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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Translation of A Savage, Entire, by Parker
+#41 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+Title: The Translation of a Savage, Complete
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6214]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 27, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE, BY PARKER ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE, Complete
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+Volume 1.
+I.        HIS GREAT MISTAKE
+II.       A DIFFICULT SITUATION
+III.      OUT OF THE NORTH
+IV.       IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY
+V.        AN AWKWARD HALF-HOUR
+
+Volume 2.
+VI.       THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
+VII.      A COURT-MARTIAL
+VIII.     TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR
+
+Volume 3.
+IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES
+X.        "THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS"
+XI.       UPON THE HIGHWAY
+XII.      "THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
+XIII.     A LIVING POEM
+XIV.      ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
+XV.       THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The Translation of a Savage was written in the early autumn of 1893, at
+Hampstead Heath, where for over twenty years I have gone, now and then,
+when I wished to be in an atmosphere conducive to composition.  Hampstead
+is one of the parts of London which has as yet been scarcely invaded by
+the lodging-house keeper.  It is very difficult to get apartments at
+Hampstead; it is essentially a residential place; and, like Chelsea, has
+literary and artistic character all its own.  I think I have seen more
+people carrying books in their hands at Hampstead than in any other spot
+in England; and there it was, perched above London, with eyes looking
+towards the Atlantic over the leagues of land and the thousand leagues of
+sea, that I wrote 'The Translation of a Savage'.  It was written, as it
+were, in one concentrated effort, a ceaseless writing.  It was, in
+effect, what the Daily Chronicle said of 'When Valmond Came to Pontiac',
+a tour de force.  It belonged to a genre which compelled me to dispose of
+a thing in one continuous effort, or the impulse, impetus, and fulness of
+movement was gone.  The writing of a book of the kind admitted of no
+invasion from extraneous sources, and that was why, while writing 'The
+Translation of a Savage' at Hampstead, my letters were only delivered to
+me once a week.  I saw no friends, for no one knew where I was; but I
+walked the heights, I practised with my golf clubs on the Heath, and I
+sat in the early autumn evenings looking out at London in that agony of
+energy which its myriad lives represented.  It was a good time.
+
+The story had a basis of fact; the main incident was true.  It happened,
+however, in Michigan rather than in Canada; but I placed the incident in
+Canada where it was just as true to the life.  I was living in
+Hertfordshire at the time of writing the story, and that is why the
+English scenes were worked out in Hertfordshire and in London.  When I
+had finished the tale, there came over me suddenly a kind of feeling that
+the incident was too bold and maybe too crude to be believed, and I was
+almost tempted to consign it to the flames; but the editor of 'The
+English Illustrated Magazine', Sir C.  Kinloch-Cooke, took a wholly
+different view, and eagerly published it.  The judgment of the press was
+favourable,--highly so--and I was as much surprised as pleased when Mr.
+George Moore, in the Hogarth Club one night, in 1894, said to me: "There
+is a really remarkable play in that book of yours, 'The Translation, of a
+Savage'."  I had not thought up to that time that my work was of the kind
+which would appeal to George Moore, but he was always making discoveries.
+Meeting him in Pall Mall one day, he said to me: "My dear fellow, I have
+made a great discovery.  I have been reading the Old Testament.  It is
+magnificent.  In the mass of its incoherence it has a series of the most
+marvellous stories.  Do you remember--" etc.  Then he came home and had
+tea with me, revelling, in the meantime, on having discovered the Bible!
+
+I cannot feel that 'The Translation of a Savage' has any significance
+beyond the truthfulness with which I believe it describes the
+transformation, or rather the evolution, of a primitive character into a
+character with an intelligence of perception and a sympathy which is
+generally supposed to be the outcome of long processes of civilisation
+and culture.  The book has so many friends--this has been sufficiently
+established by the very large sale it has had in cheap editions--that I
+am still disposed to feel it was an inevitable manifestation in the
+progress of my art, such as it is.  People of diverse conditions of life
+have found in it something to interest and to stimulate.  One of the most
+volcanic of the Labour members in the House of Commons told me that the
+violence of his opposition to me in debate on a certain bill was greatly
+moderated by the fact that I had written 'The Translation of a Savage';
+while a certain rather grave duke remarked to me concerning the character
+of Lali that "She would have been all right anywhere."  I am bound to say
+that he was a duke who, while a young man, knew the wilds of Canada and
+the United States almost as well as I know Westminster.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+HIS GREAT MISTAKE
+
+It appeared that Armour had made the great mistake of his life.  When
+people came to know, they said that to have done it when sober had shown
+him possessed of a kind of maliciousness and cynicism almost pardonable,
+but to do it when tipsy proved him merely weak and foolish.  But the fact
+is, he was less tipsy at the time than was imagined; and he could have
+answered to more malice and cynicism than was credited to him.  To those
+who know the world it is not singular that, of the two, Armour was
+thought to have made the mistake and had the misfortune, or that people
+wasted their pity and their scorn upon him alone.  Apparently they did
+not see that the woman was to be pitied.  He had married her; and she was
+only an Indian girl from Fort Charles of the Hudson's Bay Company, with a
+little honest white blood in her veins.  Nobody, not even her own people,
+felt that she had anything at stake, or was in danger of unhappiness, or
+was other than a person who had ludicrously come to bear the name of Mrs.
+Francis Armour.  If any one had said in justification that she loved the
+man, the answer would have been that plenty of Indian women had loved
+white men, but had not married them, and yet the population of half-
+breeds went on increasing.
+
+Frank Armour had been a popular man in London.  His club might be found
+in the vicinity of Pall Mall, his father's name was high and honoured in
+the Army List, one of his brothers had served with Wolseley in Africa,
+and Frank himself, having no profession, but with a taste for business
+and investment, had gone to Canada with some such intention as Lord
+Selkirk's in the early part of the century.  He owned large shares in the
+Hudson's Bay Company, and when he travelled through the North-West
+country, prospecting, he was received most hospitably.  Of an inquiring
+and gregarious nature he went as much among the half-breeds--or 'metis',
+as they are called--and Indians as among the officers of the Hudson's Bay
+Company and the white settlers.  He had ever been credited with having a
+philosophical turn of mind; and this was accompanied by a certain strain
+of impulsiveness or daring.  He had been accustomed all his life to make
+up his mind quickly and, because he was well enough off to bear the
+consequences of momentary rashness in commercial investments, he was not
+counted among the transgressors.  He had his own fortune; he was not
+drawing upon a common purse.  It was a different matter when he
+trafficked rashly in the family name so far as to marry the daughter of
+Eye-of-the-Moon, the Indian chief.
+
+He was tolerably happy when he went to the Hudson's Bay country; for Miss
+Julia Sherwood was his promised wife, and she, if poor, was notably
+beautiful and of good family.  His people had not looked quite kindly on
+this engagement; they had, indeed, tried in many ways to prevent it;
+partly because of Miss Sherwood's poverty, and also because they knew
+that Lady Agnes Martling had long cared for him, and was most happily
+endowed with wealth and good looks also.  When he left for Canada they
+were inwardly glad (they imagined that something might occur to end the
+engagement)--all except Richard, the wiseacre of the family, the book-
+man, the drone, who preferred living at Greyhope, their Hertfordshire
+home, the year through, to spending half the time in Cavendish Square.
+Richard was very fond of Frank, admiring him immensely for his buxom
+strength and cleverness, and not a little, too, for that very rashness
+which had brought him such havoc at last.
+
+Richard was not, as Frank used to say, "perfectly sound on his pins,"
+--that is, he was slightly lame, but he was right at heart.  He was an
+immense reader, but made little use of what he read.  He had an abundant
+humour, and remembered every anecdote he ever heard.  He was kind to the
+poor, walked much, talked to himself as he walked, and was known by the
+humble sort as "a'centric."  But he had a wise head, and he foresaw
+danger to Frank's happiness when he went away.  While others had gossiped
+and manoeuvred and were busily idle, he had watched things.  He saw that
+Frank was dear to Julia in proportion to the distance between her and
+young Lord Haldwell, whose father had done something remarkable in guns
+or torpedoes and was rewarded with a lordship and an uncommonly large
+fortune.  He also saw that, after Frank left, the distance between Lord
+Haldwell and Julia became distinctly less--they were both staying at
+Greyhope.  Julia Sherwood was a remarkably clever girl.  Though he felt
+it his duty to speak to her for his brother,--a difficult and delicate
+matter, he thought it would come better from his mother.
+
+But when he took action it was too late.  Miss Sherwood naively declared
+that she had not known her own heart, and that she did not care for Frank
+any more.  She wept a little, and was soothed by motherly Mrs. Armour,
+who was inwardly glad, though she knew the matter would cause Frank pain;
+and even General Armour could not help showing slight satisfaction,
+though he was innocent of any deliberate action to separate the two.
+Straightway Miss Sherwood despatched a letter to the wilds of Canada, and
+for a week was an unengaged young person.  But she was no doubt consoled
+by the fact that for some time past she had had complete control of Lord
+Haldwell's emotions.  At the end of the week her perceptions were
+justified by Lord Haldwell's proposal, which, with admirable tact and
+obvious demureness, was accepted.
+
+Now, Frank Armour was wandering much in the wilds, so that his letters
+and papers went careering about after him, and some that came first were
+last to reach him.  That was how he received a newspaper announcing the
+marriage of Lord Haldwell and Julia Sherwood at the same time that her
+letter, written in estimable English and with admirable feeling, came,
+begging for a release from their engagement, and, towards its close,
+assuming, with a charming regret, that all was over, and that the last
+word had been said between them.
+
+Armour was sitting in the trader's room at Fort Charles when the carrier
+came with the mails.  He had had some successful days hunting buffalo
+with Eye-of-the-Moon and a little band of metis, had had a long pow-wow
+in Eye-of-the-Moon's lodge, had chatted gaily with Lali the daughter, and
+was now prepared to enjoy heartily the arrears of correspondence and news
+before him.  He ran his hand through the letters and papers, intending to
+classify them immediately, according to such handwriting as he recognised
+and the dates on the envelopes.  But, as he did so, he saw a newspaper
+from which the wrapper was partly torn.  He also saw a note in the margin
+directing him to a certain page.  The note was in Richard's handwriting.
+He opened the paper at the page indicated and saw the account of the
+marriage!  His teeth clinched on his cigar, his face turned white, the
+paper fell from his fingers.  He gasped, his hands spread out nervously,
+then caught the table and held it as though to steady himself.
+
+The trader rose.  "You are ill," he said.  "Have you bad news?"  He
+glanced towards the paper.  Slowly Armour folded the paper up, and then
+rose unsteadily.  "Gordon," he said, "give me a glass of brandy."
+
+He turned towards the cupboard in the room.  The trader opened it, took
+out a bottle, and put it on the table beside Armour, together with a
+glass and some water.  Armour poured out a stiff draught, added a very
+little water, and drank it.  He drew a great sigh, and stood looking at
+the paper.
+
+"Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Armour?" urged the trader.
+
+"Nothing, thank you, nothing at all.  Just leave the brandy here, will
+you?  I feel knocked about, and I have to go through the rest of these
+letters."
+
+He ran his fingers through the pile, turning it over hastily, as if
+searching for something.  The trader understood.  He was a cool-headed
+Scotsman; he knew that there were some things best not inquired into,
+and that men must have their bad hours alone.  He glanced at the brandy
+debatingly, but presently turned and left the room in silence.  In his
+own mind, however, he wished he might have taken the brandy without being
+discourteous.  Armour had discovered Miss Sherwood's letter.  Before he
+opened it he took a little more brandy.  Then he sat down and read it
+deliberately.  The liquor had steadied him.  The fingers of one hand even
+drummed on the table.  But the face was drawn, the eyes were hard, and
+the look of him was altogether pinched.  After he had finished this, he
+looked for others from the same hand.  He found none.  Then he picked out
+those from his mother and father.  He read them grimly.  Once he paused
+as he read his mother's letter, and took a gulp of plain brandy.  There
+was something very like a sneer on his face when he finished reading.
+He read the hollowness of the sympathy extended to him; he understood the
+far from adroit references to Lady Agnes Martling.  He was very bitter.
+He opened no more letters, but took up the Morning Post again, and read
+it slowly through.  The look of his face was not pleasant.  There was a
+small looking-glass opposite him.  He caught sight of himself in it.
+He drew his hand across his eyes and forehead, as though he was in a
+miserable dream.  He looked again; he could not recognise himself.
+
+He then bundled the letters and papers into his despatch-box.  His
+attention was drawn to one letter.  He picked it up.  It was from
+Richard.  He started to break the seal, but paused.  The strain of the
+event was too much; he winced.  He determined not to read it then, to
+wait until he had recovered himself.  He laughed now painfully.  It had
+been better for him--it had, maybe, averted what people were used to
+term his tragedy--had he read his brother's letter at that moment.
+For Richard Armour was a sensible man, notwithstanding his peculiarities;
+and perhaps the most sensible words he ever wrote were in that letter
+thrust unceremoniously into Frank Armour's pocket.  Armour had received a
+terrible blow.  He read his life backwards.  He had no future.  The
+liquor he had drunk had not fevered him, it had not wildly excited him;
+it merely drew him up to a point where he could put a sudden impulse into
+practice without flinching.  He was bitter against his people; he
+credited them with more interference than was actual.  He felt that
+happiness had gone out of his life and left him hopeless.  As we said, he
+was a man of quick decisions.  He would have made a dashing but reckless
+soldier; he was not without the elements of the gamester.  It is possible
+that there was in him also a strain of cruelty, undeveloped but radical.
+Life so far had evolved the best in him; he had been cheery and candid.
+Now he travelled back into new avenues of his mind and found strange,
+aboriginal passions, fully adapted to the present situation.  Vulgar
+anger and reproaches were not after his nature.  He suddenly found
+sources of refined but desperate retaliation.  He drew upon them.  He
+would do something to humiliate his people and the girl who had spoiled
+his life.  Some one thing!  It should be absolute and lasting, it should
+show how low had fallen his opinion of women, of whom Julia Sherwood had
+once been chiefest to him.  In that he would show his scorn of her.  He
+would bring down the pride of his family, who, he believed, had helped,
+out of mere selfishness, to tumble his happiness into the shambles.
+
+He was older by years than an hour ago.  But he was not without the
+faculty of humour; that was why he did not become very excited; it was
+also why he determined upon a comedy which should have all the elements
+of tragedy.  Perhaps, however, he would have hesitated to carry his
+purposes to immediate conclusions, were it not that the very gods seemed
+to play his game with him.  For, while he stood there, looking out into
+the yard of the fort, a Protestant missionary passed the window.  The
+Protestant missionary, as he is found at such places as Fort Charles,
+is not a strictly superior person.  A Jesuit might have been of advantage
+to Frank Armour at that moment.  The Protestant missionary is not above
+comfortable assurances of gold.  So that when Armour summoned this one
+in, and told him what was required of him, and slipped a generous gift of
+the Queen's coin into his hand, he smiled vaguely and was willing to do
+what he was bidden.  Had he been a Jesuit, who is sworn to poverty, and
+more often than not a man of birth and education, he might have
+influenced Frank Armour and prevented the notable mishap and scandal.
+As it was, Armour took more brandy.
+
+Then he went down to Eye-of-the-Moon's lodge.  A few hours afterwards the
+missionary met him there.  The next morning Lali, the daughter of Eye-of-
+the-Moon, and the chieftainess of a portion of her father's tribe, whose
+grandfather had been a white man, was introduced to the Hudson's Bay
+country as Mrs. Frank Armour.  But that was not all.  Indeed, as it
+stood, it was very little.  He had only made his comedy possible as yet;
+now the play itself was to come.  He had carried his scheme through
+boldly so far.  He would not flinch in carrying it out to the last
+letter.  He brought his wife down to the Great Lakes immediately,
+scarcely resting day or night.  There he engaged an ordinary but reliable
+woman, to whom he gave instructions, and sent the pair to the coast.  He
+instructed his solicitor at Montreal to procure passages for Mrs. Francis
+Armour and maid for Liverpool.  Then, by letters, he instructed his
+solicitor in London to meet Mrs. Francis Armour and maid at Liverpool and
+take them to Greyhope in Hertfordshire--that is, if General Armour and
+Mrs. Armour, or some representative of the family, did not meet them when
+they landed from the steamship.
+
+Presently he sat down and wrote to his father and mother, and asked them
+to meet his wife and her maid when they arrived by the steamer Aphrodite.
+He did not explain to them in precise detail his feelings on Miss Julia
+Sherwood's marriage, nor did he go into full particulars as to the
+personality of Mrs. Frank Armour; but he did say that, because he knew
+they were anxious that he should marry "acceptably," he had married into
+the aristocracy, the oldest aristocracy of America; and because he also
+knew they wished him to marry wealth, he sent them a wife rich in
+virtues--native, unspoiled virtues.  He hoped that they would take her to
+their hearts and cherish her.  He knew their firm principles of honour,
+and that he could trust them to be kind to his wife until he returned to
+share the affection which he was sure would be given to her.  It was not
+his intention to return to England for some time yet.  He had work to do
+in connection with his proposed colony; and a wife--even a native wife--
+could not well be a companion in the circumstances.  Besides, Lali--his
+wife's name was Lali!--would be better occupied in learning the
+peculiarities of the life in which her future would be cast.  It was
+possible they would find her an apt pupil.  Of this they could not
+complain, that she was untravelled; for she had ridden a horse, bareback,
+half across the continent.  They could not cavil at her education, for
+she knew several languages--aboriginal languages--of the North.  She had
+merely to learn the dialect of English society, and how to carry with
+acceptable form the costumes of the race to which she was going.  Her own
+costume was picturesque, but it might appear unusual in London society.
+Still, they could use their own judgment about that.
+
+Then, when she was gone beyond recall, he chanced one day to put on the
+coat he wore when the letters and paper declaring his misfortune came to
+him.  He found his brother's letter; he opened it and read it.  It was
+the letter of a man who knew how to appreciate at their proper value the
+misfortunes, as the fortunes, of life.  While Frank Armour read he came
+to feel for the first time that his brother Richard had suffered, maybe,
+from some such misery as had come to him through Julia Sherwood.  It was
+a dispassionate, manly letter, relieved by gentle wit, and hinting with
+careful kindness that a sudden blow was better for a man than a lifelong
+thorn in his side.  Of Julia Sherwood he had nothing particularly bitter
+to say.  He delicately suggested that she had acted according to her
+nature, and that in the see-saw of life Frank had had a sore blow; but
+this was to be borne.  The letter did not say too much; it did not
+magnify the difficulty, it did not depreciate it.  It did not even
+directly counsel; it was wholesomely, tenderly judicial.  Indirectly, it
+dwelt upon the steadiness and manliness of Frank's character; directly,
+lightly, and without rhetoric, it enlarged upon their own comradeship.
+It ran over pleasantly the days of their boyhood, when they were hardly
+ever separated.  It made distinct, yet with no obvious purpose, how good
+were friendship and confidence--which might be the most unselfish thing
+in the world--between two men.  With the letter before him Frank Armour
+saw his act in a new light.
+
+As we said, it is possible if he had read it on the day when his trouble
+came to him, he had not married Lali, or sent her to England on this--to
+her--involuntary mission of revenge.  It is possible, also, that there
+came to him the first vague conception of the wrong he had done this
+Indian girl, who undoubtedly married him because she cared for him after
+her heathen fashion, while he had married her for nothing that was
+commendable; not even for passion, which may be pardoned, nor for
+vanity, which has its virtues.  He had had his hour with circumstance;
+circumstance would have its hour with him in due course.  Yet there was
+no extraordinary revulsion.  He was still angry, cynical, and very sore.
+He would see the play out with a consistent firmness.  He almost managed
+a smile when a letter was handed to him some weeks later, bearing his
+solicitor's assurance that Mrs. Frank Armour and her maid had been safely
+bestowed on the Aphrodite for England.  This was the first act in his
+tragic comedy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A DIFFICULT SITUATION
+
+When Mrs. Frank Armour arrived at Montreal she still wore her Indian
+costume of clean, well-broidered buckskin, moccasins, and leggings, all
+surmounted by a blanket.  It was not a distinguished costume, but it
+seemed suitable to its wearer.  Mr. Armour's agent was in a quandary.
+He had received no instructions regarding her dress.  He felt, of course,
+that, as Mrs. Frank Armour, she should put off these garments, and dress,
+so far as was possible, in accordance with her new position.  But when he
+spoke about it to Mackenzie, the elderly maid and companion, he found
+that Mr. Armour had said that his wife was to arrive in England dressed
+as she was.  He saw something ulterior in the matter, but it was not his
+province to interfere.  And so Mrs. Frank Armour was a passenger by the
+Aphrodite in her buckskin garments.
+
+What she thought of it all is not quite easy to say.  It is possible that
+at first she only considered that she was the wife of a white man,--
+a thing to be desired, and that the man she loved was hers for ever--
+a matter of indefinable joy to her.  That he was sending her to England
+did not fret her, because it was his will, and he knew what was best.
+Busy with her contented and yet somewhat dazed thoughts of him,--she
+was too happy to be very active mentally, even if it had been the
+characteristic of her race,--she was not at first aware how much notice
+she excited, and how strange a figure she was in this staring city.
+When it did dawn upon her she shrank a little, but still was placid,
+preferring to sit with her hands folded in her lap, idly watching things.
+She appeared oblivious that she was the wife of a man of family and rank;
+she was only thinking that the man was hers--all hers.  He had treated
+her kindly enough in the days they were together, but she had not been
+a great deal with him, because they travelled fast, and his duties were
+many, or he made them so--but the latter possibility did not occur to
+her.
+
+When he had hastily bidden her farewell at Port Arthur he had kissed her
+and said: "Good-bye, my wife."  She was not yet acute enough in the
+inflections of Saxon speech to catch the satire--almost involuntary--in
+the last two words.  She remembered the words, however, and the kiss, and
+she was quite satisfied.  To what she was going she did not speculate.
+He was sending her: that was enough.
+
+The woman given to her as maid had been well chosen.  Armour had done
+this carefully.  She was Scotch, was reserved, had a certain amount of
+shrewdness, would obey instructions, and do her duty carefully.  What she
+thought about the whole matter she kept to herself; even the solicitor at
+Montreal could not find out.  She had her instructions clear in her mind;
+she was determined to carry them out to the letter--for which she was
+already well paid, and was like to be better paid; because Armour had
+arranged that she should continue to be with his wife after they got to
+England.  She understood well the language of Lali's tribe, and because
+Lali's English was limited she would be indispensable in England.
+
+Mackenzie, therefore, had responsibility, and if she was not elated over
+it, she still knew the importance of her position, and had enough
+practical vanity to make her an efficient servant and companion.  She
+already felt that she had got her position in life, from which she was
+to go out no more for ever.  She had been brought up in the shadow of
+Alnwick Castle, and she knew what was due to her charge--by other people;
+herself only should have liberty with her.  She was taking Lali to the
+home of General Armour, and that must be kept constantly before her mind.
+Therefore, from the day they set foot on the Aphrodite, she kept her
+place beside Mrs. Armour, sitting with her,--they walked very little,--
+and scarcely ever speaking, either to her or to the curious passengers.
+Presently the passengers became more inquisitive, and made many attempts
+at being friendly; but these received little encouragement.  It had
+become known who the Indian girl was, and many wild tales went about as
+to her marriage with Francis Armour.  Now it was maintained she had saved
+his life at an outbreak of her tribe; again, that she had found him dying
+in the woods and had nursed him back to life and health; yet again, that
+she was a chieftainess, a successful claimant against the Hudson's Bay
+Company--and so on.
+
+There were several on board who knew the Armours well by name, and two
+who knew them personally.  One was Mr. Edward Lambert, a barrister of the
+Middle Temple, and the other was Mrs. Townley, a widow, a member of a
+well-known Hertfordshire family, who, on a pleasant journey in Scotland,
+had met, conquered, and married a wealthy young American, and had been
+left alone in the world, by no means portionless, eighteen months before.
+Lambert knew Richard Armour well, and when, from Francis Armour's
+solicitor, with whom he was acquainted, he heard, just before they
+started, who the Indian girl was, he was greatly shocked and sorry.  He
+guessed at once the motive, the madness, of this marriage.  But he kept
+his information and his opinions mostly to himself, except in so far as
+it seemed only due to friendship to contradict the numberless idle
+stories going about.  After the first day at sea he came to know Mrs.
+Townley, and when he discovered that they had many common friends and
+that she knew the Armours, he spoke a little more freely to her regarding
+the Indian wife, and told her what he believed was the cause of the
+marriage.
+
+Mrs. Townley was a woman--a girl--of uncommon gentleness of disposition,
+and, in spite of her troubles, inclined to view life with a sunny eye.
+She had known of Frank Armour's engagement with Miss Julia Sherwood, but
+she had never heard the sequel.  If this was the sequel--well, it had
+to be faced.  But she was almost tremulous with sympathy when she
+remembered Mrs. Armour, and Frank's gay, fashionable sister, Marion, and
+contemplated the arrival of this Indian girl at Greyhope.  She had always
+liked Frank Armour, but this made her angry with him; for, on second
+thoughts, she was not more sorry for him and for his people than for
+Lali, the wife.  She had the true instinct of womanhood, and she supposed
+that a heathen like this could have feelings to be hurt and a life to be
+wounded as herself or another.  At least she saw what was possible in the
+future when this Indian girl came to understand her position--only to be
+accomplished by contact with the new life, so different from her past.
+Both she and Lambert decided that she was very fine-looking, not
+withstanding her costume.  She was slim and well built, with modest bust
+and shapely feet and ankles.  Her eyes were large, meditative, and
+intelligent, her features distinguished.  She was a goodly product of her
+race, being descended from a line of chiefs and chieftainesses--broken
+only in the case of her grandfather, as has been mentioned.  Her hands
+(the two kindly inquisitors decided) were almost her best point.  They
+were perfectly made, slim, yet plump, the fingers tapering, the wrist
+supple.  Mrs. Townley then and there decided that the girl had
+possibilities.  But here she was, an Indian, with few signs of
+civilisation or of that breeding which seems to white people the
+only breeding fit for earth or heaven.
+
+Mrs. Townley did not need Lambert's suggestion that she should try to
+approach the girl, make friends with her, and prepare her in some slight
+degree for the strange career before her.
+
+Mrs. Townley had an infinite amount of tact.  She knew it was best to
+approach the attendant first.  This she did, and, to the surprise of
+other lady-passengers, received no rebuff.  Her advance was not, however,
+rapid.  Mackenzie had had her instructions.  When she found that Mrs.
+Townley knew Francis Armour and his people, she thawed a little more,
+and then, very hesitatingly, she introduced her to the Indian wife.
+Mrs. Townley smiled her best--and there were many who knew how attractive
+she could be at such a moment.  There was a slight pause, in which Lali
+looked at her meditatively, earnestly, and then those beautiful wild
+fingers glided out, and caught her hand, and held it; but she spoke no
+word.  She only looked inquiringly, seriously, at her new-found friend,
+and presently dropped the blanket away from her, and sat up firmly, as
+though she felt she was not altogether an alien now, and had a right to
+hold herself proudly among white people, as she did in her own country
+and with her own tribe, who had greatly admired her.  Certainly Mrs.
+Townley could find no fault with the woman as an Indian.  She had taste,
+carried her clothes well, and was superbly fresh in appearance, though
+her hair still bore very slight traces of the grease which even the most
+aristocratic Indians use.
+
+But Lali would not talk.  Mrs. Townley was anxious that the girl should
+be dressed in European costume, and offered to lend and rearrange dresses
+of her own, but she came in collision with Mr. Armour's instructions.
+So she had to assume a merely kind and comforting attitude.  The wife had
+not the slightest idea where she was going, and even when Mackenzie, at
+Mrs. Townley's oft-repeated request, explained very briefly and
+unpicturesquely, she only looked incredulous or unconcerned.  Yet the
+ship, its curious passengers, the dining saloon, the music, the sea, and
+all, had given her suggestions of what was to come.  They had expected
+that at table she would be awkward and ignorant to a degree.  But she had
+at times eaten at the trader's table at Fort Charles, and had learned how
+to use a knife and fork.  She had also been a favourite with the trader's
+wife, who had taught her very many civilised things.  Her English, though
+far from abundant, was good.  Those, therefore, who were curious and rude
+enough to stare at her were probably disappointed to find that she ate
+like "any Christom man."
+
+"How do you think the Armours will receive her?" said Lambert to Mrs.
+Townley, of whose judgment on short acquaintance he had come to entertain
+a high opinion.
+
+Mrs. Townley had a pretty way of putting her head to one side and
+speaking very piquantly.  She had had it as a girl; she had not lost it
+as a woman, any more than she had lost a soft little spontaneous laugh
+which was one of her unusual charms--for few women can laugh audibly with
+effect.  She laughed very softly now, and, her sense of humour
+supervening for the moment, she said:
+
+"Really, you have asked me a conundrum.  I fancy I see Mrs. Armour's face
+when she gets the news,--at the breakfast-table, of course, and gives a
+little shriek, and says: 'General!  oh, General!'  But it is all very
+shocking, you know," she added, in a lower voice.  "Still I think they
+will receive her and do the best they can for her; because, you see,
+there she is, married hard and fast.  She bears the Armour name, and is
+likely to make them all very unhappy, indeed, if she determines to
+retaliate upon them for any neglect."
+
+"Yes.  But how to retaliate, Mrs. Townley?" Lambert had not a suggestive
+mind.
+
+"Well, for instance, suppose they sent her away into seclusion,--with
+Frank's consent, another serious question,--and she should take the
+notion to fly her retirement, and appear inopportunely at some social
+function clothed as she is now!  I fancy her blanket would be a wet one
+in such a case--if you will pardon the little joke."
+
+Lambert sighed.  "Poor Frank--poor devil!" he said, almost beneath his
+breath.
+
+"And wherefore poor Frank?  Do you think he or the Armours of Greyhope
+are the only ones at stake in this?  What about this poor girl?  Just
+think why he married her, if our suspicions are right,--and then imagine
+her feelings when she wakes to the truth over there, as some time she is
+sure to do!"
+
+Then Lambert began to see the matter in a different light, and his
+sympathy for Francis Armour grew less as his pity for the girl increased.
+In fact, the day before they got to Liverpool he swore at Armour more
+than once, and was anxious concerning the reception of the heathen wife
+by her white relatives.
+
+Had he been present at a certain scene at Greyhope a day or two before,
+he would have been still more anxious.  It was the custom, at breakfast,
+for Mrs. Armour to open her husband's letters and read them while he was
+engaged with his newspaper, and hand to him afterwards those that were
+important.  This morning Marion noticed a letter from Frank amongst the
+pile, and, without a word, pounced upon it.  She was curious--as any
+woman would be--to see how he took Miss Sherwood's action.  Her father
+was deep in his paper at the time.  Her mother was reading other letters.
+Marion read the first few lines with a feeling of almost painful wonder,
+the words were so curious, cynical, and cold.
