Chapter I: SAID I would tell you the story of Adeline. You remember that she saw (2)

I remember the particular morning when she was taken ill. It was a tremendously hot day in June. Jimmy was sitting on the wooden bench by the garden door, with his thin hands spread out on his knees to bake in the sun. I was hanging about the garden, and longing to get back to the Inn. Mrs. Covey came out from the dairy with a dish clout in her hand. She began to vigorously “shoo” a fine cock from the strawberry bed. I can see her now, with her bent back in the brownish bodice and triangular-folded scarlet shawl. She went back to the house between rows of podded broad beans. When she cried out to the cock--who was a gay fellow, all brown and burnish--it was a queer, unwomanly cry. No doubt she knew the note with which to scare him. He went racing back to the yard, all tail feathers, swinging comb, and indignant cackle.

An hour afterward she fell on the flagstones by the back door. She had been very busy making jelly of windfall apples. Apoplexy gripped her, and she fell, a droll-looking, lop-sided heap, on the stones.

That was a long, hot, empty day. Jimmy was fretful and selfish, after the manner of chronic invalids. He missed his egg and milk, his jelly, the dozen little dainties that she prepared for him. And I think he was a trifle scared, poor chap, by the very mention of Death--Death, that unpleasant personage, with whom he already had a bowing acquaintance.

The doctor came--a hearty country man, in a high, rakish-looking trap. He said there was no hope for her. A woman came in and got her to bed. Her world waited breathlessly, soberly for her to go. Her world--of forty acres or so--was waiting stolidly. Birds in the wood--metallic finches, throaty wood pigeons, the persistent cuckoo, called across the branches and the long, rank grass of her. She had known so many generations of birds.

Out by the back door everything was eloquent of her: pans of unskimmed milk in the dairy, the preserving pan, with a wooden skimmer set in syrup.

Jimmy crawled up the white road in the sun to the public house. But I stayed behind. I was fond of the queer old woman, and I thought that perhaps I might come in useful. Zak said moodily that it was an awkward time of the year for illness. He didn’t put it in words, but I knew his thought--that it was inconsiderate of her to take to dying in the middle of haymaking. In the orchard was the awning which she had roughly rigged up for the haymakers--but who was to get the men’s tea? The grass in the eight-acre meadow had been left until the last. There was a merry jingle as the machine rattled and rocked along.

Jib and Zak, so much alike, with eyes and mouths twisted in consequence of life-long opposition to the glare of the sun, came into the parlor where I sat reading the local paper. They had been clumping hopelessly about in the garden. I had watched them, finding them more interesting than the price of store pigs and the sale of underwood. They had looked out wistfully at the eight-acre field, half lush, half shorn. They had looked up at Mrs. Covey’s window--a tiny window, set high in the brown thatch roof; a window with dim, greenish panes and the spectral suggestion of a limp calico curtain.

We heard the slipping, soft sound of feet. The stairs opened out from the sitting room. A beautiful old woman of forty-five or less--work in the fields and so many children make them old long before that--sidled up to the brothers, as they sat heavily in the Windsor chairs by the empty hearth. She was the village layer-out; once she had been the village coquette. Five shillings a corpse, and shillings hard to earn! Zak had run to her cottage and fetched her directly his mother fell. She was always called to deathbeds. She gave a sidelong look at me and courtesied with charming grace; some of these rustic women are queens of grace. Then she spoke to the brothers, the greedy look of a vulture creeping into her violet eyes.

“I’m jest slipping home now to look after my lodger. There’s no change in her. She won’t go, bless your hearts, for pretty nigh twenty-four hour. I’ll look round after tea agen; no doubt you’ll make it worth my while.”

For nearly a week it went on; the hot, breathless days, bees buzzing in the big lime by the gate; at dusk the ringing, rattling croak of frogs in the pond, the weird voice of the night-jar. Jimmy grew more fretful. He complained that he could not sleep for the cursed nightingale. He wanted to go home; back to the Inn, to the boys, to the halls, the bars, the evening papers. He had run out of tobacco--they only sold shag at the village shop. He took my last packet of cigarette papers. But I wanted to stay--for the end, which we all knew must come before another Sunday. That window, high in the eaves, rigorously shut and curtained, fascinated me.

