Katherine; a novel
Author: Thurston, Ernest Temple
Date: 2016-05-10T05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: Ebook prepared by crutledge@knology.net
Rights: Public Domain

TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER I

IT is quite expedient that one should make a concession at least twice a year and go to see what the artists are doing. Sometimes there is reward. The making of bread in the ovens of necessity, however, is not conducive to that. What the artist shows you in the galleries is mostly what he cuts up afterwards in the studios—always supposing that there is not a purchaser. If there is a willing patron, it is a different matter; then there will be nothing to destroy and some leisure to work..

But there is no denying that there are rewards, if you have patience. If only you will stand motionless on the bank of the stream for a sufficient length of time, the trout will drift out of the sombre shades into the brilliant shallows, and you will have the opportunity of seeing somewhat of God’s handicraft in God’s domain. But the impossibility of expecting the public to stand still is neither to be excused nor wondered at. They want to see their trout at once, and when well confident that he is there, under that lurching branch of willow, they have to get him out. Then you see the public put on their waders; you hear the faint swish of the lines. Down there by that ripple, where the water frolics past the shadow of the willow branch, you see the temptingly colored fly of notoriety drifting with a marvellous semblance of reality on the surface of the stream. Once it floats by, twice, twenty times maybe; but the creature is there. Out he comes with a swirl and a rush! The hook is in his gills. On the banks the critics nervously grip their nets, straining eyes to be the first to land him. Watch him pulling on the line! He’s a big fish! In a mad effort for release he has rushed down the shallows. The clattering reel applauds in answer. Every one has their eye on the flash of light and the rippling waves that mark his course. But the line is too strong, the hook too secure. He turns up at last to the surface and a greedy public lifts him out of God’s domain. In the tangle of string the persistent critic raises him high in air. He is the season’s catch without a doubt, but he will never race the swallow and the sunlight down-stream again. The public tames him. You will find him wagging his tail in the big glass bowl, opening a huge mouth to a storm of bread crumbs— God’s handicraft no longer.

But leave him alone. Let him hug the bank and the deep - green shadow under the willow, and have patience. He will come out in time. In time you will see him drifting down to the bed that he has made for himself in the gravel, and then, if your eyes are trained, you will behold him a servant to the laws of creation. You will find reward.

All this is beside the point, but there was an example of it just nineteen years ago. One of the galleries hung a picture. The public came to see it. Who says that the public does not know what it wants? That it does not know how to treat it when obtained is another matter. Tongues began wagging—people talked; the first to realize that a fish was somewhere in hiding. The subject became an indispensable course at dinner-parties. Those who had not seen the portrait of Miss Katherine Crichton were tactful if they did not admit it and relied—with the exception of those painfully ignorant—upon the numberless discussions they had listened to. The creature who avowedly disliked the portrait of Miss Katherine Crichton was bound to be either a poseur or a fool—more than likely a combination of the two.

On the catalogues which you felt it right to carry round the gallery and mark with a tick of the pencil opposite a number which had earned your critical appreciation—let it be known, you made that little notch with careful deliberation, quite heedless of those around you—on those catalogues you would have found that opposite the number thirty-seven was written, “Portrait of Miss Katherine Crichton,” then a space, and on the end of the line, “George H. Keightley.” Nothing else, as far as that page was concerned. The initiated—the old gallery-goers—however, turned to the end of the book, where they found the names of all the artists and—appended—their addresses. On this page you would have noticed, “George H. Keightley,” and, following, the number of a street in the byways of Camden Hill, Kensington. Here, then, was the deep-green shadow, the pool under the lurching branch of willow. There is no season for this kind of dry fly-fishing. It is pursued at all times. The people brought out their lines then, just nineteen years ago, and George H. Keightley was hooked in the very first cast.

There was a reason for this sportless victory which a few obscure critics perceived. That reason is the backbone of this story. But first for the picture.

In the middle of a vaguely suggested room, on a roughly sketched rug of some unrecognizable texture, sat a baby of eighteen months. A flimsy garment that would have crumpled to nothing in the fist scantily clothed part of its body. The legs were bare; the arms were bare. The toes of its little feet looked like crumpled rose-leaves, the fingers on its transparent hands like pale pieces of coral gripping foam. It sat on the rug with a look of amazement on its face, as though some one had lifted it out of a warm bath and dropped it there. Crowning its head, a startling patch on the quiet canvas, was a mat of red hair—uncombed, unkempt, uncertain in its growth, like a field of young corn, but red—burning—brilliant.

And this was the portrait of Miss Katherine Crichton. Nothing much to make a fuss about, you might say. Precisely—yet a fuss there was made, a bumbling of bees over a drop of honey. The honey was from the honey-comb, too, full of the sweetness of possibility. To put an end to this dallying then, it was the face of Miss Katherine Crichton that created the swarm.

Here was a baby of eighteen months with a personality writ large across the dimpling, chubby cheeks and the pale-blue eyes. Pale blue they were then, chips of china—old Nankin. Nineteen years changed them to gray, and the red of her hair tarnished copper. It requires nineteen years to do these things effectually. But the personality was there then; that did not change. Keightley had caught the forceful chin, the sympathetic mouth, the restless, unfathomable eyes that fixed a gaze on you and left you in a tremble of anticipation. Keightley, in fact, had surpassed himself. He had prophesied a personality, yet kept within a day to the eighteen months. You felt all these characteristics; you did not notice them. The picture tempted your imagination to put on its three-league boots and step on into the future. There it was that you saw the possibilities. This is not the last we shall see of Miss Katherine Crichton, you would have told yourself. Half London thought that and considered themselves original in the idea, until the saying, “That’s not the last we shall see of Miss Katherine Crichton,” had to be improved upon. Then one heard, at a dinner given by Mrs. Spurrier, for instance, the remark that Miss Katherine’s conquest of the public at the age of eighteen months was merely one of those events which stalks into existence with the light behind it and a lengthy shadow before.

For a great deal of this Keightley received the credit. Carried away by the personality of the baby, the public accredited most of the praise to the man. It was not really a masterpiece. The entire quality of genius lay in the fact that Miss Katherine had a personality; and for this reason George H. Keightley rose with a hungry gulp to the very first cast. High and dry they landed him on the bank, and there he set to work on Lady Martin, the Honorable Mrs. Halkett, Lord Northfleet, and many others whom it would be needless to mention. His last portrait that was exhibited, that of the Countess of Allingham, drew forth remarks from that distinguished lady which it would be uncharitable to repeat. Her dearest friend had never referred to her age as being more than fifty-three, and the unfortunate artist had made her look it to the hour.

But during the months in which the portrait of the baby was being exhibited, Keightley was a lion unapproached by any Daniel. His subsequent fate was that of every domesticated creature—he came to the hand that fed him.

This, however, is of no consequence, and does not take from the fact that hundreds crowded to see his first exhibited portrait. Mrs. Spurrier, for example, went on three different occasions. The last of these was during the Easter-term, when John, her only son, was down from Eton. John, at that time, knew about as much of pictures as a woman knows of the etiquette of sport; but Mrs. Spurrier brought him along to the gallery in his peaked coat and his absurd silk hat. Sitting on one lounge after another, he stretched out his ungainly limbs, looking all the longer for the scanty jacket, and blinked at the rows of canvases as though they were so many prize cattle in so many pens.

Having been joined by a friend in the hall where the statuary was exhibited, Mrs. Spurrier addressed but few of her remarks to her son. John therefore trailed silently in their wake, catching the drifting suds from the froth of their conversation—bubbles of talk that hovered for a moment in existence, then burst on inspection, yielding their emptiness.

When they came to the Crichton portrait they all three sank into a lounge, and John stretched his legs again, exhausted with the strain of rising to the heights of amateur art criticism. In his own phrasing, slackness would have described his condition. The fish out of its own element becomes imbued with vital energy—that, therefore, is no comparison. John was inert. He felt too impotent to wriggle. A Spartan courage kept him from a heavy sleep.

Gradually it grew upon him that they were discussing the portrait on the opposite wall. He opened his eyes and gazed glassily at the sturdy limbs and pippin cheeks of the notorious infant. The ways of women were certainly a mystery. He could understand that they thought a picture of the charge of a horse brigade poor and uninteresting art—that was natural enough in its way; women seldom had a grip on the real thing; but to rhapsodize on the beauties of a baby—unfledged, he described it—became a bone in the throat. He choked at it, blinked his eyes, then closed them.

“It’s everything you see that’s been said about it,” said Mrs. Spurrier, leaning back with narrowed eyes.

“Quite sweet,” said the companion, reclining also, as though the entire day was before her.

John groaned silently, eyes raised to the skylight.

“I’m meeting Keightley to-morrow,” Mrs. Spurrier continued. “Then I’m going to ask him who Miss Katherine is. A child like that—”

“With such a personality—”

“Ought to be watched.”

“Oh—we shall see more of Miss Katherine Crichton,” the companion said, prophetically.

Mrs. Spurrier sniffed. She herself had been the first to say that, and she had said so many better things since. She repeated a few of them then. The companion became a docile target to remarks that went within the inner ring in swift succession. The desired effect was obtained; she offered criticism with less assurance. John listened to it all with an occasional eye of amazement on the baby.

An incident occurred then that roused his lethargy. A nurse strolled through the gallery bobbing an infant in her arms. Before the picture she also stopped.

She made remarks to her guileless charge which John knew to be necessary, but considered quite unintelligible.

“Did they paint her picture without her sockies on?” asked the nurse.

This did not escape Mrs. Spurrier’s ears. She was on her feet in a moment.

“Pardon me—but is this Miss Katherine Crichton?”

“Yes, ma’am. I brought her to see her portrait.”

If you could have heard the sweet, inane endearments that followed! John writhed to think that his mother had once probably made as great a fool of him. Women were inexplicable. The child was not her own. It was past endurance when she dragged him into the group. He came up like a sheep to the scissors. Mrs. Spurrier introduced him, playfully, as John. That was the last turn of the screw. His face flamed. When the nurse moved on, he dug his hands into his pockets and turned covertly to see if any one had noticed what a fool he looked.

“Even the picture doesn’t do her justice,” said Mrs. Spurrier. “Think of the hearts she’ll break one of these days! John, think of the hearts she’ll break!”

John smiled contemptuously. Hearts! That was an expression beneath his contempt. Broken hearts! A crumpled piece of paper lay at his feet, and with careful precision he kicked it between two lounges, muttering, “Goal!” between his teeth.

CHAPTER II

THE inverted hour-glass trailed many a thin stream of sand into uneventful heaps after John had kicked his goal with the crumpled ball of paper. Those heaps rose tantalizingly near to a pinnacle at times but invariably subsided—Towers of Babel falling away into a confusion of ideas fermented by personal bias, the enemy of us all.

No amount of perseverance would ever have made John a great man, therefore, according to the usual law of temperaments, perseverance he had to the full. Up at Cambridge and afterwards, he pursued his career as the man with a net pursues the evasive butterfly—up hill, down dale, unceasingly, unswervingly, yet with the progress of a farm horse in a ploughed field after a rain.

Wilfrid Spurrier, member of Parliament for a division in one of the southern counties near Middlesex, passed a field and saw his nephew John, the cart-horse, hewing his way, up to the fetlocks in strangling mud. He waited to see the work finished, then bought the animal. John became his secretary, and Mrs. Spurrier whispered the prospects into her son’s ear.

“No wife, John. Twenty-five thousand acres of land to the estate — colossal rent-roll—” The last portion of the sentence she indicated with uplifted eye-brQws.

“Well?” said John, with irritating obtuseness.

“My dear boy, the entire future is in large type. Don’t pretend you can’t see it.”

John saw nothing beyond the fact that he had fallen into an easy secretaryship at three hundred pounds a year—to make matters worse, he said so. Mrs. Spurrier sighed heavily. Being a woman of the world, she called it incorrigible.

“There’s no justification for a man to look beyond his duty,” said John.

“Except necessity.”

“Necessity; that kind of necessity was invented by women.”

“That sounds well, but did I invent your prospects in life? When you were born, not the greatest stretch of my imagination would have helped me to conceive you at the age of twenty-six without a penny to expect from either of us, and without a glaring capacity to rise to the top of the ladder.”

“That’s another invention of women.”

“What?”

“The ladder. There’s no such thing. Every man gets to the top of your ladder who does his best.”

Mrs. Spurrier clutched at her handkerchief with involuntary annoyance.

“Don’t you consider how you stand in other people’s eyes as well as in your own? Do you manage to forget that you’ve been brought up to live like a gentleman?”

“Nothing that I contemplate now is going to pre- vent me from doing that still,” said John, equably. This was obtuseness if you wish. The man who will not see, puts up a red rag before his eyes—sure baiting to a woman.

“How do you expect to keep up appearances on three hundred a year, my dear boy,” Mrs. Spurrier asked, with admirable forbearance, “if you don’t look on beyond your duty of secretary to Uncle Wilfrid, to the possibility of coming into his property. He has no one else to leave it to.”

“The appearances of a gentleman are hardly capable of financial computation,” John returned, immovably. “The system of coinage has upset the morals of the whole world. One of these days it ’ll cast away some of the superfluous ballast and set itself right. At present there’s the common danger of things being waterlogged. It’s bound to right itself though. The lower-middle class, the tradesman, all those whom I presume you would say have no pretensions to the appearances of gentleman; they’re the ones to settle the adjustment. This country’s ruled by men who’ve been able to afford the purchase of appearances—there’s going to be an end to that. One of these days money’s going to find its own level and its own value, and the tradesman is the man who’s going to fix the plummet. The honors of knighthood, baronetcy, and aristocracy won’t be found in the show - rooms then, with a price - ticket prominently attached—honor will go to the man who does his duty for it, not to the man who puts his hand in his pocket. Judged by your standard, the essential cut of coat for the man who wants to appear as a gen- tleman must be all pockets. You talk of this secretaryship as though, according to the remuneration, it were only fit for a cad—” Mrs. Spurrier closed her eyes at the word. “I know of a good many fellows who are being paid less than three hundred a year, and are probably more gentlemanly than I am.”

“John! Your grandfather on my side was a K.C.B.” “Well, if that makes me a gentleman, I ought to be receiving a salary for it.”

“The fact that Uncle Wilfrid’s a Liberal won’t help you, if you’re going to talk like this to him.”

“I’m not going to talk like this.”

“But why not, if you feel so vitally about it?” “Because, in the first place, it’s not the duty of a secretary to preach his doctrines to his superior; and secondly, I mean to occupy his seat when he gives it up.”

The mother expressed her delight unreservedly. She recognized herself in her son as a master perceives his own personality in the work of his pupil.

“I thought you weren’t quite so foolish,” she murmured, restfully.

“I could have guaranteed when I said that that I should have been misunderstood,” exclaimed John. “It’s not a case of not being foolish, but merely of doing my best. If I do my best with Uncle Wilfrid, I shall probably be fit for his seat in Parliament, and if I am fit I ought to get it. On the other hand, if I weren’t fit for the place, no amount of necessity for appearances should constitute a claim. Blood’s no claim—breeding’s no claim—wealth’s no claim. Blood makes money, so does breeding, so does money itself —but they shouldn’t. Fitness is the only thing that counts. The capacity to raise the standard is the only thing that lasts. If to-morrow Christianity were to cease its moral influence in the minds of the majority, it would be exterminated like a slug under the heel. It isn’t Christianity that hangs on—it’s the influence, the power, the undeniable fitness to do good. Christianity is only a word—so is Christ—so is Jones. Believing in a name won’t save you. If I were to stick up a scarecrow at a cross-road which would incline the passing pedestrian to eschew evil and do good, I should be more worthy of reward than your puling infant, who is weaned into the property of his forebears with no possible fitness to do what his ancestor did in the days of the Crusades, and to which doughty deeds he now owes the title that he finds hanging on the door. The whole system’s wrong, and the man who works with a spade—calling it a spade and not a staff of office—is the man who’s going to change it.”

“If you can talk such nonsense as that, John, with such apparent fluency and conviction, Uncle Wilfrid’s seat is the only place for you. You’ll have to go into Parliament.”

“Exactly—it sounds nonsense to you, and Parliament, you think, is the proper place to deliver it. You’re perfectly right on both points. It ’ll sound nonsense to quite a lot of people, and therefore quite a lot of people will think that it should find expression in the House of Commons. That is the common opinion of government in this country. When Slater got in for Marlinthorpe last year—Slater, mind you, who puts his work before every appearance in the world— I heard a woman say: ‘England is going to the dogs. Once upon a time the House of Commons used to be considered the most refined of gentlemen’s clubs in London; but if they’re going to admit such men as Slater, we may as well call it the Union at once.’ And that’s the general idea of government in this country— a worthy profession for the sons of wealthy gentlemen; never the Holy of Holies in the Sanctuary where the greatness of a nation is made and kept.”

“Where on earth do you get these ideas from, John?”

Mrs. Spurrier felt herself crumpled in a strong arm, and a kiss, heavy as a hand, fell on her cheek.

“Not from my little mother,” exclaimed the ungainly youth.

Mrs. Spurrier smoothed out the creases he had made with a petulant hand, and tried to remember any individual on her husband’s side of the family from whom John would be likely to inherit these ideas and manners of unpalatable socialism. On her own side she knew there could be none. There was no need to look.

This was John then, at twenty-six—a Socialist—still kicking goals with heavier and more unwieldy objects than balls of paper, and between posts more closely placed together than any two lounges in an art gallery. More often than not, the flying object, speeding from the concussion with John’s energy, would fall short, or strike the posts, sometimes go wide of the mark altogether. Scoring becomes distinctly difficult in the game of Life. There the referee has no bias, and when one plays a heavy forward, useful in the scrum, never relied upon for pace, it is not an easy matter to move the spectators to applause.

Applause was not John’s portion. He could never intercept the flying pass and speed down the open field to the music of a thousand throats. He lacked anticipation. His was the power that broke the scrimmage or organized the charge. He never rose conspicuous.

It was the same way with everything. It was the same way with women. The big man with the simple heart has no conception of the treatment of women. The gazelle laughs, eyes dancing, at the heavy, car-niverous wooing of the bear; but see her terrified obedience to the luring eye of the supple chetah.

Women, without doubt, are conquered by strength; not by the gentleness of it, though, but by the fierceness of it. Impersonally, they have no respect for muscle, sinew, and bone. Your weight-lifter and your Samson call forth no cries of admiration from their hearts. They shudder at his iron biceps and his power of limb. Hideous, they call it—revolting; and when he takes their hands in the gentleness of his grasp, then they call him fool. More often than not it is the man of straw, whose grip on a woman is the only strength he has, fierce in its way in contrast to her weaker power of resistance. This is the man who most times wins. He has no strength to be afraid of. He avoids his match and flies from a stronger adversary. He it is who frightens a woman with his power of arm, and then playfully begs her to feel his biceps. Women are incapable of understanding strength until they meet it. That is why they so frequently mistake it in the man of straw.

John Spurrier then, a fool in the presence of a baby, kicking goals when he ought to have been kneeling at a shrine of beauty, was no hawk for swooping on a swallow. Ere John had flapped his wings twice, the swallow had raced the sun-ray and was pitching down the wind at sixty miles an hour. Yet he captured the fairest bird that flew through a London season. It was this way that it came about.

After nine years of unsparing secretaryship, performing duties with the methodical accuracy of an automaton, John found himself master of Glenworth. Wilfrid Spurrier died in the hunting-field, thrown from his horse, dragged in the stirrup and snicked on the head every time the animal raised its hind-leg. Merciful in its way, for the first blow had been sufficient. The horse dragged death at its heels over two acres. The will, leaving John the sole owner, had not been inconsiderately made. It bore a date showing it to be only a few months old. He had waited eight years and a half then; had tested John to the limit before he had arrived at his final decision.

As it was read forth in the dreary tones of the family solicitor, the memory of the day that it had been drawn out recurred to John’s mind. He had been working in the study when his uncle came in, standing for some time in the centre of the room, and watching John’s movements.

“When do you think a man ought to make his will, John?” he had asked, abruptly.

John looked up casually from his papers.

“When he’s made dead sure that the legatees have earned their portion—not before.”

“What sort of period would you give him in which to make dead sure?”

“An indefinite one; if possible, to the day before he dies.”

“Well, I’m thinking of making my will to-day.”

John said nothing.

“I rather fancy you don’t know who I have in my mind.”

“I think I do,” said John.

“Who, then?”

“Myself.”

“Do you believe you’ve earned you portion, then?”

“No; but I fancy you imagine I have.”

At this the old gentleman had broken out into a guffaw of merriment that rattled like a bird-scare, and turning on his heel he had gone out of the room.

Mrs. Spurrier’s delight at the reading of the will was only kept in bounds by a chilling sense of decency. She had had no sympathy with her brother-in-law’s Radical ideas. He never looked a gentleman, she had frequently said, and from her point of view she was probably quite correct; but then he preferred to be one, which is a much harder and very different matter. If any family characteristics were inherited, John took them from his uncle; but what the mother had winced at in the brother-in-law she idealized in the son. In her eyes, John fell little short of perfection.

Then it was, just at this period, that the swallow flew into the season. Fulfilling every word that had been prophesied of her, Miss Katherine Crichton, personality and all, sped into sight with a morning sun-ray—God’s handicraft in God’s domain—along with the rest of us, but impossible of being caught, impossible of being tamed.

John may have imagined that he caught her. Mrs. Spurrier certainly considered her meshed when she consented to his offer of marriage; but there were others, thinking differently, who looked on into the future, making rough estimates of John’s capacity to hold her from the freedom of the open field. Principal of these were Katherine’s mother and Katherine’s friend, and whereas Mrs. Crichton knew by maternal instinct, Barbara Durrant knew by sacred confidence.

On the day of the occurrence a voluminous screed sped from Katherine’s pen, a thread of silk spun upon a cocoon within which she hid herself from herself, yet proclaiming to the whole world incidentally, and to Barbara in particular, all that she believed she felt.

One of these fine days some one will find it worth their while to collect the letters of Miss Katherine Crichton, and, editing them—in vellum for choice— will leap out of the water of obscurity into the range of the public gaze, just as George H. Keightley did nineteen years ago.

Here was the letter she wrote to Barbara Durrant, one of the most characteristic of the many to which she so foolishly signed her name.

“Barbara—I’m engaged to be married. You may remind me of what you like—call up the hundreds of things we have said, and promised and vowed. I have an answer to every one of them. Romance has nothing to do with the present. Romance is an optical illusion. Before we come out into the world, romance is all in the future; once we have come out, it’s all in the past. Do you remember the days we had in Ireland two summers ago? Look back to them—think of them. Just in a vague way, can you remember one wet day? As a picture, doesn’t it seem a flood of sunshine? Well —that’s romance. There were lots of wet days. The period of Charles II. is only romantic because it’s in the distance — it wasn’t romantic then. In two hundred years our old rumbling ’buses, our particular kind of frocks, and our quaint silk hats will be just as fantastic. That is romance—any time but the present; the shining of the sun through the drop of rain-water which colors it with all the variations of the rainbow. And that very drop of water is full of impurities—full of germs and, without the sun, uninteresting—sordid —tasteless. I can hear you asking what ever have I done, who ever have I met to make this horrid, awful change. I think I’ve met one of the best men in the world. In three months’ time I’m going to be married to John Spurrier, of Glenworth. Mother knows the details of the estate value and what it is he’s going to settle on me. She can tell you how good a match it is—I can’t. But is he in love with me? If looking at me like a sheep dog that is going to be beaten; if touching me as though I were frail filigree of china; if talking to me as though I were something away from the world altogether—if these are the signs of being in love, then he worships me. And—am I in love with him? Barbara, I fancy we were wrong when we used to say that love was a mountain in the clouds—it’s not. It’s an ordinary highway on the sea-level. I’m in love with John—I admire him, respect him, look up to him, and I can see along for miles and miles till the road’s a white thread and my eyes ache. I’m going to be perfectly happy. A mountain in the clouds is, after all, not a healthy place to live in; the death-rate on the high-road is much lower. I strike a note, you see, of practical existence. Quite::nlike me, I know. But it is going to be like me from this out. I am in an atmosphere of rigid practicality, and it is getting into my bones. You and I used to laugh at practical people, do you remember? I think we must have been very young. You see, I’m just nineteen now. Common-sense gets the best of it—I’m quite sure of that. Mother married on a mountain up in the clouds, and, to judge from her experience, the practice must be a dismal one. I will not make a fool of myself, you see. You always said that I had a fund of common-sense. Don’t you think it is standing me in good stead now? You will be principal bridesmaid—of course you knew that. Do you remember that lovely day on the rocks when we arranged it—don’t you remember the sea—glass, with the sky in it? We are going to have a house in London besides Glenworth, and while Parliament is sitting J suppose I shall have to entertain. Do you think I shall be liked? I wish I had you here to tell you quite everything. Do you remember that day when we watched the soldiers embarking from Southampton to • go to the front? Do you remember the officer who kept looking at the strap watch that he had on his wrist? I don’t know why I should ask you if you remember so many things—but, after all, there must be a past somewhere—mustn’t there?”

Why Barbara Durrant, when she concluded the reading of this letter, should have exclaimed, “Poor little Katherine!” under her breath, is not reasonably capable of solution. It would seem that women are subconsciously aware of the condition of matrimony, which they consider slavery, yet to which they are willing and anxious to accord. Few, indeed, shirk it, many rush into it, and the rest accept with a ready sense of the inevitable. This latter state of mind, it would appear, was Katherine’s. She had accepted the inevitable as a blind man accepts the everlasting night.

Whether her letter to Barbara Durrant deceived herself is a matter for the probe and lancet of the subtle psychologist. The study of events is surer ground for knowledge. Take your places, then, the lime-light is on.

CHAPTER III

WHEN a candidate owns twenty-five thousand acresof land in a small agricultural constituency, the seat for which has been held by a near relative for something over twenty years, it is only the distressed hack of the opposite party who is sent out to contest him. The wearied cab-horse put out to grass, the emaciated animal thrust into the bull-ring. Flanks gored, wounds stuffed with straw—these are bound to follow.

In contest with John for the Glenworth Constituency, the Conservatives put up Stephen Quarritch, novelist, which would have been pitiable had not Stephen Quarritch considered himself a second Disraeli, with the possible difference that his power of pen was perhaps greater than his force of oratory. He conceived many of the ideas for his own posters, and very dainty they were. Buckinghamshire yokels stood gaping before their subtle intricacies. Let it be known that Quarritch worked hard, spoke at length, and spared himself not at all. But the cart-horse was at work, and the field was not one to be ploughed. This was all reaping for John, with sharp knives and well-oiled axles, and Katherine canvassed, as some women can.

.They were not married at that time, but their engagement had been made a gift to general gossip. This fact alone, then, added charm to the irresistible persuasions of her political wisdom. Pretty wisdom it was, too; learned out of a book with the hands behind the back, and well catechised before she was allowed to launch forth upon the actual business. She knew little or nothing of politics and cared less than she knew. The heart, not the state, was her aspect of life, and with it she worked indefatigably for John’s election.

Hearing her recount the efforts of the days, John joyed in the thought that he had not only found a wife but a companion.

“She takes to the business like an otter to the water,” he said, gleefully, and with a clumsy imagination he saw her, years on, the inspiration at the elbow.

This idea of marriage and the inspiration at the elbow was a fetish that had not been moved out of the cupboard of John’s household gods. Your Socialist, broad-minded in the flesh, comes under no immunity from personal bias. John, in full recognition of the rights of liberty to all men, had overlooked women. It is a common mistake. The Socialist is always doing it. So long as his theory is the advancement of all men, irrespective of class, he must also remember that it will be irrespective of sex. The picture of the man who, achieving the scheme of his ambition, turns round to search in vain for the inspiration at his elbow is hung in every house. No man considers it good enough to frame. Some hang it on the walls in its bare mounting, with a bitter driving of nails. The whole matter is that women think for themselves; and in doing so, for the last fifty years, the entire foundations of mar- riage have undergone a change. But neither men nor women recognize it.

John did not recognize it. Katherine believed it to be the old formula—I take thee, John, for better or for worse—with ring and book and surplice, and the voice that breathed o’er Eden. Things have not developed to such an extent that women are conscious from the very beginning of thinking for themselves. At present the realization comes gradually—a cloud, the size of a man’s hand, that grows with the nursing of the wind. They enter the estate, for the most part as ever they did, full believing it to be the broad acreage of pasture—cool, green grass of submission and bubbling brooks of content; and above and over all, a feudal lord, unimpeachably just, unassailably plenipo-tent. It is a mistake; what is more, they find it out. They think for themselves. The feudal lord becomes unaccountably human. They have thought what humanity is; they understand it. They sift him down to the fine sand, whereas, before they had taken his mound of gravel to be solid rock. The sand they place in their open palms, asking if this is what they believed to be the adamant of strength. Tell them it is—the solid rock in its component parts, the dust to which all strength must ultimately return. But that is more than they can bear; and what becomes of the ring, the bell, and the book then? It may be excellent training for the man; it surely is the evolution of the woman— but what is to be done with the Sacrament of Matrimony ?

Women are beginning to think for themselves, said an observant writer in the palmy days of George H. Keightley, which not only means that women are beginning to know what they want, but are also arriving at that state of mind which determines to get it.

What a woman wants will be found written in sacred history. Lord Byron knew it—thousands have known it before and since. The man, on the other hand, must work. His only justification lies there. He has little time to give to love. In this condition of affairs you will find the knot. Untie it if you can.

Katherine’s letter to Barbara Durrant will prove with what a brave show of armor and flare of trumpets she marched into the lists. This canvassing for John’s election was a successful blowing of a defiant blast.

On the polling day, she stamped her foot because the dressmakers had overlooked some defect in her frock.

“I positively can’t wear it!” she exclaimed, until she was persuaded to let her maid perform the necessary alterations.

When she met John, tears smarted her eyes because he said nothing whatever about her appearance.

She had put all her ideas of politics into that frock, and he, for whom it was worn, noticed nothing. True, he kissed her when they were alone. Lifting then in spirits, she asked him what he thought of her dress. He forced a spurious interest, inquiring if it were new. New? Heavens! These are things a man must know, or pretend the knowledge.

The result of the polling was a foregone conclusion.

John’s majority was overwhelming — the avalanche that crushes the mountain chalet in its path. Jubilations were none the less sincere. The drive from the polling-station to the town-hall, in a carriage drawn by lusty and sweating sons of the soil, was the crowning moment of the day. John boldly took her hand, and they bowed right and left like royalty in a pageant.

“There is a sense of victory in honorable defeat,” said John, speaking afterwards from the window under the town-hall clock; “but then, I ask you, what sense of victory must there be in honorable success among men of honor, whose honor it is to lift the standard for the political welfare of the community?”

It was all politics that day in Glenworth. What else could you expect? John was a hero, a man to be proud of. Witness the pride of his mother! There was no chilling sense of decency to be observed in this affair. Mrs. Spurrier let it have full sail. Katherine felt proud of him too. He was a man to be relied upon. She repeated that to herself that night until she fell asleep. Romance had nothing to do with it. This was actual fact. Yet a chord quivered somewhere. In her sleep, she tossed from one side to the other. Once she woke to find the pillow wet with her tears, but was unable to recall the cause of them in her dream.

It is only the practical and perfected note one hears when the bugle of defiance is blown in the public square; few are permitted to listen to the quavering efforts that break and tremble in the inner chamber.

Within three weeks from that day of the polling, Katherine was married.

“Life’s good—I’m going to be happy,” she said to Barbara Durrant, while she was changing into her travelling dress. It was the only moment they had been alone together. Katherine had dismissed her maid to do the final packing.

Barbara looked at her critically through her long eyelashes. “What do you call happiness now?” she asked. A faint emphasis loitered round the last word, dragging with it a subtle odor of the past.

Katherine’s nostrils quivered at the scent; her eyes narrowed and her fingers slipped on the hook that she was fastening.

“Why—call happiness now? Why the now?”

Barbara dropped into a chair, interlacing her fingers, compressing her lips for the defence. Katherine’s hatred of insinuation, her love of the truth from the shoulder, these had not altered. She doubted really whether anything had made an intrinsic change. For the present there was the whole field of suggestion in that one word to be beaten out. Flails must be kept going. She wished for the moment that she had let things drift as they were. There was little good in disclosing old portraits and seeking for the reason of their dissimilarity with the present. But it had to be done now. She opened the family album with a wrench. Katherine at the age of fourteen—short frocks, short hair, a doll in her hands that had been through all the excruciating tortures of romance and married her heart’s desire. This was the first picture.

“That’s not like you now,” said Barbara. “If you had dolls now, you’d marry them to Chicago millionaires.”

Katherine wheeled round on a high heel.

“Do you mean to say that because John—because he inherited—because there’s a big estate—?” She could not bring herself to say the exact words, because she was not absolutely certain of their injustice. Whatever there was, it was not flagrant.

The imputation of this meaning was quite as hurtful to Barbara. Chicago millionaires had been the exaggeration of metaphor. She knew that Katherine had taken it literally in order to extract the truth. Well— she should have it.

In the friendship of girls may be found the perfection of deceit. It is quite gentle of its kind—by no means harmful. Truthful criticism to them is an undiscovered art. The payee of the compliment—and they flow like honey from a broken comb—is just as much aware of its insincerity as the recipient; yet the transaction is one of mutual satisfaction. It is the application of an emollient where the truth would irritate and inflame. Why irritate? Why inflame? The exception of Barbara Durrant is an example. She was made to suffer for it. Let those who will take warning. Katherine had asked for the truth, as she always did; Barbara gave it to her—and that is another matter.

“You’re not really in love with John,” was the gist of what she said. “Not in love as we understand it— as we understood it even only a year ago.”

Now this is scarcely the sort of thing to say to a girl on the day of her wedding. There was only one justification for it—poor in its way—Barbara knew it to be the truth.

Katherine’s lips quivered. A proud uplifting of the eyebrows contracting into a frown, kept the tears out of her eyes.

“How dare you say that?” she asked, in a subdued voice. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know in the least how I dare, unless it’s because I love you as I do. Katherine!”

That appeal was wasted then. Out the truth had to come—the whole of it too. The seam had been ripped — if it were for curiosity alone, the sawdust must come out.

“What do you mean?” Katherine repeated. “I won’t go out of this room till you’ve explained yourself.”

Here you see the folly of telling the truth. Katherine would not go out of the room until the whole matter was explained. The people were waiting downstairs. Barbara knew well the emptiness of the threat, yet it succeeded in coercing her.

“I simply mean what I said,” she replied. “You don’t love John—”

“I think he’s the best man I’ve ever met.”

“I haven’t the slightest doubt of that; but that isn’t loving him. Women don’t always love the best men they ever meet.”

“Then why have I married him?”

She would have the truth, hating each portion of it as it was delivered.

“Because there’s the side of every woman that knows marriage to be a duty; and the more advantageous it is, the greater duty it becomes. You wouldn’t marry a brute, but that doesn’t say that because John is a splendid man, you love him. His excellence of character makes the duty all the greater. The advantages of his position make the duty all the greater. You’d be a fool to refuse him. I wonder how many girls marry to save themselves from being fools—but that doesn’t guarantee you love him.”

Barbara’s cheeks were red and her eyes sparkled. These were her ideals and she clung to them. In its way, it was a bitter blow to see the only one who had shared them with her, going the way of all flesh. But she would not allow it to shake the foundations of her faith. She must love the man she married with that wildest tenderness of a woman, or marry not at all. Katherine had once said the same; but now she had joined the vast army of women who sell themselves. Sell themselves! Ridiculous! you say. Quite so— ridiculous—we all agree. Honorable exchange in the presence of qualified valuers, duly signed and attested by the profession of clergy. In this way it does not lie so rancid on the tongue.

“Can you say you love him—as we used to talk about love?” persisted Barbara, seething with sentiment.

“Love, as we used to talk about it,” said Katherine, her lip curling like the petal of a rose, “was nothing but romance—mawkish—silly—bread that an epicure would live upon in times of plenty.” Her eyes shot contempt. “If you imagine that you will find that sustaining—I’m sorry for you. One of these days you’ll come begging to my door for friendship. Girls are always sentimental—it’s bread and wine to them. Sentiment! I hate sentiment! Mine has evaporated —so will yours one of these days. There’s no need for you to wait up here. I shall be down presently.”

Barbara rose to her feet. She recognized the rift. The flaw in the metal had come out in the furnace. Now it was a gaping fissure. No mending seemed possible. She walked out of the room as a child that has received punishment from the hand it loves.

When the door had closed, waiting accurately for the faint click of the latch and the tap of the departing footsteps, making sure that she was not within hearing, Katherine threw herself on her bed, calling Barbara, opening the floodgates to a toppling torrent of tears.

CHAPTER IV

THIRTY-SIX is a reasonable age for a man to settle down; but whenever John alluded to. his marriage in that light, Katherine winced.

“Settling down!” she exclaimed; “that’s what the Campanile did outside St. Marks. You talk as if you were over fifty. Am I to settle down, too? I’m not twenty yet.”

John put a loving but a clumsy arm around her neck. “The life of a woman,” he said, “is as placid as a strip of water land-locked in the mountains—there’s no such thing as settling down for a woman; nothing comes to distress or churn the weeds below the surface.” “But there are weeds to churn?”

“Not in you,” he said; “you’re perfect.”

There is only one perfection a woman can bear to be told of—that perfection of beauty which enslaves. She will deny all others.

Here, then, you see John as a lover, deeming what he loved perfect. He would see no faults. There came a time—six months after their marriage—when Katherine had moments of catching desire to show him faults; even those that she did not possess. The men and women who dined with them in London, exhaling an odor of politics after every breath they took, like Italian jehus breathing garlic, she came at last to detest them. They all sought the improvement of the state, as children after a fulsome meal hunt for pignuts. Not one of them looked for the improvement of their lives. A reduction of taxation was the ultimate cry of them—men and women rolling in wealth, quite unable to spend it all, unless upon fads that had no market value, yet with their last breath cursing the tax.

“Look at the poor-rate!” exclaimed a woman to Katherine across a luncheon-table.

“Look at the poor!” retorted Katherine. She really knew nothing about them. The reply had been shot, the trigger pulled from nervous irritation. There was no retaliation in it; but the men about her laughed. Smart, they muttered to themselves.

This was the entertaining at which she had once wondered whether she would be liked. It became a matter of colossal indifference to her whether she were liked or not.

“Oh, the hypocrisy of it!” she exclaimed to John, when the door had closed upon the last departing guest. He stood over the fire in the drawing-room, legs straddled. In a froth of laces, she huddled on a settee.

“Horrible, I know,” said John.

With a bound and a rustle she was at his neck, fingers locked on his shoulders, eyes darting to his.

“You think so at last? You find it the empty shell after all?”

“IVe always thought so. Money’s the ground-bait, notoriety’s the worm. Your retort to Mrs. Mabberly struck the root of it. Look at the poor, not at the poor-rate. It didn’t escape me. There’s more of true government in your little finger than there is in half the political heads crowned, with office. I’m waiting for the man who has nothing but bread to get to find his way into the House. Ambition to be a light won’t make a shining government—it’s necessity that sits on the highest throne of all. Look at Russia!” Her arms had dropped from his neck, her eyes had fallen from his. It was not the hypocrisy of politics he saw with her—only the hypocrisy of politicians. If it was not the tax, he cried, then it was the state! Who thought of the heart? Seemingly not one of them. They all delved in vague ideas for a future generation, digging like convicts chained to their spades. John was in with the rest of them, digging deeper perhaps, not only putting his foot to the blade when the warder was looking, but working all through, unconscious of an audience. Yet what right of call had the future generation upon them? They only had one life, one heart, beating only with the pulse of youth for—oh, so short a time! Just a few years—gone with a puff and a flash like a colored light—a drop of strontium in the flame. And to throw all this away for a future generation to be governed by the working classes! At times the consciousness of wasting moments irritated her to madness. Had John been any other type of man—one for whom her admiration and respect could not have been so strong—she would have thrown his politics in his face. But there was a halo about John’s head that defied her. His work was honest; he did his best. Something indefinable denied her the right to treat it, as she treated the political opinions of the rest, with contempt. Yet she was neglected. There must be reparation for that. You may give a woman a kingdom and five ropes of pearls, but if she has a heart no senate of wise men or interdictions of state will prevent it from beating its call through the blood when a man looks long beneath the shallows of her eyes.

When nine months had pulled away, Mrs. Crichton received her first invitation to stay with her daughter at Glenworth. By that time spring was lifting the earth into another awakening. Every fresh morning was another moment in the rousing of a great god of delight. This was the time that Katherine loved to be out of London, where John, rushed with work before the Easter recess, was meshed like a bird in the snare. It irritated her to think that he did not struggle to be free, as so many of them endeavored to do. They saw little of each other. At times he rushed down for a week-end, and then was thirsting to be about and over the estate. On one occasion she put on big boots and tried to accompany him. John advised her not to. She insisted. In ten minutes it was obvious that she could not keep the pace. At first he cheered her on. At last he turned and patted her cheek with his big hand.

“No, good little woman,” he said, “you’ll only tire yourself. Trot back and we’ll have a cheery tea when I come in.”

Katherine turned without a word, and John, strid- ing on over the fields, looked round—once—twice— three times—till she was out of sight, wondering why she had not given a thought to glance back at him. Simpleton! Her heart was teeming with thoughts that she would turn, but a wounded pride kept her head in irons and her eyes dry.

Mrs. Crichton watched her critically as she took off the big boots by the fire in the hall. Fires in spring! Katherine gave no obedience to the seasons. She would light a fire in summer on a cold and rainy day. Warmth, she must have of heart and body. As she sat by the blaze then, unstrapping the leather laces, her heart was frozen—ice at the core. The maternal instinct of Mrs. Crichton discerned something. She had seen it before, read it between the lines of Katherine’s letters; now she heard it in the swishing flick of the leather strings as they rattled through Katherine’s fingers against her boots. Hearts were nothing to Mrs. Crichton. She had had her own experience of them. But welfare—that was everything. Katherine’s welfare was a sacred duty; she had held that banner up before all her intentions for years. From the moment that the Keightley portrait had made its sensation, Mrs. Crichton had intended a future for her daughter. And here was Katherine mated to her future; yet, remembering her own inclinations at twenty-one, Mrs. Crichton was not certain of the result. She never knew the moment when Katherine might not break away; and if it were to come at all, the first few years of her married life was the most likely period in which such a tragedy might occur. Katherine would not hesitate at appearances. It would need no flying start for her to take the wall that separates the possible from the impossible. Mrs. Crichton could see her clearing it with the grace of a well-bred hunter. There was, however, one need for congratulation. If she and John were not upon the best of terms, there was, at least to Mrs. Crichton’s knowledge, no one else on the other side. There the wall stood—always would stand—but as yet there was no positive temptation for flight. No woman, said the wisdom of Mrs. Crichton, will leave her husband unless she has a definite destination.

“You and John are quarrelling,” she said, when the boots were lying empty on the ground and the little feet that had filled them were wriggling their toes accompanying her meditation.

Katherine shot a glance at her mother, swift, keen— dazzling light piercing a chink into darkness.

“We’ve never quarrelled once since we were married,” she replied, with steady eyes; pride was at the back of them.

“Aren’t you happy, then?”

“Quite.”

“I’m hardly able to believe it.”

“It was not suggested that you should,”

“You’ll tell me nothing, then?”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

The blatant truthlessness of that was obvious to both of them. As a perversion it was considered immoral by neither. Immoral it was not. To a woman it is more immoral to tell the truth that hurts when a soothing deceit that does not deceive will explain as well.

Katherine rose to her feet and walked, faintly whistling, up the stairs. Her whistling ceased abruptly the moment she had closed the door of her room. There she stood for a moment, finally crossing to the mirror on her dressing-table, in which she gazed at her reflection. It was difficult to avoid the inclination to thrash it all out and come to a definite conclusion. She leaned forward until her face almost touched the surface of the glass, criticising the smoothness of her skin. Not a line was there. She put up a finger, touching it gently, caressingly. Without conceit, no petal of a rose in its first breaking was softer. Standing away, she looked at the whole effect. It pleased. She felt critical; she would not admit more. Rising above it all—undeniable—she was young. Scarcely twenty-one! What a few there were scarcely twenty-one! Her youth alone was priceless. How long would it last? Wasn’t it a power irreplaceable? Yet how did she use it? How could she use it? It was crumbling in her hands as she looked at it—the greatest power a woman has. She did not argue that it had gained her a husband. All the poison of the sting lay in the thought that it availed her nothing now. The possession of power is a temptation in itself; the desire to utilize it, overmastering. Without defining to herself in what direction she would exert it, Katherine felt that in the absence of its exercise there was no life. She must live; existence was meant for it. Wine to make glad the heart of man, who should refuse it? In her imagination she raised the glass and drained it dry. Down her throat it rushed, fire in the blood. Her eyes lit with the flame of it. She leaned towards the mirror and laughed. But the intoxication did not last. The dull sense of stagnation returned. She felt like a mountain torrent that has been dammed.

At Glenworth they had tea in the hall. This was by Katherine’s request. The drawing-room there was large—out of proportion — lonely. When she came down-stairs again, the tea things were laid and a fresh log was oozing and spitting on the fire. Mrs. Crichton looked up from a book, and with a glance gauged her daughter’s mood from the frock she had put on. There was battle in it, war with inverted thumbs. So a banner is spun with finest silk when carried into action.

“Is John coming in to tea?” Mrs. Crichton asked, seeking to verify her suspicions.

“He said so, but I should think it unlikely. We may as well begin.”

The wisdom of the daughter who knows her own mother is nothing to boast about. Katherine saw behind the screen of Mrs. Crichton’s question—saw sufficiently to give no satisfaction in her reply.

