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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75508 ***
+
+                                  LIFE
+
+                            THE INTERPRETER
+
+                                   BY
+                            PHYLLIS BOTTOME
+
+
+
+                        LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
+                    91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
+                           LONDON AND BOMBAY
+                                  1902
+
+
+
+
+                            Copyright, 1902,
+                                   BY
+                         LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
+
+
+                   ROBERT DRUMMOND, PRINTER, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+                         LIFE, THE INTERPRETER
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+
+    “To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without it
+    is power.”
+
+“BUT the extraordinary thing is that it has happened!” The lady who
+seemed a victim of this surprise lay back in her luxurious chair and
+exhibited a small foot on the fender.
+
+“Black velvet slippers,” said her companion critically, “on a brass
+fender are really, my dear, a poem. Where do you learn these things?
+Poor Muriel, her feet were always rather large!”
+
+“She had everything in her favor,” said Mrs. le Mentier, the first
+speaker. “Money, position, a face and figure one could do a good deal
+with. She was simply ruined by her earnestness. I have often said to
+her, ‘Well, Muriel, why don’t you take up the Church?’ But she never
+did; she said it was too comfortable and that it would crush her. I’m
+sure she’s not too comfortable now!”
+
+Mrs. Huntly rose and went to the window. It was raining dismally, with a
+constant reiterated drip, drip on the tiles. She turned back, shivering
+a little, to the cosey boudoir of her friend with whom she had just been
+lunching.
+
+“I often wonder,” she said thoughtfully, “if it wasn’t Jack Hurstly
+after all. You know I had them last summer with me; and though poor
+Muriel always managed things very well, there were times—— And then he
+went off suddenly, you know; and she said she couldn’t imagine what I
+could see in him, though I know for certain she bore with that brutal
+bull-terrier of his, and pretended to like it, while all the time she
+loathed animals—dogs especially.”
+
+“Ah!” said Mrs. le Mentier; “and she’s really dropped out—one can’t do
+anything! All the time when she isn’t actually at that tiresome Stepney
+club of hers she’s contriving things for it—positively it amounts to a
+terror! She asked me last week to sing at a smoking concert for some
+factory hands. I told her I thought smoking concerts for those kind of
+people were simply immoral, and she actually flamed up and cried, ‘You
+sing for Captain Hurstly and his do-nothing friends, who can afford to
+amuse themselves, and you won’t sing for men whose daily life is a hell,
+and whose only amusements are unspeakably degrading!’ Of course I
+stopped her at once. I told her she should give them Bible lessons. She
+saw how silly she had been then, and laughed in that dear old way of
+hers, and said, ‘You always had such a lot of common sense, Edith!’ But
+you see she must be dropped. She’ll begin to talk about her soul next!”
+Her friend yawned.
+
+“Well, my dear,” she said, “don’t you get earnest too. That wretched
+Madame Veune is coming to fit me at three o’clock, so I must be off. Oh,
+by-the-bye, if Muriel should turn up to-morrow you might ask her to come
+and see me—I don’t know her slum address—one must do what one can, you
+know. Good-bye, dear.” And the two affectionately kissed and parted.
+
+Mrs. Huntly frowned as she drove home. Muriel Dallerton had been an old
+friend of hers, and she really meant to do what she could for her.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+
+    “The sky is not less blue because the blind man cannot see it.”
+
+MURIEL DALLERTON knelt on the floor of a small lodging-house room by the
+fire. It was with evident difficulty that she could make it burn at all,
+for the soot kept rolling down and the chimney threatened to smoke. She
+had not yet accustomed herself to black hands every time she touched the
+shovel.
+
+The worst of it was she expected her uncle and guardian to tea, and she
+had to confess to herself that the prospect was not pleasing.
+
+She had lived with her uncle ever since she had been an orphan at six
+years of age, and she had been sent to an expensive boarding-school and
+been finished in Paris. After three triumphant London seasons, every
+moment of which she had lived through with the same earnest delight that
+was one of her most striking characteristics, she had come to the
+conclusion that in some way or other she was wasting her life.
+
+She had for a whole year tried every way of doing good that was
+compatible with a house full of servants, a stable full of horses, and a
+social position. But at every turn she met with opposition—this, that,
+the other was “not nice”—not “the proper thing”—the horses couldn’t go
+out—what would the servants think—she was upsetting the whole
+house—people would begin to talk. She confessed herself lamentably
+deficient in the sense of what was the proper thing, and on her own side
+she felt she could no longer bear the strain of the double life.
+
+She was needed all day at the club. She had organized games, classes,
+recitations, employments and entertainments for men, women and children,
+and all needed her personal supervision.
+
+It was not that she was not fond of pleasure—she had immense capacities
+for enjoyment. She was known by all her acquaintances as that “radiant
+Miss Dallerton”—only to _live_ for pleasure that was different, and
+little by little she found herself “dropped out.”
+
+Society is very exacting: it demands the whole heart and constant
+attendance at its haunts, so that when Muriel Dallerton finally
+announced her intention of going to live in a model tenement next to her
+club, society was careful to make plain to her that reluctantly, and
+with all due respect for her ten thousand a year, until she returned to
+her senses and her west-end house, society must pass her by on the other
+side. Her uncle, Sir Arthur Dallerton, felt deeply what was generally
+termed her “extraordinary attitude”—it cast a reflection upon him. He
+missed her gracious household ways, the little attentions with which she
+had surrounded him. He had, it is true, neglected her atrociously; but
+up till now she had always, as he framed it, “done her duty by him.” Her
+living away from him was a positive slur.
+
+Sir Arthur Dallerton was coming this afternoon to shake her resolution,
+and he had no doubt whatever of his success.
+
+Muriel tussled with the fire, which finally consented to burn, then she
+rose to her feet, brought out some tea-things, and began to toast a
+muffin.
+
+A bunch of daffodils in a cracked vase did much to improve the
+appearance of the room; a touch here, and there finished it; and she had
+scarcely taken off her outdoor things and washed her hands (very unused
+to the work they had been put to) when a dismal slavey announced, “A
+genelman to see yer, miss,” and backed almost on to the gentleman in
+question, who with an exclamation of disgust pushed past her into the
+room.
+
+“My dear Muriel,” he said, “this is disgraceful!” He paused as she ran
+forward to meet and relieve him of his hat and umbrella. She looked up
+at him, her face beaming with smiles.
+
+“Dear,” she laughed, “did the blackbeetle quite crush you? How horrid!
+But now you’ll sit down here and have some tea. You needn’t insult that
+chair by doubting it. It will bear anything I know—I saw the landlady
+sit on it, and nothing happened!”
+
+Her uncle sat down gingerly. “Were those people,” he said coldly, “down
+in what I can only call a yard—a _yard_, Muriel!—the people you
+imagine you have a mission amongst?”
+
+Muriel poured out the tea. “They look as if they needed it, don’t they,
+dear?” she said, handing him a cup. “There, you’ve got a _whole_ handle,
+and only two chips round the rim! Yes, those were some of my people. I
+hope they weren’t in your way?”
+
+“They are extremely in my way, Muriel—extremely; I may say I am greatly
+inconvenienced by them. I suppose you realize that I am alone in the
+world; and yet you seem to imagine that your duty is to be among these
+unpleasant characters in filthy slums instead of at home looking after
+my comfort.”
+
+Muriel smiled a little to herself as she thought of the array of
+servants the great house held, of the friends and cronies at the club,
+where he spent the greater part of his time. “His comfort!”—surely
+there were enough people in the world already looking after that.
+
+“Uncle Arthur,” she said, “we’ve talked all this out before, haven’t we?
+We don’t see it quite in the same light. I am very sorry you are not
+comfortable. If the servants——”
+
+“Muriel,” he interrupted in a raised voice, “how dare you mention
+servants to me! Do you imagine that when I refer to comfort I mean
+personal attendance? You have never had any heart! Mine has always been
+an essentially affectionate nature. It is domestic companionship that I
+desire; and now that you are of an age to be of some comfort to me, you
+fly off to—Heaven knows where!—and throw me back on the servants!”
+
+Muriel sighed gently and laid her hand on his. “Dear uncle, you have
+always been so good to me. But you see you weren’t always at home, and a
+girl nowadays isn’t satisfied simply in being domestic.”
+
+“I should scarcely have imagined _you_, my niece Muriel, accusing me of
+neglect! You invariably lose your temper upon these subjects, which
+proves that you feel yourself to be in the wrong. You know perfectly
+well that you can have any woman you want to live with you as lady
+companion, but you’re so independent and obstinate——”
+
+“That no one would live with me if you asked them,” she finished
+merrily. “Ah!—but please don’t talk about this any more,” she pleaded
+as he strove to begin again. “We shall never agree! I must have my work
+to do. I cannot be happy without it, and I cannot do it at home. But I
+only ask for nine months of it. It is April now, and in July you shall
+have me back for three whole months, and do just what you like, dear.
+Isn’t that a splendid bargain?”
+
+The tea was very nice, and the buttered muffins especially were done to
+a turn.
+
+Sir Arthur Dallerton crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair
+(forgetful of its former occupant). “My dear,” he said mildly, “what
+will people say? Have you ever thought of that?”
+
+“Yes, dear uncle,” said Muriel, smiling; “I have thought of it, and I
+have come to the conclusion that I had better not think about it any
+more. Won’t you have some more muffin?”
+
+Sir Arthur Dallerton graciously accepted another piece. It did not occur
+to him that Muriel had eaten nothing—those sort of things never did
+occur to him. If it had done so he would have put it down to
+hysteria—the one great refuge for the selfish.
+
+“Mrs. le Mentier,” he pursued, “who is a very sensible woman, told me
+what people were saying, and I think you ought to know of it too.”
+
+Muriel rose and looked out of the window. It was still raining heavily.
+
+“Well?” she said a little wearily.
+
+“They say this is a mere whim of yours to bring Jack Hurstly to book.”
+
+The girl by the window stood quite still. She did not see the children
+in the yard below playing cheerfully in the gutter; she did not even
+notice one of her most hopeful cases reel across the court in a
+condition which would have filled her soul with pity and disgust two
+minutes before. Her uncle thought her cold and indifferent, or possibly
+sullen.
+
+“Yes!” he said bitterly, “that is the sort of thing, Muriel, that your
+conduct forces me to put up with.” Muriel faced him suddenly.
+
+“Mrs. le Mentier,” she said quietly, “is——” she paused, “is very much
+mistaken if she thinks such absurd rumors have power to affect me; and I
+do not think you need be put out by what she says, for nobody who knows
+either Captain Hurstly or myself would believe her.” Her uncle rose to
+his feet.
+
+“You seem to be in a very bad temper, Muriel,” he said. “I knew what
+would be the result of your taking up this work. But it’s very
+depressing to _me_. I shall go home—when you come to a proper frame of
+mind, let me know.” She ran forward and kissed him.
+
+“But _you_ do love me, don’t you?” she whispered.
+
+“Of course, Muriel, if you would only give up your absurd whim.” She
+drew back a little.
+
+“Mind the stairs,” she laughed; “and oh, whatever you do, don’t tread on
+the blackbeetle.” She watched him cross the yard, and bowl off in a
+hansom. Somehow she felt very forlorn and lonely all by herself. She was
+startled to feel a tear-drop on her hand. “Nonsense!” she said; “it’s
+time for the girls’ cooking class!” She gave herself a little shake and
+put on her things.
+
+She found herself saying as she left the room, “If Jack thinks so I’ll
+never, never speak to him again.” She was a little impatient at the
+cooking class.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+
+    “And custom lies upon thee with a weight: heavy as frost, and
+    deep almost as life.”
+
+“YOU are quite right in thinking I care for her, Mrs. Huntly, and have
+done ever since I knew her,” said Jack Hurstly, looking hard at an
+inoffensive poker. “But there’s no doing anything with her. I am not
+earnest enough, it seems. She objects to my club, my sport, and all my
+set. I believe she even objects to my regiment. At any rate she thinks I
+am wasting my time here in England, and ought to be sweating in some
+beastly tropics—Heaven knows why!”
+
+“So you ought, Jack, so you ought,” said Mrs. Huntly soothingly. “Muriel
+is quite right. It’s positively shameful the lives our society young men
+lead. A horse, a gun, a club and a dress-suit, what a catalogue of
+occupations! Can you increase it?”
+
+“Oh, well,” said her companion rather sheepishly, “I’m no worse than the
+other fellows, am I, Mrs. Huntly?”
+
+“My dear Jack, she’s not going to marry the ‘other fellows,’ is she? You
+had better leave them out of the question; and if your ambition is to be
+no worse than they are you had better dispense with Muriel. Go off and
+hunt somewhere, and then come back and marry a girl of your own sort.”
+
+The door opened. “Miss Dallerton” the butler announced. Muriel came
+forward into the middle of the room. There was such a warm, gracious
+dignity about her that people who had little to recommend them but the
+external felt thin in her presence. Mrs. Huntly greeted her warmly. Jack
+said very little, but as his eyes rested on her Mrs. Huntly thought that
+the hunting expedition, if it ever came off, must be a long one.
+
+“I’m so glad, so glad to see you both,” cried Muriel joyously,
+“particularly as you are neither of you going to ask me for soup
+tickets! Dearest Mary, are you really well? And what a comfort it is to
+see a pretty dress! And won’t you please both tell me all about
+everybody, and who has married who, though they ought to have done
+better? I feel so ignorant.” She sat down by Mary Huntly, caressing her
+hand, and looking with glad eyes from one to the other like a child out
+for a holiday.
+
+“Oh, my dear girl,” cried Mrs. Huntly mournfully, “to think that you are
+out of it all! It almost breaks my heart!”
+
+“Mary, how dare you! I came to be pacified, and if I’m reproached I
+shall simply turn tail and run away! You don’t reproach me, do you,
+Captain Hurstly?”
+
+“Perhaps I should like to, if you gave me time,” he said, smiling.
+
+“Oh, but I won’t, not for any such purpose—you shan’t have a moment of
+it. But who is this?” A young girl had entered the room; she was
+dangerously pretty (it is the only adjective one can use), and she was
+perfectly self-possessed. Mrs. Huntly introduced her to them. She was a
+young cousin of hers, Gladys Travers.
+
+Imperceptibly the atmosphere changed. Mrs. Huntly and Muriel drew apart
+from the other two, and Muriel could not help noticing how perfectly
+satisfied Captain Hurstly seemed with his companion, and how well they
+got on together.
+
+When she rose to go Gladys crossed over to her. “May I come to see you,
+Miss Dallerton?” she asked. “I want so much to know about your work, and
+I—I like you so much! Don’t think me frightful. I have lived in the
+States, you know, and people say all Americans are forgiven everything!
+I do really want so much to know you.” She spoke in quick, low tones,
+the expression changing as the shadows on a pool change under a light
+wind. She was very appealing.
+
+“Oh, but it’s dear of you to like me,” said Muriel, smiling. “Please
+come _really_, will you? You will always find me somewhere about the
+club—Mary has the address.”
+
+She turned to Captain Hurstly.
+
+“I am coming with you, if I may,” he said. The two descended to the
+street in silence.
+
+“You’re looking awfully dragged and thin, Miss Muriel,” he said at last.
+
+“You always were so hopelessly rude,” she laughed.
+
+“You know what I think about the whole thing?” he said gravely.
+
+“Ah, it’s _that_ which makes me tired!” she sighed. “All my friends say
+just the same. They won’t think how—how hard they make it for
+me—no—not even you.”
+
+“Even me?” he asked quietly. She bit her lips; she was losing her head
+it seemed; she must not do that.
+
+“I take the ’bus at this corner,” she said.
+
+“I think we’ll go by hansom,” said her escort. She smiled.
+
+“You always _will_ contradict me, Captain Hurstly.”
+
+“You will not contradict _me_ if I remind you that you used to call
+me—Jack?” he ventured.
+
+The hansom drove up, and Muriel put out her hand to him. She
+unmistakably intended to go alone, even though she had let him choose
+her vehicle.
+
+“I may come and see you?” he asked. She frowned a little.
+
+“I’m very busy, you know,” she said.
+
+“Does that mean I’m not to come?”
+
+“You might come,” she suggested suddenly, “and bring Mary’s little
+cousin; she can’t come alone.”
+
+“I can though,” he persisted. She shook her head and laughed merrily.
+
+“Mary’s little cousin,” she said as she drove off, “or not at all!” And
+he never went.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+
+    “What’s the use of crying when the mother that bore ye (Mary,
+    pity women!) knew it all afore ye?”
+
+THE club room, large and bare, with a bench or two and one long table,
+was full of girls, though at first glance you might not have been
+inclined to call them so. They were all so inexpressibly old. As they
+stood talking in groups, large and broad, with their frowsy hair and
+draggle-tailed dresses, lifting loud, rough voices and breaking from
+time to time into hoarse roars of laughter, they could scarcely be
+called prepossessing. These were the girls who had warned a
+simple-minded lady Bible-reader that “if she didn’t tyke ’erself orf
+they’d strip her”—and they would have done it.
+
+As Muriel Dallerton entered the room the whole gang swarmed towards her
+in greeting. They loved her. “She ’adn’t got no nonsense about ’er,”
+“She was a real good sort, and no mistake,” and they showed their
+appreciation of her by rushing from their ten hours’ work into the club
+and paying with treasured pennies the tiny entrance fees she exacted for
+the classes.
+
+To-day was cooking class, and from a great cupboard were drawn two dozen
+aprons, which they themselves had helped to buy and make.
+
+Muriel knew just what wages they had, and never denied them the dignity
+of giving a little, if they had that little to give.
+
+Two long hours’ class followed. To the girls who were accustomed to
+factory work it was mere play, and the pleasure and excitement of seeing
+how Mary Ann’s scones or Minnie Newlove’s pie turned out was
+inexhaustible.
+
+It was not until it was over and the cooking boards and utensils put
+away that Muriel missed one of the number. Lizzie Belk was a girl who
+attended most regularly, and Muriel walked over to her mate to inquire
+after her.
+
+“Mary Ann, where is Lizzie this afternoon?” she asked. There was a
+titter of laughter from the group of girls with her.
+
+“Ye will! will ye!” shrieked Mary Ann in a sudden fury. “I’ll bash yer
+’ead in for ye, Florrie Stevens!” she cried to a girl whose laughter was
+the loudest. “What right ’ave ye to pass it on _my_ mate? I’ll tell ye,
+miss.” She appealed to Muriel. “Florrie’s none so straight as she can
+blacken poor Liz.” Muriel leaned against the table, feeling sick.
+
+“Hush, Mary, you must not talk like that,” she said at last. “What is
+the matter with Lizzie?” There was an uneasy silence. “The rest of you
+can go,” said Muriel. “Good-night, girls, go out quietly, please.” And
+the girls nodding to her in rough good-nature went out leaving her alone
+with Lizzie’s mate.
+
+Muriel crossed to her side and took her hand gently. “Poor Lizzie!” she
+said softly. “Poor, poor Lizzie!” Mary burst into tears.
+
+“’E ’adn’t ought to er done it, miss, ’e really ’adn’t!” she sobbed.
+“She was alwers a straight ’un, was Liz, an’ ’e promised ’er the lines
+an’ all, an’ now——”
+
+“Where is she, Mary?” said Muriel quietly.
+
+“She ain’t got nowheres to go to ’cept the ’orspital. They turned ’er
+off to-day at the factory; an’ ’er father’s beat ’er somethink hawful,
+miss, the blasted, drunken sot!” Muriel still held her hand.
+
+“I think we had better go and find her,” she said.
+
+“Ye won’t ’ave nought to do with the likes o’ ’er, will ye?” asked the
+girl in blank astonishment.
+
+“Yes, Mary; don’t you think Lizzie needs help?”
+
+“She needs it bad, miss.”
+
+“Then that’s what we’re going to give her,” said Muriel firmly. Mary
+still stood where she was.
+
+“Ye—ye won’t be rough on her, miss?” she begged in shamefaced tones.
+“’E treated ’er cruel bad.”
+
+“No, Mary, I won’t be rough on her. I’m not angry at all, only so _very,
+very_ sorry. It’s such a dreadful thing, isn’t it? Poor Lizzie, we must
+do all we can for her.” Mary’s big hand tightened over the slender
+fingers of their “wonderful lady,” who seemed to understand without
+being told, and never said more than she meant to do.
+
+They went out into the streets together. Lizzie was not hard to find.
+She was in a deserted yard near the factory, among heaps of refuse and
+mouldered iron. She had cried till she could cry no more, and lay in a
+sort of hopeless apathy, with wide, dull eyes staring straight in front
+of her. Muriel knelt down by her side, and Mary, with the unobtrusive
+delicacy many of the poorest have, turned away for a little.
+
+“Lizzie,” said Muriel, as if she were speaking to a little child,
+“Lizzie, I want you to come with me.”
+
+“Oh, my God!” said the girl. “Oh, my God!”
+
+“You will come, won’t you, Lizzie?” She put out her hand.
+
+“Don’t you dare touch me!” wailed the girl. “Who brought ye ’ere? Ye
+don’t know what I am. Oh, my God! my God!”
+
+“I know all about it, Lizzie, and you must get up now and come with me.”
+
+“They shan’t tyke me to the ’orspital, I tell yer—no, nor hanywheres.
+’Ome? I daren’t show my fice there! D’ye see my harm an’ my ’ead? Father
+did that, an’ ’e said ’e’d kill me if I was to come back! Oh, let me
+alone! Why don’t ye let me alone?”
+
+“Get up, Lizzie,” said Muriel, rising briskly to her feet. “Get up at
+once. I am not going to take you either home or to the hospital. You are
+coming back with Mary and me to the club, and I shall find a room for
+you in my lodgings.”
+
+“Oh, now, Liz, do come, lovey, do come!” Mary urged. Lizzie rose dizzily
+to her feet, and between the two they got her back somehow—first to the
+club, and when they had fed her they took her to a room next Muriel’s.
+
+The landlady did not say much. “If the young lydy choose to look hafter
+the likes o’ ’er, well an’ good, if not she could not stiy, of course.”
+But the young lady did choose to look after her, and to pay double for
+the room as well, so there was no more to be said.
+
+It was a terrible night. Muriel never forgot it. She sat there holding
+the girl’s hand and hearing the whole story—the old, old story, told in
+all its crude, black reality between gasping sobs.
+
+“’E said as ’ow I should ’ave my lines,” she groaned; “an’ now ’e says
+we’d starve. But I shouldn’t care for that, miss—no, I shouldn’t, if
+honly they couldn’t call me——”
+
+“No, dear, no! they shan’t call you that,” Muriel murmured. “What is his
+name, Lizzie?”
+
+“Oh, ’e ’adn’t er ought to a treated me so—Gawd knows ’ow I loves ’im!
+No!—I can’t tell ye ’is name, dear miss—don’t hask it!”
+
+“But you must tell me, Lizzie.”
+
+“Not if I was to die for it, miss!”
+
+“If you tell me I can help you, Lizzie, perhaps to—to get your lines.”
+
+“Oh, miss, ’e’d never forgive me!”
+
+“Then I can do nothing, Lizzie.”
+
+The girl sobbed afresh. Muriel rose and went to the window. Out of the
+dark clouds the stars peeped timorously, as if afraid to look down on
+the sad, sordid world beneath. A church clock chimed the hour—twelve
+o’clock—and from the public-house across the way a burst of brawling
+voices broke. It was illegal she thought to close so late.
+
+The candle on the washstand flickered miserably. She went back to the
+bedside, and with careful, tender hands put back the heavy hair and
+sponged away the tears.
+
+“Lizzie,” she said, and it seemed to her as if the whole of London stood
+still to listen, “there is some one I love with all my heart—I—I think
+I could forgive him anything.” She drew in her breath with a long gasp.
+“Now—won’t you tell me his name, Lizzie?” she pleaded. The two women
+looked at each other. The girl raised herself on her elbow and stared as
+if she were weighing the soul of the other woman (she had forgotten she
+was a lady). At last she sank back satisfied. “If she had a man,” Lizzie
+thought, “she might understand.”
+
+“It’s—it’s Hobbs—Dick Hobbs,” she said. “Ye won’t be ’ard on ’im,
+miss. They can’t ’elp it, can they? Not as I knows on—an’ hanyway
+’twere all my fault, I think.”
+
+“I—I won’t be hard on him, Lizzie.” The tears were rolling down her
+cheeks. “And now I’ll put out this light, and you’ll go to sleep, won’t
+you? And to-morrow I’ll see Dick and get a license, and—and
+everything.”
+
+“Oh, miss!” cried the girl—“not my lines?”
+
+“Yes, Lizzie! If you’re a good girl and go to sleep you shall have your
+lines to show.” Muriel left her. When she came back a few minutes later
+she found the exhausted girl fast asleep; her face was red and swollen
+still with crying, but there was a happy smile on her lips. She was only
+seventeen.
+
+“And there are thousands like this—thousands,” thought Muriel. “God
+forgive us our blindness and their pain.”
+
+Suddenly she felt very faint and dizzy. She remembered she had had
+nothing to eat since her tea with Mary Huntly. She covered her face with
+her hands, for she realized more overwhelmingly than ever that she could
+never marry Jack Hurstly. But though she had cried for the other girl,
+no tears came now.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+
+        “My God, I would not live, save that I think this gross,
+          hard-seeming world
+        Is our misshapen vision of the Powers behind the world that make
+          our griefs our gains.”
+
+A BROAD-BUILT, hulking fellow with a coarse, brutal face shouldered his
+way towards Muriel. It was one of the men’s evenings, and she had
+dropped in a moment to speak to the superintendent, and to give one of
+the men something to take home to his sick wife. When the man reached
+her she led him to a quiet corner of the room. She had never felt afraid
+yet, nor did she feel so now; only as she looked at the flushed,
+scowling face she felt a little hopeless.
+
+“They said as ’ow you wanted to speak to me, miss.”
+
+“Yes, Dick, I do.” She paused, wondering how best to make her appeal to
+him—where in fact was that spark of the Divine she so passionately
+believed in, so seldom touched, yet trusted that she touched more often
+than she knew. “Lizzie is with me, Dick,” she said at last. “Do you
+think that you have treated her quite fairly?” The scowl changed to a
+senseless, meaning smile. Muriel felt her eyes flash, but she had
+herself well in hand. “Do you think it is quite a brave, manly thing to
+do,” she asked with slow, quiet intensity, “to ruin a girl’s life—a
+girl you pretend to care for—who has trusted in you? Would you not be
+ashamed of breaking your word to another man? Yet you seem to think it
+no great harm to betray a woman! A woman like Lizzie too, who is only a
+child after all, and who kept so straight. She is very ill indeed, Dick,
+and when—when the child is born I think she will die. Wouldn’t you call
+a man who had behaved so to your sister a—a murderer?” The man’s sullen
+eyes were fixed on the floor; he shifted awkwardly from one leg to the
+other.
+
+“I don’t see has ye ’ave hany call to speak to me like that, miss. I
+ain’t no worse than the other chaps I knows on. I’d like to do fair by
+Liz, but I ain’t earning enough to keep a wife.”
+
+“You should have thought of that before you made Lizzie a mother,” said
+Muriel sternly. “And now you will leave her alone to starve,” she added
+with quiet scorn, “after having taken away her only chance of earning
+her living, and—and having done the very worst you could.”
+
+The man said nothing; his face was heavy with inarticulate rage; she
+felt that he wanted intensely to knock her down. One of his mates
+remarked to a group of men that “’Obbs looked horful hugly.” It did not
+occur to him though to walk away. Suddenly her voice softened.
+
+“Dick,” she said, “you’re not that sort of man at all—you know you are
+not. You hadn’t thought of it before—that was all, wasn’t it? You
+didn’t mean to harm poor Lizzie so. And she loves you, Dick—she wasn’t
+a bit angry with you—she doesn’t blame you at all.” (It had not exactly
+occurred to the man that she did. It was a new idea to him that she had
+a right to.)
+
+“And—and so I can tell her that you _want_ to marry her—will marry her
+at once, Dick, won’t you, before—before it’s too late? You will let me
+tell her that, won’t you?” Still no answer. “I trust you,” she said
+softly; “I feel so sure that you have the makings of a good man.”
+
+His eyes were glued on the floor. He felt more bewildered than angry,
+and still obstinately clung to silence, which could not, as he phrased
+it, “let him in for anything.”
+
+Muriel took a rose she was wearing. With a sudden impulse she held it
+out to him. “I gave Lizzie one,” she said gently, “one like this. Would
+you like to wear it?” It seemed easier to take it than to speak, but
+somehow he was impelled to look at her. Her eyes were fastened on him
+with a look he never forgot—grave, earnest, truthful—as if she had
+weighed his soul and was simply waiting for the proof of her judgment.
+
+A voice he scarcely recognized for his own growled, “Well, then, what if
+I does?”
+
+“Thank God!” she murmured softly. “Thank God!” He waited for his answer.
+She smiled at him so wonderfully that he felt the tears rise to his
+eyes. Her own eyes swam in them. “I will help you all I can,” she said.
+“Now come with me to Lizzie.” He followed unwillingly.
+
+The men by the door shouted something after him as he passed. He did not
+hear. He followed her clumsily with creaking boots into a room that
+resembled nothing he had ever seen before, though it was simply
+furnished; and sitting in a large chair by the fire was Lizzie. Her eyes
+were fastened on the door with a dumb, questioning look. She moved her
+lips as if they were dry. Then she saw him.
+
+“Oh, my man! my man!” she cried. Muriel shut the door quietly, and left
+them alone together. She felt suddenly as if she could never feel
+hopeless again.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+
+
+    “The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.”
+
+    “YOU have not come to see me for some time, Jack, yet we used to
+    be good friends once, didn’t we? One seems to have one’s seasons
+    for those kind of things, then they drop out. With sleeves, you
+    know, one mustn’t keep the fashion on a bit too long. I have
+    known dressmakers—but I won’t trouble you with my philosophy. I
+    am going to have dear Mrs. Huntly and a charming cousin of hers
+    to dinner, and so thought you might, perhaps, care to join us,
+    though I’m candid enough to admit I hope it will not be merely
+    for the charming cousin’s sake.
+
+                                                “EDITH LE MENTIER.”
+
+Jack Hurstly read the note, written on rich, heavy cream, a tiny,
+definite hand between large margins. It all seemed very familiar to him.
+Three years ago there used to be a drawer full of them, though he had
+burned them of course, he remembered, after the scene in the garden. It
+had all been very graceful and harmless, and he had immensely admired
+and pitied her with her dense husband, who shattered her dainty little
+subtleties with a heavy word or two, and “called things,” as she
+plaintively remarked to Jack, “by their proper names, as if things,” she
+had added, “should ever be called by names at all, and least of all by
+their right ones.”
+
+Then he had met Muriel. He thought of that first evening, and of her
+frank, disarming look, and of how she not only did not say things she
+did not mean, but actually went so far as to say the things she did.
+
+It was a change from a little winding stream now here, now there, to a
+free, open lake with its clear reflection from the sky.
+
+It was natural that after this should come the scene in the garden; what
+he could not understand was this little dinner three years afterwards.
+
+Curiosity and Muriel’s wilful remoteness prompted him to accept the
+invitation; but he did so formally.
+
+Edith, when she read his letter, broke into a little laugh.
+
+“A joke, my dear?” her husband asked, looking over his newspaper across
+the breakfast table.
+
+“Certainly not, Ted,” said Edith; “I should never dream of laughing at a
+joke at breakfast time!” Her husband returned to his sporting
+notes—they seemed to him so much easier to understand.
+
+Mrs. le Mentier prepared to meet her guests by dressing in Jack
+Hurstly’s favorite color. It happened to be the one which suited her;
+but it is possible she would have worn it if it had not. It takes a
+woman longer than three years to forget a man’s favorite colors, and
+longer still not to wear them when she remembers.
+
+Gladys Travers was the first to arrive, with Mary Huntly’s brother, a
+deeply earnest young clergyman with thoughtful eyes. “Cyril had to bring
+me,” she said, smiling, “because Mary had a headache, one of those
+horrid dark-room ones, you know, with tea and toast. I don’t believe he
+quite approves though of dinner parties, do you, Cyril?” Mrs. le Mentier
+shook hands with him sympathetically.
