Chapter X (7)

"I don't think there's any," she replied at once. "And as for its being hard on mothers, it's only that kind of mother--foolish and sentimental and selfish--who puts herself into rivalry with the other kind of love, when the time comes for it. The love of a child is very sweet, but it can't last like that much beyond childhood. She'd had it all. She's had it to the full. Nobody tried to deprive her of it, though of course she accuses me of trying to do so. I might have done. I shouldn't have wearied Harry with my love as she has wearied him. I should have been less exigent, less selfish, controlled myself more. She doesn't know, even now, and I shan't take the trouble to tell her, that she doesn't love him nearly as much as she thinks she does. If it weren't for her jealousy she would be quite content to live her own life chiefly apart from him, now he is grown up, and no longer a child to be petted, and to return petting. She has lived her foolish shallow life apart for the last two years, and she has let it be known that she thinks herself raised in living it. Oh, you needn't worry yourself about Charlotte. She hasn't got the depth to feel anything for long."

*CHAPTER XXVII*

*LADY BRENT AND VIOLA*

Lady Brent wondered, when Mrs. Clark opened the door to her at Bastian's lodgings, how much was known at Royd of what had already happened in this house. If Mrs. Clark had not discovered who Harry was, which seemed unlikely, and had not seen Mrs. Brent, she knew well enough whom she was admitting now. It was not made plain that she expected the visit, but she expressed no surprise at it, and evidently expected to be recognized. Lady Brent said a few words to her about her sister at Royd, as she was being conducted up the stairs. Everything would come into the light now, and it was much better so.

Viola was alone in the sitting-room. It had been made very tidy, and was filled with flowers. The great red roses might have been Harry's gift to her. The little row of vellum-bound books above the table in her corner certainly were, for Wilbraham had procured them to his order.

Viola stood by the middle table as they entered. She looked very young and very beautiful--all the more beautiful because of the colour that was flooding her delicate skin, and the half-alarmed look in her dark eyes.

Lady Brent waited until the door was shut behind her, searching her with her eyes, and then went forward and kissed her. Viola did not seem to have expected this. She was confused, and there was moisture in her eyes as she greeted Wilbraham, though she smiled at him.

Wilbraham spoke first. "You've had Lady Brent's telegram," he said. "And now she's come herself. Everything is all right, Viola."

Her tears fell. "If Harry loves you, my dear, that's enough for me," said Lady Brent, taking her hand.

"And you can hardly be blamed for loving him," said Wilbraham. "We all love him. I don't know why, but we do."

She laughed, as she was meant to do, and dried her tears. "I've had a telegram from him," she said. "He sent you his dear love."

Lady Brent showed her pleasure. "I wish he'd told me sooner," she said. "You might have been with him at Royd."

"We've all been making a mistake, Viola," said Wilbraham. "I suppose I'm most to blame, because I've had this lady under observation for a good many years, and might have known that nothing so important as you could have escaped her."

He wanted to keep the interview on a light key, at least until talk should flow between them. They had both been through a good deal during the last few days, but the trouble was ended now, and the sooner it could be forgotten the better.

Lady Brent and Viola were sitting side by side on the sofa. Lady Brent was not quite ready for the lighter note. "You know that Harry's bringing up was different from that of other boys," she said. "It was owing to me that it was so, and though I tried to avoid the appearance of dominating him, I could hardly escape being looked upon as a person who might take a decisive line either with him or against him. But I can say very truly that my guiding rule was love for him. I love Harry very much, and I have trusted him too. I wouldn't have stood out against him in anything that he had a right to decide for himself."

"I'm afraid it was I at first who wanted to keep our secret to ourselves," Viola said. "Or at least perhaps not quite at first, for then we didn't think about it; but when we first found out that we loved one another. I think he would have told you then, but I knew more about the world than he did, and I didn't think that you would want us to go on loving one another. Afterwards I did what he wanted."

"We all do what Harry wants," said Wilbraham. "He has that sort of way with him. I've done it myself, when I ought to have stood out."

"Harry is very happy now," said Viola. "He sent me a long telegram. Would you like to see it?"

"No," said Lady Brent, marking the motion she made with her hand, which showed the warm nest in which Harry's telegram was reposing. "Keep it for yourself. I want to ask you if you'd like to come down to Royd now, or wait till Harry can bring you. You will have a warm welcome whichever you like to do. He might like to know you are there."

"I expect the claims of the government service will have to come first, unreasonable as it may appear," said Wilbraham, marking her slight hesitation. "I know they have to with me."