Sure enough John did come in to tea. The gust of wind that blows open the half-closed door—there’s his entry! Mud still soft on the boots; tufts of grass sticking out from under the instep. So the good-natured beast comes sweating to the trough. But John made his apologies. He thrust out a gaitered leg, smiled boyishly at Katherine, and said he would have to be excused. That excuse was allowed, he took for granted.

“Jephson’s waiting for me,”’ he explained.

“Is it impossible to keep a steward waiting?”

Mrs. Crichton asked the question with a naTve suggestion of innocence. The quality of reproof was too subtle for John’s powers of perception; but Katherine had her finger on it unerringly.

“Quite impossible,” she said, before John could answer.

He thanked her silently with a smile, acknowledging his gratitude for her reply. Obviously it was quite impossible; but he would not have made quite so sure of a woman seeing it in that light. He found it best, on the whole, not to try and understand women. The times when he had endeavored to do so, remained even now puckered and frowning on his memory. Katherine’s undoubted interest in the general welfare was probably at the bottom of‘her willing answer. He drained, as he stood, his second cup of tea. You know the way—head thrown back, one complete action, the cup clattered back onto the saucer, empty! One slip of bread-and-butter slapped upon another, crumpled m the fingers, thrust into the mouth, swallowed! Then he made for the door.

“I’ll be back to dinner, little girl,” he said as he reached it.

Katherine jumped up. In the porch outside, she laid a hand on his arm.

“You said a cheery tea.”

It is possible that his conscience smote him with the simplicity of her reproach. But conscience! The voice of it is piping beside the call for work. A great scheme for promoting the education of scientific agriculture was in the making—a scheme to raise the intellect of the agricultural laborer. What was conscience to that? He flicked at the sting as though it were a fly, and smiled down into her eyes.

“I thought Fd be able to get away from Jephson in time, but he says it’s imperative for me to come and see the work they’re putting into the chemical laboratory. We’ve begun building, you know.”

The eagerness of his words whipped her pride. The daintiness of her frock had been froth to his breeze of enthusiasm — blown it into obscurity. She read the impatience behind the kindness of his eyes. He was mad to be off—a horse pawing the ground, fretting at the mouth.

“Do you think you’ve any love left for me after these nine months?” she asked him—one of her straight truths, no hedging about them. They came without wavering, out of nowhere, pitching with a glare into the darkness like shooting stars.

“Any love left?” His eyebrows beat up into a frown as he searched her for a sign of jesting. Couldn’t any fool see, if only to look at his face, that he was enthralled of her. “Any love left?” He had given her all that he possessed. It was not a matter of playing, no immature fancy. She stood where he placed her, pure ivory upon a pedestal of virgin marble. No woman was like her. He saw no other woman. Life was an inspiration; she made it so. Work was a relig- ion; she, the saint of it—canonized—niched—every hair of her head a relic worthy a shrine.

“Any love left?” he still reiterated. “Marriage has made me love you more. It does that, I suppose— or the other thing. In these few months I love you more—”

“But show it less.”

“Show it?”

“I’m not what I was to you.”

“Not what you were? You are more.”

“How do you expect me to realize it?”

“I tell you so. Have my eyes no voice in them as well as my tongue? Are my ambitions dumb as well? Do I show one twitch of an eye to any other woman? Whom do I look at but you? I can’t think you are meaning it. Katherine! What other men—?”

She stopped him there. The man who does not understand women is as bad in his way as the one who sometimes treats them ill. His misunderstanding of her amounted to insult. She shrank from it as from the lash of a whip.

“Do you think a woman is satisfied with the mere telling and the look of a faithful dog from the eyes? The animal itself is as capable of that, and more. A woman wants—” She saw the puzzled look in his eyes, and a sigh of impatient despair outweighed the rest of her sentence. She half turned away, then twisted back.

“It’s your work, your estate, your politics—they’re all supplanting me, and I hate them, every aspect of them! You and I are only living now for ten, twenty, thirty years or so—maybe less. What will they be to you then? Your work a frayed rope—broken; your estate, acres of land to hold our two small coffins; your politics, a few curious old schemes preserved in the spirits of history, no use to any one but as object-lessons of the frittering away of a man’s life. Yet you choose all these shifting things before love that has ruled the whole nest of them ever since creation. Your work, your estate, your politics, they change with every generation; what I’m asking for is unchangeable; every man that has won a woman has had to do it at the expense of them all.”

“You’re wrong there,” said John. She knew she was.

“Your telling me so carries no conviction with it. I know that I’m right.”

“Then what does all this mean—that I’m not pay-ing you enough attention?”

“It amounts to that.”

“Then I’ll tell Jephson to go on without me.”

“Oh no; I have things done for me spontaneously or not at all. Love prompted is an actor spluttering his lines. There’s Jephson up the drive. You’ll be back to dinner.”

He loved her with every beat of his heart. She could see it in the dejected way he obeyed her commands. But had he loved her as she required the potion, he would have flung her commands back in her face and dared the devil in her. That was the way to be loved—the sweep of the gale that ripped canvas to ribbons and drove the ship headlong under naked spars.

CHAPTER V

KATHERINE walked back into the hall under the watchful eye of a mother, as a frigate would have passed full sail after action under the scrutiny of the commander’s flag-ship. Decks were clean swept; no trace of the wounded there; those who had survived shot and cutlass ready amidships to come to the salute. You would not have seen one quiver of her lip; her eyes were dancing like the sun on rippling water. Mrs. Crichton was deceived into satisfaction as she watched her drop back into the arm-chair that she had vacated and commence light-heartedly to pour out another cup of tea.

It was a moment for commonplaces to finally cement the healing of whatever breach there may have been. A woman usually has a ready stock of these; they come glibly to her tongue—wave the wand of necessity and the sprites will rise from nowhere to the bidding. A man has not that lightness of touch; he rough-handles the wand; the sprites of commonplace shrink into hiding. Mrs. Crichton was a mistress of the art. With no sound of the sibilant whispering of the prompter, she recalled the name of Barbara Dur-rant and made it serve her ends. Where was dear Barbara now?

Katherine shook her head with dainty inconsequence. So roses overlooking the garden wall shake their heads to a puff of wind.

“When did you see her last?”

“The day I was married.”

“Not since?”

“No.”

“Nor heard from her?”

“No.”

“What broke up the friendship? I always thought that your affection for each other was permanent—an everlasting.”

“Everlastings wither,” was Katherine’s reply. “They survive the seasons but they don’t survive the years. Barbara and I found a kink in the friendship, and like reasonable creatures we snapped it off from there.” In like manner, as she said it, she broke a piece of bread-and-butter between her fingers. Mrs. Crichton was quite capable of reading the sign. It expressed finality. On that point, then, there was nothing more to be said. She waved the wand again. This time a discussion of John’s relations came trippingly forward. Mrs. Spurrier was criticised to a hook and eye. Katherine stood for the defence, fighting gallantly against the subtlety of her mother’s delicate compliments. It is no ungainly cut and thrust when women take to the steel. Only the daintiest foils are used, with buttons cunningly removed.

After a bout of ten minutes Katherine laid down an empty teacup and signified with a sigh that the game wearied her. With a certain amount of reluctant resignation Mrs. Crichton put away her wand and returned to the novel she had been reading.

“This is a ridiculous book,” she said, opening at a turned-down page.

“Then why read it?”

“Well, G. H. Bentley gave it such a good review in the Daily Herald.”

“Then you may be sure your own taste is at fault. Critics are infallible, even when they disagree. Their reviews are always better written than the books they criticise. I haven’t read a novel since I was married, but I know all about them. When John’s finished with his papers I read the reviews; you can get everything you want from them. The plot of the book told tersely so that it doesn’t weary you—they take out a sentence or two that is weak to illustrate what they mean when they object to the style. In thirty lines they can do just as well as what the novelist has endeavored to do in three or four hundred pages. Most decidedly, I should say, if Bentley has praised that book and you don’t like it, your taste is the one at fault.”

Mrs. Crichton buried herself in the book, admitting defeat, and Katherine rose from her chair as the wheels of a carriage ground the gravel of the drive outside. Visitors—the county awakened to a sense of responsibility. It was unavoidable even at Glenworth. Katherine surveyed herself in a mirror and Mrs. Crichton laid down her book.

“Callers?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows.

Katherine nodded. At that moment, standing there, while Bisset admitted the visitors into the hall, she recalled vividly the Keightley portrait. All the personality was there, intensified. The eyes looked at you, into you, thwarted by nothing. The mouth dared you, wagered you. Captain Seyd, brought by courtesy of the Martins to call at Glenworth—ostensibly out of compliment to John and his political reputation, covertly to see the development of the Keightley masterpiece—looking deep into the eyes, defied them and the mouth too. Here you have the spark where the flint strikes steel; there will be no wanting for events if the fuse is baptized with fire.

Lady Martin sailed forward to Katherine, hands out-stretched, the full rig of simulated enchantment.

“When one drives five miles and then finds an empty house—”

“It’s a relief sometimes,”’ said Katherine.

Lady Martin pitched with laughter. Her merriment, coming after every sentence that was spoken, tossed her like a collier steamer in a swell. She rolled, but she never felt amused. With a crackle of laughter she told Mrs. Crichton, ten minutes later, that humor found her and left her unmoved. Before she left Mrs. Crichton believed it to be the truth.

Fresh tea was brought in, Lady Martin declaring she was hungry as though it were a crime. Violet, the daughter, pronounced it to be the result of the drive. For five minutes conversation floundered in the net of conventionalities; then Katherine found herself alone with Captain Seyd and her fourth cup of tea.

Lady Martin had petitioned for a view of the Keightley portrait, which John had purchased before his mar- riage. Mrs. Crichton offered guidance, but Katherine refused to go.

“I positively refuse,” she said; “it’s just as tired of me as I am of it. Whenever I see it I want to put more clothes on it. I’m sure one of these days, when Fve nothing to do, I shall buy a box of paints and clothe the poor little wretch. Don’t let this deter you from going to see how ugly and fat I was at the age of eighteen months, Captain Seyd. It’s levelling, I admit; but I suppose that’s good for me.

“I’ve seen it before,” he answered. “Don’t you think I’d better keep you company and save you—if I can—from brooding on what the others are thinking?”

She took his words with a laugh, conveying permission if it pleased him. For herself she professed no gratification whatever.

“When did you see the portrait before?” she asked.

“About three years ago—no, more—four years ago— when it was in Lord Northfleet’s possession, from whom your husband bought it. It has more than fulfilled its promises.”

Katherine took her eyes away.

“Four years ago? You weren’t at the front then?”

“Oh yes; I was at the front—eleven months— thirty-one days in most of ’em.”

“Were you invalided home?”

“Yes—bullet in the shoulder, two in the thigh.” He said it tersely so that she might see the blood. Out of the angle of his eye he watched her wince. “Then enteric after Spion Kop—that was the knock-out blow.”

“I thought you must have been out.”

“Why?”

“The strap-watch on the wrist.”

He was not the man she had seen with Barbara; but the picture flashed up in a high light. Reluctant memories were dragged into her mind — perverse and resisting children clamoring for speech. Katherine condemned them to everlasting corners of silence, but they would be heard. A vision of Barbara led them relentlessly.

He lifted his cuff, baring the strap leather.

“What has the watch to do with it?”

“Most of you going out to the front carried mementos of that sort. There’s so much more sentiment about death than there used to be.”

“You mean it used to be the family bible in the breast-pocket.”

“Yes—and before that. That was sentiment of its kind — Presbyterian — Puritan. No; I mean before that, when death was a business of justification. The gauntlet was thrown back in the lady’s face then. There was no sentiment in those days.”

She was speaking hard, no grace in the words. Seyd took it for antipathy. How is a man to understand that a woman defends herself against herself by attacking the man who unconsciously reveals her?

“You disapprove of sentiment?” he said. “You think we can swallow the lead and the steel with nothing to take the taste out of the mouth?” She herself had thrown the glove; then back it should be hurled into her face. “A woman without the taint of sentiment,” he went on, “without the trace of romance, is an anomaly. Nature abhors her.” That hit her full between the eyes. She felt the sense of mastery in the blow.

“It isn’t disapproval,” she said—“merely disbelief. I can’t see how the memento can help when it comes to the facing of the inevitable. I’d sooner see a man die with his hand on the sword-hilt than caressing the locket of the girl who’s waiting for him at home. Death’s easier—life’s easier—without the disturbing qualities of these remembrances.”

“Supposing the locket were your own?” he remarked.

That came near the core. She was not prepared. It was the test and she could not stand it. But he never realized how straight he hit. It was darkness all round him. He struck by instinct, and the man who is possessed of it seldom goes wide.

“Supposing the locket were your own?” he repeated.

“I was speaking personally as well as generally,” she replied. The woman of spirit acknowledges no defeat in these matters. You will admit such acknowledgment would be impossible. But what if the locket of the argument were her own? It was a different matter when she put the question to herself. No answer came, but the absence of it thrilled her.

“Then personally,” he said, and he cut the words clean—“personally you despise sentiment?”

“I must admit I do.”

“I must conclude, then,” he said, with a smile, “that you consider me despicable for wearing this strap-watch when I went out to the front?”

She dodged him with a laugh that rang like bell-metal. “Neutral ground!” she said. “I won’t play you at home.”

He took that laugh to mean the idle emptiness of the whole discussion. Oh! Women can act! Where is there a doubt of it? He rose to his feet thinking that this was the curtain fall. Acting it had been before, perhaps—acting for the sake of sociable conversation. That laugh put an end to it. Dullard! That laugh began it!

CHAPTER VI

THE drive back to Bramburn, over the five miles alluded to by Lady Martin, would have been dismal — the hearse compelled by the regulations of traffic into the measures of a trot—had it not been for the narrative qualities of Captain Seyd’s conversation. That man could hang a story on the twitch of an eyelash and dare a gale to dislodge it. A gale was threatening to blow even then. There was a dash of the east wind, cutting—nipping, in the least of Lady Martin’s remarks. The good woman had made a false step. Her efforts of recovery were ungainly, and the fact that she recognized them as such was only the more disconcerting.

It had been a mistake in the first instance to bring Captain Seyd to Glenworth. It had been the greatest mistake of all to suggest a view of the Keightley portrait without foreseeing the possibility of being compelled to leave him alone with the fascinations of Katherine.

To have preached the efficacy of private treaty, avoiding the sordid atmosphere of the auction mart and the distracting proximity of greater value, then to have brought her most promising bidder to view an object infinitely more enticing than Violet! It made no matter that the label, “Sold,” was prominent. That, no doubt, was the more disturbing. She knew the man of arms. The clatter of swords on the boot-heels, the chink of spurs and the tread of feet—there is a music in these to which a woman must dance until she comes of an age of discretion which, by all psychological computations, is reached when her power of fascination is lost. Some woman dances for him wherever he goes. By the time he is a subaltern of a year or so’s standing, he learns to expect it. But so far from approaching her loss, Lady Martin knew that Katherine was only entering upon the understanding of the fascination that she possessed. And Seyd had come under the spell of it as a passing ship rides dazzled into the glare of the search-light. She allowed no deception of herself; he was caught by the glamour—floundering. Violet leaned back in the carriage, listening to his anecdotes with dull eyes and a smile bereft of inspiration. No wonder that Lady Martin’s remarks cut. She criticised Katherine with a lancet, avoiding the veins skirting the arteries. No blood flowed from her crafty incisions. She operated on no vital parts, called for no pity. To belittle, to impoverish, was the object of her attainment. But Seyd saw the glint of malice strike out from the knife.

“It’s a state of affairs one frequently notices,” Lady Martin remarked, in reference to Katherine’s marriage.

“What is that?” Seyd gave her a loose rein.

“The man with intellect—brilliant—usually marries an empty head.”

“Is Spurrier brilliant?”

“One of the coming men in the House, hampered, I’m afraid, by his wife. She’s quite incapable of entertaining. Such a pity! Spoils his career. I’ve been to their dinners in town.” A smile crossed her eyes, admirably suggestive. “She scarcely says a word. The Keightley portrait was her death knell. Give a dog a bad name! But give a baby of eighteen months a personality, and it’s worse than hanging. Keightley has more than my portrait to answer for.”

“She didn’t strike me that way.”

“Ah, you judge by superficial impressions. You haven’t divested yourself of the influence of the portrait. I’ve no doubt she makes an excellent wife in a moral sense, and probably John Spurrier prefers that to intellect. Had you met the mother before?” “Never.”

“Well, now, I like her. You can see that she tries conscientiously to appear natural in the position that her daughter has attained.”

“You don’t think Mrs. Spurrier does?”

“No; I wouldn’t say so. Would you, Violet?” Cunning, that rousing of Violet’s lethargy! You find no nudging of the elbow here. Violet bestirred herself.

“I never did like Mrs. Spurrier,” she said, conclusively. Lady Martin’s eye was contemptuous. This was the tactless sacrifice of pieces. The crafty gambit was exposed. In that one move Violet had revealed her mother’s simple ostentation of defence to be nothing but a method of attack. Never did like Mrs. Spurrier!

“I was not discussing whether we liked her or not.”

Aware of a false step, Violet retreated again into silence. Seyd rolled his eyes with suspicious innocence.

“What was the position of the Crichtons?” he asked. Lady Martin raised eyebrows in surprise.

“You don’t know?”

Herewith she gently stripped the bark from the Crichton tree and exposed it in all its nakedness, dwelling lightly but lingeringly upon this knot here, that knot there, pointing out with generous sympathy where the grain was coarse and the branches weak.

“In fact, the fault of them,” said Seyd, “was that they earned their living?”

“Well, brewers—”

“Exactly—”

“Must be a very degrading business,” Violet suggested—“making one’s living by intoxicating one’s neighbor.”

“I should think it depends upon the number you can succeed in intoxicating. If you can only do it in a small way—degrading, naturally. But if you can manage on a large scale—acres of premises and that sort of thing—well, you can earn a peerage. Nothing degrading in that. I remember a man when I came back from India—” Here Seyd launched into anecdote and flooded the conversation with his reminiscences. There was no stemming them. After dinner, over the choicest of his port, old Sir William Martin listened to them, crooning like a child. It reached a climax when one evening they did not appear in the drawing-room until after ten. Lady Martin read the old gentleman a lesson in selfishness and the difficulties of marrying a daughter. In timorous defence he pleaded the excellence of the port. Lady Martin threw the anecdotes at his feet, and there was no denying the truth of what she said when she spoke like that.

Here you have, then, a side-light—a glimpse into a side-show—productive of the real performance. The beating of the drum and the cries of the showman have induced you for one moment to peep between the curtains; but it is nothing of importance. A spark dropping—that is all. It is the fuse you are concerned with. Captain Percy Seyd, the raconteur, is not the man you may expect to see from this onward. Only one facet of his surface. Many-sided? Exactly! It is only the man of true mark who presents the lasting feature of stability.

CHAPTER VII

ON the Sunday following the visit of the Martins at Glenworth, John returned to town. Katherine drove him to the station.

“Why don’t you come back?” he asked her as she stood on the platform. “Everybody’s filling in.” “Would you like me to r” Her question came from the heart; he took it from the lips.

“Well—naturally—of course I would.”

“I should make a difference?” she suggested. “How a difference?”

Her eyes closed. So women bear pain—not a wince, seldom a cry, eyes closed and the heart aching. She opened them again to the light of the green fields that stretched beyond the station.

“I won’t come up yet—not for a week or so.”

“But don’t you get lonely?”

“Down here?”

“Yes.”

“Better to be lonely with trees than people.”

“But you are lonely?”

“I’m going to send for Barbara Durrant.”

“You make it up then?”

“Yes; we make it up.”

Her eyes rose to his on an impulse. The thought that perhaps he understood her more than he showed had flown through her mind as a swallow speeds, first hugging earth, then rising with a rush upward.

‘Til come up with you now—at once—if you’ll promise to stay with me this evening—take me to a theatre, stop at home, anything you like.”

The work faced him. He showed her the situation in his hesitancy. There was no need for his description of the question that was to come up before the House. She had known of it the moment the suggestion had left her lips. Her head was already turned away for his answer.

“But do come up,” he concluded. “It’s good to know that you’re near.” He worked better then and knew it.

“Good to know that the household animal has had its paws buttered and will be there when one happens on it.” Her laugh was merry, rising like the note of a lark. John laughed with her—the industrious crow. Light of heart, he thought her. Light of heart! To herself she seemed a fakir, bearing chains that dragged her body to the dust.

“I don’t think the creature will come to its cushion to-day,” she said, smiling. “Give it another hour or two in the garden.”

“Why do you use that simile?”

“Fancy.”

“I often think of you as the sumptuous pussy cat— paws like silk, eyes unfathomable, drowsy on the cushion where the sun’s warmest.”

Her eyes swept his face.

“You do think that—? But what of claws?” “Bless you, little one, no gentle pussy uses them.”

“The gentlest cat on all the cushions in the world will chatter with the instinct of his species when he sees a bird.” She told it him with straight eyes.

“Is that what you’re watching for in the garden?” He laughed at her silence on this. She was tired of his clumsy banter, he told himself. Tired? The words had found an echo. She stood listening to the repetition of them as they were tossed from her brain to her heart and back again, getting fainter and fainter until she tried to smile.

Here she would have changed the subject. Captain Percy Seyd did it for her.

“How do you do, Mrs. Spurrier?”

Katherine turned to find him, hat in hand, beside her. A light breeze of wind turned cold as it brushed her lips.

“Going to London?” she asked.

“No—seeing old Sir William off. Packed him up in the Times—tucked the corners in. He’s farther down. Won’t you introduce me to your husband?”

She obeyed mechanically. Seyd’s eyes were sharp on John’s face. This was the man of superior intellect, if Lady Martin were to be believed. Superior, perhaps, as the shire horse is to the fine-bred racer. He could pull a load—could he fly the bank of furze, clearing the strip of water ? In that first glance, Seyd declared that he could not. He saw the restive passion to the sting of the whip; but what beyond that? Nothing! merely the torn gap in the hedge and the floundering crash. Katherine—? He had but to look at her and the jump was cleared, heels clean of the brushwood and away! If it were for the sport of the matter alone, he laid his choice upon her.

Christianity has done away with duelling; it is doing away with war. Your martial type of man is becoming effete, worn out, dissipated. Unless England can rear the fittest of the new race of men of intellect, she goes under like a stone dislodged into the water. Work is the only justification. There is little work for the man of arms to do. In these times he can but sit and watch the genius of engineering turning out diabolical weapons of destruction, floating battlements to ride upon the waters, all moves in the game of bluff that an exhausted Christianity has brought about in place of the clash of arms and the generous offering of blood. The price of life has gone up high in the markets— ridiculously high—above par, beyond all reason. The trade of the sword is almost obsolete. What need for the clean cut and the rapid thrust when by building a weapon of war that now claims to mow a field of men like ripe corn one can stifle the nations into peace? No—the day of the soldier is a yesterday. Slowly but surely he is passing into the existence of the drone feeding on the hive. The time will come when the workers—the men of intellect—will turn and rend him, drowning the cries of a dying religion for the mercy it would claim. As yet he earns protection from the possibility of war. The hive is open for him to thrive and grow fat upon the honey of the community. He has, moreover, his call to the nuptial flight. Yet even here there is little sacrifice of life. One out of a thousand gives up his last breath to the pursuit. One out of a thousand! The selection of the fittest, the least effete. But life has to be given up. This is a world of sacrifice. Aristocracy and soldiery—these will be the soonest to go. Aristocracy first, the least generous of the two—soldiery when there is no longer a call for it.

The family of Seyd had served its country under the flag for generations. You will find them in the Court Chronicles of Elizabeth, sword in hand with Essex, laying bare Ireland like a bone—stripping the flesh from it, picking out the marrow with their sword-points. Then again with Cromwell—pistol in one hand, God’s Truth in the other, and a curse between their teeth. Last of the line of them came the Captain Percy, finding his way in his time into the Chronicles, sword in hand still; this time cutting the very prayers his ancestors had shouted with Cromwell from the lips of the Dutch. But no one can deny the romance of it. Not even generations, all tending towards degeneracy, can exhaust it utterly from the blood. It clung to Seyd as it clings to the rest of them. The effect of it upon a woman is indescribable; she yields under it, supine—the timorous animal beneath the hands of its master.

There was no trace of yielding in Katherine. Look for look she met his eyes—so they glance who enter the ring, shaking gloved fists as the sport demands before the contest. But the effect upon her was not wanting. She felt it through her pulse like a dropped beat that catches the breath and leaves the heart trembling. Here was a man who had the fire in his blood. What of it? It meant nothing to her. There was the sense of honor. The flame licked her cheeks; shame swept her, thinking the thought was there. She turned with an impulse to John, ignoring Seyd. But the two men were engrossed. John was expatiating views.

“It’s this absurd valuation of life I deny,” he was saying. “All the wanton extravagance expended upon the postponement of necessary dissolution. Why not legalize murder in the hands of eminent physicians in the employ of the government? We know already that they take it into their own hands at times in the case of certain death and unbearable agony. Fitness —utility—that is all you will see with the breath of life where the softness of Christianity has not made men chicken-hearted. Think of the intellect that is wasted and the money that is spent in the up-keep of asylums for the housing of thousands of incurable idiots cumbering the earth. Idiots, who in their want of reason would snap their fingers and grin in the face of death, not knowing what it is. Yet we lead a sheep to the slaughter-house with the fear of death gouging out its eyes, and all its limbs shaking like dice in a box.”

“You’d have us go without our mutton cutlets?” said Seyd.

“Not a bit of it—eat your cutlets—at every meal. But if you can harden your heart to kill a sheep that knows what death is, even before it sees it, then why! hesitate to kindly put an end to the raving lunatic who ‘ will tear down the expensive padded cells you build in search of the death you hold from him at arm’s-length in the basting-spoon of your religion. Lunacy is increasing—every year—did you know that? Increasing—because as yet we can’t acclimatize life to Christianity.”

“But science will find a cure for insanity one of these days,” suggested Katherine.

“Quite so—but until it does, spend the money on research rather than keeping lunatics.”

The guard waved his green flag, cutting short the argument, but the last words that John said were in defence of his theory. He forgot to say good-bye. Katherine turned away with a look of flint in her eyes. Seyd followed her out of the station.

CHAPTER VIII

AT Glenworth a light type of dog-cart, raked high r\ on the springs, together with the pick of the stables, were at Katherine’s services. She was an excellent horsewoman, driving or riding. There were few in the county who could equal her seat in the hunting-field; not one to show her flash of eye that knew nothing of fear, looking at danger as the antics of a faun.

She had driven John to the station that morning. A boy was holding the horse’s head when Seyd followed her out to the road.

“You discard a coachman?” he said. He stood by, patting the animal’s neck while she mounted to the driving-seat.

“Yes—I’m not a child.”

He looked up laughing. “I didn’t suggest it.”

Her mood was combative. She found suggestion in everything; the world seemed at cross-purposes. Had she been alone, she would have met her teeth upon John’s neglect of her, bitten the thought of it through and thrown her head back. Seyd’s presence irritated; not because she objected to it, but because it appeared to make more of the matter. But her head was well back; her eyes had a light in them. Gathering the reins into her hand, she asked him why he had not gone up to London with Sir William.

“You ask me as though you consider I have neglected my duty in not doing so,” said he.

“It’s contrary to what I should have expected, certainly.”

“Why?’

“Well—you generally expect a man to be tired of the country by Monday morning. The call of the Town comes wrapped up in the newspaper on the breakfast - table. You said yourself, you tucked Sir William up in his.”

Seyd swept a glance on her, a glimpse through the chink of a door. For that moment she stood to the naked eye, knowing she was watched. Directed at him, her shaft was not for him. He felt it pass by, speeding to its mark. Men tired of the country! That was her husband! Drive a woman and she fights all comers to revenge the one end. He looked at her, eager to take the blows. The spirit in her fascinated! She looked irresistible sitting there above him — injured pride in harness under a stinging whip.

“Therefore you’re surprised at finding me left behind?” He still held her eyes.

“Finding myself surprised, perhaps. I’m always doing it—unawares, round corners. Are you walking back to Bramburn?”

“Presently, I expect.”

“Your time’s your own?”

“Yes—I’m on furlough. At liberty to^o and have a chat with the station-master. His son’s in my regiment; so he told me the other day.”

“In preference to my driving you back to Bram-burn?”

“Where else, then?”

“Anywhere you like; I could walk back.”

She bade him take the seat beside her, asking no favor, giving none. He took no notice of her mood. In a moment he was beside her. On any other occasion, he was fully aware that she would have left the invitation unsaid. She was given no chance to unsay it, once offered. He was the man to take his opportunities—no show of grasping—the receiving of just payment for a lawful debt.

They drove out of the station yard in silence. In silence they turned head to the open country. Once free of the vehicles that approached or returned from the station, Katherine lifted the whip from its socket. Once she flicked it, snapping like the crack of a striking match close to the mare’s ear. No need for chastisement. The little animal shot foiward as to the starter’s pistol. The high wheels spun like tops in the sunlight; the rushing wind tossed the hair from her forehead, fanned the flame-points in her eyes. Stealing a glance at her, Seyd knew that the woman was uppermost. It was an insight—he realized the value of it. But he said nothing. She was worth watching. By Jove, he had never come across a woman with her spirit! You talk about personality! This was the essence of it. Spurrier might have his visionary theories of utility, clever enough in their way—wish ’em luck and give ’em a send-off, by all means—but this! This was arresting. True blood in a chafing collar under the bearing-rein. She wanted managing, just as she herself was managing the little mare. To be master, to have a hold on the reins, to drive her as she was driving the mare—asking for nothing and getting the best by sheer force of will—these were the thoughts that chained him to the watching of her. All the best was there; but Spurrier would never know the way to get it—was probably unaware of the full depth of its existence. Seyd could see it, though. He let the desires pass over him as one submits to the passing of heated vapor over one’s body in a bath, thrilling with the sensation of it, weakening in the effort to rise and shake it off. All this quite probably to no use, no purpose, no end; but in the mean time there she was beside him, disclosing her mind to his with every action, every look.

Fine country it was through which they were passing, high hedges of holly and hawthorn keeping the road at either side; sweeping billows of undulating land beyond, ploughed and pasture—the heart of England’s agriculture. Long, rolling curves of the red-brown earth swept up from the hollows. Here and there a ploughman with his team, hewing a Way through the rich soil, turning it from the blades in long, slender curls, would move silhouetted against the bending sky-line. Narrow your eyes to listen, and only the tapping of the horse’s hoofs on the flinted road, like the monotonous ringing of a hammer in the forge, would strike the ears, shattering the silence. Haze of UU heat hung about the distance. The sky was a blue raiment interwoven with white silk threads of light. It might have been summer. One comes back to England on such a day from the South and wonders what country in the world is like it.

“You have very little to say,” said Katherine, looking ahead.

“Not from want of appreciation.”

“Of the day?”

“And your driving.”

Her eyes lost their flame, none of their brilliance, to his praise. A little thing to say, surely! But women take the bigger things for granted. To be loved? If she cannot be that, where is her calling? If she can be commended for an accomplishment, show her the man to think of doing it. Just that one clap of applause and her mood had softened.

“You really think I drive well?”

“Well—I’ve seen all sorts of driving, from the heavy artillery going into action over broken ground, like a tornado sweeping the land, to the tandem prancing down to Ascot. I don’t know, but when a woman can do those things she compels praise.”

“Does she always get it?”

This was a moment to cast depreciation upon Spurrier. She had him in her mind. But he let it pass, half regretting the generosity, knowing the regret would have been doubled had he yielded. A man absent is a man down. The instincts of sport hold good. He held his head the higher for it.

“Do any of us get our deserts?” said he.

She nodded her head to the old complaint, then her eyes steadied as they took a corner—the keen blade of a knife that rounds the skin from the curve of an apple— so they cut it. The wheel-marks lay behind them like two segments of a circle.

“How long do you stay on at Glenworth?” he continued.

“I bind myself to no time.”

“You hate bonds, I know that.”

She turned quickly, asking more questions with her eyes than she expressed with her tongue. “How do you know that?”

“I see it. In your driving, for instance.”

“Do you think you understand women, then?” Her lip curled to a smile of half contempt.

“No—I haven’t that presumption.”

“Then why this sudden enlightenment about me?”

“You think it implies uncomplimentary obviousness?”

“Amounting to that.”

“You’re quite wrong. I look at you as a ploughboy looks into the vitals of a complicated machine. He may, perhaps, see where the steam comes from that drives the piston—just as I have seen that hatred of bondage which drives you.”

Dangerous talk this. A fatal game for a man and a woman to play at—mathematics with the personal equation. So begins platonic affection — two heads bending over the same board, until they touch and the thrill has passed between them.

“Then you turn with a sense of relief to the simplicity of the ploughshare?”

So she led him on. What woman will blame her? He had made the way. She was testing him by John’s standard. Long ago, John had turned with a sense of relief to the simplicity of the ploughshare. This man, no doubt, was possessed of no greater perseverance. But that is the quality necessary to the understanding of women. Few men utilize it to the purpose. Matters of greater importance claim priority. So is it with a man, but not so with Katherine. She must be understood. Her value- lay in understanding. Without it, her actions would be misread. Foolish — childish— impetuous—such meanings as these would be interpreted. This was being misunderstood. She writhed under it.

“Isn’t that so?” she persisted. “You turn away?” Her eyes had that steady gaze in them, stamping her words with the hall-mark of her intensity.

“Do you wish to insist that I do?” He forced her to look at him, hiding a furnace under his words. Then he saw her eyebrows rise, expressive of the casual dismissal of the subject that was coming to her lips. But he forestalled it. It was not a moment he chose to lose. In another minute they would be dealing in trivialities, she pressing the exchange with the persistence of an Arab merchant in the bazaar. He out-manoeuvred her. She saw the movement—smiled—the tactics pleased her. Things hung in a balance here. Just a word might turn the scale. She decoyed the word to the tip of his tongue, giving it no chance to come further,

“Do you think Im ploughboy by instinct?” he had asked—“as well as in education?”

“Certainly not, if you object. We’ll presume, for the sake of this foolish conversation”—how typical, that trick of the depreciating attribute!—“that you stay looking into the vitals—that’s you’re word; I think it horrid—of this complicated machine; and what else do you see? Looking won’t help you. The tangle of string is not unravelled by looking at it.”

“If I were to tell you all I saw, would you admit, where I deserved such admission, that I was right?”

“No.”

“Exactly! Your personality is wonderfully convincing.”

“How do you mean?”

“One hundred and thirty-eight women out of a hundred and thirty-nine would have promised admission rather than lose the opportunity of hearing something about themselves.”

“What a degrading opinion of the sex!”

“Yet many worse things could be said about men. Things that count. In what court would such an accusation ever be taken notice of?”

“But so mean—so little!”

“Over a little thing, I insist. There must be characteristics.”

“And you would have expected me to possess this one if you hadn’t put that question and I hadn’t answered— no?” She laughed—pure lightness of heart. Accuse the man, if you wish; the deliberate intention was there with him, deep-rooted in his fascination. With her there was none. Boys, frolicking in a boat, draw close to the edge of a weir, laughing at the danger with high shrieks of delight. There is not one of them but intends to keep out of the water and avoid a ducking. Youth must run its risks and flaunt its strength of arm in the face of the powers that be. The essence of youth it was in Katherine. Women of her age must flaunt their strength of infatuation in the face of a man. They wish him no suffering for it. Not willingly would they cause him pain; but they must find realization of their power. When then they see him tortured on the rack, driven into action, straining to the breaking of all bounds, why wonder that they are terrified? In o’he moment the boat has been capsized, they are in the water, immersed. The dreaded ducking that they dared has overtaken them.

It tempts one to plead mitigation for the man. He may not have sought the matter out, but fallen rather under the spell of it—the night-moth drawn into the glare of the dazzling light. Singed wings and the futile effort to get free, what else can one expect?

Seyd certainly was drawn into the vortex of rays. You see no struggling as yet. Too soon, surely! Many’s the open window this man has flown through, dragging susceptibly towards the light within. Candle or lamp, rushlight or taper, he has as yet come free of them all. Singed? No doubt! But nothing to show„ Still the wary creature, attractive, impressive in all his pride of plumage. A soldier, winged with scarlet; the death’s-head in his eyes, soft down in the passionate gentleness of his arms—no wonder a woman burns the light of her fascination to attract him.

Now they were passing through hilly country, beech woods on each side of them; the fringes of the trees swept with a brush of pale green—breaking buds taking their first breath. Last year’s leaves still made the carpet in the woods, russet brown, wonderful—inimitable—even as they rotted into skeletons. Away down below them stretched the flat country again, washed with the purple blue of the distance, picked out with light where the sun fell on a field of green.

Then up the hill towards them came a motor—the age of steel tearing ruts across the face of nature.

Seyd looked at the mare’s ears.

“How’s she going to take this?” he asked, casually.

“Badly—as if she were on grass. She’s been in the stable on oats for the last five days. You’d better sit tight.”

Seyd snatched a glance at her, smiling. No doubt she meant it; the flint was in her eyes again. But the quietness of her voice had amused him. Apparently she looked forward to it. He glanced at her hands, tense, nervous fingers laced on the reins. Beneath the gloves, he felt he saw the knuckles white.

“Does she always take them badly?” he asked.

“Invariably—have you ever seen the matador with the red cloak in the bull-ring at Seville?” The look in her eyes nailed the words to his comprehension.

As a matter of fact, Seyd had never been to Seville— stationed at Gibraltar, perhaps, seeing nothing of Spain. But this was no moment for an answer. He under- stood, and his eyes were on the mare. She was beginning her antics already.

“This is where you ought to have a groom with you,” said Seyd.

“What—are you afraid?” There was a whip in her voice.

He laughed aloud. “Afraid! Surely this is the salt to the whole business. I’m thinking of you. If there was a groom here it ud be his duty to get down and take her head—and he’d do it.”

“Not if I was driving.”

“Go ahead, then, let her rip. If you weren’t here I should thoroughly enjoy it.”

“You can put me out of the question.”

“That’s utterly impossible. You’ve made it so in the last half-hour.”

She had no time to answer that. He said it, too— letting the words drive home—in her ear just as the motor took its side of the road to pass them. One moment he found in which to look at her, seeing the effect of what he had said; the next, the mare’s head was to the thumping engines, straining to turn; her ears galvanized—erect; her body sidling like a dainty dancer in quadrilles. One or two furtive pulls, an uneven clatter of hoofs as with the prefatory steps of a clog-dancer—then one straining leap and away!

How they went! The wheels hummed over the ground like an engine gaining power with the increase of its revolutions. Ungovernable fear goaded every step she took. They could feel the look in her eyes behind the blinkers. There was no mistaking what she thought of motors—devils incarnate with fire in their eyes, smoke in their nostrils. No doubt the hum of the wheels behind her suggested the devil in pursuit, for there was no lagging in the speed. Down the hill she went to the level country like a missile hurled from a catapult, and they two behind her saying nothing ^-waiting.

Instinctively, Seyd put out a hand to the rail of the seat beside him, casting a glance at Katherine to whom only the reins were support. You take a woman at a disadvantage when you see her in terror or suffering from a rough passage at sea; but watch her walking the deck careless of the storm or facing danger with bright eyes and a half hint of laughter on her lips—by Heaven! you find her inspiration then. A woman unafraid could lead a whole battalion to glory. Seyd looked and looked again. Katherine was letting her have her head with just that amount of curb on the reins which never let her forget the power that was behind her. What? Power of wrist—power of arm? A Woman? No! By Heaven again! But power of personality! That is what the animal feels, carried along the leather wires of telegraphy to the steel receiver between his teeth. No doubt of the communication; no fear of its being misunderstood. He knows—the mare knew—as Seyd also knew, seeing the flush on her cheeks, hearing the steady drawing of her breath.

“You think she’ll tire out?” he said. The words as he uttered them were blown from his mcuth like froth. She just caught them as they scudded by.

“Eventually—if I can keep her straight.” To her- self Katherine seemed to shout the words. They came in a whisper to him.

From that they went on in silence, Seyd watching her, thrilled with admiration, when occasion permitted, For the most part it meant a tight seat and a steady head. His position was the worst—doing nothing; he envied her the struggle, but would not; have deprived her of it for worlds.

The first half-mile passed in a breath, and the fear was still pricking the mare. Suds of foam flew from her mouth like heavy snow-flakes. Not one jot pf abatement showed in her pace. Corners they cut as a wire cuts cheese, to save them from the wide curve and the ditch on the other side. Even then it was a grating on one wheel almost, to come back into the road’s centre. The little animal stretched herself put like a greyhound, sweeping her path with the Stride of a racer.

Neither of them thought that it would last for long —neither said it or showed it. At last coming to a straight stretch, Seyd uttered an exclamation.

“What’s the matter?” rapped Katherine.

“Round that next corner, believe I saw a farmer’s cart! God! yes—you can see his head over the hedge! Better see if I can pull her in—” His hands stretched forward.

“Leave her alone!” The words ripped from her. “Do you want to make it inevitable?” Then she strained on him. Flame mounted on her face—burning to her forehead. Her little feet, barely reaching the foot-board, were set like nuts upon a bolt, screwed tp the last turn; her arms tautened as a wire-cable that holds a ponderous weight. Still there was no slacking of the pace; yet one of the two must give. Seyd could have shouted his praise of her, but he knew which of the two it would be.

Then, round the corner—fifty yards away—lumbered the farmer’s cart. For a moment the man stopped, seeing what was before him. They could feel his amazement from there. The lightning moments seemed prolonged hours before the actual facts appeared to dawn upon his understanding. As yet, he filled more than half the road.

“Shout!” exclaimed Katherine.

“Hi! Runaway! Clear!” rent a passage through Seyd’s lips. So he had yelled orders at the front to a wavering handful of men.

Then the yokel’s mind was reached. With throttled curses he pulled his whole conveyance into the ditch, hiding himself then at the back of it as they swept past —a sand-storm scourging a desert.

They got by—a miracle—but then the corner that the yokel had just turned became their’s.; A succession of miracles is pardonable impossibility. Straight the mare went for the ditch, like an arrow finding its mark. By herself, she might almost have cleared the hedge. The futile effort was made. As if with the blow of a hammer, Seyd was driven to his knees against the dash-board with the vision of a comet of skirts pitching past his eyes and a dull cry in his ears.

CHAPTER IX

AN inert mass of garments, ironic in their dainty finery, stared threateningly at Seyd from the white road. Not one motion stirred them, and the thought of death rose—a wave of repulsion, nauseating—into his mind. Wits scatter like feathers in a gale at such a sight as this. Seyd struggled blindly to his feet and jumped into the road.

Katherine’s head was hidden, covered with a helpless arm that had been flung across it. He lifted her round into a sitting posture—gently, as they lift a priceless vase who know its value. The flame in her cheeks had burned out, leaving gray ashes; her eyes, half closed, hazed as a metal dullened with the breath. In her wrist, he felt the pulse beat tentatively. There was life—thank Heaven for that!—but in every thought he felt the helplessness of a babe.

“She be fair done for,” said a Buckinghamshire drawl behind him.

Seyd looked up, electrified into action. The passive impotence of the yokel contrasted with the chafing of his own.

“Where’s your confounded cart?”

“Along farther where ye passed me. I come back when I seed ye go over. She were a fine little mare, too.”

Seyd had forgotten the mare. For a moment he looked back at the wreck behind him. Everything was motionless there as well. Only the back and hindquarters of the poor beast were visible, standing up in grotesque proportions. The head was buried in the ditch.

“How far’s the nearest doctor from here?” he asked, quickly.

“’Bout two miles come the next mile-stone.”

“Well—you’ll have to drive like hell and fetch him. Good God! man, hurry yourself!” The command shot into the brain of the yokel. He turned and ran, obedient. Seyd watched him climb into his cart. Every time the man lashed his whip on the flanks of his horse, Seyd lashed it again in his mind with the eagerness of his imagination. Time seemed interminable before he turned the corner out of sight. Then he looked down again at the white face leaning in the curve of his arm.

She was quite unconscious. He bent down, listening to her breathing coming like the breath of a sleeping child between her lips. She was alive. He gathered courage, hope as well. She was only stunned, perhaps. Looking at her for the length of time, it came to seem that she was merely asleep. No signs of the violence of her fall were evident. She bore no disfiguring marks. The hat she had been wearing was lying a few yards away, and her wonderful hair—brown, glinted with the red of a harvest sun—tossed on her forehead obedient to the breezes. There was nothing to be done. He could only kneel there looking at her. His eyes had long since searched for habitation, or the likelihood of water. Neither offered. The spire of a village church pointed out of a clump of trees that seemed some miles away. He could not bring himself to leave her. There was the doctor to wait for. In the mean time, she might recover consciousness. The suggestion that she might wake to find herself alone were he to go in search of aid brought him determination. He stayed where he was.

Above their heads strips of clouds, vaporous, white, rode like feathers on the blue. In the hedge a wren hopped, piping, from twig to twig. Seyd closed his eyes, hoping he heard the tapping of a horse’s hoofs. The silence was like an empty world and the hope soon died. He looked back again at Katherine.

A strand of hair blew out from its binding, licking her cheek like a flame. For a moment he hesitated, then, taking it between his fingers, he pushed it back into the coils upon her head; so a boy steals the forbidden fruit.

At last he began to realize that the minutes were slipping. She was still unconscious—foolery to think of it as sleep! Yet he had known men unconscious for half an hour—more—who had come to, little the worse. He pictured them in his mind and the thought comforted. Perhaps if he said her name it might sluggishly reach her. He made the effort, feeling the hedges were full of listeners.

