safer than possibility of shameful exposure. She rose to go, -murmuring, as she took Felicia's hand: "I am sorry--sorry. You have not -understood." - -"It seemed to me that you did not." - -Maurice was approaching them at last, and, the impulse of flight -arrested, Angela rejoined: "I am afraid that you hardly want me to -understand." Maurice was beside her; she could safely say it, sheltered -from rejoinder by his eagerness. - -"You are not going, my dear Angela?" He took her hand, speaking very -quickly. "I haven't seen you. Do stay." Meeting his eyes where a shallow -sincerity seemed to glitter over depths he could not show, Angela -recovered herself and could again take up a weapon. - -"I am afraid that I am not really wanted, my dear Maurice," she said, -standing between husband and wife, still holding Felicia's hand as he -held hers, smiling from one to the other, a brave, kind smile. "I am -afraid that I am a quite unnecessary fourth here. Our old trio has -another head. I had hoped that I might, as a friendly hangeron, not be -in the way; but I am. I feel that I am." - -"Trio? Oh, you mean Geoffrey?" Maurice was perplexed, yet spoke with a -gallant lightness--the concealing glitter emphasized, while Geoffrey, -all placidity, queried-- - -"Was I ever one of a trio? That's news to me." - -Angela turned her head to glance at him. - -"So you will forsake me--even in the past? Well, I abdicate all claims." - -"But we don't--we don't, my dear Angela! We don't abdicate our claims to -you. It's not a trio," said Maurice, "it's a circle--isn't it, Felicia? -Let us all join hands. Come in, Geoffrey." - -"No, no," Angela softly echoed his laugh. "I will come again--and look -at you all. But indeed I abdicate all my tiny claims. Remember me, my -dear Mrs. Wynne, if I can ever be of any use." She pressed Felicia's -hand and turned away. Maurice went with her into the hall. Her wrap lay -there and he held it for her. - -"You may trust me, Maurice, for ever," she whispered, as she slid into -it. She did not meet his glance of helpless confusion; but she knew that -all glitter had left him. - -Driving away in her carriage, she leaned her head back in the corner, -where she shrank and burst into tears. - -In the drawing-room the last people were going, Mrs. Cuthbert among -them. "I hear your father is coming to live with you, Felicia," she -said. - -"Yes. It is too lonely for him now." - -"He won't be able to let the house, I fear." - -"For the present the house is to be shut up, and we may go down to it -for week-ends." - -"It is always a rather dangerous experiment, you know, Felicia, a third -person between a young couple." - -"We must risk it," Felicia laughed. - -When, after this final grunt, her aunt had gone, she and Geoffrey were -alone. - -He was standing at the window, and she joined him there and looked out -at the silver river with a slow russet sail upon it. The sense of peace -and confidence, felt on the day of their last meeting, was with her; but -it was more easy to speak with perfect openness since she need not speak -of themselves. - -She repressed the impulsive "How she dislikes me!" that might seem to -claim his sympathy for her painful part in the recent little drama; she -need never claim his sympathy; and a curious sense of loyalty to Angela -made her substitute, "How I dislike her. You must know it, so I may as -well say it." - -"That explains her unpleasantness, you think?" Geoffrey's voice was as -detached and impartial as if he were questioning the validity of a -dubious clause in a dubious bill. - -"Yes, if she feels my dislike even when I try not to show it. Perhaps -she didn't mean to be unpleasant." - -"Perhaps she didn't know that she meant it." - -"But it's pitiful--if she thinks she has lost friends." - -"Pretty brazen of Angela--that assumption." - -"But aren't you rather cruel?" She tried to smile, but a glance at her -face showed him how hurt, how tossed by conjecture and regret she was. -Geoffrey did not speak his own crueller thought, a thought in which he -recognized a complacent vindictiveness--"She is furiously jealous of -you." Accepting her reproach he merely said, "Angela makes me cruel. I -enjoy showing her her own real meaning." - -"That is indeed cruel--to enjoy it. I hate showing her, and yet I feel -forced to let her know what her meaning seems to me. But I'm more sorry -than I can say for it all--for her being in my life in any way. Yet she -is in it. She is the centre of Maurice's old life. Most of his friends -are hers, and she was his nearest friend--next to you. She blights -everything." Her voice had a tremor. - -"That is tremendously exaggerating her importance. I shouldn't have -suspected you of such weakness. She doesn't really make you sad?" - -"She does, rather." - -"Only on her own account then--not on your own." - -Felicia again recognized the acuteness in him that she had at first been -so blind to. Yet even to him she must pass in silence over Angela's -deepest pathos. "Oh, on my own, too," she said. "I am quite weak enough -for that." She added: "You always make me show my weakness. I seem to -find strength in showing it to you--your strength, I suppose." - -"Do you? Thanks." Geoffrey looked at her. "You do remember, then, that -I'm always there?" - -"Always." She looked back at him. - -Nothing had changed between them since, in that long, still, strange -moment, he had kissed her good-bye. - -The little silence that followed her "always," was unbroken when Maurice -entered. Maurice, since making automatic farewells to his last guests, -had stood perfectly still in the hall where Angela had left him, looking -down. - -Her words, spoken before Geoffrey and Felicia, had impressed him but -lightly, unable as he was to grasp their context, in comparison with the -words she had said to him at the door--words how well left unspoken! -Their apparent magnanimity had been almost ignoble; he felt it, and the -recognition of ignobility in her roused in him a sudden tempest of fear -and self-reproach. - -For, actually, during the last wonderful months, he had forgotten -Angela. Hardly had she done more than hover in his thoughts once or -twice, a memory at once pathetic and poisonous. It had always vanished, -like a dark alien bird, fading in the depths of a noonday sky. He was no -longer the hunted, unstable--yes, the base man who had written that -letter. He was Felicia's husband. He was in a new life, clear, fresh, -radiant, and the old one was a strange, soiled dream. - -When Angela had entered the room it had been like seeing a ghost arise. -He had felt a throb almost of terror. The sweet and new actuality -enabled him to master it, to glance at the past and accept the fact that -he still was slightly linked to it, in Angela's consciousness if not in -his own. The acceptation enabled him to look at the link with more -equanimity. After all, Angela's very coming proved how such fruitless -episodes dropped away from people; she, too, accepted the comfortable, -everyday interpretation, that of a half-emotional trifling that had come -to nothing and was, by now, nothing to either of them. But all the same -he had, at first, found it really impossible to go and talk to her. He -had not seen her since that morning in the music-room, since he had seen -tears in her eyes and kissed her--it had not been then, with her at all -events, a half-emotional trifling. The realization, like a physical -sensation, still trembled, startled, under all his coerced confidence, -while he had talked and laughed. He had glanced constantly at Felicia -while he talked, Felicia sitting between Geoffrey and Angela; his -Felicia! A creature so free from any smudge. And he had smudged her--for -Angela's sake, and for his own. The cowardly letter was an eternal -barrier between him and Angela. And now her reassuring words fastened -his fear and self-disgust upon him. Not fear of Angela betraying him, -Angela was not base; besides, she could gain nothing by betraying him; -besides, the letter was destroyed: it was a vague ominous fear of -something indefinable and dangerous. - -He stood in the little hall, and the thought of the last year's sunshine -almost smote tears to his eyes, looked back at from this sudden -blackness. He threw back his head and shoulders, seeming with the -physical gesture to shake it off, defined it as one of his moods, rose -defiantly above it, and, when in the drawing-room he joined his wife and -friend, came between them, putting a hand on the shoulder of each, -returning peace, a sense of protection and happy certitude, made him -take a long breath. - -"How good this is!" he said. - -They both smiled at him. - -Dear, best old Geoffrey. He stepped perfectly into his place, neither -holding back from it nor making it over-significant. The thought of his -astonishing debt to Geoffrey brought no heartache; gratitude was for -Felicia as well as for himself, for Felicia, too, was so happy. To show -Geoffrey the happiness he had created was the only return he could make -him; to show it frankly could give no pain to such magnanimity. That the -magnanimity had its tragic element a soul quick to divine and sympathize -like Maurice's felt; but all he could do, now, was to keep his friend's -tragedy beautiful. And he vowed he would. Geoffrey should never regret, -for Felicia would never regret. There was almost a sob of thankfulness -in him as with this welling up again of strength and confidence he stood -between them, leaning on them, and looked out at the shining river. - - - - -CHAPTER II - - -Felicia did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness -almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase -of questioning and readjustment, a phase of acute loneliness when, with -stupefaction, she realized that she had married a man whom she hardly -knew. - -It had been a strange, and for a time a disintegrating experience to see -on what slight bases she had built the fabric of her devotion--to see -that she had loved his love for her and that him she had hardly seen at -all. Afterwards, with a tender sanity and wisdom, she had pushed new -foundations under the edifice of their common life, new and stronger, -surer props, no longer relying upon her need of him but upon his of her. -She had the faculty for holding happiness, and, with something of the -serenity and strength of nature, for making it over again when the first -hold proved to be on something illusory. And, in this re-making, what -had seemed illusion became real, once more, with a deeper reality. -Understanding him, and loving him for himself, his love for her regained -its value. But from the readjustment to life a new sense of gravity, of -the risks one ran, had come to her. In looking back on her despair when -she had almost lost him, she saw the something passionate and reckless, -the quality of desperateness that must always make danger. Had Maurice -not proved loveable her own vehemence would have been the cause of -disaster, and since that fatal disaster was escaped, she felt herself -strong enough to face any others, to adjust herself to any painful -requirements of life. - -The clear-sighted seeing of her husband had in it this element of pain. -It was as if in all the outer courts of life she had found indeed the -happiest companionship, but in the inmost temple a deeper loneliness, a -loneliness that now--and this was the secret of achievement--meant -strength and not weakness. - -In all the tests of life he depended upon her, and his setting of his -clock by her time frightened her sometimes, lest that inner strength -should fail them both. She was the upholder; Maurice responded; he never -inspired. She had moments--and in them the loneliness was ghastly--of -seeing him as unsubstantial, elusive, almost parasitical in his charm; -but the charm itself, his clasping and exquisite response, was too near -and dear for these moments to be more than mere flashes. She brought -from them a maternal gentleness of tolerance, and her own joy in being -loved was still too deep for her to feel weariness. She had not yet -clearly seen, with all her understanding, that beyond this sunny domain -of his adoration she would always be alone. - -A dissatisfaction that was hardly a pain was the purposelessness of -their lives; it was a life of appreciation merely, appreciation of -themselves, their friends, books, music, pictures. - -"Darling, we have heaps and heaps of time for doing things; let's just -enjoy them now--while we are young and can. You don't want me to be a -County Councillor, do you? You don't want, yourself, to sit on -committees and be useful--like Angela, do you? There are such quantities -of useful people in the world." - -Felicia had not suggested County Councils or committees, though she did -attack his laziness, for Maurice had never been more lazy. - -The goad was gone--the goad of obvious and pressing need, and, as if on -a summer day of rowing, another hand had taken the sculls, he lay back -in the boat and looked happily, thankfully, at the sky and woods and -water. - -"_I_ shall work, then," Felicia declared; "it's only fair that I should. -You have a right to lounge, but I, who have lounged all my life, must -prove to you that I meant what I said--do you remember?" - -Their tiny income just sufficed. "If a pinch comes I'll set to," Maurice -affirmed. But Felicia said that she didn't need to be pinched; she -wanted to set to as a preventive to pinches. She was a good linguist and -she found some translating to do. Through Maurice's numerous literary -relations there was quite a nice little field of endeavour open to her, -and she persisted in ploughing it. Maurice laughed at the determination -with which she shut herself up every morning. - -"You must wait for inspiration," she retorted; "but there is no reason -why this hack-work of mine shouldn't keep off a pinch for ever." - -Adjustment to a constant and growing anxiety was necessary when her -father arrived for his long visit, a visit whose length, Maurice eagerly -insisted, must be indefinite. He saw that his insistence, generous as -she must feel it in a lover, gave pleasure to Felicia, and he pressed -Mr. Merrick for a promise of indefiniteness. - -But Felicia felt at once that her father, as usual, jarred. She had no -need to explain her father to Maurice; understanding was Maurice's -strong point; very cheerfully he found her father a bore. Unfortunately, -though quick, Mr. Merrick could not be expected to grasp the -unflattering impression nor to suspect from Maurice's attitude of bright -acquiescence that Maurice found in acquiescence the easiest way of -getting rid of him. Mr. Merrick's dogmatic intolerance could only weary -or amuse a mind so fundamentally sceptical. Felicia realized that it was -for her sake that Maurice smiled and acquiesced, but she felt it, in -consequence, incumbent on her to be very exact in acquiescence, with the -really funny result that it was, at first, more and more upon Maurice -that Mr. Merrick counted. It was the knowledge that he counted upon an -unreality that made the anxiety, the pain, for Felicia. The little -tangles of silent misconceptions on one side, of discernments on the -other, drew constantly into knots, and Felicia found herself -contemplating such a knot with discomfort one day after a talk with her -father. - -She went into Maurice's studio at the back of the flat, finding, in his -ease over a volume of French verse, an added cause for irritation. - -"Maurice, have you encouraged papa to publish that article on -'Credulity'?" she asked. - -"It is _vieux jeu_, you know," Maurice confessed, glad of the occasion -for frankness, and putting his arm around her as she stood beside his -deep chair. - -"_Do_ I know?" said Felicia, smiling irrepressibly, though unwillingly, -as she met the limpid blue of his eyes. - -"It is all true enough, as far as it goes," said Maurice, hardly -recognizing her vexation and wishing to be consolatory. "Sit down on the -arm of the chair, dear, and don't stand so still, so stiff, so -disapproving." - -"All that is true in it has been said a hundred times; the rest is as -shallow, as trivial as possible." - -She yielded to his pull and sat down on the chair-arm. - -"He takes a very crude view of religion," Maurice owned. "One doesn't -approach it from that point of view nowadays; the whole ground of -contest has been shifted." - -"Exactly. Why didn't you tell him so?" - -"Tell him, dearest? Hurt him? How could I be so brutal? Wouldn't that -have hurt you?" - -"Not so much as your encouraging him to do a thing that you know to be -foolish," said Felicia, looking over Maurice's head and feeling that -vexation could easily express itself in tears. With a quick change of -tone, looking up in sudden alarm at the eyes that had not met his, he -said: "You are displeased with me?" - -Alarm was such a new note that Felicia's breast echoed it, transforming -it to instant compunction. Her eyes dropped to his. - -"Have I been horrid? I think I was displeased." - -"Please forgive me," said Maurice gently, a smile of relief answering -her smile and irradiating his face; "I thought you would like me to -please him, to encourage him; upon my word I did." - -"I know. I know you did it for me. But I don't like you to do anything -that isn't absolutely----" - -She hesitated, still smiling compunction upon him, and, still gently, as -if with a little humorousness for the trite virtue of the word, Maurice -supplied "True?" - -"Well, yes; to yourself I mean. I mustn't be your standard. You must -have your own." - -"Ah, you mustn't ask that of me. I loved you, you know, for what I -lacked." - -"But I do ask it of you," said Felicia, and, leaning against his -shoulder, glad to have him look with her at the well-unravelled little -knot, she went on: "You see, in your kindness you aren't really fair to -him--nor to me either! He was quite cross with me just now when I tried -to dissuade him--quoted your opinion of the article. And he has sent it -to the magazine you recommended--oh, Maurice, I _was_ displeased!" - -She put her cheek against his head. To confess her displeasure seemed to -efface its cause; especially when Maurice kissed her hand and repeated, -with touching surrender to her fastidiousness, "Please forgive me. I'll -never do it any more." - -Perhaps, because of a certain individuality in its violence, the essay -on "Credulity" was accepted, and Mr. Merrick's assurance, which had been -rather pricked and ruffled since his arrival in London, was restored to -its unstable placidity. - -Felicia was conscious of a consequent triumph in his manner towards -herself. - -"The old sword isn't rusty yet," said Mr. Merrick; "it can still do -execution. I fancy it has lopped the heads off a few more falsehoods." - -Felicia was silent; she understood that Maurice perforce must smile; and -with these necessary smiles, hostages to the past, went Maurice's new -endeavour "not to do it again," that by degrees revealed to Mr. Merrick -that Maurice, no more than Felicia, was to be counted upon. - -Maurice's geniality deserted him one day when Mr. Merrick made an -assault upon the non-rational elements in the faith of a Roman Catholic -friend, and next morning Felicia, arranging some books in the studio, -heard in the adjacent dining-room her father's pugnacious tones: "The -fellow is merely an ass; I wonder you can tolerate him. I pinned him -with his winking virgin!" - -"My dear father," Maurice's voice returned, and she wondered whether her -father felt to the full its cutting quality, "we are all of us asses to -one another, so that the one virtue we should strive for is tolerance. I -hope that in the future you will exercise it towards my guests and in my -house." - -"Oh, very well; by all means," said Mr. Merrick, resentful, but -hesitating to express his full resentment. "I will merely vacate your -drawing-room on such occasions, since I am not apt at falsity." The -words were sunk in the large rustling of his newspaper. - -"I should, if I were you, merely avoid taking a bludgeon to other -people's beliefs; it's not a seemly thing--a bludgeon in a -drawing-room." - -Maurice, when Felicia entered, was cheerfully pouring his coffee after -the cheerful remark, though there was in his eyes as he looked up at -her, and then at Mr. Merrick, flushed and silent behind his newspaper, a -touch of anxiety. - -"Did you hear, darling?" he asked her, when, after breakfast, they were -alone. - -"Yes. I am so sorry. You will be patient, Maurice. He has got the habit -of bludgeoning--he thinks it right." - -"Patient, my sweetheart! Did I seem impatient? It was really for his -sake I spoke. He gets himself so misjudged." - -"Yes, yes. It was right of you to speak." - -"Only I did not intend you to hear." - -"Why not? You must always intend me to hear anything you say." She -smiled at him, really happier in this more accurately seen situation -than she had been for some time. It was easy to bear with slight -discords if their own harmony were perfect. - -But in consequence Mr. Merrick assumed his manner of the sulky child, -and Felicia felt her husband's eye upon her as, in all his encounters -with his father-in-law, he adjusted his attitude to what he imagined she -desired of him. - - - - -CHAPTER III - - -"What ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!" said -Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and -Felicia's unexpressed reluctance had made much adroitness in evasion -unnecessary. His world was drifting away from Angela's world, and in the -consequent shrinking he perhaps recognized how large a background she -had put into his life; but a background with Angela standing out upon it -was well lost; Maurice did not regret it. - -But they had met at last, and he had taken her down to dinner, and she -sat beside him now, her long eyes, steady, enigmatical, upon him, her -mouth, stiffened a little with its smile; her white garments, as usual, -seeming to slide away from her thin, white shoulders. That the shoulders -were very thin, Maurice noticed, and then, on looking into her face, -that it was almost haggard. The hint of delicate wrinklings was upon it, -like a pool of wintry water when some desolate wind breathes over its -first thin veil of ice. - -For really the first time since he had put her out of his life with the -letter, a swift, poignant pity went through him, followed by an eager -clutch at the hope that pity, by now, was pure impertinence. And the -letter, with all the sacrifices that it had made to her, had given him -the right to put her out of his life. Following the short ease of the -hope that she had ceased to love him was the thought that she might -still believe that he loved her. With an ugly vividness some phrases of -the letter flashed into his mind, and suddenly, under her steady eyes, -he felt himself growing hot. - -"No," he said, beginning to eat his soup, "we have both been busy, -haven't we?" - -"Have you, Maurice?" Angela also bent her head to a delicately raised -spoon--eating seemed always a graceful concession in her, a charitable -keeping in countenance of the grosser needs of others. "I haven't seen -the great picture or the great book yet." - -Though feeling that indolence in artistic production was not to be -struggled against, the fact, freshly remembered, that Angela knew how -that indolence had been made facile, gave Maurice a hotter sense of -burning cheeks. "Not as I should have been," he confessed. His confusion -was so apparent to himself that after a slight pause it seemed only -natural to hear Angela say, in a low, unemphatic voice, as she played -with her fork, "Do you mind this--so much? Don't on my account. I am -completely seared, Maurice." - -And as he could find no answer: "We must meet, you know. Can't you -pretend calm, as I do?" - -She had not accepted then the way of escape; the way of escape would -have meant a miserable crouching. She would never pretend that it had -been a trifling. She had loved him, and she would crouch to no -pretence. She took for granted the bond of a mutual understanding -between them. - -"You make me feel like a felon," Maurice murmured. - -"It must be, then, some wrong in yourself to make you feel that," Angela -returned quietly; "the retaliating attitude is not mine, Maurice." Then, -as the talk about them cloaked them less, "What have you and Mrs. Wynne -been doing lately? I have been so sorry to have seen so little of -her--so sorry that you could never come when I asked you. I have asked -you twice this spring, you know. She is