"I couldn't get away just now," she said. "And in August I was going away for a fortnight with father--if Harry is all right."

That was what lay like a shadow over the brightness brought by the recognition of her. The war was to be finished by that hoarded effort for which those who knew were breathlessly waiting. But the hoard was chiefly of men, and much of it must be scattered if success was to be gained by it.

Lady Brent made no pretence of taking it anything but seriously. "I have friends at the War Office," she said. "We should get news at Royd as soon as in London, perhaps sooner." She made no allusion to the other reason that Viola had given. How did Harry regard Bastian? She had talked that over with Wilbraham. They did not know even if he had met him. He was not to be asked to Royd until Harry gave the word.

Viola still seemed to be hesitating, and Lady Brent took her hesitation to mean that she would rather not come to Royd without Harry, and accepted it at once. She talked to her about Harry, and presently Viola was talking about him too, filling her hungry ears with news of the times at which she had missed him.

Viola knew that he had been wounded, though he had kept it from her at the time. "He was very ill after the second wound," she said. "A man who was with him wrote to me when he couldn't, and I got a telegram to say he was better before I got the letter, so I wasn't so unhappy as I might have been. I don't think he would have got through that if he hadn't been so splendidly strong and young, and hadn't been so devotedly nursed. All the men he was with loved him, and this one never left him."

Lady Brent would not let it be seen how much this news of his past danger moved her. Here was a thing for which none of her searching thoughts had prepared her. "He has told us scarcely anything of what has been happening to him," she said. "It seemed to lie upon him heavily."

"It doesn't now," said Viola. "Being at Royd has brought him back. He has told me all about Jane and Sidney. Do you think I might write to Jane now, and tell her about us?"

Lady Brent was struck by her entire absence of jealousy. She might have felt sad that the healing process had not been all her own work. It showed how unselfishly she loved him, and how sure she was of him.

"Jane is a loyal little soul," she said. "She will be very pleased to hear from you, I know." She smiled at Viola. "The one thing I never quite gauged at its proper value was the companionship of young people. I think now that he ought to have had more of it. But he seemed so happy, with all his own pursuits."

"Oh, he was happy, I know," she said, eagerly. "It is wonderful to hear him talk of his life at Royd. Perhaps I'm not altogether sorry I was nearly the first, because I got it all. Harry isn't like anybody else that ever lived. He's wonderful. He couldn't have been quite the same if he hadn't been brought up always in that beautiful place, and left a great deal to himself and the woods and the hills and the sea."

"I am glad you think of it like that," said Lady Brent. "But I have been troubled by something he said to me when he first came home. His upbringing has made him what he is, but there are many things it didn't prepare him for. I think he was dreading going out again, as an officer. He doesn't know other young men of his class. He is so different from them, and they want everybody to be alike. With the men of simpler lives that he has lived with and fought with he would have made his way more easily."

"Yes," said Viola. "I was very sad at first to think of him thrown into that rough hard life, but I needn't have been. And I think now he is happier about the other."

She looked at Wilbraham, who said: "We've had it out, we three together. It's not as serious as you have been thinking. You must remember that he hasn't been with young men of his own sort at all; and in the ranks of course he'd look at them from another angle altogether; and perhaps he wouldn't like everything he saw about them--his officers, I mean. That's all it is, really--a diffidence about how he's going to fit in with them. But of course he'll make his way, with the other subalterns and people, just as he did with the men. There's so much character in him, as well as everything that young men do value in each other. I think we persuaded him that he'd be a good deal better off than he has been, didn't we, Viola?"

"Oh, he didn't want very much persuasion. He said he had been worrying himself about things that didn't really matter. But he was so much happier about everything when he came back from Royd. I don't think even I could have done that--not alone. It would just have been we two, keeping out of the world together. And poor Harry is in the world now."

"Yes," said Wilbraham, "and well fitted to cope with it. Of course it came as a shock to him at first. It would have done that anyhow, and he would have had to square his accounts with it by himself, before he could have felt himself at his ease. We couldn't have helped him. If you're still troubling yourself about having made mistakes, dear lady, I don't think you need. You made very few. You forged the good steel in him, but it had to be tempered."

This view of it comforted her. "We shall all be very happy now," she said.

When they had talked a little longer, Bastian came in.

Lady Brent rose from the sofa, and they stood looking at one another for an instant before Bastian shook hands with her, with a laugh. "I wasn't prepared for this," he said. "Have you known who I was?"

"No," she said. "Your people thought you were on the other side of the world."