“Mrs. Spurrier—Mrs. Spurrier!” The formality of it! To a woman unconscious! It was bathos! “Mrs. Spurrier!” He could not say it again—it sounded too ridiculous. Katherine was her name. Miss Katherine Crichton. He wished to God—as soldiers will—that he had met her when she had answered to that. Instinctively he recalled the portrait as he had first seen it at Lord Northfleet’s, the patch of red hair, like a mat. He looked at it now—heavy heaps of it—the eyes, even then, were daring — defiant. He could not see them now. It was strange, with her head here on his shoulder, to think of what he had said to Northfleet as they stood before the picture in the gallery at Wood-stock.

“You feel that you want to smack it,” had been his remark.

“Exactly—if you dared—” added Northfleet.

If he dared. Seyd looked again at the face beneath him. One by one every feature rested in his eye— one by one, last of all her mouth. Lips half parted to the slender breaths that filtered between them. Even then, though they were pale—lacking the fulness of life—the personality had not gone from them. If he dared— Exactly—exactly.

She must have been fifteen then, at the time when Northfleet had said that. Now—? She could not be more than twenty-two. Heavens! Twenty-two! What a prize to have won! Won! Had Spurrier won her? Was it winning or netting? It is not easy to win the flying bird, and there is no sport in the net. So he judged all things, by the canons of the game. She was netted now—by circumstance, in his arms! The very thing which a moment before he had damned for want of sport in another flew at him, winged with pressing desire. He tried to take his eyes from her. They came back fluttering like filings of steel to the magnet. Why should it be beyond the bounds to take such opportunity? To look at her, eyes burning, no check to the thoughts in them? He would not see compulsion to yield that.

So he played torture with himself, driving the lash for the mere animal pleasure of the pain—flagellation!

Once her mouth opened, tentatively, as though to take a deep breath with the return of life. He looked eagerly for the opening eyes to follow, but there was no change. The temptation returned then, doubly winged, making his heart hammer through the blood. Those lips, parted, were torturing. He bent close to her. Then his head shot back as to a blow cutting upward.

“Damned scoundrel, if you did!” he muttered. Yet he still had the mercilessness to chastise himself, adding to it the regret for a deed well left undone.

You see here into the inmost of the man, the animal undaunted even by the similitude of death, with the instinct of the game, a bearing-rein to keep his head from the fretful plunge. But if the fuse had ever flickered — it was spitting with the running fire now. His hands shook as he held her. It is here you see the decadence, the effeteness of the type. No intellect in this! Take the sword from him, set him idle in the land, and the winning of blood becomes a thirst for it, seeking to be assuaged at the deepest pool.

In this instance, perhaps, he played the game. Her personality demanded that. Make it another of a lighter type. Where would she have been? Nevertheless, the fact holds. He played the game. Katherine herself put an end to it. Her eyes opened, and, like a child in a strange world, she looked about her.

“Thank the Lord!” he murmured, conclusively.

CHAPTER X

THE Barbara Durrants in this world are uncon- scionably hard to find. One comes across them by chance—amethysts in the common stone that a road-mender breaks between his knees. Like the road-mender, too, one frequently passes them by, ignorant of their value.

Notwithstanding that the breach in their friendship had been made and observed by Katherine, Barbara Durrant readily responded to the summons to Glen-worth. She came to find a darkened room, blinds lowered, and an air of quietness that permeated the house like the breathless sirocco of the desert. John paced floors and passages—the caged beast—strength made impotent. He could do nothing. Whenever he was admitted to the lightless room, he walked with a heavy noiselessness, body bending to soften the fall of each step. In that effort he succeeded; yet things in the room seemed to creak. Sometimes in the gloom he would knock against an object, dislodge something from a table. A nervous exclamation would escape from Katherine, as John stood motionless in the centre of the room like a convict, betrayed by his own clumsiness in the act of escape.

What can you hope to do with a healthy Socialist in a sick-room? The man is out of his element. He flounders—doing the worst sometimes, but always for the best. The time came when Katherine dreaded his visits. He meant well. Who doubted it? But imagine what the well-meaning action that jars can be to the woman whose nerves are dancing on a knife-edge like marionettes. She could not say that she did not want to see him. To begin with, it would have been cruel. Barbara, then, was told to tell him that she was asleep.

“Asleep? Ah, that ’ll do her good; that’s what she wants—sleep, plenty of it. She’s much better if she can sleep.” Out he went into the fields then, Jephson attendant; a school-boy, allotted an unexpected halfholiday, thrown into the playground. What else is work to the man who has passed the make-believe of his youth? Play! Making of mud battlements with the sweat of his brow, fighting sham-fights with the fire in his blood. The boy who cannot wage a bloody war against those knights who are seated at the roundtable of make-believe will never find within himself a man to conquer the giants of reality. It is the same game. The same spirit wins, the same want of it that loses.

Barbara watched him go off, crying for him, smiling at him. He was a man, every inch of him, every look of him. Was that what women wanted? At heart, was it the vital need of them? Something denied it— yet an echo, or was it a voice, acclaimed it? She turned away to Katherine’s room, still uncertain, ignorant.

“Has he gone out?” asked Katherine.

“Yes—with Jephson.”

A silence brought a vivid picture to Barbara’s mind of the words filtering through Katherine’s imagination —little pebbles cast into the water, sinking, freeing the tiny air-bubbles of suggestion from them as they sank.

“Even my being ill doesn’t disinterest him in his work!”

“I’d told him you were asleep.”

“Then he goes out like a child stripped of responsibility.”

“Well—he was relieved. You could see it in his face. He thought it would do you a lot of good.”

“But he can go out at once; and if I had been asleep, I might have wakened up the next minute.”

So women can argue their case without a smile between them. They dissolve the pearls of logic in a sparkling wine of words and drain the goblet at a draught. Only a woman can do it. It needs her flash of eye, her disarming smile, the turn of her wrist as she raises the chalice to her lips. A man would look a fool.

“Why wouldn’t you let him come in to see you then?” asked Barbara.

Katherine lay back on her pillows with a sigh.

“Have you ever seen those Japanese tight-rope performers who walk up a wire slanting to the ceiling of some immense hall? Walk right up it, with only a little paper parasol swaying in their hands to keep their balance for them? You feel your heart bump with every step they take. Imagine what you would feel watching one do it for the first time, knowing that he had never walked on a rope before in his life. That is what I feel when John comes into the room. And when he kicks against something or knocks anything down, it’s as if the wire-walker’s foot had slipped, when he was a hundred feet above my head. I hear the door open, and from that moment my heart seems on a spring. I watch him walking across the room like a gaunt ghost in this light, and my breath hangs waiting for the first noise he’ll make.”

“But that’s your nerves. It’s not his fault.”

“You defend him?”

“I know he’s fond of you—intensely fond. Until he heard you were asleep he was walking up and down tfie dining-room—miserable!”

“Will that help me to bear this furnace of pain behind my eyes?”

In such a way as this, Katherine showed her hand. Tossed with pain, nerves drawn out to a fine thread on which all thoughts balanced, she had no spirit for the simulation of her feelings. Naked, stripped of the tinsel and tfie motley, they bowed themselves before Barbara, unashamed, undisguised. It was a moment for retaliation, an opportunity for retort. Katherine had railed at her. The reply could now be her very own. You see I was right! with the thrill of self-satisfaction, the warm consciousness of infallibility. Barbara let it go by, contenting herself alone with the lesson it read.

A knock at the door, muffled, toned with the gentleness of consideration, drew Barbara to her feet.

“Captain Seyd brought these with a note to inquire if the mistress were any better.”

“Who’s that?” Katherine demanded, quickly. The sibilant whispering that trickled through the door had roused her intuition.

Barbara took no notice of her question.

“Tell him that Mrs. Spurrier is doing as well as could be expected.” The door closed. Barbara Came back into the room with an armful of flowers.

“Flowers!” Katherine exclaimed. They were a blackened mass in the gloom, but the scent of them had reached her, crying of the sun, singing of the blue sky, the open air, all the things of life that seem elysium to eyes wrapped in darkness. She took them to her as the lark takes the first glimpse of the early morning sun into its wings. Her head buried in them, her nostrils drained their perfume—so bees suck honey from the Cup of a rose, intoxicated with the spirit of life. This was what she needed. Flowers to raise her to a thought of the world outside—cool leaves to lift her from the darkness to which she was compelled. Whose thought was it? Not John’s? No! John had his work. What were flowers to him? It was the Coarser yielding of the earth’s gifts that concerned him. Food-^-to nourish the generation for the sake of the generations to come. The crops! What were a thousand acres of crops beside this one rose that brought God’s air with it into a stifled room? Then whose thought was it? Was there a doubt? Not in her mind. Her instinct was alive with the knowledge. Had she found herself at fault, rightly or wrongly it would have meant the loss of a piece in the game for the Captain Percy. What a woman expects of a man goes to his ctedit if he brings fulfilment, but she counts it against him if he fails.

“Who brought them?” she asked, head still plunged into the depth of petals, stifling impatience for knowledge.

“Captain Seyd.”

Silence! Had a bud opened in the bundle of roses, you would have heard its petals grating. Women are tense with instinct. Steel threads tautened to a straining pitch, receptive of every vibration that stirs. Barbara stood at the foot of the bed, expression concealed by the darkness, her mind stretched, sensitive to record every thought that sped through Katherine’s brain. So you see one deer look up from the herd at the distant approach of a man. The instinct is as sure—telepathic.

Of Katherine’s acquaintance with Captain Seyd, Barbara knew nothing—nothing beyond that which they all had knowledge of; that he had called at Glenworth with the Martins, had met Katherine at the station, been introduced to John, and then driven with her into the country—nothing more than that! And what was it? No evidence on which to base the faintest supposition. Yet her head was raised when first she heard of him. Now, in the silence that followed her information, thoughts, intuitions were gyrating in the darkness, like a heap of leaves swept into flight by a gale of wind. She caught at them blindly, piecing them together, making a vague, impressionistic picture of Katherine in search of romance—true in outline if not in detail. She knew it was true; would have sworn to it in a court of law.

“He left a note and inquired if you were any better.” Barbara voluntarily broke the silence. It had served its purpose.

“You said I was better?”

“As much so as could be expected.”

“Where is the note?”

Would you fancy you traced the tone of eagerness? No, you find no eagerness here. Callousness practised to finesse, neither too little nor to much, hoodwinking the man as a child is deceived by the vanishing coin in the hand of the conjuror, but achieving no deception with the woman. And why not with the woman? Because she knows that eagerness, which reasonably might convey nothing behind it, would be the most natural thing for her sex to feel in the face of such a tribute whoever the bearer might be. Imprison a woman in a dark room on the flat of her back, and she will tear open the envelope of a bill with eagerness. Why this callousness then, if not with intent to deceive? It needs an amazing nerve and a supreme quality of judgment to realize that when seeming what you really are, you may be the most deceptive.

Their friendship had had one break in it, lasting almost for a year; Barbara could not suppose that she would be received back at once into the inner temple of confidence.

“I’ve put the note here on the table,” she replied. “Do you mind handing it to me?”

Barbara held it out, leaning across the bed.

“You mustn’t read it, you know.”

“Oh, it’s only a short note, I expect—”

“The doctor said you ought to read nothing. Practical darkness and absolute quiet.”

“Barbara” — Katherine sat upright — “two days I’ve been in this room, seeing nothing but gray figures walking on tiptoe round my bed, hearing nothing but the ticking of that clock on the mantel-piece, feeling nothing but these flames of pain that leap and dance behind my eyes; if you don’t turn on the light, or light a candle, I shall get up and do it myself.”

Mutiny this, and not of the men but of the captain. Yet it was merely a trick. If Barbara saw through the deftness of the ruse, at least she did not expose it. Coming round to the side of the bed, she put her arms around Katherine’s neck and kissed her, lingeringly, lovingly, as a mother granting the importunate desires of its child.

How can you wish for sight or sound when the head is racked with pain and the nerves are grating? Instinctively one looks to the inducement for reply.

CHAPTER XI

THERE are moods when a woman will attach a sentiment to the most trifling incident in the world. What, upon the face of it, could have been more within the common order of things than that Captain Seyd should have sent a tribute expressing sympathy with the state of affairs and an inquiry for the improvement of Katherine’s condition? Yet such was her mood at the moment of its arrival, that she found a wealth of meaning in it, and, in the sluggishness of the endless hours, lavished it upon her imagination.

“Dear Mrs. Spurrier”—so ran the letter that sped her determination towards recovery—“I have let two days go by, perhaps seeming inconsiderate to you, in order that when I did make inquiries I should be able to hear of improvement, if there were any. Writing this, of course, I am ignorant and can only hope for the best. You deserved it—I fear I got it. I have not even a bruise, nothing to show for one of the most exciting collection of moments that has ever been my good-fortune to find. A slash across the face, some mark of distinction, would have been an honor. I could have carried it happily as a memento. But I am untouched. I would have it all over again, avoid- ing your injuries, in order to see you sweep past another farmer’s cart. Just before, if you remember, I had been talking of heavy artillery going into action like a tornado. Our gunners are supposed to be able to drive. Not one of them could have taken that grace of an inch that the farmer’s cart granted you, and go by as we did. Had we struck then, it would have been the hard road and no mercy. The climax, coming in the ditch, saved us. I owe my life to your handling of the ribbons! What can I do for you in return?

“I went up to Town the next day, not from boredom of the country—give me more of it—but to get you these roses. Poor recompense for your gallantry, but command me to anything. I am your servant. In three weeks from now I am bound East to meet my regiment. I am earnestly hoping to see you well again before I start.”

Nothing in it! Not really a word to complain of. You would almost demand so much of any man under the circumstances. Yet between the lines, in that broad acreage of suggestion where all women read, Katherine felt she saw the subtle trending of his mind. “I went up to Town next day, not from boredom of the country—give me more of it—” There she had halted in the letter, rereading it and rereading it again. “Not from boredom of the country—” What did that mean, but a reference to their conversation concerning men drawn by the call of the town? What did it convey, but that he had understood the reference to John in her remark; had understood it, and would have her know that he was in sympathy? “Give me more of it.” The space here between the lines was broadest of all, cramped with suggestions. She lay back on her pillows in the darkened room and, uninterrupted, let them filter through her mind—so through the mesh the wine oozes from the grape, filling the goblet that will delight the heart of him who drains it. Here you find the dreaming of a woman who is herded with her own thoughts by the arm of circumstance. In such grooves as these she is drifting when you see the far look in her eyes that penetrates the limitations of her surroundings. The disappointed woman is she whose fascinations fail, whose allurements neither touch nor thrill. In the heart of such a one you will discover the canker of bitterness. She knows her failure. You call this small-minded, a poor conception of a woman’s position. Yet it governs the whole structure, is the first brick in the building of this house of sentiment we live in. You take it as a definition of love? No wonder your mind revolts!

Love is a condition of being that is by no means arrived at so easily. The disappointed woman may find the love of a man, and salve her wounds, but she will never fascinate him. Love outcomes from the evolution of the intellect. Here we are going back to the animals from whom we have sprung like the phoenix from the flames; but the taint of the sulphur still circulates, undeniable, in the blood. Intellect alone will purge it out.

But this—this desire to fascinate, to warrant admiration and to get it—this is a primal instinct. You will not sweep it away by religion, or rid yourself of it in a day. It hangs upon a woman’s actions as the swinging curtain hangs upon a door, opening with it, shutting with it, inseparable from every motion it obeys.

Revolting, hideous, you say? You shudder at the allusion to the animals. The ape stares at you out of the past; you can see nothing but the ape; on that your gaze concentrates. You fail to see the unswerving development towards the ultimate perfection, in which giant scheme you are an atom with a part to play and a duty to perform. In preference you hug your book of Genesis to your bosom, shut your eyes, and endeavor to do your best. So the timid sportsman shuts both eyes and pulls the trigger. Sometimes he hits the mark, you say—exactly! by the mercy and pity of a God who made his eyes to open.

It is this primal instinct then that must be taken as the foundation of Katherine’s psychology. Heresy! you exclaim. Primal instincts? Excuses for immorality! Call her immoral then. Shut your eyes to the fact that her intellect battles with those instincts. Deny that a woman, robbed of her power to demand admiration where first of all she might expect it, will look for it elsewhere. Or if you do not deny it, call it immoral, have no patience with her, condemn her at once.

John saw nothing of the bowl of roses when next he came in to see Katherine. You find his eyes rushing to the pillows on which her head was lying.

“Did the sleep do you any good?” he asked, gently, bending over her.

Quick as a bird to the call of its mate, her eyes answered the tone of his voice. She lacked no apprecia- tion, needed no prompting for response. He cared. Barbara was right. In his way he cared.

“I feel better than I did.” What need was there to undeceive him? “Do you see my present?”

His eyes wandered, drifting to the flowers.

“Did Marshal send them in?”

Marshal, the head gardener. Your ideas of socialism come from the text-books if you smile at this. We shall hear of his valet next! But why not? Socialism is not philanthropy. This primary idea of the abolition of capital is merely the endeavor to Christianize everything. Capital is a wonderful power in the hands of the right man. Thrust it into the proper hands— there you have socialism. There must be men to lead; captains with drawn swords to spur on the battalion. Money is a mighty sword. Your worthless capitalist of to-day sheathes it, locked in the scabbard. Sell all you have and give to the poor! This is she cry of the Christianized Socialist. Give to the poor! As you will! Encourage the survival of the unfittest! Encourage poverty, if literal translation, unadapted to its time, is all that will content you. To exterminate poverty is the mission of the true Socialist. He will not succeed in that if he feeds and clothes the poor. When the beggar will go to jail rather than work for his wage, why give him twopence when he stands by the way-side? Work should be the cry of the best of us.

Marshal, in any case, was the head gardener. There were men under him, too. A fine sort of socialism this, to be employing labor for the beautifying of his own grounds, when there were poor creatures begging from door to door who could not call an inch of God’s earth their own! Turn your head gardeners and your under gardeners adrift, and give somewhat of your wealth to that poor beggar who does no duty for it. So you will win a seat in heaven, a promise, literally translated from the Greek.

“Did Marshal send them in?” John repeated.

“Why Marshal?” she asked.

“Oh, he has some beautiful roses under glass.”

So John had roses—at his hands. Fresh roses, warm with the life in them. He had not thought of sending her one. But this man, Seyd, had gone up to Town to fetch her these. What did it show? She stifled the comparison. It was not that John would have grudged her them. Prize roses they may have been; but he would have given them to her, all of them, down to the last bud. It was simply that the thought had not occurred to him. She looked up into his face that was puzzled with the wondering of who had sent them to her. He had not thought of it; that was all. Had she but suggested, he would have been eager to obey. Barbara was right; that she insisted upon repeatedly. Barbara was right—he cared.

“Then who sent them?” he asked.

“Captain Seyd.”

He nodded his head. Had it conveyed no suggestion to him? Apparently not. He patted her cheek.

“Mustn’t have them in the room at night,” he said. “The scent of them would be bad for you.”

So he took it, unconsciously, passing the snake in the grass.

“He sent this letter with them.” She handed it to him.

“Am I to read?”

“Of course.”

She studied his eyes as they ran backward and forward across the lines. Chasing meanings were they? Not at all! He laid the sheet of paper back on the bed, no trace of suspicion in his mind.

“Doubt if he really enjoyed the sensation of the ditch,” he remarked.

That struck the chord. Katherine tuned her strings to it.

“You doubt if he enjoyed it at all?” said she. Her voice had an edge to it.

“A bolting horse to the ultimate ditch is not my idea of enjoyment.”

“No, you prefer the all-night sitting and the wrangling of debate. You love an argument.”

“If it leads to some sort of spirit of conviction on the right side, why not?”

“Then you think Captain Seyd exaggerates?” “That’s not exactly a charitable definition.”

“Well—that he does not mean what he says?”

“He probably writes that to please you.”

“It scarcely appeals to you that it might be the truth—that he might really like to have it all over again, if only to see me drive? Does it seem quite impossible to you that I might be attractive to other men?” John had driven her to bay. She was fighting to defend the rights of her sex, the right to influence, the right to sway, the right to fascinate. He should have been jealous. That letter should have lit the inflammable spirit of suspicion. He suspected nothing. The match had been applied, but the fuse was damp; no spluttering even. There was not a doubt of her in his mind. He took her for granted, a matter of course. There was no jealousy in him. She yearned to see the glint of it in his eye. That was the compliment for which she was searching. He paid her none. This was the slight; this the chord to which the strings of her nature were vibrating. Barbara? Barbara was wrong! He did not care. This was not caring, merely the sense of proprietorship. Her nature rose against it. She must be loved; none must be sure of her. To be confident of her possession, to count her secure; it was as the dog in its kennel, the horse in its stable, an item in the household, cast upon the inventory. This was not her value; she rated herself higher.

“I imagine you’re too certain of me,” she persisted. She pitched her voice in a common key, casual to a note. “I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you. Men thought me attractive before we were engaged to be married; I don’t suppose I’ve changed so very much since then. It’s scarcely two years ago.”

Weapons such as these are a woman’s. Katherine regretted the use of them immediately they were drawn; yet once drawn, she could not retract. She wielded them. John bent his shoulders to the blows, saying nothing. To him it sounded truer than it did to her. He almost felt that he had no right to expect fidelity from her. For the time being, whipped, as had been Seyd, into submission to her personality, the soft and gentle instincts of his nature asserted themselves. The Socialist, the thinker, the logician, all were supplanted by the man. He had his definite opinions upon the position of women; before her personality they fled like ghosts at the light of the morning.

He had not valued her enough. Everything she proceeded to say proved it. In ten minutes he was biting the dust of remorse to the speciousness of her point of view. Reason left him, logic deserted him—rats fleeing from the scuttled ship. She made him feel a brute. He despised himself. He saw little but selfishness in his obedience to the call of his work, realized nothing of the inevitability of it, the essential need of those who strain towards efficiency. This point of view of her’s was overmastering.

Kneeling down by her bedside, he put his arms around her neck.

“Katherine,” he said, his voice guttural, the strong man moved to contrition, “you don’t like this man Seyd, do you?”

Trumpets! Flags flying! Victory! She wanted this. She had won it. Voices shouted in her ears; her own voice lifted.

“I believe you’re jealous,” she whispered.

He believed he was too.

Ten minutes afterwards, with Jephson, dispelled the belief. Jealous? Why should he be? He knew her better. She talked—prattling—baby words. What did they mean? Nothing! Her place was by him. They worked together. Look at what she had done in the cause of his election!

CHAPTER XII

THE earth was still budding, life was still being born, hopes were still being raised, spring was still existent when Katherine first came out of the dark into the light again. The joy of freedom was uplifting. She rose to it as the cluster of thistle-down rises to the breath of wind and is carried recklessly, waywardly across the meadows. So comes life, after its months of hibernation, thirsting for the light, draining it down as men in southern countries drink wine—like water. After those few weeks of captivity, the earth had grown young again, she with it. The sky caught a new reflection in her eyes after the enforced darkness; there was a newer ring in her voice as of metal reforged. This was living, indeed—to be born again!

John had promised to come down to Glenworth for her first convalescent walk in the open.

“It shall be on my arm—not another soul.” He said it fervently, spurred by the joy of her recovery. In his simple way he went to his room on the first day that she came down-stairs and, covering his face, knelt on one knee. Prayer was not his second nature; but he felt that thanks were due somewhere. All dues he paid.

“It shall be on my arm,” he said again, before he went away.

You see here a glimpse of the enthusiast. It was on Barbara’s arm. Work, impossible to throw off, pinned him down. He had not forgotten his promise. For a moment it looked him in the face; but the call was clarion-voiced. He sacrificed to obey. A telegram was brought up to Katherine’s room soon after breakfast. She was dressing, preparing for the first walk. Opening it, reading it, she handed it to Barbara.

“Any husband to any wife,” she said. The evenness of her voice made it the more bitter. Had she shown chagrin, it would have passed for wounded vanity. But other things were waiting. There was the day, the sun, the air, laden with scents and sounds of life. Regret passed with her remark. She looked on beyond the disappointment.

Barbara laid the strip of paper down without reply. A thought of John pacing floors and passages a few weeks back was a power to level misgiving. She refused to believe that anything short of being imperative would have held him back.

“Well, I don’t lose the walk for want of an arm to lean on,” Katherine added, flicking the final sting from her mind. “Look at those shadows on the lawn, listen to that blackbird, smell these wall-flowers!”

Each injunction was knotted, cutting, rebellious. Barbara was hurt by the apparent justice of them. She felt the steady drifting of Katherine; she knew the iron stability of John. Learning had come her way since Katherine’s wedding-day. She had learned the value of stability.

“I’m sure he did his utmost to get away,” said she.

Deftly Katherine bound a strand of hair upon her head, pinning it unmercifully.

‘‘Do you?” she remarked. The coiling and pinning of another length of hair made a pause significant. On the moment, she turned. Her eyes looked the full depth and meaning of her words as she said them. “You’ve changed, Barbara,” she announced. “You’re absolutely different to what you were.”

“Why? How have I changed?”

“How?” She charged the word with meaning. “In everything. You talked about romance—sentiment; now you palliate John’s actions when he positively neglects me. When I was married you would have condemned such a thing. Now you excuse it.” “Yes; I’ve changed—you’re quite right. John himself partly effected it.”

“John?”

“Yes. He’s worth loving, worth keeping, worth excusing. What do you complain of? Not that he looks to other women; simply that the work he is doing sometimes robs you of his attentions. You have no real excuse for complaint in that. It’s work well worth doing. His name and what he does doesn’t pass lightly across people’s lips. It may not all of it tell just now—it will, it will tell.”

Here was the voice of John, surely, crying in the wilderness for the generations to come. It stung Katherine to satire. She felt her camp deserted, followers gone. When, unaided, a woman is driven to waive her own standard, there lies a blow in every motion of the arm—she makes a weapon of it, a weapon of de- fence. Katherine, robbed of supporters, rode out caparisoned in irony; for supporters she must have, either upon one side or the other. With no one to turn to, she was dangerous. Barbara took the blows bravely.

“So you’ve become a convert to John’s optimism!” Katherine exclaimed. This was the first cut, others followed. The steel of her words had an edge, biting deep. She wielded them about her unerringly. Vacillation, treachery to one’s own belief. They were weak spots, tendons of Achilles; she struck at them, cutting them through.

“To admire, to blindly worship — I shall consider myself the greatest fool if I ever do that. It’s war—a war if you like. The ascendency of the man against the ascendency of the woman; dogs at each other’s throats. As soon as she adores, as soon as she worships, the man wins. He can wield her then like a willow switch. She becomes the cipher, the plain mother of children, growing more and more ugly every day. Do you think I’ll ever consent to be that? And the world’s full of them! It’s when he worships, when he adores, when the fear of losing her peeps out of every word he says, everything he does; that’s when a woman wins and that’s what every woman with sense fights for. Love! If Byron had written a foot-note, when he said it was a woman’s whole existence, you would have found that he meant the being loved, not the loving, or else his knowledge of women was small. It’s the most fatal mistake a woman can make to blindly love her husband. Why, in the core of the natures of them, it’s not even what they want. Their desire is for the unattainable—give them adoration and I pity you. You’ll live in a glutted market with your wares rotting at your feet.”

Fine phrasing this; but swept along with the impetus of her own attack, Katherine could rise to the heights of keenest criticism. Words came glibly, flights of them; swallows pitching down the wind, sure of their strength of wing. You find all borne down to silence before her. Personality once more. She could change her point of view before your face and carry the conversion with conviction. Logic? What does a woman want with it? Instinct carries her through all illogicalities to that appearance of the truth which she loves.

That first day out in the country, walking through avenues of young life, brought back the joy of living to Katherine. She felt it as a stream starting, timid, out of the hill-side, gathering strength into the mill-race. After an hour, she returned to the house.

“You’d better rest now,” Barbara suggested.

“Rest?” Her eyes flashed energy. “I’m going to write some letters.”

One letter only, and that to Seyd. Here she laid impetuosity aside. Letters had a term of life; words none. She ruled all her lines with diplomacy and wrote on them with a pen of consideration. Yet, strangely, a sheaf of epistles were the undoing of her. One cannot be a statesman with the heart unless there are eyes upon one. Her own eyes were watching her here—Seyd’s would follow. So she played the statesman.

“Dear Captain Seyd,—I can now indorse in writing my verbal thanks for your lovely roses. I am up, out, and well. Possibly if you have any time to spare before you start away to meet your regiment, you would like to come down for the afternoon to Glenworth—I will try and persuade my husband to leave Town on that day if you will write and let me know.”

Yours faithfully or yours truly? It mattered little which. She appended the latter because there was a subtle distinction. It was always a. dealing in subtleties when Katherine wrote letters. Surely, if the value of them is known, it is by a woman. But did he come? The question is superfluous. Cast the scent of honey on a summer wind, and if a bee should find it its course is straight. Instinct in primal matters never varies. The return of post brought a note announcing the day of his visit.

“But there is not a train from Town between two and four-thirty; which would you prefer me to take?” So his note concluded. “You had better come to lunch,” he was told.

To lunch he came, swearing by England for the country. Katherine and Barbara entertained him in a room tessellated with great squares of sunshine.

“My husband comes down by the four-thirty,” said Katherine.

“In Town is he? That’s hard on him. It’s when you’re leaving England in April that you curse the service.”

“I don’t think my husband objects. It’s anything that takes him from the service that he curses.”

“Diligence, hard work—fine characteristics. Sometimes wish I had ‘em myself—mostly, it seems, what’s the use. Thirty, forty, fifty years, what can a man do in that time? He doesn’t start till he’s fifteen. Of permanent value he can do nothing. He wears life to a thread, and when he comes to stitch his endeavors into one pattern the thread snaps. Who thanks him that he cuts the pieces? Your husband, for instance, Mrs. Spurrier, forever drives the wedge. They say up in Town—any people in a political set that I know—that he’s moulded a candle burning thirty hours to the day, eight days to the week. Yet I wonder who gets the best out of life—he or I?”

“How long does your candle burn for?”

“That’s just it. As long as I like. Puff—it’s out! Lazy—probably. Disreputable if you like. But I enjoy life.”

“But what exactly do you call enjoyment of life?” The first remark Barbara had made. The silent woman studies her man. Find her talking—cross-fires of conversation—and she takes him for granted, meaning appreciation so long as his talk interests.

“Rather hard to answer that off-hand. Give me risk, I think. That drive with Mrs. Spurrier.” His eyes swept Katherine’s. “Ten minutes it must have been, travelling like the vengeance of the Lord. I call that enjoying life. Active service is enjoying life. Big shooting, when things lie in the flat of the hand—the game. At least some one thanks you for winning there!”

“And is it all a question of thanks, do you think?” asked Barbara.

The declaration of enmity this. Antipathy sped between them—antagonists, held by the leash of conversation. Katherine watched the velvet patting of paws, talons peeping from behind their fringes. At times a smile danced in her eye—pirouetted, twirled—courte-sied when Seyd’s glance met her’s.

“And what do you think of my greatest friend?”

It was not Katherine to take the wide sweep. She cut close to everything—so she had passed the farmer’s cart. After lunch, Seyd had asked her to show him about the grounds.

“Your haunts I want?” He could ask direct as well.

And this was the first question she had put to him when they were alone.

“And what do you think of my greatest friend?”

“Did you think that was necessary?” said he.

“Think what necessary?”

“That description of Miss Durrant. I should have told you what I thought anyway. If I had any bad to say, you would only have succeeded in making it harder.”

That impression of candid honesty was safe to win appreciation. Katherine liked him for it. He meant her to.

“Smoothing ground?” she said, with a laugh.

“Not at all. What I think of Miss Durrant is not altered by the fact that she has no love for me.”

“Oh, I think you make a mistake there.”

“Not a bit of it. Why not have as many to dislike as to like you, or even more. Popularity’s only dropped fruit; all of it over-ripe. I want the fruit that needs picking.”

Katherine felt his eyes beside her. For a moment she realized a pulse in her throat. This man dared, big shooting, when things lie in the flat of the hand—these were the salt of existence to him. She felt them thrill her too. Risk—there was romance in it. This flooding of youth and of life from the sluice-gates of her newly found freedom was overwhelming. She was as the swimmer waging strength against the current, the seething water Rubbling against her eyes.

“Well—you’re opinion of her?”

“Oh—straight as a gate—no hedging about her; but she doesn’t count the world or the people in it. She’d never be really happy out of Arcadia.”

“You read character, then?”

“Why?”

“I think you’ve hit her—but she makes allowances for me.” ^

“That’s your quality—not her’s.”

“How do you mean?”

How far did she really misunderstand—how far was she drawing him on? You can never trust the innocence of a woman. She asks a question like a child, straining ears for information, and behind the uplifted eyebrows lies a knowledge greater than your own.

“Well, the quality is personality, belonging to you. The type that would make no allowances for you would have a stronger personality than your own. I should like to meet it.”

Verging on the region of the you and I this; Katherine led him away from it with a dexterous tongue. Exhausting the haunts, for, as she explained, the broad country has no corners and needs none, they strolled away from the gardens to the road on to which the drive-gates opened.

“If you want to see a bit of this part of the country that I love,” said Katherine.

“It was what I asked for,” said he.

She brought him then to a lane leading from the main road. An old, Elizabethan farm-house, red-gabled, the tiles rusted, weather-beaten, stood at the foot of it. Generations ago, the owner had made this lane to bring up his carts to the high land that rose gradually before them. Long since the ruts had been worn deep— hollow channels in which the wheels’ rims lost themselves; years had beaten the track of the horses’ feet below the level of the rails of grass that separated wheel-rut from track, track from wheel-rut. Here the hedges had grown high at either side, elders and holly-trees filling the gaps in the hawthorn. The farm was the source of the lane; from there it started like a stream out of the bare earth. Through the farm itself it brought them, where the scent of cattle and all the sounds of country life played on the senses, tunes long forgotten, worth a ransom to remember, when youth was the key-note—the dominant.

Farther on, through rents in the hedges, they saw the ploughed land sweeping upward, a warm, brown mantle sheltering the secrets of the earth. Still farther a gate, its bars charred with the winter’s rains and the searching wind, broke the line of hedge and opened to the lane. Here they stopped.

“That’s what I love,” said Katherine. The motion of her arm embraced all before them, red-brown earth cut sharp by a field of green; yet another field, pale with sprinkled lime rising above this, and on the crest a coronet of firs black-green with their luminant stems.

“The day before the accident I walked up to those woods,” she added.

“Can’t we manage it now,” said Seyd; “unless you’re tired?”

“I’m not tired.”

“The woods then. This ’ll be my last walk in England for a year.”

So he carried her with him. No sign of hesitation. Risking the rebuff of the sharp negative, he led her. There is a knowledge of women in this, this subtle tone of voice between command and suggestion. Make it command and the friction shoots its sparks of defiance; suggest and, supposing refusal, you get it.

Up the lane then they walked to the crest of woodland, single file because of the uneven path. Once her foot slipped into the wheel-rut; his hand raised her out.

“A sprained ankle might be a coincidence,” she said, with a laugh.

“Without the element of sport—moreover, it’s my turn.”

“I wonder how much of that you really mean?” John’s conversation with her had stirred in her memory, lifting to prompt her question. Seyd turned sharp on her.

“That is your opinion of me?”

His words were dry, parched. He shook them from him. A childish delight seized Katherine. He was in harness, being tried. Her spirits rose, mercurial, to see him chafing under the bearing-rein. He would throw his head back, lift it high! With a steady wrist, she kept the neck arched, the head bent. It made the blood tingle to find him restive under her hands. Laughter teased her lips; but Seyd saw nothing of that. He could not have found the spark of merriment in her eyes. If she thought that! Up to the forehead his face burned.

“That is your opinion of me?”

“Why should wondering: that be a defined opinion of you?”

“It infers boasting, a stringing of lies to catch your appreciation.”

“Oh, that’s foolish. Why should I form such a despicable impression of you?”

“Because you imply that when I say I would enjoy a repetition of that drive of ours, I am merely weaving tales to win your favor.”

Children! Nothing less than children fighting for the right of leadership in the game. He was roused to rebellion because her’s was the lead; his the part of chafing insignificance.

“It’s foolish to say things like that. Are we going to fight, when this is your last walk in England for a whole year?”

“You would think it possible for me to take no notice?”

“Of what?”

“Your insinuation.”

“I meant nothing unkind.”

“No? But there is one thing a man wishes to seem to a woman.”

“What is that?”

“A man. You hurt the quick of him when you suppose him to be anything else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But tell me why you asked that question—if you meant it?”

“I thought you had probably said it out of compliment to me; I hadn’t supposed you meant to convey a false impression of yourself.”

“Compliments belong to the age of chivalry, when a man doffed his hat to the ground before his lady, and swore at her behind the brim. I don’t pay compliments—I meant it. Saving your accident, that drive was the keenest delight to me. Delight in seeing someone drive, as you drove; delight in sitting still and admiring your amazing pluck. When a man sees pluck, if it’s only in an animal, it drags a cheer out of him; when he sees it in a woman, you find him mute or babbling incoherent applause.”

“Do you think I was plucky, then?”

“What you have imagined makes me hesitate to say what I thought.”

“Oh, do say!”

Seyd writhed under that appeal. The temptation that had whipped him when she lay unconscious in his arms had not been tied with the fine lash of this. There was something refined in the torture of it. The thought that she must know as well as he how sharp it bit into the flesh, added but another knot to the fine chord. She was making him go through his paces. He knew that; but for how long was he to bite on the snaffle? He could still feel the tightening of the curb. Was it ever to be released?

Dare he rebel against the power in that little wrist, shake curb and snaffle from him, and race with the wind of his desires? If he did, what would she do? Always the ultimate question, this—and always unanswered. If the man could answer it, if the horse could ask it, where would the woman be?

“Tell me,” she asked again, “did you really think I was plucky?”

“I have said so. Pluck is part of your personality.”

“Why do you keep harping on my personality?”

She stopped walking as she asked the question. The lane, with its shielding hedges, had ceased, opening into the breadth of high land overlooking Glenworth, three miles away in the lap of the valley. A rough path ran by the field’s edge to the belt of pine-wood. Nature untouched was alone with them; the place conveyed solitude. On the edge of the wood, rabbits played games of their own making, undisturbed. A brace of partridges ran out from the field, rising when they came into view with a whir of wings like the sudden relaxation of a clock-spring. White hawthorn hedges were here, dusted with snow - blossoms. Wherever there was grass, violets tinged its green with blue. Wild flowers were left unpicked in such a spot as this, and as Katherine stopped, facing him, stray breaths of wind, that swept no other ground, tossed about the loose threads of her hair and passed on; the very breezes that the flowers most need to scatter pollen to their kind.

“Harping on your personality?” Seyd stopped as well. “Do I harp on your personality?”

“You continually refer to it. I’ve never met any one who did it before.”

“Not when they saw the Keightley portrait?”

“Oh, that! Of a baby!”

“But it has increased since then.”

A laugh left Katherine’s lips; the breeze caught it, ringing it in the air.

“What ridiculous things we’re talking about. Where does that little charm come from that hangs on your watch-chain?”

The check steadied him. So a woman pulls on the curb with a laugh. She knows well the danger of a man becoming serious. Seyd lifted the little gold object for her to see. A gold Buddha, ruby eyes, carved with Eastern fingers.

“I found that in India—picked it up.”

She took it in her hand as he pulled out watch and chain from his pocket, that she might examine it.

“Isn’t it perfectly beautiful!” she exclaimed, looking up. The fascination of the jewel for the woman was in her eyes. The god meant nothing.

Seyd undid the clasp that chained it, letting it roll into the palm of his hand.

“Buddha—the One who knows. The most fascinating religion in the world. No hope by cheap imitation to win reward, but a determination to become god himself, and be one’s own reward. Supposing you take it—keep it. I’ve found it lucky. It weighs exactly two ounces—two ounces of the purest metal in the earth. Isn’t that somewhat of a fit present to give you for saving my life?”

He said it with a laugh; but beneath the laugh was the man, beneath the man the desire. It sufficiently concealed. She took it open-handed, with the pleasure of a child.

“Buddha,” she said, seating it on the palm of her hand.

“The One who knows,” Seyd replied.

CHAPTER XIII

AWAY goes romance for a year like a bird of passage called upon the wing. The prolonged silences falling between them as they walked down the lane back to Glenworth were breeding thoughts close on the dangerous. That stage of their acquaintance had been reached when it is foolish to talk commonplaces and fatal to avoid them. Picture the two of them, chastened by all the rods of circumstance, convention, and modern ideas of morality—two children being driven back from the truancy of Romance to the school of Reality. Her head hangs, raised sometimes impulsively with a tightening of the lips; he hums inaudibly a tune as he bites the bullet through. Such a driver as this is conventionality, sharp as a sheep-dog to turn the wavering mind.

Half of it lay in uncertainty. So is it arranged that all knowledge of human nature deserts the active passion in the moments of desire. Ask a man to judge of the nature of a woman in any case but his own. You find a cool, quiet knowledge then. When it comes to the woman beside him, hesitation is rampant. What would she say?—what would she do?—how would she take it? This one woman is different from the rest. Judgment deserted Seyd in the case of Katherine. What he knew of women was useless to him. She was different. Had he taken her hand when she seated the gold Buddha upon its palm, what would she have done? what would have happened? Questions such as these cried to him, importunate, as they walked silently back to Glenworth. And for his reserve, Katherine found admiration tempered with disappointment.

Soon after five o’clock Barbara, sitting in the hall, heard the grinding of wheels. John returned; Katherine and Seyd still absent. On the moment, her heart fluttered. Had he the suspicions that had caught hold in her mind since that afternoon when the flowers and the note had been brought from Captain Seyd? As though she were an accomplice to their absence, her heart beat apprehensively at the sound of his footsteps.

“Hullo, Barbara—all alone? Where’s Katherine?” The first thought, the first question. His eyes, the pose of his head, his attitude of arrest, all asked it before the words came to his lips.

“She’s out.”

“Now? She ought to be in by this time. Did Captain Seyd turn up?”

“Yes. She’s showing him round the grounds.”

“And there’s a touch of frost in the air. She oughtn’t to stay out as long as this.”

No suspicion; she watched him closely for it, and saw none. And he was not the mummer when it came to the concealment of his feelings. He played no part; the concern of his life was living—being. Barbara breathed relief, worshipping his trust of Katherine. So, now, she would wish a husband. Katherine was right; she had changed. John, there, had changed her.

Discarding his hat, he sank onto a lounge, leaning towards her with his head in his hands.

“You’re tired,” said Barbara.

He looked up, surprised at her observation. He had not realized it himself until her remark.

“Tired, am I? By Jove! you’re right. I think I am. I’ll tell you something in s’trict confidence.”

“What is it?” Barbara leaned forward. John confiding in her! Unaccountably a sensation crept through her, leaving her chilled, conscious that her heart was beating.

“I went to see Henning the other day.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Our medical man—extremely clever, too. He tells me I’m making for the regulation jump and won’t be able to take it—break-down and all the rest of it.”

“But why?”

“Overwork, he says; which is quite ridiculous. It’s impossible to overwork in the threescore years and ten.”

“But you are doing too much. You’re even getting that reputation. Don’t you think you take politics too seriously?”

“Politics? It’s not all politics. And here is another confidence. I’m writing a book.”

“A book?” Barbara’s eyes lit with interest. John laughed.

“You jump to the conclusion, the naturally modern conclusion; but please don’t. It’s not a novel.”

“Then what is it?”

“A treatise, a philosophy, if you can imagine me philosophic. An endeavor to wake up sleeping in- tellects; rouse them from their beds; bring them down to the duties of the day.”

“But what are the duties of the day? Hadn’t we better learn those first? Tell me just one.”

‘Til tell you the first—Progression.”

“Well, what is the subject of the treatise?”

“Religion as an evolutionary agent. Change is the key-note of existence, the tuning-fork to whose pitch the song of life is played. Least necessary of all to change is a good, sound religion; yet you’ll find it has to bend, has to go. Martin Luther bent Christianity. Some one has yet to break it. Look alone at what the bending did. England, America, and Germany shot out with the new creed into the inner circle of progression. Unless there comes another as courageous as Martin Luther that inner circle will yet be narrowed by another; we will be left behind as Italy and Spain, France and Russia were left behind three hundred and fifty-odd years ago. We all work towards the centre of a circle; narrowing down, narrowing down by a process of everlasting change, until we reach the ultimate centre.” His hand lifted with unconscious dramatic emphasis.

“Is our code of morals to go?” asked Barbara. “Does change sweep away the Beatitudes?”

“Our code of morals! You have the trading instinct common to the whole world. Our religion! Our beliefs! By what right do you think you should be blessed above all others? Code of morals is simply a catching phrase for right and wrong; right and wrong that were created with the first atom that passed into the condition of life. There is unconscious right and wrong be- side that which is conscious. You call it instinct till your words are jagged in utterance; but you cannot get away from the fact that the animal who gives up its life to that of its young is actuated, if only unconsciously, by the sense of right. Isn’t life as dear to it as to you or me? Watch it shuddering when you lead it to the shambles. Our code of morals! Morals and their opposites belong to the whole world. Religion is only the school-master teaching from the text-books what the government has commanded to be taught in the nation’s schools. Whether he uses the birch-rod of hell fire and damnation, or the sugar-plum of the prophet’s Nirvana, he is simply teaching the same lesson, that if we do right we shall progress towards a higher state of perfection, that if we do wrong we shall reach the everlasting death of a fixed type.”

“This is your philosophy?”

It might be right; it might be wrong. As the words rushed from him, bewilderment tricked Barbara’s judgment. She could say no word against it. Yet right or wrong, the sense of one striving upward, fighting, and by himself, fighting a battle where the odds were legion, pursuing the forlorn-hope of fearless conviction, caught her admiration and strung it to an inward cry of praise. “This is what you are going to teach?”

“It is what I believe.”

“How do you know it to be true?”