+
+Richard sat opposite her.  He also was engaged with his paper, but,
+chancing to glance up, he saw that she was becoming very pale, and that
+the letter trembled in her fingers.  Being a little short-sighted, he
+was not near enough to see the handwriting.  He did not speak yet.  He
+watched.  Presently, seeing her grow more excited, he touched her foot
+under the table.  She looked up, and caught his eye.  She gasped
+slightly.  She gave him a warning look, and turned away from her
+mother.  Then she went on reading to the bitter end.
+
+Presently a little cry escaped her against her will.  At that her mother
+looked up, but she only saw her daughter's back, as she rose hurriedly
+from the table, saying that she would return in a moment.  Mrs. Armour,
+however, had been startled.  She knew that Marion had been reading a
+letter, and, with a mother's instinct, her thoughts were instantly on
+Frank.  She spoke quickly, almost sharply:
+
+"Marion, come here."
+
+Richard had risen.  He came round the table, and, as the girl obeyed her
+mother, took the letter from her fingers and hastily glanced over it.
+Mrs. Armour came forward and took her daughter's arm.  "Marion," she
+said, "there is something wrong--with Frank.  What is it?"
+
+General Armour was now looking up at them all, curiously, questioningly,
+through his glasses, his paper laid down, his hands resting on the table.
+
+Marion could not answer.  She was sick with regret, vexation, and shame;
+at the first flush, death--for Frank--had been preferable to this.  She
+had a considerable store of vanity; she was not very philosophical.
+Besides, she was not married; and what Captain Vidall, her devoted
+admirer and possible husband, would think of this heathenish alliance was
+not a cheer ful thought to her.  She choked down a sob, and waved her
+hand towards Richard to answer for her.  He was pale too, but cool.  He
+understood the case instantly; he made up his mind instantly also as to
+what ought to be--must be--done.
+
+"Well, mother," he said, "it is about Frank.  But he is all right; that
+is, he is alive and well-in body.  But he has arranged a hateful little
+embarrassment for us--he is married."
+
+"Married!" exclaimed his mother faintly.  "Oh, poor Lady Agnes!"
+
+Marion sniffed a little viciously at this.
+
+"Married?  Married?" said his father.  "Well, what about it?  eh?  what
+about it?"
+
+The mother wrung her hands.  "Oh, I know it is something dreadful--
+dreadful!  He has married some horrible wild person, or something."
+
+Richard, miserable as he was, remained calm.  "Well," said he, "I don't
+know about her being horrible.  Frank is silent on that point; but she is
+wild enough--a wild Indian, in fact."
+
+"Indian?  Indian?  Good God--a red nigger!" cried General Armour
+harshly, starting to his feet.
+
+"An Indian?  a wild Indian?" Mrs. Armour whispered faintly, as she
+dropped into a chair.
+
+"And she'll be here in two or three days," fluttered Marion hysterically.
+
+Meanwhile Richard had hastily picked up the Times.  "She is due here the
+day after to-morrow," he said deliberately.  "Frank is as decisive as he
+is rash.  Well, it's a melancholy tit-for-tat."
+
+"What do you mean by tit-for-tat?" cried his father angrily.
+
+"Oh, I mean that--that we tried to hasten Julia's marriage--with the
+other fellow, and he is giving us one in return; and you will all agree
+that it's a pretty permanent one."
+
+The old soldier recovered himself, and was beside his wife in an instant.
+He took her hand.  "Don't fret about it, wife," he said; "it's an ugly
+business, but we must put up with it.  The boy was out of his head.  We
+are old, now, my dear, but there was a time when we should have resented
+such a thing as much as Frank--though not in the same fashion, perhaps--
+not in the same fashion."  The old man pressed his lips hard to keep down
+his emotion.
+
+"Oh, how could he--how could he!" said his mother: "we meant everything
+for the best."
+
+"It is always dangerous business meddling with lovers' affairs," rejoined
+Richard.  "Lovers take themselves very seriously indeed, and--well, here
+the thing is!  Now, who will go and fetch her from Liverpool?  I should
+say that both my father and my mother ought to go."
+
+Thus Richard took it for granted that they would receive Frank's Indian
+wife into their home.  He intended that, so far as he was concerned,
+there should be no doubt upon the question from the beginning.
+
+"Never--she shall never come here!" said Marion, with flashing eyes;
+"a common squaw, with greasy hair, and blankets, and big mouth, and black
+teeth, who eats with her fingers and grunts!  If she does, if she is
+brought to Greyhope, I will never show my face in the world again.  Frank
+married the animal: why does he ship her home to us?  Why didn't he come
+with her?  Why does he not take her to a home of his own?  Why should he
+send her here, to turn our house into a menagerie?"
+
+Marion drew her skirt back, as if the common squaw, with her blankets and
+grease, was at that moment near her.
+
+"Well, you see," continued Richard, "that is just it.  As I said, Frank
+arranged this little complication with a trifling amount of malice.  No
+doubt he didn't come with her because he wished to test the family
+loyalty and hospitality; but a postscript to this letter says that his
+solicitor has instructions to meet his wife at Liverpool, and bring her
+on here in case we fail to show her proper courtesy."
+
+General Armour here spoke.  "He has carried the war of retaliation very
+far indeed, but men do mad things when their blood is up, as I have seen
+often.  That doesn't alter our clear duty in the matter.  If the woman
+were bad, or shameful, it would be a different thing; if--"
+
+Marion interrupted: "She has ridden bareback across the continent like a
+jockey,--like a common jockey, and she wears a blanket, and she doesn't
+know a word of English, and she will sit on the floor!"
+
+"Well," said her father, "all these things are not sins, and she must be
+taught better."
+
+"Joseph, how can you?" said Mrs. Armour indignantly.  "She cannot, she
+shall not come here.  Think of Marion.  Think of our position."
+
+She hid her troubled, tear-stained face behind her handkerchief.  At the
+same time she grasped her husband's hand.  She knew that he was right.
+She honoured him in her heart for the position he had taken, but she
+could not resist the natural impulse of a woman where her taste and
+convention were shocked.
+
+The old man was very pale, but there was no mistaking his determination.
+He had been more indignant than any of them, at first, but he had an
+unusual sense of justice when he got face to face with it, as Richard had
+here helped him to do.  "We do not know that the woman has done any
+wrong," he said.  "As for our name and position, they, thank God!  are
+where a mad marriage cannot unseat them.  We have had much prosperity in
+the world, my wife; we have had neither death nor dishonour; we--"
+
+"If this isn't dishonour, father, what is?" Marion flashed out.
+
+He answered calmly.  "My daughter, it is a great misfortune, it will
+probably be a lifelong trial, but it is not necessarily dishonour."
+
+"You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it," said Richard,
+backing up his father.  "It is all pretty awkward, but I daresay we shall
+get some amusement out of it in the end."
+
+"Richard," said his mother through her tears, "you are flippant and
+unkind!"
+
+"Indeed, mother," was his reply, "I never was more serious in my life.
+When I spoke of amusement, I meant comedy merely, not fun--the thing that
+looks like tragedy and has a happy ending.  That is what I mean, mother,
+nothing more."
+
+"You are always so very deep, Richard," remarked Marion ironically, "and
+care so very little how the rest of us feel about things.  You have no
+family pride.  If you had married a squaw, we shouldn't have been
+surprised.  You could have camped in the grounds with your wild woman,
+and never have been missed--by the world," she hastened to add, for she
+saw a sudden pain in his face.
+
+He turned from them all a little wearily, and limped over to the window.
+He stood looking out into the limes where he and Frank had played when
+boys.  He put his finger up, his unhandsome finger, and caught away some
+moisture from his eyes.  He did not dare to let them see his face, nor
+yet to speak.  Marion had cut deeper than she knew, and he would carry
+the wound for many a day before it healed.
+
+But his sister felt instantly how cruel she had been, as she saw him limp
+away, and caught sight of the bowed shoulders and the prematurely grey
+hair.  Her heart smote her.  She ran over, and impulsively put her hands
+on his shoulder.  "Oh, Dick," she said, "forgive me, Dick!  I didn't mean
+it.  I was angry and foolish and hateful."
+
+He took one of her hands as it rested on his shoulder, she standing
+partly behind him, and raised it to his lips, but he did not turn to her;
+he could not.
+
+"It is all right--all right," he said; "it doesn't make any difference.
+Let us think of Frank and what we have got to do.  Let us stand together,
+Marion; that is best."
+
+But her tears were dropping on his shoulder, as her forehead rested on
+her hand.  He knew now that, whatever Frank's wife was, she would not
+have an absolute enemy here; for when Marion cried her heart was soft.
+She was clay in the hands of the potter whom we call Mercy--more often a
+stranger to the hearts of women than of men.  At the other side of the
+room also the father and mother, tearless now, watched these two; and the
+mother saw her duty better and with less rebelliousness.  She had felt it
+from the first, but she could not bring her mind to do it.  They held
+each other's hands in silence.  Presently General Armour said: "Richard,
+your mother and I will go to Liverpool to meet Frank's wife."
+
+Marion shuddered a little, and her hands closed on Richard's shoulder,
+but she said nothing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+OUT OF THE NORTH
+
+It was a beautiful day--which was so much in favour of Mrs. Frank Armour
+in relation to her husband's people.  General Armour and his wife had
+come down from London by the latest train possible, that their suspense
+at Liverpool might be short.  They said little to each other, but when
+they did speak it was of things very different from the skeleton which
+they expected to put into the family cupboard presently.  Each was trying
+to spare the other.  It was very touching.  They naturally looked upon
+the matter in its most unpromising light, because an Indian was an
+Indian, and this unknown savage from Fort Charles was in violent contrast
+to such desirable persons as Lady Agnes Martling.  Not that the Armours
+were zealous for mere money and title, but the thing itself was
+altogether a propos, as Mrs. Armour had more naively than correctly put
+it.  The general, whose knowledge of character and the circumstances of
+life was considerable, had worked out the thing with much accuracy.  He
+had declared to Richard, in their quiet talk upon the subject, that Frank
+must have been anything but sober when he did it.  He had previously
+called it a policy of retaliation; so that now he was very near the
+truth.  When they arrived at the dock at Liverpool, the Aphrodite was
+just making into the harbour.
+
+"Egad," said General Armour to himself, "Sebastopol was easier than this;
+for fighting I know, and being peppered I know, by Jews, Greeks,
+infidels, and heretics; but to take a savage to my arms and do for her
+what her godfathers and godmothers never did, is worse than the devil's
+dance at Delhi."
+
+What Mrs. Armour, who was not quite so definite as her husband, thought,
+it would be hard to tell; but probably grief for, and indignation at, her
+son, were uppermost in her mind.  She had quite determined upon her
+course.  None could better carry that high, neutral look of social
+superiority than she.
+
+Please Heaven, she said to herself, no one should see that her equanimity
+was shaken.  They had brought one servant with them, who had been gravely
+and yet conventionally informed that his young master's wife, an Indian
+chieftainess, was expected.  There are few family troubles but find their
+way to servants' hall with an uncomfortable speed; for, whether or not
+stone walls have ears, certainly men-servants and maid-servants have eyes
+that serve for ears, and ears that do more than their bounden duty.
+Boulter, the footman, knew his business.  When informed of the coming of
+Mrs. Francis Armour, the Indian chieftainess, his face was absolutely
+expressionless; his "Yessir" was as mechanical as usual.  On the dock he
+was marble--indifferent.  When the passengers began to land, he showed no
+excitement.  He was decorously alert.  When the crucial moment came, he
+was imperturbable.  Boulter was an excellent servant.  So said Edward
+Lambert to himself after the event; so, likewise, said Mrs. Townley to
+herself when the thing was over; so declared General Armour many a time
+after, and once very emphatically, just before he raised Boulter's wages.
+
+As the boat neared Liverpool, Lambert and Mrs. Townley grew nervous.  The
+truth regarding the Indian wife had become known among the passengers,
+and most were very curious--some in a well-bred fashion, some
+intrusively, vulgarly.  Mackenzie, Lali's companion, like Boulter, was
+expressionless in face.  She had her duty to do, paid for liberally, and
+she would do it.  Lali might have had a more presentable and dignified
+attendant, but not one more worthy.  It was noticeable that the captain
+of the ship and all the officers had been markedly courteous to Mrs.
+Armour throughout the voyage, but, to their credit, not ostentatiously
+so.  When the vessel was brought to anchor and the passengers were being
+put upon the tender, the captain came and made his respectful adieus,
+as though Lali were a lady of title in her own right, and not an Indian
+girl married to a man acting under the influence of brandy and malice.
+General Armour and Mrs. Armour were always grateful to Lambert and Mrs.
+Townley for the part they played in this desperate little comedy.  They
+stood still and watchful as the passengers came ashore one by one.  They
+saw that they were the centre of unusual interest, but General Armour was
+used to bearing himself with a grim kind of indifference in public, and
+his wife was calm, and so somewhat disappointed those who probably
+expected the old officer and his wife to be distressed.  Frank Armour's
+solicitor was also there, but, with good taste, he held aloof.  The two
+needed all their courage, however, when they saw a figure in buckskin and
+blanket step upon the deck, attended by a very ordinary, austere, and
+shabbily-dressed Scotswoman.  But immediately behind them were Edward
+Lambert and Mrs. Townley, and these, with their simple tact, naturalness,
+and freedom from any sort of embarrassment, acted as foils, and relieved
+the situation.
+
+General Armour advanced, hat in hand.  "You are my son's wife?" he said
+courteously to this being in a blanket.
+
+She looked up and shook her head slightly, for she did not quite
+understand; but she recognised his likeness to her husband, and presently
+she smiled up musingly.  Mackenzie repeated to her what General Armour
+had said.  She nodded now, a flash of pleasure lighting up her face, and
+she slid out her beautiful hand to him.  The general took it and pressed
+it mechanically, his lips twitching slightly.  He pressed it far harder
+than he meant, for his feelings were at tension.  She winced slightly,
+and involuntarily thrust out her other hand, as if to relieve his
+pressure.  As she did so the blanket fell away from her head and
+shoulders.  Lambert, with excellent intuition, caught it, and threw it
+across his arm.  Then, quickly, and without embarrassment, he and Mrs.
+Townley greeted General Armour, who returned the greetings gravely, but
+in a singular, confidential tone, which showed his gratitude.  Then he
+raised his hat again to Lali, and said: "Come and let me introduce you
+--to your husband's mother."
+
+The falling back of that blanket had saved the situation; for when the
+girl stood without it in her buckskin garments there was a dignity in her
+bearing which carried off the bizarre event.  There was timidity in her
+face, and yet a kind of pride too, though she was only a savage.  The
+case, even at this critical moment, did not seem quite hopeless.  When
+they came to Mrs. Armour, Lali shrank away timidly from the look in the
+mother's eyes, and, shivering slightly, looked round for her blanket.
+But Lambert had deftly passed it on to the footman.  Presently Mrs.
+Armour took both the girl's hands in hers (perhaps she did it because the
+eyes of the public were on her, but that is neither here nor there--she
+did it), and kissed her on the cheek.  Then they moved away to a closed
+carriage.
+
+And that was the second act in Frank Armour's comedy of errors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+IN THE NAME OF THE FAMILY
+
+The journey from Liverpool to Greyhope was passed in comparative silence.
+The Armours had a compartment to themselves, and they made the Indian
+girl as comfortable as possible without self-consciousness, without any
+artificial politeness.  So far, what they had done was a matter of duty,
+not of will; but they had done their duty naturally all their lives, and
+it was natural to them now.  They had no personal feelings towards the
+girl one way or another, as yet.  It was trying to them that people
+stared into the compartment at different stations.  It presently dawned
+upon General Armour that it might also be trying to their charge.
+Neither he nor his wife had taken into account the possibility of the
+girl having feelings to be hurt.  But he had noticed Lali shrink visibly
+and flush slightly when some one stared harder than usual, and this
+troubled him.  It opened up a possibility.  He began indefinitely to see
+that they were not the only factors in the equation.  He was probably a
+little vexed that he had not seen it before; for he wished to be a just
+man.  He was wont to quote with more or less austerity--chiefly the
+result of his professional life--this:
+
+     "For justice, all place a temple, and all season summer."
+
+And, man of war as he was, he had another saying which was much in his
+mouth; and he lived up to it with considerable sincerity:
+
+          "Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace,
+          To silence envious tongues."
+
+He whispered to his wife.  It would have been hard to tell from her look
+what she thought of the matter, but presently she changed seats with her
+husband, that he might, by holding his newspaper at a certain angle,
+shield the girl from intrusive gazers.
+
+At every station the same scene was enacted.  And inquisitive people must
+have been surprised to see how monotonously ordinary was the manner of
+the three white people in the compartment.  Suddenly, at a station near
+London, General Armour gave a start, and used a strong expression under
+his breath.  Glancing at the "Marriage" column, he saw a notice to the
+effect that on a certain day of a certain month, Francis Gilbert, the son
+of General Joseph Armour, C.B., of Greyhope, Hertfordshire, and Cavendish
+Square, was married to Lali, the daughter of Eye-of-the-Moon, chief of
+the Bloods, at her father's lodge in the Saskatchewan Valley.  This had
+been inserted by Frank Armour's solicitor, according to his instructions,
+on the day that the Aphrodite was due at Liverpool.  General Armour did
+not at first intend to show this to his wife, but on second thought he
+did, because he knew she would eventually come to know of it, and also
+because she saw that something had moved him.  She silently reached out
+her hand for the paper.  He handed it to her, pointing to the notice.
+
+Mrs. Armour was unhappy, but her self-possession was admirable, and she
+said nothing.  She turned her face to the window, and sat for a long time
+looking out.  She did not turn to the others, for her eyes were full of
+tears, and she did not dare to wipe them away, nor yet to let them be
+seen.  She let them dry there.  She was thinking of her son, her
+favourite son, for whom she had been so ambitious, and for whom, so far
+as she could, and retain her self-respect, she had delicately intrigued,
+that he might happily and befittingly marry.  She knew that in the matter
+of his engagement she had not done what was best for him, but how could
+she have guessed that this would be the result?  She also was sure that
+when the first flush of his anger and disappointment had passed, and he
+came to view this thing with cooler mind, he would repent deeply--for a
+whole lifetime.  She was convinced that he had not married this savage
+for anything which could make marriage endurable.  Under the weight of
+the thought she was likely to forget that the young alien wife might have
+lost terribly in the event also.
+
+The arrival at Euston and the departure from St. Pancras were rather
+painful all round, for, though there was no waiting at either place, the
+appearance of an Indian girl in native costume was uncommon enough, even
+in cosmopolitan London, to draw much attention.  Besides, the placards of
+the evening papers were blazoned with such announcements as this:
+
+                         A RED INDIAN GIRL
+                            MARRIED INTO
+                      AN ENGLISH COUNTY FAMILY.
+
+Some one had telegraphed particulars--distorted particulars--over from
+Liverpool, and all the evening sheets had their portion of extravagance
+and sensation.  General Armour became a little more erect and austere as
+he caught sight of these placards, and Mrs. Armour groaned inwardly; but
+their faces were inscrutable, and they quietly conducted their charge,
+minus her blanket, to the train which was to take them to St. Albans, and
+were soon wheeling homeward.
+
+At Euston they parted with Lambert and Mrs. Townley, who quite simply and
+conventionally bade good-bye to them and their Indian daughter-in-law.
+Lali had grown to like Mrs. Townley, and when they parted she spoke a few
+words quickly in her own tongue, and then immediately was confused,
+because she remembered that she could not be understood.  But presently
+she said in halting English that the face of her white friend was good,
+and she hoped that she would come one time and sit beside her in her
+wigwam, for she would be sad till her husband travelled to her.
+
+Mrs. Townley made some polite reply in simple English, pressed the girl's
+hand sympathetically, and hurried away.  Before she parted from Mr.
+Lambert, however, she said, with a pretty touch of cynicism: "I think I
+see Marion Armour listening to her sister-in-law issue invitations to her
+wigwam.  I am afraid I should be rather depressed myself if I had to be
+sisterly to a wigwam lady."
+
+"But I say, Mrs. Townley," rejoined Lambert seriously, as he loitered at
+the steps of her carriage, "I shouldn't be surprised if my Lady Wigwam--
+a rather apt and striking title, by the way--turned out better than we
+think.  She carried herself rippingly without the blanket, and I never
+saw a more beautiful hand in my life--but one," he added, as his fingers
+at that moment closed on hers, and held them tightly, in spite of the
+indignant little effort at withdrawal.  "She may yet be able to give them
+all points in dignity and that kind of thing, and pay Master Frank back
+in his own coin.  I do not see, after all, that he is the martyr."
+
+Lambert's voice got softer, for he still held Mrs. Townley's fingers, the
+footman not having the matter in his eye,--and then he spoke still more
+seriously on sentimental affairs of his own, in which he evidently hoped
+she would take some interest.  Indeed, it is hard to tell how far the
+case might have been pushed if she had not suddenly looked a little
+forbidding and imperious.  For even people of no notable height, with
+soft features, dark brown eyes, and a delightful little laugh, may appear
+rather regal at times.  Lambert did not quite understand why she should
+take this attitude.  If he had been as keen regarding his own affairs of
+the affections as in the case of Frank Armour and his Indian bride, he
+had known that every woman has in her mind the occasion when she should
+and when she should not be wooed, and nothing disappoints her more than a
+declaration at a time which is not her time.  If it does not fall out as
+she wishes it, retrospect, a dear thing to a woman, is spoiled.  Many a
+man has been sent to the right-about because he has ventured his proposal
+at the wrong time.  What would have occurred to Lambert it is hard to
+tell; but he saw that something was wrong, and stopped in time.
+
+When General Armour and his party reached Greyhope it was late in the
+evening.  The girl seemed tired and confused by the events of the day,
+and did as she was directed, indifferently, limply.  But when they
+entered the gates of Greyhope and travelled up the long avenue of limes,
+she looked round her somewhat eagerly, and drew a long sigh, maybe of
+relief or pleasure.  She presently stretched out a hand almost
+caressingly to the thick trees and the grass, and said aloud: "Oh, the
+beautiful trees and the long grass!"  There was a whirr of birds' wings
+among the branches, and then, presently, there rose from a distance the
+sweet, gurgling whistle of the nightingale.  A smile as of reminiscence
+crossed her face.  Then she said, as if to herself: "It is the same.
+I shall not die.  I hear the birds' wings, and one is singing.  It is
+pleasant to sleep in the long grass when the nights are summer, and to
+hang your cradle in the trees."
+
+She had asked for her own blanket, refusing a rug, when they left
+St.  Albans, and it had been given to her.  She drew it about her now
+with a feeling of comfort, and seemed to lose the horrible sense of
+strangeness which had almost convulsed her when she was put into the
+carriage at the railway station.  Her reserve had hidden much of what
+she really felt; but the drive through the limes had shown General Armour
+and his wife that they had to do with a nature having capacities for
+sensitive feeling; which, it is sometimes thought, is only the
+prerogative of certain well-bred civilisations.
+
+But it was impossible that they should yet, or for many a day, feel any
+sense of kinship with this aboriginal girl.  Presently the carriage drew
+up to the doorway, which was instantly opened to them.  A broad belt of
+light streamed out upon the stone steps.  Far back in the hall stood
+Marion, one hand upon the balustrade of the staircase, the other tightly
+held at her side, as if to nerve herself for the meeting.  The eyes of
+the Indian girl pierced the light, and, as if by a strange instinct,
+found those of Marion, even before she left the carriage.  Lali felt
+vaguely that here was her possible enemy.  As she stepped out of the
+carriage, General Armour's hand under her elbow to assist her, she drew
+her blanket something more closely about her, and so proceeded up the
+steps.  The composure of the servants was, in the circumstances,
+remarkable.  It needed to have been, for the courage displayed by Lali's
+two new guardians during the day almost faltered at the threshold of
+their own home.  Any sign of surprise or amusement on the part of the
+domestics would have given them some painful moments subsequently.  But
+all was perfectly decorous.  Marion still stood motionless, almost dazed,
+The group advanced into the hall, and there paused, as if waiting for
+her.
+
+At that moment Richard came out of the study at her right hand, took her
+arm, and said quietly: "Come along, Marion.  Let us be as brave as our
+father and mother."
+
+She gave a hard little gasp and seemed to awake as from a dream.  She
+quickly glided forwards ahead of him, kissed her mother and father almost
+abruptly, then turned to the young wife with a scrutinising eye.
+"Marion," said her father, "this is your sister."  Marion stood
+hesitating, confused.
+
+"Marion, dear," repeated her mother ceremoniously, "this is your
+brother's wife.--Lali, this is your husband's sister, Marion."
+
+Mackenzie translated the words swiftly to the girl, and her eyes flashed
+wide.  Then in a low voice she said in English: "Yes, Marion, How!"
+
+It is probable that neither Marion nor any one present knew quite the
+meaning of 'How', save Richard, and he could not suppress a smile, it
+sounded so absurd and aboriginal.  But at this exclamation Marion once
+more came to herself.  She could not possibly go so far as her mother did
+at the dock and kiss this savage, but, with a rather sudden grasp of the
+hand, she said, a little hysterically, for her brain was going round like
+a wheel,--"Wo-won't you let me take your blanket?" and forthwith laid
+hold of it with tremulous politeness.
+
+The question sounded, for the instant, so ludicrous to Richard that, in
+spite of the distressing situation, he had to choke back a laugh.  Years
+afterwards, if he wished for any momentary revenge upon Marion (and he
+had a keen sense of wordy retaliation), he simply said: "Wo-won't you let
+me take your blanket?"
+
+Of course the Indian girl did not understand, but she submitted to the
+removal of this uncommon mantle, and stood forth a less trying sight to
+Marion's eyes; for, as we said before, her buckskin costume set off
+softly the good outlines of her form.
+
+The Indian girl's eyes wandered from Marion to Richard.  They wandered
+from anxiety, doubt, and a bitter kind of reserve, to cordiality,
+sympathy, and a grave kind of humour.  Instantly the girl knew that
+she had in eccentric Richard Armour a frank friend.  Unlike as he was
+to his brother, there was still in their eyes the same friendliness and
+humanity.  That is, it was the same look that Frank carried when he first
+came to her father's lodge.
+
+Richard held out his hand with a cordial little laugh and said: "Ah, ah,
+very glad, very glad!  Just in time for supper.  Come along.  How is
+Frank, eh?  how is Frank?  Just so; just so.  Pleasant journey, I
+suppose?"  He shook her hand warmly three or four times, and, as he held
+it, placed his left hand over it and patted it patriarchally, as was his
+custom with all the children and all the old ladies that he knew.
+
+"Richard," said his mother, in a studiously neutral voice, "you might see
+about the wine."
+
+Then Richard appeared to recover himself, and did as he was requested,
+but not until his brother's wife had said to him in English, as they
+courteously drew her towards the staircase: "Oh, my brother Richard,
+How!"
+
+But the first strain and suspense were now over for the family, and it
+is probable that never had they felt such relief as when they sat down
+behind closed doors in their own rooms for a short respite, while the
+Indian girl was closeted alone with Mackenzie and a trusted maid, in what
+she called her wigwam.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+AN AWKWARD HALF-HOUR
+
+It is just as well, perhaps, that the matter had become notorious.
+Otherwise the Armours had lived in that unpleasant condition of being
+constantly "discovered."  It was simply a case of aiming at absolute
+secrecy, which had been frustrated by Frank himself, or bold and
+unembarrassed acknowledgment and an attempt to carry things off with
+a high hand.  The latter course was the only one possible.  It had
+originally been Richard's idea, appropriated by General Armour, and
+accepted by Mrs. Armour and Marion with what grace was possible.  The
+publication of the event prepared their friends, and precluded the
+necessity for reserve.  What the friends did not know was whether they
+ought or ought not to commiserate the Armours.  It was a difficult
+position.  A death, an accident, a lost reputation, would have been easy
+to them; concerning these there could be no doubt.  But an Indian
+daughter-in-law, a person in moccasins, was scarcely a thing to be
+congratulated upon; and yet sympathy and consolation might be much
+misplaced; no one could tell how the Armours would take it.  For even
+their closest acquaintances knew what kind of delicate hauteur was
+possible to them.  Even the "'centric" Richard, who visited the cottages
+of the poor, carrying soup and luxuries of many kinds, accompanying them
+with the most wholesome advice a single man ever gave to families and the
+heads of families, whose laugh was so cheery and spontaneous,--and face
+so uncommonly grave and sad at times,--had a faculty for manner.  With
+astonishing suddenness he could raise insurmountable barriers; and
+people, not of his order, who occasionally presumed on his simplicity of
+life and habits, found themselves put distinctly ill at ease by a quiet,
+curious look in his eye.  No man was ever more the recluse and at the
+same time the man of the world.  He had had his bitter little comedy of
+life, but it was different from that of his brother Frank.  It was buried
+very deep; not one of his family knew of it: Edward Lambert, and one or
+two others who had good reason never to speak of it, were the only
+persons possessing his secret.
+
+But all England knew of Frank's mesalliance.  And the question was, What
+would people do?  They very properly did nothing at first.  They waited
+to see how the Armours would act: they did not congratulate; they did not
+console; that was left to those papers which chanced to resent General
+Armour's politics, and those others which were emotional and sensational
+on every subject--particularly so where women were concerned.
+
+It was the beginning of the season, but the Armours had decided that they
+would not go to town.  That is, the general and his wife were not going.
+They felt that they ought to be at Greyhope with their daughter-in-law
+--which was to their credit.  Regarding Marion they had nothing to say.
+Mrs. Armour inclined to her going to town for the season, to visit Mrs.
+Townley, who had thoughtfully written to her, saying that she was very
+lonely, and begging Mrs. Armour to let her come, if she would.  She said
+that of course Marion would see much of her people in town just the same.
+Mrs. Townley was a very clever and tactful woman.
+
+She guessed that General Armour and his wife were not likely to come to
+town, but that must not appear, and the invitation should be on a
+different basis--as it was.
+
+It is probable that Marion saw through the delicate plot, but that did
+not make her like Mrs. Townley less.  These little pieces of art make
+life possible, these tender fictions!
+
+Marion was, however, not in good humour; she was nervous and a little
+petulant.  She had a high-strung temperament, a sensitive perception of
+the fitness of things, and a horror of what was gauche; and she would, in
+brief, make a rather austere person if the lines of life did not run in
+her favour.  She had something of Frank's impulsiveness and temper; it
+would have been a great blessing to her if she had had a portion of
+Richard's philosophical humour also.  She was at a point of tension--her
+mother and Richard could see that.  She was anxious--though for the world
+she would not have had it thought so--regarding Captain Vidall.  She had
+never cared for anybody but him; it was possible she never would.  But he
+did not know this, and she was not absolutely sure that his evident but
+as yet informal love would stand this strain--which shows how people very
+honourable and perfect-minded in themselves may allow a large margin to
+other people who are presumably honourable and perfect-minded also.
+There was no engagement between them, and he was not bound in any way,
+and could, therefore, without slashing the hem of the code, retire
+without any apology; but they had had that unspoken understanding which
+most people who love each other show even before a word of declaration
+has passed their lips.  If he withdrew because of this scandal there
+might be some awkward hours for Frank Armour's wife at Greyhope; but,
+more than that, there would be a very hard-hearted young lady to play her
+part in the deceitful world; she would be as merciless as she could be.