"I meant them to," he said. "I'd no use for my people, after the way they behaved to me. I took rather an absurd name, which was the last they would recognize me under if they ever came across it, which seemed unlikely."

Viola and Wilbraham were in bewilderment. "Lady Brent and I used to know one another in the old days," Bastian said to Viola. "It shows how I've cut myself off from that world that I didn't even know she was Lady Brent." He turned to Lady Brent. "It did once occur to me, after we'd been to Royd, to go to a Public Library and find out who you were, from a book. But I forgot all about it. I'm a thorough Bohemian you see, and more comfortable so."

His light tone did not please her. "If I had known who you were," she said, "when you came to Royd, we should have met, and I should have known Viola before."

His face changed as he looked quickly from her to Viola. "I'm glad you've made friends now," he said. "All the same, I doubt if you would have taken to her two years ago. I've got too far away from what I was when you knew me."

"Well, it wouldn't have been you so much that we should have thought about," said Wilbraham.

Bastian laughed. "You needn't worry about me now," he said to Lady Brent. "I'll own that I have had ideas of fighting you when the time came. I should rather have enjoyed it. I think quite as highly of Viola as you do of your grandson, and I was going to tell you so. But--well, I'm glad to know there's no necessity. I think you've behaved well; but I remember that you always had the reputation of behaving well. You'll get some reward for it in this instance, for you know without my having to take the trouble to prove it to you that Viola's birth is as good as her manners, and as for me I shall not intrude upon you with my debased habits when I've once handed Viola over."

"I used to like you as a little boy," said Lady Brent, calmly. "You were mischievous and perverse, and afterwards gave a great deal of trouble to your parents, who had not deserved it; but I don't suppose your habits are so debased as you pretend they are. I shall be very glad if you will bring Viola down to Royd when you take your holiday, if she cares to come. I think Harry would like to know that she is there."

Then Viola accepted the invitation, and Bastian did not refuse it, though he said that it was many years since he had stayed in a country house, and he didn't think he should remember the rules.

Lady Brent told Wilbraham about him afterwards, what his family was and where they came from, which was near her own girlhood's home. "I must say that I am relieved," she said. "On her father's side her birth to all intents and purposes is as good as Harry's, and on her mother's it is no worse. It counts for something. I married before Michael--that is his real name, and I suppose suggested the Angelo to his freakish imagination--before he grew up, but I was always hearing stories of his wildness and extravagance afterwards. There was never much real harm in him, and there were some very good qualities to balance what harm there was. His parents were over-strict with him, but they were fond of him, and I think if he hadn't taken offence at their attitude towards his marriage, in which of course they were amply justified, they would have come round in time."

"It may have been better for him that they didn't," said Wilbraham. "He's had to make his own living, which has probably been salutary for him, and his responsibility to Viola has kept him fairly straight. I wish he didn't drink quite so much whisky or smoke such vile tobacco, but drink hasn't taken hold of him so much as I thought it had at one time. If he had been anything like what you'd call a drunkard it would have affected Viola more. What do you think of Viola?"

"I'm glad she came to Royd, and that Harry met her," she said.

*CHAPTER XXVIII*

*IN THE BALANCE*

So far Harry had been brought in his life's story.

The gods had showered their gifts upon him. They had given him strength and beauty; a mind quick to receive their messages and eager to interpret them; a heart that went out to others and drew others to it; largesse of temporal favours, which they scatter here and there but are apt to withhold from those whom they endow with their choicest gifts. His manhood had been tried in a hard school, had been established and wrought to finer issues by it. He had known great happiness, and also suffering both of mind and body, without which happiness itself is but a monochrome. He had entered the high courts of love, and worshipped in them devoutly.

For what had they prepared him, on whom they had smiled, not so uniformly as to soften his fine fibre, but as if they would have cherished so rare an example of their handiwork, and led it towards still higher desert of their bounties? Would they not watch over him and preserve him from the ultimate dangers which youth was plunging to meet at this point in the world's long history? Or is the world's history itself a mere point in time, as it unrolls itself before their unwearying eyes, so that it matters not what destruction may be wrought in it, since there is infinity in which to forge new combinations of flesh and brain and fortune?