+
+“I know quite well what you feel,” she said in her slow, gentle voice.
+“It’s the herding together of rich people to eat brilliantly, while all
+the great half of the world have no brilliance and no dinner, and I
+think it is so good of you to come. I’ve only just _really_ one or two
+to-night, so I hope you won’t find us very worldly.”
+
+Cyril Johnstone had blushed at his cousin’s speech, but now that his
+hostess paused he said gently, “Mary was so very sorry she could not
+come.”
+
+“Dear Mary,” Edith murmured as she glided across the room to welcome two
+men who had entered at the same time—Jack Hurstly and a young doctor, a
+man of good family and even better brains. “How good of you to come,
+doctor!” said she, her eyes sparkling their most vivid welcome. “One
+feels,” she said, turning to the young clergyman, “with busy men like
+you what a debt of gratitude one owes. Now you, Captain Hurstly,” she
+added (for the first time addressing Jack), “had, I am sure, nothing to
+give up?”
+
+“Everything to attract, certainly,” said Jack with a smile at Gladys,
+who was glancing with laughing, observant eyes from one to the other.
+
+Dinner was announced, and Edith, taking the young priest’s arm, followed
+the rest of the party. She was thinking it extremely stupid of dear Mary
+to have a dark-room headache, and she was talking to Mr. Johnstone on
+the marvellous utility of Bands of Hope.
+
+“Yes,” she said, glancing over the flower-decked table, “it’s the name
+itself. Hope! What a lot it calls up, doesn’t it? Spring mornings, one
+imagines, and skies too blue to deny one anything. There’s something in
+the word which makes one think of waves.”
+
+“Because they break themselves on the rocks?” suggested Gladys, “or
+cover quicksands?”
+
+“It’s a word,” said the doctor, smiling, “with a very expansive meaning,
+and a use even more expanded than its meaning.”
+
+Mr. Johnstone looked across to Mrs. le Mentier. “It’s one of the
+cardinal virtues,” he said gently.
+
+“And they,” said his cousin, looking at Jack, “always close a
+conversation, because you see it’s so inconvenient to have to take off
+one’s shoes.”
+
+Mr. Johnstone looked shocked, and Edith started another subject.
+
+“My husband,” she said, “is away—fishing, I think it is. He has, poor
+man, a deadly feud against all animal nature, and he spends his time
+trying to exterminate it. I must confess it seems to me rather a
+hopeless quest.”
+
+“Don’t you English say,” asked Gladys of the doctor, “that it’s
+strengthening to the character?”
+
+The doctor smiled. “More to the muscles than to the character, I should
+fancy,” he said.
+
+“But isn’t it one of your tests of a character,” she persisted, “in
+England that it should _have_ fine muscles?” The conversation became
+international. Edith watched, but took no part; she was listening to
+Jack, who was not talking to her.
+
+He was instead appealing to Cyril Johnstone. “Are you at all
+interested,” he asked, “in those slum clubs?” The priest’s face
+brightened.
+
+“Immensely,” he said. “My work is there, you know, and so I have seen a
+good deal of them. But of course you refer to those under parochial
+guidance?”
+
+“Captain Hurstly,” Mrs. le Mentier broke in, “is referring, I feel sure,
+to the sweetest free-lance in the world, a dear friend of ours who has
+thought it her duty to disassociate herself from her home, and even to a
+certain extent from the Church, because she thinks she can, as the
+phrase goes, ‘reach nearer to the people’s hearts’ that way. You’ll
+admit it’s heroically brave of her. People’s hearts give one such shocks
+when one _does_ get near them.”
+
+“A case of hysteria,” murmured the doctor under his breath, “in its most
+patent modern form.”
+
+Gladys glanced lightly at Jack Hurstly; then she said in a sweet,
+penetrating voice, “There you are wrong, doctor. Muriel is the most
+healthy-minded girl I know.”
+
+“Her hysteria may be confined to one form,” he ventured.
+
+“Ah, but you should see her!” said Gladys. Here the voice of Cyril
+Johnstone broke in.
+
+“It seems to me,” he exclaimed, “the saddest thing in the world and the
+most useless. There has been too much talk about the people’s hearts,
+too many missions of sentimental women. What can they give the people?
+Their need, their crying need, is for the cultivation of the soul, and
+it is we—set apart as God’s ministers—who are called upon, and to whom
+alone rightly belongs the unspeakable privilege and duty of serving the
+poor!”
+
+Mrs. le Mentier looked gravely devotional and stifled a yawn.
+
+Jack Hurstly looked at Gladys, who again meeting his look broke out into
+a defence.
+
+“And while the Low and the High, the Broad and the Long (if there _are_
+any long, or if they aren’t all long), quarrel as to who shall help the
+poor, and how they shall be dressed to do it, what are the poor going to
+do? And why shouldn’t a woman, or even a man for that matter, go down
+among them and teach them how to live? What kind of souls are you going
+to teach in wretchedly uncultivated bodies, cousin Cyril? And if you
+believe in clubs, why aren’t you thankful for their work, even if the
+clergy are not asked to take Bible classes in them? As for Muriel and
+her poor, she’s taught them how to smile, and I actually heard one of
+them say ‘Thank you’ the other day. I don’t believe an archbishop could
+do as much even with his robes on.”
+
+Mr. Johnstone opened his mouth to answer her tirade; but Jack Hurstly,
+who had been listening delightedly, clapped his hands and laughed, and
+he felt that it was impossible to argue against a joke. Mrs. le Mentier
+rose to her feet smiling. She felt that her dinner had not helped her
+much; and she did not love Gladys.
+
+“Let us leave the gentlemen alone, dear,” she said, “to discuss our
+short-comings and their dominion. It’s an entrancing subject, I
+believe—when you can have it all your own way.”
+
+The two women floated gracefully out of the room. They were rejoined
+very shortly by the men, whom it is presumed found their points of view
+on “the entrancing subject” too different for prolonged discussion.
+Gladys and the doctor stood out on the balcony.
+
+The balmy June evening filled with the noises of the streets below
+seemed very soothing to them, and their talk interested both immensely,
+so much so that they did not hear Mrs. le Mentier preparing to sing, and
+only ceased when her low, sweet voice rang out, “Life and the world and
+mine ownself are changed for a dream’s sake—for a dream’s sake.”
+
+It was a simple song, but she sung it with a quiet passion and intensity
+that entirely captivated her audience. When the song was over they were
+not ready with their applause, and even the doctor looked as if he had
+met an ideal. Edith sang again, and they went home, all but Jack
+Hurstly. “I must speak to you a minute, Jack,” his hostess had murmured
+as he turned over the leaves of her music, and for the song’s sake he
+stayed.
+
+She stood in the middle of the room, her hands held loosely in front of
+her, like a child’s. “Haven’t you punished me long enough—Jack?” she
+asked.
+
+“My dear Mrs. le Mentier,” he began.
+
+“Ah!” she murmured, “Mrs. le Mentier! Mrs.—le Mentier—Jack!”
+
+He had before wished that he had never come; there seemed now nothing
+else to do but to wish it more strongly. She looked so young and
+piteous, and her eyes were full of a real emotion. The only ways left
+were to be weak or brutal. The last alternative would end the scene
+quicker.
+
+“It doesn’t seem much good, does it,” he finally said, “to go over all
+this again?”
+
+She smiled wistfully. “Is it all over then for you?” she asked. “Do you
+know, it was silly of me, wasn’t it? I somehow thought you might still
+be the same, and the three years’ penance enough for the past mistake?”
+She spoke with a kind of strained slowness very pitiful to hear.
+
+“Things have changed so!” he muttered.
+
+“Things?” she laughed. “How a man falls back on the inanimate! Things
+don’t change, my dear Jack, but women grow older and men grow
+wiser—that’s all. Let me congratulate you then on your increase of
+wisdom, and you will be a little sorry—for my increasing age?” He
+frowned and looked at the door; she winced as if he had struck her. “You
+want to go?” she said. “Well, there’s one thing, my dear Jack, for you
+to remember. If you should get tired of your sweet firebrand in the
+slums, ‘things have not changed,’ you will remember, won’t you? And
+women don’t—so the way is still open.”
+
+He stepped past her to the door, but he turned back to look at her (he
+often turned back). She was twisting her fan in her hands and trying to
+smile.
+
+“You can always come back,” she said.
+
+“Oh! I’m not such a brute as that!” exclaimed the man at the door.
+
+“Oh, aren’t you?” she laughed. “You have your limits, then? I’m so glad!
+And you had better go now, for I have mine too.”
+
+When the door closed firmly after him limits seemed to dissolve. She put
+the fan down carefully on the table, and she looked at her miserable
+face in the glass with a vague, ulterior satisfaction, for even if one’s
+heart was broken it was something of a comfort that one looked
+distinctly pretty in tears.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VII
+
+
+    “So long as we know not what it opens, nothing can be more
+    beautiful than a key.”
+
+THE short June days soon came to an end, and Muriel found them none too
+short, for warmth can only be enjoyed by the luxurious, and her life at
+present was anything but that.
+
+If one plunged into the work and life of the people it needed strength
+both of will and body to carry one through its disillusions.
+
+There was nothing in the least exciting in the work before her—it was
+merely very hard. Occasionally it was true the great opportunity would
+arise, as it had done in the case of poor Liz. But next to their
+extraordinary infrequency came the swiftness with which all the
+greatness evaporated: their very sins were so matter-of-fact, and the
+larger elements in life were taken so unpicturesquely that they seemed
+shorn of their solemnity, and then strangely robbed of all “the trailing
+clouds” of mystery. When a widow spoke of her dead husband as “’E made a
+beautiful corpse, ’e did—yer ought to er seen ’im, miss,” the word died
+on her lips, and to look at a dead baby as being “one less mouth to
+feed,” jarred on all her tender notes of sympathy by the crudity of its
+truth.
+
+Muriel wrote to Gladys, who, strange to say, had come to see her alone,
+not once but often, that she had never known “death could be vulgar
+before;” and, though she felt very worried at the thought of shutting up
+the club for three months, she confessed to herself her heart rose at
+the thought of the long, easy luxury of house-parties, country days, and
+even a glimpse of the sea. People, too, who said a little more—and
+meant a little less—she looked forward to meeting with a positive sense
+of rest. Clear black and white were rather glaring she thought, and how
+life was mellowed by a little mist! Jack Hurstly had never been to see
+her. She had heard of him occasionally from Gladys.
+
+Sir Arthur wished her to come at once to Blacklands, a house in a
+beautiful vicinity, not too far from the conveniences of life; and
+towards the end of July, very tired and fagged, Muriel packed up her
+things to go. There were many good-byes to be said, but they were all
+over now with the exception of Liz—Liz and the baby. She had not seen
+either of them lately. As she knocked at the door she heard the long,
+fretful wail of a sick child, and then the ungracious tones of a woman’s
+voice.
+
+“Ah, it’s you, is it?” she added shrilly as Muriel entered. “I thought
+you had given us the slip. No, I ain’t been comin’ to the club, nor I
+don’t mean to—nor Dick neither, we ’ave ’ad enough of it, we ’ave.”
+
+Muriel showed no surprise. She sat down and looked at the poor little
+baby tossing disconsolately on its mother’s lap.
+
+“Isn’t he well?” she asked.
+
+“No, ’e ain’t,” said Liz more gently; “’e do take on somethink hawful in
+this ’eat. ’E cries all night, and Dick won’t come nigh ’im. I’d a been
+a deal better off without ’im, that’s what I’d a been. What’s the use o’
+a ’usband who drinks all ’e earns? ’E don’t do _me_ no good, and I don’t
+do ’im no good—we’re better apart.” She looked at Muriel viciously in
+her increasing anger and fear, turning on the first object she met.
+
+“You’re very tired, Lizzie,” she said gently, “and very hot. Have you
+been sitting up all night with baby?”
+
+“I don’t keep no nurse!”
+
+“Poor little thing,” said Muriel, holding out her arms for it; “poor
+little dear.”
+
+“’E’ll crease your pretty skirt.” Muriel laughed.
+
+“Now, tell me,” she said, “what do you mean about Dick. Is he really
+taking to drink?”
+
+Lizzie forgot her resentment and poured out her troubles, and so again
+the woman in Muriel conquered. Yet she knew that there would be no
+gratitude for what she did. Lizzie only envied her—“her pretty frock.”
+
+She wrote to her uncle promising to go down the next day. Muriel arrived
+at Blacklands to be met by the footman and a carriage. The trappings of
+a luxury she had spurned seemed at present very grateful to her. They
+belonged, she realized, to a class of things one does not actually need,
+and yet seems to miss more than even the necessities. As she drove
+comfortably through the village she was possessed by a complete set of
+new faculties. All her old fund of light-hearted laughter sprang again
+within her; her quick, observant eyes (which she had used more lately to
+ignore than to observe) found beauties at every turn. She felt a desire
+to sketch two cottages half lost in honeysuckle planted with the most
+perfect effect of naturalness under the old tower of the ivy-covered
+church. The churchyard seemed the most perfectly restful thing she had
+ever seen. She longed to pick the hedge flowers; to let the wind blow
+about her hair, with no restraining erection to keep it in place; to
+walk barefoot across the cool, green fields; to hunt for birds’ nests in
+the wood; to climb the hills at sunset time—in short, a passion of
+longing to come near to Nature held her; to forget all the many
+inventions of the clever, brutal, unscrupulous mind of man; to be once,
+for however little time, one with the world as “God has made it.” She
+found herself taking off her gloves, and at that moment the carriage
+swept up the drive of a large old house, with an exterior too ancient to
+be quarrelled with, and an interior too full of the best of modern
+“improvements” to be in the least appropriate.
+
+Gladys was standing on the steps. She held Muriel in her arms. On the
+younger girl’s face there was an almost passionate welcome, and she
+tried to hide her eagerness in laughter, chatting in graceful snatches
+over a thousand little nothings as the two girls went to their rooms.
+“Did Muriel know that there was no one there but themselves?—everybody
+was coming down to-morrow. Yes, that abominable little flirt, Edith le
+Mentier, and her husband with his exquisite stupidity, a cloak which
+covered all his other sins—in the eyes of his wife at least. Mary
+Huntly, too, not Tom—he couldn’t. These business men really worked; but
+Muriel was a business woman, wasn’t she—the dear Muriel.” Muriel
+declared she only worked for the sake of enjoying laziness. They went
+down to tea. “That doctor, too,” Gladys continued, “with an advanced
+sister with red hair, cigarette and a bull-dog—at least I think it’s a
+bull-dog.”
+
+“Of course it is,” laughed Muriel. “You must retain something, however
+far you advance, and the bull-dog does that for you.”
+
+“The doctor overworked, you know; and the sister’s devoted. Then there’s
+Captain Hurstly, of course!”
+
+“Why of course?” said Muriel quietly.
+
+“Oh, well——” Gladys stopped, “don’t you want him?”
+
+“No, my dear, I don’t.”
+
+“Your uncle thought——”
+
+“Oh, when he thinks,” laughed Muriel, lifting her shoulders.
+
+“And there’s a friend of his——”
+
+“My uncle’s?”
+
+“Silly!—Captain Hurstly’s—a Sir Somebody Bruce.”
+
+“Alec?” suggested Muriel, quietly selecting some seed-cake. “I know him
+well.”
+
+“Do you?” said Gladys, “I scarcely know him at all. What did you think
+of him?” Her little air of indifference was beautiful. Muriel sighed.
+
+“He’s like the rest,” she said wearily. “Splendid, capable,
+broad-shouldered and—useless. I think if I were a man like that I
+should use my talent as a good shot for personal purposes; it would seem
+to me less wasteful.”
+
+“Oh, but, Muriel, we girls we’re none of us any better. You, dearest,
+you’re different. And in America I was different too. There’s so little
+strain in being happy there—so little waste in pleasure. The rush of
+life, its width and lack of limits, is a continual occupation; but here
+there are too many women. Some of them must be old maids. It’s like the
+game of musical chairs. They none of them, you see, want to be left out,
+so they take the first place vacant. They have an eye on their
+opportunities; they make efforts to attain, and a masterly mamma backs
+them. When you come to think of it—their training, their suppression!
+You can’t wonder they take their first opening. But for women to be
+hunters—forgive the naked, cruel term, darling—is repulsive. Oh, if I
+had a daughter I should drown her, or bring her up to something more
+worth living for!”
+
+She walked about the room putting this and that to rights. The housemaid
+had done it before her, but the quick, nervous movements delivered her
+of the tension she seemed under.
+
+“Something’s very badly wrong,” thought Muriel, and aloud she suggested
+the garden.
+
+The birds were making twilight magical on the velvet lawn. They sat
+breathing in the soft, rich air, heavy with the scent of summer flowers,
+too utterly at peace with Nature and the restful spell she can throw at
+moments over the most tortured hearts to do more than hush themselves
+into silence.
+
+Muriel was the first to speak. She remembered long afterwards how
+startling her voice sounded.
+
+“You have something to ask me?”
+
+“Ah!—no, no.”
+
+“Something to tell me?”
+
+“It’s hard—oh, Muriel, dearest—dearest, it’s hard!” cried Gladys.
+
+“Hard things are sometimes better shared,” said Muriel.
+
+“The hardest and the dearest sometimes can’t be,” Gladys sighed. “What
+can I do?” she added miserably. “It’s so old and stale, just the eternal
+wrong situations Nature pulls about so, or man gets twisted into! Mary,
+my cousin, you know, wants me—wants me to marry. I’m dependent on her,
+you see, since father failed in the States. They had me educated in
+England, and they ruined that for me—the steady setness that might have
+helped me now—by the wildest three years in America. Sixteen!—and
+their world without barriers, where everybody wants you to have a good
+time! No, I’m not crying—not for that. It lasted three years, and after
+the smash they sent me here. Mary doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m
+not her sort—I’m always getting into scrapes. I seem to have got into
+the nursery again, where there is nothing but corners. I’m in leading
+strings to a—maid. There’s only one way out of my nursery, Mary
+says—Muriel, it’s open now—but I almost think I’d rather throw myself
+out of the window than make use of it.”
+
+Muriel looked at her. “And is there no other door?” she asked gently.
+
+“Ah! not mine—somebody else’s, and—they’ve got the key.”
+
+“Where does it lead to?” Muriel asked.
+
+“I—I don’t know. The most beautiful place in the world, I fancy; but if
+it was a wilderness it would be the only way for me!” Timidly Gladys put
+out her hands, and Muriel held them, drawing the girl closer to her. She
+asked with wonderful mother-eyes the question no words could draw from
+her.
+
+“Yes,” she said at last, “people made a mistake when they thought the
+world was large. It’s very small—one woman’s heart can hold the whole
+of it.”
+
+“Muriel,” the other gasped, “Muriel, do you care for him?”
+
+“For Alec Bruce, dear child? No!” Suddenly her hands grew cold, a fear
+seized her, cutting her breath short and making the silence strangely
+empty. “You don’t mean him?” she asked very slowly as if she were just
+learning to talk. The girl shook her head. “You mean Jack Hurstly?”
+pursued Muriel gently inexorable. The girl caught her hands away and
+covered her face.
+
+“Oh, Muriel! Muriel!” she sobbed. “I don’t—I don’t care for him.”
+
+“Neither do I,” said Muriel very coldly.
+
+“Don’t you?—don’t you?” the girl exclaimed, her eyes shining like stars
+through a cloud. “Then, oh, dearest—my dearest, give me the key!”
+
+Muriel stood quite still smiling. She felt as if she were having a
+photograph taken; she must not move; she must try to look
+pleasant—that’s what they call it. She was still so long that Gladys
+looked up in wonder. The elder girl drew her into her arms.
+
+“It will be sure to come out well,” she murmured. Then aloud: “Little
+darling, you have always had the key—mine was only a skeleton one, and,
+Gladys, I never could have used it.” The girl clung to her shivering
+with joy.
+
+“Then, after all, you do care for him a little?” Muriel said tenderly.
+Gladys lifted up her eyes. They seemed much older—they were so happy
+and so sure.
+
+“I told you there was only the one way—the one way in all God’s earth
+for me. I think I should have thrown myself out of the window if you
+hadn’t given me the key!”
+
+“Oh, don’t!” cried Muriel half sobbing.
+
+Gladys smiled. “Dearest, you don’t understand—you see you don’t care
+for him as I do!” she said.
+
+“No,” repeated Muriel very slowly and carefully, “I don’t quite
+understand—you see I don’t—don’t care for him. Do you know, little
+dear, it’s getting rather chilly. Hadn’t we better go in and dress for
+dinner?”
+
+“Oh, to think of dinner!” laughed Gladys. “How we do mix things, don’t
+we? It’s too terribly material.”
+
+But of the two she had the better appetite. Muriel had never lied
+before, and she found it very tiring.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+    “A self-sacrifice that is thorough must never pause.”
+
+“Sunday,” said Edith le Mentier, lazily swaying her parasol, “does my
+religion for me. When I hear the sweet church bells chiming over the
+cow-laden fields I say to myself this is a Christian country. Cows and a
+church—certainly I, too, must be a Christian.”
+
+“And your responsibility ends there?” asked Gladys, who with others of
+the party was dressed to go to the little church across the fields.
+
+“My responsibility, my dear, er—Miss Gladys—as you so deliciously call
+it, is never at work in that sphere. No! I recognize it at my
+dressmaker’s; I am crushed under it in shops; I frequently come face to
+face with it in the choice of a cook. Beyond this,” Mrs. le Mentier put
+out a dainty foot under a frilled petticoat, “beyond this I am a
+rational being—that is, whenever it is possible I persuade some one
+else to do my effort-making for me. Captain Hurstly, I want a footstool;
+dear, delightful creatures, do go and do my praying for me; Sir Arthur,”
+here she put her head graciously towards their slightly embarrassed
+host, “is going to stay to keep me company.”
+
+“Delighted, I am sure,” murmured Sir Arthur, handing Gladys’ prayer-book
+which he had been carrying to the doctor, who stood grimly and
+uncompromisingly silent. It was natural that after that Gladys and Dr.
+Grant should walk together and Muriel find herself with Jack Hurstly.
+Cynthia Grant, the doctor’s sister, had not yet returned from a visit to
+the stables with Sir Alec. Muriel had not seen Jack for some time. He
+was always large and masterful (in the most calmly protective meaning of
+the word), but there was to-day a certain alertness and unobtrusive
+eagerness in his manner that was new to her. They knew each other well
+enough to be able to float off easily into commonplace chatter. It paved
+the way for all the important things which lost their stiffness by being
+set in a background of familiar banter.
+
+“I’m having a holiday,” said Jack, smiling down at her oddly.
+
+“You a holiday! You look terribly as if you needed it!” she laughed.
+
+“I’ve been working rather hard, really,” he said.
+
+“Fishing is over?” she asked.
+
+“Oh, Miss Muriel, but I’ve had a harder job to tackle. I’ve been trying
+to get the place at home in decent order—getting cottages built and all
+that sort of thing.”
+
+“You were always so practical,” she murmured.
+
+“Because, you see, the place has been a little weedy lately, and as I am
+to be off again soon I wanted to leave it in order before I went.”
+
+“Hunting big game?” she suggested indifferently.
+
+“Well—yes, rather. You see there’s been a little scrapping in India on
+the frontier, and—well, I thought it would be rather jolly to have a
+shot at the little beggars myself. You see the regiment being at
+Aldershot a fellow hasn’t got much to do, and so I have
+joined—temporarily, of course—a batch of men who are going out in
+September. Do you wish me luck?”
+
+“Your occupations,” said Muriel coldly, “always seem to me a little
+brutal.” Then she glanced more kindly at him.
+
+He was disconsolately grumbling, “Oh, I say now!” and cutting the heads
+off the nettles with his stick. They were nearing the church.
+
+“Oh, I hope, Jack,” she used the name with her old deliberate frankness,
+looking him in the eyes, steadily and kindly, “that you will have the
+best of luck. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you set to work
+again, and make something of all that’s in you—all I know that’s in
+you.”
+
+He beamed with pleasure, though he was still a little puzzled at her
+former sharpness. “It’s awfully good of you, Miss Muriel,” he said,
+opening the gate; “and you—you must know that if I am worth anything at
+all it’s all owing to you. And now that you say you believe in me,” he
+drew a long breath, “I think I could do anything—anything in the world
+to show you you’re not mistaken.”
+
+Muriel said nothing. When they reached the porch she turned to him, and
+not looking at him said slowly, “I am quite sure I am not mistaken,
+Jack.”
+
+The church was cold and dark after the bright sunshine in the fields. In
+the church she remembered Gladys, and forgot to listen to the sermon.
+She and the doctor walked back together and quarrelled all the way.
+
+It was that still, impossible hour of Sunday afternoon when the
+drowsiness of after lunch and the distance of five-o’clock tea combine
+to make inaction of one sort or another absolutely essential. Sir Arthur
+Dallerton, however, was uncomfortably wide awake. His protracted
+conversation with his charming guest contributed not a little to the
+unnatural keenness of his feelings, and with Sir Arthur Dallerton to
+feel keenly was to be in more or less of a bad temper. He saw Muriel out
+of his smoking-room window, and beckoned to her to come in.
+
+“What are you doing, Muriel,” he asked severely, “at this time of the
+afternoon?”
+
+“Everybody is going out on the river after tea, so I was seeing about
+the boats,” she said.
+
+“That, Muriel, is the business of the gardener.”
+
+“I like minding the gardener’s business,” said Muriel smiling.
+
+“My dear,” said her uncle gravely, “If you would leave the gardener’s
+business alone, and attend a little more to your own, I should be better
+pleased.”
+
+“What do you mean, uncle?” the girl asked, sitting down opposite him
+with her wide-open, unembarrassed eyes.
+
+“Of course I know that it makes no difference to you what I wish—that I
+take for granted to begin with.”
+
+She moved her head impatiently; she hated the way he had of opening any
+discussion with injured personalities. He waited for a protest, and not
+hearing one he continued with increased vehemence.
+
+“You are now twenty-seven. You have had plenty of opportunities to
+settle down in life. I have never attempted to force your hand——” A
+look in the girl’s eyes suggested the prudence of this course. “I must
+say I have been uncommonly generous in overlooking your extraordinary
+schemes, but I never dreamed they excluded marriage. May I ask,
+Muriel—I think I have a right to know—if all my hopes are to be in
+vain simply through the obstinacy of an untrained, selfish girl? Do you,
+Muriel—I insist upon knowing this—intend to marry?”
+
+“I am sorry you insist, uncle,” said Muriel very quietly, though two
+bright spots of angry color burned in her cheeks, “because I am afraid I
+can give you no satisfactory answer to your hopes. It is very
+improbable—if you really wish to know—that I shall ever marry.”
+
+“What about Jack Hurstly?”
+
+“I do not know to what you refer.”
+
+“I thought your objection to him was that he didn’t stick to his
+profession. He’s sticking to it fast enough now.” Muriel winced. “And,”
+he continued with more hope of success, “he’ll probably get potted by a
+native, and then perhaps you’ll be satisfied. You women who talk the
+most about cruelty are always the ones to send us poor devils to our
+graves.”
+
+“I have never had any objection to Jack Hurstly, and I have none now,
+but I certainly am not going to marry him. If he gets killed in India,
+as you thoughtfully suggested, it will perhaps prove to you that he is
+beyond your matrimonial schemes. I do not believe anything else would,”
+said Muriel, now thoroughly aroused. She looked lovely when she was
+angry: the gray eyes blazed and widened, the firm chin became
+inexorable, and her nostrils dilated like a spirited horse. Her uncle,
+who had an eye for beauty, appreciated her appearance, but was too vexed
+to remark on it.
+
+“Gad! you have the temper of a devil!” he grumbled in reluctant
+admiration; “but if you won’t have Jack Hurstly, you won’t. And on the
+whole you might do better. What I want you thoroughly to understand is
+I’ll have no monkey business with that young doctor. I didn’t ask him
+down here, or you either, for any such purpose. If you had liked Jack
+Hurstly, well and good. I wouldn’t have opposed the match. He’s got
+blood, and he’s got money, and I have nothing against him. But I have
+set my heart on one thing if you won’t have him.” He stopped a moment.
+“Muriel,” he said, “you know my heart is weak, and it’s very bad for me
+to be opposed.”
+
+Muriel smiled; the scene lost its strain; the gay voices of idlers on
+the lawn came in through the windows with the after-dinner grace of the
+“wise thrushes” in the shrubbery. They all sounded so restful and
+contented. But she—must she battle till her life’s end? Tears of
+self-pity rose to her eyes. Her uncle supposed them to be signs of
+softening grace.
+
+“My child,” he said, “Sir Alec Bruce is a good man, and he loves you.”
+
+“He has a good income and a good family,” suggested the girl
+maliciously.
+
+Sir Arthur waved them aside grandly. “I have set my heart upon the
+match,” said; “my life is risked by a disappointment.”
+
+Muriel crushed her hands together nervously. “And what about my life?”
+she said at last. “But I suppose that doesn’t matter,” and ignoring her
+uncle’s wrathful exclamation she stepped out of the French windows and
+joined the idlers on the lawn. Sir Arthur waited a few moments for a
+heart attack to come on, but as nothing happened he also went into the
+garden. But a few moments had dissipated the group, and only Cynthia
+Grant remained with a bull-dog and a cigarette. She looked extremely
+unsympathetic, and grumbling under his breath something far from
+complimentary about advanced young women he returned to the house. A
+moment later Dr. Grant joined his sister on the lawn. The bull-dog,
+appropriately named “Grip,” looked wistfully from one to the other. He
+knew it was impossible to be at the feet of both at the same time, and
+so with chivalrous courtesy he curled himself up once more by his
+mistress’s side and listened with heavily absorbed eyes to the following
+conversation.
+
+“Do you really mean to do it?” asked Cynthia curtly.
+
+“If I hadn’t, why should I have come here?” replied her brother, giving
+short puffs at his pipe. “You know I feel awfully out of this sort of
+thing—an abominably lazy lot.” Grip, who with the magnificent patience
+of the strong had long been putting up with an inquisitive and
+infuriating fly, now relieved his feelings with a successful snap.
+
+Cynthia laughed bitterly. “You won’t get her so easily as that,” she
+said by way of illustration. “And why should I want you to? Has it never
+occurred to you, my dear brother, that I might prefer you better
+unmarried. It’s a slackening sort of thing at best for a man, and we’ve
+always roughed it together, haven’t we, Geoff? Pretty cosily, too, I
+think.”
+
+“You might get married yourself,” he said gloomily. The girl
+suggestively lit a cigarette.
+
+“I don’t think so, Geoff,” she said with a queer little laugh. “Has it
+never occurred to you that I’m thirty, and you’ve never been
+particularly keen on it before?”
+
+“I’m not now—but I think it’s a good thing for a girl.”
+
+“You mean for a man, don’t you?” He looked at her quietly.
+
+“You’re not like yourself to-day, Sis,” he said gently. “What’s wrong?”
+
+“You’re trying to marry Muriel Dallerton. She’s in love with Jack
+Hurstly, whom she’s trying to marry to that emotional little Gladys
+thing. Meanwhile, unless they are all very careful, Edith le Mentier
+means to play her own game with them all.”
+
+“How do you know Miss Dallerton’s in love with Hurstly?” asked the
+doctor, savagely ignoring the rest of the remarks. She turned on him
+with mocking eyes.
+
+“She is interested in his conversation,” she said, and they both burst
+out laughing. Grip placed his head massively on her hands and looked
+both question and reproach at her. “His business, Grip,” she said, “is
+to get perfectly rested, not to tread on lazy people’s corns, and to see
+as much as possible of the right young lady. As for me, Grip”—she
+dropped some inconveniently heated ashes on his pink nose, which made
+him shake his head and blink severely like a shocked old lady—“where do
+I come in? Well, I have my own little game to play. And here’s dear
+Edith in a fresh pink gown. Let’s go and meet her—she’s so fond of us
+both. And you——” she looked back with a whimsical tenderness at her
+brother, “just go down to the river and find your young lady, only for
+Heaven’s sake don’t glare at her like that!”
