Chapter V: Part 5

"Oh, yes"--the puce velvet seemed to soften--"very pleased to see you, I'm sure! Come inside, madam. Ellen's just run round to the fishmonger's. I'm not enjoying very good health just now"--the glance was intolerably confidential--"and I thought I could fancy a bit of filleted plaice for my supper, or a nice whiting. Come inside, do!"

Mrs. Despard, stunned, could think of no course save that suggested. She followed Mrs. Eden into the impossible parlour that bounded the shop on the north.

"Do sit down," said Mrs. Eden hospitably, "and the girl shall get you a cup of tea. It's full early, but a cup of tea's always welcome, early or late, isn't it?"

"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Despard, automatically. Then she roused herself and added, "But please don't trouble, I can't stay more than a few minutes. I hope Miss Eden is well?"

"Oh, yes--she's all right. She lives in clover, as you might say, since her uncle on the mother's side left her that hundred a year. Made it all in fried fish, too. I should have thought it a risk myself, but you never know."

Mrs. Despard was struggling with a sensation as of sawdust in the throat--sawdust, and a great deal of it, and very dry.

"But I heard that Miss Eden was married--"

"Not she!" said Mrs. Eden, with the natural contempt of one who was.

"I understood that she had married a Mr. Cave."

"It's some other Eden, then. There isn't a Cave in the town, so far as I know, except Mr. Augustus; he's a solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths, a very good business, and of course he'd never look the same side of the road as she was, nor she couldn't expect it."

"But really," Mrs. Despard persisted, "I do think there must be some mistake. Because she came to see me--and--and she brought her baby."

Mrs. Eden laughed outright.

"Her baby? Oh, really! But she's never so much as had a young man after her, let alone a husband. It's not what she could look for, either, for she's no beauty--poor girl!"

Yet the Baby was evidence--of a sort. Mrs. Despard hated herself for hinting that perhaps Mrs. Eden did not know everything.

"I don't know what you mean, madam." The puce bodice was visibly moved. "That was _my_ baby, bless his little heart. Poor Ellen's a respectable girl--she's been with me since she was a little trot of six--all except the eleven months she was away with you--and then my Fred see her to the door, and fetched her from your station. She _would_ go--though not _our_ wish. I suppose she wanted a change. But since then she's never been over an hour away, except when she took my Gustavus over to see you. She must have told you whose he was--but I suppose you weren't paying attention. And I must say I don't think it's becoming in you, if you'll excuse me saying so, to come here taking away a young girl's character. At least, if she's not so young as she was, of course--we none of us are, not even yourself, madam, if you'll pardon me saying so."

"I beg your pardon," said Mrs. Despard. She had never felt so helpless--so silly. The absurd parlour, ponderous with plush, dusky with double curtains, had for her all the effect of a nightmare.

She felt that she was swimming blindly in a sea of disenchantment.

"Don't think me inquisitive," she said, "but Miss Eden was engaged, wasn't she, some time ago, to someone who was killed in South Africa?"

"Never--in all her born days," said Mrs. Eden, with emphasis. "I suppose it's her looks. I've had a good many offers myself, though I'm not what you might call anything out of the way--but poor Ellen--never had so much as a nibble."

Mrs. Despard gasped. She clung against reason to the one spar of hope in this sea of faiths dissolved. It might be--it must be--some mistake!

"You see, poor Ellen"--Mrs. Eden made as much haste to smash up the spar as though she had seen it--"poor Ellen, when her mother and father died she was but six. There was only her and my Fred, so naturally we took her, and what little money the old lady left we spent on her, sending her to a good school, and never counting the bit of clothes and victuals. She was always for learning something, and above her station, and the Rev. Mrs. Peterson at St. Michael, and All Angels--she made a sort of pet of Ellen, and set her up, more than a bit."

Mrs. Despard remembered that Mrs. Peterson had been Miss Eden's reference.

"And then she _would_ come to you--though welcome to share along with us, and you can see for yourself it's a good business--and when that little bit was left her, of course, she'd no need to work, so she came home here, and I must say she's always been as handy a girl and obliging as you could wish, but wandering, too, in her thoughts. Always pens and ink. I shouldn't wonder but what she wrote poetry. Yards and yards of writing she does. I don't know what she does with it all."

But Mrs. Despard knew.

Mrs. Eden talked on gaily and gladly--till not even a straw was left for her hearer to cling to.