To the women on the edge of the vortex in which manhood was fiercely involved, but striving by prayers and tears to weigh down the balance of life and death in favour of the men they loved, the gods may well have appeared contemptuously indifferent. The very interests towards which they had seemed to be working, the values they had impressed upon those to whom they had given enlightenment to understand them, what were they in the balance? It was impossible for mothers to look upon a life of no more than twenty years as rounded and complete, however they might have laboured to perfect it; or for young wives to balance the bliss of early married love against a life-time of companionship and the sweet joint care of children, and cry quits on the bargain. To them the happiness of youth is an earnest of still still greater happiness to come; a youth cut short is a youth wasted, however it may have fulfilled itself.

To Lady Brent, watching the news from the battlefields of the Somme, day after day, week after weary week, it seemed as if all young life hung by the balance of a hair. She felt the weight of it far more than during the previous years, in which Harry had been far removed, and the details of the fighting had not been brought before her with this daily deadly insistence. To her, more than to most whose hopes were dependent upon the chances of battle, did youth appear as a period of preparation rather than of fruition. Her one steady object during the last twenty years had been to work with the high gods so as to fulfil their purpose; and she seemed to herself to have been blest in her strivings in such a way as to give her the right to believe that her object had also been theirs.

She had had her grave doubts, but now the weight of them had been removed from her. Surely that had been because she had not tarried to accept the foiling of her own plans where they had not served the great purpose! The love that had come to Harry was, on the face of it, just the kind of love from which she had most desired to preserve him. Now she saw it as the crown of his happy youth, but still more as the gift that was to bless his manhood to come. The plunging of him into crude and unfamiliar life, which had still lain on his spirit at his first homecoming, and had brought her such trouble of mind on his behalf--he had come through that fire. It was, as Wilbraham had said, the tempering of the steel in him. He would not have been of the fine metal that he was if he had not felt its rigour; and, having gone through it, he would not be what it had made of him if his spirit were not now freed from it. Every letter that he wrote showed him free and untroubled in the life he was living and the work he was doing. He wrote happily and gaily, and as if there was not a care on his mind. They all seemed to take it like that--the boys who were out there, snapping their fingers in the face of Death, who was gibbering at them from every corner and trying to frighten them into respect for his menace. Harry had never feared death, and now he no longer feared life in any of its unfamiliar aspects, but embraced it with all the ardour of his youth, and with it the happiness it had in store for him when the great confusion should be smoothed out.

Surely he must be spared, for whom life held so much! It could not be squared with any theory of directing and guiding providence that one who had been dowered with the gifts of life so much above others, and was so much in accord with the higher purposes of life as they had been slowly and sometimes painfully revealed to her, should be denied his full inheritance of life.

But so much high promise had been cut down and gathered in to the dreadful harvest. Day after day those long lists came out. Names, names, columns and pages long, and each one of them to some, perhaps to many, so much more than a name. She could only wait and tremble for the tilt of the scales. He had been in the thick of it and was untouched so far, though so many of those who had been fighting around him had fallen. A charmed life? By all the theories to which she wrested her mind she ought to have believed so, as the weeks went by and his letters came. But the dread only increased.

She showed little of it. Jane was her frequent companion, and though they never spoke of the dread, each divined much of what the other was thinking.

Half child, half woman, Jane hovered strangely between fear and fatalism. She loved Harry, but if there had been any budding of a woman's love in her it had been nipped by the revelation of his love for Viola and flowed again only in the channels of her childish devotion. There was something of the woman in the way she regarded him in connection with Viola. One man for one woman to love and cherish. He was hers when he had fallen captive to her; others only had that share in him which she might grant to them. Jane had accepted Sidney as a possible mate for Harry, and now she accepted Viola, whom she also loved since she had come to Royd. There was no jealousy in her. Harry loved her as he had always loved her; and Viola loved her. She felt almost as if she had brought them together.

But in Jane's childish view the recognition of this kind of love was the closing of youth's manuscript. She was uplifted by the idea of having a pair of intimate married friends; but it would be different. She did not ask herself in what way. It might be even more agreeable than having two separate friends, but it would be different. So her view of Harry was a backward one. She talked chiefly of him as he had been, and Lady Brent, somewhat to her comfort, learnt to look upon Harry's youth also as a chapter in some sense closed, and as a very perfect chapter. Whatever might happen, he had had that. And she had been instrumental in fashioning his youth--a jewel to hang upon the neck of memory, whole and flawless.

She would not disturb Jane with her fears, but the child divined them and was often struck by foreboding, which she resisted with all her might. In this also she gave comfort. Her optimism, fitting to her youth and inexperience, was insistent, and would not be denied. Nothing could happen to Harry worse than what had happened already. Nothing--she seemed to frame her creed--could happen to one who was so loved.