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IX
+
+
+    “It is sometimes possible to say ‘No,’ but hard to live up to
+    it.”
+
+MURIEL had not in the least intended to find herself alone with Jack
+Hurstly in a canoe. It all happened so naturally that protests and
+excuses were out of the question. She looked rather wistfully at Gladys
+in a larger boat, who was talking with nervous gaiety to Alec Bruce,
+while Mary Huntly in the stern looked on with serene approval. Gladys
+would not look at her friend, and something in the girl’s manner and
+carriage seemed to denote an intense displeasure, which, after her
+confidence to Muriel, was not on the whole incomprehensible. Muriel
+sighed hopelessly. Circumstances, she thought, were against her, and
+Jack was with her; she might be stronger than the circumstances, but she
+had begun to feel that she was not as strong as Jack.
+
+“I really have changed my life a bit,” he went on, as if continuing
+their last conversation. “Do you know when you went to Stepney, and I
+got to know about all you were doing—how you gave those girls such a
+good time and helped them in their homes, and all that, you know—it
+made me feel what a cheap sort of thing the life of the fellows about
+town is, and how, after all, there isn’t so very much in just having a
+good time if there’s nothing else besides or beyond it. I hope you won’t
+think I’m talking awful rot?” he interrupted himself nervously. She
+shook her head; she found it difficult to speak; her hand dipped in the
+water seemed to her a sort of illustration of how impossible it was to
+grasp her treasure even while it surrounded her. They were singing down
+the stream the air of a new opera, and that, and the trailing branches
+overhead, would have made a wonder of beauty if she had not loved
+Gladys. “Sacrifices lasted too long,” she thought.
+
+“And so,” he continued, watching her with eager, earnest eyes as he
+talked, “while I was waiting for leave to go out to India I started a
+sort of club at home—among the tenants, you know. Nothing much of a
+place—only games and a room where the men can go and smoke and read
+their papers in the mornings. And it struck me that Miss Gladys’
+cousin—am I boring you?”
+
+“No, Jack—Gladys’ cousin?”
+
+“That Parson Cyril Johnstone,” he explained, “was really an awfully good
+sort, and might help me a bit with the men—on his own line, you know.
+And as the vicar wanted a curate, it seemed to fit in rather decently. I
+had no idea how awfully interesting that kind of thing could be. Why,
+now I know the men, and drop in to play a game of billiards with them,
+you couldn’t believe how jolly they are with me; and many of them more
+decent, wholesome kind of men than one’s own sort. I should so much like
+to show you the place, Muriel, and ask your advice about it. I’m afraid
+I’m an awfully poor hand at managing that kind of thing.”
+
+“Mr. Cyril Johnstone knows more about men’s clubs than I do!” she
+replied with half-averted head. Jack smiled. He was not used to Muriel
+in this mood; it was more like other women whom he had been used to.
+
+“You see,” he said, “Cyril Johnstone is all very well in his way, but an
+unecclesiastical eye might be able to suggest more.”
+
+“I feel quite sure,” said Muriel firmly, “that my eyes will be able to
+suggest nothing.”
+
+“They must have changed then a good deal in the last few minutes,” said
+Jack coolly; “they have always suggested plenty to me.” Muriel looked up
+desperately, and saw Dr. Grant on the bank.
+
+“Row to the shore, please, Jack,” she said, “there is room for the
+doctor.” Jack set his lips together firmly. He had no intention of
+rowing to the shore for any such purpose.
+
+“Sorry,” he said; “I’m afraid it’s impossible.”
+
+“I must insist,” she replied coldly.
+
+“Please don’t, for I hate to disobey your wishes,” he pleaded.
+
+“You overlook the alternative,” cried Muriel.
+
+“Muriel,” he said, “you don’t really mean it—I know you don’t wish it!”
+He knew this would have been fatal with another woman, but he counted on
+her sincerity. She looked from him to the shore, and back again to the
+softly shaded water.
+
+“I must ask you to do it just the same,” she said finally. He turned the
+boat into mid-stream, and they floated awhile in silence.
+
+“It is the first time I have ever refused to do what you wanted,” he
+said at last, drawing a deep breath.
+
+“It is the last time I shall ever give you an opportunity,” said Muriel
+coldly. But if she had hoped to prevent further words her hope was in
+vain.
+
+“You told me once that you cared for me, Muriel, but that I wasn’t worth
+marrying. I have tried to make myself a bit more so, and now you are not
+going to tell me, are you, that you have changed your mind?” She faced
+him steadily.
+
+“I can’t marry you,” she said. “Please don’t ask me questions, Jack.”
+
+“But I must,” he said frowning. “Why can’t you marry me?” She was
+silent. “You don’t love me?”
+
+“Perhaps I never did.”
+
+“Nonsense, dear, you’re not that sort. Tell me the truth—you do love
+me?” Muriel turned in exasperation.
+
+“Oh, yes, then, if you _will_ have it. I _do_ love you, but I’m not now
+or at any other time ever going to marry you!”
+
+They had forgotten the other boat and the river. A burst of merry
+laughter awoke them to the fact that they had drifted on a snag, and
+that the rest of the party had been watching them for the last few
+minutes from the opposite bank.
+
+It was the doctor after all who rowed out to their assistance and took
+Muriel home after tea across the fields. Muriel was desperate. Jack had
+found means to say to her that he did not in the least believe her, and
+that he was not going to give her up. Gladys had found means of very
+pointedly, though with exquisite intangibility, expressing a state of
+mind anything but pleasant to her friend. The constant flow of bright,
+good-natured chaff, the utterly superficial, pleasant brightness of the
+boating party, gave Muriel a feeling of weariness and age. She felt glad
+to be with the doctor. He at least left her alone and seemed contented
+to talk or to be silent in an easy, effortless way. Perhaps it was
+because in his profession a man “learns to do his watching without its
+showing pain.” He talked chiefly about his sister, and when they got
+home advised her in an off-hand manner “to go and lie down.”
+
+“But I am not tired,” she cried, half vexed.
+
+“No,” he replied soothingly; “still you know it’s a warm afternoon; you
+would find it restful.” Muriel smiled submissively.
+
+“To tell the truth,” she said, “I think perhaps I am a bit tired,” and
+she went upstairs.
+
+An hour afterwards there came a soft knock at the door and Cynthia Grant
+came in.
+
+“They told me you had a headache,” she said apologetically, “and I came
+to see if I could do anything for you.”
+
+“It’s very kind of you,” said Muriel gratefully; “but do come and sit
+down. My headache was only an excuse for laziness, and it would do it
+good to be talked to.”
+
+Cynthia sat down near the sofa, and after a little conversation on
+general subjects, began in abrupt, curt tones to tell Muriel the story
+of her life.
+
+Why she told it, it would be impossible to tell, except that she wished
+to approach nearer to the girl who had won her brother’s love, and that
+such a confidence was the most painful sacrifice it was in her power to
+make. It was a strange story of how she and her brother had studied
+together side by side for their degree; of how she had advanced even
+farther than he, till at length, finding she was outstripping him, in
+one magnificent burst of sacrifice she had thrown the whole thing up;
+but how the fascination of her work proved almost too much for her, till
+in desperation she left her brother altogether, and went to the Paris
+studios to study art. Here she paused awhile as if reluctant to speak
+further. “You don’t know,” she said, “what it was to have lived as I
+did, almost as a man among men. It was only we two—my brother and
+I—against the world, you know, and it’s a hard world. After I left
+him—I’m not going to tell you the whole story—there was a man who was
+a very fine fellow, an Englishman and an artist, and he fell in love
+with me before he quite knew—well, all the incidents of my life. Paris
+is rather a place for incidents, you know. He wanted to marry me. But,
+of course, I told him—and, I daresay, it wasn’t an ideal story. At any
+rate he told me he could not make me his wife, and I care far too much
+for him to be satisfied with anything else. So I went back to my
+brother, and I have been with him ever since. I help him with his cases,
+and, as his practice is rather large, and contains a good many poor
+people, I find enough to do. Are you horribly shocked, Miss Dallerton?”
+
+“Have you given up your art?” said Muriel. The other girl went to the
+window. She laughed nervously.
+
+“Art?” she said. “I never look at a picture if I can help it.”
+
+“And does your brother know?”
+
+“Everything; but it has made no difference.”
+
+“I wonder why you told me?” said Muriel thoughtfully. Cynthia smiled.
+
+“You look as if people were in the habit of telling you things.
+Besides—I don’t know—it seemed to me as if you ought to know the truth
+if we were to be friends.”
+
+“I hope we shall be,” said Muriel softly—“I hope very much we shall
+be.”
+
+“I think,” said Cynthia as she went to the door, “that if I had known
+you, it might have been different.”
+
+Muriel puzzled thoughtfully awhile over the rather grim pair she had
+come into contact with. She had known very little of that great wide
+world of professional life. Society and the slums, though they were a
+great contrast, were not, she thought, so great a mystery. But though
+Muriel was distinctly broad-minded for a woman, it was impossible for
+her just at present to absorb herself in abstract problems when her own
+life presented such pressing personal ones. Her first misery at Gladys’
+jealousy and misunderstanding seemed gone. To her surprise she had begun
+to feel almost a sense of relief. If she didn’t understand, it was plain
+there was not so very much to worry about. If one looks for too many
+things in one place, the few things one finds lose their significance.
+It is not one’s love so much that gets dulled as one’s sense of
+importance. The halo of expectation fails; next time one’s eagerness
+goes with slower feet, and is positively astonished if it ever gets met
+at all. So that now Muriel felt she had simply over-estimated both her
+friends’ characters and affection, and that nothing therefore remained
+but to clearly make Gladys see she did not intend to marry Jack Hurstly.
+Her responsibility ended there she told herself, after that she need not
+try to keep up this very unequal friendship any more. As for Cynthia
+Grant, she was a woman and old enough to know what to take for granted,
+and how not to be exacting.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER X
+
+
+        “O Heart! O blood that freezes! blood that burns!
+        Earth’s returns for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin:
+        Shut them in; with their triumphs and the glories and the rest—
+        Love is best!”
+                                                —ROBERT BROWNING.
+
+VERY firm and self-reliant natures make sometimes the natural mistake of
+under-estimating the power of passion. Their full self-control and
+constant watchfulness ignore the possibility of the strange touch of
+sudden lawlessness—the betrayal of the blood. That one could be one
+moment standing reason-bound, content, a soul at peace, and in another
+swept over the verge of thought into a sea of feeling, was absurd to
+Muriel. Yet the swift flash takes place: the world, like a curtain,
+rolls up, and all the conventions, the safeguards, the stationary
+landscapes, disappear! It was such a moment which took possession of her
+the very night that she had decided to give her lover to another woman.
+The evening had passed pleasantly, and the still glory of the summer
+night drew the party out into the dusk of the garden. Muriel slipped
+away from the rest and wandered into a little wilderness some distance
+from the house, wondering how best to carry out her plans, when suddenly
+all the blood in her body rushed to her heart, for there beside her
+stood the man she loved. It had been possible for her in the calm of
+loneliness and heartache to dispose of Jack, but now—the moon’s gold
+and silver gliding through the clouds; the thrushes calling heart to
+heart their breathless rapture in a liquid continuity of song; all the
+passion and the pain rushing into beauty, thrilled and throbbing with
+the heart of night—it was difficult to resist now. And the stars, how
+they shone down on love, each one a light struck from the royal conquest
+of their queen, the moon! They were enwrapped in that dream so boundless
+and so limited which for one breathless moment holds all the world can
+teach, and then scatters and breaks into the hundred lesser lights of
+life. A sigh broke the charm, and Muriel, wondering, withdrew herself
+from his arms, abashed and yet elated at her defeat, so much more sweet
+than any of the triumphs life had held for her.
+
+“Now,” said Jack, smiling down at her, “are you going to tell me that
+you don’t care?”
+
+“I am afraid,” said Muriel, “that it would not be very convincing if I
+did. It seems to me,” she added breathlessly, “as if before I had been
+living only on the outskirts of life. I did not know it was like that!”
+She looked at him wistfully, and asked humbly, “Is it quite right, Jack,
+do you think?”
+
+“What, my dearest?”
+
+“To forget everything; to see nothing but the world a background, and
+that one great avowal drowning all the rest?”
+
+“I think it must be,” said Jack. “Just because it’s so powerful it must
+be meant to be good—in itself, you know—only some of us poor chaps
+don’t know how to use it.”
+
+Muriel shivered a little; there was dampness in the air; the trees
+seemed to quiver. She remembered Liz and the squalid scenes where the
+power which meant heaven to her had meant darkness and life-long misery
+to the other woman. Had she gained the world only to lose it? Jack
+wrapped her shawl tenderly over her shoulders.
+
+“You must go in, little woman,” he said practically. “Now you’re mine
+you shan’t run any risks, not even summer ones. Shall I speak to your
+uncle?” he asked her as they neared the little artificial lights of the
+house.
+
+“Not yet,” she whispered hoarsely, with a terrible fear in her eyes.
+Jack followed her glance. It rested on a young girl’s face. Gladys was
+standing close at the French window looking out into the
+night—desperate, wild, despairing.
+
+“There’s something wrong with the child,” Muriel said quick to
+Jack—“bad news from home, I think,” for even at that moment she knew
+she must keep the other woman’s secret. “Let me go to her,
+darling—good-night! It’s awful, isn’t it,” she said, “to be so selfish
+and so happy!”
+
+She caught her hand from him, hurrying into the house. “It’s wicked,
+it’s wicked,” she murmured, “to be happy at all.”
+
+Gladys called out over the approaching figure, “There is a letter for
+Captain Hurstly!” He came unwillingly forward into the light about the
+window. Muriel stood now with her hand in the girl’s looking back at
+him. Gladys herself seemed unaware of the touch. She was smiling
+painfully; the “On Her Majesty’s Service” seemed to demand attention.
+
+Jack opened it, read it, glanced for a moment to Muriel, and placed it
+in his pocket.
+
+“What does it say?” said Gladys, and Jack, so absorbed by its purpose
+and the strangeness of the scene, never knew till afterwards that it was
+not Muriel who had spoken. He tried to make light of it.
+
+“Oh, I’m called off sooner than I expected.”
+
+“When?” They both spoke at once this time. Again he only heard Muriel.
+
+“The fact is—well, to-night,” he owned unsteadily. Gladys stepped
+quickly forward; a little quivering light shone in her eyes; she caught
+her breath and half unconsciously held out her hands.
+
+“Oh, I’m so sorry, Captain Hurstly!” she cried; “and I wish you—I wish
+you the very best luck in the world.” He looked towards Muriel, but she
+was gone. He met the girl’s eyes again. His own felt unaccountably
+misty. Muriel was gone, and this little thing was wishing him the very
+best luck in the world. He pressed her hands gratefully.
+
+“Thank you, thank you awfully,” he murmured. “I think I’ve got it
+to-night——”
+
+“Oh, where’s that tiresome Jack Hurstly?” cried a voice from the window.
+“I left him my fan to take care of, and——”
+
+“I’ve got it here, Mrs. le Mentier,” cried Jack hastily, stepping
+through the low French window with the missing fan in his hand.
+
+When he drove off an hour later to catch the midnight train it was Edith
+le Mentier who, side by side with Muriel, stood at the door to see him
+off. Looking back he saw that it was with her he had left “the very best
+luck in the world.” He had quite forgotten all about Gladys. From her
+window she watched him go on fire with love and happiness. His last
+words rang in her ears. She never doubted that they were meant for her.
+He had no time to say more then; but when he came back, not Muriel in
+all her beauty, nor any other woman, nor any other thing could ever come
+between them again she thought. And he would come back! The moonlight
+and the soft fragrance of the dusky night, what were they any of them
+but the earth’s pledges to her that her heaven should come again to meet
+that other heaven in her heart?
+
+“I have broken my fan,” said Edith le Mentier to Muriel as they went up
+to bed. “So stupid of me, wasn’t it; but at any rate I was not going to
+let Captain Hurstly have another one.” Muriel looked straight before
+her.
+
+“Another one, Edith?” she repeated.
+
+“Yes, stupid, didn’t you know men were in the habit of keeping people’s
+fans when they were—well, rather—don’t you know?”
+
+“I am afraid I’m rather dense—good-night,” said Muriel wearily. She
+stopped outside Gladys’ door, but there was no light or sound. “She’s
+asleep,” she thought, “I won’t disturb her,” and went on to her own
+room. It seemed rather strange to her that anybody could sleep.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XI
+
+
+              “My Faith?—
+        Which Religion I profess?—
+          None of which I mention make.
+        Wherefore so? And can’t you guess?—
+          For Religion’s sake.”
+                     —GEORGE MACDONALD.
+
+THE morning brought counsel to Muriel. She would say nothing. Jack would
+not return for a year or two, and in the meantime Gladys’ passionate
+little heart might have turned elsewhere, or in any case the quick pain
+of certainty be less. For herself she turned her eager mind anew to the
+work before her. Love acted as a spur upon the discipline of her life;
+it made the dark places plainer, and lit up with light and hope the
+saddest mysteries. She was one of those few souls in whom experiences
+can never conflict or stand in opposition to each other. She knit them
+link by link into a chain binding her closer and higher towards her
+ideals. She never thought much about her difficulties until she came up
+to them, but when she once faced them they helped her afterwards. Edith
+le Mentier’s delicate insinuation she had felt a passing disgust at, and
+had straightway brushed aside. Jealousy and suspicion need darkness and
+a closed-up room; all Muriel’s rooms were open to the sky and bright
+with sunshine. Nevertheless when she looked at Edith le Mentier she felt
+an uneasiness she could not account for.
+
+The party broke up the next morning. The doctor and his sister returned
+to town, while the others went to various other country houses, Muriel
+and her uncle going to Scotland for the remainder of her holiday. She
+was impatient to go back to her work, and the month passed in making
+arrangements and re-arrangements all involving voluminous
+correspondence. She wrote to Cyril Johnstone about Captain Hurstly’s
+club work, and as it was under parochial guidance, and various ritual
+stipulations of the young man’s were agreed to by the open-minded,
+slightly lax old vicar, he was soon settled in deeply earnest and
+energetic work such as the slow old parish had never seen before. Yet,
+as Muriel soon saw, the example of his stern habits and indefatigable
+labor bore much fruit of admiration and respect, though scarcely that
+imitation which the zealous young priest expected the doctrines he would
+have died for to bring forth. He was not satisfied with Muriel’s
+generous explanation. “It’s your doctrines that have made you, and if
+the people accept you, surely they are on the way to accept the
+doctrines?” She returned a week earlier than her uncle wished her to, to
+encourage Jack’s “Parson,” though she wrote to Jack that “your young
+priest doesn’t at all approve of me. He considers me a shallow society
+woman with a club craze, and shakes his head over my unaccountable
+friendship with you. He gave me splendid advice the other day, and I’m
+afraid I lost my temper with him, but the gravity with which he regarded
+me as he said, ‘My dear young lady, I am not speaking to you as a mere
+man, but from my priestly office,’ restored my sense of humor. . . . But
+no, Jack, I have a reason for wishing our engagement private. If it were
+any feeling of my own I would tell you, as it is you must take it on
+trust as you do me. Did you ever know Mrs. le Mentier very well?”
+
+Muriel wrote the last sentence and then crossed it out. He might
+think—— Besides, it was so absurd. She felt angry with herself for
+having crossed it out—it was so unimportant. She was surprised that
+night by a letter from Cynthia Grant, who had passed out of her mind
+with the press of duty and pleasure and life. Now, however, she awoke to
+a vigorous interest.
+
+    “You will be surprised at what I am going to ask,” the letter
+    ran, “but I hope that won’t shake you into the negative attitude
+    that it does some people. I’m not going to tell you that I have
+    any ‘religious views’ (and you will excuse me if I say that with
+    most people they are little more—and distant views at that),
+    because I haven’t; only it happens to please me to work, and I
+    like you, consequently if you see any opening for a capable
+    woman doctor who can give free ‘instruction’ to young women and
+    practical help as well, let me know and I’ll come to you. My
+    brother approves of my plan, and is going to get an assistant.
+
+                                                     “Yours,
+                                                “CYNTHIA GRANT, M.D.
+
+    “_P.S._—I am particularly anxious for interesting tumors.”
+
+Muriel thought for a moment, then laughed, and wired back: “Please come,
+plenty of interesting tumors.”
+
+It was the first day of October before the two women settled to work.
+Life opened before them full, arduous, engrossing. Around them in
+teeming factories and crowded dust-yards lived the people into whose
+lives their own brought knowledge, health, horizon. Year after year
+these sordid lives go on, working until dead-tired they stumble home and
+stand an hour or two in the close streets full of the dangers and
+temptations of the city; the holidays’ rough carnivals of over-feeding
+and drinking. Death, disease and sin the only breaks in the grim
+monotony of passing years, and now slowly and gradually the change was
+taking place. From their work the young people streamed into the clubs,
+and were taught little by little lessons of life, courtesy,
+truthfulness, honesty; and these not by confronting them with strange
+virtues, but in developing their own, generosity, kindliness and the
+marvellous quality of “straightness,” the shield of so many of the poor.
+Men found billiards and other games, even cards, though gambling was not
+allowed; they could pass their evenings in social good fellowship
+without spending their wages or staggering home drunk. Their wives, too,
+in another part were not less well cared for, and their sons and
+daughters, kept out of the streets four or five nights out of the seven,
+were all the more inclined to stay at home on the other two. More than
+all this, living among them and sharing all they suffered was a “lidy,”
+who if she had chosen need never have done a stroke of work, or given a
+thought to anything but pleasure and ease and beauty. Though some of the
+more hardened jeered at her for her sacrifice, the greater part were
+drawn in generous animation and gratitude into the work, and even those
+who jeered left her alone and would have fought any who tried to do her
+an injury.
+
+“You only touch the fringe,” Cynthia said to her one day. “So what’s the
+use? When you die it will all sink back again!”
+
+“Do you know,” said Muriel smiling, “I believe there is healing in the
+very hem of His garment, and that all these children in whom we start a
+larger life will in time permeate the apathetic multitude. As for
+ourselves, don’t doubt that when we die the work will not go on. Truly I
+should be very despairing if I dreamed that such tremendous purposes
+rested on my shoulders. We just fit in here, that’s all, and make the
+room larger for the next comer!”
+
+“Humph!” said Cynthia dryly; “after I’d made the room larger, I should
+prefer sitting in it myself.”
+
+“Nonsense,” laughed Muriel; “you would go on to make an addition to the
+house!”
+
+“My brother comes here to-night,” Cynthia stated abruptly. “He’s going
+to bring a magic lantern for the men, and show them some of his Chinese
+slides.”
+
+“I’m so glad,” said Muriel gratefully.
+
+“Do you like him?” Cynthia asked.
+
+“Like your brother? Of course, very much.”
+
+“So little as that?” cried Cynthia laughing wistfully. “Oh, Muriel,
+Muriel!” Muriel colored and frowned. It was a subject that visibly
+annoyed her, and which she tried to ignore. Dr. Grant had been very kind
+to the club. She had tried to believe he was interested in the work; it
+was a little baffling to find it hinted that it might be the worker.
+Cynthia watched her carefully. “Is there nothing besides the work?” she
+thought to herself. She introduced the subject of a meal, and Muriel
+laughingly discovered she had forgotten her lunch.
+
+“You were writing letters at lunch time, weren’t you?” suggested
+Cynthia.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XII
+
+
+                “Mercy every way
+        Is infinite—and who can say?”
+
+THERE was a high west wind, and the dust swirled in clouds at the street
+corners. It was the kind of wind that never lets one alone, and is
+constantly drawing attention to the inconveniences of one’s clothing.
+The clouds were the dull brown of approaching rain, drifting in rags
+across the chilly sky. Cynthia Grant, who had been all the night before
+and half the day through fighting over the undesirable life of a mother
+and child, felt almost aggrieved that she had saved them both. “What did
+I want to do it for? The whole system’s rotten! Why should it be
+considered mercy to prolong the agony instead of cutting it short? I
+don’t care for the woman; I hate the child; and, even if I liked them
+both, I don’t think their lives worth living. Why that drunken brute of
+a husband, who is always throwing chairs at the poor thing, should say
+‘Thank God!’ when I told him she’d live is a puzzle; he could easily
+have got some one fresh to throw chairs at, and the brat is only one
+mouth more to feed! I feel far more sympathy for that woman with ten
+children who told me she had had ‘no churchyard luck’.” She chuckled
+grimly to herself, and looked with a tolerant, amused gaze at the narrow
+alley, with its children at play in the gutters, wizened and old, with
+sharp, cruel, degraded little faces, slatternly women at doors, and
+skulking forms, that were scarcely human, lurking in corners and in the
+wretched rooms that were called “living,” a phrase more applicable to
+the vermin that inhabited them than the half-human creatures that
+sprawled there. It was a bad alley, and the tough knotted stick in
+Cynthia’s hand did not look out of place.
+
+“Yes,” she thought to herself, “Muriel must be impelled by some pretty
+desperate attraction to give up her life to this sort of thing. It will
+make her old before her time. And as for the people here, her influence
+will probably cease as most influence does with her presence, and
+trickle off them as easily as water off a duck’s back. As for me, I
+suppose I might as well be _here_ as anywhere else—now.”
+
+She looked at the sky and wondered what poets saw in it. It suggested to
+her nothing but the need of a broom. She was tired out when she reached
+rooms over the club, and glad of the tea Muriel had prepared for her.
+
+Muriel could not stay, for it was the time when her girls came out of
+the factory, and she must be ready to meet them. She was in one of her
+merriest and brightest moods. The gloom of the outside world could not
+touch her; even the sordid misery of the streets she had visited that
+afternoon only seemed to her vistas of future sunshine. She believed in
+no sympathy that stopped at sorrow; but it was because she believed so
+deeply in the reality of sorrow that she knew the certainty of joy.
+
+“What makes you so happy?” said Cynthia wistfully; “I see nothing to
+cause it.” Muriel wrinkled her eyebrows as she always did when puzzled.
+Geoff called it her “frowning for a vision,” and compared it to a
+sailor’s whistling for a wind. At last the partial vision came.
+
+“I don’t see why it should be so difficult to be happy,” she said. “All
+that one hasn’t got is bound to come some day; all that one truly _has_
+will never go. And when one is quite sure of that oneself, it is
+beautiful to be able to encourage one’s bit of the world to go on
+waiting for _their_ bright side. And how good and bright and dear things
+really are if we only come to look through them, and don’t make
+_culs-de-sac_ of sorrows. If love is the key of the world, joy is the
+hand that turns it, I feel sure. To make a creed of joy and a fact of
+love is to win half the battles, and be ready to fight the other half.
+But you know all this just as well as I do, and practise it far
+better—so what’s the use of talking? Simple things become mysteries
+directly you try to explain them. Mind you rest and sleep. I’ll be back
+for supper,” and she disappeared. It grew dark in the room afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+    “This world’s judgment cries ‘Consequences,’ and leaves it to a
+    higher court to take account of Aims.”
+
+IT was decided that one more effort should be made to rescue Muriel
+Dallerton.
+
+Mary Huntly, persuaded by her husband, wrote asking her for two days
+early in the season.
+
+Cynthia peremptorily ordered her to go, and she went.
+
+The weather in the opening charm of June would to most people have been
+better spent in the country; only London lovers felt the greater charm
+of the full, bright season set in the green freshness of the Park.
+
+There was a ball the first night, and Muriel danced in a dream of
+delight at the old easy ways, and all the beauties of sight and sound
+and sense. Gladys was away on a visit, so the return to civilization was
+marked by no jar of severed friendship.
+
+A day spent on the river with one of those groups, where each one knows
+his neighbor well enough for associations to make past pleasures present
+ones, and yet not too deeply to be able to play lightly on the surface
+of personalities, made Muriel thirsty for more. It is true that there
+were strained relationships even there, though hidden with a cultivated
+ease; but she refused to see them, and let herself be soothed into a
+fairyland of fancies.
+
+Mary had arranged as a climax a tea-party in the gardens.
+
+“Of course,” she said apologetically, “one knows they aren’t private,
+but it’s the best place in the world to wander, if only on that account.
+Wandering I always think the chief charm of tea out-of-doors; it’s a
+compensation for one’s hair being blown about and the butter melting.”
+
+“It all depends on having the right person to wander with,” suggested
+her companion.
+
+“Well, but what are all our social efforts but an attempt to find the
+right person—and then wander?” laughed Mrs. Huntly. “It’s the magic
+lottery that makes London seasons, and keeps up house-parties——”
+
+“And finally limits one to a wedding ring,” interrupted one of the
+group.
+
+“Or charms one away from the limits!” ventured a daring young man to
+Muriel. She felt vaguely uncomfortable, these children of light played
+so near the brink of things.
+
+“I don’t think I quite know what you mean,” she said gravely.
+
+“He doesn’t mean anything,” said Mary Huntly shortly. The young man
+turned to someone with whom he needn’t explain. Muriel wondered whether
+she would enjoy wandering in the gardens. “At any rate I shall not have
+the right person,” she thought.
+
+When the afternoon came the overpowering youthfulness of spring danced
+in her veins, and made it easy for the unpleasant to pass from her mind.
+She was with a little group who had not yet separated to wander, when
+she saw a woman whom she had known crossing the grass at a little
+distance from where they sat.
+
+“Why, there is Sally Covering,” she cried. “It seems years since I have
+seen her!” There was a moment’s awkward silence. Muriel looked in
+astonishment from one to the other. They all began to talk in the way of
+people who wish to ignore an impossible moment. Alec Bruce, who was one
+of the party, asked her an irrelevant question, but she brushed it
+aside.
+
+“I am going to speak to her,” she said.
+
+“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Alec. They spoke rapidly, and Muriel
+felt the color rush to her face. She felt annoyed with herself for
+speaking at all; but now that she had spoken she would not be a coward,
+so she walked the intervening space, and came up with the woman.
+
+“Mrs. Covering! you haven’t forgotten me?” she cried. The woman started
+at the sound of her name, and turned sharply. She was painted more than
+a little, and inartistically. She gave a queer little laugh as she took
+Muriel’s outstretched hand.
+
+“Dear me, no!” she said; “I am not the one who forgets, Miss Dallerton.”
+Muriel held her hand and looked into her eyes.
+
+“I suppose you will think me very rude to stop you like this!” she said;
+“but I should like so much to talk to you a few moments, if you are not
+engaged.”
+
+Mrs. Covering withdrew her hand. She was embarrassed, puzzled, and a
+trifle defiant.
+
+“I cannot think what you wish to say to me, Miss Dallerton,” she
+answered; “but I am quite at your disposal for the next few minutes.”
+
+They walked together in silence for a moment, Muriel searching for the
+right word. She remembered the woman’s story now. She had left her
+husband, and made what the set she lived in called the “dreadful break.”
+Muriel could not quite remember with whom; but people did not talk to
+her much about that kind of thing, and she had only heard the outlines
+of the story. What Muriel finally did say was not in the least what Mrs.
+Covering expected.
+
+“You have never been to see me,” she said, “in my new home.”
+
+“Oh! I don’t see people now,” said Mrs. Covering, with some bitterness;
+“I have got out of the habit.”
+
+“Mrs. Covering,” said Muriel, “I should like to be able to contradict a
+report about you. Will you give me leave?” Mrs. Covering made an attempt
+to remain defiant.
+
+“Really, Miss Dallerton,” she began, “I cannot conceive——” But as she
+looked at the girl’s honest, tender eyes her lips quivered. “It’s no
+use,” she said. “Please let us say good-bye here. It was very good of
+you to speak to me.”
+
+“But it isn’t true?” said Muriel. Mrs. Covering looked back to where
+through the trees her old acquaintances in ostentatious conversation
+pretended not to be watching them.
+
+“Well, anyway,” she said, “I was honest enough to leave my husband; if I
+hadn’t I might be over there now with your friends.” Muriel took her
+hand. She knew that sometimes the human touch does more than the work of
+words.