“If the greatest man that has lived yet, kept silence to the question, What is Truth? how can you expect one atom in the scheme to know that what it believes possesses that unknown quality. Time judges that. Here you find the power of change. Whatever a man believes in his heart to be true it is his duty to say it. Change will sweep it away if it is worthless. Nature, which is not merely the yielding of fruits and the breeding of types, nature will make use of it as she needs to her own ends. No man in the world was ever brought with absolute conviction to the belief that wrong was right; the position of mind is impossible.”

“But you will be hated. The clergy will hate you. People who still find consolation in their creeds will detest you.”

“Is it to be loved you think we live, then, or to love? Does life become worth living if all love us and we love none? Does it really matter to a man that the crowd shall hate him? Matter? Oh yes, perhaps; but if he is a man, does he weigh all his actions in that balance? People who still find consolation in their creed will only be the more firmly grafted to their beliefs by such blasphemy as mine. It will do them no harm. Oppression, persecution, you will find no more thriving food for belief than this. Look at Ireland, Catholic to a breath.”

“Then where will it do good?”

“Among the thousands of English men and women of to-day who, because they are finding no impetus in the birch-rod of hell, and no consolation in the sweetmeat of paradise, are turning their minds to idleness, emptiness, nothingness—entering the fixed type which is everlasting death. You’ll see a Low Church parson hold up the fat, white hand of horror at the thought of plaster images, and as he lowers it will raise the word images of the fires of hell and the golden harps of heaven. All religion is idol worship, and so long as an idol will bring a man to the choice of right, let it stand. The injunction of the God of Moses—thou shalt not bow down—what was that but the means to raising the thoughts of men from the cultivation of the senses to the cultivation of the mind—the firmest, boldest step towards the evolution of the intellect and the evolution of the soul.”

All this was new light to Barbara, opening a breadth of view that revealed other motives in life, other duties, showing her again another aspect of John’s character. She knew well the disfavor towards which he was steering; could warn him of the fires of hatred through which he was bound to pass and be tried. Yet with that breadth of view came the realization that he obeyed laws greater than those which she had ever perceived before; that it would be no right of hers to endeavor to save him from the inevitable satire of critics and the certain failure of his work. So he had held her, carried her, won her. She felt in him the force that moves mountains, the fulcrum bearing all the weight of the load which others, more brilliant, receive the credit of upholding.

“Have you told Katherine of this book?” she asked.

Reluctantly John shook the negative.

“Why not?”

His eyes sought hers, read them, and found confidence.

“You remember when we were engaged?”

She nodded, murmuring attention.

“Katherine worked down here for my election. She swept up votes. I had a big majority. Politics seemed in the breath of her. I heard her talk in those days, and I tell you that where she applies her personality, she wins; but you know that. You know her as well, rather, far better than I do. I thought we were mated, cast in a mould identical. You could have told me then how far out I was. Since, I have realized it for myself.”

“Are you sure of that? How do you know?”

So she came readily to the defence as much of the situation as of Katherine. Katherine she loved, wildly, admiringly, none so well. Her world of women was Katherine. Katherine, deserving the best, must have it. And Barbara knew none better than John. In the last few minutes he had been lifted high, beyond her conception. This was a man, indeed, a soldier, the bravest, waging the battle of intellect on a field where no favor was given; what better mate for her dearest? “Are you sure—are you sure?” she repeated. “Would I speak of it otherwise?”

She knew he would not. To her mind came a picture of him bleeding in the heart, yet keeping silence, and the blood from his lips, lest the crowd should see.

“The realization’s come slowly,” he continued. “Some lessons aren’t learned easily. I thought at first—why should I tell you this?”

She read his sudden misgiving, scales wavering in the balance where the weight of a hair would tell.

“It may help you to understand better. I press for nothing but your free will.”

The weight of her voice told. The voice of a sympathetic woman can wring the heart of a man dry. Many would have touched Barbara’s hand on the bond; John only clutched his own, looking gratitude.

“I find a friend,” he said.

She nodded, believing that that was all.

“Tell me what you were going to say—what you thought first.”

“First—? I thought first that the career I was giving my best to was shared with her. She hated the social politicians as I did; hated the emptiness of them, the selfishness of them, their endless strivings for notoriety, popularity, wealth. I thought it was because she believed in the true duty of progress. I found it was because they did not amuse, did not interest her. There was no distinction in her mind between the true and the false—either were dull. God bless her. I suppose they are, perhaps they are. But I had started under a misapprehension; it took me a while to realize it. She’s not happy, I see that. But what is it she wants? That question stares at me out of the lives of other women, so much of them as are thrown in my way. I can’t answer it. I had hoped a child would bring her the content of life—” He snapped off his words as you break a slate-pencil between the fingers.

“You’re her best friend,” he ejaculated.

“I was—I am; but I don’t think she realizes it.”

“Then should I speak like this to you?” Each sentence he cut with a breath. These were the pent-up thoughts of the man breaking way, as the volumes of water fight a passage through a broken dam.

“I extort nothing.” Her head hung, then she raised it, finding his eyes. “Perhaps it’s good to tell.” That was it. That was the whole matter. Unerringly she had found the humanity that was drawing expression from him. Call confession a malpractice if you will, yet the need of it is one of the limitations of human nature. The growth of ideas, the accumulation of thought would fester in the human mind, debarred the outlet of confession. In his simplicity John came to the first friend—priest or friend, which does it matter? the load is lifted, the journey begins again.

“You’re right,” he said, “it’s good to tell. Perhaps she has already told you?” Quickly he searched her face for the answer.

“Told me what?” asked Barbara.

John hesitated. He had no deftness. Words toppled from him; so fall hail-stones in a March gale, poor medium for a delicate subject needing dainty touch.

“I said I had hoped a child would bring her the content of life. Surely that’s the salt of a woman’s existence, her justification. It seems I’m wrong. She cries her youth—let her live while she’s young! And she’s said nothing to you?”

“Once she said—I gleaned what you say.”

“She pleads that a woman grows old—make her a mother and youth is torn like a garment from her back. Bless her heart—” He smiled. “She stamped her foot and said she would not wear a bonnet till nature pinned it to her head. What experience of medical science can reply to that, and I—I can’t deny her a thing in the world.”

Here peeps out the weakness; none are invulnerable. You fancy John the ideal of strength; have found him the hero, and call him the Colossus without more ado. Think of the tendon of Achilles, the finest metaphor mythology ever evolved. All heroes are warriors, girt with chain - armor, brandishing the invincible short sword of heroism; but a woman will find the weak link in the chain-work; she knows how the child dipped in the waters of the Styx must have been held by a loving mother fearing to let go. No hero but who expounds the depth of the metaphor of the tendon of Achilles. Bring forth another than John who would have demanded of Katherine her obedience, then in some other quarter you would have found a certain weakness concealed, the flaw in the strongest steel, the rent in the finest web. No mother in the world ever throws her son bodily into the waters of the Stygian river; her gentle fingers have not faith enough to lose him from their grasp. Whether it be the heel or the hand, the head or the heart, some part of him is left dry of the baptismal waters of immunity.

How much this deprivation meant to John, Barbara, for Katherine’s sake, dared not assume. He cried for Progress, the first duty. This was the stagnation of it; for by how little the race was won between Progress and Reproduction, she could not think to say. In his mind she knew it must be a close matter, needing the keen eye and the quiet judgment to decide between the straining of one neck and another.

“Whom are your beliefs to benefit?” she had asked him.

“The thousands of English men and women of today who, because they are finding no impetus in the birch-rod of hell, and no consolation in the sweetness of paradise, are turning their minds to idleness, emptiness, nothingness — entering the fixed type which is everlasting death.” That had been his answer to her question, and in the moment of his reply she had felt him denounce the idle negligence of women to the calling of maternity. Did it mean, then, that he included Katherine among the thousands? What else could she think? Yet he loved her; nothing more evident. So she would be loved herself as John loved Katherine.

But as yet, he had not seen all. Katherine craving to preserve her youth, was not the complete picture. Armed with youth, caparisoned with fascination, and mounted upon the steed of her ambition, a woman rides out in search of Romance. For the country of her dreams, Katherine was bound; couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he arrest it? Barbara almost wished that he might love her less; that he would assert his rights and bend her to his obedience. A child would save her; there would she find Romance, in the fitful, gentle breaths of a little child, a life out of her own life, part of her own flesh and blood. Then she would be delayed in the eagerness of her journey—then she would descend from the saddle of her ambitions, throwing aside the two-edged sword of her fascination, stripping the armor of her youth to give her life to the life of youth indeed.

But in the very strength of his love, John displayed his weakness. It happens so to many men. With bold and firm design they draw out the laws of their lives, then, when they yield to the drug of passion, stand content to see a woman alter the outline of the whole scheme with the fine brush of her fascinating humility. She does it in no sudden sweep, obliterating the design with one motion of the hand; the process rather is one of stippling, weaving a net-work of lines over the whole design until at length the web of her own personality blots out that of the man’s. You will find this struggle for self-assertion in progress between every man and woman—dogs at each others’ throats, Katherine had once described it to Barbara—and time after time the man falls to the woman’s methods of humble strategy. You will discover him on his knees offering to her the dearest, the most sacred of his principles, throwing the beliefs that he has held for years like flowers at her feet. Were he not unconscious of her victories, much might be done for the saving of the situation; but love binds a kerchief around his eyes and he is blind. To count the men who would scoff at such ideas as these would be impossible, for those who have succumbed, have drunk of the potion that eats with its subtle bias into the coolest judgment of them all.

John was blind. With that instinctive pity for infirmity which clings to all women, Barbara would have led him by the hand into the way of realization; yet a loyalty to Katherine made her hesitate. That very moment offered her opportunity, danced it in front of her eyes. Across the lawn, from the archway in the yew hedge behind which they had been out of sight,

Katherine and Seyd came into view, making for the house. Her step was light, her head high; she raised it, freeing the laughter from her lips. In such spirits, it seemed to Barbara then, had Cleopatra dissolved her pearls in wine and drunk a toast to Anthony.

John’s back was to the window, his eyes closed, lost in the contemplation of the problem of Katherine’s personality. Had he known, it lay behind him. Barbara’s mind swung in a balance, hesitating to speak. A touch on his elbow, one quick glance in their direction; words were not needed at all. Words would only blunt the point of the moment which might pierce a ray of light into darkness. The instrument was in her hands. She let it-fall. The moment carried them out of sight.

Was it for Katherine’s sake that she had debated with the weapon in her hand, or for her own? Subtle as it was, she put the question to herself; subtle as it was, she answered it. Both had played their part. For Katherine’s sake she had hesitated because she loved her, for her own, because the iron had entered her soul; she had found the man on whom the whole tenderness of her nature could be lavished. What of romance? That was merely the heart beating. This was the cry of the mind, the demands of a voice calling from the heights, lifting upward. In the last half-hour John had lifted her.

Why, then, had she thrust the moment of her opportunity aside? Honor? Trash! What has a woman to do with honor? That virtue a man has claimed religiously to be his own, vowing greater love for it than for the woman in his heart’s ambition. Hard vows to keep; life is strewn with their broken pieces. Yet men still cling to possession of the virtue, granting women none of it. True it is honorable to die for one’s country; but cannot silence be death? Must there be flesh wounds and spilling of blood to make death and to make it honorable? There are women who, in silence or in speech, have died a far more lingering death, whose names appear in no gazette, but that of God’s omniscience, whose deeds no rewards have won but God’s mercy. Honor! The whole world has it, or has it not. There are women who have bartered their souls and drowned their conscience in a sip of Altar Wine to gain the man their needs have cried for; there are women also who have taken honor and despair rather than a Nirvana of oblivion with the man of their heart’s desire.

This then, in a measure, is Barbara; the woman of honor; bringing the virtue to bear upon so small a matter as this, the touching of an arm, the glance of an eye, capable of being done with motives apparently as innocent of guile as the thoughtless action of an impetuous child.

So she kept silence, motionless. In another moment Seyd and Katherine entered the hall.

CHAPTER XIV

THEY all had tea together in the hall, diluting the conversation with topics of common-place interest. At the earliest opportunity, Barbara left them, offering excuse that satisfied. Underlying the idle breezes of laughter, behind the frothy, flitting clouds of empty chamber, she felt the strain of the storm that is being weaned into existence. The stillness that followed each laugh, a stillness that choked, almost asphyxiated her, was more than she could endure. Through the film of every word they uttered, she felt she saw a meaning. Seyd was going, going away for a year. Had he said anything to Katherine? Was he a man who could successfully turn his sword to the fighting of the battle between concrete human nature and abstract honor? She doubted it. If, indeed, he had not spoken, then it was the woman to be praised. Instinctively she realized the vague temerity of the man in these matters. In a chaos of doubt, then, she left them, uncertain even of her Katherine.

Why was John blind to what was happening? she asked herself. Why did he trust so fully—why did he count so much? Was it a conceit in his power to hold her? Or was it the great and benevolent optimism of his nature—that untiring belief of the best in those upon whom his affection was planted? Sitting at the window in her bedroom, looking out over the lands of Glenworth to where the distance bathed itself in blue, she tried in vain to answer her own questions. In any case, Seyd was going away; Katherine would see no more of him for a year at least. Perhaps the compensating measures of human nature would play their part by them. She might forget him. With open eyes, seeing beyond the distance, she offered some half-spoken form of prayer that such might be the case. Whatever John might be to her, in the swallow flights of her imagination, Katherine was all in the deepest sense of reality. She prayed for Katherine. To Katherine, in the last moments of a mental struggle, her thoughts turned.

She relieved none of the strain when she left them still seated in the hall. John alone was unconscious of the leaden atmosphere, weighed down with possibility. Finding Katherine light-hearted, his spirits rose. She was happy. He did not see the tortured curling of her lip in moments of repose. When a message came from Jephson asking if Mr. Spurrier could spare a moment, Seyd rose to his feet with a lifting of shoulders as though gyves had been taken from his wrists.

“I had better say good-bye,” he said, easily. “I start for the regiment next week.”

John caught his hand.

‘‘Ah, don’t you wish it were active service?”

“Good Heavens! Yes.”

“Well, it ’ll come, perhaps, sooner than we expect.”

“Are you going to prophesy?” Seyd’s words were crisp with satire—breaking china.

“No, the most unprofitable thing a man ever did in his own country, the most ruinous thing to do in England to-day. We talk of having two parties in this country; it’s preposterous. Every one of us are Unionists. The man who rises to say that England has lost the energy with which it gained its foothold, its empire, and will have nothing to do with the intellect which must be the making of the next order of things, is called a fool. If there were only a sufficient number of his stamp to form another party, that’s what the whole lot of them would be called.”

“We’re settling down into oblivion, eh?”

“Never into oblivion, no! England has led the world. No one will ever forget that. Other nations have led the world, too. Look at the ghosts of them! but never has a nation stemmed that flood of ease and comfort that comes with the favors of fortune and the reward of merit. No nation has ever done that; unless England does it now. Nations and men, they’re just one life cast in different-sized moulds, and personal bias rots the two of them away. Greatness is not all-enduring, only the effect of it. Nations don’t realize that, nor men either. Change is the greatest law we have. If we had been beaten in South Africa, it would have done us all the good in the world. The falling of Pretoria was the last blow to our self-esteem, a blow disguised as a pat on the back. I wonder how many people would admit that wealth rather than ability won South Africa for us? Only the fools. But you can’t go on buying victories. The relief of Mafeking is a luxury that English people might easily get tired of, and certainly couldn’t afford to buy forever. When the sons of the men of energy have spent the money that their fathers made with their flesh and blood, you’ll find a gaping hole in the pocket of England’s greatness. At present we are a moneyed people; our great men are wealthy men, our social lions are figures of gold. In the mint, every day, scores of men are working at the casting of the golden calf. Soon the idol will be completed, raised on high, then you may hold your breath to see whether we fall down and worship.” “Jephson says if you are busy, sir—”

John wheeled round, facing the maid.

“I’m coming. Good-bye, Captain Seyd. Active service; I can’t wish you more, and that we might find honorable defeat. They say nothing succeeds like success. Success is the most subtle poison that a great man, a great nation, or a great religion ever were compelled to drink. It turns blood to water—”

He was gone, and all he had said to those two left behind was as the ravings of a man possessed of the devil of useless fanaticism. Here it was that he lost sympathy with Katherine. Nations, men, religions— if but once he could throw the consideration of them aside and show her a heart bursting to do her service, rather than a doubtful service to the generation, he would have won her. She would not ask for it; pride forbade that. She, too, must win her rewards, not beg for them. They must come as the rain comes to the parched earth, yearning to quench its thirst. So had Seyd, with his unspoken admiration, come to her feet. She knew well by this time that the uplifting of her finger, or one motion of her lips, could call forth the flood of his infatuation. Would it overwhelm her? She believed it would not. Deep in her heart there was a firm rock of respect for John onto which, if she held, the waters might rush by her and yet her foothold would be secure. Another woman might understand the attraction that Seyd held for her—scarcely a man. He was good to look at; the open face of a man that has had the winds of heaven blown upon it, the gray eyes that have measured distance, faced death, dared the devil, and not been distorted with the craven fear of the coward. His body was lithe, well-made, strength refined to a shape of beauty. There was nothing subtle about him, nothing elusive to understand. She knew him at a glance. He could love like a lion—crushing pain into pleasure; his eyes shone a metal that could grow white in the furnace of passion. To such a man a woman yields for romance; the fine animal trained to that perfection of condition which carries the race by sheer force of impetus.

Yet in Katherine’s appreciation of Seyd the essential stimulant to the intellect was wanting; he created in her no respect. So long as with her senses she could keep him at a distance, she felt no fear for her own safety. He did not inspire the fateful knowledge that it was merely a matter of time, merely a matter of needless resistance until that moment when his mind would compel hers to reverence, when his intellect would dominate hers.

Here, then, you see, as the picture grows and the colors are mated, the difference between Katherine and Barbara. The one petulantly lifting a banner of common-sense, yet bowing to the assaults of a romantic passion; the other, clinging to romance, to find herself chained by the admiration of the intellect.

As they watched John striding up the drive with Jephson indefatigable, Katherine turned to Seyd displaying the little gold Buddha.

“I forgot to show this. I’m sure my husband would admire it.”

“Must you show it?”

“Why not?”

“I did not give it to be shown.”

“For what reason, then?”

“To be kept.”

His eyes and his voice both fought for the depths in her.

“I shall keep it.” She mastered the thrill that he had left, yet could not keep her eyes to his. As they fell, an expression distorted his lips.

“I mean, keep it for yourself—to yourself.” The pause between the two sentences vibrated with significance.

“I will do so if you wish,” she answered.

Was he winning her? The thought leaped at him— big game, he had faced it before. This was not the moment yet to put an end. He jumped aside and the thought passed him. She was not so easily won. Nevertheless, before he went, he must show her, show her the power she held, show her how it was dominating him, show her how, though it tore through the flesh, he was yet a man, strong in his own control, heroic in the worship of his respect for her.

“You must forgive me if I say good-bye now, Mrs. Spurrier,” he said, quickly. The words toppled over one another, twigs that a flood is bearing down the stream. Passion swept them, and he let her see it. He was bent on renunciation; she would not blame him that he made it tell. Blame him? It was by this he knew that he would win her in the end.

“But some one will drive you to the station, and it’s not time for your train yet. You’ve got another forty minutes.”

“Yes—I know—but I’m going to walk.”

“Walk?”

“I’d rather.”

“Why—when it is going away for a year?”

It had trapped her. She was deceived. This was the truth coming out. She did not want him to go. Still he played the game. What was a year?

“A year goes quickly, Mrs. Spurrier, and just these moments now are rather difficult—for me. Good-bye.” He took her hand in his, half raised it, then let it fall and walked without turning to the door.

At the door she stopped him. He was fast winning the game, binding the desire of him to her.

“We shall see you again next year?” she asked. “This is the 29th of April,” he replied. “I shall see you again on the 29th of April next year if you are here at Glenworth. In a year’s time.”

Was this to be the end of romance? Katherine sat down and her mind ran out across a year, speeding past the months—continents through which the swallow flies. Could this be the end of romance?

CHAPTER XV

YOU come now to tragedy as a traveller after sunny hours upon the king’s highway of romance reaches the inevitable cross-roads, where lie—buried, with a stake stuck through their bodies — the remains of those who had rather death than take the choice of ways. For this is tragedy—the choice: whether it be poverty rather than dishonor, obedience rather than sacrifice; to choose, at the compulsion of an unalterable, unimpeachable circumstance, is the moment in life when tragedy outrides romance in the journey of experience.

To this moment came Katherine, unthinking, unsuspicious— a child with laughter on its lips, faith, a light in its eyes. What was a year? she had asked, daring circumstance, when Seyd had gone. What was it? Nothing—everything. Without a thought, she counted it nothing and dared circumstance once more. A month would bring the summer; she would go to Ireland with Barbara, to the place where they had been before she was married. On those silent cliffs where they used to sit watching the sea, she would breathe in the still-wonderful atmosphere of romance. Spanish galleons had been wrecked on that coast that they knew; the wealth of the Armada lay in those waters, green with weed, clutched in the bony hands of Spanish seamen. That was romance as well. A tapestry of tales was woven in her mind—toys that a child plays with. The whole of life had been romance to her if tragedy had not thrust its way into the company.

The visit to Ireland had been arranged, Barbara triumphant, knowing that her Katherine loved her. To be taken into the heart of the kingdom of romance, what greater proof of love than this? To John, the existence of that kingdom was unknown. When first he heard of the expedition his interest roused. Katherine saw the light in his eyes but said nothing. She would beg for no favors. If he came as well, it must be for her. In confidence, she announced that he was coming, and Barbara, hearing the pride in her voice, joyed in the thought that Seyd had left them.

The next day he came down to Glenworth, John brought confirmation of Katherine’s surmise.

“There’ll be three on this trip,” he declared. “I’m for Ireland with the pair of you.”

Tea was served out on the lawn under the walnut-tree. This was the first scorching day in May, young leaves taking shape in palest green, almost as you watched them, the scent of wall-flowers in the lap of every breeze. Katherine jumped from her low chair, locking loving arms about his neck. Here was the truth of prophecy; her eyes sought Barbara’s triumphantly.

“How you’ll love it! Not a soul on those cliffs! In the village they nearly all talk Gaelic. The parish priest preaches in it. But the cliffs!—Barbara and I have sat there for hours making up stories.”

“Children!”

“Why not?”

“Quite true, the world’s empty of them.”

“You’ll hear some of the stories now—doing nothing but laze, looking out from the end of the world, watching the old sailing-ships with flapping, gray sails steal away down into the mist.”

“Ah, but not laze. I shall have plenty to do.” “Plenty to do?” Insensibly the arms about his neck released. “Aren’t you coming for a holiday? Won’t you be with us?”

Blindly he felt the sense of a mistake, and with groping thoughts struggled to mend it.

“For a long time I’ve wanted to make a study of Ireland and the Irish. They’re in the midst of a phase. You can watch the process of evolution in Ireland like a shadow stretching out with a dropping sun. They’re virgin soil; sow a seed and you can see it growing. I want to see what I can see in three weeks. It ’ll be nothing, but it ’ll be worth having.”

Katherine broke away from him with a laugh that chilled through Barbara. The moment of triumph had gone. Barbara knew well what she felt. She had foretold John’s coming, and John had decided to come. There was triumph for any woman in that. But his reasons for coming—she had made her mistake in her estimation of them. And that was when the iron had entered the flesh. It was an insult. She had been made a fool of. And there, with absolute unconsciousness of his enormity, John layback in his wicker-chair counting the possibility of work in twenty-one days in Ireland.

“As far as I can, I’m going to gather statistics,” he went on again, but here Katherine’s laugh took shape in words, glowing metal beaten to a sword that cut short his explanations as a showman slices the swinging fruit.

“Study Ireland in three weeks!” She laughed. “You’re Saxon, John—the only blood in you. Study Ireland in three weeks! England’s been studying Ireland in three weeks for the last three centuries. You’ll see a lot of begging, a deal of superstition, and any amount of squalor and dirt, and that you’ll call a knowledge of Ireland when you return. You needn’t come with us if you’re going to study Ireland; I want companionship, not philosophy.”

By the light of that last sentence John saw his mistake. But there was no going to Ireland, after all. Within four weeks from the day that the trip had been arranged, tragedy had laid its detaining hand upon the reins of Katherine’s dreams. For some days she had complained of suffering pain, at times pressing a hand apprehensively to her breast. John looked at her with worried eyes; Barbara said nothing.

At length, when no improvement showed, John took the matter in his own hands.

“You see Henning to-morrow,” he said.

“I’d much rather not. It ’ll probably be better in a day or two.”

As a man, Katherine objected to Henning. You have here the woman and her reason. Henning was cut and dried, bloodless—the accurate machine, automatic, faultless; to Katherine combining every absence of interest. He was just the man to be a friend of John’s. In describing him as that to Barbara, she felt that she had classed him unerringly.

“Henning must come to-morrow,” said John.

You felt the tempered metal there. Katherine raised no further objections; the mastery pleased her. The next morning brought Henning. Katherine met him in the hall, looking the perfection of herself. His glance at her was shrewd, but not penetrating. In the woman prepared, you find nothing; approach her unawares, and even then there is but little for detection.

“Have I been called upon to say that I never saw you looking better?” So he rose to what in him was levity. Personality is everything; add to it good looks in a woman and you have a Cleopatra enslaving emperors, lifting pedants from their grooves, and thrilling young blood through the arid veins of withered philosophers.

Up-stairs in her room, where Henning examined her, Katherine kept up a running fire of conversation, shots that ricochetted over dancing water. Suddenly, seeing an expression on his face as his nervous fingers were arrested in their examination, she stopped.

“Well?” she asked; “what have you found?” The laughter had gone from her voice like music from a bell that is broken.

The cold, impenetrable eyes of Henning met hers.

“Do you seriously think there is anything wrong, then?” he asked.

“I’d prefer to be told if there were,” she said.

He avoided that, talking of other matters till she was laughing again, her suspicions allayed. But there was the seed. The adroitness of his question had not killed it. When he said, finally, that he would like another opinion before he actually decided that nothing was the matter, Katherine nodded her head, sealing the thoughts that were leaping to her mind.

Something was seriously wrong with her. Whatever it was, she would be told. They could not keep it from her. This man tried to elude her; what did that matter? He would tell John, and John would tell her. She defied them to leave her ignorant.

“You’ll see my husband before you go?” she asked.

“Yes, I may as well.”

John was waiting for him in the hall. Katherine watched them meeting, noted the anxious, eager steps of John as he came forward, but heard nothing of their conversation. For a moment she was tempted to follow them as they passed out of the hall onto the drive; then Barbara’s hand was laid on her shoulder.

“What did he say?” she asked.

For a moment Katherine looked at her in silence; then, as the storm breaks, emptying the heavens, she poured out the volume of her suspicions.

To John were given hard facts. Henning, keeping his eyes lowered, dared not watch him as he bit the cruel reality through. Here was a stoic, meeting worse than death, facing something more bitter than failure. You find a man when you see one suffer without a word. In great matters speech can be the most superfluous of expressions. Except for a question here and there, John was silent—the great mind wordless before the greater iaea, tne great numanity oumo oetore tne greater divine.

Katherine had cancer. Henning had said it gently, qualified it with doubts, softened it with a depreciation of his own diagnosis.

“No man can swear to his own accuracy unless he’s very young at the game. I shall have another opinion.”

“But that’s what you think?”

“At present I’m inclined to it. Her fall from the dog-cart, you remember—”

“Cancer?”

“Lympho sarcoma. She’s too young for cancer.”

“But it amounts to the same thing?”

“Practically.”

“And what does that mean?”

Every word was parched, every sentence dry, brittle, breaking from his lips as you snap a slate-pencil in the fingers.

“What does that mean?” he repeated.

“My dear Spurrier”—Henning took his arm—“it means nothing until we’ve proved it.”

“And then—then—when it’s proved?”

So he struggled for the truth—bitter, poisonous—as one fighting to quench a burning thirst will drain polluted water rather than take the uncertainty of death. Uncertainty he would have nothing with; he must realize the worst. Here he shared mind with Katherine. Henning avoided him; held the truth from him, endeavored to blind his eyes. But John refused to listen.

‘Til know what there is to be known,” he persisted. “If proved, would it be fatal?”

“If proved, yes.”

“How long would it take?”

“I refuse to say any more. Fve only endeavored to warn you—nothing else. You persist in accepting it as a certainty.”

“Does she suspect do you think?”

“It’s not impossible. A woman’s instinct is the most animal characteristic she possesses. I advise you to give her no trace of a scent; she’d track it to its ultimate conclusion in a moment. Say nothing to her. If she asks you what I have said, tell her that I am merely waiting to get another opinion before I am convinced that nothing is the matter with her. There’s no need for me to tell you all this, my dear fellow; but next to administering relief, the most important part of this profession of doctoring is to tell a good lie straight from the shoulder. She mustn’t know it whatever happens.”

John looked at him, instinct alive in his eyes.

“I can see you’re convinced yourself that you’re right,” he said, slowly. “This beating about bushes, calling in other opinions—good God! You’re lying to me as well. My dear chap, I understand. But cancer! And she looks so well. Only that she had complained of suffering, I should have said she never looked better.”

Henning let him go on. He was offering to take the bit between his teeth. Why stop him? There are moments when it is best to let the animal bolt, swing into the headlong pace and wear his spirit down. But you have no creature of impulse in John, no highly strung emotions supersensitive to the galling rowels of the spur. The cart-horse we have seen him before; he is the cart-horse still, bearing load with flanks gored, nostrils hunting every breath. But you have no bolting. With a giant effort he steadied himself.

“She shall know nothing from me,” he said, quietly. It was easy to say. He told her nothing; but that was telling her all. Half an hour later, searching for him in the grounds, she found him, head bent, steps dragging as he walked down the drive. This was not John. With a struggle he lifted his head when he saw her, forcing his lips to smile and his eyes to welcome her.

She asked if Henning had gone, and, hearing that he had, the next question was quick on her lips.

“What has he said to you?”

He began well, but her eyes were keen on his, steel files grinding to a cruel point each question that she asked. Here was Katherine fighting for a knowledge of herself. Ignorance she despised. Imagination had already drawn swift impressions in her mind. Some internal disease had overtaken her. She had no pity on herself, painting the worst. Already she felt herself shunned by every one, loathed by herself. Yet how infinitely more horrible a thought it was to be ignorant of the truth, to be pitied by all who knew her. She would have the whole world know that she was not the petted child, befooled before their eyes.

Here then she had John, a school-boy, caught in the act of truancy, dragged up before his judges, his mind searched with questions as the adept fingers of the law search the pockets of a thief. He was no match for Katherine. He yielded her knowledge with every denial that he made.

“I can only assure you that Henning would have told me if anything had been radically wrong.” He forced his eyes to stand the strain of fixedly meeting hers—hers hunted with doubt, yet still hunting after knowledge.

“Then why is he getting a second opinion?”

“Naturally he wishes to convince us, to convince you. Henning’s a friend. You might think he was trying to save you worry. Another opinion—any other man will have no scruples in saying what he thinks, and Henning has no doubt what his opinion will be.”

“That nothing is the matter?” Her hand went unconsciously to her breast.

“Nothing whatever.”

“Then why have I got this pain here? Oh, you’re repeating your lesson wonderfully well. All this is what you have been told to say.” Her eyes burned into his. The pain was almost physical as he kept a steady gaze on them.

“You think I’m a fool. You treat me like a child. You think I couldn’t bear to be told the truth!” Her lip curled, tears and pride twisting it. “Oh—I could bear it; better than you know, far better than you know.”

Here she turned and left him, and John’s lips quivered. John, the school-boy kicking goals, the carthorse straining without murmur at his load. John’s lips quivered.

CHAPTER XVI

WHY did he not follow her, binding arms around her neck? It needs one of the mould of Seyd to know that when a woman so leaves a man it is a crying appeal for him to follow her. John turned slowly on his heel and walked the other way. This was the end of the duel; Katherine victorious, her desires satisfied. Bitter satisfaction to know that her suspicions were grounded on a sure foundation! If she was victorious, she was a victim too. But of what? There she stood alone. John knew, but he would tell the lie with his last breath, no matter how patent lay the truth behind it. If Barbara knew, the final twist of the rack before oblivion would not draw it from her. Certainly she stood alone; that she saw clearly, hiding no truth from herself. As a ship rent of its sails, decks swept and spars breaking, is left by the living to ride the waters untenanted, so Katherine saw herself. But not rudderless! She would still steer a course, though there were none to help her.

In her bedroom that night she would see no one, locking the door against the gentle entreaties of her faithful Barbara. Faithful? She considered none faithful now. So here you see the changing of the scene for tragedy; the dropping of this piece, the setting of that; the narrowing down to the isolation of the one individual, preparing for the moment of revelation when the choice of ways must be made, and made alone.

First, she met it all with tears. These are sluicegates in a woman, making way for the level currents of reason. Reason came, but not before her eyes were stinging with the salt of weeping and her body shaken with sobs. Then, as though they were reins with which to hold a restive horse, she took the facts and broke them to her will.

There is no royal road to a woman. You come at her by twisting paths and unsuspected alleys. Floods of tears must be stemmed, tracts of contradictions must be crossed; but once you have found her, stripped of her foibles, facing life, heart steady and eyes bright, you get the metal from its ore, white hot in the furnace—unconquerable.

The atmosphere of doubt it was, gray darkness unrelieved by any guiding light, that made her struggle the harder. She fought an unseen adversary, warring with a circumstance whose face was hidden yet whose aim was unerring and relentless. The heights of courage are required for this, and Katherine found them through tears and the depths of despair. With the first half-lights of the rising morning came the patience to wait until she knew all the truth about herself. In a few hours the specialist would have come and gone, and then, either by force or strategy, she determined to remain no longer ignorant.

She lay on her bed facing the light, with curtains drawn and windows opened, listening to the rousing sounds of life; the first morning flight of the first awakened sparrow, fluttering down from the ivy under the shoots; then the faint twittering of the rest of the bird world, lifting—lifting in volume to the increasing light of day. This was life. She checked herself from wondering how much more it would have to do with her. In time she would know; until then, all speculation was folly. Yet the shadow of it fell on all her thoughts, and Barbara, being admitted to her room with the first movements of the house, could not drive it from her.

“Can you expect me always to be cheerful?” Katherine exclaimed, bitterly.

“Darling—I don’t. My Katherine may be what she wishes—but tell me why?”

Impetuous arms, tightening about Katherine’s body, begged the answer, but received none. Firmly she unbound herself from the embrace and sat there in her dainty night-dress, frilled with its flimsy laces, just like the Keightley portrait once more—the baby seated wilfully alone upon its crawling-rug. There, still, was the forceful chin, rounded to the grace of womanhood; you found the sympathetic mouth, touched now with the knowledge of moods and bitterness, and there again the unfathomable eyes, less restless than when the artist had closely watched them, but searching where they rested; at times deep with the innocence of the baby she had been, now deeper still with the fretful knowledge of something before the woman that she was. Barbara found her eyes like the waters of a mountain lake, reflecting in her different moods all the shadows of earth and lights of heaven. But then Barbara loved her; yet there were many who found the same. Read the autobiography of Stephen Carteret, M.P., whom London knew for a wit and Ireland hoped of for a leader. On page 183 you will find his description of one of Lady Vincent’s gatherings—whetstones on which the best of London society sharpened itself—so he calls them, giving only the first letter of the lady’s name. Lady Vincent, however, we know it to be; who else in the light of subsequent events, for the same Lady V. figures largely through the book? In this manner, obvious enough in most cases, he deals with every character alluded to in the autobiography. So he speaks of Katherine:

“In this company, ” so runs the text, “I met Mrs. S., wife of one of the ablest men I have known in the House. But this was not her attraction; better to say she needed none of it. I calculated the depths of those gray eyes of hers to be sufficient for any man to drown in; but I should imagine no human lead will ever be found to fathom them. Her conversation was the playing of a harp—steel fingers on silver strings.”

Here is an outsider and a man of discretion, it would seem, with a taste for words when occasion asked them. Probably it was the only time that he saw Katherine, for, striking as was the impression she apparently made on him, he does not allude to her again. If this was the outsider, then, what of those whose life was with hers? Such a woman, once her heart binds, holds by a power of ever-constant change. Moods swept her—clouds when the wind is in the west—varying into every shade, touching every tone, but never leaving the sure knowledge of the blue behind it all. There were cloudless days, too; days when the bright lights of her eyes—such, we liken to the sun—shone uncovered, drifting from east to west until their setting. Barbara knew those days, knew them when first she wakened Katherine in the morning. No mistake could be made; you knew it from the eyes, felt it from the lips, pouting—the baby scarce awake. If you cannot think of Katherine as a child, you know nothing of her. John never thought of her as a child; and there lay a gulf between them. He counted her years—twenty-one of them—and was satisfied. So much a child she was, but not as Barbara saw her. On the cloudless days they talked like a couple of babies—nursery-folk —making believe to their hearts’ content. You cannot imagine baby-talk on John’s lips—far from it! There it might be, perhaps, but only for children of his own; and it scarcely appealed to his imagination of her that Katherine herself was too much of a child to bear him children yet. You raise objections to this. No girl past eighteen is too much of a child to obey the first duty; Katherine had yet to learn that—John to teach it her.

She breakfasted that morning in her room. Barbara’s surest wiles had failed to win her. What wiles were these? Baby-talk, which only the heart to whom it is addressed can translate. But though it had changed Katherine’s mood a thousand times before, won smiles out of tears, as the gambler wins his game in the face of impenetrable odds, on this morning the magic had gone out of the wand, the baby words fell on silence, never altering the steady, watchful look of those gray eyes. She was ready for the worst. It needed giant concentration to keep that worst ever before her; never to hope for the more generous chance, never to count on the falling of the dice. She could hear them rattling in the box. In another hour they would be on the table, and all her nerves were strained to the expectation of a lost game. With half an eye you can see her—every sensation balanced on a knife-edge, every thought vibrating on a thread.

And then he came—the specialist. In him alone Katherine saw hope of the truth. But in him, as with the rest, she was disappointed. Followed by Henning, he walked into her room. She felt that she saw Fate hanging in his shadow. You picture her trembling, apprehensive—the leading of the animal to the shambles? That never was Katherine. Courage was bred in her as you breed the length of stride into a racehorse. It looked from the eyes at you. So she watched the face of the specialist as he examined her with fingers tapping and pressing. You know their methods!

Then came his judgment—words her ears were waiting for.

“Straining of some of the muscles,” he said, dryly. “I find nothing else.”

His eye sought Henning’s, then drifted slowly to hers.

“I’m glad to be able to tell you that I entirely agree with Dr. Henning,” he said, easily. “No doubt you severely strained some muscles in your accident, and quite probably you’ll feel the pain for a little time yet. But beyond that—”. Shoulders and elbows would have risen graphically had he been a Frenchman. The broken sentence almost demanded the gesticulation; but such power of speech is not Anglo-Saxon. It remained a broken sentence. Katherine finding another in league against her, added to it, finished it with her suspicions.

The specialist held out his hand, and she gripped it, smiling. Can you count what that smile cost her? The sum is too great. Do you think she would show before these men—one a stranger to her—the speculations that were harassing her mind? Her lips smiled —eyes with them, too. Keep her bright, they thought, knowing women, knowing life. She’s young; let her have the best of it. But she read them through as a blind man reads the raised letters from his book. That did not thwart her. She still would know.

When they had gone from the room, she ran hurriedly to the door, listening with head twisted as they descended the stairs into the hall. Then she gained the landing, still out of sight, but lessening the distance through which the sound of their voices must pass. John met them at the foot of the stairs. Plainly she heard his anxious query:

“Well—well—what’s the result?”

“We’d better see you in the dining-room,” said Henning.

Katherine’s blood rushed to ice. With hands trembling, she held to the balusters. Impotence had her in a vice; her heart was the only live thing in her, leap- mg spasmodically. She had heard the worst in Henning’s voice. Nothing in her denied it. You find terror now? But courage is not drained yet. There lie the dregs of it. With a tortured effort she crushed them, straining out the last drops of her self-possession. They had gone down to the dining-room. There was one point of vantage from which she could hear their conversation. Glenworth was an old house. A Spurrier had built it in the reign of George I.; Spurriers had held it ever since. A Georgian stolidity was plainly evident in the architecture; you found it everywhere. One detail, peculiar to that and to a later time, was the little square door let into the wall of the dining-room connecting it with the adjoining kitchen. Through this came the meals to the maid or man waiting within. No time wasted for the heated plates. You may see these doors still, in younger houses than Glenworth. The too-close proximity of a kitchen has done away with them latterly. Your meals now toil up a flight of stairs from the basement, or they find their way from the far-off regions of the house.

In Katherine’s mind, then, this door centred. What easier than to open it? The fraction of an inch would yield space for the sound of voices! With uncertain fingers, she fastened her dress and ran noiselessly down the stairs into the hall. The opening of a baize door admitted her to the passage leading to the kitchen; another baize door and she entered the kitchen itself. There stood Mrs. Siddons, cook in Sir Wilfrid’s time, part of the family—indispensable to Katherine’s ideas of management.

“Madam!” You hear her saying it — fat hands, powdered in flour, half lifted from the basin.

“Mrs. Siddons—” Katherine was at her side, her thin, tense fingers gripping the fleshy arm of the amiable woman. “Mrs. Siddons—” Here must be the truth! With quick eye she saw the need of it, and all the fascinations of her persuasion went with it. “The doctors are in there — the dining-room — talking to my husband; they’re telling him what’s the matter with me—they won’t tell me, and I must know.”

“Dearie—” In this moment Mrs. Siddons became a mother with her own mistress. Women never lose that opportunity. The instinct rose in her—the primal instinct—out it came. Thousands of years have gone to perfect it, and no amount of time will ever fit out a greater altruism. “But there is nothing wrong, is there? I’d heard—they’d told me—” Here she admitted kitchen gossip. «It passed Katherine unnoticed. She would win her desires. Mrs. Siddons was won. She could hear her victory in the distress of the woman’s voice. Then she pointed to the little square door.

“Does that open easily?”

“Not a sound. What are you going to do?” “Listen. You’ll never tell?” Katherine twisted on her with the question, her eyes searching the answer before it was spoken. Mrs. Siddons melted, catching her hand. So would Katherine win, all along the line.

“You can trust me,” said the good woman; “never a word—not as long as—”

“Then let no one come into the kitchen.”

In another moment the little square door was open. No chance of watching them; but the conversation reached her. And there she hung, catching the words as they fell. See an animal parched with thirst, catching water dripping to his tongue; so she took them. One word here, another there; piecing them together, parts of an intricate puzzle, all fitting to one whole on which the picture lay. One by one she snatched each piece—a slow process—wearisome, exhausting. The strain was sapping her. She struggled to hold up. And there, at the clean deal table, stood Mrs. Siddons, welding her flour and her butter into shape, stealing hurried glances at the figure of Katherine as she crouched against the opening in the wall.

Suddenly Katherine stood erect—the last moment of courage, straightening herself before the sentence. She had heard it—cancer! That was the word that had been knocking at the door of her mind for the last twenty-four hours. Now she admitted it, standing upright for its passage; locking it then into her knowledge as the warder locks the prisoner into his cell. Cancer! That good, fat soul there, making her pastry for the evening’s dinner, she looked the picture of health. Katherine looked her up and down, the sturdy figure, the substantial waist. Through all of that good flesh and blood, there was health. The circulation was right, the heart beat its steady tune; but within her, was a disease eating her life away. She condemned herself beside this buxom creature in her white apron and clean print frock.

“Mrs. Siddons,” she said—you could hear the voice, thin, pinched, the vitality gone. Mrs. Siddons wheeled round, scattering flour. “You’ve promised to say nothing?”

She came to Katherine’s side.

“Yes—I’ve promised—and my word’s as good—I mustn’t touch yer, my hands is all flour. Well—there’s nothing the matter, is there?” How she would have loved to have added that one word dearie again; but Katherine was different. The impetuous child had vanished. This was the mistress of the house again.

“No—they’ll all tell you—nothing—absolutely nothing—”

CHAPTER XVII

KATHERINE came back to her room the shadow . of herself; courage gone, as water that has leaked drop by drop from a cracked vessel. As she closed the door, she stood supporting herself by the handle, just slightly rocking to and fro—the tree vibrating before its fall, trembling before it topples downward. The teeth of events had gnawed their way through courage, pride, everything. She hung there by that one support—dazed and alone. They had passed her sentence—two years, two years at the most. Her mind ran out in instinctive calculation, counting the months, the weeks, the days. Two years! Perhaps less. She let her hand fall from the door and swayed towards the bed. There she threw herself among the pillows, huddled in her weakness—Katherine broken—a child might have struck her, but she would not have turned.

Tragedy was with her now, waiting on her—punctiliously attendant. Two years! What to do with them —which way to choose? You can see the question writ in large, burning letters, branding themselves upon her brain. Katherine, with only two years to live? Impossible! The conception of a madman! Truly it would seem sometimes that Fate has taken leave of her senses. Why this waste of life—life young—life valuable—when thousands are being spent and brains are being racked to save the worthless? Ask the question a million times, there is not one who will answer you.

Two years—the words chased each other round her brain in hours, and days, and weeks, arranging themselves then like tableaux for her wearied contemplation.

“But how long—how long—” she had heard John reiterate—“how long do you give her? Don’t tell me half and drive me mad with the imagination of the rest. How long?”

The pause following had choked her like smoke. She had tried to breathe through it; but the silence had asphyxiated her. And then piercing it, out of it, distant, yet reaching like a heavy bell tolling death, she had caught the answer of the specialist:

“Two years—two at the most.”