The gods held the scales--life whole or life disabled on the one side, death on the other. They dipped now this way, now that. What was it that they threw into them? Was there any weight in the strong urgings of those who thought they had learnt from them that they would incline their ears to such utterances? Was there anything that might incline them to spare one to whom they had shown their favours until now? Was he not nearer to them in the tested quality of his manhood than the generality of beings whom they sent to represent their godhead on earth? Had they not fashioned him to shine in years to come as an example of the kind of human stuff they could produce from their workshops? Had they no further use for him in a world so largely populated with their failures? Or were the tokens they threw into the scales nothing at all but just the chances of time and space, so that this man's righteousness and that man's worthlessness were of no account against the tick of a watch or the ruled immutable path of a shard of iron?

Did they even hesitate? Was it destined from the beginning of time that just at that moment in a sodden desolate winter's dawn, by just that naked riven tree, the life they had given and so richly endowed should be battered out of the young eager body in which they had set it, with nothing in it left that could any more upon earth give or receive love?

So it happened. The day of blood dawned, and waxed and waned and ended. Many were killed in it, many lived to remember it as no more terrible than other days. But Harry died in it. The last boon they gave him was that he died very quickly.

*CHAPTER XXIX*

*LOVE*

On a February morning Viola walked through the woods of Royd, along the path by which Harry had hastened to meet her in those bright summer days that were now so far off. Jane was with her. They talked as they walked, and sometimes even smiled. No one would have guessed at the sorrow that lay like a numbing weight upon one of them, and had so saddened the other that she seemed in these days to have left most of her childhood behind her.

They talked of this and that, but at any moment they might fall into talk of Harry. They were never together for long without mention of him. Jane was the only person to whom Viola spoke of him freely. Lady Brent, who hid the ruin of her life and of her hopes as best she could, seemed to cling to her presence at Royd, but they could not talk together yet about Harry, though his name was not avoided between them. Mrs. Brent had been to Royd and had gone away again. Her visit had been painful enough; her sorrow was great and her laments had been ceaseless. But jealousy had prevented her trying to get a response from Viola. With Wilbraham, whom she had seen once since the fatal news had come, she had spoken of him, but then it had been as if she hardly understood what had happened. Her father had been very kind to her, but with no direct effort to console her for what was beyond consolation. She had come to Royd after a few days, and had been there ever since.

They were talking of Sidney Pawle as they walked together through the wood, to which the leafless trees admitted gleams of winter sunshine, so different from the splashes of vivid light that had quivered through the leaves on to the deep rich greenness of summer. Sidney had gone away from Poldaven, but Jane had heard from her a few days before, with the news of her engagement, now permitted, though grudgingly. She had told Jane that she meant to be married whenever Noel could get his leave, but had not yet broken the intention to her parents.

"I am sure she is right," Viola said. "Even if he gets killed afterwards she will have had him all her very own."

Jane hesitated a moment before she said, rather brusquely: "She thinks of him as her very own now."

"Oh, yes," said Viola, almost indifferently.

Jane stuck to her point. "You had Harry all your very own," she said. "There wasn't anybody else. He liked me and Sidney, but there wasn't really anybody else but you." It was by that unafraid directness, which was part of her nature, that she had made her way with Viola, where nobody else had gained any access to her tortured bewildered mind. She could say anything to her, because there was only truth and love behind her words.

"I know," said Viola. "I'm very glad Sidney is going to be happy--as long as it lasts--but I don't believe they can possibly love each other as much as Harry and I did. That's what makes it so cruel that he was killed. There was never anybody like him. Why were we allowed to know each other and to love each other if it was just to be like that?"

"That's what I mean," said Jane. "You did love each other, and even if you're awfully miserable now you'd rather be that than never have known Harry."

"It doesn't seem to matter much whether I'm miserable or not," Viola said. "Everybody who has said anything to me about it has seemed to think that's the chief thing--that I shall get over it in time. What does it matter whether I get over it or not? It's Harry's being killed that matters."

"I know," said Jane. "Older people don't seem to understand, though they only mean to be kind. It's all so different to what I'd ever thought it would be, if anything like that happened with somebody you loved very much. There's part of you goes on doing the same things almost as if you'd forgotten, and even perhaps enjoying yourself sometimes; and there's part of you that never forgets. Of course it isn't the same for me as it is for you," she added on a note of humility, "but I know enough to understand."