+
+“Will you come to me?” she said. “Will you promise to come to me when
+you want help? That you will want help I feel sure; for you are sad
+already, and you can’t help being more sad. Only don’t get desperate.
+Come to me, and we will find some way out of it together!”
+
+“I’m not sad!” said Mrs. Covering quickly. “I don’t see why you should
+think so. I’m happy—absolutely happy! Can’t you see how happy I am?”
+She bit her lip to keep it from quivering. “And as for there being an
+end—Oh, Miss Dallerton, there isn’t an _end_ for a woman like me,
+there’s only—a new beginning!”
+
+“And that you will try with me?” said Muriel with an insistence that she
+herself could scarcely understand.
+
+“The ten minutes are up,” said Mrs. Covering trying hard to smile, “and
+I have an appointment. If it is ever possible I will come to you, Miss
+Dallerton—at any rate I shall never forget that you asked me. But I do
+not think I shall come.”
+
+She walked quickly away, and Muriel watched her in silence. She
+remembered that people had said Sally Covering was the best-dressed
+woman in London. She was still—for it is rarely that the little things
+change. We don’t forget to put on gloves because our heart is broken.
+Muriel felt a passion to be alone. Alone in this world of green, robbed
+for the moment of its fresh beauty; alone to face the problem that rose
+in inexorable, dark power in society as well as in the slums—the
+problem which seems ever the same unrelenting enemy of joy and health
+and the beauty of life, and attacked the vital principles of all she
+believed in and hoped for. It was very difficult to go back to the group
+of merry idlers, dancing like butterflies over a precipice—butterflies
+intent on hiding from the unwary that there _is_ a precipice.
+
+The buzz of talk increased as she drew near them. One lady put up her
+lorgnette and looked at her as if she were some new invention, and then
+turning said in a perfectly audible voice: “The paragon of virtue
+approaches, but I don’t see the lost sheep!” The group dispersed and
+left Muriel for a moment with her hostess.
+
+“Oh, Muriel, how _could_ you do such a thing?” wailed Mary Huntly.
+“People must draw a line somewhere, you know. They may swallow the
+slums, but for _you_—before their very eyes——”
+
+“To speak to an old friend,” said Muriel quietly. “Mary, you can’t blame
+me. It’s terrible! terrible! But just because it is, one can’t let it
+pass!” Mary shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“It’s hopeless to argue with you, child,” she said. “Yet even you must
+see that if people _will_ do such things, they must be ignored for the
+sake of society at large.”
+
+“Society at large,” said Muriel bitterly, “which has caused the trouble,
+must protect itself from its own victims, I understand, Mary.”
+
+“But what would you have one do?” said Mary Huntly. “What good did your
+speaking to her do?”
+
+“It showed her that one cared,” said Muriel. “Too late, I am afraid, in
+her case. But one must give them a chance to come back, or at least see
+where they have gone, and wake them up to the horror of it! If you leave
+them to wake up too late for themselves, they will only fall into a
+deeper horror!”
+
+“A woman of that sort,” said Mrs. Huntly “is incorrigible—simply
+incorrigible, Muriel.”
+
+“Oh, Mary, you don’t mean that, I know. If it was some one you loved you
+would try to help her!”
+
+Mrs. Huntly turned with relief to welcome Dr. Grant. There was a
+positive pleasure in her greeting. It put an end to an unpleasant
+situation. The only thing in life that Mrs. Huntly was afraid of was an
+unpleasant situation.
+
+“Here’s your doctor, child,” she said in an undertone; “do go and
+wander.” Muriel accepted the proposition almost willingly.
+
+Geoff looked this afternoon so strong and unconventional—not even a
+frock-coat could make a man-about-town out of him. Not that he in the
+least answered her problem. He would probably have refused to discuss it
+with her, and would certainly have disagreed with her in his
+conclusions; and yet there was something in the strong, sound spirit of
+the man infinitely refreshing to her after the cruel butterflies.
+
+It was with a new sense of trust and confidence in him that she wandered
+in the gardens. She realized at last that the parting of the ways had
+come between her old friends and her new life. Before she had been happy
+with them because her eyes were shut, now she saw beneath all that
+seemed gay and delightful a horror of selfishness, hardness and wrong.
+
+Mrs. Covering never came to her; but whenever she felt a longing to
+return to the old life the thought of her face and the knowledge of what
+the day’s wanderings had shown her came back with the same bitterness.
+
+She knew that the man with whom Mrs. Covering had made “the dreadful
+break” would soon be received back into society again.
+
+Mothers with marriageable daughters do not ask too many questions if the
+woman disappears—and the woman always disappears.
+
+There were times when Muriel almost envied Mary her faith in the
+incorrigible—it relieved her of so much responsibility.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+                “Saints to do us good
+        Must be in heaven, I seem to understand:
+        We never find them saints before at least.”
+
+“REALLY, Gladys,” said Mary Huntly firmly, “I think you should give some
+reason for the way you are behaving. I don’t want to bother you, but
+there was my own brother, Cyril——”
+
+“What’s the use of fast-days and a cope, Mary? I should give him
+beefsteaks on Fridays and sausages for vigils, and he would apply for a
+separation. Besides, I don’t care for him.”
+
+“There is still Alec Bruce,” said Mary Huntly slowly. “He would let you
+have your own way in everything, and never remember a fast from one
+year’s end to another. Muriel Dallerton was engaged to him once years
+ago, before she met Captain Hurstly. It was her fault entirely that it
+was broken off, she was so down on him. By the way, what has become of
+your friendship for Muriel?” Gladys shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Fancy marrying a man who would let you have your own way in everything.
+I should be bored to death. No, Mary, I am only twenty, and I really
+will marry somebody sometime I promise you.”
+
+She ignored the question about Muriel and got up idly to look at the
+paper. After a few minutes it fell on her lap, and she gazed with
+wide-open eyes straight in front of her. In print, so that all the world
+could see, ran an announcement of a severe hunting accident to Captain
+Hurstly of the ——, with the addition that Miss Dallerton, his
+_fiancée_, and her uncle were soon to be on their way out to India to
+join him. It was thought probable that in the event of Captain Hurstly’s
+recovery the young couple would be married out there. Gladys watched
+with fascinated gaze the skilful movements of the footmen removing tea.
+She never forgot the delicate traced pattern on the cloth, or the two
+muffins and a half. She carefully counted and wondered, with an interest
+out of proportion to its subject, what would eventually be their fate.
+It did not surprise her that Edith le Mentier should be announced, and
+she found herself smiling quite naturally at that lady’s little graceful
+poses, when suddenly she heard herself addressed by name.
+
+“Have you heard of Muriel Dallerton’s great _coup_? My dear child, you
+really should go in for slum clubs—they’re so taking. I should do it
+myself if I could ever think of anything to say to those kind of
+creatures. And then one finds out that she’s been all the time engaged
+to Jack Hurstly, and is actually going out to India to nurse him through
+an accident and pull him safely into the bonds of matrimony. If I were a
+yellow journalist I could make the most touching headlines for
+it—‘Death or Marriage?’ ‘If he survives the first accident, will he
+survive the second?’ etc.” Gladys laughed.
+
+“But, Mrs. le Mentier,” she said, “perhaps it’s not so inevitable as all
+that. Mary was telling me she had been engaged before.” There was a
+moment’s silence. Mrs. Huntly looked sharply across at her friend, and
+Edith subdued a smile. She could not resist, however, a little shot.
+
+“Once upon a time there was a naughty boy,” she said, “so Muriel put him
+in the corner, and he ran away. Isn’t that true, Mary?” The door opened
+and two maiden ladies, who were very charitable and rather plain, took
+up Mrs. Huntly’s attention. Gladys drew Edith to the window.
+
+“Is Captain Hurstly a good boy?” she said, smiling. Edith looked down at
+her caressingly.
+
+“One’s always good if one isn’t found out,” she said.
+
+“But if one is found out, one is much worse,” persisted Gladys.
+
+“I don’t think Muriel ever cared for Alec Bruce,” said Mrs. le Mentier.
+“Why, don’t you wish her to marry Jack?” she added, glancing at the girl
+tenderly.
+
+“I’m so sorry for the doctor,” smiled Gladys.
+
+“If Muriel knew,” Gladys continued, “that he was not such a good boy,
+she would be certain to put him in the corner even longer, because she
+does care for him.”
+
+“If she sees him now while he’s ill she’ll give in. We all do when
+Nature takes it into her head to punish,” mused Mrs. le Mentier.
+
+“Then if she knew soon, she wouldn’t go?” asked Gladys. “I’m going to
+see her to-morrow,” she added.
+
+“Dear Muriel,” said Mrs. le Mentier.
+
+“Shall I take her any message from you?” Gladys questioned.
+
+“I think,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I must go myself to wish her _bon
+voyage_.”
+
+Mrs. le Mentier went home and arranged two little packets of
+letters—letters that might have been burned, that ought to have been
+burned, only that some women have the fatal habit of holding on to the
+wrong things.
+
+Gladys went upstairs and cried, and hated herself, and bathed her eyes,
+and hated Muriel more.
+
+Meanwhile, quite unconsciously, Muriel packed her trunk and gave last
+directions to Cynthia about the club and its management in her absence,
+and in her heart she prayed, “O God, let him live—let him live.”
+
+And Jack Hurstly fought with death and heat and India through long hours
+of breathless night.
+
+The boat did not sail until evening, and as Muriel parted from Cynthia
+Grant to go on to her uncle’s on a cold, chilly November morning a
+hansom drove to the door, and Gladys, deeply veiled, sprang out. She
+greeted Muriel with her old tender affection. In a minute or more they
+were rattling away through the dim streets together.
+
+“I can’t understand,” said Gladys at last, “what it all means. You
+cannot be breaking your word to me—you cannot. I have trusted you so.
+But I have waited so long for an explanation, and it has never come, and
+now you are going to him.” Muriel looked steadily at her companion with
+unfaltering, sad eyes.
+
+“I made a terrible mistake,” she said gently. “For a while I thought it
+in my power to give to you that which can’t be transferred. But why
+should we talk of this now?—even while we speak he may have passed
+beyond it all!” Gladys wrung her hands together desperately.
+
+“He is mine,” she muttered—“mine—and I shall never see his face
+again!” Then suddenly she controlled herself. “You have broken your
+word?” she asked.
+
+“I have,” said Muriel.
+
+“Do you expect a marriage founded on broken promises to prosper?”
+
+“Hush! he may be dead,” said Muriel.
+
+The hansom drove up to the door; the two girls looked at each other;
+Gladys did not get out, but as Muriel moved towards the house she leaned
+out of the window. “I pray to God he is dead,” she said quietly, then
+she gave the address to the cabman. She left a card at Mrs. le Mentier’s
+door: “Muriel is with her uncle—they go to-night.”
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XV
+
+
+        “Have you no assurance that, earth at end;
+        Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mend
+        In that higher sphere to which yearnings tend.”
+
+“I HOPE, my dear,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I am not too frightfully
+out of place. But the fog drove me to you—it positively did. Mystery is
+so more-ish, and you know how dreadfully curious I am. When were you
+first engaged to Jack, dear?” Muriel smiled.
+
+“I don’t know, truly,” she said, “for it feels now as if it was always.”
+
+“Then it must have been very recent. Recent things always feel like
+that,” said Edith. She sank down before the fire and began to warm her
+hands; the rings on them gleamed and glittered with an almost malicious
+sparkling. “It is very brave of you to marry Jack,” she murmured,
+smiling—“very brave. I hardly think I should have had the pluck to if I
+were single again.”
+
+Muriel looked in front of her. She was counting the minutes; every one
+seemed a slow, aching century separating her from the man who might be
+dying. It was a refined mode of torture to have to talk of him. She
+began to understand the feeling of a caged wild beast. As an expression
+it is trite, but as an emotion it possessed her as original.
+
+“You are not very consistent, are you?” suggested Mrs. le Mentier with a
+little hard laugh. “We none of us are, I suppose; only it’s rather
+disappointing to us wicked ones when one of the saints back down. Being
+so deficient ourselves we expect so much more of them. It’s the shock
+that one feels when a really good cook fails in his favorite dish.”
+
+“I’m afraid I’m not consistent, and I’m sure I’m not one of the saints,”
+said Muriel with a little strained smile. “What do you mean, Mrs. le
+Mentier?”
+
+“Once on a time,” replied her companion critically, regarding her dainty
+hands, “there was a girl who wouldn’t marry a man—there’s nothing so
+very astonishing about that, you’ll say; it’s happened before and it may
+happen again. But she wouldn’t marry him because she found out that his
+record showed a stumble or two. One may consider her a little
+fastidious, but one respects her. The man behaved very nicely; he
+respected her too. But then there came another man, and human nature
+made her forget all about his record, which, when you come to think of
+it, is very natural, and not at all to be blamed. It is a pity to be too
+fastidious, but one can’t perhaps respect her as much.”
+
+“Mrs. le Mentier,” said Muriel, rising to her feet, “will you kindly
+tell me what you mean?” Mrs. le Mentier slowly began to draw on her
+gloves—they fitted her to perfection—but she remained seated.
+
+“You might ask Jack when you see him—if he is well enough to be
+bothered with such unimportant things—if he remembers four years ago
+this last July. You might ask him if he would like you to see his
+correspondence at that time. You might laugh with him, when he is
+convalescent, over these letters. I have them in this little bag here,
+which when I heard of your engagement seemed better in your hands than
+mine. You might,” said Edith, holding out her hand to Muriel, and
+smiling her sweetest smile, “tell Captain Hurstly that his old friends
+have not forgotten him. Good-bye, my dear Muriel; _bon voyage_—my best
+respects to your uncle—don’t trouble to come downstairs—do you know
+the last good remedy for _mal-de-mer_?—you never suffer from it? That’s
+right; a speedy return, my dear, and mind you don’t forget my little
+messages to Jack when you see him—good-bye!”
+
+Muriel waited until the door was closed, then she went and looked at the
+letters. She knew the handwriting; she hungered for a sight of any words
+from him; and she looked at it now as if she was looking at it for the
+last time. Then she sat down where Edith le Mentier had been sitting,
+and tore them up one by one and threw them into the fire. Muriel had
+scarcely finished when Sir Arthur came into the room.
+
+“Muriel!” he cried in a tone of justifiable displeasure, “I have told
+you before never to put paper into the fire. Do you know you endanger
+our lives by your carelessness? Letters should be put into the
+waste-paper basket, not made bonfires of! Have you got your trunks
+packed, child, and all your arrangements made? We start in another
+hour.”
+
+“Uncle Arthur,” said Muriel quietly, “you will think me very strange, I
+know, and very wilful, but I’m not going to start to-day. I’m going back
+to the club to-night. I—I don’t think I am feeling very well.”
+
+Expression for the most part is a distinctly limited faculty, and those
+who carry it to its bounds in the ordinary occurrence of life find
+nothing left to say when the occasion transcends their experience. Sir
+Arthur Dallerton was dumb; he made several efforts to speak—he put his
+hand to his heart—he stared at the ceiling—he was almost startled into
+a prayer—finally he gasped out:—
+
+“You wicked girl! Send my man to me,” and closed his eyes.
+
+Muriel escaped. He had not tried to combat her decision; he was in fact
+very much relieved not to have to go. He had only submitted to the
+mid-winter journey because it was expected of him—but he was surprised,
+horribly surprised. There is something very shocking to an Englishman in
+any sudden change: to Sir Arthur Dallerton it amounted to a crime.
+Muriel had surprised him, and he could not forgive her.
+
+It was dark when Muriel drove back to the club that night, but the fog
+had lifted and the stars were out. There was something in the street
+lights and noises that awoke in her the tremendous emptiness the world
+can hold. It was a shadow, a delusion, a mere dim, spectral mist, the
+background for an infinite weary pain that made the real pivot of the
+universe. She almost killed herself with self-reproaches. What was she
+that she should blot out the glory of her lover’s world for the words of
+a jealous woman?—for a mistake in the past—a sin if you choose. It
+might be a sin. If he had sinned all the sins, if he was sin itself, it
+didn’t matter—she loved him—loved him—loved him! And the great
+steamer with its iron speed might even now be leaving the docks, and she
+had set her face against him like a flint, and there was no turning
+back. Life had placed before her the old choice of love and duty, and
+though passion justified of reason rose with double power to storm the
+fortress of her will, and last, and bitterest of all, the traitor within
+called to her to give way for hope’s sake, life’s sake, love’s sake,
+when it seemed for another’s good—to release one she would have gladly
+died to comfort—to gain that which in all the world she most desired
+for his sake, for her own, for the apparent good of them both—(Oh, how
+the traitor clamors at the gate, the traitor with those eyes, that
+voice!)—all the glowing world of hers, the infinite golden gladness of
+love—even with those to oppose and madden her, she shut her hands
+tight, and with a wordless, inexpressible prayer lifted up her soul.
+With most the struggle comes before decision, with many at the point
+itself, but with some few it is after the decision is made and when
+there is no turning back. So Muriel struggled now, though at the moment
+she had been wrapt as it were apart from all uncertainty in the cloud of
+renunciation.
+
+“Muriel!” Cynthia stood before her, petrified. Had she had news it was
+too late? She drew her towards the fire, and Muriel sat down and looked
+at her wistfully as a child might.
+
+“I think I had better tell you all about it now,” she said, “though I
+feel sure you will not understand.”
+
+“You have been doing something foolish, I suppose,” said Cynthia curtly.
+“Well, what is it?” But she drew very tenderly the girl’s jacket off,
+and smoothed her hair with gentle hands.
+
+“I have given Jack up,” said Muriel wearily, “because Edith le
+Mentier——” she stopped. “Oh, I can’t explain,” she murmured. “The
+words don’t mean anything, but—but, Cynthia, I couldn’t marry a man who
+had once loved, or thought he loved, that woman. I could not trust a man
+whom I felt was weaker than I. If I had children——” she paused again.
+“You see I knew a woman who married, and the man was a dear fellow; but
+he had been weak, and the strain was in him—and he was weak again. When
+I was engaged to Alec Bruce she said to me, ‘It’s not of so much
+importance to avoid bad men—they’re danger signals we aren’t blind
+to—but for God’s sake never marry a weak one.’” Muriel caught her
+breath with a little dry sob.
+
+“Oh, you little idiot, you little idiot,” cried Cynthia with flashing
+eyes. “What’s another woman’s, any woman’s, all other women’s experience
+to one’s own heart? Love, and take the consequences—there’s nothing
+else; it’s the only thing worth while. Why should you condemn yourself
+and Jack to a death in life because of that wretched woman?—besides,
+you don’t even know if it’s true! It’s madness, Muriel—madness. He’ll
+marry somebody else, and turn out a mere do-nothing, and you’ll wear
+your life out in another five years. And it’s all useless, reasonless,
+cruel. And then you’ll pray for his soul, and expect me too, perhaps.
+But I shan’t! Can’t you see you’re driving him back to her?”
+
+Muriel dragged herself to her feet. “You forget I believe,” she said
+very slowly, “in the life of the world to come.” Then covering her face
+with her hands she burst into tears.
+
+Cynthia Grant wrote that night to her brother: “I don’t know whether
+it’s any use, Geoff, but she’s broken the whole business off between
+herself and Jack Hurstly. She’s desperate, but determined. It’s all for
+a mere nothing. I cannot understand her; but I won’t let her work
+herself to death if I can help it. She was a fool ever to have cared for
+him, and more of a fool not to have married him. It would be difficult
+to know which we do more harm with, we women, our hearts or our
+souls—‘Where a soul may be discerned.’”
+
+But Muriel was on her knees all night praying that he might live and she
+might be forgiven.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+    “If Winter come, can Spring be far behind!”
+
+IT was a day when all hope of spring was left behind—withered in a
+black northeaster—when every one unfortunate enough to be in England
+longs for the south of France, and every one who has been out of England
+compares it unfavorably with other climates.
+
+Cynthia had left Muriel with a frightful cold and the club accounts, and
+had gone out to buy her some violets. They had heard that morning from
+Mary Huntly that Jack was recovering, though the fever resulting from
+the accident had necessitated sick leave. He would probably have got
+Muriel’s letter by now. Cynthia looked longingly at some impossibly
+expensive roses, when she heard a man’s voice behind her.
+
+“By Jove! Cynthia!” Her heart leaped from January to June. She turned
+her head slightly to face the obtruder—a delicate, fine-looking man
+with the eyes of a poet, and a chin which it would do some poets good to
+have. It took a moment for them to get over the memory of the last time
+they had met. It had begun to rain a little, and people had put up their
+umbrellas and pushed on more rapidly than ever.
+
+“What do you want?” he asked, looking from the girl to the window.
+
+“What can you afford?” said Cynthia, laughing. She was wondering what
+people wanted to hurry for on such a lovely day.
+
+“I am very rich,” he responded. “Honor bright! I could buy over the
+business. I sold my last picture for—I can’t tell you how much, it
+might stir up your demon of independence. I’m going to get you the
+roses.” In two minutes he came back with them in his hand. “By the way,
+you might as well put up your umbrella, mightn’t you, it seems to be
+raining?” he said.
+
+“Oh, so it is,” said Cynthia absently. They stood together
+uncomfortably, knowing that if no good excuse arose they would have to
+part.
+
+“Don’t you think a cup of tea would be nice?” he suggested. Cynthia
+nodded her head decisively.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “and muffins.”
+
+“Do you remember,” said her companion, as they turned towards a possible
+restaurant “those dear little French cakes and——”
+
+“I don’t remember anything,” said Cynthia sternly, “and I’m not going
+to.” Leslie Damores laughed.
+
+“You even forgot,” he said teasingly, “just now that it was raining!”
+
+“I thought you were in France. I didn’t know you were ever coming back
+to England again,” said Cynthia a little doubtfully. She noticed that he
+had not asked her what she was doing, and it hurt her. She would
+volunteer no information. They sat down by a clean table in a warm inner
+room; neat-capped maids fluttered here and there; it was very restful
+and very English. To the artist who had not been in England for eight
+years it was home, and the girl who held the roses in her lap filled in
+the picture. He studied her face carefully.
+
+“You’re awfully changed,” he said at last. Cynthia laughed.
+
+“I was twenty-two when I saw you last, and now I am thirty. I was never
+one of the dimpling kind that stay young either; as for you—you’re a
+man, so it’s different. But”—her voice grew strangely gentle—“you’re
+not quite the same, you know, Leslie; fame has come to you, and you look
+more of a fighter, and yet not quite so hard.”
+
+“Strange, isn’t it, that youth should be so exacting—with its
+impossible whites and blacks—and that the more one roughs it, and the
+harder knocks one gets, the more generously shaded it all becomes,” he
+said, watching her with keen, eager eyes. She turned her head away and
+played restlessly with the flowers in her lap. “It could never change as
+much as that,” she thought.
+
+The muffins were the nicest she had ever tasted, the white-capped maid
+the prettiest, the tea the most refreshing. It all passed so terribly
+soon, and through it all they laughed and chaffed each other like two
+schoolboys in the slang of the Paris studio. It appeared that Cynthia
+had not forgotten quite so sweepingly as she asserted; they were too
+afraid of being in earnest to do anything but talk nonsense. They left
+the little place reluctantly, Leslie Damores feeing the white-capped
+maid beyond the dreams of avarice. She decided that he must be American.
+The rain had stopped, and wintry sunset gleams warned Cynthia of the
+hour.
+
+“I’m late,” she said; “you’d better call a hansom.” He hesitated before
+he asked where he should tell the cabman to drive. Cynthia set her lips.
+“He might have spared me that,” she thought. He was a delicate fellow,
+and he shivered slightly in the cold. It was this that settled her. “I
+am working with a friend of mine in the slums,” she said hastily. “Here
+is my card with the address on it; look us up some day if you can spare
+the time—good-bye.”
+
+He went off whistling like a boy with his hands in his pockets,
+wondering when might be the earliest he might go to her, and upbraiding
+himself for his wish earlier in the afternoon never to have set foot in
+London.
+
+Cynthia came into the little dark lodging-room like a fire, a whirlwind,
+and summer lightning all in one. There were the flowers to arrange,
+lamps to be lit, the supper to get. Muriel watched her with surprise.
+This magnificent woman, with wide-open, happy eyes, strange, sudden
+smiles, that came and went, and air of life and sunshine, was a
+transformation from the cold, stern woman with the grim and almost
+repellant attitude of hard reserve. She was sweetened, softened,
+glorified, and she looked at Muriel as a mother might look at her child.
+The evening was full of club-work, and even there Cynthia showed herself
+brightly. As a rule she “had no patience with the girls,” and ruled more
+by fear than love, mingled with a sort of good-natured contempt. But
+to-night there was a new look of friendliness in her eyes, and her voice
+grew kind and gentle as she explained some simple medical rules of
+health, giving the girls object-lessons in bandaging, showing them how
+to check hæmorrhage, so absorbed and interested herself that in spite of
+themselves the girls drew near and listened. One of them, a tall,
+slender girl of some fifteen years, with already the face of a woman of
+thirty, pushed her way to the front.
+
+“Oy siy, can you do hanythink for a little fellar with a bad back?”
+Cynthia nodded shortly.
+
+“Don’t interrupt the class; you can bring him to me afterwards,” she
+said.
+
+The girl with a coarse laugh pushed through her companions to the door.
+It was a strange scene: the large room of the old factory, clean and
+bright, with a blazing fire; a work-table on which lay piles of bandages
+and splints; groups of rough, strangely garbed, out-of-elbows women,
+each with a large curled fringe, under which the tired eyes appealed to
+one as strangely unnatural, and, in the midst of them, trim, erect,
+commanding Cynthia. Orders, questions, explanations ringing out. She
+stood like a disciplined sergeant amongst a throng of raw recruits—and
+recruits they were, let into the great army of humanity with no
+safeguards, no training, or only the most elementary, all dreary,
+purposeless, hacking their way through life. Only now and then into this
+rank-and-file of the world dipped their more splendid sisters who knew
+the aim of it all, and could teach them the means of attainment. There,
+under the flaring gas-jets, in the midst of the strange, teeming life of
+Stepney, horrible, oppressive, marvellously primitive, naked of the
+veneer of civilization, two women labored to bring light and help.
+Cynthia felt strangely uplifted. Her heart was singing the song “The
+stars sing in their spheres.” She did not feel the hopelessness of it
+all.
+
+After the class was over she was about to lock up the club and go back
+to Muriel, when the girl who had interrupted the class entered again
+carrying a bundle in her arms. She placed it very gently on the table.
+
+“’Ere’s the little fellar,” she said quietly. Cynthia pulled back the
+blanket and started with surprise at the picture before her—a baby boy
+of three years old, his head a mass of black curls, and underneath great
+blue Irish eyes. His face, flushed with recent sleep, looked up at her.
+The girl seeing the admiration in her face smiled proudly. “’E’s all I
+’ave,” she said. “Mother left ’im to me to see to three years since, for
+father ’e went off with another woman, and she took it to ’art, mother
+did, so she died. Think likely ’e’ll git better, miss?”
+
+Cynthia lifted the child into her arms. There was no mistaking the
+cruelly twisted spine. He might live two years, or even three, but it
+was a bad case—incurable. She looked from the beautiful baby face to
+the eager, passionate look in the girl’s eyes, who was hungry for an
+answer. Cynthia felt angry with the hopeless tragedy of it. Possibly
+Muriel might have known what to say; for herself she raved against the
+invincible spirit of maternity, at once the torture and compensation for
+all who love the little ones.
+
+“Does he suffer much?” she asked.
+
+“’E do cry hawful sometimes, pore little chap. Can you do hanythink,
+miss?”
+
+“Do anything? I daresay I can make him a little easier, but it’s a very
+bad case.”
+
+“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll never get any better?”
+
+“I’m afraid not, Carrie.”
+
+“Do you mean as ’ow ’e’ll die?” There was an awful intensity in the
+question.
+
+“He may live some time yet.” The girl wrapped the child up in the
+blanket; the fierceness in her eyes did not prevent the gentle touches
+of her hands.
+
+“I ’ate God, so there! an’ I ’ate the club! an’ I ’ate you and the other
+lidy! I ’ate you all!” she cried hoarsely. Then suddenly the anger died
+out of her face; she turned hopelessly to the door, pausing irresolutely
+she asked again in dull despair, “Then there isn’t hanythink as you can
+do?”
+
+“Very little, I’m afraid.” She drew the blanket closer round the child
+and passed out into the night.
+
+It was late and Muriel had gone to bed. Cynthia came in and sat down by
+her.
+
+“Do you think a man would ever trust a girl a second time?” she asked.
+
+“That would depend, wouldn’t it,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “upon the
+girl’s character, and the attitude towards the broken trust, and how
+long ago it had happened, and what she had done in the meantime?”
+
+“Do you think it possible if she was different that he would love her
+again?” Muriel sighed.
+
+“I would have married Jack,” she said, “if he had been different, but he
+was the same. I suppose it all depends on whether one’s power of
+detachment is strong enough.”
+
+“You’re very tired, dearest,” said Cynthia, “and I shouldn’t bother you;
+but—but I suppose you pray, don’t you?” Muriel smiled; she did not say
+she had done nothing else since she had forfeited her life’s happiness.
+
+“Yes, I try to,” she said.
+
+“Then,” said Cynthia, “perhaps you might as well pray for me.
+Good-night!”
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+    “Our mind receives but what it holds—no more.”
+
+PEOPLE whom everybody considers tender-hearted and good-natured do not
+like to wake up to the fact that they are neither. It takes a good deal
+to wake them up to it, and they are apt to be indignant and incredulous
+even then. Gladys had always been considered particularly, gracefully
+unselfish. People might think her a little astonishing and
+unconventional, but this they put down to her American training; as for
+being underhand, cruel and grasping, no one would have dreamed it of
+her, and she least of all of herself. Love is a teacher of many lessons,
+and tears away all screens; there is no room left for anything but the
+real.
+
+Love and pain together are the two world forces for sincerity, and
+Gladys’ sincerity was not pleasant to look at. She was possessed with
+the one desire—Jack. She wanted him; she hated everything and everybody
+else. Right and wrong became two faint, inadequate words; she would have
+stopped at nothing to gain her ends.
+
+Even the dramatic instinct which had carried her through emotional
+friendships made her attractive and alluring to those to whom she was
+utterly indifferent, devout and regular in her religious attendances,
+eager and sympathetic over the miseries of the poor, they were all swept
+away. She planned, plotted, schemed and lived to meet and win Jack
+Hurstly.
+
+For the sake of meeting him she made friends to a far greater extent
+with Edith le Mentier. She smiled in tender graciousness upon Alec
+Bruce, she treated Sir Arthur Dallerton when she met him with the
+greatest interest and respect.
+
+It was through him she learned first that Muriel was not going to India,
+second that her engagement with Jack Hurstly was “off,” after that she
+ceased to take any interest in him at all. People said it was time she
+was married.
+
+It took Jack a long time to realize that Muriel meant what she said. He
+wrote again, and it was not till she stopped answering him that he began
+to believe her. The key he held to the woman riddle says that “A woman
+who goes on saying no is easier to turn than the woman who says
+nothing.” India and the old influences of the regiment had undone a good
+deal of her training.
+
+Jack told himself he was a fool to have loved her, and agreed with the
+world’s verdict that she “really went too far.” In fact the world turned
+its back on her. She had had two good marriages in her hand and thrown
+them away; her society was a strain; she did unheard-of things; she was
+really better in the slums.
+
+Everybody told him he was well out of it, and though he was outwardly
+indignant at their judgment it took the edge off his sorrow. He grew
+rapidly strong, and hunted more than ever. He was not to be invalided
+home, and he had been very badly treated. He looked upon this as virtual
+absolution for whatever dissipations he might be led into. Even in the
+nineteenth century few men have found a better excuse than “The woman
+Thou gavest me.”
+
+One evening as Jack sat smoking in his quarters, wondering lazily what
+sort of a drink it would be most possible to enjoy, a knock at the door
+aroused him from his thoughts, and gave entrance to a favorite young
+subaltern.
+
+“Hullo, Musgrave!—come in!” he said with warmth. “Have a drink?” he
+added as the young fellow sank into a chair. Musgrave shook his head.