It was then that she had stood up—the prisoner standing at the dock-rail to receive her sentence from the impartial judge. Now she was learning it off by heart. For her the clock had begun its measured beating out of time. Think, then, how real it was. From that moment, she could not bear the sound of a clock; her own watch that Barbara had given her was discarded. The sound of its ticking hammered into her imagination, beating out time to the fine thread where there is nothing left.

But as yet, while she lay there, wrapped in the pillows, it was all new. Her thoughts were not refined to that torture then. It was simply the vague two years— two years with their ghastly sense of limitation—two years with their hollow sound of finality. No tears were in her eyes. Her eyes were scorched, dry, staring. In two years this youth that she had, all her love of romance, every thought that now swept her—where would they be? Gone! valueless! finished with! Her hand crept to her breast, feeling it. She was warm, living. All her body would be cold when she was dead. Then the revolting thought of what was hidden beneath that white flesh struck her. Have you ever seen the blow of a man’s hand on a woman’s face? So she recoiled from it, withdrawing her touch.

But it was not death that she feared. Face her with danger—with Seyd you have seen her fronting it—eyes bright, lips laughing. Pluck was in the breath of her. No, it was this yielding up of sacred possession. She loved life—found it priceless. And now to give it up! To whom? What mattered that? But why? There the answer grated, tearing the courage from her. She was to give it up—the flower of it, just breaking into the blossom of womanhood, because He, who had created her, had made the vessel frail, had made it inefficiently, had made it to be broken.

She let the thoughts rush through her, calling them on, setting them in defiance, urging them to their work. The next minute she was up on her knees in the bed, swaying with the jumping springs and begging forgiveness. One more moment again, and she was down among the pillows, driving breaths of revolt between her teeth, knowing no words to ease her mind.

What irony had given her life at all? Hear her asking it, the words shouting in her mind! And even now, these sarcastic two years grinning at her, taunting her. What reason could you find? None! Would there not have been a more infinite sense of pity in ending it that day of the drive with Seyd? One half-hour’s mad struggle with the wits for safety, and then the headlong plunge into death. That was the way she would have had it done. Half an hour in which to work out the destiny—one mad half-hour, with the blood racing and the nerve stretched and then—the game to the best! But instead of that, these two years —short, oh! infinitely short—yet drawn out tortuously to their miserable, inevitable end. From every point of view she looked at them; from every point of view they presented their worthlessness.

Worthlessness! The Christian mind shudders at the blasphemy of the word. Worthlessness! Why here is an appointed time for preparation—a gift to the Divine of two blameless years. Who of us are offered opportunity such as this? How many of us strain out our lives until the end, putting off, putting off with the last inventions of the procrastinating mind? In two years the soul can be fitted for the life hereafter—cleansed, purged, swept and garnished as the house, prepared for the visit of the great Lord. These two years, laid generously into the hands, can generously be offered in return for salvation. Yes—yes—but throw yourself, too, onto your yielding pillows, and stare with vacant eyes at two years of your own, the last that you possess. Count all your nature, all your hopes and love of life before you give the answer. Two years? It is possible you might grudge five days. And if it were two years; then they were wrenched from you, cheated out of you with the fear of death. Willingly given? Then why not give them willingly to-day? Two! All of them!

In Katherine you find none of these views of sentiment. A vein of common-sense stood to her, lying at the back of every thought, creeping into the balance of every consideration. But it was not with her yet. How expect it? Days must pass before she could fit the realization of it into her life. Then, as she lay on her bed, it was- the incessant repetition of those two years, the noise of endless hammering beating down the nerves. And still no tears; the eyes dry, glazed, expressionless.

But the tears came. As she lay there, something cold and damp thrust itself into her hand—pressing, persistent, affectionate. Cupboard love ’tis said of a cat. A libel—study them! Her hand smoothed down the silky fur, idly, not thinking. Then the song began, one long, persistent hum rolling in the throat. A common, gray kitten, come for companionship, needing the gentle hand, craving affection. None of your thoroughbred creatures this, bestowing favors; simply a kitten, common to kitchen floors, seeking favors, begging for notice. She arched her back as Katherine stroked her, raising on thin hind-legs to reach the lifted hand. No tears as yet; but when she crept up to Katherine’s arms, pressing paws into the yielding flesh, then they fell—torrents of them. Rolling down her cheeks, they dropped onto the kitten’s head. With each one, as she felt it, the creature shook herself; but the song continued, the purr of pleasure; her dearest wish to be noticed. This was Sinbad. Voyaging through continents, fields, and country roads, Katherine had found the little animal. Then from its love of travel and its agility in climbing trees, irrespective of sex, it was called Sinbad—Sinbad, who was a sailor.

For those few moments, with its soothing voice, it softened the bitterness of her thoughts. She took it in her arms and told it everything for sympathy. Imagine the child, addressing it by its diminutive, whispering the awful tale of her condemnation into the twitching ear.

“Two years, Sinby. You’ll be a grown-up cat then. How long will it take you to forget me ?”

The big, round, wistful eyes surveyed her; then the cold nose rubbed her cheek. Such attention as this! The incessant hum increased in volume; the song became louder than ever.

“To-day ’ll be gone soon, Sinby—then another and another; each one more quickly than the rest.” She held the kitten in her hands and looked into its eyes. Then suddenly she put it down on the bed. It was true! The day was going then with every breath she took. So they would all go—wasting away—lessening the distance every minute. Two years—not as much, and her life, the only life she had, would be done with— finished! Why did not religion teach that there were other lives, instead of the threescore years, and then the straining hope of heaven? Where was the justice in this short span, snapped like cotton in the flame of a candle? Two years! The absolute exactness of it!

Two years! She buried her head again in the pillows, and over and round her body, Sinby marched, rubbing her nose wherever she found an angle, and all the while singing the same song—the song of infinite pleasure, the chant of absolute delight.

CHAPTER XVIII

NOW, then, we have the matter in hand. Given a woman of certain temperament, faced with the knowledge that only two more years of life are allotted to her, how would she choose to act, and what would be the result of her choice? Here you have the rider set in the orthodox way, with some hundred or more pages of demonstrated problems lying before; problems demonstrating to prove her temperament, to show her character, to make her live, move, and have being before your very eyes. Axioms there have been also, definitions, too. You have skipped them? The rider is impossible of solution without their intimate acquaintance. To save you trouble then of looking back, here they shall be repeated; merely a few of them, those most necessary to your efficient equipment.

“You take a woman at a disadvantage when you see her in terror or suffering from a rough passage at sea; but watch her walk the deck careless of the storm, or facing danger with bright eyes and a half hint of laughter on her lips—by Heaven, you find her inspiration then! A woman unafraid could lead a whole battalion to glory.”

Half axiom this, combining with it definition of Katherine. Take it for what it is worth; but in the matter before you, you will need its remembrance.

“So women argue their case without a smile between them. They dissolve the pearls of logic in a sparkling wine of words and drain the goblet at a draught. Only a woman can do it. It needs her flash of eye, her disarming smiley the turn of her wrist as she raises the chalice to her lips. A man would look a fool.”

Half axiom again; half definition too. Where did that come in? Never mind—remember it!

“When unaided a woman is driven to wave her own standard, there lies a blow in every motion of the arm.”

You have no recollection of this at all? That is as well. Now it comes to you fresh, redolent of the truth, defying contradiction. Such is the duty of an axiom. With this well grounded, you may arrive at many solutions—guard it!

“It’s the most fatal mistake a woman can make to blindly love her husband. Give them adoration and I pity you. Tou’ll live in a glutted market with your wares rotting at your feet.”

Deny this if you like, but be honest! Admit that most women have made use of words to that effect.

“The man who does not understand women is as bad in his way as the one who sometimes treats them ill”

Gross exaggeration! But, one moment! Fut it to the test. Judge by results. You will find that there is something in it after all. With Katherine at least, admit that it has meaning and Katherine it is whom you have before you. No more shall be repeated. If all the rest have slipped your memory, they must go. It is possible they may recur to the mind with the passing of events. In any case, their purpose has been definite; each word in the scale to balance with the whole. To your seats then again; the curtain is up on tragedy. If your breath is not held, the thing is failure. You will hear the condemnation of it in the furtive, restless movements of those aroundyou; you will become conscious of the irritating coughs, the uneasy shuffling. Failure, in wireless messages will be vibrating in the air. But who, setting out on a journey, contemplates this? And here is but the beginning of the journey.

For three days Katherine faced it alone, shirking nothing, reviewing it all before her. To all John’s entreaties she was deaf. Over and again he had assured her that the opinion of the specialist was one compelling complete confidence.

, “He said that nothing was the matter?” asked Katherine.

“He said the same to you.”

“Ah—to me!”

“You discount it, coming to you?”

“I know their point of view with the patient. Make it as easy as possible. Tell them lies; they’ll believe them. They’d believe anything. Haven’t they said as much to you?”

“That may be their point of view; but there’s been no need for them to give an example of it in this instance.”

She looked through him, eyes probing his nerve with relentless accuracy. Why could she not see his overwhelming generosity? Why refuse to see the misery in the heart of the jester as he cracked his pitiable jokes? So he seemed to her—an unconvincing mummer struggling feebly with his part—failing utterly to be real, failing ignominiously to bring relief. Of all that great wealth of misery in the heart of him, she saw nothing. Had he understood her at all, he would have told her, trusting her courage, believing in her pride. This was treating her as a child, belittling her, humoring the weakness he thought he knew of in her nature. So she passed his torture by, knowing of her own. Again and again he tempted her to fling the truth at him— prove what she had courage to bear. Even that she stamped out. So much had they lost in sympathy; she crushed it as beneath her. By herself she would take it—by herself, until the two years were gone. You have pride here—courage with it. In the Keight-ley portrait even it can be traced. See the independent poise of the head, the determination in the firm curve of those lips.

And yet—greatest contradiction in the world—you have in Katherine one bereft without sympathy; one depressed, inert, without companionship. Loved, she must be, but faith, belief, respect, admiration, and fear, all must go with it. She should be loved as a child, loved as a woman of the world—loved for her weak- ness, loved for her strength. Those whom she wanted must be those upon whom she could rely, at once with those who should lean to her, finding her a pillar of strength. To know her, you should follow her through the intricate maze of her contradictions, never despairing to find the true path to the heart of her, yet being content never certainly to reach it.

Parting with John, she was the creature of pride, equipped with courage, armored with reserve. Coming then to Barbara, in the quietness of her bedroom, she became the child crying for consolation, craving pity, whispering for love. Give reason for this magic change of moods. You can’t! To trace it all out, the pattern, thread for thread, stitch for stitch, would need the untiring eye and magnifying lens of some mechanical contrivance. The pen stumbles over it—the mind becomes confused.

Yet Barbara, at least, understood her; could follow her instinctively as one in the barren darkness of a cave retraces steps back to the-daylight, holding blindly to the string that has marked the way. She took her—a child into the arms—stroking her cheek with lingering fingers, urging her to tell her all. You have here the mother once more, the primal instinct again. Katherine melted under it—the flower yielding scent from the heart of itself to the caresses of the sun. Scarcely a few minutes had passed before Barbara was told everything. A shudder shook Katherine when she whispered that two years or less was the portion allotted to her, and a cry of horror blent with pity struck its way through Barbara’s lips.

“Not my Katherine,” she moaned. “Two years! It’s not true—it can’t be true!” Then she clung to her as if the hand of death were already there waiting for its reward. Unnerving this. It shook Katherine— the wind playing with a leaf.

“Don’t say it’s not true—don’t let me think it’s not true. I find it hard enough to remember that it is. It is true—two years—two at the most. I heard him say it. How do you think I can bear it, if I see you shaken by it like this? Oh, Barbara! But it’s cruel. Think how young I’ll be! Only twenty-three. And here you see women of forty still calling themselves young, still getting the best out of life. What would they not give for my years now; yet how they’d shun them if they knew.”

She sought the shielding arms again, letting the tears rain from her eyes, her body shaken with the sobbing of despair. And Barbara, weeping too—great, heavy tears that flooded in their torrents from her eyes—could only murmur with trembling voice:

“My Katherine — my little Katherine — my little Katherine.”

No call for courage here; they let it overwhelm them. The bather in the heat of June strips clothes and wallows in the quenching stream; so these two lay immersed in misery until the salt tears had stung them to resistance.

Katherine was the first to shake the torpor from her. As the bather clambers up the stream’s bank, so she lifted, brushing tears from her, facing it again.

“What would you do, Barbara?” she asked. “Tell me what you’d do?”

What a question! Unly a child could have asked it; but you have her, the child now, leaning for sympathy, craving for affection. Tightly Barbara’s arms held her, crushing yet caressing her.

“What would I do? Ah, how I wish I were the one!”

Genuinely said—genuinely wished. She saw life without her Katherine, a desert wasted, swept for miles; no horizon but the dry, barren sand; hope a carcass rotting in the relentless sun; happiness withered, starved.

“I’d give you my years willingly for your two, and count myself selfish in the exchange.”

Loving her for it, still Katherine chafed. The question she had asked was unanswered, and her nerves were a fine edge to opposition.

“That’s not saying what you would do! What would you do if the two years were your own?”

Beginning to formulate slowly in her mind was the scheme, the plan that she’was drawing out for herself. Once her mind had acclimatized itself to the facts, it was the true nature of Katherine to lay out in order the arrangement of her life. She shirked no responsibilities, avoided no duties. The matter had to be faced, and once she had lived with it to know it line by line, she met it fearlessly and bent it to her ends. Already she was mapping out these two years; for no matter how horrible the circumstance might be, those two years had to be lived, and she steeled herself to find the best way in which to live them. A loser, she refused to be. She would not let herself be cowed into servitude. Victory, mastery, the situation, they must all be hers, whatever the odds. She defied the power of circumstance to quell her. Once let her realize it, once let her mind accustom itself to an idea, however upheaving, however terrible, then up rose her courage phoenix-winged out of the ashes of her despair, and she would win a victory defying death itself to conquer her. So she stood now, with plans mapped out before her. In this mind she put the question to Barbara, seeking advice, perhaps, more likely yearning to put forth her own ideas.

“What would you do?” she repeated.

“If it did not crush me,” said Barbara, looking before her as though there lay the two years in imagined panorama—“and I don’t think it would—I should dedicate all my time to doing good. If it were possible, I think I should go into a convent where they work for the poor. I should make those two years as perfect as it is possible for living to be.” She turned with a light of inspiration in her eyes. “That’s what I should do,” she added.

It grates does it? You call this cant? But you can hear the ring of conviction; you can see just that one spark of light in the eyes, half fanatical—the blind faith.

Katherine shook herself. Had Barbara’s views coincided with her own, she would have thrown arms around her neck, still the child, swept by impulse, carried in the lap of enthusiasm. But here they parted company. Again she realized that she was alone, depending on her own strength, bound to look to her own guidance.

Go into a convent! She pictured the inertia, the wasting away of life. This was not her conception of living. There were good women in convents. Who doubted it? Quite possibly they were full of them. But it was the goodness that was negative—good because there was no contrast of bad. She knew it would bore her to death. Oh, she had no doubt that it was the Christian way of looking at it. She knew thousands who, with their full portion before them, beaming with health, would say the same. Barbara, she knew, meant it. There was no question in her mind of Barbara’s sincerity. But the whole idea to her seemed pitiably weak; a begging of the question on knees shaking with fright. Then out she said it, light sparkling in her eyes too. These were not thoughts she would leave unspoken.

“Do you imagine that that’s what I’m going to do?” she asked, freeing herself from Barbara’s arms. “Is that what you’d like to see me do—go into a convent?” Watch the smile curling Her lip, cruel almost; but so she fought her battles. At least her blows were straight —no feinting—she planted them squarely, one following another.

“I call that pitiable,” she went on, urging herself to impetuosity. “If you must go into a convent for two years because you know that that ends everything in life for you, why not go in now? How do you know that you won’t be dead to-morrow?” This to her Barbara! But she gave no time to thought. If she was in the wrong, her cause had to be made right. She fought for it, not waiting to watch the effect of her words. Barbara’s lip had quivered at this, but Katherine did not wait to console.

“Now is the time for that sort of courage. Go into a convent now—do good to the poor now. Don’t wait till you’re sentenced to two years of life like I am, but go at once if it’s the right thing to do. Is that what you think you were given life for, to filter it away through a nun’s veil, a prayer here, a prayer there, all sifting through the tiny mesh until the last drop? Is that what you think? Is it? Why don’t you answer me?”

Barbara crept closer into her chair. She knew her Katherine too well in this mood. Nothing could stem it. It must work its own way out.

“You can’t answer. You know that it’s not. Why are we made young?—why not doddering old men and women from the very start? They are the ones to suit that sort of life. Youth is given for action. Life is one continual duty of things to be done, and youth is the time to do them. How many times have we said we shall only be young once? Thousands! Thousands! You, too, chanting it with me. And now, before my youth is scarcely begun, the whole thing is to be taken from me. And what am I going to do with what is left? You think I’m going to make a fool of myself? Oh no!—I shall never do that. I think I have more sense than you give me credit for. But I’m not going to waste that generous remainder. These two years I’m going to live; squeeze life dry till I get all the best out of it. You look up at me with horror in your eyes. You think I’m going to commit every evil that there is; but you haven’t the slightest conception of the control that I have over myself. I think I know just how far a thing may be carried before one is compelled to let it fall out of the hand, and as far as that I am going to carry. I suppose, with these puritanical ideas of yours, you think that life was meant to be one continual sacrifice to enjoyment. In fact, to be happy is a crime in itself. That’s not my idea of life. I am going to live it, the more so now that I have only two years left. I don’t want you to be in sympathy with me—I can quite easily—”

A knock rattled on the door. Katherine turned, impatience, annoyance evident.

“Who can that be?” she asked of Barbara.

“I don’t know.”

“Go and see who it is. I don’t want to appear like this, with my eyes all red.”

Barbara’s eyes were smarting with tears, still falling. But she went obediently. In a moment she returned with an envelope in her hand.

“What is it?” exclaimed Katherine.

“A letter,” said Barbara, quietly, “from Captain Seyd.”

CHAPTER XIX

“WOULD you prefer that I went now?” asked Barbara.

“Why?” Her head was thrown up, suspicion shot the question from her lips. Did Barbara guess the thoughts coursing each other through her mind? A woman would. She held the letter half opened in her hand. “Why?” she repeated. She sped this second demand as fast as the first. The quick firing of the questions disconcerted Barbara; she fell under them, beat retreat to the door. She should have shown fight? Impossible! How wage war against her Katherine, condemned? Pity was too full in the heart of her, tears too close to the flooding of her eyes. Like a child watching the moving pictures in a kaleidoscope, she had seen the thoughts in their mad race through Katherine’s mind. But how blame her for them? Two years! Her Katherine! Love blinded her; she offered all she had that they might be happy—those two short years. That letter of Seyd’s, she scarcely grudged, knowing that it made interest, brought distraction. And so her sudden retreat; the moving silently to the door, the half-spoken excuse; then the one last look. Two years! Her Katherine!

Each action Katherine swept with her eyes. You call her hard? Remember the plight of her. Driven into a corner, she fought the harder, because she imagined that she fought alone.

She turned to her letter as you turn from a night of storm to a dawn of promise. These two years were to be lived—so she had told Barbara; but how live them? In these two years, she must touch romance; not merely the hem of its cloak, but on her own shoulders that cloak must be hung. Through her veins the rich folds of it must warm the blood. The realization of death must be learned with a laugh, looked full in the eyes, cheated of its effort to deprive. Death should filch her of nothing. By the time it came with its claiming fingers, she would have lived, found the goblet, drained it to the dregs. The vessel might fall from her hands as the voice of the command whispered in her ear; but it should fall empty, hollow, dry.

Here then is the letter from Seyd, the beginning of that stream of correspondence—swelling to a flood, carrying at least one with it, almost submerging another —which flowed between them during the six months of his absence.

“I find myself here on shipboard, night ahead, and the pin-point lights of Marseilles jumping on the waters astern, and all that comes into my head is that lane leading up from the farm-yard to the high-ploughed land above it.”

Intimate this, in its beginning. He did not say, “I find myself thinking of you—” But how did she read it? You guess how—with heart beginning to stir, the sleeper wakening.

“You’ve never been to Italy? So you told me. Never even seen the South. It’s worth seeing—I among the first to admit that. But come to it with your—”

Here was a word crossed out—erased. Watch her eyes dissecting the erasions, piercing the net-work of lines! She took it across to the window, and looking through to the light, she found it. There was the word —heart—no mistake possible. Why, her own heart answered to it.

“But come to it with your—thoughts—so he had considered better to write it—“wandering in English lanes—the colors go out of it—no romance here.”

So the love of romance was in him, too? Or had he caught the word from her? For the last year it had hung on her lips; quite possible he had found it there, and calculated her estimation of the weight of it. Your man who understands women is capable of such subtleties as that. But what if he is a soldier? Well, do you picture them all standing to a belching gun, deafening the world? There are times when he has more finicking work to do than that. But your mind is to the letter, or it should be. When once she had deciphered the crossed-out word, Katherine’s eyes ran over the lines, the swaying search-light scanning the horizon—her first reading.

“I have news that may mean nothing to you, but you can imagine my delight when I heard it; in six months I shall be back again! The regiment leaves Rawal Pindi for home soon after I get out. Six months from the 29th of April—what does that make? May — June —July—August — September—October! What a month? And the 29th! Five o’clock will see darkness. Then our walk up that lane must be in the morning. Conceit! How do I know that Mrs. Spurrier will be at home when I return?

“I can’t suppose that you will answer this. Why should you, even if you knew that a reply would be so thoroughly welcome? Unless I hear to the contrary, however, I shall write again. Why should I? I can imagine your asking the disconcerting question straight from the bow, pinning one to the answer. Well, suppose you have asked it? This is my answer. Between . people who have looked the ultimate straight between the eyes as we did, with a good view from the front seat of your trap, some interest is made common, we share that. I shall be eternally grateful—not exactly for my escape, more because I’ve seen you drive for a mile and more with the inevitable, all the time dancing its antics before you, yet never succeeding in making you lose your nerve.”

There was a formal conclusion to the letter referring once more to his return. Katherine’s eyes swept it for meaning, but found none. Between the lines of all that had gone before, she dwelt. There she discovered that he could see her, realize her. As he had written that letter, she had been in the eye of his mind. In turn, he came vividly into hers. He was a fine man. But what did that matter? He understood her, not thoroughly, but enough to be wary of her, to treat her with respect. That mattered a great deal. Respect she had always had; respect she always demanded. Not with a look or a word or a sign; her personality compelled it.

And there she saw him before her, as plainly, no doubt, as he had seen her. In six months, he would have returned—six months from the two years. It seemed that he would come back bringing life. Her mind fastened itself to the time. Till then, she saw little but stagnation. Would she be here in Glen-worth when he returned? All her inclinations set to it, and for the first time in the matter of letter-writing, she gave way to impulse. Then and there, she seated herself before the unwritten sheet, her pen translating as she counted the days that must pass.

“The 29th of October shall find me here at Glenworth—you will be welcome.”

So began the correspondence. Tragedy had demanded the choice—the choice of ways. Here she made it.

CHAPTER XX

AWAY goes Katherine to London, the swallow to the south, the sea-bird on its travels. Notwithstanding that the summer had set in, Glenworth draped in all its colors, she was haunted by the solitude of the country, and longed for the crowds in which to lose the thoughts that followed her.

“I’m going to Town on Monday,” she said, one Saturday, when John had come down for the week-end.

Barbara looked up, and John’s eyes brightened. Since the day of the specialist’s decision, he had racked invention to please her. In his clumsy way, he had piled one effort upon another, offering her everything, denying her nothing. There was little, indeed, to deny; her demands were mostly to be left alone. These he had obeyed, wandering down to his study to sit there by himself, disconsolate, as near depression as his temperament could touch. He was beginning to realize that he was a failure. Here, when he felt that every moment should be offered to her, even at the expense of work, he found that he was incompetent, despairingly ignorant—the boy with his lesson unlearned singled out of the class.

And this piling of efforts—over and again he watched it fall before the first story was completed. It some- times seemed that with an intentional sweep of her head, Katherine brought it to the ground. But close scrutiny of that suggestion in his study, or away in the fields afterwards, always brought the same recognition. His incompetence it was, the barren futility of his nature to charm hers. A hard realization this; but he faced it with the courage it demanded. The futile efforts were still made, but with more reticence, less assurance. With a greedy ear he listened to the ease with which Barbara won smiles from her. How was it done? There was a trick, a knack in it. Why couldn’t he learn it? He watched her methods; found that she tried one topic as you tentatively hand a dainty dish to a fastidious invalid. If approval was not shown at that, then another was tried, and so on and so on, un-wearyingly, with the same ready service of the tongue, the same patient smiling of the eyes, until in the end she won her Katherine to laughter.

John tried it. Paint him! The clumsy yokel endeavoring to emulate the dainty action of the practised equilibrist on the slack-wire; one gallant effort, hands sawing the air, feet at cross-purposes; then the ultimate contortion—no recovery. There broke the attempt; no hope to regain the wire. It swung there above his head, mockingly out of reach. Having broached one topic, Katherine meeting it with quiet indifference, words died on John’s lips. One subject after another hurried forward, bidden to his tongue; but they seemed as useless to him as the first that had failed. So he struggled; so he was unsuccessful, yet ever rising to face it again as the dogged pugilist drags himself up,

3 round after round, merely to offer mark for the glove of the winning man.

But now Katherine had declared that she was going up to London. True, he had made the suggestion himself a few days before; made it with hope uplifting, sure of success. But it had been passed over—dismissed with a sentence.

“Your town,” she had said, with a trace of bitterness—“you work in it. A woman in London is like an insect in a fly-trap—forever one endless round, never ceasing, never escaping. Only exhaustion puts an end to it.

She had said that, but what did it matter now? There stood the fact that she was going, and he had faith in its effect. He brought his judgment of women to bear upon it. Why laugh? No man was ever more in earnest; no man ever gave such whole-hearted attention to details such as these. Light dazzles a woman, so he argued—laughter is wax in her ears and companionship is the water of forgetfulness. All these Katherine would find in London. He looked forward with confidence to seeing the smile in her eyes once more, answering the word from his lips.

“You’ll just come in for the best part of the season,” said John, when he heard it. “Every one asks me for you. They thought you were going to be the greatest politician we ever had.” He allowed no regret into his voice, though the reminding him of that interest which she had once taken in his work had left its sting, smarting in the flesh whenever he had heard it.

“I was afraid you’d run away with that idea,” said Katherine. She looked pensively out of the window, as though there she saw London in perspective and was choosing then the paths that she would walk.

“What idea?”

“That I’m going to show myself at political functions —listen to the endless empty schemings of party politics—talk the unmeaning jargon of advanced socialism. Ha!” Her laugh struck like the sudden falling of a hammer on a bell. “Not one of you advance. You scheme; you plot; you litter your lives with theories and scatter your intentions like the corporation men who throw gravel on the slippery roads; but one and all of you saunter down to the House every night, crushing the intentions under your feet, crumpling the litter of theories in your fists, and sit down, tied to your seats with convention, and discuss the old routine over and over again. You may be glorious politicians in your studies, where there is no avenging press to report your speeches. Most undoubtedly you are all politicians after dinner while the coffee is cooling for you to sip it; but in the House of Commons you are nothing but county councillors who have one common, conventional interest—to reduce the rates.”

Delight glittered in John’s eyes.

“Lord! What a whipping! And, by Jove! they deserve it—some of ’em. But you’re not right. You err in your deductions. To begin with, county councillors don’t reduce rates. They don’t attempt to do it. I couldn’t tell you to what purpose they actually do sit in council, but during the course of the conclave it is an invariable item in the minutes of the proceedings to raise the rates—conscientiously to raise ’em. Child ”— he stretched his arms across the table and caught her hand—“you’ve got more wisdom in the tip of your little finger—” Something clung in his throat, and he left that sentence unfinished. Before the pause became awkward, he struggled on as a swimmer seeking more placid water. “I shall only have her two years more,” he had suddenly thought, and for the moment he had rebelled.

“But you seem to have grasped one thing,” he continued—“you’ve fallen on the power of convention. Until we realize that it is a law checking, counting, assaying the progress of evolution, we shall go on laboring under the belief that evolution ended with Darwin’s Origin of Species, that we are the final products of the survival of the fittest. Heavens! The manufactory’s only just opened, the building’s only just completed, the hands are only just called in.”

“Yes; but I’m not coming up to London to discuss the making of minds. I only warn you. Don’t expect me to follow you to crushes where politics are the only matter under discussion. I’m going to take my life in my own hands, not use it as subject to theorize upon—wasting the days of it—doing nothing.”

John had nothing to say to this. “Two years,” he kept repeating to himself; all the pity in him thrilled towards her. In his mind, he made her the gift of them. Two years! It was little enough. She must do as she wished with them. Even he realized that she was meant to be happy. Then these few months must be for her enjoyment. With the full unselfish- ness of his heart, he put his own desires away from him. Thinking that she knew nothing, knowing too well that he knew all, he would have bound her to him, drained this last sweetness from her—so the bee sucks to the end the last drop of honey from the drooping flower, relentless in its abhorrence of waste. But in John you have the practice as well as the preaching of his philosophy. Here was no idle man of theories, scattering intentions, as Katherine had denounced them in a body. Altruism he raised to the pinnacle. Not the altruism of the gospels, untempered with discretion — a blind disbursement to the beggar, an illogical suicide of individuality. This he scorned, granting the past value of its lesson, denying the value of it to-day. But the altruism of work, the labor for others that they might labor for themselves, rather than the giving to others that they might not work at all—this was his philosophy. Wealth, the incentive, he decried; wealth, the power in the right hands, he upheld. The equal division of wealth, the abolition of capital! This was the jargon of socialism, to which Katherine offered a deaf ear; and John, delighted, proclaimed it a whipping.

Here now, then, you see the great heart of his unselfishness. To accuse him of not loving much, because the temperament was not his to show it, is unreasonable, wanting in logic. Swift your finger points to Katherine; yet recollect that it was she who needed the love, she who lived for it and found little. Yet even Katherine knew the wealth of affection stored in his heart for her; knew it, but chose pride rather than ask for it.

And here is the proof of his altruism—in that, craving for those two years of Katherine’s life for his own sharing and his own happiness, he ceded them to her, knowing that no child would be left him to soften the loss. Barbara saw the full sacrifice of his generosity—knew that he denied himself—realized his greatness of heart. Katherine discerned nothing. What a heroine to choose! You will be glad for the end of her. Barbara is the woman for John. If life were settled as easily as that, who could win upward? In this story we are bound for the heights. Admit, then, that Katherine is the more capable of reaching them.

“I shall not drag you anywhere that you don’t wish to come,” said John, in answer to her announcement. “You come to London—I find that sufficient. I sha’n’t see empty rooms when I get back from the House.” “I suppose you’re at the House every night?”

“Very nearly.”

“Then you’ll never take me to a theatre—supper— anywhere? The only fare you can offer is political?” “I offer you your choice of all there is.”

Barbara rose from the table and left the room. It was impossible for her to think poorly of her Katherine; but why could her Katherine not see? John’s generosity, the unwieldy gentleness of him, overwhelmed her. He loved—so she had said it a thousand times to herself—he loved as she would be loved herself.

“Katherine!” The moment that the door had closed, John’s hands were out to her across the table. Katherine melted to this. By the heart she took things, and this appeal was from John’s. Half hesitatingly, with a pretty reluctance, her hands came out to meet his; there he buried them under a heap of kisses.

• • • • • • •

But now the story shall move for you. On Monday, Katherine came to London. No doubt about her intentions. She packed everything; brought all those little indispensable things, to enumerate which would demand the hired pen of a scrivener in making the inventory. “Time past is romance,” so Katherine had once said in a letter to Barbara; and all those little belongings upon which the dust of history—her history —had collected, not one was left behind. Every single object had had its place in her life, every single one was animated, given life by the part that it had played. Your imagination runs to dance programmes—withered flowers — a glove or a faded ribbon? No, far simpler than that; too simple for any one’s understanding but Barbara’s. Picture to yourself a little common match-box made into a cart, with matches as shafts and little card-board wheels. Imagine a tiny china dog and a Japanese stork with bending leaden neck and unsteady wire legs. Conceive a doll the size of your little finger, with unnatural flaxen hair and crimson cheeks, robed in a little red-flannel petticoat. Here, too, you find in this family of gods a little ivory elephant, an unconventional animal made of green plush, filled with sawdust. Can you picture them—all with their separate names—living personalities? If you cannot, let them go! Forget about them for the sterner matter in hand.

To Katherine, it was out of the question to obliterate them from her mind. For the world, she could not have left them alone at Glenworth; so they all travelled with her to London. Impossible to give a detailed history of the parts they had played: the little cart constructed to amuse her when she was ill; the unconventional animal of green plush, saved from the excruciating torture of the duties of a pin-cushion in the window of a fancy-shop. Can’t you imagine the pins being extracted, one by one, with the gentleness of an expert surgeon, practised in his craft? With each pin extracted, she had held a breath.

Once at the house in South Audley Street, they were all put away in a drawer cushioned with tissue-paper, close together for company, and then Katherine, with an effort, settled herself to take up London ways. The country had to be forgotten. Its associations were those which she was doing her utmost to obliterate. Not until Seyd returned, so she determined, would she think of Glenworth again. For the time, Glenworth was to be forgotten. She linked arms with Barbara, courage lifting in the heart of her. But the two years were still to be faced; at night they rose like shadows across her rest, taunting her, possessing her mind, threatening her resolves. Human nature, however, develops a marvellous power of acclimatization with the swift acceleration of events. There were the two years for her acceptance. Maybe there was many another who, unknowingly, had just the same span allotted them. Why should the knowledge make all the difference? Undoubtedly it did; but was she to be con- quered by it? With just that same determined perseverance in the face of odds which she had shown to Seyd on the day of the accident, she met her circumstances now. Night after night, time after time, she wrestled with the thoughts that combated the peace of her mind until, by those infinitely fine degrees which are the heart of Time itself, they lost their terror for her as she bent them to her indomitable desire for romance.

So she had come up to London, but the coming brought her no nearer to John. When a man rides in the park at seven o’clock in the morning, breakfasts at eight-thirty, and is clamped to his desk by ten, there is little time for romance. They met at lunch, and afterwards he went to the House, dining there sometimes when anything of importance was likely to arise at the night sitting.

Once only, she entered his study in the morning. This was soon after her arrival. He looked up to find the bright lights of her eyes resting on him.

“Bless your little heart!” said John.

That was invitation. She ran to it, twining an arm around his neck, making room for herself on his knee. Imagine the joy of him, finding her happy! Had he known that she knew everything, what would his admiration have been?

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Making a book,” said he.

“What—a novel? John! A novel?”

“No, something more interesting, more alive, I hope.”

“Then what? Why, you’ve got proofs already, and you’ve never said a word to me. What is it?”

“A trying to crystallize the new phase—a—” He found the uninterested expression on her face and stopped. “You don’t like the subject?”

“It doesn’t interest me.” No doubt of her being candid. But it was at his expense as well as her own. Imperceptibly the arm round his neck loosened; imperceptibly his hand holding hers released its grip. “To me what is and what has been is self-sufficient. Futures make themselves. Little creatures worrying in the earth to-day won’t alter the face of it to-morrow. The Creator has His methods. If He wants to alter the face of the earth, an earthquake is at His command to accomplish it. The other day I heard three clergymen discussing the respective burial rights of a suicide and an unbaptized infant.”

John’s face broke into a smile. With all her mistaken ideas, she was infinitely entertaining.

“With what result?” he asked.

“They came to the conclusion that an unbaptized infant was in every way as damned—I use their own enlightened expression—as the suicide. Then, having arrived at that conclusion, they spoke as though they had unravelled the riddle of the universe. What do they gain by it? Oh, John! Doesn’t it tire you, this ceaseless, useless speculation; when one of these days both of us will be gone—dust, that will fill up the hollows which others have dug in the ground before us—and our salvation or our—the other thing —will have been written out by God in the book of deeds thousands of years before we were ever born?”

John’s arm tightened about her.

“That’s not my idea of things, little woman,” he said. “Read my book when it comes out. It’s not a speculation upon burial rights of the just or the unjust; earth is earth, consecrated from the very beginning. The spreading of a man’s hands over it alters it not one whit. Read this when it comes out. No critic will honor me more.”

She jumped off his knee. The “little woman” had pleased her.

“Well, put it away now,” she exclaimed—“put it away and come out with me.”

His eyes fell on the sheaf of proofs.

“I must correct these,” he said.

“Sooner than come out with me?”

“Not sooner—but I must.”

“You can’t put them away for one single morning to come out with me?”

His eyes wandered regretfully to the printed slips. She could feel him counting them.

“Very well,” he said. She could feel his generosity. That stung her. She opened the door, looking back.

“Oh—it doesn’t matter. Perhaps you oughtn’t to leave them. They’re important to you. Barbara will come with me.”

“Katherine!” He called her back—let the proofs go! Two more years, and she wanted him! “Katherine!”

The door half opened again.

“Let me come, darling.”

For one moment, she came back into the room.

“I wouldn’t have you come for the world,” she said, hurt to the heart of her. He knew that two more years was her utmost allotment and yet he had hesitated. Now she would not have him for the world.

So there she left him, in a moment when he, too, would have given the world to have been allowed to come with her.

CHAPTER XXI

YOU are not going to make a book successful in this country, if you probe with cold, keen steel into the tissues of its religious beliefs. The Reformation completed the making of England’s greatness; it needs another Reformation to continue it. But who among this nation of conservatives will permit it? The man who attempts it works with failure at his elbow, clinging to him throughout the whole enterprise.

“John’s book—The Anatomy of Change—met with just that reception which Barbara had prophesied for it.

“If you give a book a name like that, what else can you expect?” asked Katherine.

John read his reviews in silence. Success he had not asked for; but he had entertained hopes of justice.

“The quality of human justice [he had written himself in his book] can only confine itself to the present. It has no power of application to that man who is behind his time or before it. Witness the reception of Christ in Judea; observe the modern judgment of the savage.

Barbara read the copy that he gave to her, marking passages with deep pencil-lines, silent exclamations of her approval. Katherine placed her copy on a shelf, where the pages remained uncut. She would not read it, knowing how ill its contents would accord with her conception of the life that had been forced upon her. You expect curiosity? You have that. Bringing Barbara into her room, she led her to talk about it.

“You’ve read it all?” she asked.

“Twice—every word of it.”

“Then you like it?”

“I think it’s splendid!”

“Oh, I can guess what it’s like. John’s hard, unyielding point of view; the cry for work. He would have life a tread-mill—men and women all chained to the devil’s invention.”

Barbara upheld him, knowing his value.

“I never read anything so rapt in optimism.”

“You get hope from it?”

“It compels that.”

“Get it—get your copy.”

Off went Barbara, steps light, heart rising. The book had taught her how John should be loved. She had visions of Katherine learning the lesson, too, with the light of realization swept into her eyes. One glimpse at her Katherine, once she was left alone, would have dispelled the vision.

What can they know about it? she asked herself. It is not their two years, but mine. She stared at the two years then, as you see a cornered animal stare at the advance of its pursuers. Two years—in the abstract to them, in the concrete to her. The time would actually come when — that span passed — her body, which now moved in obedience to her will, would be still, inert, lifeless. Her reason shuddered. This was standing on the edge. She felt its magnetic attraction drawing her nearer and nearer to the brink. Prolonged contemplation of it would be fatal. She knew that her mind would be unable to stand it. She would come to believe that it would be preferable to take her life with her own hands—then, there, having done with it—rather than wait, condemned in her cell, for the ultimate, inevitable dissolution. The thoughts were becoming intolerable, imperative. She rose hastily from her chair to throw them from her. It was like some persistent animal flying to her throat. She must shake it off! The terror of it was asphyxiating! What if she were driven to take her life then? Would it be preferable? Both alternatives had their aspect of terror. Would Barbara never come back? Some distraction in the room would save her. Was there nothing she could do? Scarcely realizing her actions, she picked up a ball of wool from Barbara’s work-basket and began to bowl it across the room at any object that offered itself.

The slight concentration demanded for her accurate aim quieted her somewhat; but when Barbara returned with the book in her hand, she found Katherine kneeling on the floor, her face white, her eyes staring, rolling a ball of wool at the leg of a chair as though life and death were at issue.

“What’s my darling doing?” she cried, hurrying forward. “What’s the matter?” Arms were round Katherine’s neck as she knelt on the floor like the Keightley portrait once more, the baby on its crawling-rug. “Why are you doing that?7

Katherine looked up, saved from the brink.

“Do you remember when we used to play marbles?” she asked, voice tottering, lips twitching with the words.

“Sweet one—but why?”

A flood of tears answered, as Katherine buried her head in the willing prison of Barbara’s arms. The worst was over. In those few moments, while Barbara had been out of the room, she had faced the music of torture. It must never happen again. In future, she knew that such thoughts as these, such concentrated speculations on what lay before her, must be thrust aside on the moment when they sought admittance. She must live, forgetting everything; and in her heart, as she hid her face against Barbara’s breast, she prayed for the speedy passing of the time until Seyd’s return. If that were wrong; if where that prayer were heard there should follow sighs of displeasure and whisperings of regret, she could not offer to alter one thought of it. Truth, as she saw it, meaning absolute discountenance of chicanery, was in the heart of her. Meanness, she loathed. If she felt too tired to say her prayers at night, she made clean admission of it to the God she prayed to. If in her n nd there harbored the intention to do anything which she knew to be wrong, there was no hesitation to divulge it.

“God—I am going to do this thing. I know it’s wrong, but I must do it. If there is to be punishment, help me to bear it bravely.”

Here you are in the most sacred heart of Katherine.

You have a prayer of hers; you and God alone have heard it. Cherish it; in all the matter that follows, it will be an insight.

“My darling’s unhappy,” said Barbara, still holding her.

Katherine rose, gently freeing herself.

“Not now,” she said, bravely—“not now. Read the book; let me hear what you say is rapt in optimism— optimism!” She sank back again into her chair.

CHAPTER XXII

BARBARA opened the book at random, seeking the markings of her pencil.

“‘Until truth has been earned, as the laborer earns his wage, every idea of worth is a symbol. An idea that is symbolical of the truth is never valueless, no matter to how few it appeals’ ”

Katherine nodded her head.

“I can hear him saying that,” she commented. Barbara continued, all her fingers keeping pages where her pencil-marks were deepest:

“‘Religion is the purest symbol of truth which exists for mankind. There is no such thing as one true doctrine, one perfect creed. Every doctrine and every creed have their place so long as they are symbolical. No creed is the truth in itself.”’

“I see no optimism in that,” said Katherine. “To some poor wretches who are clinging doggedly to the cross of their beliefs, it is pure pessimism. Is it all about religion? I want to hear what he means by the anatomy of change.”

One of Barbara’s fingers spread out a page.

“Energy is the motor-power of life; change, the mechanism of direction. These two laws only are stable. Energy and change. Death is the greatest change of all”

That is,” exclaimed Barbara, “full of optimism to me! Can’t you hear the ring of it? And he says here, down further, on the same page:

“‘What Christian would enter the valley of the shadow with gnashing teeth and fingers spent with fighting the terror of it, if he knew it to be but a temporary change of condition in place of that irrevocable and blind judgment, determining the immediate issue of heaven or hell?”

“Optimism there,” said Katherine; “optimism there if you like. No doubt a happy and convenient condition of things to believe in, but too easy. What need to strive for virtue, if you eliminate the fear of something after death?”

“Not so happy or convenient as you think,” Barbara replied. “I’ll read on a little bit further—

“‘In its beginning every religion is one of love, dominated by the divine personality of its founder. In time that personality fades, loses its distinctness, and the religion becomes one of fear. The Christian fear of death is cowardice; accordingly, so long as death is at arm s-lengthy the inevitable judgment of a lifetime has little power for the making of virtue. Death-bed repentances are more common in the Christian religion than in any other in the world. The fear of judgment comes with death itself—not before. In the first light of Christianity, death was welcomed, judgment looked forward to. Both of these spelled freedom to the Christian mind. Both now are looked upon with horror. But change, like the mole underground, is working its irresistible, invariable way. On the dimmed horizon of men s minds there hangs a cloud the size of a child’s hand. This cloud is the dust-cloud of a new generation of thought. Ten thousand horsemen and ten thousand foot are marching towards the citadel of our ill-equipped beliefs. When the sun is high in the heavens, and the air clear with the promise of better things, you may see the polished armor of their unswerving destiny glistening like the moon on far water. The first battlement to fall to their engines of destruction will be the doctrine of hell, and the crash of its overthrow will be echoed by the downfall of the doctrine of heaven. But what in its place? Chaos? Vice rampant?

“‘There is a quality in the souls of human beings which Maeterlinck in his “Life of the Bee” has called with inspiration “The Spirit of the Hive.” If by this spirit, insects of the earth, knowing nothing of hell, caring naught of heaven, will concentrate their energies upon the building of nations of their kind, how much more so will a man, endowed with the intelligence of the divine, strive towards that which aims for the betterment of his race? Good is the predominating factor. Every single soul, to the man who climbs the scaffold steps, has it.

The spark of it is unquenchable; the flame of it, infection, to those who come within its reach. How have we reached the present condition of our advanced evolution? How shall we continue in the upward progression? Solely by that natural course of selection, eliminating the fit from the unfit, the good from the evil, those who have utilized the priceless possession of energy for the benefit of the hive, from those who have sought the pleasures rather than the duties of existence. The whole question of life does not he between the choice of heaven or hell. Take them as symbols. For what do they stand? Heaven—the selection of the fittest for the completion of this huge scheme of perfected evolution. Hell—the retention of those in their type, whose actions have frustrated the scheme’s progress. Their battle must be fought again before they rise.