On the fifth day things were just as they had been on the first, each day of that week was a replica. Jib, Zak, and I were in the parlor, the local paper was more crumpled, the flowers on the window ledge drooped. Jimmy had crawled up in the sun and dust to the public house, where they had a crazy piano in the bar parlor. The layer-out, the Vulture, as I had grown to call her to myself, came slipping down the stairs again in easy list slippers of drab and green.

“Some dies hard,” she said sententiously to the two sons, twisting the corner of her apron, shaking her wavy white head, and eying me.

“It’s they game feathers she’s a-layin’ on,” she continued. “You can’t die easy on game feathers, and there’s a plenty in the bed. Game feathers! They skeer off Death--but her time’s come, poor love. Help lift her. Lay her on the floor; she’ll go soon and easy then.”

Jib and Zak looked at each other furtively, then each shook his head. They couldn’t lend a hand to help her die. The Vulture knew their thought--these women are full of intuition.

“We’ll call Mas’r Puttick,” she said with inspiration. “And p’r’aps the gentleman would not mind lendin’ a hand.”

She put her own hand to her side and took a short breath, muttering something about not being strong enough to lift.

I said I’d go and fetch Puttick. He was cutting mangels in the field beyond the garden, a couple of cows following him with keen interest on the other side of the hedge. There was a wide border of white pinks to the strawberry bed; the scent was heavy. White pinks, and, on the other side of the path, broad beans in blossom.

Puttick was a very old man, older than Mrs. Covey, and his devotion to her had been the mild jest of the neighbors. He did her chivalrous service: carried down the refuse of his allotment garden for her pigs; pea haulm, cabbage stumps, turnip tops too tough for the pot, spinach that had bolted. He was always begging refuse “for t’ old gell’s pig.” “T’ old gell” he invariably called her--behind her back--with an indulgent mixture of tenderness and contempt for her as a lone widow woman, with natural, womanly ways of scraping and nagging. He left his work solemnly when I spoke to him. We went to the house. Three of the five cats were looking askance at a saucer of sour milk set in the middle of the strawberry bed--that was “t’ old gell’s” way of scaring birds from her fruit. We went up the rat-eaten oak stairs, Puttick, the Vulture, and I.

There was a characteristic smell about the place: a smell of ancient garments, ropes of onions, apples on the floor of the attic, a smell garnered by closely shut casements.

She was lying gaunt and straight in the bed, with its carved posts, patchwork quilt, and dirty chintz hangings. Her face was yellow, so was her unbleached nightgown, so were her hands with their curved black nails. As we went in she looked round sharply at the door--a curious look; lurid, angry, beseeching.

Puttick muttered, with a thick throat and his old eyes dazed, “T’ old gell, t’ old gell.” It was grim to see her lying there with an idle tongue, with idle hands. No doubt he was feeling drearily that his time must be near too. He had been a virile young man when she had been a child. The world could not go on without old Mis’ Covey of Farthings Farm. She _was_ the world. No one else would keep him on with odd jobs all through the winter. She must be made to live. He said, after a long pause, during which I could see that his aged brain had been working turgidly in an agony of desire to rouse her:

“They blackbirds, dang ’em, was at the white-heart cherries as early as five this mornin’.”

But she did not stir. She only stared from the wall and back again, with the odd, savage stare of entreaty, which none of us could understand.

“I’ve seen many go, but none so hard as her. And yet she wasn’t what you’d call a worldly-minded woman. Take her under the shoulders, sir, if you kindly will, and, Mas’r Puttick, be ready to ketch her legs.”

The woman put her deft hands under the bedclothes and rolled the heavy legs in a plaid shawl. Then, between us, we lifted her from the malignant bed--full of the feathers of birds that she had plucked remorselessly and who would not let her go in peace now that her time had come. We stretched her decently on the floor near the clock and pulled the blanket close under her peaked chin.

“We’ve all been young,” the Vulture said confidentially to me as we jostled together down the twisting stairs. “There’s something on her mind--a slip maybe. Them things comes up at the last and won’t let us women go. The men are harder.”

Jib and Zak were still slouching in the Windsor chairs. They were helpless without their mother, great fellows of thirty-eight and forty. But she had been the mainspring. She had kept the purse-strings, kept all control. They were mechanical figures run down without her. I sat on the couch with the blue-checked cover and speculated on her secret, on some rustic story made sweet by time, some sin--a slip, as the country woman mercifully said--something which was quivering on her tied tongue and which she couldn’t give word to.