+“Anything up?” Jack asked with surprise.
+
+“Nothing particular,” said Jim Musgrave. “My aunt’s coming out here,
+though. I shall have to sit up for her.”
+
+“Oh! I say that’s bad,” said his friend sympathetically.
+
+“She’s going to bring a mighty pretty girl out with her, though, to jam
+the powder,” said the nephew irreverently. “The fact of the matter is I
+believe it’s for the girl’s sake she’s coming. There’s an awful dearth
+going on in London—herds of pretty girls and nothing to gain by it, you
+know—I don’t know what England’s coming to—we’re so scarce—they say
+the returns after the season are something awful!” Jack laughed grimly.
+
+“I’m one of them,” he said. “I didn’t make myself scarce enough it
+seems. Who’s your aunt, by-the-bye? Perhaps I know her.”
+
+“Mrs. Huntly. Her husband was a fellow of ‘ours,’ you know; but he got
+on the shelf, and they gave him some appointment at home to hush him
+asleep with. We have an awfully short day, haven’t we? And a beastly hot
+one!” The young man’s eyes grew wistful, for he loved his profession;
+and he had not been out long enough to grow stale, or to have his
+ambitions adjust themselves to lower standards. Jack sighed.
+
+“It’s a bit too long for some of us,” he said; and he dutifully thought
+of Muriel, till the remembrance of a polo match transformed them both
+into enthusiasts, and the talk grew unintelligibly technical.
+
+It was not until Jim Musgrave rose to go back to his own quarters that
+Jack remembered to tell him that his aunt was an old friend of his, and
+to ask if the pretty girl was her cousin, Miss Travers.
+
+“By Jove, do you know her?” shouted the surprised Jim. Jack nodded.
+
+“Good-night!” he said briefly, and Jim took his dismissal, wondering how
+well his friend had known Miss Travers. Jack remembered the look in
+Gladys’ eyes, and resolutely pretended that it meant nothing;
+nevertheless he was not altogether sorry he was going to see her again.
+He told himself it was because she was Muriel’s great friend.
+
+Then he went out to have a final look at the pony; it was necessary that
+it should be really fit for to-morrow’s match.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+        “Where will God be absent? In His Face
+        Is light, but in His Shadow healing too.”
+
+    “MY DEAR MURIEL,
+
+    “You and I have always been good friends, and though I have
+    never said anything to you about your trouble over Jack Hurstly
+    it has not been because I have not felt for you. I thought that
+    you were very foolish to give him up. Still you were never
+    really suited to each other, and it is better to give a thing up
+    than to hold on to it too long. I think one of the saddest
+    things is to realize how well one can get on without some one
+    who seemed so absolutely necessary. Men always reach it soonest,
+    for if they can’t attain their ideals they can satisfy their
+    instincts, while we women have to rub on between the two and
+    dress nicely. My husband wants to see India again—why, I don’t
+    know—smells, heat, travel and inferior races, not to mention
+    being cut off from everything for months, and I’ve promised to
+    accompany him, principally because it’s easier to accept than
+    refuse, and Gladys seems so set on it. She has promised to give
+    Alec Bruce his answer when she returns. It is positively a last
+    flourish, she declares; and between you and me I think she means
+    to try once more for the bird in the bush before settling on the
+    hand one.
+
+    “It’s rather brutal of me to write of it to you, but though she
+    is clever enough and blinds most people I feel certain she cares
+    for Jack, and I am a little uncertain as to how he will act when
+    he finds it out.
+
+    “If pebbles were as rare, we should most of us prefer them to
+    diamonds, I expect, and only a few would say, ‘Ah, but they
+    don’t shine!’ How you will shake your head, dear! but, trust me,
+    proximity and the hat that suits weigh a good deal more than a
+    fine character with most men, and Gladys always chooses her hats
+    well. Women of my age are past the time of romance (Edith le
+    Mentier would scarcely agree with me). Legitimate romance, at
+    any rate—if there is such a thing—is a little worn out, and
+    I’m not one of the sort that prefer religion to rouge, yet
+    to-night I can’t help confessing the game seems not worth the
+    candle. Not much behind, and not much before, and very little
+    for the meantime. Still I should marry if I were you. You’ll
+    have the compensation of saying ‘Well, that’s done,’ and when
+    everything else seems unsubstantial the solid inevitability of
+    wife and motherhood keeps one steady. That’s my argument against
+    free love—it’s not final enough, and the uncertainties are too
+    great. I had rather myself have a broken heart and a settled
+    position than a broken heart without one. Perhaps you will
+    succeed in avoiding both. Don’t think I’m morbid—probably my
+    dinner has disagreed with me. By-the-bye, the doctor says
+    there’s something wrong with my lungs—but I don’t believe in
+    doctors. Good-bye.
+
+                                                           “MARY.”
+
+Muriel read Mary Huntly’s letter over slowly with sad eyes. There was a
+hopeless ring in it, as if the plucky effort to avoid the admission of a
+life failure had almost proved too much for her. She had attained most
+things that a woman of the world wishes to attain: a good income, a
+convenient husband, a boy at Eton, and a fine figure for forty; she was
+very popular, even with other women, and she had a most capital cook.
+
+“Leslie Damores and I are going on a bus top to Kew Gardens this
+afternoon,” said Cynthia irrelevantly. “And I shall go to tea with him
+in the studios to see his new picture; he has called it ‘The Years of
+the Locust.’ I should rather like to see what he has made of it.” Muriel
+was still puzzling over Mary Huntly’s letter.
+
+“She is so fine,” she said. “It must count for something, her pluck and
+dash and the way she faces things; it can’t be all shallow, or all
+selfish—and yet it does work death. Look at poor Mary. Her age of
+primary things has passed. She has run through most of the thrills, as I
+suppose we all do by forty, and now what’s left for her? She has been
+keeping yesterday’s manna, and she finds that it has gone bad!” Cynthia
+looked interested.
+
+“I think,” she said slowly, “that a great love is the only thing to fill
+a woman’s life. I don’t believe that would wear out, would it?”
+
+“I suppose,” said Muriel thoughtfully, “that depends on how one uses it;
+one must carry things on to their farthest extent. I mean—it’s stifling
+to be satisfied. If we go on far enough we shall come to a vista, and
+it’s not till we get to see that things have no end that we are really
+beginning at all. It is what you can’t grasp makes life worth living.”
+Cynthia listened reluctantly.
+
+“But love,” she said again, “you can grasp that; and it won’t go, will
+it?”
+
+“All that’s best and highest in love you can’t grasp, I think,” replied
+Muriel. “It’s because one expects to do that that it hurts. The
+invincible thrill of things is only meant as a launching into life.
+After that friendship, comradeship, a blending of life to life and heart
+to heart becomes unconscious development. Paroxysms aren’t love, and
+they have their reaction; but love is beyond and through all, and even
+in the most sad and sordid moments gleams and throbs an impossible
+possibility! A thing always to strive for, never to attain!” Cynthia
+rose and paced the room restlessly.
+
+“Oh, Muriel! Muriel!” she said, “you don’t know——” Then she stopped
+short, and went over and kissed her, an unusual demonstration from
+Cynthia. “You’re so good,” she said, “and yet somehow so remote from it
+all! I think I begin to see now why you didn’t marry Jack. I should have
+faced it as you did, but I should have read the letters, talked about
+them—and then married him!”
+
+“And been unhappy ever afterwards,” said Muriel softly.
+
+“Yes! but that’s nothing to do with it,” cried Cynthia impatiently. “I
+acknowledge no afterwards. I would give myself body and soul to the man
+I loved, like Browning’s lady, even if he were the greatest rascal
+unhung!”
+
+“That’s a horribly selfish theory!” said Muriel with sudden emphasis,
+“and a very dangerous one. You would degrade yourself, hurt the man, and
+ruin future generations, simply because of an effervescing passion,
+which soon becomes stagnant if you give it time enough. No one can
+afford to ignore consequences, least of all a lover. Why is it, do you
+suppose, that these girls of mine, living like animals, working like
+slaves, suffering like human beings, don’t oftener catch at this
+passion-flower of yours, and take the poison of it? Simply because they
+are face to face with the consequences. They can’t get away from
+themselves, and their life is visible and public. They know what a few
+days’ rapture implies—shame, pain, publicity, perhaps starvation. They
+know that to cut off your nose spites your face, however you may wish to
+make the surrender! You don’t risk a rapid when you see the rocks, only
+when the rocks are hidden; the consequences ignored, then the selfish,
+hopeless, aimless life gives in to its instincts; and though before the
+leap you may have ignored the consequences, it will not prevent the
+rocks beneath from grinding your life out after the fall.” She stopped,
+her eyes flashing with the intensity of all she meant.
+
+She had given little by little her life over to a problem; one that she
+hated, had avoided, and that even now racked her with its misery—but it
+absorbed her.
+
+Things cease to be bearable only when life is empty, and to Muriel her
+own sorrow, her own heart, had been filled and uplifted by full
+renunciative hours. Discontent and leisure walk hand in hand, wandering
+disconsolate over a world teeming with openings and opportunities for
+energy and power. Then it becomes necessary to invent new games, and
+religion runs to melancholia—or Christian science.
+
+“I don’t think Leslie Damores will ever marry me,” said Cynthia slowly.
+She looked suddenly older and more careworn. “I—I don’t think I will go
+with him this afternoon.”
+
+Muriel put on her things to go to the club. Before she went she threw
+her arms around Cynthia.
+
+“Dearest,” she said with glistening eyes, “I don’t know what I should do
+without you.”
+
+“Pray more,” said Cynthia shortly. Muriel shook her head.
+
+“If you knew what strength you give, and how bright this all seems to
+come back to!”
+
+“Don’t! don’t!” said Cynthia sharply. “For God’s sake go to the club and
+leave me alone!”
+
+Muriel went and understood; she knew that it had been necessary to say
+those words, and after they were said she could do no more. One can
+start a crisis, but one cannot guide it, and it is usually best to get
+out of the way. Cynthia sent Leslie Damores away that afternoon, and
+faced for the first time in her life the years that the locust had
+eaten. Her lover’s picture could not have been more realistic.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+        “Only for man; how bitter not to grave
+        On his Soul’s palms one fair, good, wise thing
+        Just as he grasped it.”
+                                 —ROBERT BROWNING.
+
+LESLIE went back to the studio bewildered. She had sent him away without
+excuses. He wondered blankly what he was being punished for, and why she
+was denied him in the present; and as Kew Gardens, unless one is a
+naturalist, is not the place one goes to alone, he sat down before his
+picture and thought about her in the past.
+
+He was young and full of ideals when he first met her. He believed in
+the possibility of a Galahad, and that all women were exquisitely good,
+except a sad few who were picturesquely unfortunate. He had had a good
+mother, two beautiful sisters, and he had only seen Paris in a veil. He
+met Cynthia in the studios; her glorious red hair and the wonderful way
+she looked at him became the key to the universe. After that followed
+months of ideal companionship, and on his part at least unprecedented
+blindness. Perhaps she loved him for that most of all. Then she told
+him. He was horribly startled. He said surprised and terrible things,
+and then she looked at him—Oh that wonderful, broken, tragic look!—and
+went back to her brother. And he grew older, and wiser, and less
+surprised.
+
+He had not meant to find her in London. When he had, and they met again
+and yet again, and in fact even from the moment when she had told him
+where and how she lived, he had made the great decision.
+
+The locusts should eat no more empty years. If she could forget (_could_
+she forget, forgive at least?) that stammering judgment eight years ago,
+how happy they would be together! What noble, magnificent work would
+they not do—together—and now she had sent him away with no excuse. Had
+that self-made barrier of his fallen for another to rise? He smoked hard
+and rang the bell. There is always one way of finding out things if a
+man has sense and no false pride—to ask. He was going to ask, and he
+smiled grimly to himself as he thought of the answer she would give
+him—_should_ give him!—if strength and power and purpose went for
+anything. The tea-things that were set out for her looked miserable as
+only neglected food can look, and the room lost in the gathering
+twilight seemed emptily expectant of the guest who had not come.
+
+Leslie Damores cared nothing at all for omens and less for gloom, and
+even the fact that he could not find his matches did not evoke a frown.
+He was going to see her, and he _meant_ to see her, and he terribly
+over-paid the cabman’s fare. How many sullen looks and surly words do we
+not owe to the over-generosity of lovers, who appear to think that by
+tipping the universe they will earn the reward of Providence in the
+shape they most desire? Alas! we human beings are always misplacing our
+tips, and then we wonder when the raps that come to us seem to be
+misplaced as well!
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XX
+
+
+    “God is in all men, but all men are not in God: that is the
+    reason why they suffer.”
+
+IT was hot, with that intense silken quiver in the air which turns the
+atmosphere into a living creature.
+
+That “certain twilight” moment was already beginning to “cut the glory
+from the gray,” and across the Indian garden strolled two figures
+scarcely conscious of the breathless life, so interested were they in
+each other. Gladys Travers, in a well-fitting gown, a cloud of something
+soft that sunk into a shower of lovely curves, led the way through the
+trees to a seat.
+
+“I call it a summer-house,” she said. “It sounds so English!”
+
+“Ah!” Jack Hurstly answered half wistfully, “you’ve already begun to
+hunger for home. We all have it, you know, and try to call the most
+un-English things by familiar names, just to trick ourselves into
+thinking—Heaven knows what—that it isn’t quite so far away, I
+suppose.”
+
+“It seems hardly possible that we have been here two months,” sighed
+Gladys. “And it _was_ so strange to find you here!”
+
+Strange, indeed, Gladys! after the care-succeeding stratagem and
+innocent purposeful planning that took you and your good-natured cousin
+so straight across India to the station (not so frequently a resort for
+English travellers), simply because there this broad-shouldered young
+Englishman lived and rode and shot and spoke bitterly of life.
+
+“It was most lucky for me,” he answered honestly; “and I shall miss you
+awfully when you go.”
+
+“You are very fond of Mary, aren’t you?” she said looking at the ground.
+
+“Yes, Miss Travers.” Gladys smiled.
+
+“You’re rather stupid, you know,” she said.
+
+“I think it’s you who are rather unkind,” he answered. “And what are you
+going to do with Jim?” Gladys frowned; the conversation at that moment
+was more interesting without Jim.
+
+“_Do_ with him!” she began indignantly, and then suddenly she laughed
+and turned dancing eyes upon her companion. “Do you know,” she cried, “I
+haven’t the faintest _idea_ what to do with him! What should you think?”
+
+“He’s a very nice fellow, Miss Gladys.”
+
+“Then shall I marry him?” Captain Hurstly drew a long breath; it was
+rather like playing with fire. The sun sunk speedily in the west, and
+now in a glowing rose veil plunged behind the hills. Gladys looked up at
+him from under her long eyelashes. There was something a little wistful
+in her glance.
+
+“Do you _want_ me to marry him, please?” she asked. Jack looked from the
+sky to her face; it had caught the glow of the sunset.
+
+“I don’t want you to marry anybody,” he said simply.
+
+“Ah!” said Gladys, and there was a silence—dangerous, electric, full of
+unspoken things.
+
+“You knew Muriel?” he said abruptly at last.
+
+“She was a dear friend of mine,” Gladys replied softly.
+
+“_Was!_ Isn’t she now, then?” he questioned. She blushed and looked
+away. “Won’t you tell me?” he asked gently.
+
+“I thought she was unjust—very unjust to you!” Gladys murmured. “It
+hurt me that she should misunderstand any one.”
+
+“You’re very generous,” he replied gravely. “But how do you know, Miss
+Gladys, that she did misjudge me? Perhaps she was right to have nothing
+to do with such a poor sort of chap.”
+
+Gladys sprang to her feet, her eyes flashed, and she shook a little, her
+voice was low and intense, and Jack, who rose to his feet also and stood
+opposite to her, was drawn into the circle of her emotions.
+
+“No! Captain Hurstly. She was wrong—utterly wrong!” the girl cried.
+“What are we sheltered, protected darlings, brought up with closed eyes
+and within walls, to know of the world and man’s temptations? How dare
+we judge who have no standards of comparison? And if we love”—her voice
+grew so tender it was like music—“and if we love it is for man’s
+redemption, not for the satisfaction of our own, thin, misty ideals! And
+it should be the crown of our life to raise the man we love from lower
+things, and trust in his love to leave them for ever far behind!” She
+moved nervously back to the seat, and turned that she might still half
+face him. “I don’t know what I’ve been saying,” she said breathlessly.
+“I am afraid it must sound very silly and foolish to you, and
+rather—rather uncalled for; but it has always seemed to me that women
+like Muriel, who think God’s tools not good enough for them, do a
+terrible amount of harm.” Jack took a step forward and looked down at
+her.
+
+“If there were more women like you,” he said huskily, “there would be
+fewer men—like me, Miss Gladys.” Gladys smiled a little. It was
+difficult for her to be serious for long.
+
+“Then,” she said, “it’s certainly a good thing that I’m unique.” . . .
+
+“My dear child! you know perfectly well that this is the most unhealthy
+time to be out in. Go in at once and dress for dinner! Really, Jack, I
+should have thought you would have known better!”—Mary Huntly shook her
+head at him reproachfully. Gladys lifting her eyes up to Jack, with a
+mixture of amusement and regret, turned gracefully and passed into the
+house. Mary Huntly, for all her sage advice, stayed out in the fast
+deepening darkness.
+
+They walked for a little in silence towards the gate. Mary turned over
+in her mind what she should say to him. It was hard—extremely
+hard—and, worse, it looked disagreeable. She was used to doing
+difficult things, but as a rule they had delightful effects. She very
+much doubted as a woman of the world whether what she had to say would
+have any effect, but as a woman a little beyond the world she knew she
+ought to say it.
+
+“My dear boy!” she said as they reached the gate, “that girl doesn’t
+ring true.”
+
+“What do you mean, Mrs. Huntly?” Jack asked sternly. “Are you talking
+of—Miss Gladys?” He made that fatal half instant’s pause before her
+name that marks a lover.
+
+“You have made one mistake already in falling in love with a woman too
+good for you,” she answered quietly, “don’t make the worse one of
+falling in love with a woman—not good enough! Good-night! I think you
+had better not come in after dinner this evening.”
+
+Jack would have stayed and insisted on further explanations, for he was
+perplexed and angry—there’s nothing that makes a straightforward man so
+angry as perplexity—but Jim Musgrave who was going to dine with them
+came up, and in a mixture of greetings and farewells he had to go, but
+as he went he said very distinctly:—
+
+“Mrs. Huntly, may I come in to-morrow?” Mrs. Huntly saw in a flash it
+had been no use.
+
+“Oh, yes!” she said. “What a lot of moths you have in this climate of
+yours. Good-night!”
+
+The gorgeous moon, the thin low whisper of the tropic night, the
+rustling, murmuring life, which rose from the earth to the low sky
+above, seemed something of a new birth to Jack as free from the fetters
+of an old love he paused on the brink of a new, and because it was new
+imagined there would be no fetters.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+    “She crossed his path with her hunting noose, and over him drew
+    her net.”
+
+GLADYS was the incarnation of sprightliness; her shimmering green dress
+made her look like some beautiful heartless naiad of the woods.
+
+When dinner was over she sang softly to Jim, letting her eyes rest on
+him with a light caressing smile. Her own world had turned to paradise.
+She was playing with sunbeams on a golden earth. It was impossible for
+her to be anything but charming.
+
+Mary was very tired. She sat and talked with her husband about the boy
+at Eton; for a while at least she washed her hands of Gladys.
+
+Finally the music stopped. Gladys’ hands sunk into her lap, and Jim
+looking at her in an adoring simplicity set about for words which were
+not too common to present to his goddess.
+
+“I say” (the invocation seemed a little modern) “that’s an awfully
+ripping dress you’ve got on to-night.”
+
+“Do _you_ like it, Jim?” It was impossible for her to help the emphasis.
+It had been said of her that if she were left alone in a desert she
+would flirt with a camel. Jim would have sold his soul for a compliment,
+but could only repeat:—
+
+“Awfully!”
+
+“Are you fond of being a soldier, Jim?” she asked. She was wondering why
+Jack Hurstly did not come.
+
+“I think it’s the grandest profession in the world!” he said proudly.
+“People don’t do us a bit of justice except when there’s a row on, and
+then they praise us for the wrong things. They don’t understand that a
+man must be a decent sort of chap to win the respect of his men; and
+there are fine chances, you know, that a fellow gets on the frontier to
+show what he is made of. To hush up a disturbance or keep a district
+quiet, are pretty good pieces of work. I hope you don’t think we’re all
+of us brutes or blackguards, Miss Gladys?”
+
+“No, Jim—oh, no!” said Gladys softly. “I think you’re the finest men in
+the world, the most chivalrous to women, the strongest and the
+gentlest—truest friend and noblest foe!” Jim thought it was too
+beautiful for words, also that it was original; but it was not exactly
+what he meant, and it put an end to the discussion.
+
+“How does Captain Hurstly get on with his men?” she asked. It was
+evident by her tone that she was not much interested in Captain Hurstly.
+
+“Oh, well enough,” said Jim doubtfully. “Only you see he had rather a
+bad time with a girl at home, and that rather put him off his work, I
+think. He doesn’t seem as interested as he used to be.”
+
+“I don’t believe he cared for her,” said Gladys shortly. If there is
+nothing else to do with a clumsy fact, one can ignore it.
+
+“Oh, yes, he did awfully,” said the unconscious Jim. “I never saw a
+fellow so cut up before about a girl. She must have been a jolly
+decent-looking girl, too—I’ve seen her photograph.”
+
+“Really you’re very rude—you contradicted me flatly,” cried Gladys.
+
+“Oh, but he _did_, you know,” said the over-truthful James. “_I_ didn’t
+think she was so awfully fetching, though,” he added hastily, with the
+bright hope that jealousy of _him_ might have promoted the frown he saw.
+Gladys yawned.
+
+“You’re very dull to-night,” she said, “doing nothing but talk of the
+uninteresting love affairs of your uninteresting friends!” Jim flushed
+angrily; he was conscious that he had not introduced the subject, but he
+was too loyal to say so.
+
+“I’m very sorry, Miss Gladys,” he said; “there’s something I’d much
+rather talk about.”
+
+“And that?” said Gladys, lifting unconscious eyelashes with innocent
+ease.
+
+“I think you know,” he said with the dignified gravity of extreme youth
+over a compliment.
+
+“If you mean me,” said Gladys smiling sweetly, “I think you’re very rude
+to call me a ‘thing,’ and it’s horrid bad form to talk about a girl, you
+know.” The rest of the evening passed in a pleasant, dangerous fashion.
+
+At parting Jim wore the rose she herself had worn at dinner. It was the
+pledge of all dear, impossible things to him; it was the usual
+termination of an evening’s episode to her—a gardener would have
+accused it of blight.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+        “The truth was felt by instinct here—
+        Process which saves a world of time.”
+
+DESPERATION, when it does not rave, becomes a calm; and it was with an
+almost listless quiet that Cynthia, sitting opposite her brother in his
+office, told him she was going away.
+
+He nodded briefly, and went on writing prescriptions. He had not quite
+finished his evening’s work. The boy was to deliver them to his
+patients. The room was bare and light, with the usual rows of medical
+books, long suggestive chair, and the sturdy boy standing near a
+forbidding cupboard.
+
+Cynthia’s eyes took in the surroundings as if they had been new to her.
+
+She had argued bitterly with her brother over having no lamp-shades, and
+the naked bright skeleton roused in her now a sense of irritation. Would
+Geoff never be done, and why was he so little interested in her going
+away?
+
+But he had always been a man of one idea, she thought, and what interest
+he had was buried in his prescriptions. Ten minutes later he sent off
+the boy with a curt order or two, then he turned and looked at his
+sister.
+
+“Going away, are you?” he said. He might have been drawing out a shy
+child, or encouraging a nervous patient. Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“So I told you.”
+
+“Have you thought why, or where, or when?”
+
+“I am going to a place in Somerset on the red Bristol Channel, where
+they have mud, and sunsets, and one can be alone.”
+
+“The desire for mud is very modern, and sunsets only happen once a day,”
+he replied thoughtfully. “And as for being alone, you couldn’t be in a
+better place than London, you know, for that. People can’t stand so much
+in the country. However, I daresay a rest would do you good. Mind you
+take some books—light ones; and be careful where you go for milk—it’s
+disgraceful how they adulterate it in out-of-way places.” He was giving
+her time, and observing with keen watching eyes the lines of trouble and
+pain marked in Cynthia’s face.
+
+“Geoff!” she cried with a sudden wail in her voice, “I want you! I want
+you!” He knew that she did not mean him; but he took her in his arms and
+stroked her hair. Cynthia sobbed a little in a hard choked way; she
+could not let herself go completely even in a breakdown.
+
+“Shall we go to Paris?” he asked gently. “I have always wanted to study
+under the professors there.” He looked around his meagre office-room
+peopled with his love, his work, his dreams, to stay there another year
+till success lay in his grasp, to win life for his cases, each one
+meaning to him what a battle means to a soldier; all that went to make
+interest, satisfaction, attainment, must go because a woman
+wanted—another man. He did not mince matters, he only repeated the
+magnificent lie that rang better than most truths, “I have always hoped
+for a chance like this!”
+
+“But you couldn’t leave your practice?” she protested.
+
+“I could get an assistant for a time to take my place. It’s only for six
+months or a year, isn’t it?”
+
+“There’s Muriel—Geoff!” she reminded him.
+
+“You told me to get the idea of her out of my head—perhaps six months
+or a year will do it,” said Dr. Grant. He was smiling grimly to himself
+as he spoke. When a man attempts endurance it makes for something very
+fine. When Cynthia looked at him she saw nothing but kind, half-amused
+and wholly sympathetic eyes.
+
+“I think it’s splendid you’re so placid,” she said; “I don’t believe you
+feel things at all.”
+
+“I feel very much being kept away from my supper after working hard all
+day!” he laughed mischievously.
+
+“Oh, you poor, dear thing! I’ll see about it at once!” she cried running
+from the room.
+
+The doctor flung open the window wide and stood watching the streaming
+crowd in the dusk. The lights seemed alive against the dark masses of
+houses—impenetrable, mysterious, holding life-histories—and showing
+nothing but blank strong faces to the passers-by.
+
+The doctor believed in no God at all; but when he looked above the
+house-tops to the sky, peopled by myriad stars, he felt a moment’s
+emotion, a thrill of hope, courage and strength.
+
+God believed in him perhaps, and because he would not draw near with
+faith led him by his most unreasonable passion—love of humanity—nearer
+than he knew to the divine in humanity.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+    “I am half-sick of shadows.”
+
+MURIEL read Cynthia’s letter wonderingly. It was short, and merely
+contained her reasons for leaving Muriel for six months at least. By the
+end of that time Leslie Damores would have given her up, and she would
+be more fit to take up her life again. Muriel was not to tell him that
+she was ever coming back; she was not to overdo herself or live alone,
+and above all she must not give him her address. Geoff was going with
+her. Muriel sighed and frowned; the sigh was one of loneliness. She had
+got so used to companionship—Cynthia’s, and generally her brother in
+the evening. It was something to have a man to discuss things with
+sensibly even if she never agreed with him. She frowned because it was a
+little strange he had not written to say good-bye.
+
+He had got over caring for her that was evident. She was glad of
+that—of course she was extremely glad of it. Suddenly she felt tired
+and discouraged. The girls had been unresponsive and tiresome in the
+Bible-class. She loved Paris; she could see its clean, broad streets
+filled with brilliant, rapid life, bright and gay and fresh, alive with
+incessant laughter.
+
+It was a damp, foggy evening and the fire smoked. They had such theaters
+in Paris, and then the studios! Muriel had studied there for six months
+in the pleasantest and easiest fashion. Sometimes the love of her old,
+careless radiant life, pleasure and beauty, and the ease of things made
+her catch her breath and remember she was twenty-seven, and her eyes
+were beautiful, and there was that couple downstairs drunk and
+quarrelling again! It was too late for tea, too early for supper, and if
+she lit the candle she would have to write letters.
+
+The door-bell clanged, and she heard a man’s voice. For a moment she
+thought it was Dr. Grant coming to say good-bye. Her hands wandered
+instinctively to her hair. No!—he asked for Cynthia. He must see
+her—but she was out. “Then Miss Dallerton”—the girl “would see.” The
+blackbeetle’s heavy footsteps paused outside her door. Muriel lit the
+candles and poked the fire.
+
+“Yes, I will see Mr. Damores,” she said smiling encouragingly at the
+girl.
+
+She felt less depressed because she had already begun to sympathize, and
+yet she could not help feeling angry with Leslie Damores.
+
+He stood before her, tall, handsome, eager; she sat down and waited for
+him to speak. One of the most extraordinary things about her was her
+willingness to wait for somebody else, even her silence was an
+invitation.
+
+“Cynthia wouldn’t see me,” he began, almost boyishly. “Won’t you tell me
+why, and where she is, Miss Muriel?”
+
+“She has gone away, Mr. Damores, and left us both. It’s a case of double
+desertion, isn’t it?” she laughed nervously, for the look in his eyes
+was too strongly anxious to make the interview a pleasant one.
+
+“Has she left you a message for me?”
+
+“She does not wish to see you again,” said Muriel gravely. He was quite
+silent, with his eyes bent on the carpet.
+
+“Then—and you—do you approve of her decision?” he asked slowly, his
+voice so different from his first eager greeting. It was tired and a
+little thick. An idea flashed through Muriel’s mind; she leaned forward
+suddenly.
+
+“Mr. Damores, do you care for her?” she asked. He squared his shoulders,
+and looked back at her steadily, but a little surprised.
+
+“Really, Miss Muriel, I thought—I thought it was pretty obvious!” he
+replied.
+
+“Then,” said Muriel, “I think very poorly of you for not wishing to
+marry her!”
+
+“But, good Heavens! Miss Dallerton,” he cried, now really astonished, “I
+want nothing so much! I came here, if you must know, simply for that
+purpose! and I find her—gone—leaving no traces, and, if you will
+excuse my saying so, a great deal of confusion behind her!”
+
+“I certainly do feel confusion, not to say chaos,” said Muriel smiling;
+“and the worst of it is I can’t possibly explain. However one thing’s
+evident, if you want her you must look for her, for I have no address
+beyond Paris. She hates writing letters, and it will probably be a month
+at least before she writes and gives it to me. Will you wait in London?”
+Leslie Damores smiled.
+
+“I might find her in Paris, and I shall not find her here,” he said;
+“and when I do find her, I shall bring her back. Good-bye, Miss
+Dallerton; I’m glad I didn’t deserve your scolding this time, it looked
+as if it was going to be a pretty bad one. Oh, but I was a fool for not
+marrying Cynthia eight years ago!” Muriel held out both her hands to
+him, her eyes filled with tears.
+
+“I am glad you are going to her,” she said. “I won’t wish you luck,
+because there is something so much better that you have got already; but
+I can’t help being a little sorry, for she will never come back to me
+again!”
+
+“Are you all alone?” he asked.
+
+“There’s my work,” she said; “and the blackbeetle, who is a great friend
+of mine, and looks after me very well.”
+
+“Do you remember ‘The Lady of Shalott?’” he asked abruptly. “I always
+liked that last line of it, ‘God in His mercy lend her grace.’ Good-bye,
+Miss Dallerton.” He was gone, hopeful and strong once more, with the
+possibility of satisfaction within his grasp, and Muriel again alone.
+
+“It was all very well for Launcelot to say that,” she thought, “but when
+she needed him most she had no loyal knight and true, the Lady of
+Shalott, and—and not even God’s grace would make her forget that!” And
+Muriel put her arms on the table and cried a little about Jack—at least
+she thought it was about Jack, but it was really that Cynthia’s hand was
+on what she herself had missed. The woman’s lips that bear no kiss of
+love seem formed in vain; even the angels must sigh for them—and not
+even the angels satisfy. Yet she had held it all once, and remorse and
+passion and pity mocked at her for having thrown life’s gift away.