"Oh, my dear, I know how much you loved Harry. It's what makes me love you. I think I love you better than anybody, just because of that. It all comes back to Harry, you see. Poor Lady Brent loved him, and I'm desperately sorry for her. Sometimes it seems as if I'm more sorry for her than I am for myself. It isn't like being sorry for oneself; I don't seem to count. But I'm sorry for her. She's old, but she isn't hard, as many old people are. And there are so many other things than just Harry that she has lost."

"What sort of things?"

"Oh, everything that he was, or was going to be--everything she had thought about and looked forward to all the time he was growing up. I suppose they were all part of Harry to her; but they weren't very much to me. I think I was even a little jealous of them. Once when we were at the log cabin, and talked about going away to a new country--you know, just as you used to talk, half in fun--I thought, oh, how I wish we could, and he would work for me and I would work for him. I wished he wasn't Sir Harry Brent at all, with all that belonged to him, but just Harry, who only belonged to me."

"Of course that would have been best of all. But he was Harry just the same, and that's what matters most to Lady Brent."

"Oh, yes, I know. But all the rest does matter to her, poor dear, and I don't wonder at it--for her. Everything that meant so much to her has come to an end. He was the last Brent, and even Royd itself is nothing to her now. I should think that was a great pity myself, if it were anybody else. I think she would have liked to talk about it to me, after the first. But I just couldn't. I couldn't now--only to you. You're the only person who really knows how little it matters--to me."

Jane was silent. She had heard that talk, and tried to adjust her mind to it. Her father, deeply shocked at Harry's death, and of some comfort to her in his exposition of the Christian faith in immortality, had yet let his mind run upon some aspects of the loss that had seemed to her, in the first outbreak of her grief, almost to belittle it. He had talked about the loss to Viola, not only of Harry, but of what she would have had as Harry's wife--even as his widow. He had taken it for granted that some day she would get over her grief at Harry's death. It was not to be expected that she would think of the material benefits that would have come to her, now; but afterwards she would.

Was this so? Jane had talked to her mother, who had told her, striving hard to be honest with her, that few people were altogether free from worldly desires when they grew older, and that the most bitter grief was assuaged by time. Jane had listened, but held to her opinion that Viola would never get over Harry's loss, and that nothing she had lost besides would ever matter to her. But she had been a little shaken. Now she felt that she was justified in her faith in Viola. Not even the loss of all that saddened others who also loved Harry, but not as she did, mattered to her; the loss of those things to herself she did not think about, nor ever would.

They had come a long way through the ride. "I'm going to take you to a place I haven't been to since Harry died," Viola said, as she turned to a faintly defined track through the wood. "I've wanted to go, but I couldn't by myself."

She spoke without more emotion than had marked her speech hitherto, and as they threaded their way through the trees, which grew closely here, she told Jane how Harry had led her to the woodland pool on the morning after they had first met, and how they had spent long summer hours in that green retreat, happy in their love.

Jane felt that she was going to a holy place. Harry had never mentioned this secret pool to her, though he had shown her many secrets of the woods.

The hardly discernible path by which they had turned aside was soon lost in the tangle of undergrowth. Viola told her that they had never gone to the pool by the same way, so as not to leave a track; but she went on unhesitatingly, "I think I could find my way to it blindfold," she said.

Presently they came to the pool. Viola caught her breath and gave a little shiver as she stood on its brink. The sun had gone behind the clouds, and the waters were cold and steely, but there was no wind, and they reflected as in a mirror the bare trees, which had once been arrassed with their leafy tapestry, to close in this hidden temple. "It's not the same," she said. "It isn't secret any more. I wish I hadn't come."

She turned, and there was the great tree, with the jutting roots under its spreading canopy upon which she had sat as a queen crowned by Harry's adoring love. She seemed to recoil, and gave a cry which echoed forlornly through the naked woods. Then she sank on to the ground beside the mossed roots crying, "Oh, Harry! My darling! Oh, my darling!"

The suddenness of it had brought Jane's heart to her mouth. Viola was sobbing as if her heart would break. It was the first time Jane had seen her abandon herself to her despairing grief. Her own love and sorrow welled up in her. She knelt beside Viola, embracing her as she lay there, and mingling her tears with hers, but not speaking.

For a long time both of them wept together. Viola's sobs decreased in violence, but she cried piteously and forlornly. "Oh, Harry, I do want you so," she sobbed. "Why have you gone away from me?"