Jib and Zak went slowly back to the hayfield, Puttick to his mangels. I saw him go round the house, past the sitting-room window. He kept casting guilty glances at the window overhead with the calico blind. He had lent a hand in killing her.

But she obstinately wouldn’t die. Death was expected of her. The doctor had prophesied it; the Vulture knew it would come, by many ancient, foolish signs. The impress of her long bony body dented the swollen bed of feathers, but on the sixth day she was lying alive still on the floor on a rough couch of blankets, at the foot of the clock, whose brass face seemed to leer and twinkle at her victoriously when the western sun came in.

She would not go. The patience of the layer-out was quite exhausted.

“I must bide about the place,” she said plaintively. “It’s money out o’ pocket to me. I could be makin’ a lot in the hayfields. But I dursn’t leave. She’ll be stiff a’most as soon as the breath is out o’ her, and you can’t do nothin’ with a corpse then.”

“Sure, sure,” gurgled all the other women softly.

The room was full of women. I kept in the garden, but I could see and hear them through the open door. I could see and hear all: the sunny sitting room, with its broad window ledges, on which were pots of calceolarias, with spotted, pouch-like blossoms; the women, with children at their skirts or buried in their cotton bodices. All waiting and twittering in that house of death.

I knew every line of the local paper. The long clay pipe which Jib in pity had bestowed on me was cool, but it hurt my throat to draw such a long way. I smoked it from sentiment. I like those long clays, but properly speaking they should go with village politics. Jimmy was on his back in the orchard, deep in grass which had not been cut yet, rolling his last cigarette with long, transparent fingers. But he was waiting like the rest of us. He started up on his elbow when the sound came. We all heard it through the closed doors of bedroom and staircase. That sound! The wheezing creak of a chain. A minute later came the clear, deliberate chime of three. Then all the women and the two sons remembered that for six days no one had thought to draw up the clock. There was then no secret, no sin; no eating, biting prick of conscience.

* * * * *

She was dead by the open case, on her knees, with one crooked-out hand caught round the open door. Her eyes, wide open still, were on the softly swaying pendulum, and the heavy weight was drawn high.

Jib, who had inherited his share of her practicality, and more, went up softly as soon as he was allowed to and turned the hand round to the proper place, each hour chiming in the quiet room.

Four. Five. Six. Seven.

It was evening. The haymakers had gone and a stifling mist was creeping across the cropped meadows. The promise of another blazing day.

“Ah! to think it was only _that_ she wanted.” The layer-out extended her hand and drew down her sweetly curved mouth. “I knew there was something on her mind; there offen is with us poor women. We’ve all been young----” She broke off discreetly, in the presence of the sons. “But who’d ha’ thought of that plaguey clock? Why, any of us might ha’ drawed it up if we’d ha’ thought. I might ha’ earned good money at the hayin’ this week.”

She went down the flagged path through the orchard to the gate. Jimmy, half buried again in grass, long white daisies, and the delicate summer orchis, stared at her, and his face changed.

“She reminds me of someone I used to know,” he said, and then stopped abruptly. It was the only peep he ever gave me into his inner life. But I remembered afterward.

We sat out until dusk, smoking--what dust of tobacco we had--and looking up trains. Jib and Zak had gone upstairs. Their voices came down to us, through the window with the greenish glass, which was now swung back. They were discussing the coming sale.

“A feather bed allus fetches money.”

“There’s folk--gentry--as likes this oak.”

“It’s a good goer, an’ I’ve allus liked a chain better’n a cord.”

“Let’s take the 2.45, old man,” said Jimmy. “I’d like to look in at the Royal in the evening. They’ve got that big girl there--Lilian--what’s her name? The girl who sings Irish song’s so well.”

The fierce summer sun had gone to bed. All the night sounds were beginning--beetles, frogs, birds. The nightingale that Jimmy so hated was tuning up on a hedge near.

“Shan’t get a wink of sleep to-night,” he said dolefully, with his hard, painful cough. “Give me the cabs for a lullaby.”

Jib and Zak were coming slowly downstairs. I heard them shut her door. I could imagine her: the sheet over her hard face, the clock, to whose regularity she had given her last breath, keeping her sedate company.