+Naturally, being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event, and
+brooded on it.  It was different with her father and mother.  They were
+shocked and indignant at first, but when the first scene had been faced
+they began to make the best of things all round.  That is, they proceeded
+at once to turn the North American Indian into a European--a matter of no
+little difficulty.  A governess was discussed; but General Armour did not
+like the idea, and Richard opposed it heartily.  She must be taught
+English and educated, and made possible in "Christian clothing," as Mrs.
+Armour put it.  Of the education they almost despaired--all save Richard;
+time, instruction, vanity, and a dressmaker might do much as to the
+other.
+
+The evening of her arrival, Lali would not, with any urging, put on
+clothes of Marion's which had been sent in to her.  And the next morning
+it was still the same.
+
+She came into the breakfast-room dressed still in buckskin and moccasins,
+and though the grease had been taken out of her hair it was still combed
+flat.  Mrs. Armour had tried to influence her through Mackenzie, but to
+no purpose.  She was placidly stubborn.
+
+It had been unwisely told her by Mackenzie that they were Marion's
+clothes.  They scarcely took in the fact that the girl had pride, that
+she was the daughter of a chief, and a chieftainess herself, and that it
+was far from happy to offer her Marion's clothes to wear.
+
+Now, Richard, when he was a lad, had been on a journey to the South Seas,
+and had learned some of the peculiarities of the native mind, and he did
+not suppose that American Indians differed very much from certain well-
+bred Polynesians in little matters of form and good taste.  When his
+mother told him what had occurred before Lali entered the breakfast-room,
+he went directly to what he believed was the cause, and advised tact with
+conciliation.  He also pointed out that Lali was something taller than
+Marion, and that she might be possessed of that general trait of
+humanity-vanity.  Mrs. Armour had not yet got used to thinking of the
+girl in another manner than an intrusive being of a lower order, who was
+there to try their patience, but also to do their bidding.  She had yet
+to grasp the fact that, being her son's wife, she must have, therefore, a
+position in the house, exercising a certain authority over the servants,
+who, to Mrs. Armour, at first seemed of superior stuff.  But Richard said
+to her: "Mother, I fancy you don't quite grasp the position.  The girl is
+the daughter of a chief, and the descendant of a family of chiefs,
+perhaps through many generations.  In her own land she has been used to
+respect, and has been looked up to pretty generally.  Her garments are,
+I fancy, considered very smart in the Hudson's Bay country; and a finely
+decorated blanket like hers is expensive up there.  You see, we have to
+take the thing by comparison; so please give the girl a chance."
+
+And Mrs. Armour answered wearily, "I suppose you are right, Richard; you
+generally are in the end, though why you should be I do not know, for you
+never see anything of the world any more, and you moon about among the
+cottagers.  I suppose it's your native sense and the books you read."
+
+Richard laughed softly, but there was a queer ring in the laugh, and he
+came over stumblingly and put his arm round his mother's shoulder.
+"Never mind how I get such sense as I have, mother; I have so much time
+to think, it would be a wonder if I hadn't some.  But I think we had
+better try to study her, and coax her along, and not fob her off as a
+very inferior person, or we shall have our hands full in earnest.  My
+opinion is, she has got that which will save her and us too--a very high
+spirit, which only needs opportunity to develop into a remarkable thing;
+and, take my word for it, mother, if we treat her as a chieftainess, or
+princess, or whatever she is, and not simply as a dusky person, we shall
+come off better and she will come off better in the long run.  She is not
+darker than a Spaniard, anyhow."  At this point Marion entered the room,
+and her mother rehearsed briefly to her what their talk had been.  Marion
+had had little sleep, and she only lifted her eyebrows at them at first.
+She was in little mood for conciliation.  She remembered all at once that
+at supper the evening before her sister-in-law had said How! to the
+butler, and had eaten the mayonnaise with a dessert spoon.  But
+presently, because she saw they waited for her to speak, she said,
+with a little flutter of maliciousness: "Wouldn't it be well for Richard-
+-he has plenty of time, and we are also likely to have it now
+--to put us all through a course of instruction for the training of
+chieftainesses?  And when do you think she will be ready for a drawing-
+room--Her Majesty Queen Victoria's, or ours?"
+
+"Marion!" said Mrs. Armour severely; but Richard came round to her, and,
+with his fresh, child-like humour, put his arm round her waist and added
+"Marion, I'd be willing to bet--if I were in the habit of betting--my
+shaky old pins here against a lock of your hair that you may present her
+at any drawing-room--ours or Queen Victoria's--in two years, if we go at
+it right; and it would serve Master Frank very well if we turned her out
+something, after all."
+
+To which Mrs. Armour responded almost eagerly: "I wish it were only
+possible, Richard.  And what you say is true, I suppose, that she is
+of rank in her own country, whatever value that may have."
+
+Richard saw his advantage.  "Well, mother," he said, "a chieftainess is a
+chieftainess, and I don't know but to announce her as such, and--"
+
+"And be proud of it, as it were," put in Marion, "and pose her, and make
+her a prize--a Pocahontas, wasn't it?--and go on pretending world without
+end!"  Marion's voice was still slightly grating, but there was in it too
+a faint sound of hope.  "Perhaps," she said to herself, "Richard is
+right."
+
+At this point the door opened and Lali entered, shown in by Colvin, her
+newly-appointed maid, and followed by Mackenzie, and, as we said, dressed
+still in her heathenish garments.  She had a strong sense of dignity, for
+she stood still and waited.  Perhaps nothing could have impressed Marion
+more.  Had Lali been subservient simply, an entirely passive,
+unintelligent creature, she would probably have tyrannised over her in
+a soft, persistent fashion, and despised her generally.  But Mrs. Armour
+and Marion saw that this stranger might become very troublesome indeed,
+if her temper were to have play.  They were aware of capacities for
+passion in those dark eyes, so musing yet so active in expression, which
+moved swiftly from one object to another and then suddenly became
+resolute.
+
+Both mother and daughter came forward, and held out their hands, wishing
+her a pleasant good-morning, and were followed by Richard, and
+immediately by General Armour, who had entered soon after her.  She had
+been keen enough to read (if a little vaguely) behind the scenes, and her
+mind was wakening slowly to the peculiarity of the position she occupied.
+The place awed her, and had broken her rest by perplexing her mind, and
+she sat down to the breakfast-table with a strange hunted look in her
+face.  But opposite to her was a window opening to the ground, and beyond
+it were the limes and beeches and a wide perfect sward and far away a
+little lake, on which swans and wild fowl fluttered.  Presently, as she
+sat silent, eating little, her eyes lifted to the window.  They flashed
+instantly, her face lighted up with a weird kind of charm, and suddenly
+she got to her feet with Indian exclamations on her lips, and, as if
+unconscious of them all, went swiftly to the window and out of it, waving
+her hands up and down once or twice to the trees and the sunlight.
+
+"What did she say?" said Mrs. Armour, rising with the others.
+
+"She said," replied Mackenzie, as she hurried towards the window, "that
+they were her beautiful woods, and there were wild birds flying and
+swimming in the water, as in her own country."
+
+By this time all were at the window, Richard arriving last, and the
+Indian girl turned on them, her body all quivering with excitement,
+laughed a low, bird-like laugh, and then, clapping her hands above her
+head, she swung round and ran like a deer towards the lake, shaking her
+head back as an animal does when fleeing from his pursuers.  She would
+scarcely have been recognised as the same placid, speechless woman in a
+blanket who sat with folded hands day after day on the Aphrodite.
+
+The watchers turned and looked at each other in wonder.  Truly, their
+task of civilising a savage would not lack in interest.  The old general
+was better pleased, however, at this display of activity and excitement
+than at yesterday's taciturnity.  He loved spirit, even if it had to be
+subdued, and he thought on the instant that he might possibly come to
+look upon the fair savage as an actual and not a nominal daughter-in-law.
+He had a keen appreciation of courage, and he thought he saw in her face,
+as she turned upon them, a look of defiance or daring, and nothing could
+have got at his nature quicker.  If the case had not been so near to his
+own hearthstone he would have chuckled.  As it was, he said good-
+humouredly that Mackenzie and Marion should go and bring her back.
+But Mackenzie was already at that duty.  Mrs. Armour had had the presence
+of mind to send for Colvin; but presently, when the general spoke, she
+thought it better that Marion should go, and counselled returning to
+breakfast and not making the matter of too much importance.  This they
+did, Richard very reluctantly; while Marion, rather pleased than not at
+the spirit shown by the strange girl, ran away over the grass towards the
+lake, where Lali had now stopped.  There was a little bridge at one point
+where the lake narrowed, and Lali, evidently seeing it all at once, went
+towards it, and ran up on it, standing poised above the water about the
+middle of it.  For an instant an unpleasant possibility came into
+Marion's mind: suppose the excited girl intended suicide!  She shivered
+as she thought of it, and yet--!  She put that horribly cruel and selfish
+thought away from her with an indignant word at herself.  She had passed
+Mackenzie, and came first to the lake.  Here she slackened, and waved her
+hand playfully to the girl, so as not to frighten her; and then with a
+forced laugh came up panting on the bridge, and was presently by Lali's
+side.  Lali eyed her a little furtively, but, seeing that Marion was much
+inclined to be pleasant, she nodded to her, said some Indian words
+hastily, and spread out her hands towards the water.  As she did so,
+Marion noticed again the beauty of those hands and the graceful character
+of the gesture, so much so that she forgot the flat hair and the unstayed
+body, and the rather broad feet, and the delicate duskiness, which had so
+worked upon her in imagination and in fact the evening before.  She put
+her hand kindly on that long slim hand stretched out beside her, and,
+because she knew not what else to speak, and because the tongue is very
+perverse at times,--saying the opposite of what is expected,--she herself
+blundered out, "How!  How!  Lali."
+
+Perhaps Lali was as much surprised at the remark as Marion herself, and
+certainly very much more delighted.  The sound of those familiar words,
+spoken by accident as they were, opened the way to a better
+understanding, as nothing else could possibly have done.  Marion was
+annoyed with herself, and yet amused too.  If her mind had been perfectly
+assured regarding Captain Vidall, it is probable that then and there a
+peculiar, a genial, comradeship would have been formed.  As it was,
+Marion found this little event more endurable than she expected.  She
+also found that Lali, when she laughed in pleasant acknowledgment of that
+How!  had remarkably white and regular teeth.  Indeed, Marion Armour
+began to discover some estimable points in the appearance of her savage
+sister-in-law.  Marion remarked to herself that Lali might be a rather
+striking person, if she were dressed, as her mother said, in Christian
+garments, could speak the English language well--and was somebody else's
+sister-in-law.
+
+At this point Mackenzie came breathlessly to the bridge, and called out a
+little sharply to Lali, rebuking her.  In this Mackenzie made a mistake;
+for not only did Lali draw herself up with considerable dignity, but
+Marion, noticing the masterful nature of the tone, instantly said:
+"Mackenzie, you must remember that you are speaking to Mrs. Francis
+Armour, and that her position in General Armour's house is the same as
+mine.  I hope it is not necessary to say anything more, Mackenzie."
+
+Mackenzie flushed.  She was a sensible woman, she knew that she had done
+wrong, and she said very promptly: "I am very sorry, miss.  I was
+flustered, and I expect I haven't got used to speaking to--to Mrs. Armour
+as I'll be sure to do in the future."
+
+As she spoke, two or three deer came trotting out of the beeches down
+to the lake side.  If Lali was pleased and excited before, she was
+overwhelmed now.  Her breath came in quick little gasps; she laughed; she
+tossed her hands; she seemed to become dizzy with delight; and presently,
+as if this new link with, and reminder of, her past, had moved her as one
+little expects a savage heart to be moved, two tears gathered in her
+eyes, then slid down her cheek unheeded, and dried there in the sunlight,
+as she still gazed at the deer.  Marion, at first surprised, was now
+touched, as she could not have thought it possible concerning this wild
+creature, and her hand went out and caught Lali's gently.  At this
+genuine act of sympathy, instinctively felt by Lali, the stranger in a
+strange land, husbanded and yet a widow, there came a flood of tears,
+and, dropping on her knees, she leaned against the low railing of the
+bridge and wept silently.  So passionless was her grief it seemed the
+more pathetic, and Marion dropped on her knees beside her, put her arm
+round her shoulder, and said: "Poor girl!  Poor girl!"
+
+At that Lali caught her hand, and held it, repeating after her the words:
+"Poor girl!  Poor girl!"
+
+She did not quite understand them, but she remembered that once just
+before she parted from her husband at the Great Lakes he had said those
+very words.  If the fates had apparently given things into Frank Armour's
+hands when he sacrificed this girl to his revenge, they were evidently
+inclined to play a game which would eventually defeat his purpose, wicked
+as it had been in effect if not in absolute motive.  What the end of this
+attempt to engraft the Indian girl upon the strictest convention of
+English social life would have been had her introduction not been at
+Greyhope, where faint likenesses to her past surrounded her, it is hard
+to conjecture.  But, from present appearances, it would seem that Richard
+Armour was not wholly a false prophet; for the savage had shown herself
+that morning to possess, in their crudeness, some striking qualities of
+character.  Given character, many things are possible, even to those who
+are not of the elect.
+
+This was the beginning of better things.  Lali seemed to the Armours not
+quite so impossible now.  Had she been of the very common order of Indian
+"pure and simple," the task had resolved itself into making a common
+savage into a very common European.  But, whatever Lali was, it was
+abundantly evident that she must be reckoned with at all points, and
+that she was more likely to become a very startling figure in the Armour
+household than a mere encumbrance to be blushed for, whose eternal
+absence were preferable to her company.
+
+Years after that first morning Marion caught herself shuddering at the
+thought that came to her when she saw Lali hovering on the bridge.
+Whatever Marion's faults were, she had a fine dislike of anything that
+seemed unfair.  She had not ridden to hounds for nothing.  She had at
+heart the sportsman's instinct.  It was upon this basis, indeed, that
+Richard appealed to her in the first trying days of Lali's life among
+them.  To oppose your will to Marion on the basis of superior knowledge
+was only to turn her into a rebel; and a very effective rebel she made;
+for she had a pretty gift at the retort courteous, and she could take as
+much, and as well, as she gave.  She rebelled at first at assisting in
+Lali's education, though by fits and starts she would teach her English
+words, and help her to form long sentences, and was, on the whole, quite
+patient.  But Lali's real instructors were Mrs. Armour and Richard--,
+her best, Richard.
+
+The first few days she made but little progress, for everything was
+strange to her, and things made her giddy--the servants, the formal
+routine, the handsome furnishings, Marion's music, the great house, the
+many precise personal duties set for her, to be got through at stated
+times; and Mrs. Armour's rather grand manner.  But there was the relief
+to this, else the girl had pined terribly for her native woods and
+prairies; this was the park, the deer, the lake, the hares, and birds.
+While she sat saying over after Mrs. Armour words and phrases in English,
+or was being shown how she must put on and wear the clothes which a
+dressmaker from Regent Street had been brought to make, her eyes would
+wander dreamily to the trees and the lake and the grass.  They soon
+discovered that she would pay no attention and was straightway difficult
+to teach if she was not placed where she could look out on the park.
+They had no choice, for though her resistance was never active it was
+nevertheless effective.
+
+Presently she got on very swiftly with Richard.  For he, with instinct
+worthy of a woman, turned their lessons upon her own country and Frank.
+This cost him something, but it had its reward.  There was no more
+listlessness.  Previously Frank's name had scarcely been spoken to her.
+Mrs. Armour would have hours of hesitation and impotent regret before she
+brought herself to speak of her son to his Indian wife.  Marion tried to
+do it a few times and failed; the general did it with rather a forced
+voice and manner, because he saw that his wife was very tender upon the
+point.  But Richard, who never knew self-consciousness, spoke freely of
+Frank when he spoke at all; and it was seeing Lali's eyes brighten and
+her look earnestly fixed on him when he chanced to mention Frank's name,
+that determined him on his new method of instruction.  It had its
+dangers, but he had calculated them all.  The girl must be educated at
+all costs.  The sooner that occurred the sooner would she see her own
+position and try to adapt herself to her responsibilities, and face the
+real state of her husband's attitude towards her.
+
+He succeeded admirably.  Striving to tell him about her past life, and
+ready to talk endlessly about her husband, of his prowess in the hunt,
+of his strength and beauty, she also strove to find English words for the
+purpose, and Richard supplied them with uncommon willingness.  He
+humoured her so far as to learn many Indian words and phrases, but he was
+chary of his use of them, and tried hard to make her appreciative of her
+new life and surroundings.  He watched her waking slowly to an
+understanding of the life, and of all that it involved.  It gave him a
+kind of fear, too, because she was sensitive, and there was the possible
+danger of her growing disheartened or desperate, and doing some mad thing
+in the hour that she wakened to the secret behind her marriage.
+
+His apprehensions were not without cause.  For slowly there came into
+Lali's mind the element of comparison.  She became conscious of it one
+day when some neighbouring people called at Greyhope.  Mrs. Armour, in
+her sense of duty, which she had rigidly set before her, introduced Lali
+into the drawing-room.  The visitors veiled their curiosity and said some
+pleasant casual things to the young wife, but she saw the half-curious,
+half-furtive glances, she caught a sidelong glance and smile, and when
+they were gone she took to looking at herself in a mirror, a thing she
+could scarcely be persuaded to do before.  She saw the difference between
+her carriage and theirs, her manner of wearing her clothes and theirs,
+her complexion and theirs.  She exaggerated the difference.  She brooded
+on it.  Now she sat downcast and timid, and hunted in face, as on the
+first evening she came; now she appeared restless and excited.
+
+If Mrs. Armour was not exactly sympathetic with her, she was quiet and
+forbearing, and General Armour, like Richard, tried to draw her out--but
+not on the same subjects.  He dwelt upon what she did; the walks she took
+in the park, those hours in the afternoon when, with Mackenzie or Colvin,
+she vanished into the beeches, making friends with the birds and deer and
+swans.  But most of all she loved to go to the stables.  She was,
+however, asked not to go unless Richard or General Armour was with her.
+She loved horses, and these were a wonder to her.  She had never known
+any but the wild, ungroomed Indian pony, on which she had ridden in every
+fashion and over every kind of country.  Mrs. Armour sent for a riding-
+master, and had riding-costumes made for her.  It was intended that she
+should ride every day as soon as she seemed sufficiently presentable.
+This did not appear so very far off, for she improved daily in
+appearance.  Her hair was growing finer, and was made up in the modest
+prevailing fashion; her skin, no longer exposed to an inclement climate,
+and subject to the utmost care, was smoother and fairer; her feet,
+encased in fine, well-made boots, looked much smaller; her waist was
+shaped to fashion, and she was very straight and lissom.  So many things
+she did jarred on her relatives, that they were not fully aware of the
+great improvement in her appearance.  Even Richard admitted her trying at
+times.
+
+Marion went up to town to stay with Mrs. Townley, and there had to face a
+good deal of curiosity.  People looked at her sometimes as if it was she
+and not Lali that was an Indian.  But she carried things off bravely
+enough, and answered those kind inquiries, which one's friends make when
+we are in embarrassing situations, with answers so calm and pleasant that
+people did not know what to think.
+
+"Yes," she said, in reply to Lady Balwood, "her sister-in-law might be in
+town later in the year, perhaps before the season was over: she could not
+tell.  She was tired after her long voyage, and she preferred the quiet
+of Greyhope; she was fond of riding and country-life; but still she would
+come to town for a time."  And so on.
+
+"Ah, dear me, how charming!  And doesn't she resent her husband's
+absence--during the honeymoon? or did the honeymoon occur before she came
+over to England?"  And Lady Balwood tried to say it all playfully, and
+certainly said it something loudly.  She had daughters.
+
+But Marion was perfectly prepared.  Her face did not change expression.
+"Yes, they had had their honeymoon on the prairies; Frank was so
+fascinated with the life and the people.  He had not come home at once,
+because he was making she did not know how great a fortune over there in
+investments, and so Mrs. Armour came on before him, and, of course, as
+soon as he could get away from his business, he would follow his wife."
+
+And though Marion smiled, her heart was very hot, and she could have
+slain Lady Balwood in her tracks.  Lady Balwood then nodded a little
+patronisingly, and babbled that "she hoped so much to see Mrs. Francis
+Armour.  She must be so very interesting, the papers said so much about
+her."
+
+Now, while this conversation was going on, some one stood not far behind
+Marion, who seemed much interested in her and what she said.  But Marion
+did not see this person.  She was startled presently, however, to hear a
+strong voice say softly over her shoulder: "What a charming woman Lady
+Balwood is!  And so ingenuous!"
+
+She was grateful, tremulous, proud.  Why had he--Captain Vidall--kept out
+of the way all these weeks, just when she needed him most, just when he
+should have played the part of a man?  Then she was feeling twinges at
+the heart, too.  She had seen Lady Agnes Martling that afternoon, and had
+noticed how the news had worn on her.  She felt how much better it had
+been had Frank come quietly home and married her, instead of doing the
+wild, scandalous thing that was making so many heart-burnings.  A few
+minutes ago she had longed for a chance to say something delicately acid
+to Lady Haldwell, once Julia Sherwood, who was there.  Now there was a
+chance to give her bitter spirit tongue.  She was glad--she dared not
+think how glad--to hear that voice again; but she was angry too, and he
+should suffer for it--the more so because she recognised in the tone, and
+afterwards in his face, that he was still absorbingly interested in her.
+There was a little burst of thanksgiving in her heart, and then she
+prepared a very notable commination service in her mind.
+
+This meeting had been deftly arranged by Mrs. Townley, with the help of
+Edward Lambert, who now held her fingers with a kind of vanity of
+possession whenever he bade her good-bye or met her.  Captain Vidall had,
+in fact, been out of the country, had only been back a week, and had only
+heard of Frank Armour's mesalliance from Lambert at an At Home forty-
+eight hours before.  Mrs. Townley guessed what was really at the bottom
+of Marion's occasional bitterness, and, piecing together many little
+things dropped casually by her friend, had come to the conclusion that
+the happiness of two people was at stake.
+
+When Marion shook hands with Captain Vidall she had herself exceedingly
+well under control.  She looked at him in slight surprise, and casually
+remarked that they had not chanced to meet lately in the run of small-
+and-earlies.  She appeared to be unconscious that he had been out of the
+country, and also that she had been till very recently indeed at
+Greyhope.  He hastened to assure her that he had been away, and to lay
+siege to this unexpected barrier.  He knew all about Frank's affair, and,
+though it troubled him, he did not see why it should make any difference
+in his regard for Frank's sister.  Fastidious as he was in all things, he
+was fastidiously deferential.  Not an exquisite, he had all that vanity
+as to appearance so usual with the military man; himself of the most
+perfect temper and sweetness of manner and conduct, the unusual disturbed
+him.  Not possessed of a vivid imagination, he could scarcely conjure up
+this Indian bride at Greyhope.
+
+But face to face with Marion Armour he saw what troubled his mind,
+and he determined he would not meet her irony with irony, her assumed
+indifference with indifference.  He had learned one of the most important
+lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman.  Whoever has so far erred
+has been foolish indeed.  It is the worst of policy, to say nothing of
+its being the worst of art; and life should never be without art.  It is
+absurd to be perfectly natural; anything, anybody can be that.  Well,
+Captain Hume Vidall was something of an artist, more, however, in
+principle than by temperament.  He refused to recognise the rather
+malicious adroitness with which Marion turned his remarks again upon
+himself, twisted out of all semblance.  He was very patient.  He inquired
+quietly, and as if honestly interested, about Frank, and said--because he
+thought it safest as well as most reasonable--that, naturally, they must
+have been surprised at his marrying a native; but he himself had seen
+some such marriages turn out very well--in Japan, India, the South Sea
+Islands, and Canada.  He assumed that Marion's sister-in-law was
+beautiful, and then disarmed Marion by saying that he thought of going
+down to Greyhope immediately, to call on General Armour and Mrs. Armour,
+and wondered if she was going back before the end of the season.
+
+Quick as Marion was, this was said so quietly that she did not quite see
+the drift of it.  She had intended staying in London to the end of the
+season, not because she enjoyed it, but because she was determined to
+face Frank's marriage at every quarter, and have it over, once for all,
+so far as herself was concerned.  But now, taken slightly aback, she
+said, almost without thinking, that she would probably go back soon--she
+was not quite sure; but certainly her father and mother would be glad to
+see Captain Vidall at any time.
+
+Then, without any apparent relevancy, he asked her if Mrs. Frank Armour
+still wore her Indian costume.  In any one else the question had seemed
+impertinent; in him it had a touch of confidence, of the privilege of
+close friendship.  Then he said, with a meditative look and a very calm,
+retrospective voice, that he was once very much in love with a native
+girl in India, and might have become permanently devoted to her, were it
+not for the accident of his being ordered back to England summarily.
+
+This was a piece of news which cut two ways.  In the first place it
+lessened the extraordinary character of Frank's marriage, and it roused
+in her an immediate curiosity--which a woman always feels in the past
+"affairs" of her lover, or possible lover.  Vidall did not take pains to
+impress her with the fact that the matter occurred when he was almost a
+boy; and it was when her earnest inquisition had drawn from him, bit by
+bit, the circumstances of the case, and she had forgotten many parts of
+her commination service and to preserve an effective neutrality in tone,
+that she became aware he was speaking ancient history.  Then it was too
+late to draw back.
+
+They had threaded their way through the crowd into the conservatory,
+where they were quite alone, and there, with only a little pyramid of
+hydrangeas between them, which she could not help but notice chimed well
+with the colour of her dress, he dropped his voice a little lower, and
+then suddenly said, his eyes hard on her: "I want your permission to go
+to Greyhope."
+
+The tone drew her eyes hastily to his, and, seeing, she dropped them
+again.  Vidall had a strong will, and, what is of more consequence, a
+peculiarly attractive voice.  It had a vibration which made some of his
+words organ-like in sound.  She felt the influence of it.  She said a
+little faintly, her fingers toying with a hydrangea: "I am afraid I do
+not understand.  There is no reason why you should not go to Greyhope
+without my permission."
+
+"I cannot go without it," he persisted.  "I am waiting for my commission
+from you."
+
+She dropped her hand from the flower with a little impatient motion.  She
+was tired, her head ached, she wanted to be alone.  "Why are you
+enigmatical?" she said.  Then quickly: "I wish I knew what is in your
+mind.  You play with words so."
+
+She scarcely knew what she said.  A woman who loves a man very much is
+not quick to take in the absolute declaration of that man's love on the
+instant; it is too wonderful for her.  He felt his check flush with hers,
+he drew her look again to his.  "Marion!  Marion!" he said.  That was
+all.
+
+"Oh, hush, some one is coming!" was her quick, throbbing reply.  When
+they parted a half-hour later, he said to her: "Will you give me my
+commission to go to Greyhope?"
+
+"Oh no, I cannot," she said very gravely; "but come to Greyhope-when I go
+back."
+
+"And when will that be?" he said, smiling, yet a little ruefully too.
+
+"Please ask Mrs. Townley," she replied; "she is coming also."
+
+Marion, knew what that commission to go to Greyhope meant.  But she
+determined that he should see Lali first, before anything irrevocable
+was done.  She still looked upon Frank's marriage as a scandal.  Well,
+Captain Vidall should face it in all its crudeness.  So, in a week or
+less, Marion and Mrs. Townley were in Greyhope.
+
+Two months had gone since Lali arrived in England, and yet no letter had
+come to her, or to any of them, from Frank.  Frank's solicitor in London
+had written him fully of her arrival, and he had had a reply, with
+further instructions regarding money to be placed to General Armour's
+credit for the benefit of his wife.  Lali, as she became Europeanised,
+also awoke to the forms and ceremonies of her new life.  She had
+overheard Frank's father and mother wondering, and fretting as they
+wondered, why they had not received any word from him.  General Armour
+had even called him a scoundrel, which sent Frank's mother into tears.
+Then Lali had questioned Mackenzie and Colvin, for she had increasing
+shrewdness, and she began to feel her actual position.  She resented
+General Armour's imputation, but in her heart she began to pine and
+wonder.  At times, too, she was fitful, and was not to be drawn out.  But
+she went on improving in personal appearance and manner and in learning
+the English language.  Mrs. Townley's appearance marked a change in her.
+When they met she suddenly stood still and trembled.  When Mrs. Townley
+came to her and took her hand and kissed her, she shivered, and then
+caught her about the shoulders lightly, but was silent.  After a little
+she said: "Come--come to my wigwam, and talk with me."
+
+She said it with a strange little smile, for now she recognised that the
+word wigwam was not to be used in her new life.  But Mrs. Townley
+whispered: "Ask Marion to come too."
+
+Lali hesitated, and then said, a little maliciously: "Marion, will you
+come to my wigwam?"
+
+Marion ran to her, caught her about the waist, and replied gaily: "Yes,
+we will have a pow-wow--is that right--is pow-wow right?"
+
+The Indian girl shook her head with a pretty vagueness, and vanished with
+them.  General Armour walked up and down the room briskly, then turned on
+his wife and said: "Wife, it was a brutal thing: Frank doesn't deserve to
+be--the father of her child."
+
+But Lali had moods--singular moods.  She indulged in one three days after
+the arrival of Marion and Mrs. Townley.  She had learned to ride with the
+side-saddle, and wore her riding-dress admirably.  Nowhere did she show
+to better advantage.  She had taken to riding now with General Armour on
+the country roads.  On this day Captain Vidall was expected, he having
+written to ask that he might come.  What trouble Lali had with one of the
+servants that morning was never thoroughly explained, but certain it is,
+she came to have a crude notion of why Frank Armour married her.  The
+servant was dismissed duly, but that was after the contre-temps.
+
+It was late afternoon.  Everybody had been busy, because one or two other
+guests were expected besides Captain Vidall.  Lali had kept to herself,
+sending word through Richard that she would not "be English," as she
+vaguely put it, that day.  She had sent Mackenzie on some mission.  She
+sat on the floor of her room, as she used to sit on the ground in her
+father's lodge.  Her head was bowed in her hands, and her arms rested on
+her knees.  Her body swayed to and fro.  Presently all motion ceased.
+She became perfectly still.  She looked before her as if studying
+something.
+
+Her eyes immediately flashed.  She rose quickly to her feet, went to her
+wardrobe, and took out her Indian costume and blanket, with which she
+could never be induced to part.  Almost feverishly she took off the
+clothes she wore and hastily threw them from her.  Then she put on the
+buckskin clothes in which she had journeyed to England, drew down her
+hair as she used to wear it, fastened round her waist a long red sash
+which had been given her by a governor of the Hudson's Bay Company when
+he had visited her father's country, threw her blanket round her
+shoulders, and then eyed herself in the great mirror in the room.  What
+she saw evidently did not please her perfectly, for she stretched out her
+hands and looked at them; she shook her head at herself and put her hand
+to her cheeks and pinched them, they were not so brown as they once were,
+then she thrust out her foot.  She drew it back quickly in disdain.