“‘From all this it may be deduced that every individual action finds its way into the balance. Each man is the captain of his salvation. The death-bed repentance is as a feather in the scales’

“Do you call that easy?” asked Barbara.

Katherine sat silent as the words drove into her. She might call it an endeavor to found a new religion and scoff at it as such. New religions! Who founded them? Not men of John’s type! But the truth in it had irritated her.

“Every individual action finds its way into the balance. Each man is the captain of his own salvation.”

With the determination before her to live these two years of hers, this expression of duty was two-edged, cutting to the quick. Barbara looked up, finding Katherine’s eyes set with a steady gaze that reached far beyond her immediate surroundings. On the moment the book was dropped. Barbara knew that expression of her Katherine’s face. The tears of unconquerable depression were at the back of it. Interest in the reading of the book fled from her. She knelt beside Katherine’s chair, pouring out the treasures of baby language into her ears. But now the potion was powerless. It had lost its cunning. The magic of it was gone. Katherine, fighting her battle, arranging the deft intricacy of her affairs, as a general with maps of the country before him plans out his campaign, had no need for baby talk. At that moment, her life seemed seething as a caldron with the difficulties that beset her. Here she was brought face to face with it; but she did not shrink from the contemplation. The unswerving direction of her eyes were fixed upon it then.

“We won’t have any more of the horrid book,” said Barbara.

“Ah, but we will,” said Katherine. Her voice cut sympathy with one clean sweep, jagging no edges, leaving no hope. “He says a good deal about women who have no children, I suppose. What does he say?”

With unerring instinct, she hit the very subject which Barbara would have given her breath to avoid. But there was the tone of the book. In the little that she had heard, Katherine knew that it’ was just the topic on which John would point his views; point them with words flashing, a broadside of invectives against those women who had lived as she had. Would he have meant them to hurt her? She was not in the mood to judge him fairly. That he should have written them at all, whatever they were, blunted the fine edge of her judgment.

“Well, what does he say about that?” she repeated, thundering with scornful eyes at Barbara’s hesitation.

“There is a chapter,” said Barbara, weakly.

“What does he call it?”

“Reproduction.”

“Of course. Every scientist who endeavors to write a book upon evolution, has that chapter between his covers. Read some of it.”

“Darling, I’d rather not.”

Fatal that! It drove the determination deeper. Katherine took no notice of Barbara’s beseeching eyes. That chapter she would have, and the worst of it. The soldier tastes blood, and the thirst for it becomes unassuaging. So Katherine craved for her satisfaction. Picking up the book, she handed it to Barbara.

“Find the chapter,” she said, “and read it—the parts you have marked with your exclamatory pencil.”

“I’ve marked nothing.”

“Then read it all. Is it long?”

“No.”

You can imagine the thin, hesitating voice that intoned the words. So much as that Katherine expected. It was the words—the words that she wanted.

You follow now, a paragraph here, a paragraph there. Sentences that like acid ate their way into the metal of Katherine’s courage. But she kept a brave face through the whole accusation. So it seemed to her, a hurling of epithets, striking like stones of hail upon the naked flesh. Yet her eyes never lost their daring. Sometimes the breaths hunted each other through her nostrils. But whenever Barbara stopped, she commanded her to go on. You find her the slave-driver, whip in hand, heart pitiless. Yet surely you must see her indomitable courage. Barbara’s sufferings were the swift prickings of a pin to the long, lingering lashes that coiled themselves with then stinging force around the sensitive heart of her.

“‘Sterility—’”

The very opening sentence struck her.

“‘Sterility is one of the most implacable and far-reaching curses that nature lays upon those who subvert her laws. What can be said, then, of those who snap their fingers in the face of nature herself, and ignore the foremost duty that she has placed upon them, choosing the curse of sterility rather than the blessings of fruitfulness.’”

Here Barbara stopped and her look pleaded abatement.

“Go on,” said Katherine; “I’ll hear it all.”

‘“In evolution you have the master-sculptor carving out a great statue of perfection from the rough marble of matter with the chisel of divine inspiration and the mallet of energy. To rob him of his implements, to deny him the material on which to work, can any crime be greater than these?’ ”

Barbara shut the book with determination.

“I won’t read any more!” she exclaimed. The spirit of revolt had risen in her. Slowly she moved to the door. It was retreat; no honor in it. She left the field open to Katherine’s artillery, and as she walked apprehensively across the room, her nerves were strung to the cannonade of wrath which she felt bound to follow.

But not until her fingers had touched the handle of the door, when even the door itself was partly open, did Katherine speed her missile to its mark. It was timed to a nicety; armed with that accuracy of precision which only a woman skilled in the use of her weapons can command. This was a moment when the heart, not the intellect, must fall. The weakest spot in the defence—she took it.

You find her leaning forward, hands locked about her face, despair relaxing every attitude of her body.

“I wonder if there was ever a woman in this world so absolutely alone as I am?”

What a degree of misery she instilled into her voice! Barbara felt the tears dried, the heart aching. With a cry of sympathy she closed the door, running back to Katherine’s side.

“My darling—my Katherine—never, never alone, so long as there is breath in me.”

CHAPTER XXIII

AS the child with fevered eagerness pursues the l\ evasive butterfly, following it with breath bated and envious eyes until its attention is withdrawn to another more beautiful, brighter - colored, fleeter of wing, so Katherine for those six months pursued pleasure. Anything which distracted her mind from a contemplation of her own destiny became her quarry; she hunted it to the death, or it escaped her. But immediately the chase was over, she turned to another, started a fresh pursuit with relentless energy and untiring perseverance. And through it all, the underlying motif, rising and falling in prominence as the refrain that beats a pulse through the intricate setting of a symphony, her correspondence with Seyd continued, growing in intimacy, increasing in its promise of possibilities.

In four months almost all the formalities of casual letter-writing had proven themselves expressionless. Katherine gave herself up to the delight of it. Precaution she threw from her, casting it aside as a garment that is threadbare. What need for the consideration of appearances ? In less than two years they could think no ill of her—dead. And if they did—if these letters ever lay scattered in the light of day—how would it effect her, fast returning to the original and the ultimate dust?

The conventional beginning to their letters was dropped—Seyd’s initiative example. “My dear Mrs. Spurrier—” To that it had risen. After a time that conveyed nothing. The rest of the letter belied it. Yet he could not go further. To call her Katherine, as every subsequent expression in the letter might demand, would be risking too much. He dropped it altogether.

“You find the days slow—lethargic? They can be nothing to the sluggishness of mine. They crawl by me here under the scorching sun, like a lost caravan seeking water in the desert.

“If you were here! I’d give a lot to see you show our gunners how the ribbons can be handled.”

So he dropped formality, leaving her to imagine with what choice of words he would have begun. No doubt it added intimacy. Katherine thrilled to it, writing in the words in her imagination.

Finally she adopted it also. Subtle playing with the pen this. Seyd read approval in her imitation; was carried away by it. The next letter he wrote, spurred by the thought that he was winning her, he began, “Katherine.” With cooler consideration he tore it up. In the short period of their acquaintance, he had learned her sudden change of mood, the risk one ran in treating her with familiarity. He found her too precious to run risks for. The “Katherine” then was omitted, but the intimacy of his reply increased.

And all these letters, week by week—no Saturday ever failed to bring them with their red Indian stamp— she received and read devouringly. The sight of that pale-red stamp upon an envelope became electric to her. Heart and eyes leaped to it.

Sometimes Barbara brought them to her, and the silence in which she handed them was charged with meaning. They felt words, thoughts, eddying around them—a passing of bats in the bright evening, wings brushing their faces, but always evasive, intangible, in their elusive flight.

Then the stamps began to alter. The regiment was coming home by sea. He sent his letters overland. More than one a week now. Barbara, so it happened, brought the last. The writing they both knew—none better; but this stamp was English — the postmark Southampton.

Katherine took it—no show of eagerness. You find her opening and reading it then, Barbara’s eyes furtively watching her, begging for confidence.

“I’m going down to Glenworth to-morrow,” said Katherine, looking up from the paper.

“I thought you were going to Mrs. Crichton tomorrow?”

“Mother will have to forgive me, then—I’m going to Glenworth.”

Barbara realized the inevitable, but would not as yet accept it. Brave visions entered her head of saving her Katherine. She knew well the spirit that was dominating—the craving to say that she had lived, before her fate claimed her—the hatred of wasting the pleasures that this lite could bring her. JNo wonder that John’s book had cut deep. She must know the truth of it, must realize how much closer it came to the heart of things than the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins upon which Barbara knew she must be relying. Sins? What sins had she committed? In Katherine were a superb courage and a greatness of heart that were overwhelming. What sins had she ever committed with these qualities dominating her? None. But before the two years should have run their course, Barbara could see her Katherine drifting, and this man, Seyd, the stream on which she would be carried. It struck her then, the tragedy of it. John, writing The Anatomy of Change, had preached his gospel of the inviolable scales of selection—the irrevocable placing of ill deeds in the balance which no forgiveness, only the doings of others that were good, could outweigh.

“Morality—immorality,” so he had written, so Barbara had read to Katherine, “are merely terms—symbols. They contain the truth, but are not the truth in themselves. There are no constant laws of morality; no invariable ideas of immorality. A deed is moral or immoral which thwarts and hinders the great scheme of evolution. A thing moral to-day may be immoral to-morrow. Change is the first factor of stability.”

And here, in the very chamber of his heart, was one who offered to thwart the scheme’s progress. She had only two years to live; the pain was still with her, though Henning, in constant attendance, did what he knew to relieve it. All this, no doubt, blinded their judgment of her—John’s most of all. But if what John said were true, did that plead her mitigation? She was being tried—oh, infinitely more than they! But, lovable though she was, she lived for herself — no thought of others, no consideration for them. All must yield to her desires, all bend the knee to her wishes. It paints a cruel, unsympathetic picture—no heroine this; yet they loved her, one and all of them, unthinkingly, entirely, passionately. Who could help it? Love she was made for; love she took.

All these thoughts crowded through Barbara’s mind— stampeding for a moment, the voice of them, rushing through, deafened her.

“Is Captain Seyd going out to Glenworth to-morrow?” she asked, at last.

“No—the day after. But you know how unready they always are unless some one is there.”

“Are you going alone?” Her heart was arrested as she asked the question. Could Katherine be throwing appearances utterly to the winds?

“No—I want you to come.”

In the moment’s pause, with the one casting of her eye, Katherine caught the rising of hesitation in Barbara’s face. She struck then, as the angler strikes, in the brief second of inspired instinct.

“Barbara, come over here—come and sit on my chair.”

Knowing well the defeat before her, Barbara reluctantly obeyed.

“What do you want?” she asked, fighting for the preservation of her attitude of mind, struggling to retain her correct regard of the situation. But Katherine’s arms were about her neck, Katherine’s lips were brushing her cheek. Retain correct regard of a situation under such circumstances as these? She saw her failure grinning at her.

“I want my Barbara to love me—understand me— sympathize with me. Nobody else in the world does. You think Fm strong—strong enough to stand alone— fight these two years out for myself? You’re wrong —as wrong as you can be. Fm weak—oh, infinitely weak. It’s only by clutching at the oblivion of them that I can face them at all. You were going to say that you wouldn’t come down to Glenworth—weren’t you? Weren’t you? You were going to let me go alone?” Barbara yielded under this as wax melts to the flame. Tears rushed to her eyes, splashing onto Katherine’s arm. Katherine drew out her handkerchief.

“You would have been sorry if you had let me go alone,” she said, bitterly, beginning to wipe the tears from Barbara’s eyes. “If you had let me go alone, that might have been the last you would have seen of me. Don’t you think my life has been empty enough as it is? Do you think I would hesitate much before I chose anything that might make it more bearable. I must be loved—I can’t do without it.”

The energy in these last two sentences found its way into her application of the handkerchief to Barbara’s eyes. She dabbed at them strenuously—vigorously. Barbara quietly took the little piece of linen away from her.

“Do you mean you love this Captain Seyd, Katherine?” she asked, in a shaking voice. She looked pitiably plain when she cried. Katherine kissed her for it. “Love him—no! Goose! Why should I?”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Mean by what?”

“What you said about not hesitating before you chose anything that might make life more bearable.” Here she fell to sobs, throwing herself on Katherine’s neck. “My darling,” she moaned, the words plunging through her tears, “if you did anything like that, I think it would break my heart. Perhaps you will get well again. God may keep you with us.”

“I hate sentiment,” said Katherine, driving her words. “The thing’s inevitable—I know it by Henning’s face every time he comes to see me. I hate people who cling on to forlorn-hopes—deluding themselves into belief, deceiving themselves into contentment rather than face the real thing. I’d sooner face it out, if I had to die in agony to-morrow. This pain is not so bad—I can bear it. If I could be radiantly happy to-morrow, I shouldn’t realize it.”

“Why do you say to-morrow’ like that? Do you think he has one tithe of John’s value.”

“I make no comparisons. John has written a book. I suppose it’s clever—I don’t deny it—it is clever— cruelly so—I hate it! But he’s swept you away with it until you can see none of his shortcomings. You don’t see how he neglects me—leaves me. A woman wants to be loved. Does he give me a sign of it. I’ve no doubt, in his sluggish way, he cares—but does he show it? No! Not once—since the first six months after our marriage.”

“Perhaps—I’ll admit—he can’t show it in the romantic way that you want it—”

“Romantic!” She flung the word at Barbara,vibrating with its contempt. “Why do you say romantic? I hate the romantic lover—detest him! The man who can win you by strength of arm—the man! That is the man.”

The allusion to Seyd—Barbara clung to it, strung to a pitch. Her words rushed from her. She was on a pinnacle.

“Well, at least John knows the sacredness of a married woman. His eyes have never left you since the day you were first engaged. I remember you saying so in that letter you wrote, when you first told me of it.”

This was the pinnacle of her courage; but she fell from it. One flash of Katherine’s eyes, one sudden catching of her breath, dislodged her.

“What did you mean by that? You shall tell me what you meant by it before you go out of this room.”

There lay Barbara at her feet, personality gone, courage beaten from her.

“Did you mean that those were Captain Seyd’s intentions? Did you mean that I, too, should forget the sacredness of a married woman? That I should forget myself? Did you? Why do you sit there with your face in your hands—sobbing? Why don’t you answer me? Is that what you mean ?”

This was a torrent, flooding Barbara. She would give anything to be free. Courage was sapped from her. She trembled, lips quivering before Katherine’s wrath.

“No—no,” she gasped. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“Oh—I don’t know—I don’t know what I meant.” “If you had,” said Katherine, “I’d never have forgiven you.”

CHAPTER XXIV

THE return of Seyd into this history is momentous-momentous to Seyd himself, momentous to Katherine, momentous to those whose interests in her affairs have been so far carried along on the current of events.

How many are left of them who started out with visionary hopes of an enthralling history, when first they saw the baby personality upon its crawling-rug? A breathless few, perhaps, exhausted with their exertions of floundering through the sloughs of psychology. To these, however, surely there must rise a tide of promise in Seyd’s arrival back in England.

The man of fixed purpose he has shown himself at least to be, unturned from his course, even though some thousands of miles divided him from Katherine. She had weighed that in the balance of his favor, credited it to his account. But the asset most powerfully in his unconscious possession was the tragedy that had fallen upon her, the fate that like the sword of Damocles hung, poised above her head, held by a thread, the strands of which were daily loosening, hourly fraying to the inevitable fall.

What would he think of her if he knew? She judged him accurately, assessed his value with the true precision of her instinct. If he knew, the loathing which she had for herself would be his as well. He found health, nerve, courage in her. That was what charmed him. If he had found youth her charm alone, and she had lost it! There was no generosity in men under a circumstance such as this—love, affection, admiration went from them—even the ghost of these was given up. Men had no power of simulation.

Did the attitude of John never cross her mind? It would seem that it did not. If the innermost thought of her were dragged out into the light, it would be seen that her heart was set upon Seyd. The letters had done the mischief. In them, had he but known it, she had yielded herself, determined for pleasure in the few months that were left her. But this most secret thought of all, she would not admit, even to her own consciousness.

The dog-cart, she sent alone to meet him. Here she felt that she was not giving away. Eagerness, none should see in her. Dignity was offended by the thought of it, respect outraged. And with Seyd, least of all, would she show the tenseness of her mind. Wherefore, not only did the dog-cart go alone, but Barbara it was who met him in the hall.

Not for one moment in those six months that had passed had she forgotten her dislike of him. With the man it was different. Six months had swept the friction of their last conversation from his mind. At the time he had admitted to her dislike of him. Some thousands of miles, some thousands of faces had rolled over that knowledge, obliterating it. The thought was gone from him.

Finding her there, waiting tor him in the hall, he conceived her an ally, grasped her hand, treating her as such.

“You think of the East,” he said, his face browned, glowing with health, lighting with enthusiasm. “You think of the East—minarets, pinnacles, temples of jewelled gods sinking down in an opal dust of sunset; but my Heavens! when I got out of the train just a little while ago and looked at the flat country, gray and green, monotonous, I wouldn’t have given it for the valley of diamonds or the golden gates!”

Barbara translated all this as the words ran from his lips. It was Katherine he would not have exchanged. Intimacy between them must have ripened since he had been away—fruit that some sun has fed with its nourishing warmth. There was a sure tone of confidence in his voice. He entered the field a winner. It was as though he carried the odds with him, displayed to the world. No dark horse this; the favorite cantering down to the starting-post, all eyes on him, all breaths held until the moment when he should romp home, fulfilling every expectation.

In the uncertain light of her ignorance, Barbara’s mind, reaching out, found the letters. There lay the solution of his confident assurance. Week after week, not one failing, he had written to her. Each one, as she saw it now, had been a thread in the texture of the cloak that was blinding them both.

“You’re glad to be back, then?” she said, offering little encouragement to his enthusiasm.

“Glad?” His good spirits were unquenchable. Not even tne cnining tone ot rnroara s voice couia cneck their exuberant vitality. Here was the boy back from school, home for the holidays with a new lease of life and blood galloping through the veins to live it. No scheme seemed impossible, no adventure too thrilling. In such mind as this, the returning school-boy flings his arms about a mother’s neck, disarraying, crumpling her attire, careless of everything. Distant though she was, Seyd could have done as much to Barbara, risking rebuff, daring retaliation.

“Glad?” he repeated once more. “That word’s not robust enough. But how is she—Mrs. Spurrier? Quite well again now, of course. She wrote to me sometimes, and her letters seemed cheery enough, but she never mentioned anything actually about her health.”

A thought, winged as an arrow, poised in the bow of Barbara’s mind. There was the string taut! One relaxation of the fingers and it would sing its note of death to all this business; the hum of the arrow speeding to its mark would become words, telling him the truth of Katherine, opening his eyes, killing sentiment. Should she tell him of the state of Katherine’s health? Could she tell him? What Katherine would say left no doubt in her mind. Or was it fair to Katherine herself? It was not her place to tell him. From Katherine’s quiver the arrow must come; but would she ever withdraw it? Yes, she might do that. She might even fit it to the string; but would it ever speed forth on its errand of destruction?

As these questions danced dizzily before her eyes,

Seyd rattled imperturbably on. He gave her no opportunity to speak.

“You can’t guess what letters mean out there. I’ve had some years of it. You come to watch the arrival of the post as a cat watches a mouse. Letters are brought in and hungry eyes follow their doling out. Feeding-time! That’s what it amounts to. And you see the plate getting more and more empty as it comes round. Heavens! Will there be nothing left for you! That sort of feeling, you know. Then it passes you— empty—and you know you have nothing but hunger to nurse for the whole of the next seven days. Ah! Mrs. Spurrier!”

As though Barbara had never been in existence, as though his conversation with her had been a dream to this reality, he left her side and moved eagerly towards the broad oak staircase.

“Ah! Mrs. Spurrier!” The change of voice. So a singer alters his register as the need for expression requires it. It was not obtrusive, yet all ears heard it save his own.

Barbara turned a glance on her as she descended the stairs, and even she, antipathetic in that moment to all about her, fell to her Katherine’s fascination.

“I must change into something,” she had told Barbara when the dog-cart with its orders had departed for the station. “You had better be in the hall when he comes—some one must be there to meet him.”

Her tone here had been casual, the indolent expression of nonchalance. Yet now, as she came forward to meet Seyd’s out-stretched hand, Barbara realized that the change, so lightly alluded to, had been made with scrupulous care, infinite insight. She wore the tailor-made dress of a woman whose home is the country. Health it suggested, youth, energy—the essence of all three. No man would dream of asking her how she was when he saw her in that costume. Health would be taken for granted—and good spirits? There they danced in her eyes like the reflection of the sun on a summer sea.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, surveying her, “the summer’s done wonders for you. Do you remember the last time I saw you—down here—you doubted whether you could walk to the top of that hill ?”

“It was certainly a pull,” she agreed.

Seyd caught the sound of restraint in her voice. What had changed her? From those last letters of hers, he would have expected a warmer welcome than this. Had he to begin all over again? It amounted to that. In ten minutes he had realized it. Katherine, writing from out of the heart of her, was another creature to come into actual contact with. He had expected the gentle pressure of the hand, the allusion in conversation to their letters, which held secrets none others knew. He had anticipated that she would seek to be alone with him. But in everything he was disappointed. Reserve was a shield before her. When Barbara proposed that she should go down to the village, Katherine begged her to stay. In comparison, it seemed more formal than the very first time when he had called there with the Martins. The six months had made a difference, notwithstanding their corre- spondence. She had to be won all over again. Seyd rose to it, undaunted.

“Are you staying down here for good?” he asked, as they walked into lunch.

“No. I go back to Town to-morrow. Can’t do without my rides in the park yet.”

“You ride in the morning?”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Ah—if you find me there, will you object?”

“Not at all, but don’t do it on my account.”

Seyd?s eyes questioned hers, but received no answer. Here the usual quickness of his understanding failed him. He thought her interest in him all but gone—only a spark of it left, that hazardously found a life for itself in the dead ashes. That she was afraid of him, still more that she was afraid of herself, never occurred to his mind.

So women appear incomprehensible. There is little that a man need have fear of. Emotion sways him, and he lets the storm have its swing. Appearances! Where do they count? Deeds matter in the long run; appearances not at all. But with a woman deeds must give way to appearances when the matter comes to a balancing of the scales. By the latter alone her doings are judged; by the latter alone her state of mind is published to the world.

With all her knowledge of herself, Katherine here foresaw the end. But to show that knowledge by one look in the eyes, to convey its existence by one word on the lips, would mean the crushing of chance, the immediate making of the inevitable.

So, while at Glenworth, she held him at bay. But before he left for Town that evening Seyd took courage in both his hands and questioned her change of manner. Here you have the foolhardiness of the man of arms driven into action, letting the winds take caution with them and scatter it like seed the thistle sheds.

Had Katherine’s life been other than it was, had youth and time been there at her disposal, Seyd in this moment would have crushed his chances under heel. But here the tragedy that he knew nothing of came to his unconscious aid. It was not in her mind to lose him. Pride had to stand aside to let this craving of hers for life pass on.

“Do you know, I find a great difference in you,” he said, standing in the hall at the moment of his departure. Barbara had said good-bye some time previously, receiving no pressing invitation from Katherine to stay.

“I don’t suppose you’ve changed in yourself,” he continued — “I don’t suggest that. But in your attitude to me. If I look through all your letters when I get back to-night, as I shall do, I shall find an utterly different personality.”

“You’ve kept all my letters?” Her heart lurched in her.

“Every single one of them.”

“Why?”

That was a dangerous question to ask. It fell from her before she could conceive the possibilities of his answer. Hastily, then, she amended it, concealed it, as a child, in fear of discovery, hides the broken pieces of some ornament.

“I thought I made the request that they should be burned?”

“Not to my knowledge. Why should they be burned?”

“No woman likes her correspondence to be seen.”

How she was bending to him! It is in this grip of a man that a woman, no matter what her personality, comes to be powerless. Seyd could see then, in that moment, Katherine too, that with the tightening of his fingers he could wring her submission from her. But that was not the way he intended the winning of Katherine. Conquered in such a way as this, she would never be submissive—always the thorn in the side, drawing blood.

“Your letters shall never be seen except by the person for whom they were intended. I, too, would burn them rather.”

“Why should you be afraid that others should see them?” So she turned on him, fighting vainly for her preservation.

“Fear doesn’t come into it. Those letters are the only thing that I possess, calling value, in the world.”

“But how are you sure that they are safe from other people’s inspection?”

“I have them under lock and key—unapproachable. I would give them up to no one—but to you; and if you asked me for them, I could not sacrifice them for nothing.”

He took her hand, raising it slowly to his lips—slowly, that she might withdraw it if she wished. But there it lay, the fine, white fingers in his broad palm. For one moment, he let his eyes consume them; then, with lips trembling, strained to the utmost for self-possession, he kissed them.

“Every morning shall find me in the park at eleven,” he said, thickly. “I shall find you there, I hope. Good-bye.”

Her lips made the words, but her voice refused them. She stood there like a willow that the storm has shaken, and, when the grating of the wheels on the drive reached her ears, the tears for some unaccountable reason found her eyes, and there in the hall, some minutes later, Barbara discovered her, a shadow of herself.

CHAPTER XXV

THERE is a great and marvellous circus situated—stationary—in the heart of this immense London of ours. It is an institution, fixed, moving not even into the provinces to seek the favor of the multitude. To Londoners only are the performances repeated day after day, varying—never in the performance itself— only in the performers. Every morning from the early hour of seven o’clock—if there is light—until twelve or twelve-thirty, some one of the troupe may be seen in the ring doing his or her turn to whatever spectators there may be. It is the cheapest show in London. The price of admission is uniform—one penny. For one single penny, you may take a seat between Lord Bayswater and the Duchess of Bedford Park and witness the most interesting of spectacles that the County Council permits and affords for your amusement!

They say that money is water in the sieve of London if you would enjoy yourself. But it is only the plays that are not worth listening to and the shows that are not worth seeing that cost money in this hypocritical city of London. Why pay five shillings—anything to two or three guineas—at the Coliseum to see a fine lady on a white horse, when at Banbury Cross, or even in Hyde Park, for the sum of one penny you may behold many a gracious dame seated on horses of various colors? Fine ladies too, with whom are histories and scandals, making them of infinitely greater interest than your poor, tinselled thing whose faded satin shoes are pinching her heels, and whose beer is waiting for her, losing all its gay frothiness as it stands beside the make-up box on her dressing-table.

It is the Row—the world-famed Rotten Row—that is the tanned arena of this great and wonderful circus. Comedy, Tragedy, Life & Co., the most renowned of entertainers on the face of this globe. Theatres they have everywhere over the earth; circus arenas too. But there is only one Rotten Row.

Here, at seven o’clock in the morning, from behind the scenes, into which only the select and favored few are ever permitted to peer, you will find a certain number of men and women doing their turns. These are all the people of energy, taking perhaps the only exercise they can obtain during the day—stolen before the very face of the clock. These do not interest you? Few, it is true, go to see them. Yet among them you will find the men who are building up the history of this nation of England—the men of energy, the men of health, the men of action. John, you would have found among them—one of the first.

But are there no freaks—no clowns? is there no comedy in this, what you call, inimitable show ? Ah— your inclination is for humor! Here, then,you have it to the full. Clowns! You have plenty! From nine-thirty until ten-thirty, while critical London sits at its breakfast, the arena is theirs alone. You will find them fighting in the unyielding saddle against the demon of obesity. Comic warfare this. If there is yet the child in you, you will throw up your hands and laugh till the tears are falling down your cheeks. That elderly man there in faultless attire, with pallid face and agonized expression—once he tripped it with the best, had his fling—lived the life. Now you see him under pain of death trotting round the arena every morning, yearning to entice back the circulation of his sluggish blood to its worn-out channels. Under pain of death! Fighting to win back the glamour of the past! There is a wealth of humor in this. Look at that woman with heated face and wide eyes, gripping her reins with the nervous force of determination. Your eyes twinkle, and there is a smile twitching on your lips before you ever hear the comic history of her. Once she was a slender girl, winning hearts—trampling on them perhaps. Opportunity was there, for London was at the feet of her. She was feted—ah! Those were the times! She lived too; had her day. You find her here, struggling to win it back. In her face—can’t you see it?—that fixed, untiring belief: “If I keep on at this—every morning— one hour—taking it seriously—the day will come back” —and then the little act that follows behind the scenes, which no one may behold. Hope stepping onto, the weighing-machine and the hand of Fate pointing to thirteen - stone. Oh! Comedy! Can you ask more than this?

What then, after? Who follows these? Where is the queen of the circus, without whom no arena is complete? You mean the thing of tinsel, gkirts expos- ing rather than concealing the graceful limb? You want your heart to flutter and your lower lip to fall? You want to know what envy is, to wish that you were only in her place? At eleven o’clock, as the bell chimes and the band strikes up its metallic music, with a thumping of drums and a blowing of horns, the queen of the ring rides into the arena.

Is she winning? Is she dainty? Does she always smile as sweetly as that? Are her lips always as red? Paint? It could not be! Why shatter illusions? You will not have it so! Those ropes of pearls! Those diamonds and that gold! They must pay her immense sums of money to enable her to buy such trinkets as these! Yes—they pay her well—those who employ her.

Hear the shouts of applause as she enters! She is only going to trot gracefully round the arena, revealing her beauties to the crowd of which you at least are one. The thing of tinsel! - The catch of the season! You will not have it so? Yet there it is. Listen to the shouts again. What has she done? Merely bowed in her winning way, dazzling all eyes, seizing all hearts. Who would believe that she was rotten to the very core! Rotten Row! Suitably called! The statement would be sweeping did it not admit of exceptions. But there are plenty of them. Katherine was one. You find her entering the Row at eleven o’clock, every morning that she was in Town, sitting her horse as though the saddle had cradled her. So she rode over the very ground that John had covered some hours before.

When first he had heard of her intention to ride, he had gone at once to Henning.

“Do you think it’s wise?” he had asked; then, seeing the expression on Henning’s face, he realized the fatuity of the question; was answered, yet struggled still for satisfaction.

“I understand well enough what you mean when you look like that,” he exclaimed. “Why play games of chance with the inevitable. But believe me, it’s not that. Think of it, though—two years! Imagine what one day of that means to me! I don’t want to lose a single hour of it.”

“It has not been said that you will.”

“But I may?”

“And she certainly will lose an hour’s enjoyment out of every day. She’s fairly free from pain, I think; really she’s wonderfully free; if it doesn’t make that worse, then—” His shoulder finished the sentence in a shrug.

John’s head turned to the window, avoiding Henning’s eyes. This was the point—her unconscious happiness (unconscious he imagined it to be) or his conscious loss — which? Silently he took Henning’s arm in a grip and, without a word, left him.

So you behold Katherine, riding every morning. Once or twice, she endeavored to persuade John to come and see her start.

“Just come to the steps,” she urged, pressing him to it with voice and eyes.

He pleaded the first excuse that came to his lips. She would have him torture himself with the sight, as well as with the knowledge of that which was robbing him of her sooner than need be.

“Aren’t you rather selfish?’’ she whispered, bending over his shoulder.

“Perhaps I am.” He waited until the door had closed behind her, and then a curse forced a way from him.

After that she would not ask him again; and every time he heard the horses starting from the open door, her words came back to his memory—“Aren’t you rather selfish?” Was he? He drove his pen bitterly over the paper. If necessary, she must think him so.

But do you imagine Katherine harboring thoughts? Speech robbed her of them at the moment when they entered her mind. It may all have added to the deep impression in her heart that John had no power to make her happy. Every moment of hope that dies gives up its body to the structure of despair—coral insects yielding their lives that life and death may walk where deep waters once glittered in the sun.

Here she rides then, morning after morning, so long as the weather held. On horseback, her will against the animal’s beneath her, the moments were enchantment—time that is spun from a fairy’s wand. Her eyes were shut to the people about her. You find no posing for the crowd in Katherine. Then, indeed, she rode in her kingdom of romance—all of it make-believe! Once draw her attention to those who passed by and it was shattered. But then the prince came galloping out to meet her on his chestnut mare, trappings glittering in the sunlight, the inevitable striking from his eyes. She yielded to him. It was the story. The— once upon a time—must have its ending as the telling runs. From that time and onward, she rode with Seyd. Exhilaration brought its forgetfulness. The wind beat on her face; his questions tingled in her ears, and when their eyes met, as when perhaps they turned to retrace their steps, all that would be impossible for a woman to say, all that would be impossible for a man to listen to in silence, sped between them as the lightning flames.

Romance! It must come once in a woman’s life. She saps her knowledge of the world from it, but only realizes that knowledge when it has passed. Romance is the birth of her. When the glamour of that has gone —faded; when the trappings on the prince’s steed have lost their laughter at the sun; when the sound of the approaching shoes rings no more music from the courtyard stones, then her eyes are opened. It may be a moment, it may be a year; with some, indeed, the time is long in coming. But once it has passed, the phase goes with it. She is the woman now, ready, fit, prepared to become the mother. The last development this. She holds it, the power of it, the sympathy, the touch until the end.

To find romance, then, let us watch her. Day by day, Seyd won her back to the intimacy that had existed between them. Those months when he was away, it had been the hesitating pen chained with limitations. But you cannot chain the eyes of a man in whom passion is burning like a beacon on a headland; neither can you make his voice a slave to the whispered demands of conventionality. Armed with the firebrand of his desires, he throws a light into the darkest corners of speech, lights up the meaning of his soul, lying concealed behind every word.

So Katherine read his thoughts by the illumination of the passion that overwhelmed him. It was a yielding to everything. She offered no obstacles, thwarted him not at all. As the animal that stretches its length in the sensual pleasure of the warm sun, she let her conscience be lulled and her delight be won by his persistent wooing.

Time after time he took her out to a theatre, to dine here, to supper there. John asked no questions. His belief in her was too implicit to admit of suspicion. If she were happy—so long as he knew it, so long as he found her so—he would deny her nothing. Seyd, he knew, was back in England; had met him on one or two occasions. Katherine employed no deceit to conceal her friendship with him. If John did not always ask her where she had been, she felt no compulsion for voluntary confession. Whenever he did inquire of her whereabouts, she made no offer to refuse him knowledge. His remarks were usually the same:

“Enjoy the piece?”

“Immensely.”

“Why don’t you go and see so-and-so? They tell me it’s excellent.”

Always the naked belief in her, unclothed with any of those many garments — suspicion and the like — which we put on, next to the skin, for our own protection. His opinion of women was unchanged. Unpos- sessed himself of the lusts of the flesh, he saw virtue a straight, unbending path traversed by every woman who had the gentleness of birth and the refinement of soul. Yet his Anatomy of Change showed an abstract knowledge of human nature at which, knowing his ignorance of actual humanity, one might well marvel.

There was no need for Katherine to hide anything from him. When he questioned her, she made no concealment. But with Barbara! Here you have a very different matter. Suspicion in women is ingrained in their love—the two are inseparable; mental antennae susceptible to the lightest touch, trembling in the keenness of their receptivity. To Barbara, she said nothing. Barbara, she knew, was watching her. It was Barbara, if really she feared any one at all, from whom she felt reproof.

Then came the inevitable climax towards which she and Seyd had been mounting step by step together.

“I’ve got a box to-night for the opera,” he said, when he met her in the Row.

Katherine’s eyes looked into the distance.

“You’ll come—won’t you? ‘Boheme.’”

“La Boheme”! The remembrance of the music thrilled her. She felt the close approach of the end. Ought she to go? Mimi’s farewell song rang through her blood—vibrating.

“Don’t you think we’re going about too much?”

“From my point of view, or yours?”

“Well—say yours.”

“That is impossible. I find myself a man without an aim in life when I can’t entertain you.”

“Then from mine?”

“That I can’t answer. It’s a question of so many things with you.” Here he was honest. So he had won her all through. No lie had the man ever told her, no deception, no false argument had he ever used. “We go this path”—so he might have said in actual words — “this is to where it leads—do you think it worth while to pursue it?” No seduction, based upon deceit, would ever have won her. That he had realized when first he had seen her at Glenworth. To find herself befooled, he knew well what attitude of mind would be hers then—the typhoon, driving all before it.

“So many things?” she questioned, apprehensively. “What things?”

“Whether it were worth while—that, perhaps, most of all—and that, without doubt, you know better than I.”

“You say you’ve got a box?”

“Yes—rather high up. I’m afraid it’s on the third tier.”

“Why couldn’t you get seats in the stalls.”

“I could have done so.”

“Then why didn’t you.”

“Because there are many things I want to say to you. To say them in the stalls would be impossible.”

“Do you intentionally put me on my guard?”

“Yes—intentionally. But it is not putting you on your guard. That is the wrong way of looking at it. You have nothing to guard against from me. I’ve told you before that I find your personality absolutely convincing. That in itself is a guard to you with any man. In what I shall do, I ask you to trust me implicitly.

Perhaps you already realize that you can. What I may say—and, as I tell you, I have a whole sheaf of things to talk about—is subject to your commands. You can issue an order for silence and it shall be implicitly obeyed.”

“Do you want me to tell you now whether I am going or not?”

“I would rather.”

“Can’t I telephone to you this afternoon?”

“If you would prefer that—certainly.”

“I would prefer to do that.”

“Very well—I shall be in my rooms—all the afternoon. You know the telephone number.”

You hear the quietness of the voices, the almost matter-of-fact tone in which everything is said? So is the lull in the heavens, the leaden atmosphere of silence that drags its weight onto the very soul of you before the bursting of the storm.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE storm burst. In the afternoon Katherine tele phoned her acceptance. Remember that human nature, as with a story, must run its course. There are certain lines which it follows or avoids, according to its individual personality. She had to go, you say, otherwise there would have been no story. That is not the point of view at all. The object here, is not to spin a fairy tale for you. Here human nature weaves its own plot. Katherine’s going is no exigency of the narrative; much rather is it Katherine’s humanity. Eighteen more months of her life; did it ever enter your mind that she would refuse?

They met in the vestibule, shaking hands in a silence in which words lay hiding from expression. In silence they made their way up to the third tier, waiting while the attendant unlocked the door of the box and admitted them. The sound of the key as she turned it struck on Katherine’s ears; the suggestion of a door which had to be unlocked, closing behind them when once they had entered, tightened the strings upon which her entire outlook of the situation was pitched.

“A programme, sir?” asked the attendant.

“Thank you.” Seyd handed her a shilling and took the valueless piece of paper. The attendant hunted ostentatiously among her money for change.

“I haven’t got a sixpence,” she said. “Shall—shall I go and see if I can get change?”

“No—it doesn’t matter—that’s all right.”

“Thank you,sir.” She drew a breath of relief. With a glance in Katherine’s direction, she closed the door. The snap of the latch behind her seemed to Katherine the application of the firebrand to the last boat. Now all her fleet was burning. But what did that matter? Where lay the value of the fleet to her, when in so short a time her command of it would be ended? Why not glory in the huge bonfire that tossed its flames and belched its great columns of smoke into the heavens? She had been forced into a bargain with Fate; one-sided it might seem to be from every point of view, but Katherine’s determination to win the best of it was unconquerable. Certain years of life were hers, by every right in the world; if Fate then sent her messenger of Death to claim them before their expiration, Katherine would cheat her of the better bargain. Into what time was left her, she would crowd the incidents of life, heaping one upon the other in the pressing need of time.

She faced the thousand theatre lights as Seyd removed her cloak from her shoulders. His knuckles, as he gripped it, touched her skin, completing the circuit of the nervous current that was alive and racing within her. There was no intention in it. She felt that; but in the silence that still breathed like the breath of a sleeper, every little incident was magnified in weight, bringing down the scales, playing havoc with the balancing of all thoughts.

Until the moment when he had taken off his own coat, hung it upon the pegs behind them, and seated himself on a chair in the shadows of the box, they had said nothing. There was something prophetic in this. Silence is an atmosphere in which only thoughts that are deep-moving can find a means to live. One or the other, if they had felt it, would have struggled with conventional words to break the silence; yet neither, so far, had offered to dispel the power of its influence.

Their situation in the theatre, two tiers directly over the stage-box, placed them in such a position that they could be seen only by those immediately opposite. When Seyd then took his seat in the shadows, facing the stage at an oblique angle, this suddenly became evident to Katherine.

“Why did you take this particular box?” she asked.

You hear the question, prompted by the sudden thought, thrown from her, those living gray eyes of hers directing it.

For a moment he looked at her, weighing whether it should be the truth. The truth it always had been; why not now?

“I object to finding myself in the zone of glasses between the acts. This and the corresponding box on the other side are the only places where you can escape it.”

“But can you always manage to get either one or the other?”

“If you book far enough in advance.”

“When did you get this, then?”

“Nearly a week ago. Only a few days after I came back to town.”

An intuitive flash of comprehension glittered dangerously in her eyes.

“Some one disappointed you, I suppose, and you asked me?” She purred the words; but in the eyes he saw the power to strike. This was jealousy; she was driven to anger by what she believed to be true. It thrust a weapon in his hand, revealed a weak spot in the chain of her armor. She was his, then; he saw the end, as a general of forces sees victory in the turning of a single flank of the enemy. He leaned forward.

“That would offend you?” he asked.

As one half overbalanced to take a leap, she steadied herself.

“No woman likes a poor compliment.” She drilled her voice to callousness.

“You believe that to be the case, then?”

“I’m not thinking about it now.”

A moment more and he would have lost the advantage; she was wresting the foil from his hand. Then he struck.

“I took it meaning that you and I should be here or the box go empty.”

She twisted round. “You counted on me?”

“I count on nothing where you are concerned. The chances were even; there might almost have been odds that the box would go empty. I took my chance—a sporting one.” He tried to force her eyes to his, but failed. The conductor had taken his chair, the baton was raised, the violin bows were hovering over the strings like the trembling wings of dragon-flies. Seyd caught his breath, and his gaze towards Katherine burned through the shadows. She tried to concentrate her attention on the waves of melody that, like a heated vapor from exotics, rose upward, weakening her; but the knowledge of Seyd’s presence behind her was only intensified by it. Driven, swept with passion, a man electrifies the atmosphere that surrounds a woman. It may be an atmosphere of loathing; it may be one of total submission to delight; but whatever that atmosphere may be, her mind is strung like the finest string of a harp to the knowledge of its vibrating existence.

So Katherine, her eyes searching aimlessly through the brilliant lights to the crowded stalls beneath, could feel the overwhelming presence of Seyd’s existence behind her. Tone by tone the note of her nervous imagination was raised, until it seemed there in that starved space that some one must speak, the curtain must be raised, or she would be compelled to get up, yielding to the strain of it, and leave the box.

His voice broke the silence, lifted it—the raising of a cumbrous curtain behind which existence suffocated.

“What have you done with the little gold Buddha?” he asked.

“I have it still. Buddha, ‘the One who knows’— that’s what you told me the name meant, didn’t you?”

She sought wildly for trivialities, as one who, with the law upon his heels seeks desperately for disguise. But each trivial remark, as she made it, he conjured into a meaning charged with danger.

“The One who knows—that is right. How much of his wisdom has he imparted to you? How much do you know? How much do you realize of all I have to tell you?”

Here the lights faded through the theatre—darkness leaped upon the brilliancy like a great animal overwhelming its prey, and the curtain rose on the interior in the Latin Quarter. Katherine seized the opportunity for release, leaning forward as though drawn by the magnetism of the voices beneath her on the stage.

“If you persist in talking while the curtain is up, I shall be really angry,” she said, with a laugh.

Was this the feline instinct, this playing with the game? Was she merciless—tantalizing—toying with the swaying influence of her fascination? No—not for a moment. Here was reality; she did not play with that. Fear, anticipation, temerity were goading her like rowels of a spur. When she laughed, it was as the acrobat perched on the dizzy height, who laughs down into the faces of those below him. She knew that Seyd was driven to the utmost limit of his restraint; a word, a look, a touch from her, and the floodgates of his intensity would be opened—she would be overwhelmed. So she stood with circumstance then, as one holding a greyhound by the leash on the course, when the prey is still in sight. The moment was bound to come when she must loose the knot and let that power find freedom and release; but the anticipation of the sudden, sweeping rush awed her. It was in these moments that she felt life beating in the blood; so she had determined to have it.

As the curtain fell on the first act, Katherine leaned back in her seat with lips half parted, eyes watching the opposite box as though engrossed with interest in its occupants.

“I’m sure I know those people over there,” she said, with apparent ease. “The face of that man—looking through the glasses now—is perfectly familiar.”

Seyd leaned his arm on the back of her chair. As the sleeve of his coat brushed her shoulders, she bent forward. It might have seemed that she found her position uncomfortable; it might have seemed that she was annoyed by the nearness of the attitude which he had taken. But Seyd read it to be neither of these. Fear! He saw it in her eyes, traced it on the expression of her mouth. She—Katherine! The girl whom he had seen driving a bolting horse into the teeth of death, without a tremor in her face, eyes dancing to the tune of danger—she was afraid, and of him, of his nature; the nature which, in the meekest of men, can quell a woman into supine submission.

“Are you going to persist in talking of the commonplace?” he asked, with a muffled voice.

She turned glittering eyes to his. “I’ll talk of anything you like,” she said, brightly, “if you’ll get me a cup of coffee. I was so anxious not to keep you waiting in the vestibule, that I wouldn’t wait for it at home.” Her voice was high-pitched; it had almost the sound of a woman in whose brain the fumes of wine are dancing revels. But she gained her armistice. Seyd obeyed her commands, and by the time that they had settled down again, Katherine with the cup before her on the ledge, he watching her with hollow eyes whenever she raised it to her lips, the curtain had lifted on the second act.