AN INTERLUDE.

IT was only Mrs. Conifer. Thought the woman would never go! Poor soul! What a curse a conscience is. She was a fool to come back! Said she couldn’t help it! She loathes the very memory of Kinsman--she adores her husband--and yet she comes back to-night. That is so deliciously like a woman--to come back. To come creeping through the gate, dodging the porter, like she used to do, just to get the flavor of those old, distasteful days on her tongue again.

Kinsman had the ground floor at No. 7. A middle-aged couple rent it now; the wife watches everyone in and out of the Inn through a pair of opera glasses. In Kinsman’s time there were high-art curtains--very dingy--at the windows and tumbled red-and-white dhurries on the floor and blue plates hung by wire along the walls.

He was a languid, artistic chap--played the violin, hung about old bookstalls and _bric-à-brac_ shops in the lanes off Holborn.

He very rarely went to a music hall, avoided rowdy parties, dined out a great deal in the season, and spoke now and then, in an off-hand, half-ashamed way, of his people near Park Lane. There were photographs of society beauties on his mantelshelf, propped up against Oriental bowls--“pudden basins,” his laundress dubbed them scornfully--he gave you to understand that he knew all the beauties personally.

He visited the Conifers, who had a big dingy house in Russell Square. Conifer was a stockbroker, very much absorbed in his business, and Mrs. Conifer was an extremely pretty blonde in the china-doll style. She was the kind of little woman who is called “dressy” by her friends.

You don’t know the oppressively respectable side of Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury is altering fast. The change pains me. I wish some fellow who could write would immortalize the old place before it disappears. Every time I go outside the gates of the Inn some change hits me in the face. I see hoardings with up-to-date posters and the addresses of house-breakers in places where once there was a familiar, flat-faced house, with wide-framed windows. The old shops are going, little fusty shops--eating houses, furniture stores, undertakers. I saw the last typical eating house this morning. There was nothing in the window but a big blue dish--Kinsman would have admired it--and a row of pressed beef tins, with a haddock hanging flabbily over each tin.

Bloomsbury is forever in the violent stage--always going up or down. Directly they took away our exclusive gates and let the cabs run straight through to Kings Cross and Euston, there was an epidemic of boarding houses. I believe that every house in Woburn Place takes lodgers--more or less genteelly. An old fellow who had the first floor set at 3 when I came to the Inn remembered the days when only carriage folk lived in Great James Street. The first professional brass plate on a door ruffled the inhabitants considerably.

Great James Street, Doughty Street, and a few more belong to the Tichborne family. I remember a charwoman who used to say viciously--at times when she considered herself imposed upon by those she worked for:

“Ah! Wait till Sir Roger comes out o’ quod, and then they’ll see.”

Just now we are aggressively on the up grade. It is much worse than going down. The Duke has determined to make Bloomsbury a superior residential quarter once more. He has pulled down some houses, added a story to others, made gardens of the mews--and ruined the place for all sentimental people. These red-and-white blocks of flats spoil the neighborhood. We are becoming vulgarly opulent. Once you might have drawn a line, roughly, say down Southampton Row, and so divided the oppressively respectable from the aggressively Bohemian. That was so in Mrs. Conifer’s time.

She was on the respectable side, of course: where people subscribe to Mudie’s and make the changing of books the great business of the day, where the men come home punctually to dinner at seven and the women stroll down Oxford Street regularly on fine afternoons. You may still see them swarming out of Hanway Street, very well dressed as a rule, and very often Jewesses.

Mrs. Conifer was sometimes dull, so dull that she used to go to a cake shop and have her afternoon tea and listen to the other women’s chatter. Here was an opportunity that Kinsman could not miss. Before long she went to his rooms instead of going to the cake shop. It was really much more amusing. The Inn is quiet in the afternoons. A great many of the fellows are in the City, and the laundresses have gone away for the day. Mrs. Conifer used to thread her way through quiet by-ways--down Guilford Street, along monastic Great James Street, across Theobalds Road, and onwards. The gardens were quiet in those days; we did not allow children in until evening. It was so beautifully fresh and still after the roar and dust of outside London, the summer smells of provision shops, and the rattle of omnibuses. Kinsman had shaded windows--it was summer time at first--and a dainty tea. He liked her to come in the afternoons because Sophia Dominy, of whom he was a little afraid, was safely shut away in the big mantle shop where she was dummy. But by and by Mrs. Conifer came in the evenings also--after dinner, when Conifer had shut himself up for the evening in his study. She used to drive up to the gates on wet nights. I saw her more than once myself--always beautifully dressed and closely veiled, and having that intangible air of shrinking which is natural to the woman who never goes out alone after dark.