"Thank you very much," she said. "I see it was all a mistake. I must have been wrong about the address." She spoke hurriedly--for she had heard in the shop a step that she knew.

For one moment a white face peered in at the glass door--then vanished; it was Miss Eden's face--her face as it had been when she told of her lost lover who died waving his sword at Elendslaagte! But the telling of that tale had moved Mrs. Despard to no such passion of pity as this. For from that face now something was blotted out, and the lack of it was piteous beyond thought.

"Thank you very much. I am so sorry to have troubled you," she said, and somehow got out of the plush parlour, and through the shop, fruit-filled, orange-scented.

At the station there was still time, and too much time. The bookstall yielded pencil, paper, envelope, and stamp. She wrote--

"Ella, dear, whatever happens, I am always your friend. Let me know--can I do anything for you? I know all about everything now. But don't think I'm angry--I am only so sorry for you, dear--so very, very sorry. Do let me help you."

She addressed the letter to Miss Eden at the greengrocer's. Afterwards she thought that she had better have left it alone. It could do no good, and it might mean trouble with her sister-in-law, for Miss Eden, late Mrs. Cave, the happy wife and mother. She need not have troubled herself--for the letter came back a week later with a note from Mrs. Eden of the bursting, bright-buttoned, velvet bodice. Ellen had gone away--no one knew where she had gone.

Mrs. Despard will always reproach herself for not having rushed towards the white face that peered through the glass door. She could have done something--anything. So she thinks, but I am not sure.

* * * * *

"And it was none of it true, Bill," she said piteously, when, Mabel and Gracie safely tucked up in bed, she told him all about it. "I don't know how she could. No dead lover--no retired tea-broker--no pretty house, and sweet-brier hedge with ... and no Baby."

"She was a lying lunatic," said Bill. "I never liked her. Hark! what's that? All right, Love-a-duck--daddy's here!"

He went up the stairs three at a time to catch up his baby, who had a way of wandering, with half-awake wailings, out of her crib in the small hours.

"All right, Kiddie-winks, daddy's got you," he murmured, coming back into the drawing-room with the little soft, warm, flannelly bundle cuddled close to him.

"She's asleep again already," he said, settling her comfortably in his arms. "Don't worry any more about that Eden girl, Molly--she's not worth it."

His wife knelt beside him and buried her face against his waistcoat and against the little flannel night-gown.

"Oh, Bill," she said, and her voice was thick with tears, "don't say things like that. Don't you see? It was cruel, cruel! She was all alone--no mother, no sister, no lover. She was made so that no one could ever love her. And she wanted love so much--so frightfully much, so that she just _had_ to pretend that she had it."

"And what about the Baby?" asked Mr. Despard, taking one arm from his own baby to pass it round his wife's shoulders. "Don't be a darling idiot, Molly. What about the Baby?"

"Oh--don't you see?" Mrs. Despard was sobbing now in good earnest. "She wanted the Baby more than anything else. Oh--don't say horrid things about her, Bill! We've got everything--and she'd got nothing at all--don't say things--don't!"

Mr. Despard said nothing. He thumped his wife sympathetically on the back. It was the baby who spoke.

"Want mammy," she said sleepily, and at the transfer remembered her father, "and daddy too," she added politely.

Miss Eden was somewhere or other. Wherever she was she was alone.

And these three were together.

"I daresay you're right about that girl," said Mr. Despard. "Poor wretch! By Jove, she was ugly!"

THE LOVER, THE GIRL, AND THE ONLOOKER

The two were alone in the grassy courtyard of the ruined castle. The rest of the picnic party had wandered away from them, or they from it. Out of the green-grown mound of fallen masonry by the corner of the chapel a great may-bush grew, silvered and pearled on every scented, still spray. The sky was deep, clear, strong blue above, and against the blue, the wallflowers shone bravely from the cracks and crevices of ruined arch and wall and buttress.

"They shine like gold," she said. "I wish one could get at them!"

"Do you want some?" he said, and on the instant his hand had found a strong jutting stone, his foot a firm ledge--and she saw his figure, grey flannel against grey stone, go up the wall towards the yellow flowers.