In the interval which followed this, she kept him by adroit strategy at a distance that was narrowing with the passing of the minutes. It was in the third act, where Mimi sings her farewell song, that the first moment of the crisis came.

“Listen to this—you must listen to this,” she whispered, tensely, as he drew his chair nearer to hers. “The end of this song of Mimi’s always takes the last breath of strength out of me.”

He heard her words as the song began. He fitted them into the music as it lifted, rising to the very crisis of its melody. And then where it runs to its climax—as Katherine leaned back again with a deep-drawn breath into her chair, Seyd seized her hand with fingers tense as steel.

“Ah—don’t!” she whispered.

But in her voice vibrated the note of submission, echoing with the dominant of the song.

“Don’t—oh, don’t!” she pleaded, as he burned her hand with his kisses; but she did not withdraw it, and in the words as they broke in utterance, Seyd heard the cry of her heart that she did not claim obedience.

CHAPTER XXVII

LIFE is a great and ever-flowing river, rising from j the womb of the earth, racing to the grave of the sea; sudked up then in the spirit of mist into the heavens and cast down again bringing pregnancy once more to the earth, that she may give forth her everlasting yield. All nature works upon this law, and the life that we see is the river itself; the river racing, eddying; the river stagnant or moving evenly to its end. There are currents in this river of life into which, if a man should fall, there is little hope for him to steer a course to safety. In such a current, Katherine and Seyd were now engulfed; he, yielding to the inevitable flood; she, struggling against its incomprehensible power, twisting this way, tossing that, in her futile endeavors to find still water.

Yielding comes easier to a man than to a woman. The chances are that he will be swept into the quieter stream, finding release; but with the woman it more often is the inevitable whirlpool, sucked into which, there is no escape. So her struggles are the fiercer; she yields at greater cost, with greater reluctance. You find Seyd watching Katherine’s efforts to shake free, as the physician contemplates the struggles of his patient, fighting for the retention of consciousness against the tightening grip of the anaesthetic—waiting —merely waiting for the moment of oblivion.

When once with the outburst of his passion, Seyd had kissed her hands, the rush of the current was deafening in their ears, robbing reason, silencing conscience as you bewilder a child into quietness with a torrent of words. The conquering power of Katherine’s personality had lost its weapon of defence; the strength to wield it was there, but it lay between them on the ground as his eyes flamed before hers.

“What are we going to do,” he asked, “when this is over?” The last scene was in progress; Mimi was dying to the whispering of the violins. But the stage was forgotten, swept out of existence. Here between them, as they sat together conventionally in that box on the third tier, was playing a real tragedy of life more absorbing, more compelling than any lit by footlights before a spellbound audience. Yet if eyes were cast in their direction, you would have found them casually withdrawn, untouched by the sight of those two figures who, before as large an audience as any actor or actress can wish, were playing out the parts allotted to them by that greatest director of every human drama whereof the stage is life itself.

“What are we going to do?” he repeated, when for answer she only looked and looked away.

Katherine shook her head. In such matters as these, it is not the woman’s part to act. In asking the question, it was not Seyd’s intention that she should. His course of action lay mapped out before him as the course of a river is drawn; this was merely a test of her submissiveness.

“We go to supper—anyhow.”

“No—oh, I think we’d better not.” She tried to drive force, determination, into the words, but he caught at the unwilling effort.

“You don’t mean that. You can’t deny me that. We’ve had supper before together.”

“Yes—but—but the circumstances were different.” “Different! Yes, different in a concrete way. Were they intrinsically different in the abstract? Have you been blind all this time to a knowledge that I cared for you as a drowning man cares for life, as a starving man cares for the crust that will set the blood running in his veins again?” He sought wildly for his similes, taking the first that came at random to his lips. “All this time do you mean to tell me that you have been ignorant—untouched by it? From that day of the accident when the pluck of you won praise from me that I dared not utter then? — after you were thrown out, while you lay unconscious with your head on my arm— can you tell me that you know no more of life than to think I could see you as often as I have, write to you as often as I have written, and be answered as you have answered me, without being burned by this sort of thing? Yet now you say circumstances are different! I tell you they’ve altered not one jot, except by the touching of my hands on yours. These things that I am saying now, we’ve said over together a thousand times in our minds. I’ve seen them crossing and recrossing in your eyes You! You’ve read them a million times in mine. You infer that we should not go out to supper together now; you suggest that it is wrong. If it is wrong now, why has it not been wrong these nights before?”

All this the unswerving instinct of the man to make the woman culpable in order to gain his ends.

“It has been wrong,” she replied. The rush of his words had left her more breathless than he. Her lips were parted, the great, black pupils of her eyes swept out the gray in their predominance.

“Wrong! You admit it!” Now she was slender grass before the blade of the sickle. He balanced the weapon in his hand and whirled it round.

“How much more do you admit with that? Have you brought me to this, eyes open, conscious to the last, wantonly, mercilessly? I don’t believe it! Women of your stamp shape finer than that.” He bent nearer to her, stamping the words with conviction. “Whatever I may be—I don’t praise myself—but you care for me. It may be passing—perhaps a week could kill it, but you care for me now. No woman would have gone as far as this for the simple game of it. When you begged me to stop a little while ago, when I was kissing your hand, you never meant it. ‘Go on!’ your voice said, while your lips cried, ‘Don’t!’ What are you trying to save by saying that you won’t come to supper afterwards? Not my opinion of you — if that could matter anyway. Not your reputation— you have come out with me before and nothing has touched that. Do you think you can lead a man as you have led me and find, when at the crisis, that he will be just as tractable, just as docile as you could wish him? Not for a moment have you thought that; not for a moment have you supposed that once I broke all barriers, I should be the meek, obedient creature, uncertain of my mood, unmoved by what blazed in me! Then why have you done all this? Why? Two reasons—with you there can be only two. Either you care for me—God grant that—or life has seemed dull, uninteresting, and you have cried for relief, needing excitement, craving the quick pulse, seeking the moment when things lie in the hollow of the hand. Do you remember when I gave that as my definition of enjoyment to Miss Durrant? I saw your eyes light up; I knew you then—even then.”

If John had only wooed her this way, thrusting his strength upon her, forcing her to the bended knee, demanding his right of submission as Seyd was doing now! Katherine bent under it as metal crumples in the furnace. Yet this was the fire she had yearned to raise; for this she had blown the tiny spark which, on their first meeting, she had seen strike its light in Seyd’s eyes. How kindle it until, with the lifting of the breeze, it burned all before it? That had been her question, that her aim, half conceived in their first acquaintance, determined upon when once she had heard the sentence on her life.

Until this was accomplished, she, as thousands of men and women before her have done, counted that existence was incomplete. This furnace she must pass through before she could consider that life was well begun. To the full she must realize the power of womanhood that she possessed, see its havoc-working strength upon one being at least before she could say that breath and body had not been given her in vain. Here is the glamour stripped from Katherine, as you tear the tinsel from the gilded toy. No heroine! How could the qualities of heroineship be claimed for her? You find her as Cleopatra of old, watching the slave victims writhing in their death agonies as she learned the power of her poisons from their distorted lips and twisted limbs.

But now that the furnace was in full blast and the flames licked her, she found herself consumed in it. There seemed no escape; she wanted none.

“Where do you propose to go to supper?” she asked. “We might be seen anywhere. I know you’ll repeat that we’ve been out to supper before; but I can’t help what you say—this is different.”

“You don’t want to be seen?” he asked, with a rising breath.

“No—I mustn’t be seen—if I am to come.”

“Then my rooms—I can give you supper there.” He steeled his voice to quietness as you bend straight a rod of iron.

Katherine searched his face apprehensively. She believed then that the suggestion had only that moment occurred to him.

“Your rooms in St. James’s?” she asked, hesitatingly.

“St. James’s Court—the place is absolutely quiet, right out of the stream of the traffic.”

“If I came, I couldn’t stay for long—not more than half an hour at the outside.”

“Then let’s get away now before this is over and the other theatres empty.” He pushed his chair back eagerly, half rising to his feet in anticipation of her acquiescence. But still she sat there, forcing her eyes to the stage as if, by the concentration of her mind upon the play, she could shut out the overwhelming desire to yield.

“I said, if I came,” she said. Her voice was dry, her lips too parched to properly make the words.

With an effort Seyd gathered patience.

“You meant you would. At a moment like this it isn’t your words that mean anything.” He bent down nearer to her, pouring his words into her ears as you stifle the consciousness of pain with a narcotic. “Do you think if you came readily, offering no resistance, that I should love you the better for it?”

“Had I better come at all?” she whispered.

For answer, he took her cloak from the wall behind them, and held it up to place upon her shoulders. She turned and looked at him—wavering—the light of resistance flickering unsteadily in her eyes. Then it went out. She rose quickly and thrust her arms into the sleeves. With infinite care he kept his hands from touching her. This was a moment of undecided balance, when the scales, seemingly swinging in his favor, might in one moment be turned against him. Holding the door open for her, Katherine passed out into the passage. They said no word as they descended the broad stairs. So it had been when they had arrived; but now it was different; they were leading towards a greater crisis still.

In the vestibule Seyd told the commissionaire to get a hansom.

“Hansom! Hansom!”

Katherine heard it shouted outside. Still she said nothing. Seyd stole a glance at her, debating whether the silence were better than a bartering of the commonplace conversation. A casual remark was on his lips when the man in uniform beckoned to them.

“Hansom ready, sir.”

They went forward. Katherine’s teeth were set, her eyes steady. The commissionaire held her dress as she mounted on the step, and the next moment they were being carried along in the stream of the traffic— leaves that the wind has blown into the mill-race-all the sounds of life bubbling, eddying, dinning its jargon into their ears.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THERE, for your study of life, is the heart, mind, the soul of a woman, laid bare as the scalpel and lancet can strip it. Think of it placed out before you on the table in the psychological dissecting-room. If ever you have failed to understand Katherine, you shall understand her now.

They had passed through Long Acre, and the searching lights of the theatres in Leicester Square were glaring into their eyes before either of them spoke. Seyd broke the silence, broke it gently, as they speak— muffled voices—in a sick-room.

“You’re shivering,” he-said. “Why’s that—are you cold?”

“No, I’m not cold.”

Her lips barely opened to emit the words. Seemingly she grudged them with an ill-spared grace. “Then why?”

“Why does he drive through the most crowded thoroughfares? The man’s a fool!” Her nerves were tripping to a measure. Fear played the tingling tune.

Seyd snatched a glance at her. Her lips were thin, tight-pressed; her eyes swept from right to left of them with unceasing motion, scanning the faces as they passed, suspicious as a search-light on the eve of war.

“Can’t you tell him to avoid Piccadilly?” she snapped. “He’ll drive all down Piccadilly till he gets to St. James’s Street if”you don’t. Tell him!”

“I don’t think I’d better.”

“Why?” She rapped it out.

“No good making him suspicious.”

She halted, blood rushing to ice at this. A few more notes of the dance and her nerves would have given out.

“What does that matter—he’s only one—these”— her eyes swept over the jostling crowds—“these are thousands. Tell him to drive down by Pall Mall.” Seyd hesitated. The man, afraid to make a fool of himself even at the instance of the woman he wanted most. In his mind’s eye he saw the cabman in the divorce court cheerfully offering his evidence.

“If you don’t lift up the trap-door and tell him, I shall stop the cab and get out!”

No fear of mistaking her determination in this. She clipped her words with the blade of fear, leaving sharp edges on them all. Seyd raised his hand to the trap-door above his head, slowly, measuring her mood.

Her eyes were strained, pilloried. He heard a word hiss in her breath.

“If you don’t do it now—at once—it ’ll be too late!” she said, unevenly. He did it then, recognizing the inevitable in her voice.

Down Regent Street, then, they went, taking the quietness of Pall Mall, turning up into St. James’s Street. The court lay off the main thoroughfare, empty—not a soul was to be seen. Katherine breathed relief as she descended.

Here, now, was the last gate through which the man is swept, and at the portals of which nearly every woman hesitates, flesh willing and spirit weak. But you look for hesitation in Katherine in vain. She watched the cabman turn his horse, hoofs clattering on the macadamized road, bells jingling with the ungainly movements. If she had wished to draw back, there was her opportunity. It passed her, casting not even the faintest shadow of regret. As they mounted the dimly lit stairs together, ignoring the proffers of the lift-boy, the sound of the departing hansom sang a warning in her ears, but she discarded it.

Is this a woman with no sense of delicacy, no gentle refinement of reticence? Are consequences obliterated in her mind? Can she be the same person who has just driven through the streets, fear branding her with its red-hot iron? Surely she was afraid of consequences then! Not Katherine. Every consequence was weighed in her mind six months ago, when she foretold to herself this ultimate development of her acquaintance with Seyd. Now she defied them all. The fear that had shaken her in its grip while they drove to the theatre was no fear of recognition. Had she been recognized, passed some one in the street who had known her well, it would not have altered the course she was set upon. But the being seen by the thousands from whom, in her nervousness, she seemed to read the knowledge of what was in the making; that whipped her. The callow youth, even, when first he takes into the light of day the woman of his selection, feels that all eyes are grinning, laughing at his secret.

How much more must it be with a woman in whom the sensitiveness of modesty is like the balancing of a hair upon a razor edge? Modesty! In a woman unmoved by the contemplation of her own vice? Yet it takes a great deal more than the contemplation of viciousness to sweep out modesty from the gamut of human virtues.

All the finer, if not the higher, qualities at least are Katherine’s, many of the latter too. Her attitude towards life, you may blame that, but the most punctilious cannot but admit that she adopted it with courage. It is a dangerous sermon to preach, the courage of evil. There are those who have done it with a pretty tongue and smart epigram; but it has only succeeded in making evil attractive, glossing it with a coat of brilliants that scintillate with a fascinating light of pleasure. The courage of evil needs heavy words and cumbrous phrases, demanding a steady mind to unravel them. By this means alone can the sermon hope to avoid misconception.

Courage, no doubt, there is required to choose the wrong and follow it unswervingly, without hesitation, to its end. For some of those great characters in history and legend—the Robin Hoods and the Dick Turpins of our chronicles — admiration is won, rightly won; theirs at least was the courage of sincerity. How many are there among us who challenge and defy the moral law as did these highwaymen of old? Do we possess the courage of sincerity? With how many of us would not be found the negative virtues of compulsion and the negative vices of fear? Is there sincerity in either?

Here lies the danger in this doctrine of the courage of evil; for if a man shall choose vice rather than virtue, he must be told to be sincere in his viciousness; not toying with it, endeavoring to conceal it from himself as well as from those around him, but openly acknowledging his desire, openly pledging himself to gratify it. How many are there who could listen to that and not feel that there was something to be proud of in doing evil, after all? Few indeed! Yet let one who thinks that, endeavor to commit a sin, sincerely facing it, concealing it from no one, acknowledging the inevitable punishment to follow. He will find it a trying business. It is in secluded chambers, with blinds lowered and curtains drawn, where a man cannot see the hand that does the deed, and will not realize the mind that conceives it, that vice is followed and obeyed. Is there sincerity in that?

Sincerity you find, however, in Katherine. Hers was the vicious pursuit of pleasure; none realized that more than she. But here was no blindfolded game with her intentions. She saw them to the last, faced and acknowledged them. No offer suggested itself to her mind to withdraw. Seyd pleased her, attracted her; beyond that—nothing. He had found the way to win her—but was she won ? Neither the heart nor the soul of her! Won to choose him as the medium to her ends—nothing more than that.

What sort of a woman is this, then? From a man’s point of view, does such a woman exist who will yield herself wholly and alone to pleasure, with no love in the heart of her, no worship, however momentary, for the man to whom she gives all? On the lips of the majority of them you will find framed the instant negative. From this stand-point is taken the greater seriousness of a woman’s unfaithfulness. A man—so the unwritten law will tell you—can be unfaithful only with the needs of his body; but with a woman it must be the needs of the heart and soul as well. Once faithless, and her love is dead, her home sacrileged. Conveniently this is not so in the greater number of cases with a man.

In the nature of Katherine as an individual, you have the denial of all this. Her aim, the pleasures of the moment; the desire—calling this life—to live. Neither the heart nor the soul of her have been touched by any man as yet. The sacrament of matrimony— with these two short years before her—she has counted as nothing. Why in any number of cases is matrimony counted so sacred by a woman? Why, when before marriage she can be unfaithful to the vows of her own chastity, does she look with such religious eyes upon the strip of gold and the laying on of hands? Because matrimony is her sole support, and the first instinct of life is to support life and support it as comfortably as possible.

With Katherine you have none of the meanness of these motives; the courage of her intentions, however bad they may be, rises high above them. A quick beating of the heart, an uneven taking of the breath, there may have been these as she entered Seyd’s rooms and the door closed behind her; but if for one moment he imagined that his was the mastery of the situation— and such thoughts are wont to ride triumphant in the mind of a man—pride of conquest deluded him.

The chambers off St. James’s were comfortable—a bachelor’s quarters; two rooms, capacious in their way, opening one off the other with a well-sized hall giving entrance.

Seyd switched on the light as Katherine entered the sitting-room. You can see her eyes racing to the surroundings for their first impression. At a moment such as this, the mind of a woman is wax, imprintable to a feather’s weight. In that one comprehensive sweep, Katherine had made her estimate, turning then to him with pretty gesture, conveying beneath it her approval, yet signifying to him her enchanting ingenuousness.

Had one of the many women who had visited him in these chambers ever shown such charming naivete as she did?

“Jolly rooms!” they might have said, as they had thrown themselves into his most comfortable of chairs, their voices taking possession of all around them, their eyes assessing values, putting up everything to an auction. Katherine stood there like a child, awaiting his commands. Ah! But what lay behind it? It deceived our friend Seyd. The connoisseur of women may know his hobby well; but knowledge trips from him, like a dancer to the wings, when he becomes the ardent purchaser. Advise a friend! There is none so capable. Wisdom will fall from his lips as you pour syrup from a jar; but let the advice be needed by himself, and his lips are mute, his wisdom parched.

In such a case as this, Seyd would have warned a friend, beware of the woman strung to nerves, walk gently with her when she drapes herself in innocence; you’ll find only fire in her lips if you look for kisses, daggers in her eyes if you search for passion. But the case was his own, and wisdom was now blown on the four winds, scattered like down on the hedges.

“You sit in that chair,” he said, confidently, “while I look for supper.”

“Supposing there’s nothing?” she said, with a laugh. It caught hysterically on a high note, but it was a laugh; the first sign of gayety that she had shown since they had left the theatre. Seyd drained encouragement from it, left the sideboard where he was about to search for provisions, and came to her side.

“Would that matter?”

“I understood I was to come to supper.” She let her eyes scintillate into his while he swayed under them. This was power! She played with it tentatively, fearfully.

“Would you go, if there were none?”

His nostrils dilated, quivering after the words.

“I suppose I should be compelled to.”

“Then trust to my providing and prove it. Take off your cloak and that scarf over your head. This fire’s too warm. You’ll catch cold when you go out.”

She turned her back to him while he lifted it from her shoulders for the second time that evening.

“And the scarf,” he said.

She had half removed it as he held one end; then she turned.

“Why should you want the scarf off?”

“Your hair—it hides your hair.”

She would have bound it about her head again, had his hand not held the end. With a quick, impetuous movement he took it from her altogether, and there for a moment they stood, eyes burning their flames—two animals on the verge of battle.

“Do you blame me because I love your hair?” he asked.

That won her back again. The glittering beacon of revolt died out. She looked her pleasure, and for answer he called her—Katherine—the first time that the words had found the courage needed to place them on his lips.

“Katherine,” he said, and his voice was as low as the wind that rides before a storm.

She looked at him with calculating eyes, wondering whether she cared to hear him say it.

“What made you say that?” she asked.

Seyd put his hands lightly on her arms.

“The force of habit of saying it to myself for the last six months.”

Had his hands gripped her passionately with the words, she might have detested them; but he still held her lightly; it showed respect and so they touched her. A softness swept into her eyes; not because the words had come from him, but because of the words themselves. She must be loved! How many times has that been insisted upon? If only John could have proved his love to be as real as that—her name on his lips night after night, though miles innumerable should separate them! To that, coming from such a man, she would bend, yield, submit her whole personality. Coming even from Seyd, they touched her.

“You’ve kept on saying it over to yourself?” she asked. Seyd caught the gentleness in her voice; claimed it, eyes triumphant, for himself. Then his hands gripped her, passion turning to the force that rocks a man as you swing a cradle.

“Yes—night after night, I’ve repeated your name!” he exclaimed. The words toppled over each other, clattering on her ears. “Day after day Fve thought of nothing else while I waited for your letters.”

Katherine struggled free of him and sank onto the chair from which she had risen. The rush of the tide was on her now. She felt the sweeping volume of his passion surrounding her like the waters of a flood. Seyd followed her, falling to one knee by her side, seizing her hand.

“You and I should have met years ago,” he said, in a breath. The words were galloping from his brain to his lips like riderless horses. “You were made for me, but it’s not too late now. There’s all the world outside London. Katherine!” His arms flung round her like a lasso. “Katherine!” His mouth was against her ear now, hiding his face.

“You’ll let me take you away and give you the love you ought to claim. Italy! Think of it! The East! Egypt! Anywhere in the world! You and I!” The disjointed sentences fell from him, clipped, cut, broken. Then he brought his eyes to hers, holding them before her like braziers that burned into her flesh.

“All this was meant to be from the first moment I met you. Don’t you know that now? Can’t you see it?”

She made no answer.

“Katherine!”

No answer. He brought his lips to her cheek. It was damp. That unchained him. He rained his kisses on her, lying there inert in his arms.

Some minutes later and she was struggling from him, breaths hunted from her as in an animal spurred beyond its strength.

“Get the supper,” she said. Her voice was sharpened with intensity. “You must get it now, or I shall go!”

He stood there—the slave under the whip—debating revolt. In the grip of his arms, she half willing as she was seeming then to him, her power would be but paper in a vast machine. Katherine read the contemplation in his eyes; knew that the animal in him was freed, ready for the spring. She stood up to the losing game and faced it.

“Get the supper,” she repeated, quietly. In that moment of uncertain balance, she found herself watching the knotted veins as they pulsed on his temples.

Seyd stepped towards her, and her breath hung waiting in her throat.

“You don’t mean that?” he muttered. “Why introduce a farce into it, after you’ve let me kiss you the way I kissed you now? Face it! Good God! I’ll take every care of you. I meant all I said about Italy. We’ll go away together. I’ll give my whole life to you afterwards.”

If this was life, Katherine was living now. In the palms of their open hands the matter lay; but hers were the steadier of the two. He stood there shaking as a man smitten with ague; his forehead glistening in the light, and the pupils of his eyes swamped the gray.

Katherine found one moment of pity for him; then it passed. No fear dominated her; but in her mind she relegated the whole matter, determining that it should wait. The undeniable end was there before her; you find no shutting of her eyes to that. If she were to see him again, she recognized the result would be inevitable; but not now, not now. It gratified her to hold the power over him. Her conception of life was not the indiscriminate snatching of its moments. She dallied with all sensation; you recognize the woman in her with this. There was no pinnacle of emotion so high, but that, when she reached it, she could maintain her balance. With the man, once he has climbed to the height comes the rush of blood, head swimming, eyes dazed and giddy; then the fierce plunge into action for relief.

The war between these two characteristics of the sexes is what you have before you now. Who wins? The woman! The woman all through! If she has personality, no man, even though he be swept headlong on the gale of his passions, has a chance against her. The personality you have in Katherine up to the last moment, when defeat was grinning in her face, rejoicing at her inward discomfiture.

‘‘I must go,” she said, eyes nailing the words while her lips uttered them. “I must go at once, unless you do as I suggest.”

His eyes answered hers with dull defiance.

“If I let you go.”

In the breath she took was a contempt that whipped him for his folly. You cannot say these things with impunity to a woman of spirit.

“Good God, Katherine! I didn’t mean that!”

He could have cursed the words for falling from his lips. In his condition he saw mitigation for them himself; but would she? It was a damnable thing to have said! Confound it; before all, he believed himself to be a gentleman! That was no gentlemanly thing to have said. Here he lost sensation to the goad of passion in his feeling of remorse, and so she won him. Victory in the face of odds that had seemed unsur-mountable!

“You forgive me?” he said, taking her hand. “I scarcely knew what I was saying.”

It was genuine humility. Katherine felt pity for him but no pride. She made no allowances; there are not many women who do. They anticipate that a man in the grip of passion will be as a stone in a giant’s sling; but they do not understand it.

“Say you forgive me,” he repeated, eagerly. She granted it, and he kissed her hand.

“What are you going to give me for supper?” she asked, lightly. To this subject, finding it safe, she clung tenaciously.

“You’ll see in a minute.” He went to the oak chest which, with its beaten iron fittings, served as a side board. “The whole commissariat’s in here—the base of supplies. We’ll have every single thing up to the front.”

Katherine watched him, half smiling, as he laid the dishes and the bottles one by one upon the table. Lobster mayonnaise, pate de foie gras, galantine of chicken, cold pheasant, a fruit salad, champagne, sherry, liqueurs—one by one he brought them forth as a conjurer drags before the eyes a warehouse from his magician’s hat. Beyond a certain point in this wizardlike production of the meal, Katherine’s smile left her. Instinct, like the prompter in the wings, was whisper-ing urgingly in her ears.

“Do you mean to say you always keep a stock like that on the premises?” Brush velvet the right way and you have her voice: soft, gentle, all her suspicions crushed out of it. There was no sensation of the grain in its texture to the mind of Seyd. He took the question as unsuspectingly as the inexperienced peel takes the well-cast fly.

“Good Heavens—no!”

He was cutting the wire from a champagne bottle and did not see her face.

“Then it’s not a foregone conclusion that when you impulsively ask people to supper, they’ll be so regally entertained?”

Seyd looked up, thinking she was driving at the point that he was doing to her as he had done to others. Here his first suspicion—clumsy in the extreme! But this she took for granted; instinct was prompting her subtler thoughts than that.

“This was a day of fortune?” she added.

“Well—not—not exactly. I ordered all these things this morning.”

“Ah!” She sat down on the chair by the fireplace, leaning on its arm so that she faced him. “Then I can claim the honor for myself?”

A smile of generous confession lit up his face.

“Of course you can.”

“Oh!” Her lips curled, then met tightly—so you close the pages of a book that disgusts you. “Then you counted on me to-night?”

He stood by the table mute, with the wire-cutter half gripped in his hand. Here was her point. He saw it now. Never admit to a woman that you count on her human nature—in the next breath add—never let a woman see where you wish to lead her. The one is tantamount to the other. He was in the trap; as he stood there he looked it.

“‘These things that I am saying now, we’ve said over together a thousand times in our minds. I’ve seen them crossing and recrossing in your eyes. You! You’ve read them a million times in mine.’ That’s what you said to me in the box to-night. Word for word I’ve remembered it. It came back again to me just now. On that basis you’ve gone. On that foundation you bought all these things this morning. I can see you when you ordered them, with a grin on your lips, as you might smile watching a bird-trap covered with bread crumbs. You counted on me!” Her look withered him as she rose again to her feet. “Oh, I can’t tell you the keen pleasure it gives me now to go and leave you to the feast alone.”

“Going?” He whispered it, eyebrows bent as he searched her.

“Will you help me on with my cloak?”

“But Katherine! Why?”

“Do you think I would stay one moment with a man who rates me so low as you—hold my cloak for me, please!” She thrust it into his hands. Obedience came to him in a dream. Before he was aware of it, she was at the door, his eyes following her as the Israelites followed the pillar of fire.

“I forbid you to come down-stairs,” she said. “If I had known— Ach! And when I think of the people who have seen me with you—!”

The door shut with a sense of finality. He stood there listening to the tapping of her high-heeled shoes as they clattered through the silence into nothing.

The wire-cutter was still in his hand. He held it up before him and looked at it.

“God damn!” he shouted.

Then, with a sweep of the little instrument, he knocked off the neck of the champagne bottle. Up rose the fountain of wine from the dismembered trunk as though with the blow every artery had been severed. And there, as it frothed and foamed, he poured it into a tumbler until it all was wine, and drank—drank like a dog on a summer day.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE next morning at breakfast, Katherine appealed to John.

“Are you doing anything this evening?” she asked. John laid down the newspaper on the moment and came to her side.

“Going to the House, I expect.”

“No getting out of it?”

“Depends upon the counter-attraction.”

She looked up bewitchingly into his face.

“Fm the counter-attraction.”

Heavens! She was fascinating! Even John, eyes blind to the delights of women, heart bound up in philosophy, could not fail to realize that. He crushed her head against him with his hand and kissed her lips with what gentleness he knew. The embrace was disarranging, but she nestled to it.

“And what do you want to do?” he asked. “Anything—I don’t mind. I’ll go anywhere you like to take me.”

“No preference?”

“A music-hall perhaps. You can smoke there and we can talk.”

“Very well, name your music-hall?”

“John! You’ll really take me?”

“Of course.”

She raised herself to him, binding arms around his neck. All the power of fascination that she knew was glittering in her eyes.

“Do you care for me, John?” she whispered.

To have really pleased her, it should have driven him to a passionate declaration. She would have yielded much to that. But you find him gripping her wrists tenderly in his hands, and unbinding her arms from his neck.

“Care for you?” he repeated, gutturally. “Good God, yes, with all my heart!”

To her that was intellect—head ruling the heart in the government of the mind. She made no complaint then. It was his way—his method. It was genuine at least—surely lasting—no reason why he should tire of that. But it was scarcely life. To her, with her two years, life was a race and a short one. There lay their difference of mind; he found it in the work-shop —bared arms to the elbow, wiping the sweat from his face as he worked.

They dined at home, Barbara perplexed as she watched Katherine’s mood. What was the meaning of these flashes of laughter and the sharp, clever retorts to John’s remarks? Katherine was winning him; but to what? She could see John dazzled with her brightness. Yet only the day before Barbara had by accident heard Katherine’s message to Seyd over the telephone. Her instinct had leaped to the tone of voice in which it was uttered. Something had been in the balance then; but which way had the balance turned? Could she read the indicating finger in Katherine’s mood now? No, it bewildered her. She had noted the time when Katherine had returned the previous night. Half-past twelve had been upon the point of striking when she had entered the house. Where had they been afterwards? To supper, perhaps? But she might make whatever pretext her imagination could suggest, yet there at the heart of it all, like some canker embedded in the rose, lay the instinct of suspicion— predominant.

A definite intention then had found its way into her mind. Katherine told her nothing—confidence was almost dead between them, friendship ebbing like a tide; but her love for her in these moments was if anything the greater in the flood of pity that she felt. Yet, nevertheless, her intention was unswerving. John’s eyes must be opened. Blind to Katherine, immersed in ignorance of her personality, he had been too long. What even would he say when he heard that for all these months she had been conscious of the fate that was awaiting her? That alone would drive him to the readjusting of his judgment. She would have told him this very night; but now that was impossible. He was happy—happy as a child with the bubble of life. Why break it for him then? After dinner they were left alone for a few moments, but Barbara could not find it in her heart to tell him what she feared.

From the hall door, she watched them going off together to the party, breathless with delight. The refinement of cruelty it would have been to tell him then.

At the music-hall, John lit a cigar and leaned back in his seat at peace with the world, contented to the heart with his relaxation.

“Admit this is really funnier than the House,” said Katherine, as a singer hung tentatively in the wings, waiting eagerly for the applause to barely constitute an encore.

John looked at her and laughed.

“You think the House funny?”

“Could you go there and live—night after night—if it weren’t?”

John half closed his eyes with a satisfying sense of amusement.

“Excellent company, you are,” said he.

Her face lit with pleasure. Good company—she would wish a man to find her that. So she sought the more to please him; brought his book into the conversation, playing for his egotism with a dainty touch.

“I like your book, John,” she said, breaking the pause. The dainty touch is not, of necessity, the indirect one when it subtly conveys conviction.

He twisted in his seat, eyes alight with pleasure.

“That opinion from you is worth having,” he replied. The stage was far from him now. “Honestly —I thought you wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Well, do you remember what you said when I told you I wanted to study Ireland? And you declared you were sick of politics.”

“So I am. I see one man out of every fifty of you working for the country, and till he dies he’s roundly called a fool. Success must mean the coining of money nowadays, or it’s not counted worth a snap of the fingers. And not only that, but it’s mainly instrumental in attaining to success. Certainly we worship the golden calf at the temple of the mint.”

“We do! By Jove! Money’s not checks or counters now, it’s so many ounces of gold—so many ounces of silver. How little men thought when they gave the first piece of lead as a reminder of what they owed, that one day that reminder would come to be made of a metal that the whole world would cringe to!”

Suitable conversation this, for a music-hall! But it pleased John, and Katherine fed him with it.

“Yet after all,” she continued, voicing opinions of her own, choosing the opposition lest for want of incentive he should lose interest—“after all, this life’s short enough. Why blame a man for struggling for that which pleases him most, so long as he struggles honestly, admitting it the motive? It’s that I find so poor—the cowardice to admit the incentive they work under.”

John nodded his head. Cowardice played its part and a big one; she could feel him agreeing with that. But behind the nodding of his head, Katherine saw his total disapproval of her views.

“We part there, eh?”

He inclined his head towards her with a smile.

“We do,” he said. “We do—at the very foundation.”

“But why?”

“This life’s not so short for what has to be done in it. We only find it short because we’ve invented the word eternity, placed in it the conditions of heaven and hell, and then made comparisons with the threescore years and ten. No wonder they seem short. But time is merely a mechanical invention of the human mind—it’s merely a symbol. Time no more exists than the actual presence of Christ in the Eucharist—both are symbolical; one stands for the needs of the mind; the other for the needs of the soul. Think of it this way—time has a beginning and an end— eternity has neither. You can split up time into ages, an age into centuries, a century into years, and so on, down to seconde. Eternity is indivisible. Would you call this life so short, do you think, if you recognized it as merely a condition in the chronos of eternity—a condition as indestructible in its essence and essentials as night and day are conditions, ever changing, yet ever in existence. Do you, for example, believe, or feel that the day is dead when the night comes?”

“That day—yes.”

“Then I should have said daylight. Do you feel that daylight is dead when night comes?”

“No.”

“Then why consider your life so short, because in every threescore years or so it changes its condition? The length of existence in almost every condition varies. Do you imagine that the ephemera who come to-day and are gone to-morrow don’t find time to do the duties they are called upon to perform? But— good Heavens! What a subject for a music-hall!”

He broke ofF shortly with a laugh, but the conviction still glistened with a light in his eyes.

“It’s infinitely more entertaining than those awful French acrobats. Look at that man bowing! The more revolting some people are, the more pleased they seemed to be with themselves. Look at his smile when he skips up into the air. He’s frantically delighted with himself. Go on with what you were saying. They bore me fearfully—that doesn’t. What do you infer by the changes of condition? Do you mean to say we live again, are born again?”

John’s eyebrows knitted to the question. When you come to the inoculation of beliefs, you find the impassable limitations in such men as John. Here is a Baptist, crying in the wilderness of callous scepticism; crying night and day as the lion roars in its hunger. He is burned and consumed in the furnace of his own convictions; but in his eyes there is no spark of the divine fire which, like the concentration of the sun’s flames, burns into the flesh of those who come beneath its power. Meet the man! He is quiet, reticent; you find in him none of that indomitable power of personality that wrings from the lips of a centurion the cry, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

John, faced with Katherine’s question, was silent— the biologist hewing way through the countless stages of evolution until he reaches the germ of life itself, then looking up to find himself confronted with the intangible mystery of the everlasting—why?

“Who is to say?” he asked. “Who is to say if we are born again? You can imagine the numberless questions following the propagation of such a belief. “What am I likely to become in the next life? What was I in the last? Yet it’s all so intensely reasonable. We’ve risen—every soul of us—and why not individually? In every single being must be a combination of the virtues of altruism and egoism. Altruism for the preservation of the race—the species—call it what you like; then why not egoism for the preservation of the individual? When you find a personality able to answer the thousand questions that are bound to follow this—able to answer them with the inspiration of a symbolical allegory that will touch the hearts of people’s imagination—you will have a new religion spreading through Europe like a running fire, setting light to the torpid mysticism that should be alive with fanaticism if good is to come out of evil. It’s sufficient for me myself that I believe it. Those questions don’t occur to my mind. I base my life on the whole construction and am satisfied.”

“You believe that? That we go on living—one life after another? To what purpose—what end ?”

Her face was lit with inquiry, her eyes fixed, set firm upon his.

“To what purpose? That we may win upward. So far we have done it physically, beating through forests of difficulties, cutting through jungles of darkness to the light—dim enough now, God knows—of the mind. And why should it all finish with that? One type of mind is supplanting another every few hundreds of years; religions stand there, mile-stones on the wayside, marking the distance we have come. Why should that not be to the same purpose — the winning upward in the development of the soul?

Every single one of us has the power in his own hands —the power of sincerity, the ineradicable gift of a conscience which makes the choice between right and wrong the eternal, ever-present question in the mind of human beings.”

“Do you honestly mean that you don’t believe in the forgiveness of sins?” Here they were on a point which touched her nearly.

“I do,” said John.

“I never heard anything so unmerciful in all my life!” Katherine declared, looking unseeingly to the stage and back again.

“Do you call it wanting in mercy when you are asked to pay for what you owe?” he asked, quietly.

“Of course not—but I see no parallel in that.”

“There’s a close one. Out of two courses of action, the right and the wrong, you choose the latter. Do you think that will only hurt yourself? Do you fancy that it will be only detrimental to you? Not a chance of it. We’re all strung together, we human beings, strung together in the great effort to reach the heights in so many infinitesimal ways that it is impossible for any action, good or bad, to have no effect upon those around us. Why dive into details? That assertion is obvious. If, then, we do evil, we are an influence for evil, and to human nature we owe a debt which can only adequately be paid by the doing of good. How is the forgiveness of our sin going to help those whom we have injured? Not one inch of the way!”

Katherine’s eyes had revolt in them. This could not be true! Desperately she fought, wrestling with the persuasion of it, beating her reason against its stubborn resistance, hammering at the door of the faith in which she had been brought up, for aid and weapons to contest it. She had broken with Seyd. On the previous night when she had left him, it had been her intention never to see him again. Was this to be her reward—the hurling of these opinions at her defencelessness? But if she had determined to see no more of Seyd, there was yet no remorse in the heart of her; only the bitter resentment that he had counted upon her yielding. But for that, it would have been her open admission that he had won her.

In this mood, seeking a leader before she might be thrown upon her own strength, Katherine had appealed to John. And to such an end as this he led her! If her forces were to be joined with his, it must be under his banner. She saw no other method possible. Nothing could shake him from following the insignia of his belief. In a socket of steel and a grip of sterner metal still, the banner rested; so would he bear it to the very last—curling, flapping, twisting in the breeze of his enthusiasm.

Yet how could she take this creed of his and bind it to her faith? In one sense it revolted her; in another she felt the full reality of terror. What more terrible than to toil from one existence to another, struggling upward in this life, falling back in that—no appreciable aim in it, no apparent end? Her whole nature demanded rest from the thought of it; it conveyed nothing but the exhaustion of fatigue. Here she had found a flaw in the argument, and straight she voiced it with words cold as steel fresh-drawn from the scabbard.

“You believe in no punishment, then? Lose energy, lose courage in the race, and in the next life we find ourselves caught back in the current, with further to go and less strength for the journey.”

“Is there no punishment in that?” asked John.

Katherine’s answer was ready as an arrow fitted to the quivering bow.

“Punishment—yes—if we realized it. But we don’t. Whether I won or lost in my previous existence, I am utterly unconscious of it. If I lost, I am aware of no punishment now.”

“You don’t consider the conditions of this existence we now live in are a punishment in themselves? Don’t, even, you look forward to your heaven, though you know as little about it as I do of the end towards which I believe I am striving? Is that a sign that you find these conditions of struggle and warfare — which is life, however much we try to beautify it—so pleasurable and so sweet? Don’t tell me that you imagine an all-pitiful God capable of condemning those very creatures whom He has made to an everlasting hell of conscious punishment! However much a man has sinned, you cannot make me believe that a great power of pity could sentence him to that. Think of it! An unending eternity of pain for perhaps twenty years or so of vice! It doesn’t balance. Your weights are all wrong. But if for the twenty years of vice you have a similar number of years—a lifetime, in fact—of opportunity to pay back the debt you owe with sacrifice—shake free of this great creditor of ours —- existence — and start afresh, there is a merciful and just punishment in that —a sentence capable of remittance after some time of good conduct. You’ll find that the more merciful hell of the two is this life that we are living here. But it’s hell — not much getting away from that.” He thought of his love of her.

Katherine’s fingers clutched in her palm, tearing the words as he uttered them.

“You and I are utterly at variance,” she said, bitterly. “We ought never to have married. I hate to think you think like this. Hell, you call our time here. I have been always taught to believe it a blessing— the blessing of this life. I tell you I love it! If you were to offer me heaven now, rather than enjoy—what life is left me”—her words clung here, dry in her throat; John cast a glance at her, thinking how unconsciously she spoke—“I’d choose the years to live. Life!” She took a deep breath as one who, after some years, first breathes the sea. “It seems to me like a great, big, open freedom from the slavery of death. I wouldn’t part with a minute of it. It shall be mine up to the last. I love it!”

John’s hand crossed over his face. He looked a year older when it had passed.

“If you take life as a toy,” he said, slowly, “it ’ll break up under your very eyes.”

“Is one to struggle and strain at life, then, as you do, wearing out youth to patched middle-age, wearing out middle-age to threadbare senility, and then die like a horse between the shafts in the street?”

“No, I haven’t said that. Have your toys—play with them for fear the seriousness of life should overwhelm you; but never think that life itself is the toy—it isn’t. Death is not so great a matter when you don’t make it the gate to a heaven or a hell. The most serious moment in your life was when you were born—all your chances were before you then for a certain number of years; they go like a bubble on a bush of thorns when you die. It will only become serious once more, when you are born again.”

Katherine rose to her feet.

“Help me on with my cloak,” she said.

“You’re going?” asked John, in amazement.

“Yes—I hate this place—hate it. I wish we had never come out together—we can’t agree—it’s utterly impossible! You make life hateful to me — hateful! And I won’t take it that way.” Her voice caught.

“Katherine.”

She turned swiftly, eyes lit with tears and the determination of revolt.

“What is it?”

“Whatever I’ve said, I love you,” said John, quietly.

But that had no service for Katherine then. She turned on her heel to the door of the box.

CHAPTER XXX

WHEN they reached home that night, Katherine went straight up to her room, dropping a goodnight over her shoulder as she mounted the stairs, leaving John alone in the hall. He waited, watching her turn the comer on to the first landing. She did not look around. At that moment he would have given all he possessed for one glance of her eyes in friendship, one smile from her lips in love. As she disappeared, he turned away with a sense of starvation. Watch a little ragged urchin, face glued to a pastry-cook’s window! Observe his face as he turns away! For the first time in his life John experienced loneliness. Katherine knew it too; but nights of it. Call it her own fault! Yet there it was, sleeping with her, dogging her footsteps. Only when she had been with Seyd, could she forget it.

But in his first experience it came more hardly to John, the first falling hailstone of the storm that strikes and numbs the cheek. He shivered under it. Taking off his coat, he threw it on a chair in the hall; then, as he turned, he faced Barbara.

Her name came exclamatorily to his lips. There had been an air of secrecy in her approach; he had not heard her footsteps; there was a greater air of it in her presence as she stood there. It swept him like a gust of wind from an open door.

“What is it?” he asked, unconsciously reading her attitude to mean caution, and intuitively obeying its command.

“Is Katherine unhappy?” she asked, below her breath.

The question was unexpectedly direct; he could only nod his head to it.

“Well, come into the dining-room,” she continued, still breathing her words. “I want to speak to you.”

He followed her quietly, questions shouting in his mind, drowning to his ears the sounds of his own footsteps.

“Well, what is it?” he asked again, when she had closed the door, crossing the room to where a few stillburning coals were lying like sleepy eyes in the black bed of the grate.

“I’m going away in a day or two,” said Barbara. She may have expected the flood of questions to follow; but he waited in silence, realizing that this was but the preface to her mind. “Katherine”—her lip quivered in the effort to bring out the next words without a show of her misery—“Katherine and I aren’t the friends that we used to be; we shall be the bitterest enemies if she ever hears what I am going to tell you now.”

Tears were rising to her eyes as the water forces its way through lock - gates. No power she possessed could drive them back; then they overflowed, chasing down her cheeks. John could say nothing. With a weeping woman he was powerless—lost to the initiative.

The fine mechanism bewildered him—here again was the ploughboy looking into the vitals of a complicated machine.

“Come, cheer up, Barbara,” was all he said—that, the utmost his invention ran to. He would have said the same to a school-boy. Beyond that, he let her struggle on.

“You don’t understand Katherine,” she said, driving the words hastily from her. There was the truth of it. It was as well that he should take it first, thrust upon him, rather than being led to the knowledge by winding paths.

“You talk about her personality—I’ve heard you use the word many times; but you don’t really know what her personality means. Would you ever think that she could bear to be told that she had cancer—that only two more years were left her?”

“Great Heavens! You haven’t told her?” He held the question above her as you raise a whip.

“No, I have not said a word.”

“Nor I—it’d be the essence of cruelty. She loves her life. I know that much of her.”

Barbara steadied her eyes on him.

“Yet she knows it,” she said, quietly; “word for word, as you know it. She has known it for the last seven months.”

You see John struck across the face, his lips whitening with the blow. She knew it! Knew it this evening, all the time that they had been talking! And all that he had said, presuming her unconscious—words that must have whipped her with a cruel, stinging lash!

She knew it? Preposterous! No woman could have borne the knowledge and held her tongue under such a bitter punishment as that!