prettier than ever"--Angela -leaned forward to look down the table--"and so Geoffrey evidently finds -her. Is Geoffrey more fortunate than I? Does he see much of her?" - -Though knowing Angela well, Maurice was not capable of suspecting her of -treacherous little hints and warnings. "Not much," he answered; "he -drops in to tea now and then. He really is busy, you know," Maurice -added, "so we are not very fortunate in seeing him often, either." - -"Geoffrey, without knowing it, is becoming more anxious for place than -for power," said Angela, "and not only as a means to power but as an end -in itself. It would be a rather black outlook for him, wouldn't it, if -the Government were to go out? I suppose he could fall back on the Bar." - -She spoke with a musing vagueness. Maurice was not looking at her, and -her eyes were on his charming profile, on the quick colour that flamed -again in his cheek. She suspected herself now of cruelty, knowing that -her love sought ease in cruelty. His dear, enchanting profile! She -looked at it with a turn of her sick heart, even while speaking the -cruel, vague words. - -"Dear Maurice!" she murmured, "I didn't mean that! Indeed, I forgot for -a moment why office must be so important to him. There need be no pain -in it for you--beyond the blundering frankness of my reference to what -you let me know;--I can't get over that habit of frankness with you. But -Geoffrey chose to so shackle his career." - -"He knows," Maurice stammered, "that if he were to feel a shackle I -would abandon----." - -"Ah, but would you?" said Angela as he paused. "Though that is why, for -your sake, more than his--I know your sensitiveness--that is why, dear -friend, I had hoped that this year would be for you an incentive to -energy rather than lethargy. You are more shackled than he is--I want to -see you free. I wish--I wish," she smiled with quite her old sweet -lightness now, "you would let me try to help you. Can I inspire no -longer?" - -But Maurice could feel no sweetness, or, if sweetness there were, it was -to him poisonous. Had he, indeed, opened himself to this? He could find -no words. - -"Dear Maurice, how you distrust me," she murmured, "how you forget that -such a friend as I know myself to be takes it too much for granted, -perhaps, that she has all her old rights; the right to be true; the -right to help. Forgive me, I have hurt you, I see. I couldn't hurt you -if you trusted me. Is Mr. Merrick, here, too? Ah, yes, I see. I read -to-day his article on 'Credulity.'" - -In the turmoil of his feeling, helpless astonishment, distrust indeed, -yet a self-reproachful pity pervading it, Maurice almost gasped with -relief at the change of topic. She was speaking on normal levels where -he could breathe; she was smiling kindly, no longer with that -over-significant sweetness that stung and bewildered, and with a -comprehension of his pain, she had turned from it. - -"Isn't it appalling!" he laughed--he would have laughed at anything said -in that normal voice--"it's unfortunate weakness of his, that beating of -dead lions, to which Felicia and I have to yield." Angela also laughed. -"My dear Maurice! I see it all. It is rather pretty. There's a pathos in -it, so far as you and she are concerned." - -"Of course, we were done with all that crude naturalism in the -eighties," Maurice said. "I am afraid Felicia and I find the -grotesqueness of his attack painful rather than pretty or pathetic;" and -with the relieved sense of respite, of free breathing, he humorously -enlarged upon this grotesque side of the situation. - -Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, Geoffrey and Felicia talked -with their sense of peaceful confidence. That she made the music of his -life, the sad yet stirring music, she could but know: how much she was -its object she had not guessed. But the time seemed far away when she -had seen his object as a rather pompous ambition, symbolized in her -roguish imagination by a statesman statue with roll of papers in hand, -and commanding brow, set high and overlooking conquered territory. - -She had become rather indifferent to his objects, the man himself was so -staunch, so living, so moving onward. - -They talked now of slightest things, the slightness proving how far -intimacy had travelled, comparing childish memories. It was pretty to -glance down these innocent vistas in each other's lives. Felicia told of -the day when she had locked herself in the attic, intending to starve -herself to death, in passionate resentment at some fancied wrong, and of -how, unable to turn the key again when her fear overcame her longing for -vengeance, too proud, in spite of fear to call for rescue, she had -remained there through a night of lonely horror. - -Geoffrey's reminiscences of naughtiness were more staid. He had never -been very passionate or resentful. "I was a conceited little beggar and -always kept cool." At a very early age, after a whipping from his -mother, he had looked up at her, laughed and said, "Do you want to go -on?" "I knew nothing would make her angrier: I must have been an -exceedingly disagreeable child." - -Both Maurice and Angela, during pauses in the dinner-table talk, were -conscious of this happy rivulet, Maurice listening and finding some of -its peace, until, seeing that Angela also listened, his peace was jarred -upon. - -After dinner, in the drawing-room, Geoffrey again joined Felicia, and -Maurice, making his way half automatically to Angela, who sat turning -pages in a corner, felt a sharper pang of shame. That Angela should know -Geoffrey's secret was, in some inexplicable way, a baleful fact. He was -conscious of a wish to ward off balefulness as he sat down beside her, -and an impulse better than the merely self-protecting desire brought -sudden, sincere words to his lips. "Angela, you have really forgiven me, -haven't you?" he said. If she had really forgiven him he was safe, -Felicia and Geoffrey were safe; Angela herself was freed of that baleful -aura which his own sick conscience cast around her. She had put away her -book. The light was dim and her face in shadow. He could not see the -expression upon it as she sat silent for some moments, her hands -turning, mechanically and quickly, the fan upon her knee; suddenly they -were quiet and she said: "I have forgiven you--if what you said was -true." - -"True? How could it not be?" Maurice stammered, conscious at once that -his impulse had been unwise. - -"It could not be if you loved her most." He was silent, struggling with -his thoughts. - -"You love her most--now," Angela said with a distant, a tragic touch of -questioning. - -"She is--my wife." - -"And therefore you love her most: for the past--loyalty to your wife -must seal your lips. If it were so! Yet it is hard--hard to forgive, -Maurice, not the pain, not the bewildered pain, but the crippling of my -life, the blotting out--for a time--of my heaven. And how could I -forgive if you robbed me of even my right to a memory? Of even my dead -joy?" - -"But--I told you--that I was unworthy--that I was undependable; that I -couldn't depend on my own feeling----" Maurice stammered on. - -"You tried to help me so," said Angela quickly, "and it was that that I -could not forgive--your smirching of it all; but you told me, too, to -read between the lines. I did; I believed what I read there." - -Even there she had only read that he loved her; not that he loved her -most. There was the intolerable, the unforgiveable. She rose, feeling -that she must leave him or burst into sobs. "I understand," she said. -"You must, for her sake, be loyal to the past. I won't ask further. Now -I will go and talk to her." She went across the room to Geoffrey and -Felicia, leaving Maurice in a miserable perplexity. - -Should he have been bravely brutal? Told her that the first truth, of -past and present, was his love for Felicia? Yet the minor truth was -there--the truth Angela clung to as her right--that he had loved her, -too, if only for the moment; could he, in the name of the larger truth, -rob her of it? He was not able clearly to see what he most wished or -regretted--that he might never see Angela again, that he had ever seen -her, were perhaps the clearest wish and regret. - -Angela sank into a seat beside Felicia. She had still that sense of a -strangled sob in her throat. A spiteful little comment floated, -strawlike, upon the passionate sea of her thoughts; she grasped it, -repeating to herself, "Cheap, alluring little creature." It helped her -to evade the sob and to bear the contemplation of Felicia's beauty. Oh, -yes, she had a certain beauty, a creamy childishness, the obvious charm -of soft white and cloudy ambers that had brought Geoffrey to her and won -her husband's shallow heart to constancy. Creaminess, childishness, -cheapness would always count for most in this strange world of irony and -pain. - -"At last I can escape to you," she said. "You have been so surrounded -all the evening, and Maurice and I have been reminiscing; I can never, -it seems, find you quite alone"--she smiled at Geoffrey--"but Geoffrey -hardly counts, does he? Isn't it odd--have you noticed it--that I have -hardly spoken with you except before Geoffrey, and perhaps, with me, -Geoffrey does count--a little uncomfortably? I seem to arouse all his -cynicism, and it's difficult to be quite oneself in the face of even a -friendly cynicism. I always fancy that we could really get at one -another, Mrs. Wynne, if we could achieve a _tete-a-tete_." - -"How selfish, my dear Angela." Geoffrey, stretching his long legs in a -low chair, did not even offer to accept the open hint. "You don't get -rid of me like that. I refuse to miss you." - -"Isn't that a palpable evasion?" Angela turned her smile from him; "we -must play Pyramus and Thisbe to his determined wall. Only please make -allowances for acoustic disturbances; a voice heard through a wall may -be misinterpreted." - -Felicia, ready to be amused and to make things easy, laughed at the -wall's stubborn presence. "I can't urge him to miss you. If he is -cynical we will simply leave him--_plante la_. He is more the schoolboy, -though, than the cynic." - -"You find the kindest interpreter, Geoffrey. Well, as a schoolboy then, -don't let him pull off my legs and wings for love of mischief. What have -you been doing all this time?" - -"Simply jogging on," said Felicia, finding in Angela's application of -her simile a certain justice. There was, indeed, in Geoffrey's -ruthlessness an element of cruel glee. - -"Maurice tells me that he has been lazy. You must whip him up; you must -spur him; it's fatal to Maurice to be allowed to jog. He must race -neck-to-neck with some incentive or he soon falls to mere grazing. He is -the racer type. But your father hasn't been jogging," Angela continued, -telling herself before Felicia's not very responsive look that she must -try some other interest--any allusion to Maurice would rouse the -hostility of this jealous little wife. "What a gallop, indeed, his -article on 'Credulity'!--Maurice and I have been talking about it." - -Felicia's eyes turned on her father, who was standing in isolation and -assumed indifference before the fire-place. She felt, in seeing him, -that familiar throb of indignant pity. No one could realize more acutely -than she the qualities in him that made for unpopularity; but it was his -ineffectiveness more than his vanity, his lack of power more than his -assumption of it, that made the world fall away from him. Her judgement -of her father always passed, with a swift self-condemnation, into a -judgement of human unkindness. She brought her eyes back to Angela, her -good temper chilled; there was sudden hardness in her look as she said: -"Have you?" - -"Yes,"--Angela smiled tender comprehension upon her--"I do understand. -Only I don't feel quite as you and Maurice do about it. I don't feel it -either so grotesque or so painful. I like the combativeness of it, the -way he hurls himself at windmills. You take it too seriously. It's a -thing to smile over, not a thing to be distressed about." - -Felicia's stare had become frozen, and before it she faltered, suddenly -and gently. - -"As an old friend of Maurice's--as a friend of yours--you allow me to -understand--and be sorry for the pain, don't you?" - -Felicia had risen, an instinctive recoil from something snake-like. - -"No, I don't allow any pity that divides me from my father," she said. -"You misunderstand my husband--and the privileges of your friendship for -him." - -She had not known what her intention was in rising; but now, looking at -her father, she turned and went across the room to him. - -Angela watched her in silence. With an effort she brought her eyes back -to Geoffrey, who, still stretched out in his chair, met them with a -sardonic smile. She felt as if Felicia had put a gash across her face -and as if he were pitilessly jibing at it. Her hand, again turning her -fan, trembled as she said, "Mrs. Wynne has a talent for _coups de -theatre_." - -"And you for carrying daggers up your sleeve, Angela. I perceive that -walls might be useful." - -"You are blinded, I know, to her cruelty. It is she who uses daggers. My -sympathy was real--a sympathy that any friend might have expressed--I -supposed, of course, that she felt with her husband. Her bitter -misconception of me distorts every effort I make to touch her." The -pathos and nobility of her words seemed to Angela her own nobility and -pathos. Her eyes filled with sincerest tears. - -"Dropping dramatic metaphors, Angela, I certainly think that since you -can't speak to Mrs. Wynne without making yourself highly disagreeable, -you'd better give up trying to speak at all." - -Geoffrey rose. With something of the cheerful and inflexible mien of an -Apollo, turning, bow-in-hand, from the slaughtered children of Niobe, he -walked away. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - - -"WHAT did you and Angela have to say to one another?" Maurice asked. He -and Felicia were driving down the polished sweep of Piccadilly alone, -for Mr. Merrick disliked crowded hansoms, and the long silence had been -unbroken. Leaning back in her corner, her cloak folded tightly around -her, Felicia had gazed blankly at the powdery blue of the sky, the -thickly sprinkled lights beneath it, her heart a chamber of angry -misery. Maurice's question, its light curiosity like the aimless -fumbling of a key, suddenly unlocked and threw open the door. - -"Maurice--Maurice," she said under her breath, yet it was like a cry, -"why did you talk to her about papa's essay?" Maurice's curiosity, had -been a little less aimless than its lightness implied, but he felt now -as if she had fired a pistol at his head. - -"What did she say?" he asked quickly and sharply, revealing his fear. - -"She said that she was sorry for us, and understood it--that you had -told her we disliked the article." - -"We did--you know," said Maurice after a moment, and, as he saw the -pale oval of his wife's face turn upon him: "She spoke of it; I didn't -think of concealing what we felt. I can't think that she meant to be -impertinent." It struck him, even now, as odd that he should be -venturing an excuse for Angela at the moment that his thoughts were -assailing her with a passionate vindictiveness. - -"Maurice, Maurice," Felicia repeated, in a voice empty now even of -reproach. It was a deep, a weary astonishment. - -"Dearest, don't misjudge me; don't make a mountain out of a mole-hill. -You know how one slips into such things." He leaned forward on the apron -of the cab to look his insistent supplication into her eyes, but hers -refused to meet them. "And she is an old--old friend, my precious -Felicia; one can't mistrust one's friends. It seemed perfectly natural -to talk it over." - -"Oh, Maurice, how miserable you have made me!" They were in the smaller -streets nearing Chelsea, and she covered her face with her hands. In an -agony of remorse he put an arm around her shoulders, beginning now to -see his culpability with her eyes, exaggerating it with his magnified -imagination of her contempt. He--who had encouraged his father-in-law to -publish the wretched thing--he to jest about it with a woman whom he -fundamentally distrusted! He could find no further words. They reached -the house in silence. Mr. Merrick, who had arrived just before them, was -inclined to talk, but, kissing him good-night with a certain vehemence, -Felicia went at once to her own room and after a few moments Maurice -followed her. - -She had already taken off her dress, and, in a white dressing-gown, was -hastily unpinning her wreath of hair. Maurice, in the mirror, met the -deep look of her eyes. His face was pallid as he stood hesitatingly near -the door, not guessing that anger was already gone and that the anguish -at her heart was dread of loss of love for him, dread of some -insurmountable barrier--would treacherous weakness be such a -barrier?--coming between them. Now she turned, and seeing him standing -there, white, not daring to supplicate, she stretched out her arms to -him. He sprang to her. - -"Oh, Maurice, don't--don't--don't," she stammered incoherently, not -clearly knowing what she wished him not to do. She dropped her face upon -his shoulder. "Don't let me ever--not love you. Hold me always." - -"Felicia, you almost kill me." - -His pallor, indeed, as she looked at him, shocked her. In the sudden -realization of the torture he had suffered the thought of its cause grew -dim and even trivial. What barrier could ever come between such a need, -such love, and her? - -"My poor Maurice, how unjust I have been. How hasty, how cruel. I do -understand. With her one can't be straight. She led, you followed; how -could you not? How could any one dear and trusting evade her? I do see -it all. You are not to blame. Oh, Maurice, how pale you are!" - -She sank into a chair, her arms around him, and he knelt beside her, -leaning like a little child his head upon her breast. - -"It is one of my horrors," he said. "For a moment I saw myself as you -might see me. For a moment I thought I might lose you." - -"Darling Maurice--never, never. I hated her so--that blinded me. I hate -so to think that she was ever near you--has any claim. Perhaps it is -almost a mean jealousy. Forgive me. Kiss me. Let us laugh at it." - -In his mind a thought, almost an inarticulate sob of terror and longing, -rose--rose and shook him. "Tell her now, tell her all." Terror quenched -longing. How explain? How seem anything to her but unutterably base? He -could never show her that craven spectre of the past. The real self that -clung to her could not risk losing her. He could not smile. He kissed -her, his eyes still closed, saying, "Don't take your arms away until the -horror is quite passed." - - - - -CHAPTER V - - -The spring and summer were over and autumn already growing bleak when -Geoffrey one afternoon drove to Chelsea. He drove there often, on his -free Wednesdays and Saturdays, since the Wynnes, after their round of -country visits, had returned to London, usually finding Felicia alone, -for Maurice was really working at a portrait, and Mr. Merrick spent most -of his time at his club, watching life from its windows with an ironic -eye. At tea-time Maurice would appear, tired yet merry, from the studio; -friends came in, the quiet shining hour broke into sparkling facets; but -the hours alone with her were personal possessions to Geoffrey, jewels -that strung themselves in a rosary through his weeks and months. They -talked, or Felicia played to him, declaring that his taste for music -grew; they often sat silent, she sewing and he watching her. The -thickets had been thorny of late, he had discovered that a curtailed and -uncertain income could make life curiously nagging and difficult, but -from these brambles it was comforting to look at the atoning cause of -them. The hours with her so justified his first groping simile of the -sunny opening among trees, grass, clouds and sky. His confidence in her -happiness irradiated his own problems. - -This afternoon the confidence received a little shock. He came late, -after tea-time, and walking before the maid into the drawing-room had -time, before Felicia saw him, to grasp the disturbing significance of -her attitude. She was sitting alone near the window, her elbows on her -knees, her face in her hands. For a moment he thought that she was -crying, and, like a pang, the memory of sunlight among young birches, -snowdrops, a distant bird-song, went through him. - -Felicia, however, was not crying; and as she looked round at him, he saw -that the attitude might have been one of merely momentary weariness. - -"I was almost asleep," she said. - -Taking up a bit of sewing she began to talk about the political -prospects. "I hear that you are not altogether in sympathy with the -Government," she said. - -"I'm not--not altogether." - -"I even hear that you may resign." - -"Perhaps I would," said Geoffrey, leaning back and smoothing his hand -over his hair, "if I could afford it. I serve my own purposes better by -remaining in office." - -"Do you mean that you can't afford--financially--to risk failure?" -Felicia asked. "I never associated you with compromise." - -"It's not my own failure, but the failure of the policy I believe in -that I might risk by refusing to compromise. One fights for one's cause -in politics with all sorts of weapons. As for personal failure, I may -not be put to too stringent a test; I may make enough money to float me -to absolute independence. Did you know that I was a ferocious -gambler--and not only on the Stock Exchange, but with cards?" - -The placidity with which he showed her his faults always amused Felicia, -even when she could not share it. He made no effort to win good -opinion--not even hers. - -"I have heard, and to tell you the truth I am sorry about the cards." - -"Why?" - -"I don't like the idea of a pastime becoming so significant. To say the -least of it--it's not fitting." - -"Well," said Geoffrey, laughing, "I won't do it any more. You are quite -right." - -"Oh, not on account of what I say, please," she protested, slightly -flushing; "you must judge for yourself." - -"So I do. I have judged. You may be sure I would never yield anything I -believed in--even to please you. I have always disliked the significance -cards might come to assume, so I yield, and gladly, since it does please -you." - -"That is a relief. I could not bear to be a standard. And I can't -believe," she added, "that your winnings at cards can have any -significance for your career." - -"Ah, any stick counts in the raft that keeps one floated. But as for my -career, if I've an object, you mustn't think it a career. I don't -bother much about my career. I'm a converted character, you see." - -"Converted! You? From what and to what?" - -Felicia's face, on its background of sky and river, turned on him the -look he loved--fond and mocking. He returned it, smiling, but gravely. -"It is quite true. It's not that I care less for my ambitions, but -differently. My goal has shifted, and everything is at once more simple -and more complex; the aims are bigger and far simpler; the fight is -bigger, too, but more complex than when the fight was personal. I -shouldn't mind failure, really, or beginning over again. You converted -me, you see." - -"I?" said Felicia, with more sadness than surprise. - -"Yes, you. Your courage, your sincerity, your faith, that wasn't the -least blind but counted the costs and took the risk every time. Oh, -don't protest; indeed, I hardly know how or why I felt it of you; merely -my whole interpretation of things began to twirl on another axis. The -idealistic philosophies of my college days came back to me--with all -sorts of personal meanings in them. I began to trust life and its -significance, since I trusted you so utterly." - -"You almost terrify me," said Felicia; "would the world turn round the -other way again if I proved horrid?" - -"Oh, no, that is done with. If you proved horrid I would suffer, but the -world would continue to turn in the right direction--despite your -wrongness." - -"Ah, that's a real conversion then." Felicia rose, laying down her work. -She was touched, near tears. Standing beside him and looking down at him -she said, "Shall I play to you?" - -"Do," said Geoffrey, but taking her hand he held it for a moment, adding -quietly, in almost a matter-of-fact voice, "Dear." - -He had let go her hand as quietly when Angela was ushered in. - -Angela and Felicia had not met since that night of the past