+
+When the blackbeetle, whose other name was Catherine Mary, appeared
+again it was to bring supper, and a message from a poor woman that “She
+was taken cruel bad, and would Miss Muriel come to her?” Muriel left her
+after a terrible four hours. The fight had given her strength, and the
+light in her eyes was wonderful. She had forgotten all about the Lady of
+Shalott.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+        “La vie est vaine:
+          Un peu d’amour,
+        Un peu de haine,
+          Et puis—bonjour!”
+
+“REALLY, Mary, it’s absurd to stay away from the picnic! And I simply
+can’t go if you won’t. That odious Mrs. Collins makes the most hateful
+chaperon, with her ‘Come here, my dear!’ just at the wrong moments.
+_Won’t_ you come, Mary?” Gladys, in the most delicate of Dresden
+flowered silks, with a huge hat one mass of pale pink roses and black
+velvet, looked imploringly at her companion.
+
+She was a girl it was impossible to describe without mentioning her
+clothes. One felt if she had worn a yachting suit with gilt buttons she
+would have looked pathetic. Mary Huntly took one of the little hands in
+hers.
+
+“The truth is, dear—but don’t, please, tell Tom—I had a slight
+hæmorrhage this morning. Nothing much, it is true, but these tiresome
+lungs will bother me, and I know I ought to keep quiet to-day.”
+
+“You never used to be so fussy about your health, Mary,” exclaimed the
+girl petulantly. There is nothing that so torments a brave woman as a
+gibe at nervousness. It was true that Mary had conquered her fear, but
+she knew it to be something that comes again, and would never while she
+lived cease to give up coming. She winced and let the girl’s hand drop;
+she had not voice enough to explain. The persistent cruel healthiness of
+the girl before her aroused in her a kind of defiance.
+
+“Since you are so keen, dear, I will go,” she said, “but I hope they
+won’t expect me to talk!” She laughed huskily.
+
+“Tom is out shooting, isn’t he?” she asked Gladys later as they walked
+towards the carriage which was to take them to their destination.
+
+“How funny you are, Mary! You never used to be so interested in Tom’s
+movements,” laughed Gladys; “he won’t be back, I don’t suppose, till
+long after we are.” An hour later, by a half-ruined temple, under the
+shade of great enshrouding trees, Jack Hurstly sitting beside Gladys
+asked her a little sharply if her cousin wasn’t very seedy.
+
+“Yes, poor dear!” said Gladys with the wistful, pathetic look that had
+helped to draw Mary to the picnic; “and she’s so dreadfully plucky and
+determined, I couldn’t persuade her to stay at home with me. I can’t
+tell you how anxious it makes me feel!”
+
+Jack’s eyes grew tender over her. Hats of a certain shade cast sincerity
+in a becoming glow over an upturned face. He wanted to help her, protect
+her, comfort her! His vexation was transferred to Mary. It must be such
+a strain to go about with an obstinate, sick woman. Jim Musgrave sat by
+his aunt. All the rest had gone off somewhere—a general direction to
+which all picnics tend where there is no one to victimize the party with
+games. Gladys had promised to go and see an ancient well with Jim, and
+she had gone to see it—with Jack Hurstly; only Mrs. Collins and Jim sat
+with Mary. Suddenly she put her hand on his arm.
+
+“Jim—take—me—home,” she cried. It was the end of the picnic.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+    “God’s Hand touched her unawares.”
+
+WHEN Tom Huntly rode home with a big bag of game after a satisfactory
+dinner with a crony it was nearly twelve o’clock. Yet to his surprise
+the whole house was lit up, and there was an uneasy sense of motion and
+confusion. He dismounted and called for a servant. Suddenly he heard a
+woman crying. He let the horse go and walked into the house.
+
+“How can you expect me to go to her? No, I won’t! I won’t! Oh, it’s
+horrid! it’s terrible!—just when I was so happy too! No, doctor, go and
+sit with her till Tom comes! Oh, my God! . . . Doctor! here he is!”
+
+“Where is my wife?” said Tom Huntly. The words sounded to his ears like
+a quotation; it was absurd to suppose they could be his. He did not look
+at Gladys, dissolved in frightened tears over the inappropriateness of
+the angel Death. The doctor spoke with the unreal cheerfulness of his
+profession.
+
+“Another hæmorrhage, Major Huntly. It is over now, but you must expect
+to find her a little weak.” Then, as Tom Huntly uncomprehendingly
+followed him, “It is my duty to tell you that I consider her case
+serious—very.” A nurse stood by the bed fanning her. A sudden
+remembrance of the boy’s birth (the boy at Eton) swept over him.
+
+She looked very young, with that old, bright something in her eyes that
+the last ten years of the world had managed to dim. She whispered his
+name.
+
+“Tom, come a little nearer.” He knelt beside her, and put his arms
+around her. They had wasted a lot of time. “I wanted you so—Tom,” she
+whispered. “It’s been such a poor sort of thing, hasn’t it? What we
+might have been to each other, I mean? But it’s been all my fault, dear.
+I never knew a man that could have made me half—so happy. There are not
+many women who could say that of their husbands in our—world—are
+there, Tom?” She coughed till the slow breath came back. “So you’ll not
+worry, Tom?” she gasped.
+
+“Mary—Mary, darling—you won’t leave me and the boy?” It was frightful
+this want of time. She smiled bravely.
+
+“I’m so glad you care,” she murmured. “Tell him—Tom—that his mother
+says she wants him to be—a gentleman—like his father.” The nurse
+stepped forward, but the doctor shook his head.
+
+“There is no need,” he said, but he meant “There is no hope.”
+
+“Ah, Mary! Mary!” She opened her eyes again: she was much too tired to
+be frightened of death.
+
+God takes the ignorant, plucky souls who have fought the good fight, not
+quite knowing why, very peacefully to Himself.
+
+“I should like,” she gasped, “more air.” The nurse came towards her bed
+with the fan in her hand, but before she could reach her a gust of wind
+strangely cool and fresh swung the curtains of the window, and Mary
+Huntly was dead, having passed from a life which stifled, limited and
+kept back all the highest and noblest in her to beyond the horizon where
+“Over all this weary world of ours breathes diviner air.” The room was
+very quiet and still. The doctor after a few words to the nurse,
+engaging her for another case, went off to his quarters.
+
+Gladys composed two heart-broken notes to Jack Hurstly in her sleep, and
+Tom Huntly left alone with the body of the woman he loved fought the old
+fight with the grimness of things.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+    “And Memory fed the Soul of Love with tears.”
+
+“TOO late!” is a phrase holding the eternal knell of life. It sounds
+like a muffled peal even to those who hear it lightly said. To those who
+have lived through it, the worst of the battle passes before their eyes
+again. Many, perhaps blissfully, miss all that it means. They dare not,
+or cannot, face remorse. That they themselves have pulled down their
+house about their ears seems to them an infamous impossibility. They
+forget all their own cruel words, long neglect and unfair judgment, and
+only remember flashes of sunlight which they connect—probably quite
+falsely—with themselves. Their “yesterdays look backward with a smile.”
+
+Gladys never realized even as much as a tinge of shame. She cried a
+great deal. Mary knew how to manage things so beautifully, and, better
+still how to manage Tom. There was a certain heavy awkwardness about Tom
+that Gladys didn’t like. It had the effect of putting her in the wrong,
+which was, on the face of it, absurd. Also he wouldn’t do what she
+wished without coarsely asking “Why.” Altogether, Mary had taken the
+edge off a difficulty; and Gladys hated difficulties almost as much as
+she did explanations.
+
+It was so dreadfully trying, too—Mary’s dying just then! Another week,
+perhaps, and it would not have mattered so much. The thought forced her
+to look into the glass. The crying had done no great damage; she would
+dress entirely in white. Jack would come round soon after breakfast to
+find out how Mary was. Oh, poor Mary!
+
+There was something so bald and primitive and earnest about death;
+_whatever_ happened she would not be taken to see the body. She went out
+into the dining-room. Suddenly she began to be afraid of meeting Tom.
+
+Tom had passed the night of a thousand years; it comes once or even
+twice in a lifetime. He was looking very old and haggard. When Gladys
+came into the room he winced as if he had touched a snake. It was a very
+awkward meeting. Tom would have gone out of the room and said nothing,
+but there was breakfast—and the servants. By-and-bye there was only
+breakfast, and Gladys sitting where Mary used to sit. She was thinking
+that at least he might have shaved, and wondering if she dared to speak
+to him. It was very hot and still.
+
+“Did you know that Mary had had a hæmorrhage before?” he asked in the
+dangerously level tones of passion curbed. Gladys burst into tears.
+
+“How can you speak of her in that heartless way, Tom?” she cried. He
+gave a queer little sound that might have been a laugh.
+
+“Answer me,” he said. The question was how much did he know, and what
+was the safest lie? He saved her the trouble. “Very well, you did know,
+then! Now how long has this been going on?”
+
+“It was easy enough to keep it from you, Tom!” she said, with the
+brutality of a weak thing cornered. “You never took the trouble to find
+out. Poor Mary made me promise not to tell you. She told me first in
+England that her temperature rose every night, but that she didn’t
+intend to make herself an invalid for that. She said you were the sort
+of man who hated invalids.” Tom broke a paper-cutter he had been playing
+with on the table. “I don’t know how many hæmorrhages she had—not very
+many; certainly not one for a long time——”
+
+“Certainly not one yesterday morning,” he interrupted slowly, a little
+pause between each word. “Before you went to the picnic?” Gladys looked
+desperately at the paper-cutter. There was something in the psalms about
+a green bay-tree that occurred to her, not of course in connection with
+herself.
+
+“No, she never said so. She wanted particularly to go to the picnic; she
+said (who was it that said women are no inventors?) that she would be so
+dull without you. I tried to persuade her not to go, but she would——”
+
+“I wonder,” said Tom meditatively, “how many lies you have been telling
+me? Don’t get angry, it really isn’t worth while, and it doesn’t matter
+in the least, you know, only you had better save some for your old age.
+You can pack your things, as we are going home next week.” He rose
+drearily from the table and made his way out of the room; he cared so
+very little about anything.
+
+He felt as physically tired as after a forced march. An endless expanse
+of days and months and years passed before his eyes—there seemed so
+much time now.
+
+Suddenly he thought of the boy!—Mary’s boy and his. He straightened
+himself up; there was still somebody left to do that for. For Mary’s
+sake he would devote himself to the boy; it was tremendously worth
+while. He sat down and painstakingly wrote a letter that made his own
+tears come and the boy’s when he read it, and drew the two together as
+nothing but sorrow and loneliness and love can ever do. It followed so
+naturally and plainly that if Mary wanted her son to be like his father,
+the father must try to be a better sort of chap. Remorse receded, and
+took with it the burden of hopelessness.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+        “She was beautiful, and therefore to be wooed:
+        She was a woman, and therefore to be won.”
+
+GLADYS went into the garden, where it was coolest and shadiest, and sat,
+a lovely and pathetic figure, leaning, it is true, against a cushion
+with her listless hands in her lap.
+
+So Captain Hurstly found her. She had written the little heart-broken
+note, and she rose to meet him with quivering lips.
+
+“Oh, Jack, Jack!” she murmured—in an abandonment of grief Christian
+names fall so naturally, and it sounded very sweet to Jack—“how good of
+you to come!”
+
+“Good of me?”—he held both her hands; she had given them to him
+unconsciously—“I think it was awfully sweet of you to see me—I’m so
+sorry, dear—so sorry!” The tears rolled down her cheeks. She looked
+very pretty when she cried, and it was very difficult not to kiss her.
+
+“Mary was everything I had in the world,” she said withdrawing her hands
+with a swift blush, and sinking back on the cushions again—“mother,
+sister, friend. And Tom—Tom has been so brutal to me Oh, what shall I
+do, what shall I do!”
+
+“Tom brutal to you?”
+
+“Yes! he hates me. I’m sure I don’t know why. Perhaps he feels now he
+might have done more for Mary. She told me often how terribly lonely she
+was before I came to her. We are to go back to England next week, and I
+know too well what that means!”
+
+“What does it mean?” he asked looking at her long and carefully, the
+white dress that fell away from the little fair throat, the pathetic
+quiver of the dainty mouth, the hopeless, hunted look in the big dark
+eyes.
+
+“Oh, I can’t tell you!” she cried with a sudden gasp. “Don’t—don’t ask
+me!”
+
+“I must know,” he said firmly; “tell me, please.” The color swept over
+her cheeks, her eyes faltered and fell before his, her hands trembled in
+her lap.
+
+“Tom wants me to marry,” she said at last, “a man I can never—love.”
+She covered her face with her hands. “Go away!” she cried piteously.
+“Isn’t it hard enough already without making me tell—you!” She gasped
+the word containing her passionate heart. She was in earnest now, that
+was why she hid her face; she knew that she would not be so pretty.
+
+The word that fell in the hot still morning lived ever afterwards in
+Jack’s mind with the heavy scent of tropical flowers, the restless
+quiver of the air, and the sharp metallic stroke of a coppersmith’s beak
+near by. She was unhappy, and pretty, and clinging—and she loved him.
+Had he any right to make her love him so, and then leave her to a bitter
+and miserable marriage? So pity spoke, and the beauty of the girl’s
+lithe form, the curl of hair just escaping the uplifted hand, the
+delicate scent she used, the whole scene with its setting of the old hot
+Indian garden spoke to passion. And when pity and passion speak at the
+same moment, reason, sense, and self-control fade fast away. He took her
+hands from her face; she looked at him as a startled child would look;
+he felt the beating of her heart; he drew her closer to him, and she
+made no resistance.
+
+“Gladys, Gladys, will you be happy with _me_, darling?” he asked her.
+
+“Oh, Jack!” she cried, “you never even asked me—if I loved you!”
+
+An hour later, radiant, triumphant, cruel, Gladys stood before Tom
+Huntly.
+
+“I am not going back to England with you,” she said. “I am going to
+marry Jack Hurstly. I shall stay with Mrs. Collins till the wedding, and
+come home with Jack, for good.” Tom Huntly looked at her, alive and
+young! and upstairs lay the body of his wife, and the girl could be so
+happy!
+
+“Are you quite heartless?” he asked wearily. The insolence of her joy
+turned to weak self-pity, and she began to cry again.
+
+“Oh, poor, poor Mary!” she sobbed. “She _so_ wanted to help me choose my
+trousseau!” Tom left the room, shutting the door after him.
+
+Jack went back to his quarters. He wondered why the scent she wore
+seemed so familiar. He remembered at last that Edith le Mentier had used
+it too, and he remembered at the same time with equal irrelevancy that
+Muriel never used scent.
+
+That evening he had a long talk with Tom Huntly. His friendship with
+Mary had been a deep and real one, and he thought Gladys must have been
+mistaken about Tom’s brutality. He was not that sort of man; and he
+thought Tom was equally mistaken when he said rather doubtfully, “I hope
+you will be happy with Gladys; she’s not half up to the form of that
+other girl of yours.”
+
+Any reference to Muriel was peculiarly irritating to him just now.
+
+It also seemed that people who knew Gladys very well did not appreciate
+her so deeply as people who knew her slightly—a trait which is
+certainly a trifle unfortunate in a man’s future wife. But he had burned
+his boats, and he remembered how pretty she was, and tried to think it
+very natural that the day after his engagement he should find his
+_fiancée_ playing love-songs on the piano to her very distant
+connection, Jim Musgrave.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+    “Is she not pure gold, my mistress?”
+
+JIM looked at his uncle and said nothing. The two men were smoking on
+the piazza. It was late evening, the day before Major Huntly was to sail
+for England. He had just mentioned Gladys’ engagement, and found that
+his nephew knew nothing about it. Jim grew rather white, and the two
+puffed steadily at their pipes again.
+
+“She ought to have told you,” said his uncle at last. “Does it make a
+lot of difference?”
+
+“Yes,” said Jim laconically.
+
+“I don’t want to bother you, old fellow, but I think I ought to know did
+she give you any reason to think——” Jim shook his head.
+
+“No—I was simply—a fool,” he said shortly; and then he added with a
+rather bitter smile “she wasn’t.”
+
+“But now, you know,” said his uncle, “you’ll shake it off, I hope;
+there’s as good fish in the sea, you know, as ever came out of it.”
+
+“And they can stay there,” said Jim.
+
+“But you don’t mean you still care for her?”
+
+“Yes, sir, I always shall—whatever she does!”
+
+The night was radiant. Full in the starlit sky the moon poured forth a
+clear stream of light, bringing out the colors of the world thinly, not
+as the sun does, but with a strange, mystic richness all her own. The
+two men had not poetic temperaments. Nights and moons and stars were
+much alike to them, and they were not thinking just then so much of each
+other’s sorrows, chiefly of their own. Yet there was a very warm feeling
+of sympathy between them, and they sat for some time longer smoking in
+silent fellowship. At last Jim rose to his feet.
+
+“I shall be on duty to-morrow, sir,” he said, “so I’m afraid I shan’t
+see you again. You’ll drop me a line when you’ve reached home, and tell
+me how you find the little chap?”
+
+“Yes, Jim. I say, old fellow, I wish Mary was here to-night, she’d know
+what to say to you. I’m afraid I shall only make a mull of it—you’ve
+faced your guns pluckily about Gladys—don’t take it too hard; and if I
+could do any good at seeing your colonel about getting you some shooting
+leave——”
+
+“Thank you, sir,” Jim interrupted; “it’s awfully good of you. I think
+perhaps there’s an opening for me to go to the front again, a fellow of
+‘ours’ is taken with enteric out there. I’ll get along all right—and
+you know what I feel about aunt Mary. She was too good a woman to make
+me lose my faith in them, and it wasn’t Gladys’ fault, sir—it was all
+mine. You won’t blame her, will you?”
+
+“Oh, I won’t blame her,” said his uncle shortly—“good-bye.”
+
+“Good-bye, sir,” and Jim, sternly setting his shoulders with all an
+Englishman’s passionate determination to suppress his emotion, passed
+out into the night.
+
+It was the same beautiful world when earlier in the evening he had
+enjoyed a talk with his lady-love, and had said that he thought the
+world was really “an awfully jolly place.”
+
+He would believe no wrong of her now—it is love’s creed for the
+young—only the world was a beastly hole—that was all; and it was hard
+lines on a chap to have to come into it whether he would or no. His
+grief rushed him into metaphysics, an unknown quality to Jim, and he
+felt more himself again when he had applied for leave—and got it—to be
+sent to one of the most unhealthy parts of India where there was a
+little row on.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+    “What matter how little the door, if it only lets you in!”
+
+PARIS, always in a glitter, struck both Cynthia and Geoffrey as being
+almost too emphatically the same.
+
+They separated after the dear, delicious lightness of the earliest
+French meal, one to go to the studios and try to get a skilled but
+unpractised hand in again, the other whimsically to the lecture-rooms,
+an atmosphere congenial, but thin and uncolored to one fresh from the
+active fight. So the first week passed, and quite unconsciously they
+began to imbibe the gay French surface, the triumphant shrug at the
+disagreeable, the bright intensity of the absorbing present. It was not
+that they forgot or felt less, but as if straight from the seriousness
+of the downstairs rooms they had strayed into the nursery and were
+playing at being children again. It was one morning on her way to the
+studio that Cynthia met an old acquaintance of hers, an emphatic
+American girl, who exclaimed in the arresting tones of her
+countrywomen:—
+
+“Why, Cynthia Grant, is that you!” Cynthia turned smiling.
+
+“Millicent!” she said, “in Paris?”
+
+“Why, certainly,” laughed Millicent gayly; “didn’t you know I was
+married. I couldn’t keep it up any longer. You remember Clifton Perval?
+He was that set! I _had_ to give in to him! But come right away home
+with me, Cynthia; I’ve the most perfectly lovely flat you ever saw!”
+Cynthia felt suddenly human.
+
+“All right,” she said, “I’ll give myself a holiday. So you are actually
+_living_ in Paris. You always wanted to, didn’t you?”
+
+“_Want_ to? I was just crazy. But I let my husband know I’d be planted
+_here_ or nowhere! So we just came. Launcelot will be just as pleased to
+see us——”
+
+“Who is Launcelot?” laughed her friend.
+
+“My little boy. Why, didn’t I tell you?” Her bright, keen face clouded a
+little. “Yes, I’ve got a child.” She paused flatly, and then fell back
+with ready gush on an easier line. “Don’t you think Launcelot a real
+pretty name? I told Clifton I’d take nothing common. No William-George
+effects for me! So his name is Launcelot Cummins Perval. Cummins was my
+name, you remember, before I married. Oh, here we are. Now isn’t it a
+charming location? It’s so sweet and central.” Cynthia nodded.
+
+They were taken up almost to the top of a high building. The flat was
+evidently small and inexpensive. As they entered Cynthia was struck with
+the effect of an aggressive effort to conceal. Everything seemed
+unnaturally placed so as to hide something else, and to block views.
+There were a quantity of unnecessary things, and some very bad pictures.
+Millicent had never had much art though she had a great deal of talent,
+but the talent had deteriorated and the art vanished.
+
+Sitting on the floor, his head a mass of dark curls, with wide, blue,
+astonished eyes, was a little fellow of about six, in quaint, tight
+black velvet trousers. He looked at his mother wistfully.
+
+“You said he would come back,” he exclaimed sorrowfully; “but he hasn’t
+for hours and hours!”
+
+“Why, Launcelot, how silly you are,” cried his mother; “come here, right
+away, and shake hands with this lady. Aren’t you _glad_ to see mother
+come home so soon?”
+
+The child rose obediently and advanced towards Cynthia. His eyes were
+heavy with the difficulty to express his thoughts, his eyebrows were
+knitted painfully. Cynthia’s eyes grew tender as they met his.
+
+“What have you lost, sonnie?” she asked gently.
+
+“Oh, it’s Tony that’s goned away,” he began eagerly.
+
+“The child’s bird escaped out of the window this morning,” his mother
+explained contemptuously; “Marie opened the cage, or something. The
+thing squealed awfully; it’s rather a relief. Now, Launcelot, you go
+back to your bricks, and mother will give you some candy by-and-bye.”
+But Cynthia held the child’s hand.
+
+“I want to hear about Tony,” she said firmly. The boy’s eyes were full
+of tears, but he controlled himself manfully.
+
+“If God has taken him,” he said, “I think it’s very selfish. God has
+birds and birds, and I only had Tony.”
+
+“Why, Launcelot Perval,” exclaimed his mother in shocked tones,
+“whatever do you mean? You’re a very naughty boy to talk so; mother’ll
+have to punish you if you say such things.” The boy ignored his mother.
+She might have been an intrusive fly. He brushed her away. Cynthia
+understood.
+
+“But perhaps God didn’t take him,” she suggested thoughtfully. The boy’s
+face brightened, but clouded again.
+
+“He lives in the sky,” he said; “and that’s where Tony went. He must
+have flown straight to God, and I think God _ought_ to have sent him
+back,” his lips quivered again. “I’ve waited hours and hours,” he
+repeated mournfully.
+
+“God has got such a lot of things to do,” she said, “perhaps He will
+send him back to-morrow. Don’t you think you could wait till to-morrow,
+Launcelot?”
+
+“Why, really, Cynthia,” laughed her friend, “I can’t let you encourage
+the child in such notions. Now, look here, Launcelot, if you will be a
+good boy, and not worry any more, I’ll ask papa to buy you another
+Tony.” She was a good-natured woman, but she missed the point.
+
+“Oh, but there isn’t another Tony,” he said looking at his mother
+reproachfully; “there aren’t two mes nor two Gods, mama?”
+
+“Oh, do be quiet, Launcelot,” she cried falling back on the dense weapon
+of her authority; “of course there aren’t two Gods. I shall send for
+Marie to take you away!”
+
+This threat closed the discussion. The child went back to the window,
+and gazed wistfully at the roofs, still wondering at his unanswered
+prayer.
+
+Millicent showed Cynthia her flat. Cynthia began to understand the
+pathetic concealments. They were very poor.
+
+“We manage to have good times, though,” Millicent explained. “We get
+around and see things. Men don’t like women being _too_ economical, and
+I don’t believe in it myself. They just spend and spend, and then make a
+row over the bills. I don’t see why we shouldn’t spend too; it don’t
+make much more of a row, for they put it down to us anyway! But it’s
+very unfortunate our having that child!” She cast an impatient glance at
+the little fellow in his odd-shaped, out-grown clothes. “Sometimes I
+positively don’t know which way to turn. His father and I don’t know
+what to make of him—he’s that funny! It doesn’t rightly seem as if he
+was our child!”
+
+“He’s a dear little fellow,” said Cynthia pityingly; “I wish you would
+let me take him home for this afternoon, I would bring him back at
+bedtime. I shall be all alone.”
+
+“Why, that’s real sweet of you, Cynthia,” said Mrs. Perval. “Clifton and
+I want so much to have a nice afternoon with some French friends of
+ours—Monsieur le Comte de Mouselle and his sister. He’s the most
+perfectly charming man. Do you know him?” Cynthia shook her head.
+Millicent tittered. “He’s just wild about _me_,” she said, “but of
+course I know how to deal with him. _They_ can’t take me in, you bet!
+but I’ll be real pleased,” she added, seeing Cynthia’s attention wander,
+“to let you have Launcelot for this afternoon as soon as Marie can get
+him ready.” Ten minutes later the two left the flat. Mrs. Perval, her
+hands on her hips, talking to them as they went.
+
+“Now, Launcelot, be sure you’re a good boy, and mind what you say.
+Cynthia, don’t let him worry you—please. I’ll be _real_ pleased to see
+your brother again, Cynthia. Give him my love, and tell him——”
+
+Whatever she was to tell him was lost on the way downstairs. Cynthia and
+the boy felt suddenly free, their eyes sparkled, they clasped each
+other’s hands tightly—the world lay before them, the great glittering
+Paris world, rich with delights. A French-woman with bright, bright eyes
+passed them. The boy pressed a little closer to Cynthia.
+
+“The streets roar so,” he said fearfully. “Do you think it’s at all
+likely there’s any lions about?”
+
+“They are always careful to shut them up,” Cynthia explained, “when boys
+go out with friends.”
+
+They had a wonderful lunch and lots of marvellous French cakes, and if
+there were any lions they remembered that “friends” didn’t like them,
+and kept within bounds. Cynthia felt for the first time that she could
+breathe without it hurting her. To be alive and separate is so terrible
+to love. The child’s hand in hers made her look past herself into a
+world more beautiful and infinitely higher than her dreams.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+    “Oh; the light, light love that has wings to fly!”
+
+DR. GRANT had not found the wrench of parting much easier than his
+sister, but, like many people with deep emotions, he had found room
+enough to keep his unhappiness apart from his everyday work and
+appearance, and to take a certain amount of placid enjoyment out of his
+new mode of living. The difficulty was in completely deceiving Cynthia
+by the constant holiday aspect she expected of him. Sometimes the shadow
+fell between them, and they would be silent and apart, then both would
+bitterly blame themselves, pity each other, and rush back into the
+holiday aspect again. They would have been far happier if they had been
+less reserved.
+
+It was about six when Geoff, returning to their apartments, heard the
+noise of talk and merry laughter in his sister’s room. He opened the
+door hastily to find Cynthia on her knees before the fire roasting
+chestnuts with a curly-headed youngster, who laughed the more at his
+appearance, as if it were a part of the game.
+
+“This is the Knight Sir Launcelot,” said Cynthia gravely, waving her
+hand towards the boy. “Launcelot—the King!” Launcelot nodded.
+
+“I always ’spected him,” he said earnestly, “and now God must have sent
+him instead of Tony. Do you think kings are nicer than birds?” he added
+anxiously to Cynthia.
+
+“Not most of them,” said Cynthia preparing to shell a hot chestnut; “but
+mine’s a very nice king, as nice as any bird I should think.”
+
+“Things when they’re _very_ nice fly away,” puzzled the thoughtful
+knight; “if kings _was_ as nice as birds they might fly too!” He drew
+down his brows and gazed at the solid and substantial doctor. “But
+you—you don’t look as if you was a very flying person,” he finished
+triumphantly. “Would you like a chestnut?” The doctor accepted one with
+enthusiasm, and Launcelot, the king and the woman with red hair spent a
+charming and exciting evening.
+
+They only parted at bedtime at his mother’s door on the express
+understanding that he was to come again the next day, and that knights
+never even under the hardest circumstances cried, and that last, but not
+least, the coal-black charger with a stiff neck under the king’s coat
+transported thither from a fairy shop must be shown without delay to
+Marie, daddy and the cook. These facts being grasped the worst was over,
+and the knight, strewing wet kisses in his wake, was borne away to bed,
+leaving his volatile mother expressing shrill-voiced thanks to Cynthia
+and Geoff. The streets seemed ten times brighter and less chilly to the
+doctor and his sister, and they went to a screaming French farce for the
+rest of the evening, and felt much the better for it. In fact they even
+forgot for a while their determination to enjoy themselves.
+
+After this it became the custom for Launcelot to go to Cynthia every
+afternoon and stay with her till evening. Millicent was always grateful,
+but frequently hurried—more hurried even than an American woman in
+Paris generally is. She did not refer again to the charming Count and
+his sister, but one day she told Cynthia that “Clifton had gone away.”
+
+“For how long?” asked Cynthia quietly. Millicent stared, then she sat
+down and laughed. She laughed for a long while, but not very merrily.
+Finally she explained with a blank terseness.
+
+“He’s just quit; he’s gone! he’s left me. Don’t stand there and stare,
+Cynthia. Sit down. We didn’t have a very good time together.” She
+continued pacing restlessly up and down the little tawdry room. “He was
+always the sort of man that wanted a good time, and we didn’t have much
+money. After the child came, you know, it was worse than ever. I wasn’t
+going to play the door-mat to Clifton, but I did my best to make it
+pretty.” She looked at the little concealments, ragged and thin in the
+heartless Paris sunshine, and they looked more pathetic than ever. “And
+I dressed real well, but there wasn’t any keeping him. He only told me I
+was ruining him with dressmakers’ bills, though he knew I make the most
+of my own clothes! Sometimes I wish I hadn’t been so cock-sure about
+Paris. In America there’d have been something to keep him back, but
+there’s nothing to keep one back in Paris. Things look as innocent and
+pretty——” her voice broke; “but they aren’t, Cynthia—they’re real
+mean! they’re real mean!” Cynthia sat silently gazing at the carpet. The
+nervous, breaking voice, the frightened, restless figure were not lost
+upon her. They seemed familiar somehow, quite as if she had seen them
+before; and the ring of pain in the most meagre phrase “But they
+aren’t—they’re real mean! they’re real mean!” voiced a feeling that had
+once been part of her without a voice. She waited for the inevitable
+sequel. It came in a burst of hysterical sobs. “He left me a note,
+Cynthia—Clifton did—he said I should know where to look for
+consolation!”
+
+“The brute!” cried Cynthia. Millicent laughed.
+
+“Well! don’t you know they’re all that way when a man is tired. Nothing
+will keep him; and then he wants to throw a sop to something, maybe he
+thinks it’s his conscience, so he invents another man for the woman he’s
+left—if—if there isn’t one already.”
+
+“Millicent,” Cynthia stood up, and took the pretty, heavily ringed hand
+in hers, “do you think the second man will bring you anything better
+than the first? He never does—the only difference is he leaves you
+worse. Stick to your art and Launcelot!” Millicent tore her hands away.
+
+“Pshaw! you’re always talking about the child—I hate him!—there!—I
+hate him! I hated the pain, I hated being put aside, I hated having to
+spend my time on him—maybe if he hadn’t come Clifton would have been
+different; maybe other things would have been different too! As for my
+art, as you call it, what is art to a woman? Why, it’s nothing! you know
+it, Cynthia. If Leslie Damores hadn’t played the fool——”
+
+“Hush!” Cynthia stammered in a piteous attempt to hide the pain of his
+name.
+
+“Well, then! If a man wanted you, I’d like to know what pictures would
+mean? Pictures! I may be weak and silly—I know I am—I loved my
+husband. Yes! I did! I know I did. But if I can’t have him, I must have
+somebody. And you want me—to paint! Well! I’ll tell you. I wanted to
+please Clifton—so I painted. Now the Count doesn’t like the folks I mix
+with——” she bridled perceptibly, and Cynthia felt sick, “so I won’t
+paint any more.”