"Oh, don't!" she cried. "I don't _really_ want them--please not--I wish--"

Then she stopped, because he was already some twelve feet from the ground, and she knew that one should not speak to a man who is climbing ruined walls. So she clasped her hands and waited, and her heart seemed to go out like a candle in the wind, and to leave only a dark, empty, sickening space where, a moment before, it had beat in anxious joy. For she loved him, had loved him these two years, had loved him since the day of their first meeting. And that was just as long as he had loved her. But he had never told his love. There is a code of honour, right or wrong, and it forbids a man with an income of a hundred and fifty a year to speak of love to a girl who is reckoned an heiress. There are plenty who transgress the code, but they are in all the other stories. He drove his passion on the curb, and mastered it. Yet the questions--Does she love me? Does she know I love her? Does she wonder why I don't speak? and the counter-questions--Will she think I don't care? Doesn't she perhaps care at all? Will she marry someone else before I've earned the right to try to make her love me? afforded a see-saw of reflection, agonising enough, for those small hours of wakefulness when we let our emotions play the primitive games with us. But always the morning brought strength to keep to his resolution. He saw her three times a year, when Christmas, Easter, and Midsummer brought her to stay with an aunt, brought him home to his people for holidays. And though he had denied himself the joy of speaking in words, he had let his eyes speak more than he knew. And now he had reached the wallflowers high up, and was plucking them and throwing them down so that they fell in a wavering bright shower round her feet. She did not pick them up. Her eyes were on him; and the empty place where her heart used to be seemed to swell till it almost choked her.

He was coming down now. He was only about twenty-five feet from the ground. There was no sound at all but the grating of his feet as he set them on the stones, and the movement, now and then, of a bird in the ivy. Then came a rustle, a gritty clatter, loud falling stones: his foot had slipped, and he had fallen. No--he was hanging by his hands above the great refectory arch, and his body swung heavily with the impetus of the checked fall. He was moving along now, slowly--hanging by his hands; now he grasped an ivy root--another--and pulled himself up till his knee was on the moulding of the arch. She would never have believed anyone who had told her that only two minutes had been lived between the moment of his stumble and the other moment when his foot touched the grass and he came towards her among the fallen wallflowers. She was a very nice girl and not at all forward, and I cannot understand or excuse her conduct. She made two steps towards him with her hands held out--caught him by the arms just above the elbow--shook him angrily, as one shakes a naughty child--looked him once in the eyes and buried her face in his neck--sobbing long, dry, breathless sobs.

Even then he tried to be strong.

"Don't!" he said tenderly, "don't worry. It's all right--I was a fool. Pull yourself together--there's someone coming."

"I don't care," she said, for the touch of his cheek, pressed against her hair, told her all that she wanted to know. "Let them come, I don't care! Oh, how could you be so silly and horrid? Oh, thank God, thank God! Oh, how could you?"

Of course, a really honourable young man would have got out of the situation somehow. He didn't. He accepted it, with his arms round her and his lips against the face where the tears now ran warm and salt. It was one of the immortal moments.

The picture was charming, too--a picture to wring the heart of the onlooker with envy, or sympathy, according to his nature. But there was only one onlooker, a man of forty, or thereabouts, who paused for an instant under the great gate of the castle and took in the full charm and meaning of the scene. He turned away, and went back along the green path with hell in his heart. The other two were in Paradise. The Onlooker fell like the third in Eden--the serpent, in fact. Two miles away he stopped and lit a pipe.

"It's got to be borne, I suppose," he said, "like all the rest of it. _She's_ happy enough. I ought to be glad. Anyway, I can't stop it." Perhaps he swore a little. If he did, the less precise and devotional may pardon him. He had loved the Girl since her early teens, and it was only yesterday's post that had brought him the appointment that one might marry on. The appointment had come through her father, for whom the Onlooker had fagged at Eton. He went back to London, hell burning briskly. Moral maxims and ethereal ideas notwithstanding, it was impossible for him to be glad that she was happy--like that.

* * * * *

The Lover who came to his love over strewn wallflowers desired always, as has been seen, to act up to his moral ideas. So he took next day a much earlier train than was at all pleasant, and called on her father to explain his position and set forth his prospects. His coming was heralded by a letter from her. One must not quote it--it is not proper to read other people's letters, especially letters to a trusted father, from a child, only and adored. Its effect may be indicated briefly. It showed the father that the Girl's happiness had had two long years in which to learn to grow round the thought of the young man, whom he now faced for the first time. Odd, for to the father he seemed just like other young men. It seemed to him that there were so many more of the same pattern from whom she might have chosen. And many of them well off, too. However, the letter lay in the prosperous pocket-book in the breast of the father's frock-coat, and the Lover was received as though that letter were a charm to ensure success. A faulty, or at least a slow-working, charm, however, for the father did not lift a bag of gold from his safe and say: "Take her, take this also--be happy"--he only consented to a provisional engagement, took an earnest interest in the young man's affairs, and offered to make his daughter an annual allowance on her marriage.