spring, and -the parting then made future meetings improbable. - -Felicia had put Angela and Angela's meaning behind her, and had not -doubted that Angela would acquiesce in mutual forgetfulness. It was -astonishing and very disconcerting to see again this spectre rise, and -rise, as always it seemed, in Geoffrey's presence. - -She advanced into the room, smiling vaguely--vaguely hesitating, an -intentness under the hesitation. - -Felicia still stood beside Geoffrey, and before he, too, rose, and faced -the unwelcome guest, their attitude almost implied the clasp of hands -that Angela had not seen. - -Her eyes fluttered quickly from one to the other and then fixed in a -long gaze on Felicia. - -"Dear Mrs. Wynne, I wanted to see you alone," she said. - -Geoffrey, at this, turning his back, strolled to the window. - -Angela's purpose swiftly put him aside, would not linger; "I won't -wrangle with Geoffrey; besides, he really makes no difference," she -said. "For such a long time I have wanted to see you--ever since that -night--but you have been away, and so have I. I have been wretched about -that night. I could not bear to think that you misunderstood me so -cruelly. I have come to beg you to forgive me. It was presumptuous of me -to think for a moment that you would care for what I thought or felt, or -that my sympathy could be anything but indifferent to you. It was only a -blunder. I did not realize that you disliked me so much." - -Felicia's amazement struggled between a dim belief and a vivid -disbelief. The uppermost feeling came out, but in a dismayed voice, for -that half-belief plucked at her--"I think that you have always disliked -me--really I do." - -"I have longed to love you!" cried Angela; "longed to love you--if you -would let me;" and, as she heard the intolerable beauty of these words, -she burst into tears. - -Felicia turned her eyes on Geoffrey; his back to the window, he leaned -on the window-sill, folding his arms. Stupefied, Felicia's eyes -questioned him, "Shall I believe her? Shall I put my arms around her?" -It was her impulse, the quick response of her tenderness to suffering. -But under the impulse something strong held her back, something that -made it a false one, partaking of the falseness that aroused it; and -Geoffrey's sombre look at her seconded the distrust. She stood silent -and helpless. - -Angela uncovered her eyes. "Don't you believe me?" she asked. - -"I will try to," Felicia stammered, "if you will give me time--help me -to----" - -"You are very pitiless," said Angela in a voice that had caught back its -full self-control. "Very hard and pitiless." - -"What can I do? I cannot trust your affection; really I cannot. That is -the truth." - -"It is that that is hard and pitiless--to think of one's truth more than -of another's pain." - -"You always say the right thing," Felicia answered gravely; she could -but recognize the other's seeming right; there was no irony in the -words. - -"I have come to you with love," said Angela, controlling an anger that -made her voice tremble slightly, "and you have rejected me. I have given -you my best. But sincerity and love shrivel before such cruel scepticism -as yours. I am sad, sad for you, because to the sceptic all life must -turn to ashes. You are the spirit that denies: I don't distrust my own -flowers because when you look at them they die. I am sorry for you. You -live in a world where I cannot breathe. Good-bye." - -She had turned away, thrilling with her spiritual splendour. From -apparent failure she sprang to triumph. And, with a final flashing -vision of a Pilgrim's Chorus marching past Venusburg to a kingdom of the -sky, she added, resting eyes of saintly solemnity on her antagonist: -"God bless you." - -She was gone; and not moving, not looking at Geoffrey, Felicia said, "I -have been horrible. I could not help it." - -"You are all right," said Geoffrey, coming from the window, "you seemed -pretty horrible, and that gave her one of the best times of her life. -You positively buckled the wings on her shoulders. But she knows you're -right, and she won't forgive you for it, either." - -"To have a person who hates you say 'God bless you'--it frightens me." - -"Nonsense. It was an ugly missile, I own; but it's the worst she can shy -at you. Now come and play for me," said Geoffrey. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - - -Angela walked away breathing quickly. Her exaltation still floated her -above her anger, but through the anger and through the exaltation a deep -sense of injury and humiliation rose again and again, bringing tears to -her eyes. And under what circumstances had Felicia rejected her -outstretched hand, striking down its patient pitifulness? The suspicions -of her first entrance into the room gathered around her, cloaked her -warmly; there was a shiver in that sense of humiliation. Exaltation, -too, was a cold thing if one suspected that others did not see one as -exalted. Angela hardly knew that the hot currents of feeling that poured -through her heart were those of hatred. - -And hardly had she walked five minutes than she met Mr. Merrick, -strolling in all his handsome dignity down the street. - -There was no project in Angela; only the blind instinct to seize him, to -use him; a weapon, perhaps an avenging weapon. - -A fire was blazing in her, and by its glare through darkness she saw -only fitfully her own desires. She held out her hand with a quick smile. -"Dear Mr. Merrick, I had hoped to see you to-day. Will you walk back -with me a little?" - -She realized that Mr. Merrick's slight knowledge of her could not be a -very friendly one, but she guessed him to be susceptible to atonement. - -Firmly and quickly she went on, "I have always wanted to talk to you and -always missed the chance. We disagree, I think, about many things--and -disagreement always attracts me. I long at once to get the larger sight, -to test my truths by other's truths. I so respect honesty, conviction, -talent, even when used for purposes that oppose my own." - -Mr. Merrick, feeling a deep surprise and, perhaps, a touch of suspicion, -bowed gravely and turned to walk beside her. - -"I have so wanted to ask you about your life, about the steps of thought -that have led you to your present position; for you must recognize that -it is a position--and that to have achieved it implies responsibilities." - -Still with large gravity Mr. Merrick inclined his head, finding no ready -words in answer to such comprehensive interest. - -Angela was not wanting in humour, and a malicious thought of _Maitre -Corbeau, sur un arbre perche_, flashed through her mind. He evidently -accepted her implied homage as a making of amends fully due to his -distinction. - -"I have tried so often to really know you," Angela said, smiling -plaintively, though lightly; "especially since reading your essay on -'Credulity' last spring. But I can never find you." - -"Ah, yet I am often at home at this hour." - -The touch of surprised suspicion was gone; Mr. Merrick spoke with -benignity. - -"Ah, but it's difficult, you see." Angela's smile gained at once in -gaiety and plaintiveness. "I had so hoped to see more of you all; I -hoped when your daughter came to London that as an old friend of her -husband's--he is like a brother to me--was, I perhaps should say--she -would let me be her friend too. London is a big, ugly place for a fresh -young creature. I know it so well. I should have liked to hold her hand -as it were, while she made her first steps in the muddy, slippery -world." - -Mr. Merrick looked now a trifle perplexed, and Angela felt that she had -gone a little too fast as he said, "I have been with Felicia from almost -the beginning of her London life; and since I fancy that I know the -world better than any young woman can know it"--he inclined himself to -Angela with a slight, paternal irony of manner--"she has had her hand -held. I have watched over my young nestlings," Mr. Merrick added, -smiling kindly upon her. - -"Yes, yes," she hurried to say, "a man knows more, of course--can guard -from anything obvious; but the things to be guarded against in our -complex modern life are not the obvious things; they are breaths, -whispers, vague touches in the dark. Dear Mr. Merrick,"--her gentle look -had now its rallying touch of boldness--"men do not hear or feel the -things I mean. And, again, you are a man of the world, but your daughter -is not a woman of the world. I know what you have wished for her--to -keep your rose-bud sheltered, the dew still upon it; so often the ideal -of the father when he has seen life in all its dangerous reality. You -have succeeded; she is a rose-bud with the dew on it. Dear Mr. Merrick, -keep it dewy." Her smile straight into his eyes was grave, steady. -Maitre Corbeau was flattered by her words, her look. The vague -self-distrust that often fluttered in him, that fear of perhaps lacking -what she so delightfully saw in him, was still. He had hardly grasped -the significance of her allusions. - -"You see," Angela went on quietly,--she was by now quite sincerely in -the very frame of mind her words fitted, warning, protective, benignant, -exalted in his eyes so that the mood of that final "God bless you" was -with her again, a mist that shut out flames,--"You see, your daughter is -younger than I am. In one sense--it may sound odd, but I am very -clear-sighted in all matters of sympathy--in one sense I doubt whether -she could understand you as I do." - -Angela's voice was as mild and smooth as milk and honey as she glided to -another turn of her labyrinth. "There is an inevitable narrowness, -intolerance, in youth; something cruel in the clearness of young minds, -unable to see beyond their own acuteness. It didn't surprise me that -neither she nor Maurice appreciated your essay. I disagreed with it, but -I saw the bigness of my opponent, saw all the thought and life and -suffering that underlay every sentence; and when I realized that they -saw only the little superficial things, that they laughed at the shrubs -and thickets and didn't even look up at the mountain, I felt all the -strange situation, all the pain it must be to you; felt, forgive me if I -say too much, your loneliness." - -Mr. Merrick was amazed, perhaps more amazed by this revelation of some -unkind disloyalty in his children, than gratified by Angela's sympathy. -But though he could feel little gratitude he felt no distrust; and his -injuries suddenly lowered, even larger than he had fancied. Maurice too! -There was treachery then as well as disloyalty. The sudden grievance -could not be kept down. - -"I am surprised at Maurice. He urged me to publish, seemed to see -nothing but the mountain," he said. - -Angela felt a hasty recoil from this false step; she had imagined the -dissuasions both Felicia's and Maurice's. - -"Oh, about Maurice I don't know," she said quickly; "it was in my talk -with her about it that I saw her dislike--and only inferred his." She -felt that she had dogged all sorts of funny, half-hidden little -dangers--Maurice's aroused enmity was the plainest of them--and what was -she racing towards? what her object? She could not see. Felicia took all -from her, would share not a jot or tittle of her rich possessions; well -then, she would keep what came. Besides, Felicia was in peril. Yes, -there was the object. She heaved a sigh as it emerged once more before -her. - -Mr. Merrick, after a silence not without its dignity, forbearing -further comment on the revelation, went on: "Yes, loneliness is the lot -of age. Youth is narrow. I don't complain; one can't when one -understands. Before her marriage Felicia was my complaisant little echo. -I filled her mind with all it owns. Now other interests have pushed me -out." - -The object, the beneficent object, was now so clear, that the dubious -meaning of that sudden dodge was comfortably obscured; with one's eye on -a beacon one could no longer glance at these wayside mishaps. She had a -look of quiet homage for his generosity, as she said, "As to interests -that push you out I hardly care for one. Your daughter's feeling about -your essay could hardly have been spontaneous in your complaisant echo; -it's the rarest women, the strongest only, who do not echo some one; I -imagined that in this case she echoed her husband, but I see the larger -influence. My Cousin Geoffrey was with your daughter when I came this -afternoon. I hoped to see her alone--to see you; but I felt that I was -interrupting. He admires your daughter greatly. The dewy rose attracts -after dusty, practical life; it's pleasant, after turmoil, to inhale the -perfume. As I say, frankly, it is an influence that I regret." - -"He is Maurice's most intimate friend," said Mr. Merrick quickly. - -She felt his involuntary clutch at the answer to an intimation he hardly -recognized. - -"Yes, he is," she assented, "but not the friend I would have chosen for -Maurice either. Maurice wants an ideal in life, an impetus away from -dreams and dilettante dawdling into noble action. Geoffrey is pinned to -activity, indeed, but hardly in its noble forms; pinned rather to the -practical, the expedient, the continual compromise of political life -that tends, I think, to eat away all sense of moral responsibility. Not -a good influence for either of your nestlings. I am very frank, Mr. -Merrick, but I have known both these men so well, since boyhood. -Geoffrey is strong, and Maurice, with all his charm, is weak; the -contrast must tell. Geoffrey predominates over Maurice and will, I fear, -over your daughter. Already we have found his influence working. Women -echo the strongest. Here I am, at home. It was so good of you to come -with me. I am so glad of our talk. Won't you lunch with me and my father -on Friday? Lord Challoner is to be with us--a clever man; he will be -delighted to meet you. You and he will talk while papa and I listen. I -love to watch minds striking sparks. You will come?" - -"With pleasure." Mr. Merrick's varying emotions culminated for the -moment in gratification. Lord Challoner was a very clever man; Lady -Angela well known as a very clever woman. The responsibilities of his -recognized worth wrought in him as he walked homeward. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - - -The talk had been as suave as the ascent of a rocket; and once its -destined height attained its transformation into successive explosive -shocks swiftly followed. Felicia, shortly after her father's return, -burst into Maurice's dressing-room. She had known a tormenting doubt of -her own distrust; now her indignation was sure of itself, her distrust -was justified; there was almost a relief in the fulness of her anger. - -"Maurice, what do you think has happened?" she demanded. - -Maurice was just finishing his dressing. He looked round at her -inquiringly, laying down his brushes. Felicia's indignations were rare, -and therefore rather alarming; but seeing that this indignation was in -no way connected with himself--Felicia's whole aspect irradiated a sense -of union, a conviction that he was to second her in her indignation--he -took up the brushes again and put a finishing touch to his hair. "What -is it?" he asked, wondering if Mr. Merrick had suddenly become -insufferable, and rather hoping that such was the case and that Felicia -would initiate a movement to get rid of him. "Nothing to bother you -about your father, dear?" he added. - -"Exactly. You remember last summer--Lady Angela and papa's article? She -came here this afternoon and asked me to forgive her. I couldn't; it -seemed cruel, I know; but I felt through and through me that I must not -trust her. She went away, forgiving me, and now papa tells me that she -met him and has been talking with him, and that he finds her charming, -and that he is going to lunch with her! Imagine the audacity!" - -Maurice, looking at her in the mirror, had turned white, feeling -serpent-coils tightening about him again. - -"How astonishing!" he ejaculated. But more than astonishment, he felt a -sickening fear. What had Angela intended? What did she now intend? - -"We must prevent it," said Felicia. "I hate, dear, to bring you into it, -but you must see as I do that it's impossible. Try to explain it to -papa; try to make him feel that she cannot be trusted, that she will -poison everything; that in trusting her he divides himself from me." - -Maurice had begun to tie his white cravat, but his fingers fumbled with -it, and he realized that they were trembling. Uppermost in his mind was -a hope, clutched at, that Angela's proffered friendship had been -sincere, a dread lest Felicia's rejection of it should call down upon -her Angela's revenge; for after all had not Angela, under the -circumstances, behaved with extraordinary generosity? And what a weapon -she held--and withheld--the weapon he himself had put into her hands. It -was the thought of this weapon, turned against his wife's breast, and -murdering there her love for him, that made him white. - -"I will tell him, dear, anything you like," he said, in a voice she -recognized as strange. "And she was here, you say, this afternoon? -Felicia, dearest"--he had managed now to draw through the loop of the -white tie--"weren't you a trifle hard on her?--a trifle cruel, as you -say? She is a visionary creature. She probably came to you with a real -longing for reconciliation; and if she had offended you it had been -unconsciously--through taking too much for granted. You know you -misjudged her last summer. You remember, darling, you said you did." - -Something like terror was freezing Felicia's anger. She steadied herself -with the effort to look at and to understand Maurice's point of view. "I -said so because I wanted to make it easy for you; because I longed to -believe myself in the wrong. Even now, I long to believe it. Perhaps I -am unjust; perhaps she is right in what she said of me--that I am hard, -cynical; perhaps she has really always wanted to be my friend. I can't -think it out; I only feel that I cannot trust her, that she is false, -and that she is getting power over papa. Why, I don't know, except that -she loves power, and that through him she may strike at me; for what I -feel most of all, and I have always felt it, Maurice, is that she hates -me." - -"Dearest,"--Maurice searched a drawer for a handkerchief--"I know all -you feel; but you do grant, don't you, that your dislike of her, -instinctive from the first, may blind you to some real sincerity in her? -I don't think she hates you; she is jealous. I am afraid, though it's -caddish to say it, that she did care a good deal about me, and that -that's the root of it. Her impulse is really kind, but your instinct -makes you feel the pain and bitterness under it. Understanding it all, -as we do, it seems really cruel to push her away, to break with her -utterly." - -"We must, we must," said Felicia, "for her sake as well as ours, we -must." - -"Why, dearest?" Maurice tipped some perfume on the handkerchief. - -"It can only be more pain and more bitterness for her if we don't. What -can I mean to her? What can you mean to her? And I have broken with her. -Oh, Maurice, surely you see that it must be." - -He turned to her now, and saw that tears were running down her cheeks. - -Caution left him. "Dearest!" he exclaimed, his arms about her in a -moment, "rather than hurt you I would walk over ten thousand Angelas. -Dearest, don't cry; I will do my best. I'll try and dissuade your -father--an ugly task for me. Poor Angela was my friend." - -"Oh, Maurice, say that I do not come between you and anything real." - -Hiding her face on his shoulder, it comforted her to think herself weak, -and he, with his larger, kinder comprehension, strong. - -"You are the only real thing," Maurice answered. He felt that he forced -her to imply herself wilful in wrongness; and his fear lest she were -more right than she guessed made his triumph seem dangerous. - - * * * * * - -Felicia said that she would not come in to dinner, and Maurice walked -slowly to the drawing-room, pausing for a moment over his thoughts in -the little hall. Felicia's parting kiss had quieted his worst fear--the -fear lest her love suspected past wrongs in him, a baseless fear he now -saw, and with this steadying of the nerves he could see the other fear -as baseless too. Angela would never turn despicably on him; besides, -even if she did, Felicia would never believe her, her jealousy would -piteously interpret her desperation. There was further relief in -thinking Felicia unjust. The thing must be patched up, and Felicia -brought to see that common fairness demanded a certain toleration of -Angela. - -Mr. Merrick was reading a paper with a pretence at absorption, and -Maurice guessed that he was very angry. Neither commented on Felicia's -absence, and they went in silence into the little dining-room. - -"So you are going to make friends with Angela," Maurice observed -lightly, when the servant had gone. - -"Felicia has spoken to you, I infer," said Mr. Merrick, sipping his soup -in slow and regular spoonfuls. His father-in-law's aggressively noisy -manner of imbibing soup had long been a thorn in the flesh to Maurice. -It was peculiarly irritating to-night. He could but hold Mr. Merrick -responsible for all the vexatious situation. Silly, gullible old fool! -He could almost have uttered the words as the sibilant mouthfuls -succeeded one another. How obvious, in looking at him, that Angela could -only have captured him as a tool. To think that, again cast the -danger-signal on the situation, made it more than vexatious. Maurice -forcibly quieted his mental comments, since to think his father-in-law a -silly old fool roused again his worst suspicions of Angela. - -"Naturally, she has spoken to me," he said. - -"I trust that you do not share her morbid hatred." - -"I don't know about a morbid hatred," Maurice answered, controlling his -impatience with the more success now that the soup was done. "I see a -very normal antagonism of temperament. Angela is all artificiality, and -Felicia all reality; but I do think," he added, "that Felicia has the -defects of her qualities. She scorns artificiality too quickly. Her -scorns outshoot the mark. I don't think that poor Angela, with all her -attitudinising, meant any harm this afternoon. Why should she? It was, I -own, rather hard on her to come to beg for forgiveness, and to have -Felicia refuse to forgive her." - -Mr. Merrick had not dared openly to express his angers and grievances, -for then he must reveal their source, and that he felt to be -inadvisable; but the latent angers only awaited their opportunity. - -"Upon my word! Forgiveness for what?" he demanded. - -Maurice recoiled as Angela that afternoon had recoiled. He had intended -a cheery, mending talk, and he had not intended that it should lead him -to this. He could not tell Mr. Merrick the cause of Angela's visit--that -he had jested with her over the very article he had urged him to -publish. - -"I don't quite know what happened," he said, searching his mind for a -safe clue. "Felicia, as you know, didn't like that article of yours; -Angela spoke to her about it--it was in the summer--there was some -misunderstanding; Felicia resented her sympathy." - -Matters were becoming clear, luridly clear, to Mr. Merrick's mind, and -Angela gained all that Felicia lost. "Indeed," he said, ominously, "she -criticizes her own father and resents the frank and more intelligent -criticism of a friend." - -"No, no!" Maurice was feeling a rush of stupefaction. What had he done? -This was not the clue. "Felicia, as far as I understand, didn't initiate -the criticism--resented Angela's." - -"I see; I understand. It is the proffered friendship she rejects; the -community, not the criticism." Mr. Merrick felt that in Angela's -interpretation of the scene he held a touchstone of its real -significance, invisible to Maurice. And how noble had been her further -reticence. His anger rose with redoubled vigour over the slight obstacle -Maurice had thrown before it. "I see it all," he repeated; "the quixotic -generosity of Lady Angela's seeking for reconciliation, and Felicia's -rejection of her. As I say, a morbid hatred, and that only, explains -it, and it explains it all." - -Maurice was silent, with a sort of despair he felt that so, in its false -truth, the situation must rest. - -"At all events," he said, "I don't suppose that under the circumstances -you will really care to accept this invitation of Angela's." - -"I have accepted it." - -"Grant that it's a bit indelicate of her to