And then one night she met Sophia Dominy in the doorway. It was bound to happen. Sophia was a handsome girl with a fine figure--I told you she was dummy at a mantle shop. She came out of the shadow of the doorway as Mrs. Conifer drew into it. It so happened that Kinsman was late home that night; his windows were dark. Mrs. Conifer looked. With her quick woman’s eye she took in every detail of this other woman, whose clothes were a pitiful struggle for costly effect--seal plush instead of sealskin, weedy ostrich plumes in her hat, and in her small ears the glitter of red glass. There must have been insolent contempt in her china-blue eyes, for Sophia’s great black ones began to blaze, and she put her hand on the other’s slim, nervous shoulder. She said, with an offensive touch of comradeship:

“Good-evening, Mrs. Conifer.”

How did she find out? How do women learn these things? _You_ can say perhaps--_I_ give it up. I only know that Kinsman had been very careful--as careful as a man knows how.

Little blond Mrs. Conifer started, and then stared coldly at the gaudy, tawdry, dark creature in the doorway.

“I--I don’t understand,” she faltered; “I--excuse me--I do not know you.”

She made a weak attempt at dignity, but she looked horribly ashamed and alarmed. She was afraid that the girl knew everything and was going to blackmail her.

“But I know you,” returned the other, with a little fierce chuckle of triumph. “I know why you have come here to-night. You ladies give yourself such airs--you are not a bit better than girls like me. If everybody had their rights, I ought to be Mrs. Kinsman. See!”

Mrs. Conifer did see. The whole hideous position was perfectly clear to her, without another word. You won’t believe me, of course, but she wasn’t a wicked woman. She had simply drifted, like any other idle young woman might. There had been a fascination about Kinsman, with his queerly furnished rooms, his romantic airs of art-worship, sympathy, and so on. She had regarded herself as misunderstood and was inclined to be plaintively melancholy about Conifer’s obtuseness. Kinsman had been an affinity. She got the insidious flavor of the Inn. There had been nothing vulgar or wicked about the affair. It had only been delicious, piquant, dangerous--like a leaf torn out of the “Decameron.” Sophia Dominy brought everything up to date, brought terrifying visions of the Divorce Court. Mrs. Conifer was a faithful wife again, in every thought, directly she looked into those blazing black eyes and understood.

She whisked round and rustled swiftly in her skirts of silk across the square, getting out at the Holborn end and plunging into the stream of people on the pavement flowing westward. So soon as the first tightness was out of her throat and the first desperate trembling had left her limbs she hailed a hansom, telling the man to stop at the corner of Russell Square. She fell back quivering on the seat and shut her eyes, but opened them again directly because the face of Sophia rose before her--triumphant, grinning, pale with chalk, and hidden to the thick brows with a coarse fuzz of hair.

She went tottering up her own doorsteps. As she slipped along the hall, and past the study door, Conifer called out:

“Is that you, Freda?”

“Yes, it is I.”

“Come in.”

She stepped over the threshold and stood in the warm room, her pale head hanging and her half-shut eyes filled with dread. She forced herself to look up at last and to stammer out:

“We drove down to Terry’s Theater, Mrs. Hart and I. But the house was full--so--so we drove back. That is all--really.”

Conifer was sitting over the big table as usual, and as usual it was strewn with papers. But the double knot of anxiety was untied from above his eyes and the packets of paper were pushed back. There was a new tenderness on his face, or, rather, the revival of on old one.

“I’m glad you came back,” he said. “I’ve got time to talk to you to-night, darling. I shall have time to take you about again myself. I’ve been awfully worried lately about business--you wouldn’t understand, it would only bother you. But I was afraid once that it meant ruin. I’ve been in a very tight place. But it’s all right now.”

He set back his shoulders and sighed, as if he threw off at that moment the burden of months.

“I shall,” he repeated, laughing foolishly, “have time for _you_ now.”