Jane rose to her knees. Viola, still lying against the roots, with her head buried on her arm, caught her hand and held it. The pressure thrilled Jane through and through. She could console, in this unconsolable grief. She felt as if it were a trust from Harry to do so. Viola was not quite alone in the world, if she could still cling to her in her bitter trouble. She bent down again and kissed her, and Viola's arms went round her neck. "Don't cry any more," she said through her own falling tears. "Harry hasn't left you. He's alive and happy. Perhaps he's looking at us now. He loves you as much as you love him."

Viola's sobs ceased for the moment. "He did," she said. "Oh, if I knew he loved me still I could bear never seeing him any more. But he's dead. They killed Harry, Jane. Can you believe it? My darling Harry! He kissed me here when he was alive and we talked and talked such a little time ago. I can hear him now this very minute and feel him by me. But he is dead. I must keep on saying it or I can't believe it. Harry is dead."

Her sobs broke out afresh. Jane rose to her feet, "No," she said, with a solemn look on her child's face. "Harry isn't dead. He won't like to see you giving way like that. Just for a time you can't help it, I know; but you've cried enough. Get up now, Viola, and let's talk about Harry."

Viola arose obediently, and dried her eyes. "I've always tried to be brave," she said, "because I knew Harry would like it. He wouldn't have gone away from me if he could have helped it. I'm sorry I said what I did just now, but it was too much for me seeing this place. I shan't come here again. Let's go away."

Jane hesitated. "Wouldn't you rather stay, and talk about him here?" she said. "It brought him more back to you to come here. It was too much for you at first; but now you've got over that----"

Viola stood and looked about her. Her cheeks were wet with her tears, and at intervals a tremor passed through her body; but she was not weeping now, and the quieter look was returning to her face.

"It is the same place, after all," she said, as if slowly recognizing it. "But it's bare--like my heart is. I used to think it welcomed us when we came here, it was so quiet and beautiful. It's beautiful now, though. Harry would have loved it like this. Yes, we'll stay here a little, Jane dear. Look, this is just where I used to sit, and Harry would always lie on the grass. In other places he used to sit by me, but here he said I was a queen, and he must be at my feet. Come and sit by me on my poor throne, Jane, and we'll talk about him."

They sat side by side. Jane nestled to her with her arm around her waist, and for a time they said nothing. The sunlight fell upon them, filtering through the interlaced branches, as they sat still in a contact which was a solace to both of them. Grief does not set abiding marks upon the young. But for the traces of her tears Viola was as fresh and fair as when she had sat there for Harry to worship her. It was only in her tender reliant heart that the wound was quivering and throbbing. She was widowed of her love, though she had never been wed. There was no one who could comfort her, except the still younger girl who shared her love and her grief, and was nestling to her.

The silence of the woods lay all about them, but it was not the iron silence of deep winter. There was a sense of reviving life in the February sunshine, and the hazy purple of the already swelling leaf-buds.

Viola bent over Jane and kissed her. "You do comfort me, dear," she said. "I thought nothing could ever comfort me again, but you do. You loved my darling Harry."

Jane buried her face on Viola's breast and cried softly, and Viola's tears came again, but not with the abandonment she had lately shown. They were healing tears of love and sympathy.

Jane dried her eyes, still leaning against Viola, and said: "I'm very glad you brought me here. Now I know. Now I know for certain."

"What do you know, dear?" Viola asked her gently. She felt the stirrings of love in her towards this child, so loyal and so steel-true. Her quiet tears, leaning on her breast, had brought out the child in her. She had been dreadfully hurt too, and needed for herself the consolation that she had only thought of giving, with a strength and wisdom beyond her years. Viola kissed her again as she asked her question.

"I know that Harry is alive," said Jane, sitting upright and looking out across the waters of the pool, upon which there was not a tremor. It was as if it had hushed itself to listen. "This place seems to be full of him. I know why. It's because of the love that it holds. Love can't die; it's there for always. Harry loves you just as much as he did when you came here together. I believe he loves me too, just as he used to when I was little. Once he sent me a message, before anybody, because we were friends. Now I believe he's sending me a message again. He loves you. Yes, he does. It isn't that he did love you, and then he died and you've only got that to remember. He loves you now, and he'll never leave off loving you, till you see him again, and are happy together as you used to be."

Viola's eyes had been fixed on her, as if fascinated. Her utterance was almost prophetic in its rapt intensity. When she had spoken she nestled to Viola again, and said in a softer tone: "It makes me almost happy now, believing that. Don't you feel that it's true?"

"Do you really _believe_ we shall meet again some day?" Viola asked. "If you'd asked me--before--I should have said I believed that. But it hasn't given me any comfort, up till now. I suppose I didn't really believe it, as I used to believe I should meet him again the next day here. If I could only know it!"