steal such a march on -Felicia. It looks like retaliation, you know." - -Mr. Merrick flushed. "I do myself and her the honour to think that it -looks like friendship for myself." Fresh lights were breaking on him -every moment. Dewy roses in danger; perilous influences. "I do her the -further honour," he went on, "to believe that Felicia's rejection of her -does not alter her wish to do well by Felicia. For my part I will do my -best to atone to her for the cruel affront that she has received at my -daughter's hands." - -Maurice, after the uncomfortable meal was over, almost feared to go to -Felicia's room with his news of defeat. He feared, too, with this new -weakness born of his new self-disgust, that her love already had taken -on that shadow of suspicion and distrust that he dreaded. He was feeling -a sort of giddiness from the hateful pettiness of complexity that -enmeshed him. He even imagined he might find her crying in bed, and -dinnerless, a horribly effective form of feminine pathos that he had -never yet had to face in her. The sight of a tray outside her door -reassured him as to the dinner, and it was with a sense of exquisite -relief, a sense of dear, sane, commonplace effacing silly doubts that he -found her engaged in the very feminine but very unpathetic occupation of -tidying her drawers. - -She sat--her lap filled with gloves, ribbons and handkerchiefs, and was -folding and rearranging, apparently intent on her occupation. Her eyes, -as she looked round at him, gave him once more that sense of quiet -security. She had faced the situation, seen its triviality, recovered -her humour and her calm. Maurice at once saw the situation as only -trivial too. - -"Well?" Felicia asked, laying a lawn collar in its place. - -"Well, dear, I'm afraid he is unmalleable. He is going." - -Felicia's face hardened a little, but not, he knew, towards himself. - -"He sees the strain, the unnaturalness he makes?" - -"Try not to mind, dear. You'll find that it will adjust itself." - -Maurice had not guessed, nor had Felicia herself even, the almost panic -sense of dismay and danger that underlay her determined activity, her -determined cheerfulness. Angela seemed to threaten all her life. Worst -of all, though Felicia clung blindly to her instinct, she seemed to -threaten her very power of judging, feeling clearly. Darts of -self-distrust went through her, and following them, strange -disintegrating longings to justify Angela by that self-distrust, to own -herself hard, cruel, and to find peace. Her mind played her these -will-of-the-wisp tricks, tempting her--to what bogs and quicksands? -Under the shifting torment only the instinct held firm, and with shut -eyes it clung to courage as her only safeguard; courage to face the -tangled life, and the greater courage needed to face the tangled -thoughts and conscience. It kept the quiet in her voice, her eyes, as -she answered now. - -"I mind, of course; but I believe that with time he will come back to -me. I shan't oppose him. As long, dear, as she doesn't come between you -and me, it's really all right." - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - - -"Yes, it had become impossible," said Geoffrey. He was standing before -her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked. -"I couldn't submit to being dragged helplessly at the wheels of a -chariot that I would have driven in precisely the opposite direction." -He smiled a little as he added, "So you see before you a ruined man. Are -you pleased with me that I've embraced failure?" Lightness of voice went -with the smile, and, superficially, the old manner of holding out a -sugar-plum to a child. - -Felicia, knowing what his resignation of office meant to him, was too -much distressed by what she felt beneath the lightness to respond in the -playful key. - -"You are not a ruined man," she said; "I'm not pleased that you should -call yourself that. You really can't afford to re-enter the House as an -independent member?" - -"No," said Geoffrey, shortly; "I can afford nothing but drudgery." - -"Drudging with you will only be a stepping-stone back to power." - -He was studying her as he stood before her, seeing suddenly after his -momentary self-absorption, her pallor and thinness. She almost reminded -him of the ghostly Felicia, the Felicia of tears and helpless grief; -the Felicia of that distant day among the birch-woods. This Felicia was -not helpless, not weeping, not quite so wan, but her looks made an -ominous echo. He took a seat beside her. "Your father still goes -constantly to Angela?" he asked. - -Felicia nodded gravely, yet without plaintiveness. Geoffrey made no -comment on the affirmation. In silence for some moments, he told himself -that this daily growing alienation accounted for the air of pain and -tension. - -"I must actually seem to you to whine over myself," he said, presently. -"Of course, I know that the drudgery is only a stepping-stone. I must -fill my pockets with ammunition; find the pebble for my sling before I -confront Goliath again. But tell me something.... I may ask it?" He -hesitated. Under his light firmness he knew a shattered, groping mood. -He could not think with clearness either for her or himself, and only -felt that he must ask. - -"Anything you like," Felicia answered gravely. - -"Are you happy?" - -He had never come so near as in asking the question; they both felt it. -Some barrier was gone; the barrier of her happiness, perhaps. Felicia -knew that the little moment suddenly trembled for her with that sense of -nearness; in another she felt that her sadness would be a stronger -barrier. - -She looked up from her sewing. - -"You know what I feel about papa and Lady Angela. I feel it foolishly -perhaps." - -"Apart from that, it's a pain, I know, but one can adjust oneself to -pain." - -"Apart from that, am I happy? What do you mean by happiness?" - -"Are you satisfied? Is your life growing? Is it glad?" Each question was -a stone thrown into a deep, deep well of sadness, but she answered with -serenity over these shaken depths, even smiling at him with a flicker of -the old malice. "It would not grow if I were satisfied, nor, perhaps, if -I were altogether glad." - -She saw by the look of accepted gloom that came to his face that he knew -himself banished from that moment of nearness, and over the barrier felt -herself putting out a hand of tender compunction and comradeship, as she -went on more gravely, "I think I am happy, but happiness is not a thing -one can look at. It's like a bird singing in a tree--one parts the -branches to see it and it is silent." - -"You hear it singing, then, when I don't ask you questions?" He had -grasped the metaphorical hand, understanding and grateful; -understanding, at all events, as much as she herself did. - -"Yes; and when I don't stop to listen for it." - -They talked on again: of his situation, his projects, but these things -were now far from their minds. The fact of his broken life no longer -held Geoffrey's thoughts; they were in a chaos of doubts and surmises. -He had ruined himself, then, that she might hear the bird sing, and it -was silent; and was it only silent? Had it flown? For the first time -since he had played the part of a happy fate in her life he knew a -passionate regret for what he had done. No doubt, no surmise, touched -her love for her husband. The regret was for the chance he had -lost--that other chance of making her happy. Why hadn't he ruthlessly -held on to the advantage circumstance gave him, the advantage not only -over Maurice's poverty, but over Maurice's weakness? A lurid thought -went over that weakness. Would he, Geoffrey, whatever his poverty, have -given her up? The "no" that thrilled sternly through his blood told him -that to his strength the triumph might have come. He only quelled the -tumult by remembering her strength. Dubious peace--to think that her -strength would never have let him hope; her strength was great, no -doubt, but was it as great as he had imagined? And would it have held -her faithful to a finally fickle Maurice? Above all, would it have -outmatched his own through years? The tumult was rising again, and he -saw that the sudden, wild regret had been like the opening of a -flood-gate to such tumults. He must endure them with as much composure -as he could muster from contemplation of the fact that the past was -irrevocable, that he had given her to her husband, and that she loved -her husband; the last fact in particular laid a chill, sane hand on -retrospect. - -He and Felicia were still talking when Mr. Merrick entered. - -Far from assuming a culprit's humility, Mr. Merrick's demeanour of late -showed, towards Maurice and Felicia, an aggressive indifference, and -towards Geoffrey a portentous gravity. He had made a habit of coming in -upon _tete-a-tetes_, taking up a book, and seating himself, with a -frosty nod and air of remonstrant determination that was more than a -hint for Geoffrey's departure. - -Geoffrey had ignored the hint on several recent occasions, continuing to -talk until Maurice's appearance seemed to relieve Mr. Merrick from some -sense of grim obligation; he would then arise, with no word, and stalk -away. Geoffrey felt amusement in watching these manoeuvres, giving very -little thought to their significance, and finding a schoolboy fun in the -conviction that he annoyed Mr. Merrick very much by outsitting him. But -to-day he was in no mood for annoying Mr. Merrick; Mr. Merrick's -appearance, indeed, annoyed him too vividly for him to feel the fun of -retaliation. He got up at once, and before the other had taken his place -near the window. - -"Good-bye," he said, taking Felicia's hand; his eyes lingered on her -pallor, her wanness. "I won't silence the bird any more. I'll see you -soon again. Tell Maurice I'm sorry to miss him." - -He departed, and Mr. Merrick, arrested in his usual routine, paused, -book in hand, on his way to his chair. - -His frustrated passive energy took form in speech. He sat down and -opened the book, observing, "I am sorry, Felicia, to be obliged to send -any of your guests away." - -Felicia had noticed and wondered at the interruptions, hardly suspecting -them of purpose, but now all manner of latent irritations leaped up in -her. To-day, especially, she had resented her father's appearance. She -had needed Geoffrey, the haven of his silence and his strength. After -that one strange moment of inner trembling, the old sense of quiet skies -and an encircling shore had returned, and she had rested in it. - -Now, looking up, her face sharpened with quick suspicion and quick -resentment, she asked, "Obliged? Send my guests away? Indeed, papa, you -could not do that." - -Her voice rather alarmed Mr. Merrick; it revealed a more resolute -hostility than he had suspected; and real hostility, final or open -hostility between him and his child, Mr. Merrick, in his heart of -hearts, feared more than any calamity. Flattered vanity, injured trust, -real anxiety for her welfare, had all helped to float his new -independence, but he never contemplated really sailing away from her. He -nerved himself now with the thought of his duty. Swinging his foot, -speaking with measured definiteness, his eyes on his book, he said, "I -shall at all events do my utmost to protect you from an undesirable -intimacy." - -Felicia's quick heart guessed at the alarm that nerved itself, and now, -after the moment in which her anger rose, her sense of the ludicrous -shook the anger to sudden laughter. - -"Papa! how ridiculous!" she exclaimed. "Really, your prejudices -shouldn't make you say and do such foolish and such futile things. Mr. -Daunt is my dearest friend--Maurice's dearest friend." - -"It is a friendship I regret for both of you. Maurice is weak, Mr. Daunt -is strong; he dominates you both." - -"What folly, my dear father!" - -"Very well, Felicia, folly be it. I can only say that your conduct in -this, as in other respects, deeply distresses me. You are altogether -changed." - -"I changed? In what respect?" - -Mr. Merrick paused to review swiftly all the respects, before saying, -"You have become cynical, ungenerous, disloyal." - -Felicia's amusement hardened to stern gravity. She grew even paler, -laying down her sewing as she said, "Ungenerous? Disloyal? I?" - -"You, Felicia. It has given me the very greatest pain." - -"How have I been ungenerous? disloyal?" - -Her father did not meet her eyes. - -"You have been ungenerous to a very noble woman, who only asked to be -your friend. You have been disloyal to me." - -"To you!" Her interjections were like swift knives, cutting at his -careful deliberateness. "What do you mean?" - -"You thought fit, moved by this influence that I deplore--quite apart -from its open antagonism to my claims on you--to scoff and jeer at my -essay. It would have been enough to have expressed your dislike to me -alone." His eyes now turned to her. - -She gazed at him with an almost stupid astonishment. Suddenly she rose. -As if some hateful revelation had torn stupefaction from her,--"That -horrible woman!" she cried. - -"It was your husband who told me," said Mr. Merrick quickly. - -"Maurice told you that I had scoffed at your essay with that woman?" - -Her eyes now had a corpse-like vacancy, very unpleasant to meet; only -his consciousness of integrity enabled Mr. Merrick to keep his own -steady. - -"Scoff is perhaps too strong a word. You allowed her to see to the full -your dislike, your scorn, and then repulsed her sympathy. That is what -Maurice gave me to understand, and that, I don't fancy you can deny, is -the truth." - -Felicia, looking now about her vaguely, sank again in her chair. Her -silence, her dazed helplessness, tinged Mr. Merrick's displeasure with a -slight compunction. - -"There, child," he said, rising as he spoke, "don't feel like that about -it. Any injury that I may have received is fully forgiven. The only real -harm is your irrational hatred,--don't stare like that, Felicia--your -irrational hatred, as I say, and the influence that I protest against -and must always protest against." - -Still she was silent, though her gaze had dropped from him. Her -silence, her look of disproportionate dismay, perturbed and rather -embarrassed him. He yielded to the magnanimity of a pat on the head as -he passed her on his way out of the room, saying, "Think it all over; -think better of it all." Pausing at the door, he added, "_She_ bears no -grudge, not the faintest; understands you better than you do yourself, -my poor child." She still sat, lying back in her chair, her eyes cast -down, her hands intertwisted in her lap. It was uncomfortable to leave -her so, but after all, the punishment was deserved, her very silence -proved as much; and he had done his duty. - -Felicia was hardly conscious of his presence, his voice or his going; -the words went over her head like the silly cries of a flight of cranes; -when the door was closed it was as if the cranes had passed. She was -alone on a great empty moor, it seemed, an empty, lowering sky above -her. - -This, then, was the truth. Her husband was a false, a craven man. -Fiercely, yet with a languid fierceness, as of slow flames, feeling an -immense fatigue, as though she had been beaten with scourges, her -thoughts stripped him of all her sweet seeings of him. Shallow, -impressionable, weak, his love for her the only steady thing in him; his -loyalty to her as unsteady as a flame in the wind; his love, perhaps, -steady only because she was strong. She could feel no pity; rather she -felt that she spurned him from her. In her weariness it seemed to her -that for a long time she had been trying to love him, and that now the -effort was snapped. And her scorn of him passed into self-scorn. Fatal -weakness and blindness not to have seen him truly from the first, not to -have felt that her craving for love, her love for his love, had been -more than any love for him. In her deep repulsion from him and all he -signified, his individuality and its fears, its sadness, its devotion, -were unreal to her, blotted out in scorn--scorn, the distorter of all -truth--as unreal as her love for it had been. And with her recognized -weakness and despair came, with the memory of that trembling nearness, -the thought of Geoffrey, and her heart suddenly cried out for him, for -his strength, his unwavering truth. She closed her eyes, holding the -thought close. - -Some one entered, and she opened her eyes on Maurice. He had worked all -the afternoon. The sitter was gone. He beamed with conscious merit, -deserving her approbation, quite like a child let loose from school; -smiling and radiant. - -He came to her as she lay sunken in the chair, leaned to her for a kiss, -and paused, meeting the hard fixed look of her eyes. - -"What is the matter, dearest?" he asked, and his heart began to shake. - -"Why did you tell papa that lie?" - -He hardly understood the question, but her tone struck through him like -a knife. "What lie?" - -"You told him that I talked to Lady Angela of my dislike for his -article." - -"Didn't you?" Maurice asked feebly, for his brain was whirling. The -added baseness did not urge her voice from its horrible, icy calm. - -"I, Maurice? When you--you only talked to her of it?" - -"Felicia, I swear you have mistaken it. Don't kill me in looking like -that. Let me think. I told him--yes--I had to explain how it -happened--your anger towards Angela, your sending her away. I muddled -into the whole thing. I suppose I let him think that you had talked. How -could I tell him that it was I? For Heaven's sake, be merely just, -darling,--Felicia,--how could I tell him that, when I am half -responsible for his publishing it? You remember the mess I got into to -please you?" - -"To please me? You are a coward, Maurice." She turned her eyes from him. - -Maurice stood before her, miserably, abjectly silent. Moments went by, -and still she sat with stern, averted eyes that seemed to look away from -him for ever. It was not even as if she paused to give a final verdict; -it was as though in her last words she had condemned him, and as if, -now, he were a thing put by and forgotten. - -But though, her brow on her clenched hand, her eyes fixed, half looking -down, she seemed a figure of stony immutability, more than if she looked -at him, she was aware of his misery, his abjectness, his piteous loss of -all smiles and happy radiance. Her own words--"a lie," "a coward," -echoed. Insufferable shocks of feeling, indistinguishable, immense, went -through her; and suddenly the surging sense of her own cruelty, his -piteousness, made a long cry within her. She could not bear to be so -cruel; she could not bear to have him suffer. The inner cry came in a -stifled moan to her lips. "Maurice!" She covered her face with her -hands. He fell on his knees beside her, his heart almost broken by -sudden hope. They clung together like two children. "Forgive me; forgive -me," she repeated. "Forgive me. Nothing--nothing could deserve such -cruelty. My poor, poor Maurice; I didn't love you. I was so cruel that I -didn't love you any longer." - -She looked into his blue eyes, his face, quivering with sincerity. With -the confession, the awful moments of hatred drifted into nightmare -unreality. His need of her, his love for her, were the only realities; -they engulfed the vision of herself--dry, bitter, bereft of her love for -him. It flitted away--a bat--in the sad, white dawn. It was she, who, -holding him to her, explained, to herself as well as to him, how it all -happened; an involved, sudden twist of circumstance before which he had -been bewildered, weak. "And weakness is more forgiveable--so far more -forgiveable than cruelty, dear--dear," she said. "Horrible I! to have -had such thoughts." She could forgive him. She could not forgive herself -for having hated him. The very memory trembled in her like a living -thing. No tenderness was great enough to atone. - -Later on, when Mr. Merrick appeared, Maurice rose, and with unflinching -distinctness put the whole piece of comic tragedy before him, sparing -himself in nothing. After the searing torture he had undergone, he felt -no pain in the avowal. Mr. Merrick's red displeasure rather amused him, -so delicious was the sense of utterly redeeming himself in Felicia's -eyes. It was Felicia who felt the pang for her father's wounded vanity -and for the ugly picture that Maurice must present to him. - -"You have behaved in a way I don't care to characterize," Mr. Merrick -remarked, when Maurice had finished with "If I had only had Felicia's -courage at the beginning--only frankly told you that I didn't like the -article--if I hadn't been over-anxious to please you and her, I wouldn't -have got myself into such a series of messes." - -And now Maurice, his head held high, his thumbs in his pockets, looking -as if, with gallant indifference, he were facing cannon that he scorned, -replied that he deserved any reproach. - -"Maurice has been weak, too complaisant," said Felicia, "but there has -been a half-truth in all he said; he kept back the whole for fear of -hurting you. Forgive us both." - -"You have nothing to forgive in Felicia," said Maurice; "she has been -the target, I think, for all our egotisms to stab." - -"Indeed, Maurice, indeed. I am not in any way aware of having wounded my -child except where your tergiversation opened her to my just reproach. -If she has been a target you have hidden behind it." - -"Exactly." Maurice received the raking fire with undisturbed equanimity. -"In future you'll remember that whatever I say she can never deserve -reproach." - -Felicia was protesting against this too sweeping defence, when Mr. -Merrick interrupted her with "I only beg that in the future you will not -whet your consciences on my feelings. Pray consider me, if only -slightly." - -Felicia looked, when her father went out, too dejected as a result of -this scene of dauntless penance. - -"Smile, smile, darling," Maurice begged, raising her hand to his lips, -and feeling like a knight returned to his lady, shrived of misdeed by -peril bravely fronted. - -"Tell me it really is all over. Tell me that I pleased you--that it was -what you would have hoped of me." - -"Yes; you were all that I wished. It is only that I am sorry for him. He -is like a hurt child, Maurice." - -"He will forget and forgive in a day or two. We will pet him; make much -of him. Can I do anything more to feel that I am fully loved again?" - -She leaned her forehead against his arm, tired with a spiritual and -bodily fatigue that made her voice dim and slumberous as she answered, -"Don't ever remind me that you were not." - - - - -CHAPTER IX - - -The news of Geoffrey's resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice's -new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He -finished the portrait over which he had been loitering, with a sudden -vigour that seemed in its auspicious result to promise more originality -than he had ever shown, and in pursuance of the new resolution, he -accepted another order--a dull and wealthy old ecclesiastic in a -cathedral town--an order, in spite of remunerativeness, that he would -certainly have refused a month before, as absolutely clogging to all -inspiration. - -"I shall have to leave Felicia to you for perhaps over a fortnight," he -said to Mr. Merrick, as, in a hansom they drove to an evening party. -Felicia preceded them with the friend at whose house they had dined. - -Maurice had carried out his project of "petting" his father-in-law, but -in spite of his butterfly manner of gaiety Mr. Merrick's mood showed -little relaxation; his wounds were deep; they rankled; and now he -received the news of guardianship, which Maurice imparted with an air of -generous self-sacrifice, gravely. - -"It's our first separation," Maurice added. "You will have her all to -yourself. My loss will be your gain." - -His smile left Mr. Merrick's gravity unchanged. The opportunity seemed -to have come for the discharge of a painful duty. - -"That I am to have Felicia all to myself, I question," he said, looking -ahead at the swift lights of the moving town; for he did not care to -meet his son-in-law's eyes while he seized the opportunity. - -"Well,"--Maurice good-humouredly yielded to his funny exactitude--"not -altogether; her friends will relieve guard now and then." - -It was wiser to reach his purpose by slow approaches; Mr. Merrick evenly -remarked, "My guard shall be unbroken," adding, "It will be doubly -necessary." - -He was rewarded by a light note of wonder in Maurice's voice. "You seem -to take it very seriously, my dear father." - -"I take it seriously, Maurice." - -Even from Mr. Merrick's complacency such magnified significance was -perplexing; Maurice turned an inquiring gaze upon him. - -"What are you talking about?" he asked. - -"I regret this departure of yours, Maurice. I beg you to reconsider it." - -"My dear father, what _are_ you talking about?" - -"You should not leave Felicia. She is exposed to certain influences--to -a certain influence--that I deeply disapprove. She is unruly, reckless. -I pretend to no further authority. She defies me." - -"Will you explain yourself?" The patience of Maurice's tone was ironic. - -"I will speak plainly, since you force it. Mr. Daunt is too much with -Felicia." - -"Geoffrey! He can't be too much with her." - -Maurice's nerves, since the last scene with Felicia, had been on edge. -Only a contemptuous amusement steadied them now. Mr. Merrick's paternal -anxiety, alloyed though it was with the latent desire to hit back, was -sincere; Maurice saw in it only a pompous, an idiotic impertinence. - -Mr. Merrick's voice hardened to as open an hostility as his -son-in-law's. - -"People notice it. There is talk about it. I will not stand by and see -my child's name become the plaything of malicious gossip." - -"Who notices it? Who talks about it? What utter and damnable folly!" - -"I decline to enter into an unbefitting altercation with you, Maurice. -Your friend is obviously in love with your wife, and Felicia allows him -to be too much with her." - -"Is this pure imagination on your part? I know, of course, that there's -never been any love lost between you and Geoffrey." - -"I have been warned," said Mr. Merrick, reluctant, yet with redoubled -dignity. - -Maurice's smouldering nerves struck to flame, and an ugly illumination -glared at him. "This can be no one but Angela," he said. - -It was difficult to keep dignity under eyes that seemed to take him by -the throat; in the struggle to look firmly back Mr. Merrick was silent. - -"Come. Own to it. The venomous liar!" Maurice added in a low voice, -studying the revelations of the other's wrathful helplessness. - -"I have no wish to deny it, and I must forbid you to speak in that -manner of a woman who honours you by calling you her friend." - -"I know Angela better than you do," Maurice laughed. His fury almost -passed away from its derivative object. - -"The fact remains that people talk, and that truest kindness warned me -of it." - -"If people talk it's she who makes them. I've known--ever since I -married her--that Geoffrey loved Felicia." Maurice flung him the truth -scornfully. - -"Yet you speak of lies!" - -"I know my friend, and honour him, as you don't seem to know or honour -your daughter." - -"I know human nature as you don't seem to know it. It's a dangerous -intimacy. I insist on my right to protect my daughter." - -"You insult her by claiming such a right. Don't speak to me of this -again." Maurice, as he said it, grew suddenly white with a new thought. -"And never dare," he added, turning eyes that quelled even Mr. Merrick's -fully-armed championship, "never dare tell Felicia that you have -discussed her with that woman." - -"You may be sure that I would not expose Lady Angela to Felicia's -misconception." - -Mr. Merrick, in his realized helplessness, cast about him for some -retaliatory weapon. He seized the first that offered itself. "And since -my meaning as Felicia's father seems gone, I had better go myself. I am -not needed, since you say so, by either of you." - -It was the idlest threat. In utter astonishment he heard Maurice -answering, "I've thought more than once of suggesting it. By all means." - -"I will remain with Felicia while you are away." - -"As you please." - -"I will leave directly after your return." - -"When you will." Maurice's voice was quieter. The unexpected prospect of -relief mollified him. "It's a pity, for Felicia will suffer, but she -herself must see that it doesn't do. You have made life too -uncomfortable for both of us. And after this! Well, you've made things -impossible. For a time you had better realize what your daughter is away -from her, realize how little she needs any one's protection. It's -settled then; you go, on my return." - -Mr. Merrick bowed. He was aghast, outraged, more than all, wounded. The -hurt child whimpered and then fairly howled within him, while, in -silence, he smiled ironically. They reached their destination, Maurice -in a growing rage that for once obliterated his fears. It was like -strong wine that uplifted, made him almost glad. - -He left his father-in-law and made his way through the crowded rooms in -search of Felicia. He needed to look into her limpid eyes after this -hissing of serpents. But instead of Felicia he found Angela. - -For the distasteful monotony of these assemblies Angela had always an -air of patient disdain; and to-night, under a high wreath of white -flowers, her face more than ever wore its mask of languid martyrdom. She -was in white, perfumed like a lily. - -Maurice felt a keener gladness on seeing her. His wrath, running new -currents of vigour through him, carried him past any hesitation. At last -he would have it out with Angela. - -"I want to speak to you," he said. "Is there any place where one can get -out of this crowd?" - -Angela saw in a flash that a crisis had arrived; and in another that she -had been working towards such a crisis, living for it, since Maurice had -cast her off. For a moment, beneath the rigour of his eyes--to see -Maurice unflinching was a new experience--her spirit quailed, then -soared, exulting in the thought of final contest. Since he wished -it--yes, they would speak openly. He should at last hear all--her hate, -her love, her supplication. She was an intimate in the house where -Maurice and Felicia were formal guests; her quick mind seized all -possibilities. "Yes," she said, "there is a little room--a little -boudoir. No one ever goes there on nights like these." Her self-mastery -was all with her as she moved beside him through the crowd. She was -able, over the tumult of hope and fear, to speak calmly, to smile at -friends her weary, fragile smile. - -"Aren't these scenes flimsy and sad?" she said. "How much happiness, how -much reality do they express, do you think?" - -Maurice forced himself to reply. "They express a lot of greediness and -falseness; those are real enough." - -"That is true, Maurice," she said gently; "so true that I sometimes -think I would rather be a washerwoman bending in honest work over my -tubs; one would be nearer the realities one cares for." - -They left the reception-rooms, and she was silent when faces were no -longer about them. She led him down a passage, across a book-filled -room, a student's lamp its only light, and softly turning the handle of -a further door, opened it on the quiet of a little room, discreetly -frivolous with the light gaiety of Louis XV decorations, empty of all -significance but that of smiling background for gay confidences or -pouting coquettries. Not exactly the background for such a scene as she -and Maurice must enact, yet Angela triumphed in the contrast. Tragic -desolation, splendid sincerities would gain value from their trivial -setting. Her passion, her misery, would menace more strangely, implore -more piteously among nymphs and garlands. - -She dropped into a chair, and put out her hand to a jar of white -azaleas. She asked no question, but she looked at him steadily. Maurice -had closed the door and stood near it, his back to it, at a distance -from her. The sound of the world outside--the world that smiled and -pouted--was like the faint hum of a top. - -"How have you dared warn my father-in-law against Geoffrey?" asked -Maurice. He was nerved to any truth. - -Angela made no reply, her long, deep eyes on him while, automatically, -her hand passed over the azaleas. - -"How could you betray my confidence in you? What a fool I was to trust -you!" - -"Betray you?" she murmured. - -"You pursue me and my happiness!" Maurice cried, and hot tears of -self-pity started to his eyes. Her eyes dropped. That his hand should -deal this blow! - -"I pursue you?--and your happiness, Maurice?" she repeated. - -"Can you deny it? Since we came back to England you have been a poison -in our lives." - -She was struggling with the moment's dreadful bitterness. Over the -bleeding pain of it her sense of his cruel injustice sustained her to a -retort: "I have betrayed nothing. You are the only betrayer, Maurice. -You betrayed my love; you betrayed your wife to me." - -"Great heavens!" Maurice dropped his forehead on clenched hands, "it was -to spare you!" - -"I guessed it," said Angela, while her hand still passed lightly over -the azaleas. - -They were silent for a moment, and presently in a voice, steady, even -gentle, she went on, "I have wished, sincerely wished, to be your -wife's friend. Even after she refused my friendship, I have wished to -guard her, at least, from malicious gossip. You know what London is. You -and I and your wife live in among people who regard old-fashioned -scruples intellectually, not morally; but your wife's position is not -great enough to allow her to be reckless. Even without such knowledge as -mine to reveal it, Geoffrey's love for her makes her conspicuous. They -are here together to-night. I saw them at a concert the other day; met -them in the Park before that. When last I went to your house I found -them together, alone, and--I understand your wife, Maurice--she would -think no harm of it--I think she had just kissed him; no harm, -Maurice,"--before his start her voice did not quicken, "she would -imagine that she kissed him as a brother. He held her hand, I think. I -felt it my duty to put petty conventions and reticences aside, and for -her sake, for your sake, Maurice, to warn her father, with all delicacy, -all caution. I believe it, with all my soul, to be a perilous intimacy. -That is my betrayal." - -Maurice's brain swam with the picture she flashed upon it. Only for a -moment;--Felicia's smile went like a benison over it. Even if it were -true, he could look at the picture, after that first pause of -breathlessness, steadily. Even if it were true, he could smile back, -understanding. - -"Geoffrey has all my trust," he said; "I have all Felicia's love." - -"You think so," said Angela quietly. Again her eyes fell before his, but -her face remained fixed in its conviction of sincerity. - -"How dare you, Angela." - -Still looking down, she went on as steadily as before, her voice -anchored with its weight of woe,--how he loved Felicia!--"I dare because -I believe that she loves him most. Her love for you and your weakness is -maternal by now. I know it, I feel it; I can see it when she looks at -you and at him. She loves him as she has never loved you. And I! Oh, -Maurice--Maurice--I!" She suddenly cast her arms upon the table, her -head fell upon them; terror, regret, and passionate longing swept over -her; her voice broke and she burst into sobs. "Couldn't I have let her -go from you? Has it not been nobility in me to guard her--for you? She -has never loved you, and I--Maurice, you know, you know--how I have -loved you, how I love you! Forgive me! Have pity on me!" - -Maurice, frowning darkly, sick with unwilling pity, hating to feel that -she deserved pity and that he hated her, turned his eyes away. She had -terrified him too much; had dared to lay desecrating hands on the thing -dearest to him in the world. Something, and not the least best thing in -him, froze before her cry for pity and made him incapable of -forgiveness. For once in his life he hardened into resistant strength. - -His silence was more horrible to Angela than any look, any word. She -raised her head and saw his averted eyes. Only humiliation remained for -her. She rose. Her wreath of flowers, loosened, had slipped to one side, -she put up a vague hand to it, moaning "Maurice!" - -Still he looked away, with odd, startled eyes that did not think of her. -The wonder of the shot that had passed through his heart was still felt -more as a surprise than as a pain. - -She knew that she would always see him so--erect, beautiful, startled -from a shot. She tottered to him; she fell before him and grasped his -arms. "Oh pity me! Don't be so cruel. What wrong have I done? Despise -me--but pity me." - -"I cannot," he said. - -"Then kiss me--once--only once." - -"I cannot," he repeated, still not looking at her. - -"Have you never loved me? Never really loved me--as you love her?" she -said, shuddering and hiding her face as she crouched at his feet. - -"Never!" - -Swaying, trembling violently, she arose. She threw wide her arms, seized -him, and closing her eyes to his look of passionate repulsion, kissed -him on his brow, cheek, lips, before, almost striking her from him, he -broke from her, burst open the door and left her. - - - - -CHAPTER X - - -"Geoffrey, dear old boy, walk home with me, will you?" On the steps, -after seeing Felicia and her friend into their carriage, Maurice put his -hand through Geoffrey's arm. "I've had a row with my father-in-law--would -rather not see him just now." They crossed the square together. Maurice -was feeling no reaction to weakness after his strength. The scene was -like a distant memory, and that strange shot that had hurt, had pierced -him with such a pang--not of suspicion, not of foreboding, but of -wonder, deep, sad wonder. - -He felt a sort of languor after pain, and, as they walked, went on -dreamily: "Such a queer evening, Geoffrey, horrible!--yet no, splendid -too. Facing things is splendid isn't it? I want to tell you something, -Geoffrey--to confess something--I want you to know. That winter--when I -thought I could not marry Felicia, I went pretty far with Angela. I -thought everything was up with me; I didn't care much where I drifted. -And I did drift. Nothing much more than there has always been, Geoffrey; -with Angela it was never a case of playing with fire, the danger was of -getting frozen into the ice. It was abominable of me--caddish;" -Maurice's dreamy voice had a dignity that seemed to hold all other -reproach than his own at arm's length, a dignity so strange and new that -Geoffrey even at the moment's great upsurging of bitterness, regret and -question could repress it as unworthy, not only of himself, but of -Maurice. "Abominable--abominable," Maurice repeated, "for I let her -think--more than ever--that I cared--something. She is odious to me, -Geoffrey. I can't be just to her." - -Geoffrey said nothing, but his quiet profile made confidences as easy as -peaceful breathing; the confidences that could be told. The others--ah! -that distant wailing of regret. But in this dreamy mood even that was -very distant. "Perhaps, dear old fellow--if I'd told you--on that night, -you wouldn't have cared to help me." - -Maurice stated the fact calmly, looked at it calmly. "In that case--what -would I be, Geoffrey?--if you and Felicia had not made me?" - -In the still, sleeping town, chill with a coming dawn, they were as near -as spirits, walking together through old memories. - -"I would have cared to help you--and her," said Geoffrey. - -"Ah! well; perhaps;" Maurice sighed a little. "While I'm away, Geoffrey, -see a lot of Felicia, and, Geoffrey, see that Angela doesn't get near -her. Her silly old father dislikes you, but you won't mind that. He -suspected you of being in love with her, so I informed him that he was -right. Dear old Geoff! You will see after her?" - -"I don't mind the father; I would mind making it difficult for her to -get on with him." - -"Oh! you won't. He's had to accept it. I wouldn't like to go if you -weren't here to see after her. So you don't regret making me?" - -"Making you and her so happy?" Geoffrey smiled, humouring his child-like -mood. - -"I do make her happy? You see it. It's your reward, my dear friend. -That's what I want to say to you. I've said it often enough to myself. -You shall never regret it, so help me God." - -Without looking at him Geoffrey put his hand on Maurice's, pressing it -firmly. Dimly, he felt, among crowding shapes of accepted sorrow, only a -peace, a thankfulness. - -"You see," Maurice stammered, "I should die without her. She is life to -me, Geoffrey. You don't know what you've given me--I hardly knew. She is -life to me--that's all; and I should die without her." - -The talk with Geoffrey seemed like a dream the next day. It was not -real; Maurice's conscience could not call such faint confession real. -Yet, in spirit, it had been more real than the reality which eyed it -sadly. In spite of sadness it went with him like a thought of peace, of -safety. - -Felicia, when she heard of her father's proposed and accepted departure, -acquiesced with even more cheerfulness than he had hoped for, and when -Maurice, flushing a little, told her of Mr. Merrick's resolution to -protect her, she said that she had suspected that. "I am glad you let -him know the truth, too. It's really better to let him see that he has -only discovered what no one wishes to conceal." She looked musingly up -at her husband. Though she looked clearly, no consciousness in her -answering his flush, a faint trail of cloud drifted--faint and -far--across the quiet sky of her thoughts, or was it a little wind that -blew apart the veil of white serenity, showing darkness behind it? That -turning of her weariness and wretchedness to Geoffrey--the memory of it -was like the drifting cloud, or like the revealing wind. Dimly the -darkness faded. The turning had been because of cruel passion, that -horrible moment of mistaken hatred. The cloud melted, or was it -self-reproach that once more drew the veil of tenderness across the -dark? - -Maurice, gazing, saw only the musing thought. - -"I can't blame him--really--either, Maurice. You and I know how Geoffrey -loves me, but we can hardly expect papa to see that as an accepted fact -nor to recognize the calibre of such a love." - -It was his recognition of the calibre of Geoffrey's love that kept -Maurice's faith high above even a self-dishonouring twinge of jealousy. -Yet the sadness, as for might-have-beens in which he had no share, still -was with him. The vision of that unseen kiss was with him too. He did -not believe it true, though his love for Felicia almost claimed it true; -it beautified her--that kiss of reverent pity and tenderness. The toad -Angela flung became a flower on Felicia's breast; that he could smile at -such a vision was his flower, too; but the vision was part of the -sadness. He saw himself shut out from a strange, great realm--colourless, -serene, like a country of glorious mountain peaks before the dawn, a -realm that he, in some baffling way, seemed to have defrauded for ever -of its sunrise. He put aside the oppression, saying, "You don't mind, so -much then, his going?" - -"I am sorry, of course. But he made things too difficult. It will be -easier to get back to the old fondness if we are not too near. And he -will enjoy, when things blow over, coming to us for short visits." - -The prospective peace, he saw, left her, with a sort of lassitude, a -little indifferent to her father's pathos. Before this placidity his -sadness became a sudden throb of gloom. - -"You do mind _my_ going?" he asked. - -Felicia was sitting on the window seat and had looked down into the -street far below for his coming cab. She glanced up quickly at him as he -stood beside her, seeing the shadow in his eyes. - -"Dear goose!" She drew him down on the seat, her hand in his, "Mind your -going? I hate it. But it's only for a fortnight--less, if you are lucky -with your work." - -"Only a fortnight!" Maurice repeated, half playfully, but half fretfully -too. "You can say that! It's our first parting, Felicia. It seems to me -an eternity before I shall see you again." - -She still looked into his eyes, seeing, under the playfulness, the -fretfulness, all that he had suffered during these last weeks of -entanglement. Leaning her head on his shoulder, she said dreamily: -"Don't go." - -"Really?" Sunlight streamed through clouds, "Really you say don't go? -And my duty? my work? all the virtues you make me believe in?" - -"I want to keep you near me, to comfort you for it all," Felicia said. -He understood the reference to his pain. The very sweetness nerved his -growing strength, the resolution to be worthy. With his arms around her -he whispered that he adored her and that he would go and work so well -that she should be proud of him. She listened, her eyes closed, yet, -when he had spoken, still dreamily she repeated, "Don't go." - -"Are you tempting me? because if you are, if you really want me to stay, -I can't go." - -She did not reply for a long time, lying quietly against his shoulder, -her hand in his. They heard the cab drive up. - -"I suppose you must go," she said, "Yes, of course, you must. Only, -isn't it happy, sitting here together? You must go, though I want you to -stay, for I really am sensible; I know there is a grown-up world; but -sitting here makes it seem unreal, and I think of sweet, silly things, -like children's games on a long summer afternoon." - -She straightened herself, sighing, smiling, then as she looked at him, -she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. In her eyes sudden tears -answered them. - -"It's that we have been rather unhappy, isn't it, dear Maurice?" - -"Never, never again," he whispered; and, in a voice that took her back -to such a distant day; "Do you remember once, long ago, when I first -knew you, I told you that it was lack, not loss, I dreaded--it's only -loss I dread now, for my life is full. And with you to prop me I am -growing into such a real personality that I shall lose even my cowardly -dread of loss. I'll never make you unhappy any more." - -"Ah! but what about me? It's I who have made you unhappy, dear. Forgive -me everything. You shall have no more dreads." - -She leaned to kiss his forehead, rising, her hands in his. Compunction -for the weakness that had showed him her unwillingness to let him go, -smote her. Her strength more than ever, now that it was triumphing, must -nerve his growing strength. - -"Never, never again," she repeated. "So go, dear, have all the virtues. -We will both work. The eternity will pass." - - - - -CHAPTER XI - - -Mr. Merrick, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own -expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw -little of each other now. Felicia was busy with her writing, with her -friends. The days passed quickly. Geoffrey appeared punctually every -day, but only for short visits. He told her that the readjustment of his -life to its lower key kept him frightfully busy. He looked jaded, -harassed. - -Over these visits Mr. Merrick, oddly enough, no more mounted guard. -Indeed, beneath the frigidity, the hurt child had howled itself into a -frightened silence. Mr. Merrick's foundations seemed giving way beneath -him, and, to add to the sense of general crumbling, he had not heard -from Angela for many days. That his child should cast him off made a -desolation so large that it was only dimly realized. Angela's defection -was a concentrated, a sharp bitterness. He evaded its contemplation by -accusing himself of over-imaginativeness--nerves on edge--no wonder--and -went to her one afternoon at tea-time. Maurice's fortnight was nearly -over, and the time of his own departure drew near. Already he had -meditated a retreat on Paris, a week there to make the descent from -London to the country less of a horrid jolt. - -Angela was at home, alone, and looking, to Mr. Merrick's sharpened -suspicions, colder, different. She was so white, so haggard that he -hoped that ill-health and not change towards himself might be the cause -of difference. At all events she was hardly beautiful, and something in -her face, baffled, rapacious, dimly suggested a hovering, hungry bird of -prey. Mr. Merrick felt uncomfortable, and, weakness in discomfort taking -shelter in appeal and pathos, he found himself announcing to Angela his -virtual dismissal from his children's roof. After all, as he reflected, -it was in a sense Angela's doing. She might now at least from the -frankness of the intimacy she had made between them, show him -comprehension and compassion. - -"To speak plainly, I've been turned out," he said, stirring the cup of -tea she had handed him. - -"Turned out?" repeated Angela, with an impersonal vagueness, quite as if -it had been a stray dog of which they were speaking. - -Mr. Merrick's suspicion grew past alarm to resentment, and