Mrs. Conifer’s pretty, weak face stiffened into horror. She was thinking of the quiet Inn, with its perpetual, sanctified taste of cloisters and the Middle Ages; thinking of Kinsman’s rooms, with the high-art furbelows, the violin under the table, the untidy dhurries on the floor, the impressionist daubs which he had painted himself and hung on the wall to keep the blue plates company. She thought of the black, dingy doorway, of the girl with the savage face and the twinkling earrings.

“Talk to me.” Conifer, who had shut the door carefully, half lifted her into the great chair by the fire and stretched himself at her feet on the rug, like a faithful dog.

Their eyes met; his full of worship, hers of lava-like tears.

“You love me?” she asked incredulously, the frozen look creeping more stiffly over her face. “I --I began to think----”

She looked such a small, shrunken thing--as he told her afterward--that he felt quite anxious and remorseful.

“Love!” he cried out boyishly; “I should think I did. Only business worries, you know, darling, enchain a man. He can’t be always saying it.”

He took her in his arms. She shivered as he kissed her, taking her full punishment from his ardent lips. She had loved him all along--only him. She thought of Kinsman, in his stuffy, wooden room, with a fierce, ashamed loathing. She kept quiet a little, her head on her husband’s breast and his lips just flicking her face now and then. At last she broke out beseechingly:

“Let us go away for a holiday.”

“Very good idea. When?”

“To-night--to-morrow, I mean. And, Dick--”

“Yes.”

“Let’s give up this house and go into the country. You can have a pony trap and a season ticket.”

“That isn’t half a bad idea,” he responded lazily--he was too happy to be positive or vehement about anything. “The rent here is very high and I don’t see what we get for it.”

* * * * *

They went abroad for two months, and when they returned they took a house somewhere in Surrey. They lived there for four years--with a pony trap, a man for the garden, and all the other accessories of rural gentility. Mrs. Conifer was very happy. She had two charming children. She was in the third best set--the set which draws the line at tenant farmers, but thinks it rather a privilege to be invited to the Vicarage.

She never thought of Kinsman, of that dazed, magic time when she had been a traitor to Dick. She only heard of him twice--once when they saw his name in the newspaper--co-respondent in a divorce suit or something of that sort--and wondered if it were the same man--_their_ Kinsman--casually over dinner.

That was all. Except for that, she never gave Kinsman a thought, not even a shudder. She was too happy, too prosperous, too busy. She had her children. She had also her dogs, her bees, her poultry--all the live things that women gather about them in the country, to take the place of shopping. She had her little social excitements--summer garden parties and winter hockey. She had her little heart-burnings and triumphs--being snubbed by this woman or dropping that one.

But one day when she was out alone on her bicycle she came upon Kinsman in a lane near the house. He was very shabby, obviously very down on his luck. She remembered all at once that he had never given her back her letters--those foolish, imprudent letters in which she had bared her soul. She gripped the handle bars of her machine desperately. He was standing in her path. For a moment she had a wild plan of running him down. But the next moment her foot was on the ground. She had dismounted and faced him.

That was the first of many meetings. He was on his last legs, he was absolutely unscrupulous, and he regularly bled the poor little woman. Once her husband commented on her shabby hat, offered to raise her allowance, and gave her five sovereigns to go on with. The yellow coins dropped like burning blood into her palm. Twice a week she met Kinsman in the lane--Kinsman, shabby and dissolute and a blackmailer. I don’t know what he had been up to in those four years, something queer, no doubt. He was always a bit of an enigma. He cleaned her out at last. She had to tell him that she could not give him another penny. It was in the lane as usual. A wet, sodden October afternoon. The sky was gray and unrelenting, like Kinsman’s face. When they parted, after a piteous scene on her part, it was on the understanding that he would come to the house that night and give her husband those letters. That was all.

On her way home she met one or two people--her best friends. They chatted a bit of little social things--the hockey ball, a wedding, to which she had not been asked, some new people at a house on the hill, on whom nobody had yet called.