+Immediately she caught the fashionable slippers from her feet and threw
+them among the discarded garments.  She looked at herself again.  Still
+she was not satisfied, but she threw up her arms, as with a sense of
+pleasure and freedom, and laughed at herself.  She pushed out her
+moccasined foot, tapped the floor with it, nodded towards it, and said a
+word or two in her own language.  She heard some one in the next room,
+possibly Mackenzie.  She stepped to the door leading into the hall,
+opened it, went out, travelled its length, ran down a back hallway, out
+into the park, towards the stables, her blanket, as her hair, flying
+behind her.
+
+She entered the stables, made for a horse that she had ridden much, put a
+bridle on him, led him out before any one had seen her, and, catching him
+by the mane, suddenly threw herself on him at a bound, and, giving him a
+tap with a short whip she had caught up in the stable, headed him for the
+main avenue and the open road.  Then a stableman saw her and ran after,
+but he might as well have tried to follow the wind.  He forthwith
+proceeded to saddle another horse.  Boulter also saw her as she passed
+the house, and, running in, told Mrs. Armour and the general.  They both
+ran to the window and saw dashing down the avenue--a picture out of
+Fenimore Cooper; a saddleless horse with a rider whose fingers merely
+touched the bridle, riding as on a journey of life and death.
+
+"My God, it's Lali!  She's mad--she's mad!  She is striking that horse!
+It will bolt!  It will kill her!" cried the general.
+
+Then he rushed for a horse to follow her.  Mrs. Armour's hands clasped
+painfully.  For an instant she had almost the same thought as had Marion
+on the first morning of Lali's coming; but that passed, and left her
+gazing helplessly after the horse-woman.  The flying blanket had
+frightened the blooded horse, and he made desperate efforts to fulfil the
+general's predictions.
+
+Lali soon found that she had miscalculated.  She was not riding an Indian
+pony, but a crazed, high-strung horse.  As they flew, she sitting
+superbly and tugging at the bridle, the party coming from the railway
+station entered the great gate, accompanied by Richard and Marion.  In a
+moment they sighted this wild pair bearing down upon them with a terrible
+swiftness.
+
+As Marion recognised Lali she turned pale and cried out, rising in her
+seat.  Instinctively Captain Vidall knew who it was, though he could not
+guess the cause of the singular circumstance.  He saw that the horse had
+bolted, but also that the rider seemed entirely fearless.  "Why, in
+Heaven's name," he said between his teeth, "doesn't she let go that
+blanket!"
+
+At that moment Lali did let it go, and the horse dashed by them, making
+hard for the gate.  "Turn the horses round and follow her," said Vidall
+to the driver.  While this was doing, Marion caught sight of her father
+riding hard down the avenue.  He passed them, and called to them to hurry
+on after him.
+
+Lali had not the slightest sense of fear, but she knew that the horse had
+gone mad.  When they passed through the gate and swerved into the road, a
+less practised rider would have been thrown.  She sat like wax.  The pace
+was incredible for a mile, and though General Armour rode well, he was
+far behind.
+
+Suddenly a trap appeared in the road in front of them, and the driver,
+seeing the runaway, set his horses at right angles to the road.  It
+served the purpose only to provide another danger.  Not far from where
+the trap was drawn, and between it and the runaway, was a lane, which
+ended at a farmyard in a cul-de-sac.  The horse swerved into it, not
+slacking its pace, and in the fraction of a minute came to the farmyard.
+
+But now the fever was in Lali's blood.  She did not care whether she
+lived or died.  A high hedge formed the cul-de-sac.  When she saw the
+horse slacking she cut it savagely across the head twice with a whip, and
+drove him at the green wall.  He was of too good make to refuse it, stiff
+as it was.  He rose to it magnificently, and cleared it; but almost as he
+struck the ground squarely, he staggered and fell--the girl beneath him.
+He had burst a blood-vessel.  The ground was soft and wet; the weight of
+the horse prevented her from getting free.  She felt its hoof striking in
+its death-struggles, and once her shoulder was struck.  Instinctively she
+buried her face in the mud, and her arms covered her head.
+
+And then she knew no more.
+
+When she came to, she was in the carriage within the gates of Greyhope,
+and Marion was bending over her.  She suddenly tried to lift herself, but
+could not.  Presently she saw another face--that of General Armour.  It
+was stern, and yet his eyes were swimming as he looked at her.
+
+"How!" she said to him--"How!" and fainted again.
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event
+His duties were many, or he made them so
+Men must have their bad hours alone
+Most important lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman
+Sympathy and consolation might be much misplaced
+These little pieces of art make life possible
+Think of our position
+Who never knew self-consciousness
+You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 2.
+
+
+VI.       THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
+VII.      A COURT-MARTIAL
+VIII.     TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR
+IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE PASSING OF THE YEARS
+
+Lali's recovery was not rapid.  A change had come upon her.  With that
+strange ride had gone the last strong flicker of the desire for savage
+life in her.  She knew now the position she held towards her husband:
+that he had never loved her; that she was only an instrument for unworthy
+retaliation.  So soon as she could speak after her accident, she told
+them that they must not write to him and tell him of it.  She also made
+them promise that they would give him no news of her at all, save that
+she was well.  They could not refuse to promise; they felt she had the
+right to demand much more than that.  They had begun to care for her for
+herself, and when the months went by, and one day there was a hush about
+her room, and anxiety, and then relief, in the faces of all, they came to
+care for her still more for the sake of her child.
+
+As the weeks passed, the fair-haired child grew more and more like his
+father; but if Lali thought of her husband they never knew it by anything
+she said, for she would not speak of him.  She also made them promise
+that they would not write to him of the child's birth.  Richard, with his
+sense of justice, and knowing how much the woman had been wronged, said
+that in all this she had done quite right; that Frank, if he had done his
+duty after marrying her, should have come with her.  And because they all
+felt that Richard had been her best friend as well as their own, they
+called the child after him.  This also was Lali's wish.  Coincident with
+her motherhood there came to Lali a new purpose.  She had not lived with
+the Armours without absorbing some of their fine social sense and
+dignity.  This, added to the native instinct of pride in her, gave her a
+new ambition.  As hour by hour her child grew dear to her, so hour by
+hour her husband grew away from her.  She schooled herself against him.
+--At times she thought she hated him.  She felt she could never forgive
+him, but she would prove to him that it was she who had made the mistake
+of her life in marrying him; that she had been wronged, not he; and that
+his sin would face him with reproach and punishment one day.  Richard's
+prophecy was likely to come true: she would defeat very perfectly indeed
+Frank's intentions.  After the child was born, so soon as she was able,
+she renewed her studies with Richard and Mrs. Armour.  She read every
+morning for hours; she rode; she practised all those graceful arts of the
+toilet which belong to the social convention; she showed an unexpected
+faculty for singing, and practised it faithfully; and she begged Mrs.
+Armour and Marion to correct her at every point where correction seemed
+necessary.  When the child was two years old, they all went to London,
+something against Lali's personal feelings, but quite in accord with what
+she felt her duty.
+
+Richard was left behind at Greyhope.  For the first time in eighteen
+months he was alone with his old quiet duties and recreations.  During
+that time he had not neglected his pensioners,--his poor, sick, halt, and
+blind, but a deeper, larger interest had come into his life in the person
+of Lali.  During all that time she had seldom been out of his sight,
+never out of his influence and tutelage.  His days had been full, his
+every hour had been given a keen, responsible interest.  As if by tacit
+consent, every incident or development of Lali's life was influenced by
+his judgment and decision.  He had been more to her than General Armour,
+Mrs. Armour, or Marion.  Schooled as he was in all the ways of the
+world, he had at the same time a mind as sensitive as a woman's, an
+indescribable gentleness, a persuasive temperament.  Since, years before,
+he had withdrawn from the social world and become a recluse, many of his
+finer qualities had gone into an indulgent seclusion.  He had once loved
+the world and the gay life of London, but some untoward event, coupled
+with a radical love of retirement, had sent him into years of isolation
+at Greyhope.
+
+His tutelar relations with Lali had reopened many an old spring
+of sensation and experience.  Her shy dependency, her innocent
+inquisitiveness, had searched out his remotest sympathies.  In teaching
+her he had himself been re-taught.  Before she came he had been satisfied
+with the quiet usefulness and studious ease of his life.  But in her
+presence something of his old youthfulness came back, some reflection of
+the ardent hopes of his young manhood.  He did not notice the change in
+himself.  He only knew that his life was very full.  He read later at
+nights, he rose earlier in the morning.  But unconsciously to himself,
+he was undergoing a change.  The more a man's sympathies and emotions
+are active, the less is he the philosopher.  It is only when one has
+withdrawn from the more personal influence of the emotions that one's
+philosophy may be trusted.  One may be interested in mankind and still
+be philosophical--may be, as it were, the priest and confessor to all
+comers.  But let one be touched in some vital corner in one's nature,
+and the high, faultless impartiality is gone.  In proportion as Richard's
+interest in Lali had grown, the universal quality of his sympathy had
+declined.  Man is only man.  Not that his benefactions as lord-bountiful
+in the parish had grown perfunctory, but the calm detail of his interest
+was not so definite.  He was the same, yet not the same.
+
+He was not aware of any difference in himself.  He did not know that he
+looked younger by ten years.  Such is the effect of mere personal
+sympathy upon a man's look and bearing.  When, therefore, one bright May
+morning, the family at Greyhope, himself excluded, was ready to start for
+London, he had no thought but that he would drop back into his old silent
+life, as it was before Lali came, and his brother's child was born.  He
+was not conscious that he was very restless that morning; he scarcely was
+aware that he had got up two hours earlier than usual.  At the breakfast-
+table he was cheerful and alert.  After breakfast he amused himself in
+playing with the child till the carriage was brought round.  It was such
+a morning as does not come a dozen times a year in England.  The sweet,
+moist air blew from the meadows and up through the lime trees with a
+warm, insinuating gladness.  The lawn sloped delightfully away to the
+flowered embrasures of the park, and a fragrant abundance of flowers met
+the eye and cheered the senses.  While Richard loitered on the steps with
+the child and its nurse, more excited than he knew, Lali came out and
+stood beside him.  At the moment Richard was looking into the distance.
+He did not hear her when she came.  She stood near him for a moment, and
+did not speak.  Her eyes followed the direction of his look, and idled
+tenderly with the prospect before her.  She did not even notice the
+child.  The same thought was in the mind of both--with a difference.
+Richard was wondering how any one could choose to change the sweet
+dignity of that rural life for the flaring, hurried delights of London
+and the season.  He had thought this a thousand times, and yet, though he
+would have been little willing to acknowledge it, his conviction was not
+so impregnable as it had been.
+
+Mrs. Francis Armour was stepping from the known to the unknown.  She was
+leaving the precincts of a life in which, socially, she had been born
+again.  Its sweetness and benign quietness had all worked upon her nature
+and origin to change her.  In that it was an out-door life, full of
+freshness and open-air vigour, it was not antagonistic to her past.  Upon
+this sympathetic basis had been imposed the conditions of a fine social
+decorum.  The conditions must still exist.  But how would it be when she
+was withdrawn from this peaceful activity of nature and set down among
+"those garish lights" in Cavendish Square and Piccadilly?  She hardly
+knew to what she was going as yet.  There had been a few social functions
+at Greyhope since she had come, but that could give her, after all, but
+little idea of the swing and pressure of London life.
+
+At this moment she was lingering over the scene before her.  She was
+wondering with the naive wonder of an awakened mind.  She had intended
+many times of late saying to Richard all the native gratitude she felt;
+yet somehow she had never been able to say it.  The moment of parting had
+come.
+
+"What are you thinking of, Richard?" she said now.  He started and
+turned towards her.
+
+"I hardly know," he answered.  "My thoughts were drifting."
+
+"Richard," she said abruptly," I want to thank you."
+
+"Thank me for what, Lali?" he questioned.
+
+"To thank you, Richard, for everything--since I came, over three years
+ago."
+
+He broke out into a soft little laugh, then, with his old good-natured
+manner, caught her hand as he did the first night she came to Greyhope,
+patted it in a fatherly fashion, and said:
+
+"It is the wrong way about, Lali; I ought to be thanking you, not you me.
+Why, look what a stupid old fogy I was then, toddling about the place
+with too much time on my hands, reading a lot and forgetting everything;
+and here you came in, gave me something to do, made the little I know of
+any use, and ran a pretty gold wire down the rusty fiddle of life.  If
+there are any speeches of gratitude to be made, they are mine, they are
+mine."
+
+"Richard," she said very quietly and gravely, "I owe you more than I can
+ever say--in English.  You have taught me to speak in your tongue enough
+for all the usual things of life, but one can only speak from the depths
+of one's heart in one's native tongue.  And see," she added, with a
+painful little smile, "how strange it would sound if I were to tell you
+all I thought in the language of my people--of my people, whom I shall
+never see again.  Richard, can you understand what it must be to have a
+father whom one is never likely to see again--whom, if one did see again,
+something painful would happen?  We grow away from people against our
+will; we feel the same towards them, but they cannot feel the same
+towards us; for their world is in another hemisphere.  We want to love
+them, and we love, remember, and are glad to meet them again, but they
+feel that we are unfamiliar, and, because we have grown different
+outwardly, they seem to miss some chord that used to ring.  Richard, I--
+I--"  She paused.
+
+"Yes, Lali," he assented--"yes, I understand you so far; but speak out."
+
+"I am not happy," she said.  "I never shall be happy.  I have my child,
+and that is all I have.  I cannot go back to the life in which I was
+born; I must go on as I am, a stranger among a strange people, pitied,
+suffered, cared for a little--and that is all."
+
+The nurse had drawn away a little distance with the child.  The rest of
+the family were making their preparations inside the house.  There was no
+one near to watch the singular little drama.
+
+"You should not say that," he added; "we all feel you to be one of us."
+
+"But all your world does not feel me to be one of them," she rejoined.
+
+"We shall see about that when you go up to town.  You are a bit morbid,
+Lali.  I don't wonder at your feeling a little shy; but then you will
+simply carry things before you--now you take my word for it!  For I know
+London pretty well."
+
+She held out her ungloved hands.
+
+"Do they compare with the white hands of the ladies you know?" she said.
+
+"They are about the finest hands I have ever seen," he replied.  "You
+can't see yourself, sister of mine."
+
+"I do not care very much to see myself," she said.  "If I had not a maid
+I expect I should look very shiftless, for I don't care to look in a
+mirror.  My only mirror used to be a stream of water in summer," she
+added, "and a corner of a looking-glass got from the Hudson's Bay fort in
+the winter."
+
+"Well, you are missing a lot of enjoyment," he said, "if you do not use
+your mirror much.  The rest of us can appreciate what you would see
+there."
+
+She reached out and touched his arm.
+
+"Do you like to look at me?" she questioned, with a strange simple
+candour.
+
+For the first time in many a year, Richard Armour blushed like a girl
+fresh from school.  The question had come so suddenly, it had gone so
+quickly into a sensitive corner of his nature, that he lost command of
+himself for the instant, yet had little idea why the command was lost.
+He touched the fingers on his arm affectionately.
+
+"Like to look at you--like to look at you?  Why, of course we all like
+to look at you.  You are very fine and handsome  and interesting."
+
+"Richard," she said, drawing her hands away, "is that why you like to
+look at me?"
+
+He had recovered himself.  He laughed in his old hearty way, and said:
+
+"Yes, yes; why, of course!  Come, let us go and see the boy," he added,
+taking her arm and hurrying her down the steps.  "Come and let us see
+Richard Joseph, the pride of all the Armours."
+
+She moved beside him in a kind of dream.  She had learned much since she
+came to Greyhope, and yet she could not at that moment have told exactly
+why she asked Richard the question that had confused him, nor did she
+know quite what lay behind the question.  But every problem which has
+life works itself out to its appointed end, if fumbling human fingers do
+not meddle with it.  Half the miseries of this world are caused by
+forcing issues, in every problem of the affections, the emotions, and the
+soul.  There is a law working with which there should be no tampering,
+lest in foolish interruption come only confusion and disaster.  Against
+every such question there should be written the one word, "Wait."
+
+Richard Armour stooped over the child.  "A beauty," he said, "a perfect
+little gentleman.  Like Richard Joseph Armour there is none," he added.
+
+"Whom do you think he looks like, Richard?" she asked.  This was a
+question she had never asked before since the child was born.  Whom the
+child looked like every one knew; but within the past year and a half
+Francis Armour's name had seldom been mentioned, and never in connection
+with the child.  The child's mother asked the question with a strange
+quietness.  Richard answered it without hesitation.
+
+"The child looks like Frank," he said.  "As like him as can be."
+
+"I am glad," she said, "for all your sakes."
+
+"You are very deep this morning, Lali," Richard said, with a kind of
+helplessness.  "Frank will be pretty proud of the youngster when he comes
+back.  But he won't be prouder of him than I am."
+
+"I know that," she said.  "Won't you be lonely without the boy--and me,
+Richard?"
+
+Again the question went home.  "Lonely?  I should think I would," he
+said.  "I should think I would.  But then, you see, school is over, and
+the master stays behind and makes up the marks.  You will find London a
+jollier master than I am, Lali.  There'll be lots of shows, and plenty to
+do, and smart frocks, and no end of feeds and frolics; and that is more
+amusing than studying three hours a day with a dry old stick like me.  I
+tell you what, when Frank comes--"
+
+She interrupted him.  "Do not speak of that," she said.  Then, with a
+sudden burst of feeling, though her words were scarcely audible: "I owe
+you everything, Richard--everything that is good.  I owe him nothing,
+Richard--nothing but what is bitter."
+
+"Hush, hush," he said; "you must not speak that way.  Lali, I want to say
+to you--"
+
+At that moment General Armour, Mrs. Armour, and Marion appeared on the
+door-step, and the carriage came wheeling up the drive.  What Richard
+intended to say was left unsaid.  The chances were it never would be
+said.
+
+"Well, well," said General Armour, calling down at them, "escort his
+imperial highness to the chariot which awaits him, and then ho!  for
+London town.  Come along, my daughter," he said to Lali; "come up here
+and take the last whiff of Greyhope that you will have for six months.
+Dear, dear, what lunatics we all are, to be sure!  Why, we're as happy as
+little birds in their nests out in the decent country, and yet we scamper
+off to a smoky old city by the Thames to rush along with the world,
+instead of sitting high and far away from it and watching it go by.  God
+bless my soul, I'm old enough to know better!  Well, let me help you in,
+my dear," he added to his wife; "and in you go, Marion; and in you go,
+your imperial highness"--he passed the child awkwardly in to Marion;
+"and in you go, my daughter," he added, as he handed Lali in, pressing
+her hand with a brusque fatherliness as he did so.  He then got in after
+them.
+
+Richard came to the side of the carriage and bade them all good-bye one
+by one.  Lali gave him her hand, but did not speak a word.  He called a
+cheerful adieu, the horses were whipped up, and in a moment Richard was
+left alone on the steps of the house.  He stood for a time looking, then
+he turned to go into the house, but changed his mind, sat down, lit a
+cigar, and did not move from his seat until he was summoned to his lonely
+luncheon.
+
+Nobody thought much of leaving Richard behind at Greyhope.  It seemed the
+natural thing to do.  But still he had not been left alone--entirely
+alone--for three years or more.
+
+The days and weeks went on.  If Richard had been accounted eccentric
+before, there was far greater cause for the term now.  Life dragged.  Too
+much had been taken out of his life all at once; for, in the first place,
+the family had been drawn together more during the trouble which Lali's
+advent had brought; then the child and its mother, his pupil, were gone
+also.  He wandered about in a kind of vague unrest.  The hardest thing in
+this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep and the
+cheerful greeting of a familiar eye.  And the man with no chick or child
+feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when he returns
+from a journey or his day's work.  It gives him a sense of strangeness
+and loss.  But when it is the voice of a woman and the hand of a child
+that is missed, you can back no speculation upon that man's mood or mind
+or conduct.  There is no influence like the influence of habit, and that
+is how, when the minds of people are at one, physical distances and
+differences, no matter how great, are invisible, or at least not obvious.
+
+Richard Armour was a sensible man; but when one morning he suddenly
+packed a portmanteau and went up to town to Cavendish Square, the act
+might be considered from two sides of the equation.  If he came back to
+enter again into the social life which, for so many years, he had
+abjured, it was not very sensible, because the world never welcomes its
+deserters; it might, if men and women grew younger instead of older.  If
+he came to see his family, or because he hungered for his godchild, or
+because--but we are hurrying the situation.  It were wiser not to state
+the problem yet.  The afternoon that he arrived at Cavendish Square all
+his family were out except his brother's wife.  Lali was in the drawing-
+room, receiving a visitor who had asked for Mrs. Armour and Mrs. Francis
+Armour.  The visitor was received by Mrs. Francis Armour.  The visitor
+knew that Mrs. Armour was not at home.  She had by chance seen her and
+Marion in Bond Street, and was not seen by them.  She straightway got
+into her carriage and drove up to Cavendish Square, hoping to find Mrs.
+Francis Armour at home.  There had been house-parties at Greyhope since
+Lali had come there to live, but this visitor, though once an intimate
+friend of the family, had never been a guest.
+
+The visitor was Lady Haldwell, once Miss Julia Sherwood, who had made
+possible what was called Francis Armour's tragedy.  Since Lali had come
+to town Lady Haldwell had seen her, but had never met her.  She was not
+at heart wicked, but there are few women who can resist an opportunity of
+anatomising and reckoning up the merits and demerits of a woman who has
+married an old lover.  When that woman is in the position of Lali, the
+situation has an unusual piquancy and interest.  Hence Lady Haldwell's
+journey of inquisition to Cavendish Square.
+
+As Richard passed the drawing-room door to ascend the stairs, he
+recognised the voices.
+
+Once a sort of heathen, as Mrs. Francis Armour had been, she still could
+grasp the situation with considerable clearness.  There is nothing keener
+than one woman's instinct regarding another woman, where a man is
+concerned.  Mrs. Francis Armour received Lady Haldwell with a quiet
+stateliness, which, if it did not astonish her, gave her sufficient
+warning that matters were not, in this little comedy, to be all her own
+way.
+
+Thrown upon the mere resources of wit and language, Mrs. Francis Armour
+must have been at a disadvantage.  For Lady Haldwell had a good gift of
+speech, a pretty talent for epithet, and no unnecessary tenderness.  She
+bore Lali no malice.  She was too decorous and high for that.  In her
+mind the wife of the man she had discarded was a mere commonplace
+catastrophe, to be viewed without horror, maybe with pity.  She had heard
+the alien spoken well of by some people; others had seemed indignant that
+the Armours should try to push "a red woman" into English society.  Truth
+is, the Armours did not try at all to push her.  For over three years
+they had let society talk.  They had not entertained largely in Cavendish
+Square since Lali came, and those invited to Greyhope had a chance to
+refuse the invitations if they chose.  Most people did not choose to
+decline them.  But Lady Haldwell was not of that number.  She had never
+been invited.  But now in town, when entertainment must be more general,
+she and the Armours were prepared for social interchange.
+
+Behind Lady Haldwell's visit curiosity chiefly ran.  She was in a way
+sorry for Frank Armour, for she had been fond of him after a fashion,
+always fonder of him than of Lord Haldwell.  She had married with her
+fingers holding the scales of advantage; and Lord Haldwell dressed well,
+was immensely rich, and the title had a charm.
+
+When Mrs. Francis Armour met her with her strange, impressive dignity,
+she was the slightest bit confused, but not outwardly.  She had not
+expected it.  At first Lali did not know who her visitor was.  She had
+not caught the name distinctly from the servant.
+
+Presently Lady Haldwell said, as Lali gave her hand "I am Lady Haldwell.
+As Miss Sherwood I was an old friend of your husband."
+
+A scornful glitter came into Mrs. Armour's eyes--a peculiar touch of
+burnished gold, an effect of the light at a certain angle of the lens.
+It gave for the instant an uncanny look to the face, almost something
+malicious.  She guessed why this woman had come.  She knew the whole
+history of the past, and it touched her in a tender spot.  She knew she
+was had at an advantage.  Before her was a woman perfectly trained in the
+fine social life to which she was born, whose equanimity was as regular
+as her features.  Herself was by nature a creature of impulse, of the
+woods and streams and open life.  The social convention had been
+engrafted.  As yet she was used to thinking and speaking with all
+candour.  She was to have her training in the charms of superficiality,
+but that was to come; and when it came she would not be an unskilful
+apprentice.  Perhaps the latent subtlety of her race came to help her
+natural candour at the moment.  For she said at once, in a slow, quiet
+tone:
+
+"I never heard my husband speak of you.  Will you sit down?"
+
+"And Mrs. Armour and Marion are not in?  No, I suppose your husband did
+not speak much of his old friends."
+
+The attack was studied and cruel.  But Lady Haldwell had been stung by
+Mrs. Armour's remark, and it piqued her that this was possible.
+
+"Well, yes, he spoke of some of his friends, but not of you."
+
+"Indeed!  That is strange."
+
+"There was no necessity," said Mrs. Armour quietly.
+
+"Of discussing me?  I suppose not.  But by some chance--"
+
+"It was just as well, perhaps, not to anticipate the pleasure of our
+meeting."
+
+Lady Haldwell was surprised.  She had not expected this cleverness.
+They talked casually for a little time, the visitor trying in vain to
+delicately give the conversation a personal turn.  At last, a little
+foolishly, she grew bolder, with a needless selfishness.
+
+"So old a friend of your husband as I am, I am hopeful you and I may be
+friends also."
+
+Mrs. Armour saw the move.
+
+"You are very kind," she said conventionally, and offered a cup of tea.
+
+Lady Haldwell now ventured unwisely.  She was nettled at the other's
+self-possession.
+
+"But then, in a way, I have been your friend for a long time, Mrs.
+Armour."
+
+The point was veiled in a vague tone, but Mrs. Armour understood.  Her
+reply was not wanting.  "Any one who has been a friend to my husband has,
+naturally, claims upon me."
+
+Lady Haldwell, in spite of herself, chafed.  There was a subtlety in the
+woman before her not to be reckoned with lightly.
+
+"And if an enemy?" she said, smiling.
+
+A strange smile also flickered across Mrs. Armour's face as she said:
+
+"If an enemy of my husband called, and was penitent, I should--offer her
+tea, no doubt."
+
+"That is, in this country; but in your own country, which, I believe, is
+different, what would you do?"  Mrs. Armour looked steadily and coldly
+into her visitor's eyes.
+
+"In my country enemies do not compel us to be polite."
+
+"By calling on you?"  Lady Haldwell was growing a little reckless.  "But
+then, that is a savage country.  We are different here.  I suppose,
+however, your husband told you of these things, so that you were not
+surprised.  And when does he come?  His stay is protracted.  Let me see,
+how long is it?  Ah yes, near four years."  Here she became altogether
+reckless, which she regretted afterwards, for she knew, after all, what
+was due herself.  "He will comeback, I suppose?"
+
+Lady Haldwell was no coward, else she had hesitated before speaking in
+that way before this woman, in whose blood was the wildness of the
+heroical North.  Perhaps she guessed the passion in Lali's breast,
+perhaps not.  In any case she would have said what she listed at the
+moment.
+
+Wild as were the passions in Lali's breast, she thought on the instant of
+her child, of what Richard Armour would say; for he had often talked to
+her about not showing her emotions and passions, had told her that
+violence of all kinds was not wise or proper.  Her fingers ached to grasp
+this beautiful, exasperating woman by the throat.  But after an effort at
+calmness she remained still and silent, looking at her visitor with a
+scornful dignity.  Lady Haldwell presently rose,--she could not endure
+the furnace of that look,--and said good-bye.  She turned towards the
+door.  Mrs. Armour remained immovable.  At that instant, however, some
+one stepped from behind a large screen just inside the door.  It was
+Richard Armour.  He was pale, and on his face was a sternness the like
+of which this and perhaps only one other woman had ever seen on him.  He
+interrupted her.
+
+"Lady Haldwell has a fine talent for irony," he said, "but she does not
+always use it wisely.  In a man it would bear another name, and from a
+man it would be differently received."  He came close to her.  "You are a
+brave woman," he said, "or you would have been more careful.  Of course
+you knew that my mother and sister were not at home?"
+
+She smiled languidly.  "And why 'of course'?"
+
+"I do not know that; only I know that I think so; and I also think that
+my brother Frank's worst misfortune did not occur when Miss Julia
+Sherwood trafficked without compunction in his happiness."
+
+"Don't be oracular, my dear Richard Armour," she replied.  "You are
+trying, really.  This seems almost melodramatic; and melodrama is bad
+enough at Drury Lane."
+
+"You are not a good friend even to yourself," he answered.
+
+"What a discoverer you are!  And how much in earnest!  Do come back to
+the world, Mr. Armour; you would be a relief, a new sensation."
+
+"I fancy I shall come back, if only to see the 'engineer hoist with his
+own'--torpedo."
+
+He paused before the last word to give it point, for her husband's father
+had made his money out of torpedoes.  She felt the sting in spite of
+herself, and she saw the point.
+
+"And then we will talk it over at the end of the season," he added, "and
+compare notes.  Good-afternoon."
+
+"You stake much on your hazard," she said, glancing back at Lali, who
+still stood immovable.  "Au revoir!"  She left the room.  Richard heard
+the door close after her and the servant retire.  Then he turned to Lali.
+
+As he did so, she ran forward to him with a cry.  "Oh, Richard, Richard!"
+she exclaimed, with a sob, threw her arms over his shoulder, and let her
+forehead drop on his breast.  Then came a sudden impulse in his blood.
+Long after he shuddered when he remembered what he thought at that
+instant; what he wished to do; what rich madness possessed him.  He knew
+now why he had come to town; he also knew why he must not stay, or, if
+staying, what must be his course.
+
+He took her gently by the arm and led her to a chair, speaking cheerily
+to her.  Then he sat down beside her, and all at once again, her face wet
+and burning, she flung herself forward on her knees beside him, and clung
+to him.
+
+"Oh, Richard, I am glad you have come," she said.  "I would have killed
+her if I had not thought of you.  I want you to stay; I am always better
+when you are with me.  I have missed you, and I know that baby misses you
+too."
+
+He had his cue.  He rose, trembling a little.  "Come, come," he said
+heartily, "it's all right, it's all right-my sister.  Let us go and see
+the youngster.  There, dry your eyes, and forget all about that woman.
+She is only envious of you.  Come, for his imperial highness!"
+
+She was in a tumult of feeling.  It was seldom that she had shown emotion
+in the past two years, and it was the more ample when it did break forth.
+But she dried her eyes, and together they went to the nursery.  She
+dismissed the nurse and they were left alone by the sleeping child.  She
+knelt at the head of the little cot, and touched the child's forehead
+with her lips.  He stooped down also beside it.
+
+"He's a grand little fellow," he said.  "Lali," he continued presently,
+"it is time Frank came home.  I am going to write for him.  If he does
+not come at once, I shall go and fetch him."