+
+She looked at the clock. Cynthia gazed at her desperately; she heard
+Launcelot’s voice in the next room. She had taught him “Sir Galahad,”
+and his voice rose in a triumphant shout at the last words, “All arm’d I
+ride, whate’er betide, until I find the Holy Grail!”
+
+“What are you going to do with the child?” she asked wearily. Millicent
+flushed. No woman is without the saving grace of feeling, through some
+chord, a touch of shame.
+
+“The Count,” she said, “says he’ll send him to school; he’s very kind.”
+
+“Very,” said Cynthia dryly. “He will send him to a French school, where
+he will grow into a second Count—it’s very kind of him. Millicent, if
+you have no other plan, will you give him to me?”
+
+“To you!” said Millicent—“to you?” She was astonished. She was, after
+all, his mother, and even where motherhood brings no love it keeps its
+sense of property. “Why, Cynthia, I don’t know as I _can_; you see,
+after all, I’m his mother! It’s very kind of you, Cynthia—but——” She
+looked again at the clock.
+
+“Look here!” said Cynthia suddenly, “I’m not going without the boy. You
+had better make up your mind to give him to me. You don’t want to ruin
+his life as well as your own, and if you don’t let me have him——”
+Cynthia’s eyes flashed. “He will be more in your way than ever now. I
+shall stay and—explain—to the Count!” she finished grimly. Millicent
+turned white.
+
+“Oh, go!” she said. “For Heaven’s sake go, and take the boy with you. I
+suppose you don’t know what people will say! I suppose it doesn’t matter
+to you that we all know why Leslie Damores didn’t marry you. I
+suppose——”
+
+“Oh, Lady Beautiful!”—the knight stood looking from one to the other at
+the door—“Lady Beautiful, do you know where it is?”
+
+“Where what is, my darling?”
+
+“The Holy Grail,” said the knight wrinkling his brows. “I don’t know
+where to find it.” Cynthia took his hand.
+
+“Let’s go and look for it,” she said; “it isn’t here.”
+
+She hesitated, but Millicent stood at the window with her back to them.
+She put her hands to her hair and replaced a pin. Cynthia turned with
+the boy, and together they left the little tawdry flat for the last
+time; left the strange, sad life with its shattered opportunities and
+sordid concealments; left his mother standing by the window waiting for
+the Count.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+        “Where He stands,—the Arch Fear
+        In a visible form.”
+
+    “IT is absolutely necessary you should come to me at once. I am
+    extremely ill.
+
+                                                      “YOUR UNCLE.”
+
+This brief but characteristic epistle rung in Muriel’s head as she left
+the club for the night. It was a trying time to leave the work. She had
+almost a settlement now of new helpers, men and women, all under her
+headship, devoted and earnest workers, but needing direction, and a
+firm, experienced hand. Cyril Johnstone had volunteered to come to her.
+Association with her having convinced him that she was neither
+light-minded nor superficial, and that in spite of his exalted office he
+still had something to learn from a woman. Captain Hurstly having
+withdrawn his liberal subscription, the club-work in his parish had
+fallen through, and the old, broad-minded, empty-headed vicar could jog
+on in peace to his grave with a sly chuckle or two at the fizzling out
+of modern efforts.
+
+Meanwhile honest hard work and the buffeting experience of the
+working-man had opened the young curate’s mind and sobered his heart,
+and there is no such worker in any cause as the disciplined enthusiast.
+
+Muriel was happier about her work than she had ever been. It was only
+right, according to her ethics, that as satisfaction dawned the new call
+should come. She did not know what her uncle’s illness meant, but she
+settled work for the next few weeks, had a final talk with her new
+associate, and putting on what she called her society dress drove off in
+a hansom to her uncle’s. She found him in the comfortable stage of a
+dressing-gown and hot chocolate. He closed his eyes as she entered the
+room.
+
+“Muriel, is that you?”
+
+“Yes, dear; I came at once.”
+
+“If you had not come it would have been too late! Muriel shut the door!”
+Muriel shut the door. The room was very warm, and the bright winter
+sunshine lit up the gold in her hair, and brought out the smile which
+was always latent in her eyes. She sat down by him and took his hand.
+
+“Have they made your chocolate nicely?” she asked.
+
+“Never! Of course they haven’t. I am infamously neglected. My slightest
+wish is thwarted. I am not master in my own house, Muriel! That is why I
+sent for you. You at least, before you became so selfish and absorbed in
+your own pleasure, knew how to look after my comfort. The doctor says I
+must on no account move. I suffer agonies from my foot, and if anything
+was to upset me the gout might fly to my heart! Yet though I have spoken
+about it again and again, they _will_ leave skin on my hot milk!”
+
+“Shall I make you some more chocolate, and boil the milk myself?” asked
+Muriel smiling. He growled an affirmative. And Muriel, chatting brightly
+about his favorite topics, made him fresh chocolate, and lightened the
+room by certain little readjustments of flowers, books and cushions that
+the eyes of the most diligent of servants always just miss over, as if
+to prove that self-help smiles after all.
+
+Sir Arthur Dallerton had aged terribly. Death’s hand rested upon so much
+that was mortal. It is only in such cases that death is dreadful.
+Muriel, who had so often seen it, thought she had never seen it more
+sadly, for in his eyes was the haunting fear from which there is no
+escape. Later on in the evening he called her to him. She had been
+singing over some old Scotch airs. She came and sat on a footstool at
+his feet, with her head on his knee. He liked to stroke her hair and
+hold her hand; it gave him a sense of peace and security.
+
+“Muriel,” he said, “do you think there is any chance of—anything
+happening to me?” The verb “to die” is terrible to some people. Sir
+Arthur Dallerton preferred the evasion of something happening.
+
+“Why, no, dear; what should—happen?” said Muriel smiling. “Things—sad
+things might cease to happen for you; but that would be beautiful,
+wouldn’t it?”
+
+“Oh, Muriel, I don’t want to die! I am afraid! afraid!” His voice rose
+almost to a scream. She stroked his hand and soothed him as if he were a
+frightened child.
+
+“There, there, dear heart! it won’t hurt you, see; there isn’t any
+death, or anything to be afraid of, surely! Only light, peace and rest,
+dear uncle, and all the beautiful, lovely things of earth quite free,
+and nothing to hurt any more!”
+
+“Oh, Muriel, child, do you think I shall see people whom I’ve come
+across in life? Oh, it’s awful!” The poor, silly, selfish life, held
+hopelessly before his eyes by the Inexorable Reality, made him catch his
+breath. The girl’s heart sank, but she spoke with firm assurance.
+
+“We shall meet nothing that we can’t bear—nothing that is too hard for
+us—for God is just as strong to save after death as before.”
+
+“But if there isn’t any God, if there’s only an awful grave? Oh, Muriel,
+it’s a dreadful thing to be an old man!” He shivered from head to foot,
+and she nestled closer to his side.
+
+“The body dies, and never feels anything; it’s just a sleep, and it will
+never dream, or wake, or fret and trouble any more, and we believe that
+the spirit is safer without it, and close to God,” she murmured.
+
+“I’m not so sure of that,” said her uncle sharply. “Some spirits can’t
+help it. They’re no better than they should be, and what do you think
+happens to them?”
+
+The blind cannot see. It is a scientific fact and a living reality; the
+nearest they can reach to sight is to feel that they do not see as much
+as they might see, and they dim that view by the cry of the eternally
+inadequate “I can’t help it.”
+
+Muriel pressed her lips to the poor human hand.
+
+“Dear uncle, such spirits must be made as well as they ought to be. We
+must trust God for the method, for we can’t know what is best; but I am
+quite sure God meant us all for His, and if we hold fast to that we
+shall grow like Him in time, and He will give us time, for there is all
+eternity for us to go on being good in if we have made the start.”
+
+“You’ll never leave me, Muriel? Promise you will never leave me!” There
+was a moment’s pause, while she looked into the fire and watched the
+red-hot coal grow black and drop to ashes in the grate.
+
+“I’ll never leave you, dear,” she said at last. “And you won’t be afraid
+any more?” she questioned. “I shall sleep right in the next room to you
+if you want me. You won’t be afraid?”
+
+“No, child! It’s been very lonely without you, and they’re very
+thoughtless about my chocolate. But you don’t think there’s any—hell,
+do you?”
+
+“Oh, no, dear; I am quite sure there’s not. Now don’t you think I’d
+better ring for Thomas to carry you to bed, and I’ll see that the cook
+does your broth nicely.”
+
+“You may if you like,” he said grudgingly; “and mind you come to bed
+early, and come to me the moment I call you.”
+
+“Yes, dear, I will,” and she kissed him gently.
+
+“You’re a good child,” he murmured sleepily. Just as she closed the door
+he called her back. “Muriel!”
+
+“Yes, uncle.”
+
+“Are you sure about what you just mentioned, you know?”
+
+“There’s nothing in all the world or out of it but God, be very sure,”
+she said with the passionate certainty of her faith.
+
+He was not quite certain whether he liked that very much better either.
+But his broth was just as he wished that evening, and he did not call
+her in the night for he passed away peacefully in his sleep. And there
+was no dark left but his own soul, and even that with the hope of light
+in it passed into the eternal.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+        “This cold, clay clod was man’s heart:
+        Crumble it, and what comes next?—Is it God?”
+
+MURIEL woke up to a new poverty and an extra ten thousand a year. The
+latter scarcely passed through her mind, but the former made her
+terribly lonely. Now there seemed nothing left, and the world a vast
+cold place void of personality.
+
+She repeated three times over during a hurried, lonely breakfast that
+she had her work, and the post brought her two letters, one with
+Cynthia’s Paris address, the other in a handwriting that drew all the
+blood to her heart. She put it aside and read Cynthia’s. It told of her
+work and of Launcelot. The tone was softer than usual. Muriel was
+scarcely surprised when she read “Launcelot says his prayers every
+evening, and always goes to church on Sundays. So I do, too. His soul
+wants nourishment as well as his body, and I promised to take care of
+him. The other night Geoff took him to bed, and when I went up to look
+at them they were kneeling side by side looking out of the window.
+Launcelot has an idea that the Holy Grail is in one of the stars, and he
+is always looking for it. You have found it, Muriel, dear, and I am
+beginning to believe that some day I may find it too.” She did not
+mention Leslie Damores; evidently he had not discovered her yet. Muriel
+hesitated to send him Cynthia’s address; she believed it better for them
+both to wait.
+
+Finally she took up the second letter. “Will you forgive me for writing
+to you? Gladys and I are married. We have left India for good, which
+means my profession dropped, you understand; but Gladys says there is no
+one to dress for in India. You’ll think it awful cheek on my part, but
+she’s very young yet, and you used to have a tremendous influence over
+her. I suppose you couldn’t drop in now and then and give her a hint or
+two? I should like to see you awfully.—JACK.”
+
+Muriel carefully put the letter on a table, and sat with her hands on
+her lap gazing steadfastly into the fire. She saw three things, and she
+saw them plainly. One was that Jack did not love his wife, another that
+she, Muriel, had hardly forgiven Gladys, and thirdly that Jack would
+like to see her awfully. There was a dim, shadowy fourth, but this she
+brushed angrily away; it hinted that there was more sunlight in the room
+than before she had read the letter.
+
+Finally she drifted into a compromise it would do no harm to see Gladys.
+She wrote telling her of her loss and inviting her to tea the following
+week. She was very nervous when the afternoon came, and paced restlessly
+up and down the long reception room in her heavy black dress vexed with
+her expectancy, listening to the noises in the street. The sharp jingle
+of a hansom passing, hesitating, stopping, brought her to a chair.
+
+Then came the sound of an electric bell, and a minute later the door
+swung open and a footman announced “Captain Hurstly, miss.”
+
+Muriel looked at him inquiringly. She did not appear in the least
+nervous now, for natures that tremble at a hindrance rise triumphantly
+to meet a calamity, and in a moment she realized that his presence was
+fully that.
+
+“Gladys couldn’t come at the last minute, and I did want to see you so,
+Muriel,” he explained. He pleaded as he had always done, and he was just
+as handsome. She let these things have full weight with her before she
+spoke.
+
+“Won’t you sit down, Captain Hurstly; they will bring tea in a minute. I
+am sorry your wife could not come.”
+
+Jack looked at her with eloquent, grieved eyes, but she meeting them saw
+the coward in his soul, and her face hardened. He had not cared enough
+for her to remain unmarried, merely enough to desire a flirtation after
+marriage. She had not slept properly for three nights after she received
+his letter. He was the first to find the silence uncomfortable.
+
+“I am not sorry she could not come,” he said with a tender inflection;
+“I wanted to see you alone. It is a long while since I have seen you,
+Muriel. To me it seems desperately long, and yet you have not changed at
+all.”
+
+“You are mistaken, Captain Hurstly; I have changed a great deal. You
+also have altered considerably.” Muriel’s tone was convincing even to
+herself; she was beginning to believe she could after all bear it.
+
+“It is true I have altered,” he replied. “You alone might know how
+terribly, but I suppose it is never wise to follow a wrong by a folly.
+Only one can’t help oneself when one’s world, all that one has ever
+cared for, tumbles about one’s ears. Oh, Muriel, how could you do it!
+how could you do it!” He was intensely in earnest; he could always be
+that at the very shortest notice. He stood in front of her looking down
+with the same passionate blue eyes which used to stir her heart, and yet
+when he met hers it did not seem as if he was looking down.
+
+“If you have come to open a question forever closed between us, Captain
+Hurstly, and which your own honor and good sense should know to be
+doubly closed by your marriage, I must ask you to excuse me. I did not
+invite your wife to tea as a permission for you to insult me.”
+
+“You are right,” he said looking at her with frank admiration; “you are
+always right, Muriel, without you I have forgotten how to be. Forgive
+me, I did not come here to upbraid you for ruining my life——”
+
+“I should think not, indeed,” Muriel interrupted scornfully.
+
+“But to ask you to help me about Gladys. Are you my friend enough to
+wish to do that—Muriel?” She flushed painfully.
+
+“I should like to help you,” she said in a low voice.
+
+“It’s simply that she won’t understand the danger of flirting with other
+men—every and any other man apparently,” he explained; “and I don’t
+want my wife to be a second Edith le Mentier.” There was a pause; his
+illustration was unfortunate.
+
+“You give her no cause to complain of you by your attention to
+the—first Mrs. le Mentier?” she could not forbear to ask.
+
+“Muriel!” he cried. The protest was too vehement to be convincing. She
+rose and held out her hand.
+
+“I will do all I can for your wife, Captain Hurstly—I am afraid it will
+be little enough—on one condition”—he waited anxiously—“that you will
+not attempt to see me again.”
+
+“You really mean it?” He spoke slowly, intensely. She never knew
+afterwards how she kept her hands from trembling.
+
+“You have singularly forgotten the little you knew of me if you think I
+do not mean what I say, Captain Hurstly.” She turned wearily to the
+door. He compared her in his mind with Edith le Mentier. Muriel was
+telling him to go away. She had told him to come back. Gladys was only a
+shadow in his life, a chained shadow; he did not even think of her at
+this moment. He had never depended on principles or considered
+consequences.
+
+“Good-bye, then, Muriel,” he said. “I suppose I must thank you for your
+promise, though its condition is terrible to me. You don’t know what you
+may be driving me to!”
+
+“Oh, I’m not driving you,” cried Muriel desperately, the weakness of his
+nature dawning more fully on her; “drive yourself, Captain
+Hurstly—drive yourself!”
+
+So he went, and was driven by some passion of irresponsibility from
+Muriel to Edith le Mentier. He found her in.
+
+For Muriel there was just earth—weak earth—where her ideal had once
+made heaven for her.
+
+It is not often we are brought into such sharp contact with our broken
+idols; if it were we should cease to make new ones—and that would be a
+loss.
+
+Muriel stood face to face with the knowledge that she had been a fool—a
+girl with a dream—lie—hugged to her heart: and God help women who have
+to realize such dreams in the daylight of facts.
+
+All she could find to say was that he was absolutely dead; she had not
+risen yet to see her deliverance. If the world had been empty before,
+now it was a blank. Those who die leave a sense of loss, but to know
+that one we loved has never lived is the greatest and most tragic
+emptiness of all. Muriel saw failure written over her heart. There was
+only one thing left: she fell on her knees and offered up her failure.
+So love passed away from her, but it left her on her knees.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+    “The black moments at end, the elements change.”
+
+IT was early, and the sunlight with sharp shadows had a chilly and
+almost stage effect. The sky was dazzling over Notre Dame. Geoffrey
+Grant sat in the great church, watching the sunbeams catch up and
+glorify the dust. Worshippers and sightseers slipped in and out, and
+many candles gleamed.
+
+The thought of Muriel had driven him there; and now he was alone with
+it, he thought half cynically how many had been driven there from the
+effects of unhappy love affairs, only they had called it aspiration. He
+at least was honest with himself; he knew it was Muriel.
+
+In his early youth he had been embittered by a girl. It was the usual
+story of love and no money, and the girl had chosen not to wait. When
+success and good fortune came to him, he was indifferent to it. He
+treated all women with a sort of good-natured contempt, thinking them
+creatures of diseased nerves and hysterical affections. Necessary evils
+distinctly, but of the two perhaps more evil than necessary. His sister
+had been the one exception; he almost worshipped her. Then came her
+story. A crisis which he had passed through, by an extraordinary power,
+but once faced, he had resolutely killed, and hidden all traces of the
+past. His sister never knew what agony she had brought into his life.
+She believed that his perceptions were blunted, instead they were too
+delicate to be obvious; he had encased them in reserve, and bore without
+wincing because the worst pain stings into silence. Muriel had been a
+revelation to him, her gaiety was so spontaneous, her brightness so
+infectious. She had thrown her life, all dusty and human, into the glory
+of the sunbeam, and she was strong. He had watched her with Jack
+Hurstly, and he watched her afterwards. As a doctor her magnificent
+healthiness appealed to him. He could not imagine her having nervous
+prostration; as a man he marvelled at her. She knew that he loved her,
+yet she could look him straight in the eyes and be frankly friendly.
+
+It had become the purpose of his life to strengthen their friendship
+into something more. For a long while he had struggled against it, but
+it was a passion that found grace with his whole nature; and, when he
+had come to the conclusion that strength lay in submission, Cynthia
+needed him, and he laid down his love and his work to face the Arch Fear
+of his life. If Cynthia should fail!
+
+The last month had worn lines in his face, and his keen eyes in repose
+looked sadder than ever. He had fought, and the worst was over; he had
+watched and fenced, waited and listened, seized opportunities, avoided
+dangers, guided and guarded, and slaved that Cynthia should be safe and
+ignorant of his efforts. He had felt happier when Launcelot came, and
+this afternoon had left her with a mind at rest.
+
+The figure of a woman with a child in her arms attracted him. She had
+evidently come a long way; she was tired and footsore, and very poorly
+dressed. He watched her buy a candle for the Virgin’s shrine and kneel
+there till overcome with weariness, she slept, her head against a
+pillar, but even though she slept she clasped the child. He felt less
+impatience than usual with the wasteful, senseless candle-buying, and
+the love, the unconscious love of motherhood, and all things beautiful
+touched him closely. After all, he wondered, there was something
+strangely more than human in women who could give so much as Muriel and
+that mother. No physical passion could explain it all—it was so
+selfless, so extraordinary, so unnatural in another mood he might have
+called it, but here and now “supernatural” seemed the more fitting word.
+The baby stirred in its sleep, and the mother’s eyes opened watchfully.
+She changed its position to a more comfortable one in her arms, then she
+made the sign of the Cross on its forehead, and crossing herself rose to
+her feet and left the church. The doctor rose too, and then, moved by an
+emotion he could never account for knelt and prayed. He smiled a little
+whimsically to himself. “Why, I believe I am becoming a Christian,” he
+thought. But he had not changed; he was only beginning to see what all
+along the tremendous struggle of his life had been making him. People
+who are so much better than their creeds often wake up to find their
+creeds are higher than they dreamed.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+    “I shall clasp thee again: and with God be the rest!”
+
+HE had found her! He repeated breathlessly to himself the one great
+fact. Leslie Damores had searched all their old haunts in Paris, had
+wandered and waited and watched, and now at last found her in a great
+class-room of French students. He had come as a special favor to the
+master in whose studio they worked, and he could not signal her out for
+more than a word, but by a clever clumsiness he knocked over her
+drawing-board. As he picked it up and gave it to her all the great
+unspoken things passed between them. It proved the mocking inadequacy of
+words that all he could say was “When may I see you?” and that she could
+only answer “After the class.” The first blessed moment had gone,
+general criticisms had to be given, and French and English art
+discussed. An hour passed interminably; he could not always stand where
+the glint of red gold hair made of the studio a new heaven and a new
+earth. Then in a blessed skirmish of conflicting drawing-boards and
+parting chatter the class broke up, and somehow the master and the pupil
+found themselves once more in the streets of Paris, or the new
+Jerusalem. There was at that moment ridiculously little in a name. Their
+thoughts were only a happy chaos, and he could do nothing but repeat the
+only fact that mattered.
+
+“I have found you at last,” he said.
+
+“I don’t believe you ought to have looked for me,” she replied gravely,
+for she was afraid.
+
+“What made you run away, Cynthia?” he asked. She could give him any
+reason but the right one. She chose to deny the charge.
+
+“I didn’t run away,” she said; “I merely wanted to come to Paris.”
+
+“Then why shouldn’t I look for you?” cried Leslie triumphantly; “I
+merely wanted to come too.”
+
+“I don’t know where we are going to,” said Cynthia, looking at him to
+see if he was much altered.
+
+“I don’t think it in the least matters providing we go there together,”
+laughed Damores. “As it happens, here’s a cemetery; shall we go in and
+look at the tombstones?” Cynthia laughed as well. It was too absurd to
+think of death. There were lines in his face; he must have missed her a
+good deal. They went into the cemetery together. A husband who had come
+to put some flowers on the grave of his dead wife thought them
+heartless. They were not heartless, they were only too happy to remember
+they had hearts at all.
+
+“Now you have come, what are you going to do?” she asked at last. She
+could not meet his eyes now; the things they meant cried too loudly for
+an answer.
+
+“I am going to marry you,” he replied smiling, “if you’ll let me. I
+don’t think anything else matters just at present.” Cynthia felt the
+color in great rebellious waves sweep over her face. She looked with
+unseeing eyes at the wreaths of absurdly artificial flowers.
+
+“Do you fully realize what that means, Leslie?” she asked. “Can you face
+everything—everything?”
+
+“Everything! everything!” said Leslie quietly, “with you; without you I
+cannot live my life. You are the best of everything I do. You never came
+to see my picture—it would have told you all. Once I made a tremendous
+mistake. It seems a crime when I look back. There is only one thing that
+can ever wipe it out. Cynthia, is it too late to ask you to be my wife,
+and overlook the past?” She could not speak, her heart thundered, and
+seemed to shake the ground she stood on.
+
+God had given her a tremendous reward, a gift unspeakable after she had
+renounced what had been to her the very hope of joy, and from the lips
+of the man she loved pardon and oblivion swept her sin into the free,
+pure waters of love. She lifted up her eyes to him that he might read
+there all her heart and soul his eternally and for ever. For a long
+while silence came down and covered them. They turned at last, and
+slowly and without speaking left the place of tombs—the acre of God’s
+sleeping ones. The man who had been stung by their laughter, seeing
+their faces again, recalled his injury. “After all,” he thought, “they
+had their business here.” And he was right, for love and death live in
+no separate houses.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+        “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”
+                           —ROBERT BROWNING.
+
+GLADYS was desperately unhappy. She had got what she wanted, and that,
+unfortunately, is frequently what follows. The unscrupulous get much,
+but they lose more; and Gladys, who had won her heart’s desire, sitting
+in a beautifully furnished room before the photograph of the husband she
+adored, was weeping bitterly. From the first day of their marriage jars
+had arisen. He was hopelessly selfish about his personal comforts, but
+he had a certain tremendous code of honor of the sort that abhors a lie
+and connives at a betrayal. Gladys was given to frequent fibbing. He had
+been disgusted, and had not hidden it; she had been spiteful and
+pointedly malicious. Little bitter unspoken things rose up as their eyes
+met. Their honeymoon had not been a success. (An exacting woman and a
+selfish man should avoid honeymoons.)
+
+Their home-coming was scarcely more so. They were both very extravagant
+in different directions, and they had no patience for each other’s
+extravagances and no self-denial for their own; they were weak and
+obstinate over trifles. Gladys was extremely demonstrative and fond of
+talking; Jack cared very little for outward expressions of feeling, and
+preferred women who could hold their tongues. He was perfectly frank,
+and paid all his compliments to other women. Gladys lived on admiration,
+and if she could not get it from the man who ought to give it to her,
+she would try to draw it from the man who would. She found this very
+easy. A good many of her husband’s brother officers admired her, and one
+of them, a Major Kennedy, frequently told her so.
+
+She was crying bitterly now over a note that lay on her lap. It was an
+invitation to a dinner from Edith le Mentier to meet Major Kennedy. It
+mentioned her husband in a way that brought the angry color to her
+cheeks. She was beginning to understand, and the tears dried. She
+thought of what Major Kennedy had said of the way to treat husbands:
+“Give ’em a little wholesome indifference, and look round you; that’s
+the way to whistle ’em back!”
+
+After all, a woman might have a good deal of fun without any harm coming
+from it. Lots of married women did. Look at Edith le Mentier for
+instance—hateful thing! Yet no one could doubt that her husband was
+devoted to her—and other women’s husbands too! Her eyes flashed as she
+thought of Jack. She stamped her foot. “I’ll pay them both out!” she
+cried, and she accepted Edith le Mentier’s “delightful invitation.”
+
+Muriel called on Mrs. Hurstly later in the season. There was a moment’s
+silence as the two women met. The room so daintily and beautifully
+furnished seemed filled with memories. Their eyes were drawn together to
+the photograph of Jack Hurstly in uniform. It was a curious coincidence
+that he had given to his wife the very photograph Muriel had returned to
+him. It was the only copy. Muriel withdrew her hand and sat down with
+her back to the photograph.
+
+“And are you going to live in London?” she asked Gladys, studying the
+girl’s face, the defiant sad eyes and peevish mouth, the fretful
+restlessness of the dainty figure. Pity was killing the last traces of
+her disappointment in her. Gladys returned her gaze curiously; she was
+thinking how becoming black was to Muriel.
+
+“Oh, yes!” she said; “I suppose we shall practically live here. I hate
+the country, you know, except for house-parties, and Jack’s estate is
+particularly dreary, I think. I hate ‘estates,’ they’re like
+appropriated pews, one always wants to sit somewhere else! Have you
+given up your club craze yet? Your uncle’s death must have made a lot of
+difference to you?” Muriel smiled.
+
+“If you mean am I horribly rich? I’ll admit it, but it will make the
+‘club craze’ flourish more than ever, I expect. I have bought up three
+houses in Stepney and turned them into one for a settlement of workers.
+I am making arrangements now to enlarge the club, and in two or three
+weeks I shall go back to it.” There was a slight pause. Gladys played
+with some violets in a stand. “Are you quite happy?” said Muriel at last
+very gently. “I hope, dear, you are quite happy?” It appeared to Gladys
+absurd to suppose she could possibly mean it, yet the tone sounded
+sincere.
+
+“Happy?—of course we are! Why we have only been married a few months,
+and Jack has discovered I wear my own hair and keep my own complexion,
+and I am reassured as to the harmlessness of his habits and the extent
+of his income. What more can one ask?”
+
+“Those in themselves might add to your unhappiness if you were so
+already, but they could scarcely succeed in _making_ you happy, I am
+afraid,” said Muriel quietly.
+
+“Wouldn’t _you_ be happy with—Jack?” questioned Gladys. Sorrow, if it
+doesn’t increase tenderness, tends to brutality. Muriel met her eyes
+calmly.
+
+“No,” she said slowly, “I do not think I should be quite happy—with
+Jack.” She did not refer to their broken engagement. Gladys expected her
+to, and was touched.
+
+“It was horrid of me to say that,” she said, “if you still care for him,
+and rude of me if you don’t.”
+
+“I don’t think you either rude or horrid,” said Muriel quietly, “only
+not quite happy. I am very sorry for you, dear, because, though I don’t
+care for Jack as I did, he made me very miserable once.” Gladys pulled
+two violets to pieces on her lap. Muriel shivered; she hated wanton
+destruction of anything, and she loved flowers.
+
+“I have behaved very badly to you,” said Gladys at last in a low voice.
+“It was I that helped Edith le Mentier make trouble between you and
+Jack.”
+
+“You loved him so?” asked Muriel gently. Gladys burst into tears.
+
+“I don’t know why you should treat me like this,” she sobbed, “for I did
+my best to ruin your life, and I would again to get—Jack!” Muriel took
+her in her arms; all her old love and pity returned to her.
+
+“It would make no difference to me if you did,” said Muriel; “I should
+only be sorry for you. Tell me what’s the matter?”
+
+“He doesn’t care! he doesn’t care!” she wailed. “I don’t believe he ever
+did, and now he’s gone back to that hateful woman again. Why shouldn’t
+_I_ amuse myself if I want to? He doesn’t love me, and—and other people
+do!” Muriel’s face grew stern with pain. If she had wished for revenge
+it was at her feet, but with all her soul she sorrowed for the wreckage
+of two lives.
+
+“I don’t think you are quite yourself,” she said. “If you love Jack, you
+know he is the only other person there is. He must have cared for you as
+well, or he wouldn’t have married you, dear. So put the other people
+quite away, and smile, and wear your prettiest clothes. You will find
+Mrs. le Mentier quite a secondary consideration. Why, she isn’t even
+pretty! Jack only goes to see her because you won’t be nice to him. Now
+have you been quite nice to him? Given up yourself in all the little
+ways, that he might give himself up to you in the great ways? Remember
+men are like children: you must put their toys away, and bring them out
+again at the right times, and not fret them about unnecessary things.
+Now, put on some of the dear violets and come home to tea with me!”
+Gladys looked at her suspiciously. Muriel laughed. “There’s nothing I
+want to get out of you!” she cried; “and you are no use to me whatever.
+_Now_, will you come?” Gladys had the grace to blush; an impulse to
+trust the girl she had wronged moved her. She gave her a letter to read
+and went out of the room to get her things on. Muriel read the letter
+standing, then she went to the window and sat down.
+
+She felt very tired. It is not so much of a surprise to find the
+outwardly barbarous with angel hearts, as to see the delicate and
+finished products of a noble civilization inwardly corrupt. The letter
+was from Major Kennedy. There are times when conditional immortality
+seems the only safeguard of heaven. Muriel felt too miserable almost to
+breathe. There come moments in the brightest lives of blank depression.
+The greatest effort she ever made was to take Gladys back to tea with
+her. That evening Jack Hurstly dined at home, and his wife burned an
+unanswered letter.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+    “There is still sun on the wall.”
+
+“SO Launcelot is to go to school, and Cynthia is to be married, and you
+are to be left all alone?” asked Muriel smiling as she handed Geoff a
+cup of tea. She had handed him a good many cups of tea since he had been
+back in England.
+
+“I am to be left all alone,” repeated the doctor, looking at her
+steadily.
+
+“I have been practically alone ever since I can remember,” said Muriel
+suddenly, “but I have seldom been lonely. In fact I often think it is
+only the people who don’t live alone who _are_ lonely. They are always
+trying to be understood, to break through barriers and live on a common
+level, and there’s no such chance, for the more one shares the little
+things the more pitilessly isolated the big things make us. It is so
+dreadfully inadequate that tantalizing partial help one gets from
+others.”
+
+“There I think you are wrong,” he said looking quietly across at her.
+“It’s the whole loaf theory you’re defending. You might just as well say
+a man had better have no legs than one, or could be as active without a
+crutch as with one, simply because he can’t be very active anyway. We
+all want what help we can get, and it is not the least necessary for
+people to understand us to help us. Children are the greatest help.