resentment -cowered under a more sturdy manner of pathos as of one who faced fate's -unjust bolts with erect bearing and unconquerable gaze. "Our friendship, -it seems, is unforgiveable. It was a choice between it and them. I -couldn't submit to such intolerable dictation." - -Angela felt as if, after a long drowning swoon under water, she were -being resuscitated to painful life by blows upon her head. She, so -blameless, having done no wrong except love with a fatal fidelity; she, -crushed, humiliated, was to feel another lash. Even her kindness to this -pompous fool was to be made a scourge for her. - -Mr. Merrick saw that she grew more white as, with folded arms, she -drooped her head and looked up at him from sombre brows. "They can't -forgive you that? They hate me so much?" - -"Apparently," said Mr. Merrick, his growing sense of the indignity of -his situation giving him a deeper gloom of manner. "The crisis was -brought about by my venturing to warn Maurice on the subject you have -spoken of." - -"And you told him who had warned you? I see." - -Mr. Merrick took hasty refuge before the cutting quality of her voice. -"He sprang at the conclusion and defied me to deny that it was you. He -was outrageous. I have had to defend you as well as myself, Lady -Angela." - -"He accused me of falseness?" - -"Insolently." It was well that she should know how much he had had to -champion her. "I don't care to recall the terms." But Mr. Merrick was -feeling an odd satisfaction in recalling them. His heart, before this -rebuffing friend, before her icy eyes and icy voice, was calling out for -Felicia--Felicia whom he had lost because of this,--did she not suggest -something snake-like? His wounded affection, his wounded vanity, longed -for such comfort as Felicia alone could give. It would be well could he -believe Lady Angela--if not a liar, at least a presumptuous busy-body. -His first impressions of her were flooding his mind again. - -"I could not forgive the insolence," he said, "although I can conceive -it possible that you and I have been to a certain extent mistaken. Such -a mistake must naturally wound Maurice and Felicia." - -Angela leaned back in her chair, her long eyes on him, and he felt, like -a palpable atmosphere, the enmity between them. - -"As it happens, Maurice told me that he had always known of his friend's -love for Felicia," he pursued. "It's in no sense an ordinary case of -attraction, you see. A Dante and Beatrice affair. He has absolute trust -in his friend, Maurice has, and I, of course, have absolute trust in -Felicia. Not that I approve; I would have felt it my duty to protest in -any case." - -"You think that I imputed some wrong that was not there, and that owing -to me this breach has come between you and your daughter?" said Angela. - -"I hold you in no way to blame. Without a full knowledge of -facts--Maurice's knowledge the most important of them--one may naturally -draw false inferences. We were both a little hasty in judging." Mr. -Merrick essayed a generous smile. - -A deep flush passed over Angela's face. For a long moment she was -silent, her eyes on him; then, in a voice harsh and monotonous she -said-- - -"I hardly know what facts may mean to you--or inferences. Maurice, -before he married your daughter, told me that Geoffrey had paid him to -marry her. They live upon Geoffrey's money. He has ruined his career for -your daughter's sake. These are further facts, Mr. Merrick. Have I -indeed been a little hasty in my inferences?" - -Mr. Merrick, his tea-cup in his hand, his face with as yet merely a look -of wonder on it, sat dumb. - -"You now see the knowledge that underlay my warnings. What Geoffrey's -motives were I cannot say; purely disinterested, perhaps; apparently -your daughter was dying for love of Maurice. Whether they have remained -so disinterested is for you to judge. But I hope you will acquit my -warnings of hastiness." - -"Maurice told you?" Mr. Merrick repeated. He chiefly felt a deep, -personal humiliation. - -"As he told me everything at that time." - -Mr. Merrick rose unsteadily, putting down his tea-cup upon the table. -"The scoundrel!" he said. - -"Which one do you mean?" - -"The scoundrel! I mean Maurice. She shall know him." - -Angela's eyes glittered. - -"I think it well that all the truth should be known," she said. - - - - -CHAPTER XII - - -That evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. "Will you -come to me,"--the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an -arrow--"and repeat to me the calumnies that you have spoken to my -father. I shall regard a refusal as a retractation." - -Angela traced her own answer with a deliberateness that savoured to her -mind of unwavering benevolence. "I will be with you at eleven to-morrow -morning. Do not think that I come as an enemy. Be as strong to hear the -truth as I to speak it." - -She kept the boy waiting while she copied and re-copied the words into a -larger, firmer script in which there should be no hint of threat or -unsteadiness. - -Between the sending of this acceptance of challenge and the hour of the -interview next day Angela's mind, like a wreck, was tossed from -shuddering heights to engulfing abysses. Since the moment when she had -crawled at Maurice's feet her image of herself had been broken, -unseizable. She no longer knew herself, she, the uplifter, a crouching -suppliant. What she had further done--that final, passionate abandonment -where vindictive fury, worship, and desperate appeal to the very -rudiments of feeling were indistinguishably mingled,--she could not -look at steadily. Yet, in swift glances as at something dazzling and -appalling, she could just snatch a vision of a not ignoble Angela. There -had been splendour in those hopeless kisses, a blinding splendour; she -must veil her eyes from it. - -Most terrible of all was the seeing of herself slip and slide from a -serene eminence down into a slimy, warring world. The betrayal of -Maurice had not been in her ideal of herself; it forcibly abased her to -a level of soiling realities--hatreds, jealousies, revenges. With sick -revulsion she could imagine herself feebly turning--though bones were -broken--feebly crawling up again from the abyss, either by some -retractation, or by withholding from Felicia the ultimate humiliations -she could inflict upon her. She might evade the cruellest truth; spare -her the deepest wounds and so hug once more the thought of her own -loyalty to the man who had struck her from him, a loyalty crowned with a -halo of martyrdom. - -But so to turn would be to own herself abased; to see herself in the -mud; and Angela could not for long see herself in the mud. - -Then, in the swing of reaction, her head reeled with the old illusion of -height; she was again on her illumined pinnacle, ruthless through very -pity, wounding with the sharp, necessary truth; stern to the glamour of -a loyalty grown craven, saving Felicia from a falsity that must corrode -her life. A pitiful, relentless angel. She saw the sword, the -wings--white, strong, rustling, the splendid impassivity of her face. - -Yet on the pinnacle the darting terrors of the abyss went through her. -Was not the truth what Maurice had said--what he had looked--so horribly -looked--and not what he had written; that he had written to spare her; -had never loved her? She turned shuddering from the thought as she had -shuddered at his feet. If that indeed were truth he must convince -Felicia of it. The fact of his written words was there, surely -unforgiveable; the fact of Geoffrey's love was there; was not the fact -of a dim, growing love for Geoffrey there too? She had said it; she -believed it; and again, upon the pinnacle, the hands of miry hopes -clawed at her. Hardly could Maurice forgive the betrayal. Yet--had he -not once loved her? The memory, sweet and terrible of that far-away -spring day--his kiss and his embrace--faltered, "yes," though it wept in -saying it. Should Felicia prove to him that Angela had only spoken truth -might not the showing of the letter be one day forgiven by a man -scorned, abandoned? She had been forced to the showing by all their -guilty incredulity, and to save Felicia from the trap laid for her, to -save her from Geoffrey's scheming passion--so could she dress her -motive--had pointed out the trap, the danger. Where lay her guilt, if, -after this, Felicia chose to verify all her prophecies by walking -straight into the trap? It had not been to kill her love for her -husband, but to warn her of Geoffrey's love that the letter was shown. -So her thoughts groped in the dubious future; and when despair flung her -back again on the black present, hatred, hatred for Maurice, and the -recklessness of hatred, caught her, clasped her, sustained her from -falling, and hurried her on all trembling with the final thought that if -hope were dead, there was nothing to lose in betrayal, nothing to gain -in loyalty. - -As she drove next morning to Felicia, the day's clear sunlight, the -almost wintry freshness of the air, lifted her mood once more to -steadiness. She beat off debasing visions, pushed away miry hands, told -herself that neither hope nor hatred was with her. And she felt herself -standing high in sunlight as she waited for Felicia in the little -drawing-room, its windows open on the blue, the brightness. She felt -herself in tune with purity and radiance. Dressed from head to foot in -spotless white, the long flowing of her fur-edged cloak monastic in -simplicity, the white sweep of a bird's breast about her head, she was -as pitying and as picturesque as a sculptured saint looking down through -centuries of woe from the lofty niche of a cathedral; and a more human -but as consolatory a simile showed her as a Dorothea waiting in all her -tender strength and helpfulness for a fragile, tawdry Rosamund. - -But when Felicia entered, and as she turned to her from the window, a -mood as high, as inflexible as her own,--higher, more inflexible, she -felt, in a crash that had a crumbling quality--met her in Felicia's -eyes. For a moment Angela was afraid, felt herself rocking in her niche; -in the next the recollection of her truth upheld her. Truth, pity and -tenderness; with these she would meet this stony, hating creature. - -"You see," she said, "I have not refused to come to you." - -"You had to come, after what you had said," said Felicia. - -It was a preliminary only; the pause before conflict. Angela's eyes went -over her. Felicia wore her customary blue serge, her lawn collar and -black bow. In her place, Angela thought, she would have felt the -effectiveness of an unrelieved black dress; a comment followed by a -further recognition of Felicia's indifference to effectiveness that left -another little trail of fear. She had slept; well, perhaps. Her eye-lids -showed no languor. Her face was white, cold, composed. Hardly fragile. -Certainly not tawdry. From this re-adjustment to reality Angela glanced -out at the sky. She must grasp at all her strength. She must pray for -strength. With her eyes on the sky her mind sped hastily through the -uplifting supplication--haunted as it sped by a thought of pursuit that -gave a shadow-simile of a fleeing through caverns. - -But she brought back gentle eyes to Felicia. "Mrs. Wynne, you have never -understood me; never believed me; you have always misunderstood, and -mistrusted me, as you do now. I have been forced to this," said Angela, -keeping all her quiet while Felicia stood before her with her stony -face. "I have watched you like a child wandering in the dark. I have -seen you come to the brink of a pit in the darkness. I have put out my -hand to save you. That is all my fault." - -"By the pit, you mean, I suppose, Mr. Daunt's love for me. As my father -told you, I have known, my husband has known, from before my marriage, -that he loved me. You did not only warn. You lied. About my husband," -Felicia's eyes did not change, as she said the word, looking straight at -Angela. Since the night before when her father had told her vile -falsehoods she had felt not one doubt of Angela's falsity. A white heat -of utter scorn had never left her. She would have scorned her too much -to see her had not her father's frenzied belief pushed her to this -elemental conflict. She would tell Angela again and again that she was a -liar. - -"How you hate me," Angela now said. - -"And how you hate me." - -"I do not. I pity you. I want to help you." - -"I will pity you if you confess that you have lied." - -"If it were to help you I could almost do it--though that would indeed -be to lie. I believe that truth is the only helper. Your husband was -paid to marry you." - -Felicia's eyes received it unflinchingly. - -"It may be so. Geoffrey is generous enough; Maurice is enough his friend -to accept his help. I will ask him to tell me all the truth. Your -implication was that my husband married me through pity." - -"You are very sure of people's love for you." - -Angela saw herself lashed by the hatred of these two men, by the scorn -of this woman whom they loved. Her voice shook. - -"I am perfectly sure of their love." - -"Yet your husband's love was not always yours." - -She was horribly unmoved by half truths; this again she accepted. -"Maurice may once have cared for you. Since he has known me he has loved -me. I cannot spare you when you come between me and my husband." - -"Since he knew you he loved me--loved me most!" Angela could scarcely -draw her breath. "He married you from pity--it is not a lie--loving me. -And I loved him--I love him now! It is the cross of my life! It crushes -me!" Her breast panted with the labouring breath; she threw her cloak -back from her shoulders and kept her hands at her throat, even then -conscious of the gesture's dramatic beauty. "He is unworthy of it--that -I know. He is incapable of the sacred passion I feel. He loves most the -one he is with, and when he was with me--before you took him from me--he -loved me most--before God I believe it--and with the best love of which -he is capable. I would have lifted him--inspired him--he used to say I -would. He told me that he loved me and that only my wealth had kept him -from me--the day that Geoffrey came with his news of you. I would have -redeemed him had not you made a claim on his weakness, his pity." - -"I know that you are lying," said Felicia. But as she listened, as she -spoke, old doubts, old fears flitted across the dimness of the past. - -"Then,"--Angela's breath failed her; she drew Maurice's letter from her -breast and put it in Felicia's hand--"read that," she half whispered. - -And as she did this she knew that she had rolled to the very bottom of -the abyss. It was only a glance of horrid wonder. She could not look at -herself. She could not turn her eyes from the moment's supreme -vengeance. She stood watching her rival--her victim--yes, yes, those -voices from the abyss were true--watched her cheeks grow ashen, her eyes -freeze, her beauty waver, change to something strange, rigid, mask-like. - -But Felicia, as she read on to the end, and then, mechanically turning -to the first page, read once more, did not think of Angela or even know -that she was there. As she read and the blood seemed slowly crushed out -of her heart, she forgot Angela, forgot herself, fixed in a frozen -contemplation of Maurice's perfidy, a trance-like stare at him and at -Geoffrey; Maurice who had abased, Geoffrey who had exalted her. Geoffrey -held up from the dust, where Maurice struck her, some piteous, alien -creature. But this new revelation of Geoffrey was dimmed again by the -written words and the thought they hammered on her brain: "My husband's -words." Then at last identity whispered "of me." - -They ran, the words, like flame, scorching, blackening her past with -him. Meanest, weakest, cruellest. Most dastardly of all, most loathly, -was his love for her, his facile adaptation of his life to hers, his -fawning dependence on the nature nearest him. Most horrible it was to -know--for she knew it--that he indeed loved her. An acted lie--while he -could betray her to another woman--would have made him less odious to -her. That he could at once love and betray was the horror. - -She hated him. She had shut her eyes again and again so that in seeing -too clearly she might not love him less; they were widely open now and -they saw more than the loss of love. - -With all the force of her crucified trust and tenderness, all the -passion of her shattered pride, she hated him. - -Raising her eyes she saw Angela standing and looking at her. Angela was -distant, unreal, a picture hung before dying eyes. She felt no hatred -for Angela; instead, with the terrible clearness of her new vision, she -felt a far-away and contemptuous pity. She saw both herself and Angela -caught in the same net of falsity; both she and Angela in their -struggles were piteous. Angela had been ugly in her struggle, but she -could not feel that she hated her. - -She turned her head away, looking vaguely around her at the room that -had become unfamiliar, ominous. A chair was near her, one she and -Maurice had bought together. She sank upon it thinking dimly--"This was -home." - -"You see--I did not lie to you," said Angela. That Felicia should show -no anger, should not writhe and curse beneath the foot upon her neck, -made her wonder--in another of those crumbling flashes--whether indeed -her foot was upon Felicia's neck. She had struck her down, she had -humbled her, but was she not now to be allowed to forgive, to staunch -the wounds with magnanimity and sorrow? Was it possible that the horrid -image of her was the true one? Was it possible that Felicia too, was -seeing her in the mire? - -She repeated: "You see I did not lie to you." - -"No," said Felicia, folding her husband's letter as she spoke, "you -didn't lie." - -Her very voice had the charred, the wasted quality; life had been burned -out of it. - -"And can you not believe _now_ that I never hated you?" said Angela. - -Felicia leaned her head on her hand, closing her eyes. "I don't care. It -makes no difference to me." - -Angela felt herself shut out, infinitely remote from the other's -consciousness. Tears rose in her eyes, almost a sob in her throat. "How -cruel you are. What have I done to deserve such cruelty? I have only -tried to help you." - -Still with her hidden face, Felicia sat silent, thinking of Maurice, of -Geoffrey, only vaguely hearing Angela's words. - -"And then how human;--after all I am human. See how intolerable it was -to me, your scorn of me, your rejection of me when I meant only good, -when I knew that he had loved me most; when I knew how infinitely I -loved him." It comforted her to feel the tears running down her cheeks -and, in her poor, stricken humanity, to seem noble to herself in her -avowed abasement. "Perhaps I have been jealous--oh, how can I tell? -Perhaps I made too high and impossible an ideal for myself and thought -that I could conquer that yearning to be loved. Can't you pity me? Can't -you see what I have suffered in seeing him with you?" - -Felicia, looking on the ground, mechanically pushed back the hair from -her forehead. The picture indeed was in a piteous attitude; she knew it, -although she could feel nothing. - -"Yes, I am sorry for you. It has been horrible for you," she said, but -with the weariness that a soldier, lying shattered, helpless, upon a -battlefield, might show towards the tormenting clamours and lamentations -of a wounded enemy beside him. She wished to be allowed to bleed quietly -to death. These alien hands plucked at her for a help, a sympathy she -could not give. She was sorry; but when one was shattered one could only -know that one was sorry and be tired. - -Angela's weeping was stilled for a moment. After all, it was not pity -that she wanted. She wanted to be lifted from the nightmare of -abasement; to feel herself looking down once more; to be the consoler, -the binder of wounds--not the suppliant; not the recipient of an -indifferent dole. She approached Felicia, putting out her hand to her. - -"And you know--dear--dear--child, how I pity you. Ah, let this pity, -this mutual agony unite us, Felicia--you who have lost only an illusion, -I who have lost a reality. Can we not see each other more clearly now? -Can we not understand--and kiss each other--like sisters?" - -Maeterlinckian visions--a tower, a sad blue sea, a great blue sky, white -birds, wandering, beautiful souls in pain--crossed her mind, enhancing -her consciousness of beauty. It was beautiful, what she said, and she -must look beautiful, leaning in whiteness, with her outstretched hand, -the tears of her deeper sorrow upon her face, towards this fallen -comrade. This would atone for all, be the spiritual significance of all -the tragic drama, this union of suffering sisters. She drooped softly -upon the figure in the chair, encircling it. - -But with a violence that made Angela reel back, almost losing her -footing, Felicia started to her feet. Staring, white, shuddering, she -looked at the other woman. - -"Don't touch me. You must not touch me.--Go away--you are horrible," she -said. "You fill me with horror." Her voice was hoarse, shaking. - -Angela had retreated from her, and while they looked at each other -across the room, a strange struggle and change showed itself in her -face. Felicia's conviction entered her. She felt herself evil. She felt -herself horrible. - -With terror and malignancy she gazed for a long moment, and then, in -silence, she went from the room. - -Felicia heard the trail of her long skirts, like the dry swift rustle of -a snake, cross the hall, and heard the door close softly upon her. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - - -Felicia stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the -rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, -unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land that melted to the sky, was -a bleak, diffused whiteness that told where the sun was. Since her -arrival the day before the rain had poured down ceaselessly, imprisoning -her in the lonely house. Her father, after the scene of her hateful -avowal, her escape from his fury of sympathy, had gone to Paris for a -week. She had left him packing in the flat; he would join her later. - -Felicia had taken one of the maids with her in her flight from the -desecrated new to the old home, and had wearily aided her in making it -liveable. The sitting-room where she now stood, after her half-tasted -lunch of tea and fruit and bread-and-butter, was cheerless, for the more -intimate books and pictures were in London; the furniture without its -chintz covers was shabby, and the fire after long smoking, only now -forced its way to a sullen brightness through heaped-up logs. She turned -to glance at it once or twice, mechanically conscious of housekeeping -duties. It had quite done smoking; it was going to burn. Presently, -before the blaze, she would sit and rest--and sleep; there had been no -sleep last night in her desolate room between the blankets of a -hurriedly improvised bed; the maid protesting against damp sheets. -Felicia had wondered indifferently, as they worked together, what the -kind girl thought of this ominous pic-nic impromptu; she thanked her -inwardly for the dumb discretion of her class. There was nothing more to -do now. Chintz-covers--she glanced at the chairs that looked flayed -without their proper coverings; but those had better wait until just -before her father's arrival; for him she must manage cheeriness as well -as the bare comforts of life. Until he came all she wanted was -stillness, warmth, a bed to creep into at night. - -Felicia's mind was fixed on two points, one past, one future--the -writing of a letter yesterday to Maurice and his finding of it when he -returned to-night--or to-morrow morning. She saw herself in the pause -between a dagger's uplifting and its stabbing fall. She had known no -pity in writing; she felt no pity for the reading. Her mind, indeed, -went with a sullen quiet--much like the flames among their logs--through -the well-remembered words. - -"I am leaving you to-day and I will never see you again. Lady Angela has -showed me the letter you wrote to her before we were married. You did -not even marry me through generous pity; Geoffrey forced you to it. You -betrayed him to her; you betrayed me to her. You gave me your sham in -return for my reality. Do not tell me that you loved me then, and now. -That is the worst of it. Such love is a sham. I despise you. I see only -falseness and cowardice in you. And through all this ruin I see Geoffrey -as he is--and I see myself. I see now that I love him. You know that -your honour--a strange word to write to you--is safe between our hands; -but I love him as much as I hate you; the thought that he is there helps -me to live. It is through your baseness that I see all his nobility. Do -not write to me, for I shall not answer. These are the last words that -you shall ever see from me." - -This letter was lying on Maurice's dressing-table waiting for him. - -There had been a fierce exultation in writing it, as at escape from a -stifling cavern; and the sense of having flung the soiled and tattered -past behind her, wrenched manacles of pity and tenderness from her -bleeding flesh, of having run, naked, free, into the night--the cold, -calm night, upheld her. But at moments those written words whirled oddly -in her mind. "To him? From me?" She would think it dizzily; and dread -clutched at her heart, dread of she knew not what, except the fate that -had made the writing inevitable. A Felicia cruel enough to write it was -as strange as a Maurice base enough to make her cruel. - -But, she told herself, leaning her forehead against the cold window -pane, to think herself cruel was still to idealize Maurice. He would -suffer--for a day, a week, a year perhaps; would, fancying that he had -truly loved her, feel remorse, despair; but when her love was no longer -there to call forth his response the fancy would soon die. His love for -her was no doubt as real as anything in him was real; but no love in -Maurice could be more than fancy. His buoyancy would float him once -more, and life once more be sweet to him. Life would always, in spite of -certain moments of black whirlpool, be sweet for Maurice. - -She could even imagine a sentimental bond growing between him and -Angela. Angela was horrible enough for any cleverness. Her passion had a -sincerity that would give life to any lie. She would twist facts into -some becoming shape, build her bower and beckon Maurice into it. A -shuddering seized her thoughts of Angela; she turned from them. - -The rain now dashed on the window. The pallid memory of light was gone -from the sky. Fold upon fold of deeper darkness covered it. The trees -shook in the rising gusts of wind. - -There was the turn of the road that she had often watched through so -many years, longing for it to bring life to her. Well, she had had her -wish. She had met her lions. She could not feel herself ennobled by her -contests. It rather seemed that the lions had mangled her. - -As she stood, pressing her forehead against the window and looking at -the storm, she saw a figure, leaning to the steep ascent far down the -road, a tall man's figure under an umbrella. - -Figures were few on the road, and, on such a day, a casual stroller -improbable. Her heart leaped to a terror of Maurice coming in person to -plead and expostulate. Impossible that her letter had not forbidden all -pleading and expostulation. It could not be Maurice. - -It was not, as she saw, with a drooping of the breath in a relief so -great that she knew how great the foolish terror must have been, as the -figure, after a momentary disappearance, came nearer in that turn of the -road. The long waterproof, the slanted umbrella, still made identity a -conjecture; but already the steady stride, the grave, decisive carriage -had a familiarity that hurried a new and deeper fear on the first. Not -Maurice; not her father; obviously not Uncle Cuthbert. Could it be -Geoffrey? - -Since the day before, Geoffrey had been for her a figure aureoled and -pedestalled--strange transfiguration of the statesman statue!--lifted -high, far away, in his almost saintly strength; a figure to be gazed at -with thanksgiving for its smile upon herself; but still so strange in -its new setting that any nearness of regret or tremor had not touched -her. - -But to see Geoffrey now--now that she was his--and knew it.--The thought -shook her with regret, fear, unutterable sadness. - -It was Geoffrey. She drew back from the window as he approached the -house. Regret was for the past, sadness for the future, but the fear was -for the present and it seized her like the storm. He was perhaps not so -high, so aureoled, so saintly. Wild surmises flashed lightnings through -her mind, that seemed to rock like an empty bird's nest in a shaken -tree. Had Maurice returned? Had he in a frenzy of anger or despair -showed Geoffrey her letter? Had Geoffrey come to claim her on the -strength of her own avowal?--come to claim her?--to take her away? - -She had no time to analyze the terror of such surmises--what they -implied of disillusion in him--or to look at the rapture that ran a -dreadful radiance through terror and disillusion. That there should be -rapture was perhaps the terror's root. She heard him in the hall ridding -himself of the dripping umbrella and waterproof. Why, after all, call it -disillusion? Perhaps strength not less saintly than that of renunciation -lay in a solemn claiming. His nobility had chained them. Might not -nobility now break the chains? But could he break them? Was not her -strength to be counted with? She was asking herself the final -question--in a gasp--as he came in. - -His white, intent face admitted of many interpretations, even of one -altogether new to her, for she felt in it something of a hesitation, a -perplexity, that suggested weakness. For once he was not sure of -himself; or, rather, not sure of what he was to do. Felicia, near the -window, looked silently at him. - -"It's true, then, you have left him?" - -His eyes sounded hers as though he, too, were finding new meanings in -her. - -"Yes, I have left him. Who told you?" - -"Your father. He was just leaving the flat. He was very incoherent. All -I could grasp was that." - -He did not know then, and any revelation of what his attitude would be -when he did know was adjourned. Felicia, feeling suddenly how faint she -was, how weak from want of food and sleep, went past him and sank into -the deep old chair before the fire. - -"Sit down. You must be tired. You had to walk from the station? There -was no fly?" - -"No. I didn't mind the walk." Geoffrey did not sit down; he took a turn -or two up and down the room. - -"Your father said that you would never go back to your husband." - -"I never will." - -"You have ceased to love him, then?" - -"Absolutely ceased." - -Geoffrey had paused now near the window, and was looking out. She could -guess of what he was thinking; of that walk in the spring woods, and the -girl who had said that to be unhappy with the man she loved would be -happiness. He was thinking that he had tried to give her happiness and -that he had failed. And presently, without turning, he said, "May I ask -why?" - -The thought of the spring day dwelt with her, infusing all the present -tragedy with a tender, an exquisite pathos--like the spring's--like the -day of distant bird-songs and melancholy brooks. She owed him -everything. _Might_ he ask? - -"What may you not ask?" she said. "There is nothing that I have a right -to keep from you now. This is why. Lady Angela showed me -this--yesterday." Without turning her head she held out the letter. "It -was written, you will see, the day after you and I walked together--when -you told me that you loved me--when I told you that I loved him." - -Geoffrey's hand was on the letter. For a moment, as her memory chimed -with his, he grasped her wrist and she felt his kiss upon her hand. - -He did not know. In the silence that followed, while, behind her chair, -he read, Felicia was wondering, wondering--would he discover it? Should -she hide it? Should she tell him? Was it not indeed his right to be -told? Did she not owe it to him to let him know that a reward--though -such a tragically belated one--had at last come to him? Even to hesitate -seemed to smirch him with that fear of disillusion; or, her mind -followed it further, hunted it down, while she breathed quickly--was it -the possible rapture that made the real dread--the rapture of seeing him -claim her and of admitting his claim? With an almost lassitude she -thrust the balancing thoughts from her. How could she know what she felt -or what she was, until the truth was there spoken and looked at between -them? The circle had brought her back again to the first question. -Should she tell him? She could not answer it. She closed her eyes. -Suddenly she thought sharply, "I must not tell." She wondered if it was -an inspiration; it seemed to have no sequence. So oddly does the most -logical thing in life, the rewarding illumination of a conscience and -character strengthened by strife, dazzle the obviously linked, the -bewildered and bewildering intelligence. Like the revolving light of an -unseen lighthouse it flashed out. A moment after it seemed unreal. Yet -the memory of it would almost automatically guide a way among reefs and -breakers and siren whirlpools. Felicia did not think all this. She kept -her eyes closed and breathed more quietly. Geoffrey stood silent, and -she knew, without looking round, that he had finished the letter. - -"Now you see. Now you understand all," she said. - -He made no answer. She opened her eyes, turned in her chair. He had -mastered any horror, though his expression had the strained look of -having been wrenched from horror to the resolute facing of a mystery to -be tracked. He seemed to gaze through her at it. - -"Now you see. Now you understand," she repeated. "I do, Geoffrey." - -She had never called him by his name before. - -His eyes now rested on hers. - -"Let me tell you," she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against -the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and -calm. "Let me tell you that I see you and know you--and understand. -Don't ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it -has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could -see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I -hardly feel anything now except my gratitude to you for your wonderful -nobility--your love. To see it--to know it--is worth the suffering." - -He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the -calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head--the -dear, proud head--to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the -conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face. - -"How could he. To you." It was not question or exclamation, but a deep, -sickened wonder. - -"He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn--and my pain; -he didn't love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him." -She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. "You thought he -loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?" - -"I?" Geoffrey's stare was almost boyish. - -"I?--who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?" -it said. - -"Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel--a thing to -be tossed appeasingly to a rival." Again she closed her eyes. "It makes -me dizzy sometimes." - -Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her -pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed, -as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around -the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out. - -Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts -steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them -steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice--how near his heart he only -now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a -wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, -lamenting--seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and -intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, -so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other -night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous -letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that -had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in -baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet--was it essential? Still -holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice's baseness would -serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the -baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the -other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He -grasped at last his own decision. - -He did not turn from the window as he said, "You must go back to him." - -Her long silence showed, perhaps, a speechless horror. He turned to her. -She still lay back in the chair. He came before her. She raised empty -eyes to him. - -"I know that he loved you; you know, as I do, how he loves you now, how -incapable, now, he would be of it." She made no reply. There was no -reproach in her eyes, no pain or rebellion, only a strange, still depth -where he could see nothing. His decision reinforced itself as it felt a -quiver of blind presage run through it. - -"He was a base coward. I feel it for you as deeply--more deeply than you -can for yourself. He was in despair of marrying you and he dallied with -Angela--well, if he were half in love, what matter now? He had been in -love half a dozen times before he met you. All those young emotions are -games; Maurice was playing at life. He needed reality, and he has lived -into it with you. I saw him cry with despair when he thought he had lost -you; I saw his rapture when I told him he could marry you. I can guess -what happened afterwards. He was afraid of Angela--and sorry for her, -and he wrote her this lie. Yes, he was a liar and a coward--what of it? -You have made him over. He is a different man. Say that he still is weak -as water--what of it? He adores you; I know it--and you loved him--once. -You gain nothing by leaving him, and he loses everything--everything. -_You_ are his only chance. He will go to pieces without you." - -Her silence, those deep, empty eyes on his, almost exasperated him with -the sense of fighting in the dark--he knew not what--but fighting some -force in her, strong in its still resistance. And not in her only; in -himself he felt a rising host of shadowy, veiled opponents. - -He walked away from her up and down the room. "Only the other night--how -I understand it now--he was trying to tell me all he could. He spoke of -remorse and of his love for you, Felicia; he said that he would die -without you." - -"Do you really want me to go?" Felicia asked. - -Geoffrey, glancing at her, saw that she had covered her face with her -hands. He stopped in his impatient walking, his back to her. "I want -what is best for him, and for you. You know I'm not a sentimentalist. I -think a woman better off, more secure, more sure of a rightly developing -life even with a husband she thinks she can't care for, than drifting -about by herself; a dubious rebel against conventionality; forced into -an exaggerated dignity, an exaggerated uprightness; conscious that she -has to be explained and justified; cut off from her social and domestic -roots--a flower if you will, and a very sweet and spotless flower,--but -a flower kept alive in a vase of water, under cover, in an artificial -temperature, liable to shatterings--to witherings; not a flower well -rooted in the earth, growing, with the wind and sun about it." - -"Witherings? Shatterings? What if the very ground one grew in is -poisoned? You want me to go back to him--not loving him; do you want me -to go back hating?--for I do hate him." - -Geoffrey still paused. - -"I want you to go back understanding him; pitying him. Bother love." - -That memory of the lighthouse flash could no longer guide in this -darkness where a blind and wilful giant's hand steered for a shore of -reefs and precipitous cliffs intolerable for shuddering flesh to look -upon. She herself must grasp the helm and turn the ship straight to the -open, unknown sea. - -"Do you want me to go back, loving you?" she said. - -"Loving me?" Geoffrey repeated, and the giant indeed reeled back, as if -from a staggering blow. His arm fallen, the ship in a moment had whirled -round and fronted the tempestuous elements. - -Her final question had been asked as evenly, as monotonously as the -others. She went on: "I wrote and told him that I despised him--hated -him, that I would never go back to him. And I told him that I loved you. -He will get that letter to-morrow--perhaps to-day." - -Geoffrey turned to her. All thought was struck to chaos. Maurice, -Felicia, himself went like storm-blown birds through the mind that had -been too steady--in the steadiness a rigidity tempting to an ironic, -shattering blow. And in the chaos Maurice sank back--back, and -down--where he had chosen to be, by his own act; and Felicia rose like -dawn over the darkness. He approached her, leaned over her. - -She opened her eyes to him. - -The beat of the rain against the windows sounded as if from great -distances. They were near in grey solitude, the world fading to -emptiness; they were near in the enfolding storm, in the sound that was -like a deeper silence. Neither spoke and neither smiled; into the mind -of neither man nor woman came the image of a kiss or an embrace. Looking -deeply into each other's eyes they seemed to see an eternity of awe and -wonder. It was Geoffrey who first spoke. - -"I felt it." - -"You did not know it, Geoffrey." - -"I touched something in the dark." - -"I would not have told you if you had not wished to send me back to -him." - -"Why not, Felicia?" - -Her eyelids for a moment fell, almost as if she mused. - -"It seemed to make things less simple--more difficult." - -"More difficult, perhaps," said Geoffrey, "but more simple, too, I -think. Have you known for long?" - -"Only, clearly, yesterday; but it seems now as if it had been -there--oh--for long, long--since the beginning perhaps. I can't tell. I -can't see. But so strangely, Geoffrey, not touching or harming my love -for him, giving it strength indeed, I believe, as you gave me strength." - -Still she seemed to muse, quietly; with down-cast eyes in speaking, but, -in her pauses, raising that grave eternity of look to him. - -"The threads go back and back--and they turn round one another. I can't -see them separately till now--when his is broken. You remember when you -kissed me, Geoffrey, at the edge of the wood? It was then--it must have -been then--that the threads ran together. And ever since you have been -woven into my life--into my love for my husband--I don't know what was -you and what was I." - -His hand on the back of the chair, he still leaned over her. Felicia -rose, drawing a long breath. She walked to the end of the room; went to -the window; turned to face him. - -"Ah! Felicia," said Geoffrey. Looking at her with a sadness almost -stern, he clasped his hands together in a gesture curiously -uncharacteristic of him; significant of his helpless pain. - -"Yes, yes," she said, "I know. Why did I make the mistake? Why did I not -see who was the man I must love? Geoffrey, I would rather have you -reproach me than listen to myself." - -"Did you think I would reproach you? Did you think I would add that? I, -too, was blindfolded," he said, looking away from her. - -His voice was the voice of frozen tears. - -They stood silent, his suffering beating at her heart. She knew that a -word from her would unlock flood-gates. - -And a great wave of longing rose in Felicia, engulfing her utterly, so -that she knew for some moments that seemed eternal nothing but its -thunder and its restlessness. She had already seen in herself, in her -love for Maurice, this capacity for recklessness, and now a deeper -tumult roared in her ears. For this was the man she loved. Through -mistakes and misery they had found each other. Why not fall upon his -neck and shut her eyes to all that distant world? Why not cry out to -him, Take me away? His strength would never lift a finger to tempt her -weakness; but was there not in him a new and beautiful weakness that -would not resist the appeal of her strength, her courage? Would appeal -not be courageous? To see that weakness in him was a craving that shook -her through and through as she stood there with her fixed, contemplative -face. - -She closed her eyes, dazzled by the thought, and it was as if the wave -echoed far above her head, and in the sudden stillness of its depths she -knew them black and dangerous. - -But in that moment of deep struggle it was not the thought of danger or -of duty that gave her strength to strike upward to the air. It was the -thought of Geoffrey and of the ruin that such an abandonment would make -in his life. More than the lurid courage to repudiate safety and the -world's wise barriers for herself, was her refusal to burden him with a -defiant happiness. - -She could not distinguish her weakness from her strength, nor know which -had tempted and which saved her. She knew only her love for Geoffrey; a -love that at the crucial moment seemed a long, strong stroke that sent -her upward, up to the air again. It was a leaden waste of water she rose -to; a sad, colourless sky above; but there was a radiance in its -whiteness. Her soul was half fainting, but she knew that her lassitude -was that of victory. And all the time the surface woman of custom and -control kept her look of contemplative solemnity. - -Such victory made all lesser struggle easy. She merely looked her -incomprehension when she heard Geoffrey saying-- - -"And now I wonder if you will believe me when I say that I still want -you to go back to Maurice." - -His voice told her that he, too, had been engulfed; that he, too, had -struggled; that love of her had given him strength to win his victory, -and then, in its light, to think; think clearly. But his thought made a -fog about her. She could only gaze in wonder. "Nothing is really -changed," said Geoffrey, who, his hand still on the back of her empty -chair, had curiously the expression of an orator determined to convince, -hardly stooping to persuasion. "You and I are parted. He needs you as -much as ever, and you, Felicia, need him more than ever, his claim on -you, I mean, his dependence, the burden that it must take all your time -and all your energy to carry. I must hurt you with the truth--only I -believe you have seen it, as I have. It's a choice between taking up -your old life--and, I am sure of it, Felicia, making a tremendously good -thing out of it--or living the new life I described to you--the life of -the flower in the vase on the mantelpiece--a life of constant danger. -For you--I know your strength; but could it keep me from you, year in -and year out, do you suppose, if there were no barriers between us, no -actual barriers of everyday life and everyday obligations? For myself--I -would die for you, as you know; but to live without you--seeing you -drifting--alone--in a sadness worse than any suffering--? I know that -the time would come when I would ask you to chuck everything for my -sake--for your own I'd put it, too:--Felicia--for my sake--if I asked -you as I could--you would do it; and you know as well as I do that that -sort of chucking means failure all round. You wouldn't be the growing -flower; you wouldn't be the cut flower in the vase"--his face, white in -its intentness, grew hard as his mind flashed to the similes that would -strip all illusion from her; "you would be like those snowdrops that I -carry here--on my heart;--on my heart for ever, but crushed, shrivelled, -dead." He had seen his weakness as she had not seen her own. She saw -now, and as he had wished, without illusions. - -"But go back to him!" she said, closing her eyes and shuddering from the -cup he held out to her. - -"He loves you. He needs you." - -"Go back from fear?--fear of you?