That afternoon she did not change her dress, but went indoors and threw herself on the drawing-room sofa in her short, bicycling skirt. In front of the window she faced was a cherry tree, its boughs bent by the wind and its long, dry leaves floating yellow to the grass. She tried to form her plans. Would Dick turn her out that night? It was beginning to rain; inside, the fire was cheery. The room had never looked so nice. Her wild eyes roved over her little cherished gimcracks on the tables--the dainty rubbish that housekeepers accumulate and love. When she heard wheels outside she did not rise. She was afraid. Perhaps Kinsman had stopped the trap on the way from the station. But Dick came in and gave her the usual temperate kiss and asked in the usual hearty way how the youngsters were and whether dinner was going to be punctual. He sat sprawling in slippers and an old coat by the fire, saying comfortably what a rough night it was and how the wind had lashed into his eyes as he drove home.

She turned on her cushions and watched him. He was growing fat and bald--there were prosperous, uninteresting curves all over him. He had ripened into a flourishing business man who liked his dinner and a good cigar, who considered his wife as one of his comforts--and very little more. But she loved him. How she loved him! Would he send her away that night?

He was mumbling sleepily that it was not fit weather in which to turn a dog out. Would he turn her out? Would he let her take the baby?

She stared out at the autumn sky and tossing trees; in, at the firelight chasing round the warm, picture-loaded walls. Where would to-morrow find her? To-morrow she would be an outcast.

All the time her ears were pricking for the door bell and, when it clanged, she started to her feet, with a choking sound in her dry throat. Her face was clay above the severe line of her rigidly cut cloth bodice. The bell rang again. She got up and almost crawled toward that deep chair by the fire and kissed her husband--a kiss of relinquishment. He patted her hair and looked at her in lazy surprise. Then he said in a voice of mild irritation:

“That can’t be Crook” (he was the curate). “He said he’d look in one night for a game of chess. But I didn’t ask him to dinner, and he surely wouldn’t turn out in such weather. I hope it isn’t Crook. I want to do some work to-night.”

He glanced at his black bag, which was bloated with papers which he had brought from the City.

Mrs. Conifer looked at it too--resentfully. She was thinking, with her woman’s logic, that it was this ardent devotion to business on her husband’s part which had made her drift. If he had not, in the Russell Square days, brought home that bag so often, she would not be in such a pitiable plight to-night. There was a hurried opening of doors downstairs, voices in the hall, then a sharp report and another.

Mrs. Conifer shrieked. Her husband pulled himself out of the depths of the chair and rushed downstairs. Presently she stole after him, her legs like lead and her wild heart thumping in her throat.

The hall was brightly lighted with a red and yellow light, filtering through colored glass lanterns. Face downward on the tesselated floor was the body of a man, his prone head in a pool. The door was flung back. Black night outside and the sob of the wind!

Two men, the gardener and another, lifted something from the step and carried it in. Mrs. Conifer dragged herself forward. The world swung round with her--they were bringing in another woman. They stretched her beside the man--a woman with the wreck of a gaudy black beauty. It was a face which Mrs. Conifer had seen once--in the doorway of the Inn, the face of Sophia Dominy, her savior.

The servants were telling Dick how it happened. Kinsman had called and asked for him. The woman must have been close behind. As he stepped across the threshold she fired, then turned the weapon to her own head.

Kinsman was always a puzzle. What had he been doing in the intervening four years? How had he disgraced himself? Had Sophia been with him all the time? No one will ever know. One thing only is certain; that Sophia, who was a very jolly, good sort of girl, had been bitterly jealous of Mrs. Conifer.

Dead eyes blankly regarding her; blood circling sluggishly on the floor; October wind moaning in and lifting sadly the draggled end of smartness on the poor girl’s dress!

She lost all control, drew her shaking hands from her breast, and gave a long cry of horror and despair. She couldn’t even be grateful for her escape--couldn’t realize it. Dick turned. He saw her there for the first time. He put an arm about her and led her upstairs--to the firelit room, with the open piano, the bowls of autumn flowers, and the pleasant litter of magazines. She flung herself into his arms, choking with emotion.

“My God!” she gasped--suddenly, horribly vehement for so childish and dainty a creature--“if--if--if----”

She was on the verge of a confession, but Dick’s trust was so complete that he thought her merely hysterical--as well she might be. He lifted her distorted face from its burrow in his coat and put his wife with tender insistence on the sofa.

“There, there,” he said, patting her softly. “Don’t you give way. It’s a beastly business. What the deuce could poor Kinsman have wanted with me? I must go, dearie; there is a great deal to be arranged. I’ll send one of the maids to look after you.”