"But don't you _feel_ that Harry's alive?" said Jane. "I do. If you can't feel it yet it's only because you've been so sad and so puzzled that you haven't known. But if I can feel it you will be able to more still, because Harry loved you so much. I think he wants you to feel it now."

It was Viola's turn now to look out across the water. "It would be like Harry," she said, slowly. "Oh, Jane, if it's only true!"

She put her hand to her breast, and a smile broke out upon her face--such a smile as had not lightened it these many days.

"Of course it's true," said Jane, in her decisive way. "It's part of our religion. We say every Sunday in church: 'I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.'"

"Ah, but that's not the same. I want to think of Harry as alive now. It seemed to come to me just now that he really is--like the sun breaking through the clouds. If _that's_ true, Jane dear--if _that's_ true, that my darling Harry is alive now somewhere, just like he used to be, and loving me all the time, and I only have to wait for a little before I see him again----"

"You won't even have to wait," said Jane, "if you know he's loving you, and you can go on loving him because he's alive, and not only remember what he was when he was here."

"No. It will only be like what it was when he went away before. My heart was going out to him always, and when he came back all the parting was forgotten, and it was sweeter than if we hadn't parted. Oh, Jane, fancy seeing Harry just like he used to be, beautiful and laughing and happy! Do you think it's possible that it can be really like that--that he's somewhere now--not lying out there in France, but just as he was when we loved each other so much? Tell me you really believe it, and are not saying it only to comfort me."

Jane clung to her again. "I'm sure of it," she said. "It's Harry's message. You don't mind it coming through me, do you? It's a message to you; he wants me to give it you. It's not in words, as if he were speaking. It's all through me. Harry wants your love just as much now as ever he did, and he loves you just as much too."

Viola sat silent, with a tender look in her eyes, and a smile upon her lips. Presently she said: "Harry once saw something, not belonging to the world which everybody can see, and when he told me I knew at once why he had seen it, because there had never been anything in the way with him. There never has been. You could look deep, deep, deep into him, and never find anything there that wasn't beautiful and true. I wonder if there's another place where people like that really belong--no, not a place, but something they belong to all the time they're in the world, and that goes on just the same for them when they have left the world. I think there must be, Jane, and that's how it is with Harry. That would make him here, with us, wouldn't it?"

"Yes," said Jane, softly. "That's what I feel about it. It's all love. I can't explain exactly, but when he was here with his body there was something else more important still, and just as real. It's love that is real--like a person. Can you understand?"

"Yes, I think I can, and it's what I meant, too, that is so comforting. What I loved most in him when he was here is just what he is still, and I can go on loving it, because it didn't die when he was killed. I wonder if he thought that too. I couldn't bear to think of him being killed, so he never talked about it."

"Wasn't that because he thought it didn't _really_ matter?"

"Oh, how it matters to me! But perhaps God took him so that he should never be spoilt, not the least little bit. Oh, but I would have tried so hard to be worthy of him, if only he'd been left to me, just for a little little time longer. He said I helped him. I believe I did, when he was unhappy--because the world wasn't like it had been to him here, and I knew more about the world than he did, poor darling!"

"It's very hard indeed, and you can't quite understand it all. But when you say to yourself, it's all it seems somehow to put it more right. And the text says, God is love, so that would come in too, though I don't quite know how till I think about it more. But what I'm quite certain of is that Harry couldn't have been _wasted_. I think that's what poor Lady Brent can't see. All of him that we loved is alive somewhere. I'm more and more sure of that every moment. I believe it's what Harry is trying to say to us. Let's just say we believe it, Viola dear. Perhaps it will even make him more happy if we do. I believe it. I believe Harry is alive and that he knows about us, and some day you will see him again, and you will be happier together than you have ever been. Say it, Viola."

"The last letter Harry wrote to me," said Viola, musingly, "he said he should love me always, always, always. Do you think he meant what we've been saying, Jane, though he wouldn't write about being killed?"

"I expect he did. I'm sure he must have believed it, and I'm sure he wants you to believe it now. Say it, Viola. Say you believe it."

Viola rose and stood before her. A smile was on her lips, and there was a light in her eyes. "I do believe it," she said, "and it will make everything different to me all through my life. Harry will be with me always."

She turned and stood, looking up to the clear space of sky above the pool. "Oh, Harry, my darling," she said very softly, and tenderly, "can you hear me--your own Viola, who loves you so? I do love you, darling, now and for ever."