+
+"Never! never!"  Her eyes flashed angrily.  "Promise that you will not.
+Let him come when he is ready.
+
+"He does not, care."  She shuddered a little.
+
+"But he will care when he comes, and you--you care for him, Lali?"
+
+Again she shuddered, and a whiteness ran under the hot excitement of her
+cheeks.  She said nothing, but looked up at him, then dropped her face in
+her hands.
+
+"You do care for him, Lali," he said earnestly, almost solemnly, his lips
+twitching slightly.  "You must care for him; it is his right; and he
+will--I swear to you I know he will--care for you."
+
+In his own mind there was another thought, a hard, strange thought; and
+it had to do with the possibility of his brother not caring for this
+wife.
+
+Still she did not speak.
+
+"To a good woman, with a good husband," he continued, "there is no one--
+there should be no one--like the father of her child.  And no woman ever
+loved her child more than you do yours."  He knew that this was special
+pleading.
+
+She trembled, and then dropped her cheek beside the child's.  "I want
+Frank to be happy," he went on; "there is no one I care more for than
+for Frank."
+
+She lifted her face to him now, in it a strange light.  Then her look ran
+to confusion, and she seemed to read all that he meant to convey.  He
+knew she did.  He touched her shoulder.
+
+"You must do the best you can every way, for Frank's sake, for all our
+sakes.  I will help you--God knows I will--all I can."
+
+"Ah, yes, yes," she whispered, from the child's pillow.
+
+He could see the flame in her cheek.  "I understand."  She put out her
+hand to him, but did not look up.  "Leave me alone with my baby,
+Richard," she pleaded.
+
+He took her hand and pressed it again and again in his old, unconscious
+way.  Then he let it go, and went slowly to the door.  There he turned
+and looked back at her.  He mastered the hot thought in him.  "God help
+me!" she murmured from the cot.  The next morning Richard went back to
+Greyhope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+A COURT-MARTIAL
+
+It was hard to tell, save for a certain deliberateness of speech and a
+colour a little more pronounced than that of a Spanish woman, that Mrs.
+Frank Armour had not been brought up in England.  She had a kind of grave
+sweetness and distant charm which made her notable at any table or in
+any ballroom.  Indeed, it soon became apparent that she was to be the
+pleasant talk, the interest of the season.  This was tolerably comforting
+to the Armours.  Again Richard's prophecy had been fulfilled, and as he
+sat alone at Greyhope and read the Morning Post, noticing Lali's name
+at distinguished gatherings, or, picking up the World, saw how the lion-
+hunters talked extravagantly of her, he took some satisfaction to himself
+that he had foreseen her triumph where others looked for her downfall.
+Lali herself was not elated; it gratified her, but she had been an angel,
+and a very unsatisfactory one, if it had not done so.  As her confidence
+grew (though outwardly she had never appeared to lack it greatly), she
+did not hesitate to speak of herself as an Indian, her country as a good
+country, and her people as a noble if dispossessed race; all the more so
+if she thought reference to her nationality and past was being rather
+conspicuously avoided.  She had asked General Armour for an interview
+with her husband's solicitor.  This was granted.  When she met the
+solicitor, she asked him to send no newspaper to her husband containing
+any reference to herself, nor yet to mention her in his letters.
+
+She had never directly received a line from him but once, and that was
+after she had come to know the truth about his marriage with her.  She
+could read in the conventional sentences, made simple as for a child,
+the strained politeness, and his absolute silence as to whether or not
+a child had been born to them, the utter absence of affection for her.
+She had also induced General Armour and his wife to give her husband's
+solicitor no information regarding the birth of the child.  There was
+thus apparently no more inducement for him to hurry back to England than
+there was when he had sent her off on his mission of retaliation, which
+had been such an ignominious failure.  For the humiliation of his family
+had been short-lived, the affront to Lady Haldwell nothing at all.  The
+Armours had not been human if they had failed to enjoy their daughter-in
+-law's success.  Although they never, perhaps, would quite recover the
+disappointment concerning Lady Agnes Martling, the result was so much
+better than they in their cheerfulest moments dared hope for, that they
+appeared genuinely content.
+
+To their grandchild they were devotedly attached.  Marion was his
+faithful slave and admirer, so much so that Captain Vidall, who now and
+then was permitted to see the child, declared himself jealous.  He and
+Marion were to be married soon.  The wedding had been delayed owing to
+his enforced absence abroad.  Mrs. Edward Lambert, once Mrs. Townley,
+shyly regretted in Lali's presence that the child, or one as sweet,
+was not hers.  Her husband evidently shared her opinion, from the
+extraordinary notice he took of it when his wife was not present.  Not
+that Richard Joseph Armour, Jun., was always en evidence, but when asked
+for by his faithful friends and admirers he was amiably produced.
+
+Meanwhile, Frank Armour across the sea was engaged with many things.
+His business concerns had not prospered prodigiously, chiefly because his
+judgment, like his temper, had grown somewhat uncertain.  His popularity
+in the Hudson's Bay country had been at some tension since he had shipped
+his wife away to England.  Even the ordinary savage mind saw something
+unusual and undomestic in it, and the general hospitality declined a
+little.  Armour did not immediately guess the cause; but one day, about a
+year after his wife had gone, he found occasion to reprove a half-breed,
+by name Jacques Pontiac; and Jacques, with more honesty than politeness,
+said some hard words, and asked how much he paid for his English hired
+devils to kill his wife.  Strange to say, he did not resent this
+startling remark.  It set him thinking.  He began to blame himself for
+not having written oftener to his people--and to his wife.  He wondered
+how far his revenge had succeeded.  He was most ashamed of it now.  He
+knew that he had done a dishonourable thing.  The more he thought upon
+it the more angry with himself he became.  Yet he dreaded to go back to
+England and face it all: the reproach of his people; the amusement of
+society; his wife herself.  He never attempted to picture her as a
+civilised being.  He scarcely knew her when he married her.  She knew
+him much better, for primitive people are quicker in the play of their
+passions, and she had come to love him before he had begun to notice
+her at all.
+
+Presently he ate his heart out with mortification.  To be yoked for ever
+to--a savage!  It was horrible.  And their children?  It was strange he
+had not thought of that before.  Children?  He shrugged his shoulders.
+There might possibly be a child, but children--never!  But he doubted
+even regarding a child, for no word had come to him concerning that
+possibility.  He was even most puzzled at the tone and substance of their
+letters.  From the beginning there had been no reproaches, no excitement,
+no railing, but studied kindness and conventional statements, through
+which Mrs. Armour's solicitous affection scarcely ever peeped.  He had
+shot his bolt, and got--consideration, almost imperturbability.  They
+appeared to treat the matter as though he were a wild youth who would not
+yet mend his ways.  He read over their infrequent letters to him; his to
+them had been still more infrequent.  In one there was the statement that
+"she was progressing favourably with her English"; in another, that "she
+was riding a good deal"; again, that "she appeared anxious to adapt
+herself to her new life."
+
+At all these he whistled a little to himself, and smiled bitterly.  Then,
+all at once, he got up and straightway burned them all.  He again tried
+to put the matter behind him for the present, knowing that he must face
+it one day, and staving off its reality as long as possible.  He did his
+utmost to be philosophical and say his quid refert, but it was easier
+tried than done; for Jacques Pontiac's words kept rankling in his mind,
+and he found himself carrying round a vague load, which made him
+abstracted occasionally, and often a little reckless in action and
+speech.  In hunting bear and moose he had proved himself more daring than
+the oldest hunter, and proportionately successful.  He paid his servants
+well, but was sharp with them.
+
+He made long, hard expeditions, defying the weather as the hardiest of
+prairie and mountain men mostly hesitate to defy it; he bought up much
+land, then, dissatisfied, sold it again at a loss, but subsequently made
+final arrangements for establishing a very large farm.  When he once
+became actually interested in this he shook off something of his
+moodiness and settled himself to develop the thing.  He had good talent
+for initiative and administration, and at last, in the time when his wife
+was a feature of the London season, he found his scheme in working order,
+and the necessity of going to England was forced upon him.
+
+Actually he wished that the absolute necessity had presented itself
+before.  There was always the moral necessity, of course--but then!
+Here now was a business need; and he must go.  Yet he did not fix a day
+or make definite arrangements.  He could hardly have believed himself
+such a coward.  With liberal emphasis he called himself a sneak, and one
+day at Fort Charles sat down to write to his solicitor in Montreal to say
+that he would come on at once.  Still he hesitated.  As he sat there
+thinking, Eye-of-the-Moon, his father-in-law, opened the door quietly and
+entered.  He had avoided the chief ever since he had come back to Fort
+Charles, and practically had not spoken to him for a year.  Armour
+flushed slightly with annoyance.  But presently, with a touch of his old
+humour, he rose, held out his hand, and said ironically: "Well, father-
+in-law, it's about time we had a big talk, isn't it?  We're not very
+intimate for such close relatives."
+
+The old Indian did not fully understand the meaning or the tone of
+Armour's speech, but he said "How!" and, reaching out his hand for the
+pipe offered him, lighted it, and sat down, smoking in silence.  Armour
+waited; but, seeing that the other was not yet moved to talk, he turned
+to his letter again.  After a time, Eye-of-the-Moon said gravely, getting
+to his feet: "Brother!"
+
+Armour looked up, then rose also.  The Indian bowed to him courteously,
+then sat down again.  Armour threw a leg over a corner of the table and
+waited.
+
+"Brother," said the Indian presently, "you are of the great race that
+conquers us.  You come and take our land and our game, and we at last
+have to beg of you for food and shelter.  Then you take our daughters,
+and we know not where they go.  They are gone like the down from the
+thistle.  We see them not, but you remain.  And men say evil things.
+There are bad words abroad.  Brother, what have you done with my
+daughter?"
+
+Had the Indian come and stormed, begged money of him, sponged on him,
+or abused him, he had taken it very calmly--he would, in fact, have been
+superior.  But there was dignity in the chief's manner; there was
+solemnity in his speech; his voice conveyed resoluteness and earnestness,
+which the stoic calm of his face might not have suggested; and Armour
+felt that he had no advantage at all.  Besides, Armour had a conscience,
+though he had played some rare tricks with it of late, and it needed more
+hardihood than he possessed to face this old man down.  And why face him
+down?  Lali was his daughter, blood of his blood, the chieftainess of one
+branch of his people, honoured at least among these poor savages, and the
+old man had a right to ask, as asked another more famous, "Where is my
+daughter?"
+
+His hands in his pockets, Armour sat silent for a minute, eyeing his
+boot, as he swung his leg to and fro.  Presently he said: "Eye-of-the-
+Moon, I don't think I can talk as poetically as you, even in my own
+language, and I shall not try.  But I should like to ask you this:
+Do you believe any harm has come to your daughter--to my wife?"
+
+The old Indian forgot to blow the tobacco-smoke from his mouth, and, as
+he sat debating, lips slightly apart, it came leaking out in little
+trailing clouds and gave a strange appearance to his iron-featured face.
+He looked steadily at Armour, and said: "You are of those who rule in
+your land,"--here Armour protested, "you have much gold to buy and sell.
+I am a chief, "he drew himself up,--"I am poor: we speak with the
+straight tongue; it is cowards who lie.  Speak deep as from the heart,
+my brother, and tell me where my daughter is."
+
+Armour could not but respect the chief for the way this request was put,
+but still it galled him to think that he was under suspicion of having
+done any bodily injury to his wife, so he quietly persisted: "Do you
+think I have done Lali any harm?"
+
+"The thing is strange," replied the other.  "You are of those who are
+great among your people.  You married a daughter of a red man.  Then she
+was yours for less than one moon, and you sent her far away, and you
+stayed.  Her father was as a dog in your sight.  Do men whose hearts
+are clear act so?  They have said strange things of you.  I have not
+believed; but it is good I know all, that I may say to the tale-bearers,
+'You have crooked tongues.'"
+
+Armour sat for a moment longer, his face turned to the open window.  He
+was perfectly still, but he had become grave.  He was about to reply to
+the chief, when the trader entered the room hurriedly with a newspaper in
+his hand.  He paused abruptly when he saw Eye-of-the-Moon.  Armour felt
+that the trader had something important to communicate.  He guessed it
+was in the paper.  He mutely held out his hand for it.  The trader handed
+it to him hesitatingly, at the same time pointing to a paragraph, and
+saying: "It is nearly two years old, as you see.  I chanced upon it by
+accident to-day."
+
+It was a copy of a London evening paper, containing a somewhat
+sensational account of Lali's accident.  It said that she was in a
+critical condition.  This time Armour did not ask for brandy, but the
+trader put it out beside him.  He shook his head.  "Gordon," he said
+presently, "I shall leave here in the morning.  Please send my men to
+me."
+
+The trader whispered to him: "She was all right, of course, long ago, Mr.
+Armour, or you would have heard."
+
+Armour looked at the date of the paper.  He had several letters from
+England of a later date, and these said nothing of her illness.  It
+bewildered him, made him uneasy.  Perhaps the first real sense of his
+duty as a husband came home to him there.  For the first time he was
+anxious about the woman for her own sake.  The trader had left the room.
+
+"What a scoundrel I've been!" said Armour between his teeth, oblivious,
+for the moment, of Eye-of-the-Moon's presence.  Presently, bethinking
+himself, he turned to the Indian.  "I've been debating," he said.  "Eye-
+of-the-Moon, my wife is in England, at my father's home.  I am going to
+her.  Men have lied in thinking I would do her any injury, but--but--
+never mind, the harm was of another kind.  It isn't wise for a white man
+and an Indian to marry, but when they are married--well, they must live
+as man and wife should live, and, as I said, I am going to my wife."
+
+To say all this to a common Indian, whose only property was a dozen
+ponies and a couple of tepees, required something very like moral
+courage; but then Armour had not been exercising moral courage during
+the last year or so, and its exercise was profitable to him.  The next
+morning he was on his way to Montreal, and Eye-of-the-Moon was the
+richest chief in British North America, at that moment, by five thousand
+dollars or so.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR
+
+It was the close of the season: many people had left town, but
+festivities were still on.  To a stranger the season might have seemed
+at its height.  The Armours were giving a large party in Cavendish Square
+before going back again to Greyhope, where, for the sake of Lali and
+her child, they intended to remain during the rest of the summer,
+in preference to going on the Continent or to Scotland.  The only
+unsatisfactory feature of Lali's season was the absence of her husband.
+Naturally there were those who said strange things regarding Frank
+Armour's stay in America; but it was pretty generally known that he was
+engaged in land speculations, and his club friends, who perhaps took the
+pleasantest view of the matter, said that he was very wise indeed, if a
+little cowardly, in staying abroad until his wife was educated and ready
+to take her position in society.  There was one thing on which they were
+all agreed: Mrs. Frank Armour either had a mind superior to the charms
+of their sex, or was incapable of that vanity which hath many suitors,
+and says: "So far shalt thou go, and--" The fact is, Mrs. Frank Armour's
+mind was superior.  She had only one object--to triumph over her husband
+grandly, as a woman righteously might.  She had vanity, of course, but it
+was not ignoble.  She kept one thing in view; she lived for it.
+
+Her translation had been successful.  There were times when she
+remembered her father, the wild days on the prairies, the buffalo-hunt,
+tracking the deer, tribal battles, the long silent hours of the winter,
+and the warm summer nights when she slept in the prairie grass or camped
+with her people in the trough of a great landwave.  Sometimes the hunger
+for its freedom, and its idleness, and its sport, came to her greatly;
+but she thought of her child, and she put it from her.  She was ambitious
+for him; she was keen to prove her worth as a wife against her husband's
+unworthiness.  This perhaps saved her.  She might have lost had her life
+been without this motive.
+
+The very morning of this notable reception, General Armour had received
+a note from Frank Armour's solicitor, saying that his son was likely to
+arrive in London from America that day or the next.  Frank had written to
+his people no word of his coming; to his wife, as we have said, he had
+not written for months; and before he started back he would not write,
+because he wished to make what amends he could in person.  He expected to
+find her improved, of course, but still he could only think of her as an
+Indian, showing her common prairie origin.  His knowledge of her before
+their marriage had been particularly brief; she was little more in his
+eyes than a thousand other Indian women, save that she was better-
+looking, was whiter than most, and had finer features.  He could not very
+clearly remember the tones of her voice, because after marriage, and
+before he had sent her to England, he had seen little or nothing of her.
+
+When General Armour received the news of Frank's return he told his wife
+and Marion, and they consulted together whether it were good to let Lali
+know at once.  He might arrive that evening.  If so, the position would
+be awkward, because it was impossible to tell how it might affect her.
+If they did tell her, and Frank happened not to arrive, it might unnerve
+her so as to make her appearance in the evening doubtful.  Richard, the
+wiseacre, the inexhaustible Richard, was caring for his cottagers and
+cutting the leaves of new books--his chiefest pleasure--at Greyhope.
+They felt it was a matter they ought to be able to decide for themselves,
+but still it was the last evening of Lali's stay in town, and they did
+not care to take any risk.  Strange to say, they had come to take pride
+in their son's wife; for even General and Mrs. Armour, high-minded and
+of serene social status as they were, seemed not quite insensible to the
+pleasure of being an axle on which a system of social notoriety revolved.
+
+At the opportune moment Captain Vidall was announced, and, because he and
+Marion were soon to carry but one name between them, he was called into
+family consultation.  It is somewhat singular that in this case the women
+were quite wrong and the men were quite right.  For General Armour and
+Captain Vidall were for silence until Frank came, if he came that day,
+or for telling her the following morning, when the function was over.
+And the men prevailed.
+
+Marion was much excited all day; she had given orders that Frank's room
+should be made ready, but for whom she gave no information.  While Lali
+was dressing for the evening, something excited and nervous, she entered
+her room.  They were now the best of friends.  The years had seen many
+shifting scenes in their companionship; they had been as often at war as
+at peace; but they had respected each other, each after her own fashion;
+and now they had a real and mutual regard.  Lali's was a slim, lithe
+figure, wearing its fashionable robes with an air of possession;
+and the face above it, if not entirely beautiful, had a strange, warm
+fascination.  The girl had not been a chieftainess for nothing.  A look
+of quiet command was there, but also a far-away expression which gave a
+faint look of sadness even when a smile was at the lips.  The smile
+itself did not come quickly, it grew; but above it all was hair of
+perfect brown, most rare,--setting off her face as a plume does a helmet.
+She showed no surprise when Marion entered.  She welcomed her with a
+smile and outstretched hand, but said nothing.
+
+"Lali," said Marion somewhat abruptly,--she scarcely knew why she said
+it,--"are you happy?"
+
+It was strange how the Indian girl had taken on those little manners of
+society which convey so much by inflection.  She lifted her eyebrows at
+Marion, and said presently, in a soft, deliberate voice, "Come, Marion,
+we will go and see little Richard; then I shall be happy."
+
+She linked her arm through Marion's.  Marion drummed her fingers lightly
+on the beautiful arm, and then fell to wondering what she should say
+next.  They passed into the room where the child lay sleeping; they went
+to his little bed, and Lali stretched out her hand gently, touching the
+curls of the child.  Running a finger through one delicately, she said,
+with a still softer tone than before: "Why should not one be happy?"
+
+Marion looked up slowly into her eyes, let a hand fall on her shoulder
+gently, and replied: "Lali, do you never wish Frank to come?"
+
+Lali's fingers came from the child, the colour mounted slowly to her
+forehead, and she drew the girl away again into the other room.  Then she
+turned and faced Marion, a deep fire in her eyes, and said, in a whisper
+almost hoarse in its intensity: "Yes; I wish he would come to-night."
+
+She looked harder yet at Marion; then, with a flash of pride and her
+hands clasping before her, she drew herself up, and added: "Am I not
+worthy to be his wife now?  Am I not beautiful--for a savage?"
+
+There was no common vanity in the action.  It had a noble kind of
+wistfulness, and a serenity that entirely redeemed it.  Marion dated
+her own happiness from the time when Lali met her accident, for in the
+evening of that disastrous day she issued to Captain Hume Vidall a
+commission which he could never--wished never--to resign.  Since then
+she had been at her best,--we are all more or less selfish creatures,--
+and had grown gentler, curbing the delicate imperiousness of her nature,
+and frankly, and without the least pique, taken a secondary position of
+interest in the household, occasioned by Lali's popularity.  She looked
+Lali up and down with a glance in which many feelings met, and then,
+catching her hands warmly, she lifted them, put them on her own
+shoulders, and said: "My dear beautiful savage, you are fit and
+worthy to be Queen of England; and Frank, when he comes--"
+
+"Hush!" said the other dreamily, and put a finger on Marion's lips.  "I
+know what you are going to say, but I do not wish to hear it.  He did not
+love me then.  He used me--" She shuddered, put her hands to her eyes
+with a pained, trembling motion, then threw her head back with a quick
+sigh.  "But I will not speak of it.  Come, we are for the dance, Marion.
+It is the last, to-night.  To-morrow--" She paused, looking straight
+before her, lost in thought.
+
+"Yes, to-morrow, Lali?"
+
+"I do not know about to-morrow," was the reply.  "Strange things come to
+me."
+
+Marion longed to tell her then and there the great news, but she was
+afraid to do so, and was, moreover, withheld by the remembrance that it
+had been agreed she should not be told.  She said nothing.
+
+At eleven o'clock the rooms were filled.  For the fag end of the season,
+people seemed unusually brilliant.  The evening itself was not so hot as
+common, and there was an extra array of distinguished guests.  Marion was
+nervous all the evening, though she showed little of it, being most
+prettily employed in making people pleased with themselves.  Mrs. Armour
+also was not free from apprehension.  In reply to inquiries concerning
+her son she said, as she had often said during the season, that he might
+be back at any time now.  Lali had answered always in the same fashion,
+and had shown no sign that his continued absence was singular.  As the
+evening wore on, the probability of Frank's appearance seemed less; and
+the Armours began to breathe more freely.
+
+Frank had, however, arrived.  He had driven straight from Euston to
+Cavendish Square, but, seeing the house lighted up, and guests arriving,
+he had a sudden feeling of uncertainty.  He ordered the cabman to take
+him to his club.  There he put himself in evening-dress, and drove back
+again to the house.  He entered quietly.  At the moment the hall was
+almost deserted; people were mostly in the ballroom and supper-room.  He
+paused a moment, biting his moustache as if in perplexity.  A strange
+timidity came on him.  All his old dash and self-possession seemed to
+have forsaken him.  Presently, seeing a number of people entering the
+hall, he made for the staircase, and went hastily up.  Mechanically he
+went to his own room, and found it lighted.  Flowers were set about, and
+everything was made ready as for a guest.  He sat down, not thinking, but
+dazed.
+
+Glancing up, he saw his face in a mirror.  It was bronzed, but it looked
+rather old and careworn.  He shrugged a shoulder at that.  Then, in the
+mirror, he saw also something else.  It startled him so that he sat
+perfectly still for a moment looking at it.  It was some one laughing at
+him over his shoulder--a child!  He got to his feet and turned round.  On
+the table was a very large photograph of a smiling child--with his eyes,
+his face.  He caught the chair-arm, and stood looking at it a little
+wildly.  Then he laughed a strange laugh, and the tears leaped to his
+eyes.  He caught the picture in his hands, and kissed it,--very
+foolishly, men not fathers might think,--and read the name beneath,
+Richard Joseph Armour; and again, beneath that, the date of birth.
+He then put it back on the table and sat looking at it-looking, and
+forgetting, and remembering.
+
+Presently, the door opened, and some one entered.  It was Marion.  She
+had seen him pass through the hall; she had then gone and told her father
+and mother, to prepare them, and had followed him upstairs.  He did not
+hear her.  She stepped softly forwards.  "Frank!" she said--"Frank!"
+and laid a hand on his shoulder.  He started up and turned his face on
+her.
+
+Then he caught her hands and kissed her.  "Marion!" he said, and he
+could say no more.  But presently he pointed towards the photograph.
+
+She nodded her head.  "Yes, it is your child, Frank.  Though, of course,
+you don't deserve it.  .  .  .  Frank dear," she added, "I am glad--we
+shall all be glad-to have you back; but you are a wicked man."  She felt
+she must say that.
+
+Now he only nodded, and still looked at the portrait.  "Where is--my
+wife?" he added presently.
+
+"She is in the ballroom."  Marion was wondering what was best to do.
+
+He caught his thumb-nail in his teeth.  He winced in spite of himself.
+"I will go to her," he said, "and then--the baby."
+
+"I am glad," she replied, "that you have so much sense of justice left,
+Frank: the wife first, the baby afterwards.  But do you think you deserve
+either?"
+
+He became moody, and made an impatient gesture.  "Lady Agnes Martling is
+here, and also Lady Haldwell," she persisted cruelly.  She did not mind,
+because she knew he would have enough to compensate him afterwards.
+
+"Marion," he said, "say it all, and let me have it over.  Say what you
+like, and I'll not whimper.  I'll face it.  But I want to see my child."
+
+She was sorry for him.  She had really wanted to see how much he was
+capable of feeling in the matter.
+
+"Wait here, Frank," she said.  "That will be best; and I will bring your
+wife to you."
+
+He said nothing, but assented with a motion of the hand, and she left
+him where he was.  He braced himself for the interview.  Assuredly a man
+loses something of natural courage and self-confidence when he has done
+a thing of which he should be, and is, ashamed.
+
+It seemed a long time (it was in reality but a couple of minutes) before
+the door opened again, and Marion said: "Frank, your wife!" and then
+retreated.
+
+The door closed, leaving a stately figure standing just inside it.  The
+figure did not move forwards, but stood there, full of life and fine
+excitement, but very still also.
+
+Frank Armour was confounded.  He came forwards slowly, looking hard.
+Was this distinguished, handsome, reproachful woman his wife--Lali, the
+Indian girl, whom he had married in a fit of pique and brandy?  He could
+hardly believe his eyes; and yet hers looked out at him with something
+that he remembered too, together with something which he did not
+remember, making him uneasy.  Clearly, his great mistake had turned from
+ashes into fruit.  "Lali!" he said, and held out his hand.
+
+She reached out hers courteously, but her fingers gave him no response.
+
+"We have many things to say to each other," she said, "but they cannot be
+said now.  I shall be missed from the ballroom."
+
+"Missed from the ballroom!"  He almost laughed to think how strange this
+sounded in his ears.  As if interpreting his thought, she added: "You
+see, it is our last affair of the season, and we are all anxious to do
+our duty perfectly.  Will you go down with me?  We can talk afterwards."
+
+Her continued self-possession utterly confused him.  She had utterly
+confused Marion also, when told that her husband was in the house.  She
+had had presentiments, and, besides, she had been schooling herself for
+this hour for a long time.  She turned towards the door.
+
+"But," he asked, like a supplicant, "our child!  I want to see the boy."
+
+She lifted her eyebrows, then, seeing the photograph of the baby on the
+table, understood how he knew.  "Come with me, then," she said, with a
+little more feeling.
+
+She led the way along the landing, and paused at her door.  "Remember
+that we have to appear amongst the guests directly," she said, as though
+to warn him against any demonstration.  Then they entered.  She went over
+to the cot and drew back the fleecy curtain from over the sleeping boy's
+head.  His fingers hungered to take his child to his arms.  "He is
+magnificent--magnificent!" he said, with a great pride.  "Why did you
+never let me know of it?"
+
+"How could I tell what you would do?" she calmly replied.  "You married
+me--wickedly, and used me wickedly afterwards; and I loved the child."
+
+"You loved the child," he repeated after her.  "Lali," he added, "I don't
+deserve it, but forgive me, if you can--for the child's sake."
+
+"We had better go below," she calmly replied.  "We have both duties to
+do.  You will of course--appear with me--before them?"
+
+The slight irony in the tone cut him horribly.  He offered his arm in
+silence.  They passed on to the staircase.
+
+"It is necessary," she said, "to appear cheerful before one's guests."
+
+She had him at an advantage at every point.  "We will be cheerful, then,"
+was his reply, spoken with a grim kind of humour.  "You have learned it
+all, haven't you?" he added.
+
+They were just entering the ballroom.  "Yes, with your kind help--and
+absence," she replied.
+
+The surprise of the guests was somewhat diminished by the fact that
+Marion, telling General Armour and his wife first of Frank's return,
+industriously sent the news buzzing about the room.
+
+The two went straight to Frank's father and mother.  Their parts were
+all excellently played.  Then Frank mingled among the guests, being very
+heartily greeted, and heard congratulations on all sides.  Old club
+friends rallied him as a deserter, and new acquaintances flocked about
+him; and presently he awakened to the fact that his Indian wife had been
+an interest of the season, was not the least admired person present.
+It was altogether too good luck for him; but he had an uncomfortable
+conviction that he had a long path of penance to walk before he could
+hope to enjoy it.
+
+All at once he met Lady Haldwell, who, in spite of all, still accepted
+invitations to General Armour's house--the strange scene between Lali and
+herself never having been disclosed to the family.  He had nothing but
+bitterness in his heart for her, but he spoke a few smooth words, and she
+languidly congratulated him on his bronzed appearance.  He asked for a
+dance, but she had not one to give him.  As she was leaving, she suddenly
+turned as though she had forgotten something, and looking at him, said:
+"I forgot to congratulate you on your marriage.  I hope it is not too
+late?"
+
+He bowed.  "Your congratulations are so sincere," he said,  "that they
+would be a propos late or early."  When he stood with his wife whilst the
+guests were leaving, and saw with what manner she carried it all off,--as
+though she had been born in the good land of good breeding,--he was moved
+alternately with wonder and shame--shame that he had intended this noble
+creature as a sacrifice to his ugly temper and spite.
+
+When all the guests were gone and the family stood alone in the drawing-
+room, a silence suddenly fell amongst them.  Presently Marion said to her
+mother in a half-whisper, "I wish Richard were here."
+
+They all felt the extreme awkwardness of the situation, especially when
+Lali bade General Armour, Mrs. Armour, and Marion good-night, and then,
+turning to her husband, said, "Good-night"--she did not even speak his
+name.  "Perhaps you would care to ride to-morrow morning?  I always go
+to the Park at ten, and this will be my last ride of the season."
+
+Had she written out an elaborate proclamation of her intended attitude
+towards her husband, it could not have more clearly conveyed her mind
+than this little speech, delivered as to a most friendly acquaintance.
+General Armour pulled his moustache fiercely, and, it is possible,
+enjoyed the situation, despite its peril.  Mrs. Armour turned to the
+mantel and seemed tremulously engaged in arranging some bric-a-brac.
+Marion, however, with a fine instinct, slid her arm through that of Lali,
+and gently said: "Yes, of course Frank will be glad of a ride in the
+Park.  He used to ride with me every morning.  But let us go, us three,
+and kiss the baby good-night--'good-night till we meet in the morning.'"
+
+She linked her arm now through Frank's, and as she did so he replied to
+Lali: "I shall be glad to ride in the morning, but--"
+
+"But we can arrange it at breakfast," said his wife hurriedly.  At the
+same time she allowed herself to be drawn away to the hall with her
+husband.