“No,” she cried sharply, “I want to be alone.”

He kissed her and went away. After a little she heard him leave the house. Then the baby wailed in the room above and the nurse crooned it quiet. She heard the tramp of feet in the hall; heard the study door shut stealthily, and guessed what this dread, subdued bustle meant.

She got up stiffly and went round and round the room, taking up every little toy from the tables thoughtfully, arranging mats and flowers--touching everything with a wistful clinging because it had been spared to her. And then she suddenly remembered--remembered that she was not quite safe yet.

Everything downstairs was still. She stole to the door and listened. Then she pattered out onto the landing, stooped down, and taking off her slippers carried them in her hand. She crept down the stairs--cursing the steady tick of the tall clock, the rustle of her silk petticoat. She reached the study and waited outside the door for a moment. She was gathering courage to save her honor. She turned the handle at last. Someone had lighted the lamp--the reading lamp with the green shade. It cast a faint yellowish flicker on the horrible shrouded things that were stretched, side by side, on the big table.

In the drawer of that table Conifer kept a flask of brandy. She took it out and tipped some of the blazing spirit down her throat. It nerved her to peel the sheet from Kinsman’s face, to draw it lower, to thrust her delicate hand, heavy with Conifer’s jewels, into the inner pocket of the dead man’s coat and steal her letters.

Then she drew the sheet back--heart, hand, and head heavy with recollection. All sorts of minor things flashed through her dizzy head--things which had been romantic, daring, delightful at the time--which she exaggerated now into deadly sins, never, never to be wiped out. At Sophia she did not look. But her light blue eyes fixed on Kinsman. His thin lips seemed to have taken a mocking curve--although she had the best of the game. His mouth was shut forever and her letters were back in her own possession. She tucked them into her bodice, remembered to pick up her slippers from the floor, and stole away.

There was a servant in the drawing room tending the fire; there was another, as she could hear, busy in the bedrooms, preparing for the night. But the nurse was downstairs and the nurseries were empty, except for the sleeping children.

She crept in, looking furtively round the firelit walls. She went over to the hearth, dug the unclean letters fiercely in, and watched them burn. There was a little white frock airing on the guard. She took it up in her hot hands and kissed it. Toys were all over the floor; one, a fur monkey with one eye missing and the other fiery-red, seemed to blink up malignantly--and as if it knew and would one day tell her children.

She went into the night nursery and looked at two small heads and two small bodies curled under flowery eider downs. The children were both babies under three. There were toys here too and little socks that she had knitted. These two rooms filled her with a wilder misery and terror than she had known before, because she had been so near losing those little heads on the pillows.

Heavy with shame, thinking of those two--_things_--below, she slipped to the floor and tried to pray--for the souls of the dead and the peace of the living. But her knees stiffened. She stumbled to her feet, moaning. A grotesque memory beat in on her. She remembered the old superstition--that no witch could shed a tear; that this was the witches’ most bitter punishment. Well, here was hers. She could not pray. She had sinned, but she had come through the fire. She was faithful to Conifer with a double fervor. She had a high constancy and love which the mere faithful wife, who has never been tempted, cannot attain. Still--she must bear the burden--of an interlude--all her days.

* * * * *

She was out of sorts for a long time afterward--taking no interest in her bees, her poultry,--they are rose-comb Andalusians, she told me impressively,--or her children. The local doctor said that her nerves were all wrong. He recommended raw eggs and a thorough change. Conifer has brought her up to town. He has been taking her the round of the theaters--French plays, farces--imagine her sitting through them! On this, her first free night--he’s dining with a City company--she came to me! came creeping through the Inn in the old way, because she couldn’t help it.

What an impulsive, delightful, compromising fool a true woman is! I only met her twice--for a minute, by accident--with Kinsman--and yet she came to me to-night. Put herself absolutely in my power. I might blackmail her as Kinsman did. I might tell Conifer. Fortunately for her I shan’t.

She sat and talked, elaborated every detail, shredded every sensation, just as Pray did. I wish these remorseful, perplexed, sinned against and sinning people would not come to me. They shove their skeletons in my face, rattling every bone, speaking of the past--always, always the past--to a fellow who wants to keep young, who doesn’t feel his age.

MORTGAGED.