--of myself?" - -"Turn from that thought then. Don't let it be a question of you or me. -Go back from pity, and because you loved him; because you are his wife." - -"But after that letter!" - -"Is a person's moral deficiency to warrant the breaking of such a bond? -If your mother had done something horrible would you be justified in -disowning her?" - -"Oh--a mother!" Felicia's tears ran down. - -"Remember, I wouldn't urge--I wouldn't ask you to fear me or pity him -unless I knew he loved you. Unless he had that claim I would say that -you were right, altogether right, in cutting him away from your life. -Felicia, it's his love, perhaps, his helpless, piteous love for you, -that makes the barrier that holds me from you now--my memory of his -face--his voice--when he said that you were his life--that he would die -without you. He thanked me for his happiness--you and I had 'made him.' -He said: 'You shall never regret it--so help me, God.' Felicia, you have -given him his soul. You must not rob him of it." - -"Geoffrey! Geoffrey!" she said, pressing her hands against her eyes--for -his words flooded her mind with memories that came with the intolerable -pain of life, after long swooning, stealing into crushed arteries, -wrenched and broken limbs--"I have given him no soul. He has found his -soul through me, perhaps, but I can't rob him of it." - -"You can stifle it, make it speechless, useless. Ah, Felicia, you do -pity him. And you must--you must pity him--and forgive him." - -"How could we go on," she whispered, "after my letter to him? after he -knows?" - -"He doesn't return till to-morrow, you said? He has not read it yet. -Besides, let him know the facts--but the facts from yourself. Tell him. -Spare him the letter. It was a terrible letter, my dearest, dearest," -said Geoffrey, with the deep, quiet assurance of safety. - -"After his to her!" - -"You wanted to hurt. You meant to drive the dagger in up to the hilt. -Cruel, dear, cruel. Save him before he gets it. Say it to him, if you -will; let him have it straight; but don't let him read it--alone. Poor -old Maurice!" Geoffrey added. - -The words, his comment on them, the "poor old Maurice!" that seemed a -final summing, thrilled through her, and with the thrill flashed -suddenly before her a vision of Maurice--a piteous Maurice. The hatred -of her own written words smote upon her as she saw his face of terror -reading them. He had betrayed her; he had lied and been a coward; but -she knew, and she seemed to have forgotten it for so long, that his life -was hers, that it was a new life, that he indeed loved her, and that -bereft of her he could not recover. A distorting mist melted from her -seeing of him, and as it melted she heard Geoffrey--so far away it -seemed--saying, "Can you really bear to think of his reading that -letter--alone?" - -She went towards him--there was now no longer any fear in his nearness. -He pushed the chair to the fire, and she sank into it sobbing. - -Poor, poor Maurice. Yes, in that final, comprehending pity was the -truth. Geoffrey was kneeling beside her. He put his arms around her and -she leaned her head on his shoulder as she wept. How different this from -the rapture of abandonment that had called to her--to him. What had he -not conquered in himself--and her--to do this great thing for her?--to -save not only her, but through her, Maurice? - -But, though he had conquered, she felt broken. - -"Life is so long, Geoffrey." - -He did not reply. She knew that he, too, was looking down that vista of -long years where they must walk apart. - -"And life--founded on pity----" - -"More will come. Something like a mother's love." - -She knew that he spoke the truth. That vision of Maurice's -terror-stricken face--reading her letter--had stabbed to more than pity. -The protecting passion that had flung itself between him and the reading -had in it a deeper quality. She could not analyze the fiercely defensive -tenderness. Presently, when her tears were over, and his arms still -around her, they were looking silently into the fire, she said, "I won't -disappoint you, Geoffrey." - -He hid his face against hers. She felt that his cheek was wet. - -For a dizzy moment a greater pity, a fiercer tenderness, rose within -her, a passion far other than the maternal passion that was to take her -back to Maurice. - -His cheek was wet; she clasped him in her arms. - -And as they clung together, both felt the pendulum-swing of human -emotion that from very excess of height plunges into abysses, the dark -of unknown depths. They had not escaped the wrench with fundamental -things, the swinging stupor of ecstasy and anguish. Tearless now, and in -silence, they clung and kissed each other. - -The pendulum swung in natures steadied by conflict; the plunging moment -came, went, and, without any conscious volition, left them shuddering -from the final and now inevitable victory, but looking again down the -long vista. It was mechanically that Geoffrey unlocked his arms, rose, -and moved away. - -Her little travelling clock ticked, eagerly it seemed, on the -mantelpiece. - -"Just half-past three," said Geoffrey. - -Felicia went to the window. - -"The rain has stopped," she said. "We can walk to the station in less -than an hour." - -Geoffrey, his hand on the mantelpiece, looked into the fire. "Don't you -want something to eat? Some tea?" - -"No; do you?" - -"No, thanks." - -"I will put on my hat and coat; I will be only a moment." She went to -the door while Geoffrey said-- - -"We can catch the fast afternoon train. We shall be in London by six." - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - - -A cold, evening sky was over London as Geoffrey and Felicia drove -through wet squares and streets. Here, too, the storm had lifted, and -between its darkness and the darkness of the coming night was the still -moment of bleak and bitter twilight; strips of chill radiance behind the -tattered trees; the pallid sky shining from the puddles of the roadway. - -They had hardly spoken to each other during the walk; the wait at the -desolate little station; the journey in the train. Geoffrey had merely -expressed the hope that she was not cold; she had feared that he was -hungry, had begged him to buy a sandwich. Once or twice from their -corners of the railway carriage they had gravely smiled at each other. -Now in the cab they neither spoke nor smiled. - -Felicia's mood was that of the bleak, still pause between the storm and -the darkness. It had its peace, its colourless peace. She could not look -back at the storm and the coming darkness seemed impenetrable, but -already her thoughts stole towards it, seeing, as if in a dream, -Maurice, comforted; feeling his hand in hers. - -She had a dreaming, a sorrowing presage that he had already returned, -already knew the truth, that she would find him waiting, hopeless, yet -waiting hopelessly for help. - -From her letter he would look up at her--returned to him. And, though -the thought wept for his pain, in her weariness it had lost its fear. -There was peace in its very sadness. For then there need be no horrid -crash of revelation for her to face. In silence she would hold out her -arms to him. And "poor, poor Maurice," her heart whispered. - -The river, when they reached the Embankment, had the sky's cold -stillness; a drowned face looking up at its ghost. Felicia, shivering a -little, said that it was very chilly. A stir of fear came with the -sudden hope that Maurice was not waiting for her. She would rather face -crashes than have him waiting--alone--with her letter. Hope and its fear -were like a rising of life, of eagerness in her. She leaned her head -from the window of the rattling four-wheeler to direct the cabman; -explaining: "They often take a longer way here." - -"I will see you up to the door of the flat," said Geoffrey. - -She nodded, then said, "But if he is there? If Maurice should come to -the door?" - -"But he doesn't return till to-morrow." - -"He may be there--I think he is there." - -"Well--the maid would come to the door. Besides--if he did--what more -simple than to shake his hand and say good-bye to you both?" - -She said quietly, "We shall not see you again--for how long?" - -"Oh, it will be quite natural that I should now go under for some -years," Geoffrey answered as quietly. "Some day, when you and Maurice -feel like seeing me----" - -"Yes; some day," Felicia answered, with her head again out of the -window. - -His dull ache of misery had been so steady that he was surprised to find -it capable of a deeper pang. He had almost the impulse to ask her if her -quiet were wrung from such agony as his. The next moment he was hating -himself for the whimpering selfishness that could not feel gladness for -her fortitude. Yet the plaint was there, and it dimly guessed at a -woman's capacity, strange in its sanity, its acceptance of compromise, -for two lives; her absorption in response to the claim that she may -listen to. He himself had helped to lock her into that smaller room of -her heart and now she must live in it, since the high and beautiful -chambers were closed to her for ever. In the smaller room, too, was the -love cruelly wounded, wounded by her hand. Her whole nature was now an -eagerness to staunch, uplift, console. - -The cab drew up before the block of flats, and while Geoffrey, saying -that he would walk back to his rooms, paid the man, Felicia went inside -and rang beside the lift for the porter. Geoffrey had joined her when -the man appeared. - -Yes, he said, Mr. Wynne had come back that afternoon. No, Mr. Wynne had -not been out again, though he had sent the maid away soon after -arriving. He knew that he had not gone out for he had been sitting in -the hall all day. - -There had evidently been talk, Geoffrey saw. Felicia saw nothing, -thought of nothing but Maurice's presence above; her heart seemed choked -in its beating. She made no objection to Geoffrey following her into the -lift. - -They stepped out together and, before the foolishly decorative little -door that Maurice had so often jested over they paused, the porter still -lingering. - -"You can go," said Geoffrey cheerfully; "I prefer walking down." - -The man reluctantly descended and then Geoffrey rang. - -Felicia leaned against the wall, seeing Maurice's eyes as he had said -good-bye to her, hearing his, "It seems to me an eternity before I shall -see you again." He had read her letter, alone. Remorse gave her the -sense of swooning to all about her. - -With almost a start she saw that Geoffrey still rang; and now he knocked -as well. - -"Maurice must be asleep," she said. - -Geoffrey, his finger pressed on the electric bell, nodded. - -She had answered, "The eternity will pass." It seemed an eternity. And -it had passed. Yes, here she was again, before the familiar door, and in -a moment he would see her. - -"I should think that by now he would be awake. Don't you think that he -must be awake by now?" she repeated the question almost irritably as he -did not answer her; adding, "Perhaps he guesses that it is we, and will -not see us. Oh Geoffrey--Geoffrey. How could I have written such a -letter!" - -"It will be all right when you see each other. You must meet his -despair, of course." Geoffrey, his shoulder turned to her, continued to -knock loudly. The draughty landing with its twilight square of window -open to a damp brick wall, was vault-like in its cold; Felicia, clasping -her arms, shivered. - -Geoffrey presently said, "I shall have to break the glass and open the -door." - -At this she started from her place, caught back his hand. - -"No, no! He can't have waked yet. He is worn out--tired--imagine how -tired! Go on ringing. Knock again." - -Her face showed a horror that did not know itself. - -"I think I had better break the door," said Geoffrey, gently; putting -her back. - -She dropped to helpless submission. - -The glass panel crashed in under the sharp blow and putting his hand -through the aperture Geoffrey drew the bolt. - -Inside was complete darkness. A touch at the electric button near the -door and the little hall, its closed doors, its chairs, table, jar of -laurel-leaves, flashed upon them. - -Geoffrey still kept Felicia behind him. - -"Let me go first," he said. - -"You! First! No, no, I must see him first." - -But firmly now he held her back. - -"Felicia, you must wait here. Maurice may be ill." - -She had seized his arms to push by him and they stood clutching each -other in the brilliant light. - -"Ill!" she repeated. "And I am not to go to him! My husband!" - -Something in her stricken face, her fixed eyes, made him yield. - -"Come then, let us go together." - -"No." Her thrust against him did not relax. "I must go alone; I must see -him alone; I must speak to him alone." - -Geoffrey clasped his arm around her. "Felicia, understand me, you shall -not go alone. We are too near to be separated--in this. We must go -together." - -He saw that his words tore from her mind the veil that covered horror. -She submitted, grasping, yet pushing from her, the arm that held her. - -"To our room--first. The light is turned in the same place--near the -door." - -Geoffrey flung open the door. It did not need the light to show them -that the room was empty; the desolate evening sky again confronted them -at the window. They drew back. - -"The drawing-room--the studio--he could not easily hear in the studio." - -Geoffrey knew that her hope was desperate--almost mechanical. They -looked into the drawing-room; went through the dining-room to the -studio. All were empty. They retraced their steps. Her hand no longer -grasped and repelled his arm. She leaned upon it. - -"His dressing-room--across the passage," she half whispered. - -If only, Geoffrey thought, she would faint in his arms so that he might -lay her down and go alone. But her swiftness equalled his. Neither could -hesitate. He threw open the door of the little dressing-room. - -Darkness again. The curtain drawn before the window with its courtyard -aspect. Geoffrey's hand felt for the electric button, trembled before it -found it. Light came like a shock in the darkness. Maurice lay at their -feet. - -The pistol had not fallen from his hand, though the open fingers no -longer held it. He had not shot himself through the head. Thank God for -that, Geoffrey found himself trivially thinking; his head was unmarred -and beautiful. One hardly noticed the breast's tragic disarray. - -As Felicia put away his arm and left him it was now Geoffrey who leaned, -weak, nerveless against the wall. - -He watched her kneel beside her husband, and, softly pushing the pistol -from his hand, take the empty, open hand in hers. - -With a look of tender wonder, like a mother with her sleeping child, she -slightly touched his hair and brow. It was still with wonder that she -looked up at Geoffrey. - -"He is dead," she said in a hushed and gentle voice, as the mother says: -"He is sleeping." - -Geoffrey's white, silent face, the tears so strangely running down it, -over his cheeks, into the corners of his lips, gave her a shudder. Her -eyes turned again to the serenity, the slumbering serenity, of the dead -face. - -For long moments she sat still, while Geoffrey stifled his sobs. - -"Is my letter there?" she said at last. He saw the open letter on the -dressing table; near it was a sealed envelope. - -He forced himself to cross the room to them. The dressing table was -behind her; he lifted the letters above her head; the envelope was -addressed to Mrs. Wynne. Hesitating, he glanced down, and saw that she -had raised her head, that her eyes were on him. She put up her hand. - -"Wait--not now." - -"I want it now," she commanded with her emotionless gentleness. -Now--while I am still stupefied; he understood. He gave it to her and -turned aside while she read, down there, at his feet, beside Maurice. - -The letter was not long. He heard her hand fall softly with it. She sat, -the vacant hand before her face, bowed over her husband. - -Geoffrey could not speak to her and he could not leave her. He stood -looking down at the dressing table--empty but for its little ivory tray, -its pin-cushion. Maurice had not unpacked his dressing-case. A -photograph of Felicia was stuck into the glass; not the framed one; that -was packed too; he had taken it with him. This was a profile; not good; -making her too sad, as Maurice had said. - -He heard now that she wept. - -He could not speak to her, he could not leave her, yet in his -wretchedness he felt himself an alien, a merciless onlooker, till the -tearing thought of Maurice, lying there, dead, seemed to justify his -presence by his grief. - -And presently he felt a touch on his hand. He looked down at her. Her -face still hidden she held up the letter to him. - -"I am to read it, Felicia? You wish me to read it?" - -"He is ours. It is because of you--because of you that I----" She could -not finish, and again he understood that she would say that because of -him she could look on her dead husband with a right to her despair. He -had given him back to her and her to him. - -"Dearest Felicia," he read, "I was a coward. But I always loved you -most--even when I lied to her. And now there is nothing in the world for -me but you. And I am unworthy of you--and of my friend. All I can do for -you is to set you free. Do you remember Maeterlinck's poem, darling? I -do smile; not only so that you shan't cry, but for pure joy that at last -I can really do something not ignoble in your eyes. Darling--darling--it -is only horrible because I can't see you again, and because you hate me -and perhaps may still hate me and not believe me. Don't, ah! don't hate -me. Love me again when I am no longer there to give you pain. Be happy, -dearest one.--MAURICE." - -A groan broke from Geoffrey's lips. Had it been any other woman at his -feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt, -he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was -half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love -yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from -herself. - -"Oh, Maurice--my Maurice, I have killed you," Felicia said. "How can I -live?" - -He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly, -patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at -Maurice. - -And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compassion, she -shuddered with dreadful sobs. - -"He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness--so -afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me--loving -me--and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might -always hate him. I can't live. I can't." - -Geoffrey could not think clearly. No phrases of consolation came to him -to lift her from her despair. He was with her in it. He could not lift -her yet. - -And it was no selfish claim that rose to his lips; rather it was the -succouring instinct of life that spoke through him to show her life's -supreme imperative as, putting his hand on hers and Maurice's, he -stammered, "You must, you must. For me." - - -Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. - - -A SELECTION OF POPULAR AND STANDARD BOOKS - -Published by CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. - -THE WORKS OF GEORGE MEREDITH - -THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL -BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER -SANDRA BELLONI -VITTORIA -EVAN HARRINGTON -THE EGOIST -ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS -LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA -THE AMAZING MARRIAGE -DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS -THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND -RHODA FLEMING -THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT -THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS -SHORT STORIES -POEMS--2 Vols. -AN ESSAY ON COMEDY - -LIBRARY EDITION. - -Complete in eighteen crown 8vo. volumes, as above, with a photogravure -Frontispiece to each. Cloth gilt. 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There are few better realised characters in late fiction than -this man who ... takes upon his own shoulders the punishment which the -Biblical law visits upon the descendants of a sinner. The background is -filled with many fine sketches of life and character.... Miss Glasgow -has never written a better book."--_Worlds Work._ - -"Such an excellent piece of work as this stands out in pleasing relief -at a time when there is produced only too much mediocre and inferior -literature. It is not only a very interesting story, but it is -profoundly true. 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All the characterisation, both of the -Europeans and of the natives, is adequate, and some of it admirable. The -style is strong and pungent. No book of such promise has come from -America since Frank Norris's 'Shanghaied.'"--_Morning Post._ - -"Mr. Rideout has made his men and women good and bad, very much alive, -and his clean, wholesome danger delightfully thrilling."--_Punch._ - - -CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. - - -_By MARY JOHNSTON_ - -_Lewis Rand._ - -With Illustrations in Colour by F. C. YOHN. - -"There is a delicacy, a distinction, a force in the writing which raises -the book into the highest plane. The story is enthralling, and the -treatment of it is that of a great and true artist. 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A powerful rememberable piece of work for which one has -nothing but admiration and praise."--_The Bookman._ - -_Sir Mortimer._ - -[_4th Edition_ - -"'Sir Mortimer' will add to the debt owed to her by all who have read -her books.... In the conception of the plot and its development, and in -the creation of attractive characters, Miss Johnston's ability is of a -very high order indeed."--_The Literary World._ - -_The above, with the exception of "Lewis Rand," are also issued in a -Pocket Edition, price 2/6 net each; full Limp Lambskin, 3/6 net._ - - -CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. - - -ERNEST THOMPSON SETON'S NATURE STORIES - -"I give it as my opinion, that as a writer about Animals, - -THOMPSON SETON -CAN'T BE BEATEN."--_Punch._ - -_Biography of a Silver Fox_ - -Illustrated Square Crown 8vo. 5/-net. - -"A romance of the realist kind and the fascinating lore of the woods is -accompanied by the most delightful picture of foxes great and small. 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As a piece of socio-political -journalism it invites the attention of every citizen in the nation." - -_The Christian World_ says:--"Apart from its literary charm, this book -should be read by English people if only to dissipate the singular -notions concerning Socialism which are current amongst many of them. -Brimful of ideas and suggestions, fascinating in its style, with not a -dull sentence in it, this book, by one of the acutest minds in England -to-day, on the question which looms beyond all others in interest and -importance, cannot but compel the attention of thoughtful men of all -schools, whatever their attitude towards its conclusions." - - -CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. - - -_By Mrs. C. S. PEEL_ - -_THE SIMPLE COOK-BOOKS_ - -A new and useful series of books for the kitchen. - -_Crown 8vo. Price 1/-net each volume._ - -_I. 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The Revolutionist's Handbook. -Maxims for Revolutionists. - -_John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara._ 1 vol. 6/-Preface for -Politicians. Home Rule in Ireland and Egypt. - -13. _John Bull's Other Island._ In Four Acts. - -14. _How He Lied to Her Husband._ In One Act. With Preface. Preface to -Major Barbara. First Aid to Critics. The Salvation Army. Christianity -and Anarchism. - -15. _Major Barbara._ In Three Acts. - -Separate Editions of the plays, paper wrappers, 1/6 net; cloth, 2/-net -except those marked.* - - -_Novels of my Nonage_ - -_The Irrational Knot (1880)._ Reprinted with a preface in 1905. 6/- - -_Cashel Byron's Profession (1882)_, with the dramatic version in the -Elizabethan style, entitled, "The Admirable Bashville or Constancy -Unrewarded," and a note on Modern Prize Fighting. 6/- - - -_Essays in Philosophic Criticism_ - -_The Perfect Wagnerite (1898)._ Second Edition, 1903. Reprinted 1906. -3/6 net. - -_Dramatic Opinions and Essays._ Originally contributed to _The Saturday -Review_ in 1895-98. Selected by JAMES HUNEKER, with a Preface by him. 2 -vols. 10/6 net. - -_Press Cuttings._ Paper cover, 1/-net. - -CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD. - - * * * * * - - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -The Confounding of Camilia=> The Confounding of Camelia {title page} - -an idolent=> an indolent {pg 14} - -You wont like Geoffrey=> You won't like Geoffrey {pg 35} - -milien=> milieu {pg 40} - -tenacious worldiness=> tenacious worldliness {pg 48} - -clearer vison=> clearer vision {pg 79} - -he ammended=> he amended {pg 129} - -unobstrusiveness=> unobtrusiveness {pg 176} - -resistlessness=> restlessness {pg 303} - -dependance=> dependence {pg 305} - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's Paths of Judgement, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATHS OF JUDGEMENT *** - -***** This file should be named 42012.txt or 42012.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/0/1/42012/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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