+
+He was very angry, but he knew he had no right to be so.  He choked back
+his wrath and moved on amiably enough, and suddenly the fashion in which
+the tables had been turned on him struck him with its tragic comedy, and
+he involuntarily smiled.  His sense of humour saved him from words and
+acts which might possibly have made the matter a pure tragedy after all.
+He loosed his arm from Marion's.
+
+"I must bid father and mother good-night.  Then I will join you both--
+'in the court of the king.'"   And he turned and went back, and said to
+his father as he kissed his mother: "I am had at an advantage, General."
+
+"And serves you right, my boy.  You had the odds with you, but she has
+captured them like a born soldier."  His mother said to him gently:
+"Frank, you blamed us, but remember that we wished only your good.  Take
+my advice, dear, and try to love your wife and win her confidence."
+
+"Love her--try to love her!" he said.  "I shall easily do that.  But the
+other--?"  He shook his head a little, though what he meant perhaps he
+did not know quite himself, and then followed Marion and Lali upstairs.
+Marion had tried to escape from Lali, but was told that she must stay;
+and the three met at the child's cot.  Marion stooped down and kissed its
+forehead.  Frank stooped also and kissed its cheek.  Then the wife kissed
+the other cheek.  The child slept peacefully on.  "You can always see the
+baby here before breakfast, if you choose," said Lali; and she held out
+her hand again in good-night.  At this point Marion stole away, in spite
+of Lah's quick little cry of "Wait, Marion!" and the two were left alone
+again.
+
+"I am very tired," she said.  "I would rather not talk to-night."  The
+dismissal was evident.
+
+He took her hand, held it an instant, and presently said: "I will not
+detain you, but I would ask you, Lali, to remember that you are my wife.
+Nothing can alter that."
+
+"Still we are only strangers, as you know," she quietly rejoined.
+
+"You forget the days we were together--after we were married," he
+cautiously urged.
+
+"I am not the same girl, .  .  .  you killed her.  .  .  We have to start
+again.  .  .  .  I know all."
+
+"You know that in my wretched anger and madness I--"
+
+"Oh, please do not speak of it," she said; "it is so bad even in
+thought."
+
+"But will you never forgive me, and care for me?  We have to live our
+lives together."
+
+"Pray let us not speak of it now," she said, in a weary voice; then,
+breathlessly: "It is of much more consequence that you should love me
+--and the child."
+
+He drew himself up with a choking sigh, and spread out his arms to her.
+"Oh, my wife!" he exclaimed.
+
+"No, no," she cried, "this is unreasonable; we know so little of each
+other.  .  .  .  Good-night, again."
+
+He turned at the door, came back, and, stooping, kissed the child on the
+lips.  Then he said: "You are right.  I deserve to suffer.  .  .  .
+Good-night."
+
+But when he was gone she dropped on her knees, and kissed the child many
+times on the lips also.
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+If fumbling human fingers do not meddle with it
+Miseries of this world are caused by forcing issues
+Reading a lot and forgetting everything
+The world never welcomes its deserters
+There is no influence like the influence of habit
+There should be written the one word, "Wait."
+Training in the charms of superficiality
+We grow away from people against our will
+We speak with the straight tongue; it is cowards who lie
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 3.
+
+
+IX.       THE FAITH OF COMRADES
+X.        "THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS"
+XI.       UPON THE HIGHWAY
+XII.      "THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
+XIII.     A LIVING POEM
+XIV.      ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
+XV.       THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE FAITH OF COMRADES
+
+When Francis Armour left his wife's room he did not go to his own, but
+quietly descended the stairs, went to the library, and sat down.  The
+loneliest thing in the world is to be tete-a-tete with one's conscience.
+A man may have a bad hour with an enemy, a sad hour with a friend, a
+peaceful hour with himself, but when the little dwarf, conscience,
+perches upon every hillock of remembrance and makes slow signs--those
+strange symbols of the language of the soul--to him, no slave upon the
+tread-mill suffers more.
+
+The butler came in to see if anything was required, but Armour only
+greeted him silently and waved him away.  His brain was painfully alert,
+his memory singularly awake.  It seemed that the incident of this hour
+had so opened up every channel of his intelligence that all his life ran
+past him in fantastic panorama, as by that illumination which comes to
+the drowning man.  He seemed under some strange spell.  Once or twice he
+rose, rubbed his eyes, and looked round the room--the room where as a boy
+he had spent idle hours, where as a student he had been in the hands of
+his tutor, and as a young man had found recreations such as belong to
+ambitious and ardent youth.  Every corner was familiar.  Nothing was
+changed.  The books upon the shelves were as they were placed twenty
+years ago.  And yet he did not seem a part of it.  It did not seem
+natural to him.  He was in an atmosphere of strangeness--that atmosphere
+which surrounds a man, as by a cloud, when some crisis comes upon him and
+his life seems to stand still, whirling upon its narrow base, while the
+world appears at an interminable distance, even as to a deaf man who sees
+yet cannot hear.
+
+There came home to him at that moment with a force indescribable the
+shamelessness of the act he committed four years ago.  He had thought to
+come back to miserable humiliation.  For four years he had refused to do
+his duty as a man towards an innocent woman,--a woman, though in part a
+savage,--now transformed into a gentle, noble creature of delight and
+goodness.  How had he deserved it?  He had sown the storm, it was but
+just that he should reap the whirlwind; he had scattered thistles,
+could he expect to gather grapes?  He knew that the sympathy of all his
+father's house was not with him, but with the woman he had wronged.  He
+was glad it was so.  Looking back now, it seemed so poor and paltry a
+thing that he, a man, should stoop to revenge himself upon those who had
+given him birth, as a kind of insult to the woman who had lightly set him
+aside, and should use for that purpose a helpless, confiding girl.  To
+revenge one's self for wrong to one's self is but a common passion, which
+has little dignity; to avenge some one whom one has loved, man or woman,
+--and, before all, woman,--has some touch of nobility, is redeemed by
+loyalty.  For his act there was not one word of defence to be made, and
+he was not prepared to make it.
+
+The cigars and liquors were beside him, but he did not touch them.  He
+seemed very far away from the ordinary details of his life: he knew he
+had before him hard travel, and he was not confident of the end.  He
+could not tell how long he sat there.  --After, a time the ticking of
+the clock seemed painfully loud to him.  Now and again he heard a cab
+rattling through the Square, and the foolish song of some drunken
+loiterer in the night caused him to start painfully.  Everything jarred
+on him.  Once he got up, went to the window, and looked out.  The moon
+was shining full on the Square.  He wondered if it would be well for him
+to go out and find some quiet to his nerves in walking.  He did so.  Out
+in the Square he looked up to his wife's window.  It was lighted.  Long
+time he walked up and down, his eyes on the window.  It held him like a
+charm.  Once he leaned against the iron railings of the garden and looked
+up, not moving for a time.  Presently he saw the curtain of the window
+raised, and against the dim light of the room was outlined the figure of
+his wife.  He knew it.  She stood for a moment looking out into the
+night.  She could not see him, nor could he see her features at all
+plainly, but he knew that she, like him, was alone with the catastrophe
+which his wickedness had sent upon her.  Soon the curtain was drawn down
+again, and then he went once more to the house and took his old seat
+beside the table.  He fell to brooding, and at last, exhausted, dropped
+to a troubled sleep.  He woke with a start.  Some one was in the room.
+He heard a step behind him.  He came to his feet quickly, a wild light in
+his eyes.  He faced his brother Richard.
+
+Late in the afternoon Marion had telegraphed to Richard that Frank was
+coming.  He had been away visiting some poor and sick people, and when he
+came back to Greyhope it was too late to catch the train.  But the horses
+were harnessed straightway, and he was driven into town, a three-hours'
+drive.  He had left the horses at the stables, and, having a latch-key,
+had come in quietly.  He had seen the light in the study, and guessed who
+was there.  He entered, and saw his brother asleep.  He watched him for a
+moment and studied him.  Then he moved away to take off his hat, and, as
+he did so, stumbled slightly.  Then it was Frank waked, and for the first
+time in five years they looked each other in the eyes.  They both stood
+immovable for a moment, and then Richard caught Frank's hand in both of
+his and said: "God bless you, my boy!  I am glad you are back."
+
+"Dick!  Dick!" was the reply, and Frank's other hand clutched Richard's
+shoulder in his strong emotion.  They stood silent for a moment longer,
+and then Richard recovered himself.  He waved his hand to the chairs.
+The strain of the situation was a little painful for them both.  Men are
+shy with each other where their emotions are in play.
+
+"Why, my boy," he said, waving a hand to the spirits and liqueurs, "full
+bottles and unopened boxes?  Tut, tut!  here's a pretty how-d'ye-do.  Is
+this the way you toast the home quarters?  You're a fine soldier for an
+old mess!"
+
+So saying, he poured out some whiskey, then opened the box of cigars and
+pushed them towards his brother.  He did not care particularly to drink
+or smoke himself, but a man--an Englishman--is a strange creature.  He is
+most natural and at ease when he is engaged in eating and drinking.  He
+relieves every trying situation by some frivolous and selfish occupation,
+as of dismembering a partridge, or mixing a punch.
+
+"Well, Frank," said his brother, "now what have you to say for yourself?
+Why didn't you come long ago?  You have played the adventurer for five
+years, and what have you to show for it?  Have you a fortune?"  Frank
+shook his head, and twisted a shoulder.  "What have you done that is
+worth the doing, then?"
+
+"Nothing that I intended to do, Dick," was the grave reply.
+
+"Yes, I imagined that.  You have seen them, have you?" he added, in a
+softer voice.
+
+Frank blew a great cloud of smoke about his face, and through it he said:
+"Yes, I have seen a damned sight more than I deserved to see."
+
+"Oh, of course; I know that, my boy; but, so far as I can see, in another
+direction you are getting quite what you deserve: your wife and child are
+upstairs--you are here."
+
+He paused, was silent for a moment, then leaned over, caught his
+brother's arm, and said, in a low, strenuous voice: "Frank Armour, you
+laid a hateful little plot for us.  It wasn't manly, but we forgave it
+and did the best we could.  But see here, Frank, take my word for it,
+you have had a lot of luck.  There isn't one woman out of ten thousand
+that would have stood the test as your wife has stood it; injured at the
+start, constant neglect, temptation--" he paused.  "My boy, did you ever
+think of that, of the temptation to a woman neglected by her husband?
+The temptation to men?  Yes, you have had a lot of luck.  There has been
+a special providence for you, my boy; but not for your sake.  God doesn't
+love neglectful husbands, but I think He is pretty sorry for neglected
+wives."
+
+Frank was very still.  His head drooped, the cigar hung unheeded in his
+fingers for a moment, and he said at last: "Dick, old boy, I've thought
+it all over to-night since I came back--everything that you've said.
+I have not a word of defence to make, but, by heaven!  I'm going to win
+my wife's love if I can, and when I do it I'll make up for all my cursed
+foolishness--see if I don't."
+
+"That sounds well, Frank," was the quiet reply.  "I like to hear you talk
+that way.  You would be very foolish if you did not.  What do you think
+of the child?"
+
+"Can you ask me what I think?  He is a splendid little fellow."
+
+"Take care of him, then--take good care of him: you may never have
+another," was the grim rejoinder.  Frank winced.  His brother rose, took
+his arm, and said: "Let us go to our rooms, Frank.  There will be time
+enough to talk later, and I am not so young as I once was."
+
+Truth to say, Richard Armour was not so young as he seemed a few months
+before.  His shoulders were a little stooped, he was greyer about the
+temples.  The little bit of cynicism which had appeared in that remark
+about the care of the child showed also in the lines of his mouth; yet
+his eyes had the same old true, honest look.  But a man cannot be hit in
+mortal places once or twice in his life without its being etched on his
+face or dropped like a pinch of aloe from his tongue.
+
+Still they sat and talked much longer, Frank showing better than when his
+brother came, Richard gone grey and tired.  At last Richard rose and
+motioned towards the window.  "See, Frank," he said, "it is morning."
+Then he went and lifted the blind.  The grey, unpurged air oozed on the
+glass.  The light was breaking over the tops of the houses.  A crossing-
+sweeper early to his task, or holding the key of the street, went
+pottering by, and a policeman glanced up at them as he passed.  Richard
+drew down the curtain again.
+
+"Dick," said Frank suddenly, "you look old.  I wonder if I have changed
+as much?"
+
+Six months before, Frank Armour would have said hat his brother looked
+young.
+
+"Oh, you look young enough, Frank," was the reply.  "But I am a good deal
+older than I was five years ago.  .  .  Come, let us go to bed."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THOU KNOWEST THE SECRETS OF OUR HEARTS
+
+And Lali?  How had the night gone for her?  When she rose from the
+child's cot, where her lips had caught the warmth that her husband had
+left on them, she stood for a moment bewildered in the middle of the
+room.  She looked at the door out of which he had gone, her bosom beating
+hard, her heart throbbing so that it hurt her--that she could have cried
+out from mere physical pain.  The wifedom in her was plundering the wild
+stores of her generous soul for the man, for--as Richard had said that
+day, that memorable day!--the father of her child.  But the woman, the
+pure translated woman, who was born anew when this frail life in its pink
+and white glory crept out into the dazzling world, shrank back, as any
+girl might shrink that had not known marriage.  This child had come--from
+what?--She shuddered now--how many times had she done so since she first
+waked to the vulgar sacrilege of her marriage?  She knew now that every
+good mother, when her first child is born, takes it in her arms, and, all
+her agony gone, and the ineffable peace of delivered motherhood come,
+speaks the name of its father, and calls it his child.  But--she
+remembered it now--when her child was born, this little waif, the fruit
+of a man's hot, malicious hour, she wrapped it in her arms, pressed its
+delicate flesh to the silken folds of her bosom, and weeping, whispered
+only: "My child, my little, little child!"
+
+She had never, as many a wife far from her husband has done, talked to
+her child of its father, told it of his beauty and his virtues, arrayed
+it day by day in sweet linen and pretty adornments, as if he were just
+then knocking at her door; she had never imagined what he would say when
+he did come.  What could such a father think of his child, born of a
+woman whose very life he had intended as an insult?  No, she had loved
+it for father and mother also.  She had tried to be good, a good mother,
+living a life unutterably lonely, hard in all that it involved of study,
+new duty, translation, and burial of primitive emotions.  And with all
+the care and tearful watchfulness that had been needed, she had grown so
+proud, so exacting--exacting for her child, proud for herself.
+
+How could she know now that this hasty declaration of affection was
+anything more than the mere man in him?  Years ago she had not been able
+to judge between love and insult--what guarantee had she here?  Did he
+think that she could believe in him?  She was not the woman he had
+married, he was not the man she had married.  He had deceived her basely
+--she had been a common chattel.  She had been miserable enough--could
+she give herself over to his flying emotions again so suddenly?
+
+She paced the room, her face now in her hands, her hands now clasping and
+wringing before her.  Her wifely duty?  She straightened to that.  Duty!
+She was first and before all a good, unpolluted woman.  No, no, it could
+not be.  Love him?  Again she shrank.  Then came flooding on her that
+afternoon when she had flung herself on Richard's breast, and all those
+hundred days of happiness in Richard's company--Richard the considerate,
+the strong, who had stood so by his honour in an hour of peril.
+
+Now as she thought of it a hot wave shivered through all her body, and
+tingled to her hair.  Her face again dropped in her hands, and, as on
+that other day, she knelt beside the cot, and, bursting into tears,
+said through her sobs: "My baby, my own dear baby!  Oh, that we could go
+away--away--and never come back again!"
+
+She did not know how intense her sobs were.  They waked the child from
+its delicate sleep; its blue eyes opened wide and wise all on the
+instant, its round soft arm ran up to its mother's neck, and it said:
+"Don't c'y!  I want to s'eep wif you!  I'se so s'eepy!"
+
+She caught the child to her wet face, smiled at it through her tears,
+went with it to her own bed, put it away in the deep whiteness, kissed
+it, and fondled it away again into the heaven of sleep.  When this was
+done she felt calmer.  How she hungered over it!  This--this could not be
+denied her.  This, at least, was all hers, without clause or reservation,
+an absolute love, and an absolute right.
+
+She disrobed and drew in beside the child, and its little dewy cheek
+touching her breast seemed to ease the ache in her soul.
+
+But sleep would not come.  All the past four years trooped by, with their
+thousand incidents magnified in the sharp, throbbing light of her mind,
+and at last she knew and saw clearly what was before her, what trials,
+what duty, and what honour demanded--her honour.
+
+Richard?  Once for all she gently put him away from her into that
+infinite distance of fine respect which a good woman can feel, who has
+known what she and Richard had known--and set aside.  But he had made for
+her so high a standard, that for one to be measured thereby was a severe
+challenge.
+
+
+Could Frank come even to that measure?  She dared not try to answer the
+question.  She feared, she shrank, she grew sick at heart.  She did not
+reckon with that other thing, that powerful, infinite influence which
+ties a woman, she knows not how or why, to the man who led her to the
+world of motherhood.  Through all the wrongs which she may suffer by him,
+there runs this cable of unhappy attraction, testified to by how many
+sorrowful lives!
+
+But Lali was trying to think it out, not only to feel, and she did not
+count that subterranean force which must play its part in this new
+situation in her drama of life.  Could she love him?  She crept away out
+of the haven where her child was, put on her dressing-gown, went to the
+window, and looked out upon the night, all unconscious that her husband
+was looking at her from the Square below.  Love him?--Love him?--Love
+him?  Could she?  Did he love her?  Her eyes wandered over the Square.
+Nowhere else was there a light, but a chimney-flue was creaking
+somewhere.  It jarred on her so that she shrank.  Then all at once she
+smiled to think how she had changed.  Four years ago she could have slept
+amid the hammers of a foundry.  The noise ceased.  Her eyes passed from
+the cloud of trees in the Square to the sky-all stars, and restful deep
+blue.  That--that was the same.  How she knew it!  Orion and Ashtaroth,
+and Mars and the Pleiades, and the long trail of the Milky Way.  As a
+little child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had
+made friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs
+of the earth beneath--the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the
+cry of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind.  She had
+known Nature then, now she knew men.  And knowing them, and having
+suffered, and sick at heart as she was, standing by this window in the
+dead of night, the cry that shook her softly was not of her new life,
+but of the old, primitive, child-like.
+
+'Pasagathe, omarki kethose kolokani vorgantha pestorondikat Oni.'
+
+"A spear hath pierced me, and the smart of the nettle is in my wound.
+Maker of the soft night, bind my wounds with sleep, lest I cry out and be
+a coward and unworthy."
+
+Again and again, unconsciously, the words passed from her lips
+
+'Vorganthe, pestorondikat Oni.'
+
+At last she let down the blind, came to the bed, and once more gathered
+her child in her arms with an infinite hunger.  This love was hers--rich,
+untrammelled, and so sacred.  No matter what came, and she did not know
+what would come, she had the child.  There was a kind of ecstasy in it,
+and she lay and trembled with the feeling, but at last fell into a
+troubled sleep.
+
+She waked suddenly to hear footsteps passing her door.  She listened.
+One footstep was heavier than the other--heavier and a little stumbling;
+she recognised them, Frank and Richard.  In that moment her heart
+hardened.  Frank Armour must tread a difficult road.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+UPON THE HIGHWAY
+
+Frank visited the child in the morning, and was received with a casual
+interest.  Richard Joseph Armour was fastidious, was not to be won at the
+grand gallop.  Besides, he had just had a visit from his uncle, and the
+good taste of that gay time was yet in his mouth.  He did not resent the
+embraces, but he did not respond to them, and he straightened himself
+with relief when the assault was over.  Some one was paying homage to
+him, that was all he knew; but for his own satisfaction and pleasure he
+preferred as yet his old comrades, Edward Lambert, Captain Vidall,
+General Armour, and, above all, Richard.  He only showed real interest
+at the last, when he asked, as it were in compromise, if his father would
+give him a sword.  No one had ever talked to him of his father, and he
+had no instinct for him so far as could be seen.  The sword was,
+therefore, after the manner of a concession.  Frank rashly promised it,
+and was promptly told by Marion that it couldn't be; and she was backed
+by Captain Vidall, who said it had already been tabooed, and Frank wasn't
+to come in and ask for favours or expect them.
+
+The husband and wife met at breakfast.  He was down first.  When his wife
+entered, he came to her, they touched hands, and she presently took a
+seat beside him.  More than once he paused suddenly in his eating, when
+he thought of his inexplicable case.  He was now face to face with a
+reversed situation.  He had once picked up a pebble from the brown dirt
+of a prairie, that he might toss it into the pool of this home life; and
+he had tossed it, and from the sweet bath there had come out a precious
+stone, which he longed to wear, and knew that he could not--not yet.
+He could have coerced a lower being, but for his manhood's sake--he had
+risen to that now, it is curious how the dignity of fatherhood helps to
+make a man--he could not coerce here, and if he did, he knew that the
+product would be disaster.
+
+He listened to her talk with Marion and Captain Vidall.  Her voice
+was musical, balanced, her language breathed; it had manner, and an
+indescribable cadence of intelligence, joined to a deliberation, which
+touched her off with distinction.  When she spoke to him--and she seemed
+to do that as by studied intention and with tact at certain intervals--
+her manner was composed and kind.  She had resolved on her part.  She
+asked him about his journey over, about his plans for the day, and if
+he had decided to ride with her in the Park,--he could have the general's
+mount, she was sure, for the general was not going that day,--and would
+he mind doing a little errand for her afterwards in Regent Street, for
+the child--she feared she herself would not have time?
+
+Just then General Armour entered, and, passing behind her, kissed her on
+the cheek, dropping his hand on Frank's shoulder at the same time with a
+hearty greeting.  Of course, Frank could have his mount, he said.  Mrs.
+Armour did not come down, but she sent word by Richard, who entered last,
+that she would be glad to see Frank for a moment before he left for the
+Park.  As of old, Richard took both Lali's hands in his, patted them, and
+cheerily said:
+
+"Well, well, Lali, we've got the wild man home again safe and sound,
+haven't we--the same old vagabond?  We'll have to turn him into a
+Christian again--'For while the lamp holds out to burn'--"
+
+He did not give her time to reply, but their eyes met honestly, kindly,
+and from the look they both passed into life and time again with a fresh
+courage.  She did not know, nor did he, how near they had been to an
+abyss; and neither ever knew.  One furtive glance at the moment, one
+hesitating pressure of the hand, one movement of the head from each
+other's gaze, and there had been unhappiness for them all.  But they
+were safe.
+
+In the Park, Frank and his wife talked little.  They met many who greeted
+them cordially, and numbers of Frank's old club friends summoned him to
+the sacred fires at his earliest opportunity.  The two talked chiefly of
+the people they met, and Frank thrilled with admiration at his wife's
+gentle judgment of everybody.
+
+"The true thing, absolutely the true thing," he said; and he was
+conscious, too, that her instincts were right and searching, for once or
+twice he saw her face chill a little when they met one or two men whose
+reputations as chevaliers des dames were pronounced.  These men had had
+one or two confusing minutes with Lali in their time.
+
+"How splendidly you ride!" he said, as he came up swiftly to her, after
+having chatted for a moment with Edward Lambert.  "You sit like wax, and
+so entirely easy."
+
+"Thank you," she said.  "I suppose I really like it too well to ride
+badly, and then I began young on horses not so good as Musket here--
+bareback, too!" she added, with a little soft irony.
+
+He thought--she did not, however--that she was referring to that first
+letter he sent home to his people, when he consigned her, like any other
+awkward freight, to their care.  He flushed to his eyes.  It cut him
+deep, but her eyes only had a distant, dreamy look which conveyed nothing
+of the sting in her words.  Like most men, he had a touch of vanity too,
+and he might have resented the words vaguely, had he not remembered his
+talk with his mother an hour before.
+
+She had begged him to have patience, she had made him promise that he
+would not in any circumstance say an ungentle or bitter thing, that he
+would bide the effort of constant devotion, and his love of the child.
+Especially must he try to reach her through love of the child.
+
+By which it will be seen that Mrs. Armour had come to some wisdom by
+reason of her love for Frank's wife and child.
+
+"My son," she had said, "through the child is the surest way, believe me;
+for only a mother can understand what that means, how much and how far it
+goes.  You are a father, but until last night you never had the flush of
+that love in your veins.  You stand yet only at the door of that life
+which has done more to guide, save, instruct, and deepen your wife's life
+than anything else, though your brother Richard--to whom you owe a debt
+that you can never repay--has done much in deed.  Be wise, my dear, as I
+have learned a little to be since first your wife came.  All might easily
+have gone wrong.  It has all gone well; and we, my son, have tried to do
+our duty lovingly, consistently, to dear Lali and the child."
+
+She made him promise that he would wait, that he would not try to hurry
+his wife's affection for him by any spoken or insistent claim.  "For,
+Frank dear," she said, "you are only legally married, not morally, not as
+God can bless--not yet.  But I pray that what will sanctify all may come
+soon, very soon, to the joy of us all.  But again--and I cannot say it
+too prayerfully--do not force one little claim that your marriage gave
+you, but prove yourself to her, who has cause to distrust you so much.
+Will you forgive your mother, my dear, for speaking to you?"
+
+He had told her then that what she had asked he had intended as his own
+course, yet what she had said would keep it in his mind always, for he
+was sure it was right.  Mrs. Armour had then embraced him, and they
+parted.  Dealing with Lali had taught them all much of the human heart
+that they had never known before, and the result thereof was wisdom.
+
+They talked casually enough for the rest of the ride, and before they
+parted at the door Frank received his commission for Regent Street, and
+accepted it with delight, as a schoolboy might a gift.  He was absurdly
+grateful for any favours from her, any sign of her companionship.  They
+met at luncheon; then, because Lali had to keep an engagement in Eaton
+Square, they parted again, and Frank and Richard took a walk, after a
+long hour with the child, who still so hungered for his sword that Frank
+disobeyed orders, and dragged Richard off to Oxford Street to get one.
+He was reduced to a beatific attitude of submission, for he knew that he
+had few odds with him now, and that he must live by virtue of new
+virtues.  He was no longer proud of himself in any way, and he knew that
+no one else was, or rather he felt so, and that was just the same.
+
+He talked of the boy, he talked of his wife, he laid plans, he tore them
+down, he built them up again, he asked advice, he did not wait to hear
+it, but rambled on, excited, eager.  Truth is, there had suddenly been
+lifted from his mind the dread and shadow of four years.  Wherever he had
+gone, whatever he had been or done, that dread shadow had followed him,
+and now to know that instead of having to endure a hell he had to win a
+heaven, and to feel as if his brain had been opened and a mass of vapours
+and naughty little mannikins of remorse had been let out, was a trifle
+intoxicating even to a man of his usual vigour and early acquaintance
+with exciting things.
+
+"Dick, Dick!" he said enthusiastically, "you've been royal.  You always
+were better than any chap I ever knew.  You're always doing for others.
+Hang it, Dick, where does your fun come in?  Nobody seems ever to do
+anything for you."
+
+Richard gave his arm a squeeze.  "Never mind about me, boy.  I've had all
+the fun I want, and all I'm likely to get, and so long as you're all
+willing to have me around, I'm satisfied.  There's always a lot to do
+among the people in the village, one way and another, and I've a heap of
+reading on, and what more does a fellow want?"
+
+"You didn't always feel that way, Dick?"
+
+"No.  You see, at different times in life you want different kinds of
+pleasures.  I've had a good many kinds, and the present kind is about as
+satisfactory as any."
+
+"But, Dick, you ought to get married.  You've got coin, you've got sense,
+you're a bit distinguished-looking, and I'll back your heart against a
+thousand bishops.  You've never been in danger of making a fool of
+yourself as I have.  Why didn't you--why don't you--get married?"
+
+Richard patted his brother's shoulder.
+
+"Married, boy?  Married?  I've got too much on my hands.  I've got to
+bring you up yet.  And when that's done I shall have to write a book
+called 'How to bring up a Parent.'  Then I've got to help bring your boy
+up, as I've done these last three years and more.  I've got to think of
+that boy for a long while yet, for I know him better than you do, and I
+shall need some of my coin to carry out my plans."
+
+"God bless you, Dick!  Bring me up as you will, only bring her along too;
+and as for the boy, you're far more his father than I am.  And mother
+says that it's you that's given me the wife I've got now--so what can I
+say?--what can I say?"
+
+It was the middle of the Green Park, and Richard turned and clasped Frank
+by both shoulders.
+
+"Say?  Say that you'll stand by the thing you swore to one mad day in the
+West as well as any man that ever lived--'to have and to hold, to love
+and to cherish from this day forth till death us do part, Amen.'"
+
+Richard's voice was low and full of a strange, searching something.
+
+Frank, wondering at this great affection and fondness of his brother,
+looked him in the eyes warmly, solemnly, and replied: "For richer or for
+poorer, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health--so help me
+God, and her kindness and forgiveness!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+"THE CHASE OF THE YELLOW SWAN"
+
+Frank and Lali did not meet until dinner was announced.  The conversation
+at dinner was mainly upon the return to Greyhope, which was fixed for the
+following morning, and it was deftly kept gay and superficial by Marion
+and Richard and Captain Vidall, until General Armour became reminiscent,
+and held the interest of the table through a dozen little incidents
+of camp and barrack life until the ladies rose.  There had been an
+engagement for late in the evening, but it had been given up because
+of Frank's home-coming, and there was to be a family gathering merely--
+for Captain Vidall was now as much one of the family as Frank or Richard,
+by virtue of his approaching marriage with Marion.  The men left alone,
+General Armour questioned Frank freely about life in the Hudson's Bay
+country, and the conversation ran on idly till it was time to join the
+ladies.
+
+When they reached the drawing-room, Marion was seated at the piano,
+playing a rhapsody of Raff's, and Mrs. Armour and Lali were seated side
+by side.  Frank thrilled at seeing his wife's hand in his mother's.
+Marion nodded over the piano at the men, and presently played a snatch
+of Carmen, then wandered off into the barbaric strength of Tannhauser,
+and as suddenly again into the ballet music of Faust.
+
+"Why so wilful, my girl?" asked her father, who had a keen taste for
+music.  "Why this tangle?  Let us have something definite."
+
+Marion sprang up from the piano.  "I can't.  I'm not definite myself
+to-night."  Then, turning to Lali: "Lali dear, sing something--do!
+Sing my favourite, 'The Chase of the Yellow Swan.'"
+
+This was a song which in the later days at Greyhope, Lali had sung for
+Marion, first in her own language, with the few notes of an Indian chant,
+and afterwards, by the help of the celebrated musician who had taught her
+both music and singing, both of which she had learned but slowly, it was
+translated and set to music.  Lali looked Marion steadily in the eyes for
+a moment and then rose.  It cost her something to do this thing, for
+while she had often talked much and long with Richard about that old
+life, it now seemed as if she were to sing it to one who would not quite
+understand why she should sing it at all, or what was her real attitude
+towards her past--that she looked upon it from the infinite distance of
+affectionate pity, knowledge, and indescribable change, and yet loved the
+inspiring atmosphere and mystery of that lonely North, which once in the
+veins never leaves it--never.  Would he understand that she was feeling,
+not the common detail of the lodge and the camp-fire and the Company's
+post, but the deep spirit of Nature, filtering through the senses in a
+thousand ways--the wild ducks' flight, the sweet smell of the balsam,
+the exquisite gallop of the deer, the powder of the frost, the sun and
+snow and blue plains of water, the thrilling eternity of plain and the
+splendid steps of the hills, which led away by stair and entresol to the
+Kimash Hills, the Hills of the Mighty Men?