“She can’t know it!” he exclaimed.

“She does—every word as you heard it from the specialist. She was listening in the kitchen at Glen-worth j through that little door that opens into the dining-room. She stood there listening to everything that was said, and then she crept up-stairs to her room and told me.”

John paced the room as Barbara had seen him in the first days of Katherine’s illness after the accident. Exclamations forced passage to his lips and tumbled from him, disconnected and broken, as you hear the moaning of some dumb animal in pain.

“What has this to do with your going away?” he asked, stopping abruptly in his stride.

“That in itself has not much to do with it. She wanted me then, when she told me that. It’s in the last few weeks that I’ve realized I am utterly useless to her.”

“Why?”

Here was the crucial point—the barrier which must be leaped before she could acquit herself of the duty which she felt forced upon her. One breath, she took, gathering courage to herself, then made the leap, eyes closed, heart praying that she was in the right.

“There is Captain Seyd—”

John faced her on the name — the soldier jerked by the command. Here was the firebrand perilously near the mine. Wanting in demonstrativeness, he may have been; but threaten to snatch the woman from the heart of such a man, and you stir up instincts that are volcanic, thwarted by nothing. Barbara rushed the words from her as you drive a flock of witless sheep to the shearing.

“Can you tell me you’ve not seen her interest in him, his infatuation with her? I’ve realized it ever since they had that accident in the trap. Find her happy! That is all you have thought about. Failing to make her so yourself—you remember our conversation at Glenworth, the day he was down there—you have let any one do it for her, blindly believing the best in all she did. Had I told you of this before, with nothing to show for it, you would have poured thunder on my head—shouted me to silence.”

“What have you to show for it now?” he said, thickly.

“The whole time that he was away Katherine wrote to him, every week, and he to her. They never missed a post.”

“Good God—yes! But mayn’t a man and woman write to each other? She’d saved his life. Do you think marriage is a prison, gates barred, warders jangling keys?”

Barbara sped on, taking no notice. It was all loathsome to her—what her Katherine would call the refinement of meanness. With each word, she lashed herself in willing flagellation.

“Then, on his way home, he wrote to her every day. She went down to Glenworth,when he got back, to meet him. I knew by his manner in the hall, when I saw him first, tnat in ms mina ne claimed ner, counted on her. You could hear the confidence in his voice.” John turned on his heel, walking down the room. Suspicion leaped again and again like, a mad dog to his throat, and again and again the strength of his belief in Katherine threw it from him.

“You women!” he said, bitterly, as he paced back. “You’re slaves to your instinct. A blind intuition leads your blindness of reason, and when, as sometimes you’re bound to, you fall into the ditch, there you lie, swearing it the pathway on the high-road to justice. God! A few letters and a meeting when a man has come back from India after a six months’ absence! What less could you reasonably suppose than that? Yet you, with no doubt the best heart in the world, and your blind intuition, see in it the circumstances of a dangerous liaison. Bless your good heart, Barbara.” He took her gently by the shoulders, and she felt his touch thrill through her. “It takes more than events such as these for a sensible child like our Katherine to throw away her good name and mine after it.”

Barbara forced herself from him. The touch of his hands on her shoulders was corrupting her sense of duty. He must be made to see it all as she saw it, and save Katherine before it was too late. That she had come to do; that she would not swerve from until her object was accomplished. To be swept like this in a tempest in the midst of her duty, was more than she had contemplated; but she weathered it—the frail craft of honor breasting every wave, lifting to every blast of the gale.

“You can call it blind intuition/’ she said as she stood away from him; “but you do not shake my knowledge of what is drawing perilously close to the crisis. Since Captain Seyd has come home they have ridden every morning together in the park, and almost every night have been out together to a theatre.” “She hasn’t told me so,” John retorted, triumph lifting in his voice.

“You haven’t asked her,” said Barbara.

Suspicion had him here. She saw it strike the light in his eyes, and from that moment the fire began to burn.

“The other night Katherine did not return until half-past twelve. Did you notice that? No! You were working in the study.”

“But why,” he burst forth—“why in God’s name should she want the infatuation of this man? A soldier —fought in a battle or two—spilled some blood, perhaps —a cupful at the most; beyond that, nothing in him. His ideas on subjects the most commonplace are not the kind that would have interest for Katherine! There’s a woman with ideas of her own! She wants a mind with other ideas in it to sharpen her wits on.”

“She’s got two years to live,” said Barbara, quietly, “and she wants to live them. There you’ll find the key —use it—I’ve given it to you. You think a woman like Katherine, with all her cleverness and remarkable personality, wants nothing but intellect. You never made so great a mistake in your life! She wants attention, admiration, adoration. A woman is only young once, and these are the tributes she expects to be paid to her youth. If her husband doesn’t pay them and—add this to it, for it is the biggest factor of all—she has only two years of life left her—ask your own logic what she is most likely to do.”

John bowed under the accusation, offering no retaliation, suggesting no excuse. In this one moment Barbara had lifted a curtain from his eyes. Neither acknowledging the situation she suggested to be correct, nor denying anything that it implied, he stood there, generously convinced of his own shortcomings.

“What had better be done?” he asked. To action he came now, as the vessel begins to move with the filling of her sails. “What do you think I can do?”

“Go and see Captain Seyd yourself—tell him the whole truth about Katherine, and ask for all those letters to be given back to you. Break it! End it! Good-night!” She wrung his hand and went out— out, as it seemed to her, into the darkness, the nothingness, the loneliness. When Katherine came to know of what she had done, her life would be broken, too.

CHAPTER XXXI

IF suspicion were alive in John’s mind, he yet denied that definite proof had been given him. Believe in her? He would do that to the last. You find in him the colossal optimist, divining in the great scheme before him the best in everything.

If his beliefs were true, might it not be said that they were true then, at the moment? Fling scorn at him! Bid him work his revolution in the minds of men at once. So they tossed their contempt on Calvary. But in The Anatomy of Change you would have found his answer:

“One man spills his blood in favor of a new religion, another strikes in defence of the old—lest the change of ideals be too sudden, and from being beneficial they become volcanic. Who can tell the moment when the seasons alter, or the quarter where the wind will change.

His beliefs in themselves are the expression of a wide and enduring optimism. Who among us could face the knowledge of a prolonged struggle, the ever fighting upward in the teeth of an unswerving law of selection? The majority of us are pagans still at heart—courage in it, who doubts that? Courage is needed for the solution of all life’s problems. But it is a pagan courage, this sudden facing of the judgment of God. The hurried life, the short shrift and then one lunge into eternity, they must be taken with set teeth and a hint of the devil-may-care in the eyes; but that courage is of the body, needed for the moment only. How many have it now? Very few of us. With the conception of hell, like some paid assassin in hiding under the cloak of it, the fear of death crept into the world. Go to the Campo Santo in Pisa and see the picture of hell in one of the frescoes on the wall! Try to think that a divine being prompted and originated the idea of it, and your faith in God will run from you like rats from a scuttled ship. The generous heart of a man will vomit at the sight of it. Here came the fear of death, a demon distorted and deformed. To the mind of John, Death brandished his sickle in vain. A change he found it—the slipping from one condition to another. Higher or lower? That your life itself would tell. There is a weapon against the cold fingers of fear in this. So, with the courage of his reason, he faced everything; so he faced his suspicion of Katherine, that was gnawing with its vermin teeth into the very heart of him.

You find him acting automatically on Barbara’s suggestion; automatically, but without impulse. Something was to be done, how expediently he did not hesitate to question. No actual charge had been made against Katherine. He felt himself that no charge were possible; yet the facts that were presented held sufficient importance for him to realize that it might be more advisable to put the plain case before Captain Seyd without alluding to his motive for doing so.

To Seyd, then, making appointment by telephone, he went the next afternoon. Into the same room where Katherine had so closely sailed to the wind of a dilemma, he was shown, making no observations as she had done; sweeping the room with his eye, but seeing nothing. Taking up a position at the fireplace, he turned, facing the man who had shown him in.

“The Captain said he would be in at about this time, sir.”

John looked at a clock and nodded.

“I can wait,” he said.

“The paper, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

The door closed and John faced the fire, looking down into the glowing coals. Had he been a fool in coming? Was it the childish impulse of a jealous man? Barbara had been serious over it. He knew that only the stress of circumstance would have driven such suggestions to her mind. But she was a woman, prone to be tricked by her imagination—a slave—so he had said it—to her instincts. A mood of dogged materialism was shaping every thought that passed through his mind, shaping them as the linotype mechanically turns out its letters on the moulded metal. What percentage of women were unfaithful to their husbands, circumstanced as was Katherine? She had everything to lose—gaining what? And for how short a time, since she knew? Heavens! She knew! It suddenly forced itself upon his understanding again.

She knew! What a wealth of courage there was in her! In his estimation, she rose to heights that women had never reached before. Hers was the heart of a lioness—so would the queen of the forest face death with her young suckling to her side. Yet with Katherine there was not even the maternal instinct feeding the fire within her. She fronted it by herself; had said no word of it but to Barbara; craved no sympathy, but stood there alone, biting through the bullet, facing the strident music of the death-march of time as it dinned its warning in her ears. Pagan courage this! And—my God! The pluck of it!

But there—there in that fact itself was confutation to Barbara’s suspicions. Had she not known, it might have been a different matter. Here there would be no time left for the man to make his only reparation. Unless—unless she hoped for secrecy, and counted that the matter would pass without recognition. But was that the way of women? Did these things pass with them? No—they threw their heart and soul after a man when once it came to that. He began to feel certain that he had come on a fool’s errand. This man was entertaining; he had more time at his disposal than John. She had taken the opportunity of his interest in her to drown the thought of her impending fate. That was all. He looked up from the fire, firm in the confidence of his point of view. Women were seldom fools, Katherine the least likely of them all.

His eyes lifted to the mantel-piece to find a photograph of Katherine gazing at him; not only that, but leaning up against the frame was a letter addressed to Seyd, written in the uncommon characters of her handwriting. Conceive such absolute indifference to his surroundings in the mind of any man! It is almost impossible. He had been hanging over it for five minutes, utterly unconscious of its existence. The mere fact of a letter, waiting for its owner, would have had magnetic attraction for the majority. You can see their eyes drawn to it, reading the postmark, divining its contents, prompted by experience of their own, and, if finding it was from their wife, picking it up with fingers twitching at the flap of the envelope, ears strained, eyes alert as a cat’s watching a hole in the wainscot.

But now his eyes were drawn to it, baffled by the thickness of the paper that stood between him and the message it contained. That letter must have been posted to him in the morning of that day. Had she written and posted it before they went to the theatre, Seyd would have had it with his breakfast. Thoughts, suspicions, suggestions whirled around him in a mad dance—elves that have found some wandering stranger, encircled him with their magic ring, and caper round him laughing at his discomfiture. So the ideas that crowded upon him cast their spell on John. For the moment of realization, he was bewitched with jealousy. Reason, logic, materialism, all the strength in him ran like water from a broken pitcher. If she were unfaithful! There he realized how much she was to him. Valuation, this, in the market of the world. How much a thing is worth depends upon how much we want it—how much we know others would desire to take it from us. So his mind was warped with suspicion.

For a perceptible length of time, John stood over the letter, strained to it as the steel clings tenaciously to the magnet. You expect the desire to open it growing into action; you anticipate finding it torn between his fingers? Or do you see John as he is—a man with honor straight as a rod of steel; none of your flexible virtues bending to the shape of the moment? Here might have been excuse for him. The subtlety of the temptation might have duped another in his place. Here he was filled with suspicion of Katherine, and in this letter could possibly be found proof of her innocence. Imagine the velvet voice in that suggestion! It had no persuasion for John. The letter was not his; he would not open it. You find him giving it a wide berth; walking to the window that looked down into the court below as Seyd entered the room.

“I’m extremely sorry, Spurrier.” He came forward, hand out, the words rising easily to his lips; He blessed circumstance for them. What cause other than that of Katherine had brought John here? From the moment he had heard of John’s request, speculations had been bidding, loud-voiced in his mind, for the highest offer of his credulity.

“Hope I haven’t kept you long,” he added. “Take a pew, won’t you?”

John seated himself slowly.

“I’ve come on rather queer business,” he began. Conventionalities he ignored; the art of them was beyond him. Without a subject, this was a man of silence; give him a matter in hand, and he rode to it as men have ridden into the belching mouth of a mighty cannonade.

“I want—” His teeth met on the coming words, bit through the sentence to a jagged edge of silence. Seyd had seen the letter. In the pause, John watched his eyes as they leaped to it; so the hunter sights his game and treads with weary steps to cover his approach. He moved callously to the mantel-piece, leaned upon it with one elbow, rapt in close attention to what John was saying.

“You want what?” he asked, carelessly, taking the letter in his hand, calmly surveying the writing, quietly thrusting the envelope into his breast-pocket.

Into John’s heart, like a diver into the sea, leaped conviction. Now instincts were alive in him, the possession of which until these moments he had been utterly unaware. He found his mind a tautened wire to the vibration of suggestions. Every little action of the man before him flashed a meaning to his eyes, every expression on Seyd’s face twanged the tautened wire. He was a mass of sensations, over-ridden, led by jealousy and the desire to save his Katherine, if it were not already too late.

“Don’t let me prevent you from reading that letter,” he said, slowly.

“That’s all right,” said Seyd. “Doesn’t matter—it can wait.”

John forced Seyd’s eyes to his as the bacteriologist clamps his thin glass-slips under the microscope; then he focussed them until the knowledge that he was stripped, naked and exposed was borne in upon Seyd’s understanding.

“Well, what is it you want?” he repeated. Have it out now and be done with it. No fencing with buttoned foils could parry the truth now; he wrenched the buttons from their points and lunged with the weapon of defiance in his hand. “What is it you’ve got to say?”

The first thrust this, in the duel between the two forces, the force of arms, in which you may find all the powers of the fascination of brute strength, and the force of intellect, in which you will discover the overmastering power of reason.

“Well, I’ve come to tell you that your intimacy with my wife must cease.”

Now you hear the ringing of the steel—metal against metal as the weapons clash. They fronted each other here, John rising quietly to his feet. In the silence that followed the blunt directness of his statement, Seyd’s breaths measured out the seconds as they beat by.

“You mean our acquaintance?” he said, at length.

“I mean your intimacy.”

“That’s an intimate word.”

“It’s kinder than a good many,” said John.

Seyd thrust that in a balance and watched the scale descend. If anything it weighed heavier than John’s voice implied. With swift intuition, he struggled to measure John’s mind. The eyes that met his in the effort were cold, unreadable. Until he knew more of John’s knowledge, he would admit to nothing. That, if only for Katherine’s sake, was demanded of him.

“Then I don’t quite understand you,” he said, moulding a puzzled expression on his face.

“The words were intended for simple English,” said John. “I wish your intimacy with my wife to cease.”

“Then I must presume we have a different definition for that word—intimacy—but I think I have the right, at least, to ask why our acquaintance should be put an end to. If you have heard anything to my discredit which makes you think that your wife would be the better for not knowing me, give me the opportunity to answer the accusation.”

John’s eyes swept over him in sudden comprehension. Nothing was to be got from him on lines such as these. The man would lie to the last inch of the tether; rightly, too, perhaps, since in the matter he was not alone. Safeguard the woman, that should be the first consideration. If this was his purpose, John found a moment of approval for it.

“I don’t wish you to answer anything,” he said, quietly. “I’ve come here to demand something from you, and I’m going to get it before I go. I’ve also come here to tell you something which most likely will persuade you to accede to my request.”

A smile of renewed confidence twitched Seyd’s lips. Here was a man, racked with jealousy, knowing nothing. In a few words he could be despatched; nothing in life so easy.

“What is it you want to demand?” he asked, with gentle politeness.

“All the letters that my wife has written to you,” said John.

Up went Seyd’s eyebrows in quiet but amused surprise.

“And what is it you have to tell me that will most likely persuade me to accede to that request, if I have such things as letters of your wife?”

The offensive, John was stung to now. The quiet surprise of the man, the gentle smile, they throbbed like an acid through his blood. This was the mood in which to fling the vitriol of truth into Seyd’s face. Two steps closer he came, crushing out with the light in his eyes that debonair attitude of Seyd’s, as he posed before him.

“When my wife had that accident with you in the trap at Glenworth, she contracted the disease of cancer. Did you know that?”

This was the blow under the heart that leaves no mark save the patch of blushing red. It fell on Seyd unguarded, unbroken in its relentless force. He took it with white lips and the dazed and lifeless eye. There is no retaliation to this kind of winning stroke. The crushing blow in the face, up from that spurts blood and anger; you find the hammering fist flying back’ from it with redoubled energy. But the blow beneath the heart, there is no answer to be given when that falls unguarded with its hollow thud. Follow it up— one more stroke of the human hammer, with the weight of the body flung into the arm—and your man is dead flesh at your feet, such as any butcher hangs upon his meat-hooks.

It is a fair blow in the interests of the sport. You take your chance of it when it comes; but Heavens! you win that chance first. Here was John’s, won fairly in this ring of ours where the rounds are measured to various times, and the judge sits waiting till a man shall fall. He took it. Rid yourself of the belief that there is sentimentality or compassion when men are once within the ring, and the towels are flapping like punkas in the night as each round goes by. There is no sentimentality then. A man staggers before you with eyes that are questioning his own consciousness; but you do not wait for him to find the answer. There is no time for that. You give him the answer—right below the chin—that little chuck to the spine which settles all difficulties that are wandering in his mind. Whenever you see that question hunting in his eyes— hit then! There will be no mercy in his heart for you, if you let him answer the riddle for himself. Let your heart open once he is down; your hands are tied then.

As yet the amazement was settled on Seyd’s face, and before he could recover John’s final blow had fallen with its sickening weight.

“Cancer,” he repeated. “You know what cancer is. Once every five years or so a scientist pours an adulterated promise of hope into the heart of the public that a cure has been found. There is no cure. Just nine months ago, they told me that she had two years to live—two years at the most.”

Beneath this Seyd fell. The blood drained out of him. There was no retaliation to this. He could not answer it. The power of answering was gone. He hung to the mantel-piece with loose, slipping fingers, out of which all sense of touch had strained. From John’s point of view, the matter had not reached him as yet. He could only see it from his own; how it affected him; the sense of horror mixed with pity that it brought. She had cancer! In one sweep, the arm of circumstance had obliterated all thought of her beauty from his mind. He saw nothing but the disease; there it glared at him with its awful eyes.

You have in Seyd, the man to whom the freshness of life appeals. He had found it in Katherine. The women he had met in India, the women he had known at home, they were faded, exotics over-nurtured in a damp, unnatural heat. But this disease, no matter how she had come by it, no matter how cruel a blow of fate it was, this swept her charm of freshness out of existence as with a wet sponge you wipe the writing from a slate. To him, in that short moment, Katherine was dead already. What was she to him now? Dead in a year? In a year! If they had gone away together, as he had proposed, and he had learned it then! He thanked God for the deliverance.

With hollowed eyes, he looked up at John, words dead, dried on his lips. What could be said? Pity? He felt that, perhaps, but not for John; earnestly for Katherine, vaguely for himself. He had loved her. Where was the doubt that he had loved her? You put your own valuation upon that form of love—Seyd put his. But possibly all this was for the best. A poor consolation to think of now, yet he fancied he put courage into it.

“Upon my soul,” he said, at last, brokenly, “I don’t know what to say.”

“I have not asked you to say anything,” was John’s reply, hard, driving to the point. He wanted no show of sentiment. With Katherine, he shared abomination of that. It had not been for sympathy that he had come to Seyd. The letters he wanted, and to the demand for them he clung persistently.

“If you’ll get me those letters now—” he continued— “I don’t want anything else.”

For the moment Seyd looked at him, weighing consequences, following out the moves in the game, one ahead of another to the inevitable checkmate. It counted nothing, this sacrifice of pieces; retaining the letters could avail him nothing. He admitted himself that the game was done. If the jealous husband wanted to read them—let him! He would find nothing. The key to all that was cramped between the lines, that lay in his possession. It would be a memento, a souvenir, a keepsake of a time that had had and lost its enchantment.

“You shall have the lot,” he said, magnanimously, “and I hope when you read through them, that you will find ample cause to retract that word intimate, which you made use of at the beginning of our conversation.”

The inflammable powder of retaliation flared its blaze in John’s eyes, leaving the dull, smouldering smoke of contempt.

“It is the common nature of a man,” he said, intensely quiet, “to form his judgment of another upon his own character. If there were anything indiscreet in my wife’s letters to you, I know her sufficiently to realize that it must have been written in a foolish moment of unguided impulse, and I have no wish to see it. I consider it unnecessary that any letters of hers should be in your possession. I am sure you must understand my meaning.”

His eyes met Seyd’s and wore them down until they fell; then he turned to the window as the other departed into the next room.

“I greatly resent,” he said, as he brought the bundle back with him—“I greatly resent your inference that Mrs. Spurrier’s correspondence is not safe with me.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” replied John, equably.

“I think you should apologize for such a statement.”

John took the parcel silently, then put it in his pocket.

“You heard what I said?” persisted Seyd, the courage, the daring, the determination that comes to a man once he has left the ring and the fight is over.

“Oh, that’s all right,” John repeated. The victory was in the tone of his voice, lest Seyd should forget. “And is this all?” he added.

“Absolutely.”

“Except, of course, the one in your pocket. The letter you took up from the mantel-piece as you came into the room?”

Seyd’s eyes shifted under the gaze of John’s.

“I have not read that yet. You shall have it when I do.”

You hear in his voice the last struggle for that semblance of victory, which is a crutch to the man who must walk away from the scene of his defeat before the eyes of the multitude and of himself. John settled himself quietly to make him yield.

“I want to take it with these,” he said. With the giant pressure of his will, he forced the gentleness into his voice. “What do you gain by keeping and reading it? Nothing? Don’t admit to me by your determination that there has been more than I care to suspect. You’re walking on the wire of circumstances now—don’t let your foot slip. Give me that letter with these—it’s wisest. You give it to me and I know nothing of its contents—you persist in reading it”— his lips tightened, and Seyd saw his fingers close— “and by God! I shall know then how far the matter has gone. Is it worth risking that now, when you know what I have just told you? Do you think it’s worth it, and all the consequences that will follow?”

Seyd picked it out of his pocket and flung it on the table.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE letter received by Seyd from Katherine had been written immediately on her return from the theatre with John. You see in this, as with a sudden light in darkness, the spark of impulse striking from the flint, igniting the inflammable tinder of revolt. At that moment, she had found life impossible with John. Travelling through the narrowed space, their different points of view had met at last—meteors which the inevitable law of gravity has brought together in the violence of collision. The letter to Seyd, telling him that she would go with him to Italy—anywhere where there was sun in the heavens, and one could forget that the days went by—that had been the resultant bolt from the blue, hurling to earth.

She had not found regret for it when the next morning came. Regret for a thing once done, she counted weakness, despising the thought of it. With John, existence would become the exhausting moments of the witness in the court of law. Impregnated with that cold, implacable reason of his, she could imagine him sitting in judgment, cross-questioning with his eyes every word that fell from her lips, every action of hers that came under his notice. There was no freedom in it. She stretched her arms in vain, they only struck the roof of this cramped prison of her life.

Young? Yes, she was young still.

“Bring me the hand-glass from the dressing-table,”’ she demanded of the maid, who brought up the breakfast that morning to her bedside.

When the girl had gone, she searched its polished face for an answer. To the letter, the glass confirmed it. The healthy color in those cheeks—the smoothness —she leaned closer to it, daring detection—no! there was not a line. She frowned and her forehead puckered; she resumed the natural expression, and as with a breath of magic the lines had gone. That was youth! God! she would be young still when she died. That thought, from bitter experience, she crushed out of her mind.

But this time that was left her, why should it be spent in the ungenerous space which this prison of John’s belief could only afford her? She had been brought up to belief in the infinite mercy of God. God could see the greater hardship of her life better than John. John knew that she had but another year or so before her; yet he would apply this creed of his to her as well as any other. It was his weights, his’ balance, not hers that were wrong. According to him, there would be no mercy applicable to her. She would sink lower in the scale, she would have incurred a debt which only more virtue than she considered herself even to be capable of could ever repay to get her upon the same footing; and, moreover, in another existence, she would be unconscious of the debt that stood against her, and so she might fall lower still. What comfort, what hope was there in that? None—none at all!

That was the great virtue of the Christian religion— it was the deepest comfort in the conception of man.

That is the cry of every mother’s son of us—the comfort of Christianity. But what are you going to get out of human nature by petting it with comfort? Comfort, if that be all, will rot the backbone of humanity. Was Christianity a comfort when human nature threw aside its pagan belief in the multiplicity of gods? Was the belief in Christ a comfort when it brought men and women in their ready thousands to the dripping jaws of famished beasts; when it caused you to stay your hand in the moriient of revenge; when it bid you bless them that cursed you, and sell all that you had for the mercy of the poor? Christianity was poor comfort in this life then; but with its promise of heaven, and its ominous threats of hell, it was a giant lever under the great marble block of intellectual matter. When the egotism of the brute had brought forth man through the tractless forest of physical evolution, it turned upon him then to rend him. At that, the most critical moment in the history of life and evolution, came Christ, the Saviour of the World, saving mankind with His vast doctrine of Altruism—saving humanity from the egotism of death.

Here, if I have but half the heart of your sympathies, you will see the canker eating out the truth of life from Katherine; you will see the subtle, hidden maggot of decay that is feeding away at the heart of some of the best of us. When a religion comes to be a comfort on the lips of its most ardent adherents, its day is on the horizon; before the night falls it will have vanished behind the edge of time.

Secure in that comfort, which she had drained from her argument with the theories of John, Katherine put the hand - glass away and turned to her breakfast. Letters were on her plate. She picked up the first. Henning’s handwriting was characteristic of him— tight—precise—exact. She cast her eye over it, as she would have looked at a bill, yet continued to hold the page in her hand. Henning was bringing the specialist to see her that afternoon. A thread of ice crawled through her blood. What did that mean? Not less than the year and the few short months? Not less—surely not less? The letter fell from her fingers; she clutched her face in her hands and stared out before her with teeth set and lips pressed to whiteness. She was breathing now like a driven beast to keep the cry of despair in her throat as it struggled for her lips. If it were less, could she bear it? Hardly! There would come the limit of her endurance, the thin strip of tape that would snap as the runner swept it by.

Again she looked at the letter. It told her nothing; neither one way nor the other. Here, then, she summoned courage from the deepest corner of her heart, as you cry for aid before some devastating power. Never had she needed it so much as then; never had her effort to be brave cost her so much. The tears swelled in her eyes as she bound herself in the thongs of pride, content to wait until she knew the worst.

The thought of Seyd’s answer to her letter alternated through the morning with the anticipation of the spe cialist’s reason for wishing to see her again. These two thoughts—the oscillations of the pendulum—swung to and fro against her brain, beating out the time until his arrival.

In the middle of the afternoon, when her patience was drawn to a fine thread—foot tapping on the carpet, eyes slanting to the clock—the specialist came, Henning attendant—the obedient shadow of the great substance. So she defined them to herself as they entered.

One by one all the examinations were gone through —the same sacrifices to the altar of impression. Ceremonies of the high-priests feeding the credulity of the worshippers; you see here Katherine’s regard for the profession, yet she mostly said these things to aid her courage.

“Well?” she asked, straightly, when his fingers had ceased their groping and the specialist was standing erect.

“I should like to talk to Dr. Henning for a few moments,” said the great man. “He will come back and see you again. Is your husband in, by-the-way?”

That last question thrashed the nerve from her. The tone in which he had said it—depressed, disappointed—that alone convinced. The days were to be shortened, clipped, cut down. By how long? God! By how long? Hadn’t they the mercy to tell her then? Must they first retire to gossip on the mistake that they had made in granting her two years instead of one? Let these thoughts master her, and she would show the fear that had taken her courage by the throat! But that she must never do. Show fear? To these two men who had seen so many cringe and crawl from death? She would sooner die then, before their very eyes.

She tempered her voice in the furnace of her will, and answered them quietly, calmly; you would have thought emotion could not touch her.

‘‘No, my husband is out. If you wish to write a message they will take it down-stairs.”

They thanked her; the specialist shook her hand, and in silence—as they had come—they departed. With the closing of the door, she caught the bedclothes in her hands, as though she would tear them into ribbons; then, binding them tight about her head, she buried her face in the pillows, and all that could be seen of her was the shaking figure that huddled beneath the almost shapeless mass.

There she lay, motionless, until a knock on the door stirred her into action. She knew nothing of the time that had passed, but this was Henning’s return. With swift movements she tidied her hair, swept the tears from her eyes, then called admission.

Henning entered and came to the side of the bed.

“I’ve a confession to make,” he began.

Katherine searched him, probed him with her eyes. There was a tone in his voice; she failed with all her astuteness to understand it.

“Confession of what?” The words came from her with a breath.

“The diagnosis we made of your case, when we saw you first, about eight or nine months ago.”

“Cancer!”

The word shot as a comet from her lips, blinding Henning to amazement.

“Your husband told you?” he said, quietly, with endeavor.

Katherine shook her head. Her eyes were lighted with the watching beacon of anticipation; yet she could not find the words to implore his explanation. He realized, at least, that nothing more would be told him of the knowledge that she had gained; it made the rest more easy in the telling. He coughed in preparation.

“Well, we’re none of us infallible,” he went on. “The word itself is mediaeval. The greatest advance in science is the attainment of the knowledge that we know very little. We have learned, at least, to wipe the word infallible out of the dictionary.”

Katherine pinched her flesh beneath the cover of the bedclothes. To what was he leading? He was dragging his words as though they were in chains. The strain of waiting for their approach was almost more than she could bear.

“I am happy to say that our diagnosis has been at fault. Lympho sarcoma, as we had thought it to be, presents considerable difficulties to the profession of medicine. I myself have known many cases—” He stopped. The strain had snapped, and the reaction in its sudden rebound had robbed her of control; her face was again in the pillows as she shook with her tears. There Henning left her.

What did it mean? With the ceaseless energy of a mighty engine that question battered on her brain. She was to live—what did it mean? Whatever may have been or was still at fault with her, that did not matter: in the counting, it was a grain of sand swept in the storm. It fled through her mind, never halting for consideration. But that she was to live; she looked at her life then as a child who, with its face flattened against a window-pane, gazes into an unknown world.

The figure of Seyd rose there, pre-eminent. Look where she would, he fronted her. Even then he had read her letter, knew the step which she had taken, and was no doubt making arrangements for their immediate departure. She could see him, burning in his passion for her, counting the moments until they should meet. Did that thrill her? Did her pulses quicken at the thought of that? You find her facing it with hollow eyes, lacking lustre, losing fire. Here was a problem, indeed, knotted, tortuous in the winding paths that led to its solution — a maze wherein she turned and turned in vain to find escape.

A problem? With life just washed back to her on the turning tide of her destiny? You imagine delight in her, clambering to the pinnacle of its emotion; you picture her down on her knees, thanking God for the deliverance? But to Katherine there was an infinitely more subtle point of view. Seyd for nine months or a year; her nature had asked for that; but Seyd for the rest of her life—now lengthened to the ordinary span— there was a different aspect when it was viewed in this way.

She dragged him before her mind, and weighed his merits, one by one, in a balance, tuned to the substance of a hair swaying to a breath upon the agate of her inclinations. A serious matter this. Marriage may require the best and the ablest of a woman’s consideration before she enters into the contract; but when it comes to the leaving of her husband to share life with some one else, then the scale-pans must be brushed and polished lest a grain of dust should turn the balance of reason.

Seyd for a year, living in a mad race—the acceleration of time that leaves no leisure to value and compare the moments as they fly by—Seyd under those conditions? Yes! She had said it before—meaning it— why should she shrink from it now? But Seyd through the chain of years, one linked to the other by unbreakable rings of steel—for once the road had been taken, there would be no turning back; she saw that, clear-“visioned in her mind—Seyd under these conditions? No! Never—never! She would sooner die then, asking no mercy.

Not once in their whole acquaintance had her mind ever risen to idealization of Seyd. Swept with that passion for romance, she was yet no sentimentalist. A vein of common-sense, of logical materialism—as you find the rift of quartz in the heart of the rock—ran through her whole composition. Seyd, she judged, assessing his value to her with the unswerving accuracy of one whom you would say had no heart. There were, in fact, those who, meeting her in mere casual acquaintance, had divined her to be unreachable. The social virtues of the many, it is true these did not touch her. A great heart, or a simple heart, to either of these she would bend as the rapier blade will double to the sensitive touch. In the simplicity of Barbara, she had found the real expression of herself; but the great heart of John, that she had never seen. In him she found the dried philosopher, chained like the Bible of old to the lecturn, never reaching the souls of any but through the dullened intonations of the preacher. Her Bible must be in the inner chamber, learned from the heart to reach the heart; not learned by the ears to deaden the senses. John had never realized her possession of that inner chamber; had passed the door a thousand times, but never tried the lock. She doubted whether he could ever descend from that attic of his in the stars, and with the sword of a great nobility cut through the chain that held the door of that inner chamber of hers, and force his entrance to her soul.

His Anatomy of Change—perhaps that was great in its way; she had heard it said that it was the work of a great man. But that was not the greatness which touched her. Big deeds—they must win her—they only.

Then how had Seyd accomplished his victory—gaining a year’s submission in the face of every moral law? It is not a mystery, if there be any who will accept a thesis of psychology. Love is the inspiration of the intellect—passion the impulse of the senses. You will find, perhaps, a combination of the two in most; but no law makes them inseparable. The power to perceive the good, the ability to recognize the beautiful; that is intellect—it is also love. But the passion that sweeps through this struggling forest of humanity, dinning its wail of desire into the ears of us all, in that you will find nothing but the impulse of the senses. By the egotism of that, by the egotism of other hunger too, we rose to where we stood when the first religion brought its faint knowledge of altruism and began the lifting of the mind in the great and wonderful ascent.

In this you have answer then to the mystery, if there be any, of Katherine’s attitude towards Seyd. Call this history—this poor play of people—a study; then of what has it been? Of a nature in whom circumstance has broken the blending of egotism and altruism, of a nature in whom circumstance has biassed the choice of ways, and in whom personality has lifted its voice against the law.

The more Katherine realized her position, the quicker worked her mind towards extrication. What was to be done must be done at once. She must recall her letter from Seyd. Straightway then she dressed and went to the telephone. As she descended the stairs, a maid came into the hall.

“You’re wanted on the telephone, madam.”

As the receiver fouched her ear, she recognized Seyd’s voice. Let him speak first; if there were loophole, then, she would seize it.

“Your husband has been here to see me.”

“When?”

“Now—this afternoon. He apparently understands everything about our—our ”—Katherine’s pulses hung for the word—“our friendship. He asked me for your letters.”

“You gave them?” The poison of hatred was secreted in her voice.

“Yes, I gave them. He apparently knew everything.”

“Did you get the letter I sent you this morning?” “Yes, but I—”

“You didn’t give him that?”

“Yes, but you must let me—”

Rage rode over her like the charge of a thousand horse. She flung the receiver from her as the madness trampled on her control. The little ebonite trumpet flew to the length of its flexible tether—there it broke. The rest of Seyd’s explanation was vibrating on a dead wire.

CHAPTER XXXIII

HERE is the summit of Katherine’s life. You see her perched upon it, swaying in the dizzy height. Step by step, choosing each foothold with unaided intention, she has mounted to this crisis. An unconscious movement now, a loss of balance, realizing where she stands, and it will be all over. You will see the moment’s effort of recovery, then the giddy jerk into space and the sickening sight of the body pitching downward. All will be irremediable then; Katherine will have gone under.

Which shall it be? Which ought it to be? Which would it be in your case—and yours—and yours—and with the most of us?

Katherine faced the facts, steadied her eyes, letting none escape her. But here, when she found the unyielding array that met her gaze, her courage failed.

What had this life to offer, which had just been offered her? She had broken faith with John. With the rigid morality of his point of view, she rapidly assumed his judgment of her. The man who had written The Anatomy of Change could never find it in his nature to forgive. There the fact of her letter to Seyd would stand; nothing she could pray for would unwrite it in his eyes. In the unswerving contemplation of the deed, he would count it done, as she, in her heart of hearts, counted it also.

“Yet there has been no actual wrong!” She cried it a thousand times to herself; but her conscience answered—a ready echo to the words—that it was not from the need of determined intention.

To John then she looked in vain. She had tied the inextricable knot, and it was beyond reason to hope that he would help her to unravel it.

What then was left her? Nothing but the choice of two alternatives: the cutting of the knot, clean-swept with an unerring blade, or the casting of it to Seyd, as her fingers and his had helped to make it. God! What a choice! If she had thought it impossible to drag out life with Seyd before she had known of his ungenerous yielding of her letters, what must it be now? Both of them had read her last note; no trace of doubt on that point entered her mind. If for himself, she saw no forgiveness; then surely for Seyd, she gave no pardon in this.

Seyd? No! The army of her self-respect marched out before her thoughts and flouted this consideration. Were there no others upon whom she could rely? Her mother? Mrs. Crichton, overwhelming the moral aspect with the consideration of her worldly foolishness! Barbara? Barbara, who, if a year of life were left her, would seclude herself in the silent refuge of a convent!

Katherine clutched her hands wildly. You can see her eyes searching the emptiness for a sight of hope, her ears straining in the silence for a sound of promise.

Nothing came. Nothing offered. In her life she must be loved. There was no hope of that; only the ceaseless beating up and down in chains of her own shackling, an endless servitude in payment of the debt she owed. Here then was death—nothing else. She met the realization with the flint in her eyes. No sound of the reproaching of fate passed her lips. .She admitted no thought of it to bombast through her mind. It had come, as she had seen when she had received Henning’s letter, sooner than they had expected. A year or two had been given her—tantalizingly dangled before her eyes—and she had cried that it must be lived. Straightway she had made life as she wished it for herself, sought it out, hunted it, pursued it, overtaken it, to find that what she had thought was life—was death. Now the whole span was thrust into her hand; but she dared not take it; could not face the terrible realities it held. John’s words then came to her, clattering— dancing on her ears: “If you take your life as a toy, it ’ll break up under your very eyes. Death is not so great a matter when you don’t make it the gate to heaven or hell.”

Neither heaven nor hell did she see it now. Death was escape. She would take it; not hysterically; in no moment of overwrought emotion. Let the coroner shout it in the streets, that verdict of charity—while temporarily insane—but her mind was steady in its balance. She had reviewed every prospect and the benefit of death had out-weighed them all.

As she walked back on the way to the stairs, her steps were steady, her eyes bright, glittering with the fixed resolve, and she had faced death for the last nine months—why not now? There was a sense of familiarity in the thought of it. Utterly alone, she had stood before it then; still utterly alone, she was standing before it now.

Then the hall door opened. Katherine turned with breath caught, the steady progress of her thoughts checked with the sudden reality of John’s presence. Here her nerves broke, fell from the fine wire on which their balance had seemed secure. She felt as though she had been struck behind the knees; her limbs trembled. All would have gone smoothly, easily to its end, but for the appearance of John. For the moment, as she felt the outer call of life swept on to her like a gale of rushing wind that strikes a ship, she lost her steadiness. Her hand found the baluster for support. Effort beat the weakness down—hammered it out on the anvil—then she passed on up the stairs.

By the silence in the hall below, she knew that John was watching her, could feel his eyes burning through her. To reach that last step and turn out of sight before he called her name—every nerve in her strained to that.

“Katherine!”

A gasp of exhaustion spent from her lips as she turned.

“What is it?”

“You’ve heard—you know?”

“Know what?”

“Henning said he’d told you—their diagnosis.”

Was this the first thought in his mind? She looked down at him with puzzled eyes.

“Yes—” She nodded her head vaguely. “Not cancer.”

He began mounting the stairs to her. She counted the steps as he took them, getting nearer and nearer, the proportions of his figure enlarging with every step until it seemed to blot out all light and reason. She would have screamed if his hand had not gripped her wrist.

“You’re not well, child,” he said.

Katherine looked half wonderingly into his eyes.

“You’ve got my letters,” she replied.

“How do you know that?”

“Captain Seyd telephoned.”

“Yes, I’ve got them in my pocket.”

“You can give them to me if you’ve finished with them.”

He took her by the arm and led her to her room. Knowledge was beginning to come to him. Her nerves had been tautened to the last pitch; he could feel them vibrating to the sounds of his voice. In her room, he closed the door, picked her up bodily, and laid her on the bed. Now she was passing through a dream. All this she found to be incomprehensible. Her reason was struggling feebly, like some half-drowned animal, to gather what it meant.

But John awakened her from that. Out of his pocket he drew the bundle of letters and laid them by her side. In a moment she was sitting up, tearing open the parcel. The letter she had posted that morning fell out free from the rest. She pounced on it, turned it over. Then her eyes lifted to John, wandering with suspicion about his face.

“Who sealed this up again?” she asked, in a whisper.

“No one. It was never opened.”

Never opened! She felt driven to shriek with laughter—only the nails in her flesh goaded it back. Suddenly she lifted to her knees, putting her hands on John’s shoulders.

“What have you been thinking of me?” she asked, straight to his eyes.

His deep breath prefaced the thousand thoughts that had journeyed through his mind, but he only said: “I’ve been thinking that life is about the hardest to those who care for it most.”

“Then you don’t hate me?”

“Why should I?”

“For what you know.”

“I know nothing.”

“But you’ve read these letters?”

“Not one of them.”

Here was the great heart of the great man! She gazed at him in wonder.

“But you’ve guessed—and you’ve wondered?”

“Yes—I’ve done that.”

“Then why don’t you ask me any questions?” “Because if there was anything to tell me you couldn’t bear your life without its being told.”

Katherine’s eyes struggled with tears. This, indeed, was the greatness of John. She felt it swell over her, the mighty billows of a boiling sea that roar to us the majesty of creation. On John, she had counted least of ail, judging him by human standards in whose tables were the weights of jealousy, vanity, and the like. Her mind stood out against his now, its poverty shuddering beside his wealth of nobility. This was the great man, the obliteration of self, the annihilation of all personal bias—even where most nearly it touched his heart—in the judgment of his fellow-creatures. In this one moment a curtain was lifted from her eyes, bringing her the one step nearer to the truth and the height of life in the great transformation scene—that steady evolution of our conception of the beauty and greatness of existence.

“Do you think it safe to trust people as much as that?”

“Not always safe—but always better.”

“If I were to say there were nothing, then?”

His eyes took hers and held them.

“I should believe you.”

The nobleness of this touched her, moved her, blent steel into the courage of her soul.

“You must read this,” she said, lips quivering, but with the fear of life annihilated. “You must read this—and then—if you want to—just go out of the room—just—just go out of the room.”

She covered her eyes with her hands, hearing the tearing of the paper, the letter extracted from the envelope, the unfolding of the doubled sheet as it reached his eyes. Now he was reading it—now—now—in this silence. There were seven lines in it, but no expression of affection through it all—not one—not a single one. No beginning and no end—simply the seven lines; he must have reached the end by this time.

Yes, he was folding it up slowly again. Now he was beginning to walk towards her, on his way out of the room. Would he pass? Would he stop? She was pressing her eyeballs into her head.

“Is this all?” asked John. The heart in his voice was nerved to the negative.

Katherine took her hands away from her eyes. Her head nodded. The word she was struggling to say was in her throat.

“Then Seyd knows nothing of it?”

“Only that I had refused—before.”

Why had she accepted, then? He knew that. The casting of the light upon her nature from Barbara’s lantern of understanding had thrown much of his ignorance prominently before his eyes. What few details of Katherine’s friendship with Seyd were in his possession, he pieced intuitively together, realizing his own shortcomings, content to acknowledge hers.

Presently she was up on her knees again, hands on his shoulders, eyes deep-resting in his.

“I must ask one question, John,” she said, quietly, “before I can go on—before I can take up the thread again.”

“What is that?”

“Will the time come when you will be able to forgive me?”

In his hands, he took her face, pressing her cheeks, drawing her eyes still closer into his.

“It has come,” he said. “It is.”

“John”—her lips brushed the words against his lips —“I love you, not because I’ve gained forgiveness, but because you have given it. I’ve never seen anything great or big in life till now. But I’m going to ask you a question. Why do you say that you don’t believe in the forgiveness of sins, and yet forgive me?” She held his head close to hers for the answer.

“You want philosophy now?” he asked, with a smile. “I want to understand that. When you said it to me at the music-hall the other night, it was like pouring steel into my heart. It meant to me then that we had nothing in common—seemed to break up my life and yours. Now you forgive me where it must hurt you most. You do believe in the forgiveness of sins?” “No, not as you understand it.”

“How do I understand it?”

“You see the mercy of God wiping them out—annihilating them so long as the balance of your deeds is in your favor. If it is not in your favor, you see everlasting perdition. I believe in neither of those things. They’ve had their day. The familiarity of human nature with those two beliefs has bred its contempt. The best of us now have an arrogant disbelief in hell, but we still speak with a confident assurance of heaven. But that is no belief. If you refuse to accept one, you must refuse to accept the other. No creed can hold without entire acceptance. Therefore, insomuch as I don’t agree with this wiping out of sins by divine agency, I do not believe in your forgiveness of them.” “Then when you say you forgive me—?”

“I mean”—he kissed her eyes—“I love you. So I understand forgiveness.”

“But what I have done—?”

“The fact that I love you and that the good is in the least of us will help you to undo. Will you do something for me now?”

“Anything in the world—my husband—”

“Let me send Barbara to you—she’s unhappy. She told me the other night that she felt you did not want her any longer.”

Katherine released her hands.

“Send her now,” she said.

A few minutes later, Barbara came into the room, with Sinby, the kitchen cat, marching at her heels.

THE END