+People who know that we want the moon may be wise enough to tell us it
+is only a worn-out world of rocks, but people who can’t fathom our
+desires can still help us by telling us it is beautiful. It is one of
+the first lessons doctors learn to help patients to help themselves. In
+fact it is the greatest good we or anybody else can do.”
+
+“Yet you don’t say that the most ignorant doctors are the best?” she
+prevaricated.
+
+“No! because sympathy of that kind without knowledge is sympathy without
+a backbone. Physical cases require the definite as a foundation, but
+when one deals with the invisible, love comes first, not knowledge.
+Ignorant mothers mean more to their children than thoughtful scholars
+could—even if they do slap them occasionally. A man or woman without a
+home, if they have no jars and frets, must miss the influence of it, and
+feel the horrible loneliness of life.” He so intensely meant what he
+said that Muriel felt she had been flippant, and yet his seriousness
+made her long to be more so.
+
+“Birds who sit on telegraph wires, and can fly away from the line of
+communication whenever they want to, are more to my liking,” she said.
+
+“You forget that the birds have nests,” suggested the doctor smiling.
+
+“And you that we don’t have wings,” sighed Muriel. “And we can’t change
+our mates every spring; when we choose we choose for life, expecting the
+better—and getting the worst!”
+
+“Not always,” said Geoff quietly.
+
+Muriel felt angry; she could not tell why. She had never talked in this
+strain before; she felt vicious with the universe, and its
+representative opposite her made her worse; besides she had just been to
+see Gladys.
+
+“If there was an alternative we would take it,” she said. “But half of
+us women are brought up in such a lackadaisical way that there’s no use
+for us. When we have brains and opportunity we are generally physically
+handicapped. People don’t cut the woman who works now—they shrug their
+shoulders at her, and that’s worse! As for resources (they advise
+resources, you know, after one’s reached twenty-six), they are an outlet
+for wasted powers, a puny outlet, a mere compromise with failure! Oh!
+I’ve seen it again and again, dozens of times, capable, efficient girls
+brought up to be perfectly, daintily useless! After the schoolroom is
+over they get a dress allowance—and practise on the piano. Their heads
+must be full of something, so then come the rubbish—heaps of life,
+silly curates, silly extravagances, or piteously futile old maidhood!
+They keep us from being trained for anything else because they want us
+to marry, but all the other trainings help towards that the more one
+learns the more fit one is to teach. Self-reliance, good judgment and a
+sense of proportion are not out of place in a wife, and motherhood is
+only a word without them.” The doctor laughed.
+
+“Train your enterprising exceptions,” he said; “perhaps in time they’ll
+give the average woman a lift, but I don’t go all the way with you by
+any means. You over-estimate women because of one or two women you have
+met who stand mentally above their race. Average women at present
+haven’t brains enough to seize opportunities or to apply sensible
+educations. Domesticities or resources, and a silly curate or two, are
+just what they can appreciate, and good, solid hard work what they wish
+to avoid. I don’t say women lack brains, but as a rule they lack depth
+and continuity. They have very little of the mental soundness, even the
+clever ones, that the average man has as a matter of course. They don’t
+concentrate, and they’re altogether too personal to make much headway in
+the professions. You needn’t look as if you wished to annihilate me,
+Miss Muriel—I’ve no doubt you could—but I believe it to be a fact that
+women as a whole haven’t got physical or intellectual stamina enough for
+public life, and all the education and opportunities in the world will
+never give it to them!”
+
+“But we’re only beginning,” cried Muriel. “See how far we’ve got
+already.”
+
+“That’s the worst argument you have got against you,” said the doctor
+smiling. “You are _too_ quick to be natural; you work in spurts with
+reactions—growth, _real_ growth, is a much slower affair. But even
+granting you that you have been kept back, you simply can’t be _more_
+mentally than you have physical strength for, and as long as you are
+labelled women, you’ll be labelled _weak_.” Muriel laughed.
+
+“You sound so horribly sensible,” she said, “and you leave us no power!”
+
+“Ah! there you’re mistaken,” said the doctor. “All your strength (and
+Heaven knows you’ve got enough!) lies in weakness! When we come to the
+bottom of it, emotion rules the world, and woman is queen of the
+emotions.”
+
+“Oh, doctor! doctor!” cried Muriel with uplifted hands. “Principles!
+principles!” Geoff smiled grimly.
+
+“Ah! principles,” he said; “they are very good things for theories, and
+they act as a drug on the passions—but sometimes they don’t act!
+Good-bye, Miss Muriel, my principles warn me of my office hour.”
+
+Muriel let him go willingly. She felt absurd, snubbed, dissatisfied. She
+wanted some one to look at her as Jack had looked, with those adoring,
+humble eyes, and to listen to her as Jack had listened passionately
+sympathetic, and ready to agree with her that two blacks make the
+loveliest white in the world. She hated herself for being so rubbed up
+the wrong way; and in one breath accused Dr. Grant of being rude, and
+herself of being ridiculous. Finally she decided that neither of these
+things had anything to do with it, but that she was upset about Gladys.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+    “The Devil drove the woman out of Paradise; but not even the
+    Devil could drive Paradise out of the woman.”
+
+                                                 —GEORGE MACDONALD.
+
+“THE worst of being unusual,” said Edith le Mentier to Jack as he talked
+with her under the cover of loud, unmeaning drawing-room music,
+“is—that’s it’s so common. Really you know it’s ridiculous running
+away. Everybody does it!”
+
+“Still you know one can’t come back again—one’s got to count the cost,”
+he said looking at her anxiously.
+
+She had made him think he cared a good deal for her, and she cared
+desperately for him. He did not realize how much—it was her greatest
+victory that he didn’t. She trembled at even feeling his eyes on her,
+his presence near her.
+
+“I feel such a brute,” he said, “leaving Gladys.”
+
+“Brutes can’t live with fools,” said Edith le Mentier. “I like—brutes,”
+she added under her breath. Then she looked at him. “I don’t see the
+necessity for you to leave—Gladys,” she said.
+
+The music stopped with a crash. The hostess cried, “Oh, how delicious!
+Thank you! And _which_ of the dear old masters was that?” The
+conversation leaped joyously into freedom.
+
+Jack felt the room and the plants and the beautiful dresses whirl round
+him like a dream.
+
+“But,” he said, “I’m not that sort of a man.” He had risen to the very
+height of his standard. Edith understood instantly.
+
+“I mean,” she said gently and sadly, “we might never see each other
+again.”
+
+“Edith! Edith!” he said; “not that, my darling!”
+
+“Remember where you are,” she said in an undertone. “They’re going to
+ask me to sing,” she added. “Come to me to-morrow.”
+
+“I wish you would tell me if you mean to trust me!” he pleaded.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders; they were very pretty ones; then she sang.
+They had nothing there she knew but Gounod’s “There is a green hill far
+away.” And so she sang that. She sang it beautifully.
+
+Gladys was sitting up for him, she had had a headache and could not
+accompany him. She always had a headache if there was the chance of her
+meeting Edith le Mentier. She had dressed very sweetly to welcome him,
+and looked very young and pathetic. It was so late that he scolded her
+for sitting up for him, but she told him she had something special to
+say, and took him into the library, shutting the door. The fire gleamed
+cheerily, and Jack, as he leaned back in a big arm-chair, and looked at
+the pretty, eager face opposite him, felt more of a brute than ever.
+
+“I have had Muriel with me all the afternoon,” she began nervously, “and
+she made me promise to talk it all over frankly with you. She’s been so
+good to me, Jack!—and I told her that I would——” She hesitated, and
+looked at the fire.
+
+He could see that her lips trembled, and a sudden longing to take her in
+his arms and comfort her came over him, as he had done one short year
+ago in the Indian garden. But he did not—it was some time since he had
+done so. And there was this evening’s terrible barrier in between.
+
+“Do you know, Jack, we haven’t been married quite a year, and yet we
+aren’t very happy, are we? I’m afraid I have been terribly to blame,
+Jack. I wanted to tell you so long ago, but you didn’t—didn’t seem to
+care a bit. Then you began to see such a lot of that horrible woman, and
+I hated that, and I thought I hated you! People told me I ought to amuse
+myself, and that there were other men besides neglectful husbands—and
+Major Kennedy, he’s a great friend of yours, and he came so often to the
+house—and you never seemed to care. Indeed, I don’t believe you ever
+took the trouble to find out, and I was very miserable and silly! I
+daresay being miserable should have made me wise, but you were the
+highest thing I loved, and _still_ love, Jack, and you didn’t care!” She
+paused a moment, catching her breath, and he grew white in a sudden
+agony of fear and pain.
+
+He had lived with this woman—she was his wife! He had married her a
+young, untried girl, and he had given her the key to all the dangers,
+and left her to face them alone. He dared not interrupt her, and so he
+waited, fearing each heavy, silent moment as it passed.
+
+“I wanted love, and he—he said he loved me, Jack! Ah! don’t speak! I
+was a fool and worse! but indeed I didn’t understand, and then—Muriel
+came,”—he drew in a deep breath, it might have been a sob of
+relief,—“and I tried to be different. Do you remember that night, two
+weeks ago, when you came in late and I kissed you, and you—laughed at
+me? Oh, Jack, how it hurt me! And then the next day he told me he would
+sell his soul for a kiss. Perhaps he didn’t mean anything, but you had
+gone to tea with Edith le Mentier, and I—let him, Jack!” He started
+forward, but she stopped him by a gesture. “Wait till I finish, please,”
+she said. “Then I understood, and I sent him away, and cried all the
+afternoon. He wanted me to run away with him, and I was weak and
+frightened. I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for
+Muriel. You said I wasn’t truthful, so I want to be quite truthful now.
+I think if it hadn’t been for Muriel I should have gone. I wanted to
+hurt your pride if I couldn’t win your love; but Muriel stood by me, and
+wouldn’t let me go. She told me what to say to Major Kennedy. I’m not
+sure—but I believe she said something to him herself—anyway he went
+off somewhere at once. Oh, Jack, _can’t_ you love me! can you ever be
+good to me again?” She lifted up her arms towards him, with the tears
+rolling down her cheeks. She was weak and irresolute, vain and foolish,
+but he had done nothing to help her, yet she had gone through what had
+defeated him, and she was asking him whether he could forgive her! “I
+loved you, Jack,” she cried piteously; “I loved you all the time! And
+it’s all over now for ever and ever!” The color rushed into her face and
+a new look came into her eyes—a look he did not understand.
+
+“Why do you say it’s all over?” he asked dully. “It may happen again.”
+
+“It will never come again,” she said, “because—oh, Jack, I—I’m afraid,
+but I’m very glad too—it’s always so wonderful, and don’t you
+understand?” she covered her face with her hands, “I am going to be—the
+mother of your child!” At last it came to him, and for ever killed the
+irresponsibility of love’s selfishness. He took her now in his arms, he
+dared to do so, because now for him too the other was all over. She was
+helpless and clinging, she was his wife, and she was going into the
+valley of the shadow of death because she loved him. “Oh, Jack, will you
+forgive?”
+
+“Forgive you!” he cried, and tried to explain to her how sorry he was,
+how much to blame, and how glad at last that they both of them
+understood, and how now it would all be different—so wonderfully
+different! But he did not tell her about Edith le Mentier.
+
+When she was safe in bed he wrote to the other woman, and hurt her very
+bitterly. The other woman, for all her faults, is very often brave, and
+Edith le Mentier suffered horribly; but she bore the great defeat, and
+was only a very little irritable the next morning. She did not sing
+Gounod’s song again; she said it was scarcely suitable.
+
+She always shrugged her shoulders and smiled when people mentioned
+Jack’s wife, and when they spoke of him she said “Poor fellow!”
+
+Who could tell that those were the figures of the sum called tragedy?
+Not the tragedy of the true-hearted who see through pain the vista of
+glory, but that inordinate agony which because it is so solely selfish
+eats into the heart that bears it, and for the vista substitutes a
+_cul-de-sac_.
+
+Jack and Gladys went to his estate in the country, where they spent some
+bad hours, and learned lessons of tolerance. It was, fortunately for
+Jack, the hunting season, and he rode hard to hounds. Gladys cultivated
+the country people, read a great deal, and took an intelligent interest
+in Jack’s “runs.” At the end of the time they could live together quite
+comfortably, and avoided the unendurable with the ready forbearance of
+quite long married people. The knowing what to avoid is the key to most
+things, though it is often difficult to turn.
+
+A son was born to them, making Jack a proud father, and consequently a
+good husband. And Gladys found a life more engrossing than her own. She
+wrote and asked Muriel to stand godmother.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+    “Life’s business being just the terrible choice.”
+
+THERE was trouble at Shindies Alley, not that there was anything unusual
+in that! For it was a place where trouble was the commonplace, and what
+the comfortable call tragedy almost a nursery rule. Only the trouble was
+worse than usual, amounting to the prospect of the police and a possible
+murder case in the papers. “Rough Tom” being not quite so drunk as usual
+had beaten his wife nearly to death, a thing he had done before, but
+never quite so effectually. It was better, the neighbors thought, to
+send a boy to the doctor’s, he and the lady at the club had been there
+before. This time the doctor arrived first. “Rough Tom” was off, no one
+of course knew where. All denied any knowledge of him, though exultingly
+willing to report any unnecessary and loathsome details of the row. The
+doctor dismissed the crowd curtly. They vanished silently into dark
+holes and corners.
+
+It was a cold night. The children sharing the den where their mother lay
+cursing and groaning cried dismally. They also cried loudly; it seemed
+worth while with both a row and a doctor. Geoff despatched them to a
+neighbor’s across the passage, and examined the woman by a guttering
+candle. She swore horribly, but she was too much engrossed with pain to
+be afraid; she was also anxious to explain that it was not her man’s
+fault but another woman’s, whom she called by a variety of names. She
+was too ill to be moved, and the doctor began with steady gentleness to
+dress the wounds. He needed a nurse, but he had no time to send for one.
+The case was urgent. We fight as earnestly for the most apparently
+useless lives as for the dearest, yet we cannot believe that God has as
+high a respect for the ultimate fate of the crushed soul’s life as we
+have to keep breath in a ruined body.
+
+It was the doctor’s profession, but it was that least of all that made
+him fight for her. He looked up and saw Muriel at the door. He felt
+intensely angry that she should know such a place existed.
+
+“I should advise you to go away,” he said coldly. Muriel looked up for a
+moment, simply astonished, then she advanced towards him and the heap of
+rags.
+
+“I am going to help you,” she said.
+
+“You are only in the way,” he replied grimly, not raising his eyes from
+the patient. “I want a nurse, not—a young lady.” The last words might
+have been an insult. She flushed angrily.
+
+“I can hold her for you,” she said; “I am not afraid.” It was necessary
+to have some help.
+
+“You will faint?” he questioned incredulously.
+
+“No, Dr. Grant, I shall not!” said Muriel. He knew by her tone that she
+was very angry.
+
+“Well, then, don’t waste any more time,” was his only reply.
+
+In another moment she was down on her knees, obeying short, imperious
+orders. Dr. Grant never left much to the initiative of his nurses. The
+sight was almost more repulsive than she could bear. She wanted to cover
+her face with her hands instead of using them on the awful crushed form.
+She wanted to scream at the woman’s pain, to rage at the doctor’s
+cruelty, to fly from this whole world of constant reiterated woe; but
+she was far too angry even to let her hands tremble. At last she felt
+that her strength was going; she turned white, cold perspiration stood
+on her forehead. The doctor glanced at her sharply, and then—he
+laughed. The hot blood rushed to her heart; she grew rigid now, but not
+with fear; the noise in her ears ceased. She heard every word he said,
+anticipated every need, and had not reached the limit of her strength
+when the doctor released her.
+
+“The morphia will keep her quiet till morning,” he said. “You’d better
+go home.”
+
+“Will she live?” she asked him.
+
+“Unfortunately—yes,” said Geoff. “Women of that sort generally do—to
+be beaten again!” They went in silence to the door. Muriel was quite
+certain now that she disliked him.
+
+Geoff left a few parting directions to a reluctant, but almost entirely
+sober, neighbor. When they were in the street Muriel waited for him to
+explain; but he did not explain. It was a habit of his not to, possibly
+owing to his professional desire to steer clear of the definite. Muriel
+was too astonished, hurt and indignant to remain silent for long. She
+stopped.
+
+“Good-night, Dr. Grant,” she said with an icy formality. The doctor’s
+eyes twinkled.
+
+“What’s the matter?” he asked. She looked at him with a searching angry
+glance.
+
+“Your manner has not pleased me to-night,” she replied quietly; “I
+should prefer to return alone.”
+
+“I am sorry if I have displeased you, Miss Dallerton,” said Geoff with
+his mouth ominously twitching. Was it imaginable that she couldn’t see
+he wanted to kiss her? As she stood there, aggrieved, defiant, serious,
+her eyes like two points of light under her heavy hair, the bright color
+in her cheeks, the whole daring absurdity of _her_ seriously facing life
+there in a horrible alley instead of the delicate luxury of a West-End
+drawing-room, he could have laughed at the inappropriateness of it.
+“It’s too cold for an apology,” he ventured more gravely. “I will see
+you about this later, if I may. Please let me see you home first.”
+
+She did not want to seem girlishly tempestuous, so she assented to his
+last request, but in bitter silence walked with him to the club. She did
+not give him her hand as he said “Good-night.” She wanted tremendously
+to refuse to allow him to call, to cut short their acquaintance, to
+never set eyes on him again. But she felt an absurd desire to cry
+brought on by the physical strain of the past two hours, so that she
+said nothing.
+
+Yet when she was in her room she would not cry. She forced the tears
+back, and remembered how he had laughed at her! The utter careless
+brutality of his whole behavior! And Cynthia could be so foolish as to
+imagine he cared for her! She herself had never for an instant dreamed
+it—she refused to admit it—it was impossible! It never occurred to her
+in the least that Geoff had been trying to rouse her courage through
+opposition, and to control his own too tender feelings by a mask of
+rudeness. Even if it had occurred to her she would probably have been
+just as angry, for what she was really indignant with was his strength
+and her weakness, and she could find no excuses for that.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+                         “The best
+        Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.”
+
+THE studio lamps made cheerful colors in the right places, and Cynthia
+feeling the world as far as she was concerned in her lap, in the shape
+of a baby boy, round and fair with undecided features, felt that life
+had brought its own rewards, richly, wonderfully. She was almost afraid,
+she was so happy, with the fear of those who have gone into the
+darkness, and dreamt only of the light. Leslie Damores was painting her
+again, but the face was different. It was called “Motherhood,” and it
+told of the great need satisfied. Muriel was coming in to see the
+picture. The studio door opened and a woman come into the room; she was
+little, and French, and beautifully dressed. She advanced towards
+Cynthia with a little cry; then she laughed.
+
+“Why, Cynthia, you’ve got a baby! I told them to let me come right up. I
+was an old friend, and I just had to come. Oh, there’s your husband!”
+She turned with another rapid laugh towards Leslie. He was looking
+bravely at his wife, whose face was strained and anxious; the woman
+seemed evidently nervous too.
+
+“Well, you’re very silent you two,” she cried defiantly.
+
+“What do you want?” said Cynthia coldly. “I thought you had gone away.”
+
+“And so I did, and I’ve come back. Clifton died, and I married again.
+Did you know it?—an American too—and he didn’t give me any peace till
+I promised to get Launcelot. We Americans seem to have such horrid
+consciences.”
+
+“You never had, had you?” said Cynthia quietly. The woman looked angry,
+then she laughed.
+
+“Well, I guess you’re about right—I never had much trouble that way;
+but when Sam Hicks wanted Launcelot I felt it would be right sweet to
+take him back with us to America, and I had the greatest time finding
+your address. You’re fixed up real genteel, Mr. Damores; I should think
+you must have made painting pay. And is that Cynthia’s picture? How
+perfectly lovely!”
+
+“Mrs. Hicks,” said Cynthia slowly—“I think I understood you to say that
+was your husband’s name—when you let me take Launcelot three years ago
+I had no idea you would ever claim him again. He has just gone to school
+here in England. He is very happy——” Cynthia’s voice broke. “Oh, why
+do you want him again?” she cried—“it’s cruel.”
+
+“I am going to have my boy,” said Mrs. Hicks raising her voice. “I tell
+you——”
+
+“A moment,” Leslie Damores broke in. “You were last heard of running
+away with a French Count. Do you think you are a fit person to take care
+of a child?”
+
+“Why, how dare you?” she cried, facing him with frightened rage; “I
+declare I never heard the like! I’ll have you up for libel, Mr. Leslie
+Damores; and, as for you, Mrs. Leslie Damores——”
+
+“I am speaking for my wife, and you may speak to me,” said Leslie,
+“otherwise you leave the room.” Mrs. Hicks began to cry.
+
+“And to think that I am respectably married and everything. But that’s
+what it is, a poor woman must always suffer for her mistakes, while as
+for you—you can have as many of them as you like, and you’re none the
+worse for them!” She stopped again; their silence checked her, she felt
+hushed by their quiet contempt; and yet, angrier than ever, “I’m the
+boy’s mother,” she said turning to Cynthia; “how would you like to have
+your child taken from you?” Cynthia looked helplessly at her husband;
+the woman had touched the right plea; she was the boy’s mother.
+
+“You shall see Launcelot to-morrow, Mrs. Hicks,” said Leslie, “and by
+that time I shall have inquired into your case, and if your assertions
+are true as to your husband and his means of support we will consider
+the matter. Meanwhile there is nothing more to be said, and if you will
+allow me I will take you downstairs.”
+
+Mrs. Hicks looked spitefully at Cynthia, but Leslie’s face checked
+her—the baby had begun to cry. She flung up her head and left the room.
+The baby had gone, and Cynthia was crying alone in the studio when he
+came back. He took her in his arms.
+
+“Oh, Leslie,” she moaned, “he meant everything to us, dear little
+fellow. Do you remember he made me good again, and he found you for me?
+Leslie, I can’t let him go back to her. She left him so cruelly. He is
+mine, darling—tell me I needn’t let him go—he’s such a delicate little
+fellow. Oh, I can’t! I can’t!” He stroked her hair; she had never cried
+since her marriage.
+
+“Dearest, we will leave it to him. She is his mother—we mustn’t forget
+that. She has some claim on him, after all.”
+
+“You could threaten to tell her husband about—about the Count,” she
+whispered.
+
+“Oh, no, no, no,” said Leslie gently.
+
+“I didn’t mean it, dear—I didn’t mean it,” she sobbed afresh.
+
+“I will go and bring Launcelot,” he said.
+
+“Isn’t that baby crying?” It was not baby crying, but she turned and
+fled upstairs.
+
+“After all,” said Leslie thoughtfully, “she’s not Launcelot’s mother.”
+Then he went out.
+
+Muriel came in to find the studio empty of everything but the great
+picture of “Motherhood.” The woman holding Paradise in her arms stung
+her to the quick with her expression of ineffable content. She was not
+looking at the child in her arms. She was holding it too close to need
+the reassurance of a glance; she was looking across the child with all
+the loves in her eyes, steady and beautiful and bright, eyes too happy
+to smile. Muriel knew suddenly that it was the way Cynthia looked at her
+husband. She did not wish to see them then, so slowly she let the
+curtain down before the picture and crept softly out of the room. But
+the woman’s eyes followed her home, and when she was in the club and
+back in her room she saw them still. They seemed to have a quiet wonder
+in them that any woman could ever dream that there was any other
+happiness than that.
+
+“Something is surely wrong when one begins to count up one’s blessings,”
+said Muriel. “My life is full—full of everything I want!” But as she
+looked defiantly in the glass she saw she had not got the woman’s look
+in her eyes.
+
+Launcelot and Leslie walked hand in hand very solemnly home through the
+streets of London. Leslie had been trying to explain. Launcelot’s little
+face was very white, but he would not cry.
+
+“Do you think—do you think I ought to leave you and Lady Beautiful
+and—and baby?” he asked wistfully.
+
+“She is your mother, dear boy, and she wants you very much,” said Leslie
+reproaching himself for the coldness in his voice.
+
+“And are mothers everything?”
+
+“Mothers are a very great deal, old fellow. You see you belong to
+them—you’re their very own.”
+
+“Yes, I suppose so,” said the little fellow wearily. “Baby is Lady
+Beautiful’s very own, and so are you, but I’m not to be any more.” There
+was a quiver in his voice. Leslie pressed his little hand, he felt too
+much to speak. “My mother didn’t want me very much for her very own
+before, did she? You see she gave me to Lady Beautiful.”
+
+“She wants you now,” said Damores hoarsely. They were very near home.
+
+“I—I don’t think I want her very much, you know,” said Launcelot
+wistfully. “But they didn’t give me any choice, did they, when they made
+me belong to her?”
+
+“I think they thought she needed you; you see she has no one else but a
+new husband,” Leslie explained.
+
+“Then I must go,” said Launcelot as Leslie opened the door, “because you
+see a new husband can’t be much, and a boy who belongs to you must mean
+more, I should think.”
+
+“I am quite sure that a boy who belongs to you means much more,” said
+Leslie kissing him.
+
+So it was all settled before Launcelot ever saw Lady Beautiful. They
+looked a little nervously at each other as the door opened and they saw
+her sitting by the fire. She sprang up with a little sudden cry and her
+arms held out to him. He had been to school and knew that fellows never
+cry, but he had only just learnt it—and he forgot. Leslie watched them
+for a moment sobbing in each other’s arms. The tenderness and pity from
+her new rich store made her seem more wonderful than ever to him. His
+heart ached at their grief, but the woman’s assertions were true—the
+child must go. The inevitable had to him a consolation. He went and
+smoked hard in the studio. To Cynthia it was a cage, and she struggled
+in vain against the bars, crying over Launcelot as he slept at last,
+with troubled breathing from his late sobs. But when the baby cried she
+went to it again. The next morning Mrs. Hicks appeared. She was
+nervously anxious to please. She called Launcelot by all the
+affectionate names she could think of, but he only looked at her with
+half-frightened, wondering eyes.
+
+“And now Launcelot will come with mother?” she asked at last. He looked
+wistfully back at Cynthia and her husband, his heart breaking. Parting
+with the baby had been gone through upstairs. He had cried till he could
+cry no more, so he only looked at them.
+
+“I would rather belong to you, Lady Beautiful,” he whispered, as she put
+her arms about him, “much, much rather belong to you.”
+
+She watched him walk with his mother down the street, her face pressed
+to the panes. When he reached the corner he turned and waved back to
+her. His mother gave his arm a little pull, and he did not turn again.
+It was the last time Cynthia ever saw him. He went out of her life as
+suddenly and strangely as he had entered it; but in the meantime the
+broken thread had been joined together again, the dreams she had
+resolutely crushed had blossomed in a garden of reality, and the great
+power of love had filled up what had been the emptiness and desolation
+of her soul.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER XL
+
+
+    “How Love is the only good in the world.”
+
+“NOW I have come to make my apologies, Miss Dallerton,” said the doctor
+in a cheery voice.
+
+It was a cold day, and he looked aggressively warm and reassuring. He
+never needed to be made allowances for, and Muriel could never quite
+forgive him that. She had made so many allowances for Jack.
+
+“I’m afraid you thought me a little short with you the other day—in
+fact, you were so displeased you had half a mind to walk through Stepney
+by yourself—now, hadn’t you?” he asked smiling.
+
+“You were very rude to me the other day, Dr. Grant, and though you seem
+to take my forgiveness for granted, you have not yet given me any
+explanation.” The doctor laughed, but his eyes grew colder.
+
+“Well!” he said, “so you won’t forgive me without?” Muriel frowned.
+
+“If you have a reason I should like to hear it,” she suggested.
+
+The doctor walked once or twice up and down the room. She watched him
+unwillingly; he had the most splendid shoulders; she did not think he
+could be more than thirty-six. Then he stopped before her chair and
+looked at her very gravely. He was so tall that she felt at a
+disadvantage; some instinct made her rise too, and they stood there face
+to face, their eyes doing battle. She looked away at last.
+
+“Well?” she questioned. She was conscious that her breath was coming
+quickly, and she thanked Heaven she didn’t blush easily.
+
+“I was short to you,” said the doctor deliberately, “because it seemed
+to me the only way of getting help from you. If I hadn’t made you
+thoroughly angry you would probably have fainted.”
+
+“I should not have fainted,” she said, her eyes flashing fiercely. She
+knew she was not speaking the truth, but it was too desperately
+difficult. If she submitted in one thing, where would they stop? She was
+beginning to lose her self-control and her sense of proportion at the
+same time. It is dangerous for a man to lose both, but it is fatal to a
+woman to lose either.
+
+“There was another reason,” said the doctor slowly. Muriel was silent.
+“Do you want to hear it?”
+
+“If——” she began icily. “Yes, I may as well hear it,” she finished in
+confusion. She did not want him to think she cared enough to be angry.
+
+“I love you!” he said with the same quiet deliberation and a pause
+between each word, “and it was a little difficult to let you help in any
+other way.”
+
+The room grew suddenly tense; each breath was a terrible sword which
+shook the universe; there seemed an awful conspiracy in the room to win
+some concession; the very chairs and table seemed to wait and listen. A
+hand-organ in the street clanged them back into facts again. The doctor,
+still looking at her, picked up a paper-knife; Muriel sank back into the
+chair. There seemed nothing left in the world to say, but she felt as if
+there might be if he would only keep still a moment.
+
+“I am very sorry,” she said at last, and then she could have bitten her
+tongue out, it sounded so commonplace. She noticed that he was looking
+suddenly very tired, but he smiled with grave eyes.
+
+“I knew you would be,” he said, “and I must go and make some calls. But
+you do understand now, don’t you?”
+
+“I suppose I do,” said Muriel; “but are you going away?” He almost
+laughed at her thoughtlessness.
+
+“Well! yes, Miss Dallerton,” he said; “I think I must go now.”
+
+Muriel rose to her feet, and a great wave of desolation swept over her.
+She stood there alone, and before her eyes passed the vision of those
+who had left her—Alec—Jack—Cynthia—her uncle. All with their
+different lives, their different circles. And now he was going, the
+friend who had made life and her work, her youth and her beauty so
+excellently well worth while—with whom she had argued, quarrelled and
+discussed—and he was leaving her. All of a sudden she knew she could
+not bear it—that she, too, needed help and comfort and sympathy—that
+though one may give all and prosper, yet it is blessed to receive as
+well. And then he looked so tired. He was waiting for her to dismiss
+him, and he could not understand why she was keeping him.
+
+“I don’t want you to go,” said Muriel at last. “I’m sure I need you
+more—more than the other patients, only you must learn to ask questions
+and not to make assertions only if you want me to be a satisfactory
+case!”
+
+“What made you say that you were sorry?” he asked her after a long,
+wonderful pause.
+
+“I was sorry,” she laughed at him, “that you didn’t tell me so before!”
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+When Jack heard of her marriage he shrugged his shoulders. “I always
+thought she would run _amôk_ on some sort of a professional chap, but I
+rather thought it would be a parson,” he said, and thought how much
+better she might have done for herself if she had only known when she
+had a good thing.
+
+“I thought she was cut out for an old maid,” Edith le Mentier told her
+friends; “but those sort of women generally marry and have fourteen
+children.”
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+It mattered very little to Muriel what was said. She looked at things
+now with the eyes of the woman in Damores’ picture; and she and Geoff
+having found so much for themselves were the more anxious to give their
+sunshine to the world. They believed that the purposes of love, in human
+and material things, were the channels through which the spirit finds
+soaring room—never apart from earth, but ever nearer heaven.
+
+Their one need left was to join the gospel of example, which is simply
+loving everything for love’s sake, whether it visibly love back or no.
+To acquaintances they seemed to have positively left the world, but they
+themselves knew that they had found the true one.
+
+                 *        *        *        *        *
+
+Transcriber’s Notes:
+
+A few obvious punctuation and typesetting errors have been corrected
+without note. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been
+employed.
+
+A cover has been created for this ebook and is placed in the public
+domain.
+
+[End of _Life, the Interpreter_ by Phyllis Bottome]
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75508 ***