+
+She did not know what he would think, and again on second thought she
+determined to make him, by this song, contrast her as she was when he
+married her, and now--how she herself could look upon that past
+unabashed, speak of it without blushing, sing of it with pride, having
+reached a point where she could look down and say: "This was the way by
+which I came."
+
+She rose, and was accompanied to the piano by General Armour, Frank
+admiring her soft, springing steps, her figure so girlish and lissom.
+She paused for a little before she began.  Her eyes showed for a moment
+over the piano, deep, burning, in-looking; then they veiled; her fingers
+touched the keys, wandered over them in a few strange, soft chords,
+paused, wandered again, more firmly and very intimately, and then she
+sang.  Her voice was a good contralto, well balanced, true, of no great
+range, but within its compass melodious, and having some inexpressible
+charm of temperament.  Frank did not need to strain his ears to hear the
+words; every one came clear, searching, delicately valued:
+
+              "In the flash of the singing dawn,
+               At the door of the Great One,
+               The joy of his lodge knelt down,
+               Knelt down, and her hair in the sun
+               Shone like showering dust,
+               And her eyes were as eyes of the fawn.
+               And she cried to her lord,
+               'O my lord, O my life,
+               From the desert I come;
+               From the hills of the Dawn.'
+               And he lifted the curtain and said,
+               'Hast thou seen It, the Yellow Swan?'
+
+              "And she lifted her head, and her eyes
+               Were as lights in the dark,
+               And her hands folded slow on her breast,
+               And her face was as one who has seen
+               The gods and the place where they dwell;
+               And she said: 'Is it meet that I kneel,
+               That I kneel as I speak to my lord?'
+               And he answered her: 'Nay, but to stand,
+               And to sit by my side;
+               But speak, thou hast followed the trail,
+               Hast thou found It, the Yellow Swan?'
+
+              "And she stood as a queen, and her voice
+               Was as one who hath seen the Hills,
+               The Hills of the Mighty Men,
+               And hath heard them cry in the night,
+               Hath heard them call in the dawn,
+               Hath seen It, the Yellow Swan.
+               And she said: 'It is not for my lord;'
+               And she murmured, 'I cannot tell,
+               But my lord must go as I went,
+               And my lord must come as I came,
+               And my lord shall be wise.'
+
+              "And he cried in his wrath,
+               'What is thine, it is mine,
+               And thine eyes are my eyes
+               Thou shalt speak of the Yellow Swan!'
+               But she answered him: 'Nay, though I die.
+               I have lain in the nest of the Swan,
+               I have heard, I have known;
+               When thine eyes too have seen,
+               When thine ears too have heard,
+               Thou shalt do with me then as thou wilt!'
+
+              "And he lifted his hand to strike,
+               And he straightened his spear to slay,
+               But a great light struck on his eyes,
+               And he heard the rushing of wings,
+               And his long spear fell from his hand,
+               And a terrible stillness came.
+               And when the spell passed from his eyes,
+               He stood in his doorway alone,
+               And gone was the queen of his soul,
+               And gone was the Yellow Swan."
+
+Frank Armour listened as in a dream.  The song had the wild swing of
+savage life, the deep sweetness of a monotone, but it had also the fine
+intelligence, the subtle allusiveness of romance.  He could read between
+the lines.  The allegory touched him where his nerves were sensitive.
+Where she had gone he could not go until his eyes had seen and known
+what hers had seen and known; he could not grasp his happiness all in a
+moment; she was no longer at his feet, but equal with him, and wiser than
+he.  She had not meant the song to be allusive when she began, but to
+speak to him through it by singing the heathen song as his own sister
+might sing it.  As the song went on, however, she felt the inherent
+suggestion in it, so that when she had finished it required all her
+strength to get up calmly, come among them again, and listen to their
+praises and thanks.  She had no particular wish to be alone with Frank
+just yet, but the others soon arranged themselves so that the husband
+and wife were left in a cosey corner of the room.
+
+Lali's heart fluttered a little at first, for the day had been trying,
+and she was not as strong as she could wish.  Admirably as she had gone
+through the season, it had worn on her, and her constitution had become
+sensitive and delicate, while yet strong.  The life had almost refined
+her too much.  Always on the watch that she should do exactly as Marion
+or Mrs. Armour, always so sensitive as to what was required of her,
+always preparing for this very time, now that it had come, and her heart
+and mind were strong, her body seemed to weaken.  Once or twice during
+the day she had felt a little faint, but it had passed off, and she had
+scolded herself.  She did not wish a serious talk with her husband
+to-night, but she saw now that it was inevitable.
+
+He said to her as he sat down beside her: "You sing very well indeed.
+The song is full of meaning, and you bring it all out."
+
+"I am glad you like it," she responded conventionally.  "Of course it's
+an unusual song for an English drawing-room."
+
+"As you sing it, it would be beautiful and acceptable anywhere, Lali."
+
+"Thank you again," she answered, closing and unclosing her fan, her eyes
+wandering to where Mrs. Armour was.  She wished she could escape, for she
+did not feel like talking, and yet though the man was her husband she
+could not say that she was too tired to talk; she must be polite.  Then,
+with a little dainty malice: "It is more interesting, though, in the
+vernacular--and costume!"
+
+"Not unless you sang it so," he answered gallantly, and with a kind of
+earnestness.
+
+"You have not forgotten the way of London men," she rejoined.
+
+"Perhaps that is well, for I do not know the way of women," he said, with
+a faint bitterness.  "Yet, I don't speak unadvisedly in this,"--here he
+meant to be a little bold and bring the talk to the past,--"for I heard
+you sing that song once before."
+
+She turned on him half puzzled, a little nervous.  "Where did you hear me
+sing it?"
+
+He had made up his mind, wisely enough, to speak with much openness and
+some tact also, if possible.  "It was on the Glow Worm River at the Clip
+Claw Hills.  I came into your father's camp one evening in the autumn,
+hungry and tired and knocked about.  I was given the next tent to yours.
+It was night, and just before I turned in I heard your voice singing.  I
+couldn't understand much of the language, but I had the sense of it, and
+I know it when I hear it again."
+
+"Yes, I remember singing it that night," she said.  "Next day was the
+Feast of the Yellow Swan."
+
+Her eyes presently became dreamy, and her face took on a distant, rapt
+look.  She sat looking straight before her for a moment.
+
+He did not speak, for he interpreted the look aright, and he was going to
+be patient, to wait.
+
+"Tell me of my father," she said.  "You have been kind to him?"
+
+He winced a little.  "When I left Fort Charles he was very well," he
+said, "and he asked me to tell you to come some day.  He also has sent
+you a half-dozen silver-fox skins, a sash, and moccasins made by his own
+hands.  The things are not yet unpacked."
+
+Moccasins?--She remembered when last she had moccasins on her feet--the
+day she rode the horse at the quick-set hedge, and nearly lost her life.
+How very distant that all was, and yet how near too!  Suddenly she
+remembered also why she took that mad ride, and her heart hardened a
+little.
+
+"You have been kind to my father since I left?" she asked.
+
+He met her eyes steadily.  "No, not always; not more than I have been
+kind to you.  But at the last, yes."  Suddenly his voice became intensely
+direct and honest.  "Lali," he continued, "there is much that I want to
+say to you."  She waved her hand in a wearied fashion.  "I want to tell
+you that I would do the hardest penance if I could wipe out these last
+four years."
+
+"Penance?" she said dreamily--"penance?  What guarantee of happiness
+would that be?  One would not wish another to do penance if--"
+
+She paused.
+
+"I understand," he said--"if one cared--if one loved.  Yes, I understand.
+But that does not alter the force or meaning of the wish.  I swear to you
+that I repent with all my heart--the first wrong to you, the long
+absence--the neglect--everything."
+
+She turned slowly to him.  "Everything-Everything?" she repeated after
+him.  "Do you understand what that means?  Do you know a woman's heart?
+No.  Do you know what a shameful neglect is at the most pitiful time in
+your life?  No.  How can a man know!  He has a thousand things--the woman
+has nothing, nothing at all except the refuge of home, that for which she
+gave up everything!"
+
+Presently she broke off, and something sprang up and caught her in the
+throat.  Years of indignation were at work in her.  "I have had a home,"
+she said, in a low, thrilling voice--"a good home; but what did that cost
+you?  Not one honest sentiment of pity, kindness, or solicitude.  You
+clothed me, fed me, abandoned me, as--how can one say it?  Do I not know,
+if coming back you had found me as you expected to find me, what the
+result would have been?  Do I not know?  You would have endured me if I
+did not thrust myself upon you, for you have after all a sense of legal
+duty, a kind of stubborn honour.  But you would have made my life such
+that some day one or both of us would have died suddenly.  For"--she
+looked him with a hot clearness in the eyes--"for there is just so much
+that a woman can bear.  I wish this talk had not come now, but, since
+it has come, it is better to speak plainly.  You see, you misunderstand.
+A heathen has a heart as another--has a life to be spoiled or made happy
+as another.  Had there been one honest passion in your treatment of me--
+in your marrying me--there would be something on which to base mutual
+respect, which is more or less necessary when one is expected to love.
+But--but I will not speak more of it, for it chokes me, the insult to me,
+not as I was, but as I am.  Then it would probably have driven me mad,
+if I had known; now it eats into my life like rust."
+
+He made a motion as if to take her hands, but lifting them away quietly
+she said: "You forget that there are others present, as well as the fact
+that we can talk better without demonstration."
+
+He was about to speak, but she stopped him.  "No, wait," she said;
+"for I want to say a little more.  I was only an Indian girl, but you
+must remember that I had also in my veins good white blood, Scotch blood.
+Perhaps it was that which drew me to you then--for Lali the Indian girl
+loved you.  Life had been to me pleasant enough--without care, without
+misery, open, strong and free; our people were not as those others which
+had learned the white man's vices.  We loved the hunt, the camp-fires,
+the sacred feasts, the legends of the Mighty Men; and the earth was a
+good friend, whom we knew as the child knows its mother."
+
+She paused.  Something seemed to arrest her attention.  Frank followed
+her eyes.  She was watching Captain Vidall and Marion.  He guessed what
+she was thinking--how different her own wooing had been from theirs, how
+concerning her courtship she had not one sweet memory--the thing that
+keeps alive more love and loyalty in this world than anything else.
+Presently General Armour joined them, and Frank's opportunity was over
+for the present.
+
+Captain Vidall and Marion were engaged in a very earnest conversation,
+though it might not appear so to observers.
+
+"Come, now, Marion," he said protestingly, "don't be impossible.  Please
+give the day a name.  Don't you think we've waited about long enough?"
+
+"There was a man in the Bible who served seven years."
+
+"I've served over three in India since I met you at the well, and that
+counts double.  Why so particular to a day?  It's a bit Jewish.  Anyhow,
+that seven years was rough on Rachel."
+
+"How, Hume?  Because she got passee?"
+
+"Well, that counted; but do you suppose that Jew was going to put in
+those seven years without interest?  Don't you believe it.  Rachel paid
+capital and interest back, or Jacob was no Jew.  Tell me, Marion, when
+shall it be?"
+
+"Hume, for a man who has trifled away years in India, you are strangely
+impatient."
+
+"Mrs. Lambert says that I have the sweetest disposition."
+
+"My dear sir!"
+
+"Don't look at me like that at this distance, or I shall have to wear
+goggles, as the man did who went courting the Sun."
+
+"How supremely ridiculous you are!  And I thought you such a sensible,
+serious man."
+
+"Mrs. Lambert put that in your head.  We used to meet at the annual
+dinners of the Bible Society."
+
+"Why do you tell me such stuff?"
+
+"It's a fact.  Her father and my aunt were in that swim, and we were
+sympathisers."
+
+"Mercenary people!"
+
+"It worked very well in her case; not so well in mine.  But we conceived
+a profound respect for each other then.  But tell me, Marion, when is it
+to be?  Why put off the inevitable?"
+
+"It isn't inevitable--and I'm only twenty-three."
+
+                    "Only twenty-three,
+                    And as good fish in the sea"
+
+he responded, laughing.  "Yes, but you've set the precedent for a
+courtship of four years and a bit, and what man could face it?"
+
+"You did."
+
+"Yes, but I wasn't advertised of the fact beforehand.  Suppose I had seen
+the notice at the start: 'This mortgage cannot be raised inside of four
+years--and a bit!'  There's a limit to human endurance."
+
+"Why shouldn't I hold to the number, but alter the years to days?"
+
+"You wouldn't dare.  A woman must live up to her reputation."
+
+"Indeed?  What an ambition!"
+
+"And a man to his manners."
+
+"An unknown quantity."
+
+"And a lover to his promises."
+
+"A book of jokes."  Marion had developed a taste for satire.
+
+"Which reminds me of Lady Halwood and Mrs. Lambert.  Lady Halwood was
+more impertinent than usual the other day at the Sinclairs' show, and had
+a little fling at Mrs. Lambert.  The talk turned on gowns.  Lady Halwood
+was much interested at once.  She has a weakness that way.  'Why,' said
+she, 'I like these fashions this year, but I'm not sure that they suit
+me.  They're the same as when the Queen came to the throne.'  'Well,'
+said Mrs. Lambert sweetly, 'if they suited you then--' There was an
+audible titter, and Mrs. Lambert had an enemy for life."
+
+"I don't see the point of your story in this connection."
+
+"No?  Well, it was merely to suggest that if you had to live up to this
+scheme of four-years' probation, other people besides lovers would make
+up books of jokes, and--"
+
+"That's like a man--to threaten."
+
+"Yes, I threaten--on my knees."
+
+"Hume, how long do you think Frank will have to wait?"
+
+They were sitting where they had a good view of the husband and wife, and
+Vidall, after a moment, said: "I don't know.  She has waited four years,
+too; now it looks as if, like Jacob, she was going to gather in her
+shekels of interest compounded."
+
+"It isn't going to be a bit pleasant to watch."
+
+"But you won't be here to see."
+
+Marion ignored the suggestion.  "She seems to have hardened since he came
+yesterday.  I hardly know her; and yet she looks awfully worn to-night,
+don't you think?"
+
+"Yes, as if she had to keep a hand on herself.  But it'll come out all
+right in the end, you'll see."
+
+"Yes, of course; but she might be sensible and fall in love with Frank at
+once.  That's what she did when--"
+
+"When she didn't know man."
+
+"Yes, but where would you all be if we women acted on what we know of
+you?"
+
+"On our knees chiefly, as I am.  Remember this, Marion, that half a
+sinner is better than no man."
+
+"You mean that no man is better than half a saint?"
+
+"How you must admire me!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"As you are about to name the day, I assume that I'm a whole saint in
+your eyes."
+
+"St. Augustine!"
+
+"Who was he?"
+
+"A man that reformed."
+
+"Before or after marriage?"
+
+"Before, I suppose."
+
+"I don't think he died happy."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I've a faint recollection that he was boiled."
+
+"Don't be horrid.  What has that to do with it?"
+
+"Nothing, perhaps.  But he probably broke out again after marriage, and
+sank at last into that caldron.  That's what it means by being-steeped in
+crime."
+
+"How utterly nonsensical you are!"
+
+"I feel light-headed.  You've been at sea, on a yacht becalmed, haven't
+you?  when along comes a groundswell, and as you rock in the sun there
+comes trouble, and your head goes round like a top?  Now, that's my case.
+I've been becalmed four years, and while I pray for a little wind to take
+me--home, you rock me in the trough of uncertainty.  Suspense is very
+gall and wormwood.  You know what the jailer said to the criminal who was
+hanging on a reprieve: 'Rope deferred maketh the heart sick.'  Marion,
+give me the hour, or give me the rope."
+
+"The rope enough to hang yourself?"
+
+She suddenly reached up and pulled a hair from her head.  She laid it in
+his hand-a long brown silken thread.  "Hume," she said airily yet gently,
+"there is the rope.  Can you love me for a month of Sundays?"
+
+"Yes, for ever and a day!"
+
+"I will cancel the day, and take your bond for the rest.  I will be
+generous.  I will marry you in two months-and a day."
+
+"My dearest girl!"--he drew her hand into both of his--"I can't have you
+more generous than myself, I'll throw off the month."  But his eyes were
+shining very seriously, though his mouth smiled.
+
+"Two months and a day," she repeated.
+
+"We must all bundle off to Greyhope to-morrow," came General Armour's
+voice across the room.  "Down comes the baby, cradle and all."
+
+Lali rose.  "I am very tired," she said; "I think I will say good-night."
+
+"I'll go and see the boy with you," Frank said, rising also.
+
+Lali turned towards Marion.  Marion's face was flushed, and had a sweet,
+happy confusion.  With a low, trembling good-night to Captain Vidall, a
+hurried kiss on her mother's cheek, and a tip-toed caress on her father's
+head, she ran and linked her arm in Lali's, and together they proceeded
+to the child's room.  Richard was there when they arrived, mending a
+broken toy.  Two hours later, the brothers parted at Frank's door.
+
+"Reaping the whirlwind, Dick?" Frank said, dropping his hand on his
+brother's arm.
+
+Richard pointed to the child's room.
+
+"Nonsense!  Do you want all the world at once?  You are reaping the
+forgiveness of your sins."  Somehow Richard's voice was a little stern.
+
+"I was thinking of my devilry, Dick.  That's the whirlwind--here!"  His
+hand dropped on his breast.
+
+"That's where it ought to be.  Good-night."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A LIVING POEM
+
+Part of Frank's most trying interview, next to the meeting with his wife,
+was that with Mackenzie, who had been his special commissioner in the
+movement of his masquerade.  Mackenzie also had learned a great deal
+since she had brought Lali--home.  She, like others, had come to care
+truly for the sweet barbarian, and served her with a grim kind of
+reverence.  Just in proportion as this had increased, her respect for
+Frank had decreased.  No man can keep a front of dignity in the face of
+an unbecoming action.  However, Mackenzie had her moment, and when it was
+over, the new life began at no general disadvantage to Frank.  To all
+save the immediate family Frank and Lali were a companionable husband and
+wife.  She rode with him, occasionally walked with him, now and again
+sang to him, and they appeared in the streets of St. Albans and at the
+Abbey together, and oftener still in the village church near, where the
+Armours of many generations were proclaimed of much account in the solid
+virtues of tomb and tablet.
+
+The day had gone by when Lali attracted any especial notice among the
+villagers, and she enjoyed the quiet beauty and earnestness of the
+service.  But she received a shock one Sunday.  She had been nervous all
+the week, she could not tell why, and others remarked how her face had
+taken on a new sensitiveness, a delicate anxiety, and that her strength
+was not what it had been.  As, for instance, after riding she required to
+rest, a thing before unknown, and she often lay down for an hour before
+dinner.  Then, too, at table once she grew suddenly pale and swayed
+against Edward Lambert, who was sitting next to her.  She would not,
+however, leave the table, but sat the dinner out, to Frank's
+apprehension.  He was devoted, but it was clear to Marion and her mother
+at least that his attentions were trying to her.  They seemed to put her
+under an obligation which to meet was a trial.  There is nothing more
+wearing to a woman than affectionate attentions from a man who has claims
+upon her, but whom she does not love.  These same attentions from one who
+has no claims give her a thrill of pleasure.  It is useless to ask for
+justice in such a matter.  These things are governed by no law; and
+rightly so, else the world would be in good time a loveless multitude,
+held together only by the hungering ties of parent and child.
+
+But this Sunday wherein Lali received a shock.  She did not know that the
+banns for Marion's and Captain Vidall's marriage were to be announced,
+and at the time her thoughts were far away.  She was recalled to herself
+by the clergyman's voice pronouncing their names, and saying: "If any of
+you do know cause or just impediment why these two people should not be
+joined together in the bonds of holy matrimony, ye are to declare it."
+All at once there came back to her her own marriage when the Protestant
+missionary, in his nasal monotone, mumbled these very words, not as if he
+expected that any human being would, or could, offer objection.
+
+She almost sprang from her seat now.  Her nerves all at once came to such
+a tension that she could have cried out.  Why had there been no one there
+at her marriage to say: "I forbid it"?  How shameful it had all been!
+And the first kiss her husband had given her had the flavour of brandy!
+If she could but turn back the hands upon the clock of Time!  Under the
+influence of the music and the excited condition of her nerves, the event
+became magnified, distorted; it burned into her brain.  It was not made
+less poignant by the sermon from the text: "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin."
+When the words were first announced in the original, it sounded like her
+own language, save that it was softer, and her heart throbbed fast.  Then
+came the interpretation: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found
+wanting."
+
+Then suddenly swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt
+before.  Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to
+reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband's sin upon himself,
+had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to live up to her
+new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and suggestion,
+rather than by words, laid down for her.  But now there came in upon her
+a flood of despair.  At best she was only of this race through one-third
+of her parentage, and education and refinement and all things could do no
+more than make her possible.  There must always be in the record: "She
+was of a strange people.  She was born in a wigwam."  She did not know
+that failing health was really the cause of this lapse of self-
+confidence, this growing self-depreciation, this languor for which she
+could not account.  She found that she could not toss the child and
+frolic with it as she had done; she was conscious that within a month
+there had stolen upon her the desire to be much alone, to avoid noises
+and bustle--it irritated her.  She found herself thinking more and more
+of her father, her father to whom she had never written one line since
+she had left the North.  She had had good reasons for not writing--
+writing could do no good whatever, particularly to a man who could not
+read, and who would not have understood her new life if he had read.  Yet
+now she seemed not to know why she had not written, and to blame herself
+for neglect and forgetfulness.  It weighed on her.  Why had she ever been
+taken from the place of tamarack-trees and the sweeping prairie grass?
+No, no, she was not, after all, fit for this life.  She had been
+mistaken, and Richard had been mistaken--Richard, who was so wise.  The
+London season?  Ah!  that was because people had found a novelty, and
+herself of better manners than had been expected.
+
+The house was now full of preparations for the wedding.  It stared her in
+the face every day, almost every hour.  Dressmakers, milliners, tailors,
+and all those other necessary people.  Did the others think what all this
+meant to her?  It was impossible that they should.  When Marion came back
+from town at night and told of her trials among the dressmakers, when she
+asked the general opinion and sometimes individual judgment, she could
+not know that it was at the expense of Lali's nerves.
+
+Lali, when she married, had changed her moccasins, combed her hair, and
+put on a fine red belt, and that was all.  She was not envious now, not
+at all.  But somehow it all was a deadly kind of evidence against herself
+and her marriage.  Her reproach was public, the world knew it, and no
+woman can forgive a public shame, even was it brought about by a man she
+loved, or loves.  Her chiefest property in life is her self-esteem and
+her name before the world.  Rob her of these, and her heaven has fallen,
+and if a man has shifted the foundations of her peace, there is no
+forgiveness for him till her Paradise has been reconquered.  So busy were
+all the others that they did not see how her strength was failing.  There
+were three weeks between the day the banns were announced and the day of
+the wedding, which was to be in the village church, not in town; for, as
+Marion said, she had seen too many marriages for one day's triumph and
+criticism; she wanted hers where there would be neither triumph nor
+criticism, but among people who had known her from her childhood up.
+A happy romance had raised Marion's point of view.
+
+Meanwhile Frank was winning the confidence of his own child, who,
+however, ranked Richard higher always, and became to a degree his
+father's tyrant.  But Frank's nature was undergoing a change.  His point
+of view also had enlarged.  The suffering, bitterness, and humiliation of
+his life in the North had done him good.  He was being disciplined to
+take his position as a husband and father, but he sometimes grew heavy-
+hearted when he saw how his attentions oppressed his wife, and had it not
+been for Richard he might probably have brought on disaster, for the
+position was trying to all concerned.  A few days before the wedding
+Edward Lambert and his wife arrived, and he, Captain Vidall, and Frank
+Armour took rides and walks together, or set the world right in the
+billiard-room.  Richard seldom joined them, though their efforts to
+induce him to do so were many.  He had his pensioners, his books, his
+pipe, and "the boy," and he had returned in all respects, in so far as
+could be seen, to his old life, save for the new and larger interest of
+his nephew.
+
+One evening the three men with General Armour were all gathered in the
+billiard-room.  Conversation had been general and without particular
+force, as it always is when merely civic or political matters are under
+view.  But some one gave a social twist to the talk, and presently they
+were launched upon that sea where every man provides his own chart, or he
+is a very worm and no man.  Each man had been differently trained, each
+viewed life from a different stand-point, and yet each had been brought
+up in the same social atmosphere, in the same social sets, had imbibed
+the same traditions, been moved generally by the same public
+considerations.
+
+"But there's little to be said for a man who doesn't, outwardly at least,
+live up to the social necessity," said Lambert.
+
+"And keep the Ten Commandments in the vulgar tongue," rejoined Vidall.
+
+"I've lived seventy-odd years, and I've knocked about a good deal in my
+time," said the general, "but I've never found that you could make a
+breach of social necessity, as you call it, without paying for it one way
+or another.  The trouble with us when we're young is that we want to get
+more out of life than there really is in it.  There is not much in it,
+after all.  You can stand just so much fighting, just so much work, just
+so much emotion--and you can stand less emotion than anything else.  I'm
+sure more men and women break up from a hydrostatic pressure of emotion
+than from anything else.  Upon my soul, that's so."
+
+"You are right, General," said Lambert.  "The steady way is the best way.
+The world is a passable place, if a fellow has a decent income by
+inheritance, or can earn a big one, but to be really contented to earn
+money it must be a big one, otherwise he is far better pleased to take
+the small inherited income.  It has a lot of dignity, which the other
+can only bring when it is large."
+
+"That's only true in this country; it's not true in America," said Frank,
+"for there the man who doesn't earn money is looked upon as a muff, and
+is treated as such.  A small inherited income is thought to be a trifle
+enervating.  But there is a country of emotions, if you like.  The
+American heart is worn upon the American sleeve, and the American mind is
+the most active thing in this world.  That's why they grow old so young."
+
+"I met a woman a year or so ago at dinner," said Vidall, "who looked
+forty.  She looked it, and she acted it.  She was younger than any woman
+present, but she seemed older.  There was a kind of hopeless languor
+about her which struck me as pathetic.  Yet she had been beautiful, and
+might even have been so when I saw her, if it hadn't been for that look.
+It was the look of a person who had no interest in things.  And the
+person who has no interest in things is the person who once had a great
+deal of interest in things, who had too passionate an interest.  The
+revulsion is always terrible.  Too much romance is deadly.  It is as
+false a stimulant as opium or alcohol, and leaves a corresponding mark.
+Well, I heard her history.  She was married at fifteen--ran away to be
+married; and in spite of the fact that a railway accident nearly took her
+husband from her on the night of her marriage--one would have thought
+that would make a strong bond--she was soon alive to the attentions that
+are given a pretty and--considerate woman.  At a ball at Naples, her
+husband, having in vain tried to induce her to go home, picked her up
+under his arm and carried her out of the ballroom.  Then came a couple of
+years of opium-eating, fierce social excitement, divorce, new marriage,
+and so on, until her husband agreeably decided to live in Nice, while she
+lived somewhere else.  Four days after I had met her at the dinner I saw
+her again.  I could scarcely believe my eyes.  The woman had changed
+completely.  She was young again-twenty-five, in face and carriage, in
+the eye and hand, in step and voice."
+
+"Who was the man?" suggested Frank Armour.  "A man about her own age,
+or a little more, but who was an infant beside her in knowledge of the
+world."  "She was in love with the fellow?  It was a grande passion?"
+asked Lambert.
+
+"In love with him?  No, not at all.  It was a momentary revival of an
+old-possibility."
+
+"You mean that such women never really love?"
+
+"Perhaps once, Frank, but only after a fashion.  The rest was mere
+imitation of their first impulses."
+
+"And this woman?"
+
+"Well, the end came sooner than I expected.  I tell you I was shocked at
+the look in her face when I saw it again.  That light had flickered out;
+the sensitive alertness of hand, eye, voice, and carriage had died away;
+lines had settled in the face, and the face itself had gone cold, with
+that hard, cold passiveness which comes from exhausted emotions and a
+closed heart.  The jewels she wore might have been put upon a statue with
+equal effect."
+
+"It seems to me that we might pitch into men in these things and not make
+women the dreadful examples," said a voice from the corner.  It was the
+voice of Richard, who had but just entered.
+
+"My dear Dick," said his father, "men don't make such frightful examples,
+because these things mean less to men than they do to women.  Romance is
+an incident to a man; he can even come through an affaire with no ideals
+gone, with his mental fineness unimpaired; but it is different with a
+woman.  She has more emotion than mind, else there were no cradles in the
+land.  Her standards are set by the rules of the heart, and when she has
+broken these rules she has lost her standard too.  But to come back, it
+is true, I think, as I said, that man or woman must not expect too much
+out of life, but be satisfied with what they can get within the normal
+courses of society and convention and home, and the end thereof is peace
+--yes, upon my soul, it's peace."
+
+There was something very fine in the blunt, honest words of the old man,
+whose name had ever been sweet with honour.
+
+"And the chief thing is that a man live up to his own standard," said
+Lambert.  "Isn't that so, Dick?--you're the wise man."
+
+"Every man should have laws of his own, I should think; commandments of
+his own, for every man has a different set of circumstances wherein to
+work--or worry."
+
+"The wisest man I ever knew," said Frank, dropping his cigar, "was a
+little French-Canadian trapper up in the Saskatchewan country.  A priest
+asked him one day what was the best thing in life, and he answered: 'For
+a young man's mind to be old, and an old man's heart to be young.'  The
+priest asked him how that could be.  And he said: 'Good food, a good
+woman to teach him when he is young, and a child to teach him when he is
+old.' Then the priest said: 'What about the Church and the love of God?'
+The little man thought a little, and then said: 'Well, it is the same--
+the love of man and woman came first in the world, then the child, then
+God in the garden.'  Afterwards he made a little speech of good-bye to
+us, for we were going to the south while he remained in a fork of the Far
+Off River.  It was like some ancient blessing: that we should always have
+a safe tent and no sorrow as we travelled; that we should always have a
+cache for our food, and food for our cache; that we should never find a
+tree that would not give sap, nor a field that would not grow grain; that
+our bees should not freeze in winter, and that the honey should be thick,
+and the comb break like snow in the teeth; that we keep hearts like the
+morning, and that we come slow to the Four Corners where man says Good-
+night."
+
+Each of the other men present wondered at that instant if Frank Armour
+would, or could, have said this with the same feelings two months before.
+He seemed almost transformed.
+
+"It reminds me," said the general, "of an inscription from an Egyptian
+monument which an officer of the First put into English verse for me
+years ago:
+
+         "Fair be the garden where their loves shall dwell,
+          Safe be the highway where their feet may go,
+          Rich be the fields wherein their hands may toil,
+          The fountains many where their good wines flow.
+          Full be their harvest-bins with corn and oil,
+          To sorrow may their humour be a foil;
+          Quick be their hearts all wise delights to know,
+          Tardy their footsteps to the gate Farewell."
+
+There was a moment's silence after he had finished, and then there was
+noise without, a sound of pattering feet; the door flew open, and in ran
+a little figure in white--young Richard in his bed-gown, who had broken
+away from his nurse, and had made his way to the billiard-room, where he
+knew his uncle had gone.
+
+The child's face was flashing with mischief and adventure.  He ran in
+among the group, and stretched out his hands with a little fighting air.
+His uncle Richard made a step towards him, but he ran back; his father
+made as if to take him in his arms, but he evaded him.  Presently the
+door opened, the nurse entered, the child sprang from among the group,
+and ran with a laughing defiance to the farthest end of the room, and,
+leaning his chin on the billiard-table, flashed a look of defiant humour
+at his pursuer.  Presently the door opened again, and the figure of the
+mother appeared.  All at once the child's face altered; he stood
+perfectly still, and waited for his mother to come to him.  Lali had not
+spoken, and she did not speak until, lifting the child, she came the
+length of the billiard-table and faced them.
+
+"I beg your pardon," she said, "for intruding; but Richard has led
+us a dance, and I suppose the mother may go where her child goes."
+
+"The mother and the child are always welcome wherever they go," said
+General Armour quietly.
+
+All the men had risen to their feet, and they made a kind of semicircle
+before her.  The white-robed child had clasped its arms about her neck,
+and nestled its face against hers, as if, with perfect satisfaction, it
+had got to the end of its adventure; but the look of humour was still in
+the eyes as they ran from Richard to his father and back again.
+
+Frank Armour stepped forwards and took the child's hand, as it rested on
+the mother's shoulder.  Lali's face underwent a slight change as her
+husband's fingers touched her neck.
+
+"I must go," she said.  "I hope I have not broken up a serious
+conversation--or were you not so serious after all?" she said, glancing
+archly at General Armour.  "We were talking of women," said Lambert.
+
+"The subject is wide," replied Lali, "and the speakers many.  One would
+think some wisdom might be got in such a case."
+
+"Believe me, we were not trying to understand the subject," said Captain
+Vidall; "the most that a mere man can do is to appreciate it."
+
+"There are some things that are hidden from the struggling mind of man,
+and are revealed unto babes and the mothers of babes," said General
+Armour gravely, as, reaching out his hands, he took the child from the
+mother's arms, kissed it full upon the lips, and added: "Men do not
+understand women, because men's minds have not been trained in the same
+school.  When once a man has mastered the very alphabet of motherhood,
+then he shall have mastered the mind of woman; but I, at least, refuse to
+say that I do not understand, from the stand-point of modern cynicism."
+
+"Ah, General, General!" said Lambert, "we have lost the chivalric way of
+saying things, which belongs to your generation."
+
+By this time the wife had reached the door.  She turned and held out her
+arms for the child.  General Armour came and placed the boy where he had
+found it, and, with eyes suddenly filling, laid both his hands upon
+Lali's and they clasped the child, and said: "It is worth while to have
+lived so long and to have seen so much."  Her eyes met his in a wistful,
+anxious expression, shifted to those of her husband, dropped to the
+cheeks of the child, and with the whispered word, which no one, not even
+the general, heard, she passed from the room, the nurse following her.
+
+Perhaps some of the most striking contrasts are achieved in the least
+melodramatic way.  The sudden incursion of the child and its mother into
+the group, the effect of their presence, and their soft departure,
+leaving behind them, as it were, a trail of light, changed the whole
+atmosphere of the room, as though some new life had been breathed into
+it, charged each mind with new sensations, and gave each figure new
+attitude.  Not a man present but had had his full swing with the world,
+none worse than most men, none better than most, save that each had
+latent in him a good sense of honour concerning all civic and domestic
+virtues.  They were not men of sentimentality; they were not accustomed
+to exposing their hearts upon their sleeve, but each, as the door closed,
+recognised that something for one instant had come in among them, had
+made their past conversation to appear meagre, crude, and lacking in both
+height and depth.  Somehow, they seemed to feel, although no words
+expressed the thought, that for an instant they were in the presence of a
+wisdom greater than any wisdom of a man's smoking-room.
+
+"It is wonderful, wonderful," said the general slowly, and no man asked
+him why he said it, or what was wonderful.  But Richard, sitting apart,
+watched Frank's face acutely, himself wondering when the hour would come
+that the wife would forgive her husband, and this situation so fraught
+with danger would be relieved.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ON THE EDGE OF A FUTURE
+
+At last the day of the wedding came, a beautiful September day, which may
+be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else.  Lali had been
+strangely quiet all the day before, and she had also seemed strangely
+delicate.  Perhaps, or perhaps not, she felt the crisis was approaching.
+It is probable that when the mind has been strained for a long time, and
+the heart and body suffered much, one sees a calamity vaguely, and cannot
+define it; appreciates it, and does not know it.  She came to Marion's
+room about a half-hour before they were to start for the church.  Marion
+was already dressed and ready, save for the few final touches, which,
+though they have been given a dozen times, must still again be given
+just before the bride starts for the church.  Such is the anxious mind
+of women on these occasions.  The two stood and looked at each other a
+moment, each wondering what were the thoughts of the other.  Lali was
+struck by that high, proud look over which lay a glamour of infinite
+satisfaction, of sweetness, which comes to every good woman's face when
+she goes to the altar in a marriage which is not contingent on the rise
+or fall in stocks, or a satisfactory settlement.  Marion, looking, saw,
+as if it had been revealed to her all at once, the intense and miraculous
+change which had come over the young wife, even within the past two
+months.  Indeed, she had changed as much within that time as within all
+the previous four years--that is, she had been brought to a certain point
+in her education and experience, where without a newer and deeper
+influence she could go no further.  That newer and deeper influence had
+come, and the result thereof was a woman standing upon the verge of the
+real tragedy to her life, which was not in having married the man, but
+in facing that marriage with her new intelligence and a transformed soul.
+Men can face that sort of thing with a kind of philosophy, not because
+men are better or wiser, but because it really means less to them.  They
+have resources of life, they can bury themselves in their ambitions good
+or bad, but a woman can only bury herself in her affections, unless her
+heart has been closed; and in that case she herself has lost much of what
+made her adorable.  And while she may go on with the closed heart and
+become a saint, even saintship is hardly sufficient to compensate any man
+or woman for a half-lived life.  The only thing worth doing in this world
+is to live life according to one's convictions--and one's heart.  He or
+she who sells that fine independence for a mess of pottage, no matter if
+the mess be spiced, sells, as the Master said, the immortal part of him.
+
+And so Lali, just here on the edge of Marion's future, looking into that
+mirror, was catching the reflection of her own life.  When two women come
+so near that, like the lovers in the Tempest, they have changed eyes, in
+so far as to read each other's hearts, even indifferently, which is much
+where two women are concerned, there is only one resource, and that is to
+fall into each other's arms, and to weep if it be convenient, or to hold
+their tears for a more fitting occasion; and most people will admit that
+tears need not add to a bride's beauty.
+
+Marion might, therefore, be pardoned if she had her tears in her throat
+and not in her eyes, and Lali, if they arose for a moment no higher than
+her heart.  But they did fall into each other's arms despite veils and
+orange blossoms, and somehow Marion had the feeling for Lali that she had
+on that first day at Greyhope, four years ago, when standing on the
+bridge, the girl looked down into the water, tears dropping on her hands,
+and Marion said to her: "Poor girl!  poor girl!"  The situations were the
+same, because Lali had come to a new phase of her life, and what that
+phase would be who could tell-happiness or despair?
+
+The usual person might think that Lali was placing herself and her wifely
+affection at a rather high price, but then it is about the only thing
+that a woman can place high, even though she be one-third a white woman
+and two-thirds an Indian.  Here was a beautiful woman, who had run the
+gamut of a London season, who had played a pretty social part, admirably
+trained therefor by one of the best and most cultured families of
+England.  Besides, why should any woman sell her affections even to her
+husband, bargain away her love, the one thing that sanctifies "what God
+hath joined let no man put asunder"?  Lali was primitive, she was unlike
+so many in a trivial world, but she was right.  She might suffer, she
+might die, but, after all, there are many things worse than that.  Man is
+born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over; but to
+have a sick heart for three-fourths of one's lifetime is simply to have
+death renewed every morning; and life at that price is not worth living.
+In this sensitive age we are desperately anxious to save life, as if it
+was the really great thing in the world; but in the good, strong times of
+the earth--and in these times, indeed, when necessity knows its hour--men
+held their lives as lightly as a bird upon the housetop which any chance
+stone might drop.
+
+It is possible that at this moment the two women understood each other
+better than they had ever done, and respected each other more.  Lali,
+recovering herself, spoke a few soft words of congratulation, and then
+appeared to busy herself in putting little touches to Marion's dress,
+that soft persuasion of fingers which does so much to coax mere cloth
+into a sort of living harmony with the body.
+
+They had no more words of confidence, but in the porch of the church,
+Marion, as she passed Lali, caught the slender fingers in her own and
+pressed them tenderly.  Marion was giving comfort, and yet if she had
+been asked why she could not have told.  She did not try to define it
+further than to say to herself that she herself was having almost too
+much happiness.  The village was en fete, and peasants lined the street
+leading to the church, ready with their hearty God-bless-you's.  Lali sat
+between her husband and Mrs. Armour, apparently impassive until there
+came the question: "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?"
+and General Armour's voice came clear and strong: "I do."  Then a soft
+little cry broke from her, and she shivered slightly.  Mrs. Armour did
+not notice, but Frank and Mrs. Lambert heard and saw, and both were
+afterwards watchful and solicitous.  Frank caught Mrs. Lambert's eye,
+and it said, to a little motion of the head: "Do not appear to notice."
+
+Lali was as if in a dream.  She never took her eyes from the group at
+the altar until the end, and the two, now man and wife, turned to go into
+the vestry.  Then she appeared to sink away into herself for a moment,
+before she fell into conversation with the others, as they moved towards
+the vestry.
+
+"It was beautiful, wasn't it?" ventured Edward Lambert.
+
+"The most beautiful wedding I ever saw," she answered, with a little
+shadow of meaning; and Lambert guessed that it was the only one she had
+seen since she came to England.
+
+"How well Vidall looked," said Frank, "and as proud as a sultan.  Did you
+hear what he said, as Marion came up the aisle?"
+
+"No," responded Lambert.
+
+"He said, 'By Jove, isn't she fine!'  He didn't seem conscious that other
+people were present."
+
+"Well, if a man hasn't some inspirations on his wedding-day when is he to
+have them?" said Mrs. Lambert.  "For my part, I think that the woman
+always does that sort of thing better than a man.  It is her really great
+occasion, and she masters it--the comedy is all hers."  They were just
+then entering the vestry.
+
+"Or the tragedy, as the case may be," said Lali quietly, smiling at
+Marion.  She had, as it were, recovered herself, and her words had come
+with that airy, impersonal tone which permits nothing of what is said in
+it to be taken seriously.  Something said by the others had recalled her
+to herself, and she was now returned very suddenly to the old position of
+alertness and social finesse.  Something icy seemed to pass over her, and
+she immediately lost all self-consciousness, and began to speak to her
+husband with less reserve than she had shown since he had come.  But he
+was not deceived.  He saw that at that very instant she was further away
+from him than she had ever been.  He sighed, in spite of himself,
+as Lali, with well-turned words, said some loving greetings to Marion,
+and then talked a moment with Captain Vidall.
+
+"Who can understand a woman?" said Lambert to his wife meaningly.
+
+"Whoever will," she answered.  "How do you mean?"
+
+"Whoever will wait like the saint upon the pillar, will suffer like the
+traveller in the desert; serve like a slave, and demand like a king; have
+patience greater than Job; love ceaseless as a fountain in the hills; who
+sees in the darkness and is not afraid of light; who distrusts not,
+neither believes, but stands ready to be taught; who is prepared for a
+kiss this hour and a reproach the next; who turneth neither to right nor
+left at her words, but hath an unswerving eye--these shall understand a
+woman."
+
+"I never knew you so philosophical.  Where did you get this deliverance
+on the subject?"
+
+"May not even a woman have a moment of inspiration?"
+
+"I should expect that of my wife."
+
+"And I should expect that of my husband.  It is trite to say that men are
+vain; I shall remark that they sit so much in their own light that they
+are surprised if another being crosses their disc."
+
+"You always were clever, my dear, and you always were twice too good for
+me."
+
+"Well, every woman--worth the knowing--is a missionary."
+
+"Where does Lali come in?"
+
+"Can you ask?  To justify the claims of womanhood in spite of race--and
+all."
+
+"To bring one man to a sense of the duty of sex to sex, eh?"
+
+"Truly.  And is she not doing it well?  See her now."  They were now just
+leaving the church, and Lali had taken General Armour's arm, while
+Richard led his mother to the carriage.
+
+Lali was moving with a little touch of grandeur in her manner and a more
+than ordinary deliberation.  She had had a moment of great weakness, and
+then there had come the reaction--carried almost too far by the force of
+the will.  She was indeed straining herself too far.  Four years of
+tension were culminating.
+
+"See her now, Edward," repeated Mrs. Lambert.  "Yes, but if I'm not
+mistaken, my dear, she is doing so well that she's going to pieces.
+She's overstrung to-day.  If it were you, you'd be in hysterics."
+
+"I believe you are right," was the grave reply.  "There will be an end
+to this comedy one way or another very soon."
+
+A moment afterwards they were in a carriage rolling away to Greyhope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+When Marion was about leaving with her husband for the railway station,
+she sought out Lali, and found her standing half hidden by the curtains
+of a window, looking out at little Richard, who was parading his pony up
+and down before the house.  An unutterable sweetness looked out of
+Marion's eyes.  She had found, as it seemed to her, and as so many have
+believed until their lives' end, the secret of existence.  Lali saw the
+glistening joy, and responded to it, just as it was in her being to
+respond to every change of nature--that sensitiveness was in her as
+deep as being.
+
+"You are very happy, dear?" she said to Marion.  "You cannot think how
+happy, Lali.  And I want to say that I feel sure that you will yet be as
+happy, even happier than I.  Oh, it will come--it will come.  And you
+have the boy now-so fine, so good."
+
+Lali looked out to where little Richard disported himself; her eyes
+shone, and she turned with a responsive but still sad smile to Marion.
+"Marion," she said gently, "the other should have come before he came."
+"Frank loves you, Lali."
+
+"Who knows?  And then, oh, I cannot tell!  How can one force one's heart?
+No, no!  One has to wait, and wait, even if the heart grows harder, and
+one gets hopeless."
+
+Marion kissed her on the cheek and smiled.  "Some day soon the heart will
+open up, and then such a flood will pour out!  See, Lali.  I am going
+now, and our lives won't run together so much again ever, perhaps.  But I
+want to tell you now that your coming to us has done me a world of good--
+helped me to be a wiser girl; and I ought to be a better woman for it.
+Good-bye."
+
+They were calling to her, and with a hurried embrace the two parted, and
+in a few moments the bride and bridegroom were on their way to the new
+life.  As the carriage disappeared in a turn of the limes, Lali vanished
+also to her room.  She was not seen at dinner.  Mackenzie came to say
+that she was not very well, and that she would keep to her room.  Frank
+sent several times during the evening to inquire after her, and was told
+that she was resting comfortably.  He did not try to see her, and in this
+was wise.  He had now fallen into a habit of delicate consideration,
+which brought its own reward.  He had given up hope of winning her heart
+or confidence by storm, and had followed his finer and better instincts--
+had come to the point where he made no claims, and even in his own mind
+stood upon no rights.  His mother brought him word from Lali before he
+retired, to say that she was sorry she could not see him, but giving him
+a message and a commission into town the following morning for their son.
+Her tact had grown is her strength had declined.  There is something in
+failing health--ill-health without disease--which sharpens and refines
+the faculties, and makes the temper exquisitely sensitive--that is, with
+people of a certain good sort.  The aplomb and spirited manner in which
+Lali had borne herself at the wedding and after, was the last flicker of
+her old strength, and of the second phase in her married life.  The end
+of the first phase came with the ride at the quick-set hedge, this with
+a less intent but as active a temper.
+
+The next morning she did not appear at breakfast, but sent a message to
+Frank to say that she was better, and adding another commission for town.
+All day, save for an hour on the balcony, she kept to her room, and lay
+down for the greater part of the afternoon.  In the evening, when Frank
+returned, his mother sent for him, and frankly told him that she thought
+it would be better for him to go away for a few weeks or so; that Lali
+was in a languid, nervous state, and she thought that by the time he got
+back--if he would go--she would be better, and that better things would
+come for him.
+
+Frank was no longer the vain, selfish fellow who had married Lali--
+something of the best in him was at work.  He understood, and suggested
+a couple of weeks with Richard at their little place in Scotland.  Also,
+he saw his wife for a little while that evening.  She had been lying
+down, but she disposed herself in a deep chair before he entered.  He was
+a little shocked to see, as it were all at once, how delicate she looked.
+He came and sat down near her, and after a few moments of friendly talk,
+in which he spoke solicitously of her health, he told her that he thought
+of going up to Scotland with Richard for a few weeks, if she saw no
+objection.
+
+She did not quite understand why he was going.  She thought that perhaps
+he felt the strain of the situation, and that a little absence would be
+good for both.  This pleased her.  She did not shrink, as she had so
+often done since his return, when he laid his hand on hers for an
+instant, as he asked her if she were willing that he should go.
+Sometimes in the past few weeks she had almost hated him.  Now she was
+a little sorry for him, but she said that of course he must go; that no
+doubt it was good that he should go, and so on, in gentle, allusive
+phrases.  The next evening she came down to dinner, and was more like
+herself as she was before Frank came back, but she ate little, and before
+the men came into the drawing-room she had excused herself, and retired;
+at which Mrs. Lambert shook her head apprehensively at herself, and made
+up her mind to stay at Greyhope longer than she intended.
+
+Which was good for all concerned; for, two nights after Frank and Richard
+had gone, Mackenzie hurried down to the drawing-room with the news that
+Lali had been found in a faint on her chamber floor.  That was the
+beginning of weeks of anxiety, in which Mrs. Lambert was to Mrs. Armour
+what Marion would have been, and more; and both to Lali all that mother
+and sister could be.
+
+Their patient was unlike any other that they had known.  Feverish,
+she had no fever; with a gentle, hacking cough, she had no lung trouble;
+nervous, she still was oblivious to very much that went on around her;
+hungering often for her child, she would not let him remain long with her
+when he came.  Her sleep was broken, and she sometimes talked to herself,
+whether consciously or unconsciously they did not know.  The doctor had
+no remedies but tonics--he did not understand the case; but he gently
+ventured the opinion that it was mostly a matter of race, that she was
+pining because civilisation had been infused into her veins--the old
+insufficient theory.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" said General Armour, when his wife told him.
+"The girl bloomed till Frank came back.  God bless my soul! she's falling
+in love, and doesn't know what it is."
+
+He was only partly right, perhaps, but he was nearer the truth than the
+dealer in quinine and a cheap philosophy of life.  "She'll come around
+all right, you'll see.  Decline--decline be hanged!  The girl shall live,
+--damn it, she shall!" he blurted out, as his wife's eyes filled with
+tears.
+
+Mrs. Lambert was much of the same mind as the general, but went further.
+She said to Mrs. Armour that in all her life she had never seen so sweet
+a character, so sensitive a mind--a mind whose sorrow was imagination.
+And therein the little lady showed herself a person of wisdom.  For none
+of them had yet reckoned with that one great element in Lali's character
+--that thing which is the birthright of all who own the North for a
+mother, the awe of imagination, the awe and the pain, which in its finest
+expression comes near, very near, to the supernatural.  Lali's mind was
+all pictures; she never thought of things in words, she saw them; and
+everything in her life arrayed itself in a scene before her, made vivid
+by her sensitive soul, so much more sensitive now with health failing,
+the spirit wearing out the body.  There was her malady--the sick heart
+and mind.
+
+A new sickness wore upon her.  It had not touched her from the day she
+left the North until she sang "The Chase of the Yellow Swan" that first
+evening after Frank's return.  Ever since then her father was much in her
+mind--the memory of her childhood, and its sweet, inspiring friendship
+with Nature.  All the roughness and coarseness of the life was refined
+in her memory by the exquisite atmosphere of the North, the good sweet
+earth, the strong bracing wind, the camaraderie of trees and streams and
+grass and animals.  And in it all stood her father, whom she had left
+alone, in that interminable interval between the old life and the new.
+
+Had she done right?  She had cut him off, as if he had never been--her
+people, her country also; and for what?  For this--for this sinking
+sense, this failing body, this wear and tear of mind and heart, this
+constant study to be possible where she had once been declared by the
+world to be impossible.
+
+One night she lay sleeping after a rather feverish day, when it was
+thought best to keep the child from her.  Suddenly she waked, and sat up.
+Looking straight before her, she said:
+
+"I will arise, and will go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father,
+I have sinned against heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be
+called Thy son."
+
+She said nothing more than this, and presently lay back, with eyes wide
+open, gazing before her.  Like this she lay all night long, a strange,
+aching look in her face.  There had come upon her the sudden impulse to
+leave it all, and go back to her father.  But the child--that gave her
+pause.  Towards morning she fell asleep, and slept far on into the day,
+a thing that had not occurred for a long time.
+
+At noon a letter arrived for her.  It came into General Armour's hands,
+and he, seeing that it bore the stamp of the Hudson's Bay Company, with
+the legend, From Fort St. Charles, concluded that it was news of Lali's
+father.  Then came the question whether the letter should be given to
+her.  The general was for doing so, and he prevailed.  If it were bad
+news, he said, it might raise her out of her present apathy and by
+changing the play of her emotions do her good in the end.
+
+The letter was given to her in the afternoon.  She took it apathetically,
+but presently, seeing where it was from, she opened it hurriedly with a
+little cry which was very like a moan too.  There were two letters inside
+one from the factor at Fort Charles in English, and one from her father
+in the Indian language.  She read her father's letter first, the other
+fluttered to her feet from her lap.  General Armour, looking down, saw a
+sentence in it which, he felt, warranted him in picking it up, reading
+it, and retaining it, his face settling into painful lines as he did so.
+Days afterwards, Lali read her father's letter to Mrs. Armour.  It ran:
+
+
+                              My daughter,
+
+                  Lali, the sweet noise of the Spring:
+
+     Thy father speaks.
+
+     I have seen more than half a hundred moons come like the sickle and
+     go like the eye of a running buck, swelling with fire, but I hear
+     not thy voice at my tent door since the first one came and went.
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     Thy face was like the sun on running water; thy hand hung on thy
+     wrists like the ear of a young deer; thy foot was as soft on the
+     grass as the rain on a child's cheek; thy words were like snow in
+     summer, which melts in richness on the hot earth.  Thy bow and arrow
+     hang lonely upon the wall, and thy empty cup is beside the pot.
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     Thou hast become great with a great race, and that is well.  Our
+     race is not great, and shall not be, until the hour when the Mighty
+     Men of the Kimash Hills arise from their sleep and possess the land
+     again.
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     But thou hast seen many worlds, and thou hast learned great things,
+     and thou and I shall meet no more; for how shall the wise kneel at
+     the feet of the foolish, as thou didst kneel once at thy father's
+     feet?
+
+     Thou art gone.
+
+     High on the Clip Claw Hills the trees are green, in the Plain of the
+     Rolling Stars the wings of the wild fowl are many, and fine is the
+     mist upon Goldfly Lake; and the heart of Eye-of-the-Moon is strong.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     The trail is open to the White Valley, and the Scarlet Hunter hath
+     saved me, when my feet strayed in the plains and my eyes were
+     blinded.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     I have friends on the Far Off River who show me the yards where the
+     musk-ox gather; I have found the gardens of the young sable, and my
+     tents are full of store.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     In the morning my spirit is light, and I have harvest where I would
+     gather, and the stubble is for my foes.  In the evening my limbs are
+     heavy, and I am at rest in my blanket.  The hunt is mine and sleep
+     is mine, and my soul is cheerful when I remember thee.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     I have built for thee a place where thy spirit comes.  I hear thee
+     when thou callest to me, and I kneel outside the door, for thou art
+     wise, and thou speakest to me; but thee as thou art in a far land I
+     shall see no more.  This is my word to thee, that thou mayst know
+     that I am not alone.  Thou shalt not come again, as thou once went;
+     it is not meet.  But by these other ways I will speak to thee.
+
+     Thou art here.
+
+     Farewell.  I have spoken.
+
+Lali finished reading, and then slowly folded up the letter.  The writing
+was that of the wife of the factor at Fort Charles--she knew it.  She
+sat for a minute looking straight before her.  She read her father's
+allegory.  Barbarian in so much as her father was, he had beaten this
+thing out with the hammer of wisdom.  He missed her, but she must not
+come back; she had outgrown the old life--he knew it and she was with
+him in spirit, in his memory; she understood his picturesque phrases,
+borrowed from the large, affluent world about him.  Something of the
+righteousness and magnanimity of this letter passed into her, giving her
+for an instant a sort of peace.  She had needed it--needed it to justify
+herself, and she had been justified.  To return was impossible--she had
+known that all along, though she had not admitted it; the struggle had
+been but a kind of remorse, after all.  That her father should come to
+her was also impossible--it was neither for her happiness nor his.  She
+had been two different persons in her life, and the first was only a
+memory to the second.  The father had solved the problem for her.  He too
+was now a memory that she could think on with pleasure, as associated
+with the girl she once was.  He had been well provided for by her
+husband, and General Armour put his hand on hers gently and said:
+
+"Lali, without your permission I have read this other letter."
+
+She did not appear curious.  She was thinking still of her father's
+letter to her.  She nodded abstractedly.  "Lali," he continued, "this
+says that your father wished that letter to be written to you just as he
+said it at the Fort, on the day of the Feast of the Yellow Swan.  He
+stood up--the factor writes so here--and said that he had been thinking
+much for years, and that the time had come when he must speak to his
+daughter over the seas--"
+
+General Armour paused.  Lali inclined her head, smiled wistfully, and
+held up the letter for him to see.  The general continued:
+
+"So he spoke as has been written to you, and then they had the Feast of
+the Yellow Swan, and that night--"  He paused again, but presently, his
+voice a little husky, he went on: "That night he set out on a long
+journey,"--he lifted the letter and looked at it, then met the serious
+eyes of his daughter-in-law," on a long journey to the Hills of the
+Mighty Men; and, my dear, he never came back; for, as he said, there was
+peace in the White Valley, and he would rest till the world should come
+to its Spring again, and the noise of its coming should be in his ears.
+Those, Lali, are his very words."
+
+His hand closed on hers, he reached out and took the other hand, from
+which the paper fluttered, and clasped both tight in his own firm grasp.
+
+"My daughter," he said, "you have another father."  With a low cry, like
+that of a fawn struck in the throat, she slid forward on her knees beside
+him, and buried her face on his arm.  She understood.  Her father was
+dead.  Mrs. Armour came forward, and, kneeling also, drew the dark head
+to her bosom.  Then that flood came which sweeps away the rust that
+gathers in the eyes and breaks through the closed dikes of the heart.
+
+Hours after, when she had fallen into a deep sleep, General Armour and
+his wife met outside her bedroom door.
+
+"I shall not leave her," Mrs. Armour said.  "Send for Frank.  His time
+has almost come."
+
+But it would not have come so soon had not something else occurred.  The
+day that he came back from Scotland he entered his wife's room, prepared
+for a change in her, yet he did not find so much to make him happy as he
+had hoped.  She received him with a gentleness which touched him, she let
+her hand rest in his, she seemed glad to have him with her.  All bars had
+been cast down between them, but he knew that she had not given him all,
+and she knew it also.  But she hoped he did not know, and she dreaded the
+hour when he would speak out of his now full heart.  He did not yet urge
+his affection on her, he was simply devoted, and watchful, and tender,
+and delightedly hopeful.
+
+But one night she came tapping at his door.  When he opened it, she said:
+"Oh come, come!  Richard is ill!  I have sent for the doctor."
+
+Henceforth she was her old self again, with a transformed spirit, her
+motherhood spending itself in a thousand ways.  She who was weak bodily
+became now much stronger; the light of new vigour came to her eyes; she
+and her husband, in the common peril, worked together, thinking little
+of themselves, and all of the child.  The last stage of the journey to
+happiness was being passed, and if it was not obvious to themselves,
+the others, Marion and Captain Vidall included, saw it.
+
+One anxious day, after the family doctor had left the sick child's room,
+Marion, turning to the father and mother, said: "Greyhope will be itself
+again.  I will go and tell Richard that the danger is over."
+
+As she turned to do so, Richard entered the room.  "I have seen the
+doctor," he began, "and the little chap is going to pull along like a
+house afire."
+
+Tapping Frank affectionately on the arm, he was about to continue, but
+he saw what stopped him.  He saw the last move in Frank Armour's tragic-
+comedy.  He and Marion left the room as quickly as was possible to him,
+for, as he said himself, he was "slow at a quick march"; and a moment
+afterwards the wife heard without demur her husband's tale of love for
+her.
+
+Yet, as if to remind him of the wrong he had done, Heaven never granted
+Frank Armour another child.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Every man should have laws of his own
+Flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes
+How can one force one's heart?  No, no!  One has to wait
+Man or woman must not expect too much out of life
+May be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else
+Men are shy with each other where their emotions are in play
+Prepared for a kiss this hour and a reproach the next
+Romance is an incident to a man
+Simply to have death renewed every morning
+To sorrow may their humour be a foil
+We want to get more out of life than there really is in it
+Who can understand a woman?
+Worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE "TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE":
+
+Being young, she exaggerated the importance of the event
+Every man should have laws of his own
+Flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes
+His duties were many, or he made them so
+How can one force one's heart?  No, no!  One has to wait
+If fumbling human fingers do not meddle with it
+Man or woman must not expect too much out of life
+May be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else
+Men must have their bad hours alone
+Men are shy with each other where their emotions are in play
+Miseries of this world are caused by forcing issues
+Most important lessons of life--never to quarrel with a woman
+Prepared for a kiss this hour and a reproach the next
+Reading a lot and forgetting everything
+Romance is an incident to a man
+Simply to have death renewed every morning
+Sympathy and consolation might be much misplaced
+The world never welcomes its deserters
+There should be written the one word, "Wait."
+There is no influence like the influence of habit
+These little pieces of art make life possible
+Think of our position
+To sorrow may their humour be a foil
+Training in the charms of superficiality
+We grow away from people against our will
+We want to get more out of life than there really is in it
+We speak with the straight tongue; it is cowards who lie
+Who never knew self-consciousness
+Who can understand a woman?
+Worth while to have lived so long and to have seen so much
+You never can make a scandal less by trying to hide it
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE, BY PARKER ***
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+*********** This file should be named gp41w10.txt or gp41w10.zip ************
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