"At my death she will have more," he said, "for, of course, I have insured my life. You, of course, will insure yours."

"Of course I will," the Lover echoed warmly; "does it matter what office?"

"Oh, any good office--the Influential, if you like. I'm a director, you know."

The young man made a reverent note of the name, and the interview seemed played out.

"It's a complicated nuisance," the father mused; "it isn't even as if I knew anything of the chap. I oughtn't to have allowed the child to make these long visits to her aunt. Or I ought to have gone with her. But I never could stand my sister Fanny. Well, well," and he went back to his work with the plain unvarnished heartache of the anxious father--not romantic and pretty like the lover's pangs, but as uncomfortable as toothache, all the same.

He had another caller that afternoon; he whom we know as the Onlooker came to thank him for the influence that had got him the appointment as doctor to the Influential Insurance Company.

The father opened his heart to the Onlooker--and the Onlooker had to bear it. It was an hour full of poignant sentiments. The only definite thought that came to the Onlooker was this--"I must hold my tongue. I must hold my tongue." He held it.

Three days later he took up his new work. And the very first man who came to him for medical examination was the man in whose arms he had seen the girl he loved.

The Onlooker asked the first needful questions automatically. To himself he was saying: "The situation is dramatically good; but I don't see how to develop the action. It really is rather amusing that I--_I_ should have to tap his beastly chest, and listen to his cursed lungs, and ask sympathetic questions about his idiotic infant illnesses--one thing, he ought to be able to remember those pretty vividly--the confounded pup."

The Onlooker had never done anything wronger than you have done, my good reader, and he never expected to meet a giant temptation, any more than you do. A man may go all his days and never meet Apollyon. On the other hand, Apollyon may be waiting for one round the corner of the next street. The devil was waiting for the Onlooker in the answers to his careless questions--"Father alive? No? What did he die of?" For the answer was "Heart," and in it the devil rose and showed the Onlooker the really only true and artistic way to develop the action in this situation, so dramatic in its possibilities. The illuminative flash of temptation was so sudden, so brilliant, that the Doctor-Onlooker closed his soul's eyes and yielded without even the least pretence of resistance.

He took his stethoscope from the table, and he felt as though he had picked up a knife to stab the other man in the back. As, in fact, he had.

Ten minutes later, the stabbed man was reeling from the Onlooker's consulting room. Mind and soul reeled, that is, but his body was stiffer and straighter than usual. He walked with more than his ordinary firmness of gait, as a man does who is just drunk enough to know that he must try to look sober.

He walked down the street, certain words ringing in his ears--"Heart affected--probably hereditary weakness. No office in the world would insure you."

And so it was all over--the dreams, the hopes, the palpitating faith in a beautiful future. His days might be long, they might be brief; but be his life long or short, he must live it alone. He had a little fight with himself as he went down Wimpole Street; then he hailed a hansom, and went and told her father, who quite agreed with him that it was all over. The father wondered at himself for being more sorry than glad.

Then the Lover went and told the Girl. He had told the father first to insure himself against any chance of yielding to what he knew the Girl would say. She said it, of course, with her dear arms round his neck.

"I won't give you up just because you're ill," she said; "why, you want me more than ever!"

"But I may die at any moment."

"So may I! And you may live to be a hundred--I'll take my chance. Oh, don't you see, too, that if there _is_ only a little time we ought to spend it together?"

"It's impossible," he said, "it's no good. I must set my teeth and bear it. And you--I hope it won't be as hard for you as it will for me."

"But you _can't_ give me up if I won't _be_ given up, can you?"

His smile struck her dumb. It was more convincing than his words.

"But why?" she said presently. "Why--why--_why_?"

"Because I won't; because it's wrong. My father ought never to have married. He had no right to bring me into the world to suffer like this. It's a crime. And I'll not be a criminal. Not even for you--not even for you. You'll forgive me--won't you? I didn't know--and--oh, what's the use of talking?"

Yet they talked for hours. Conventionally he should have torn himself away, unable to bear the strain of his agony. As a matter of fact, he sat by her holding her hand. It was for the last time--the last, last time. There was really a third at that interview. The Onlooker had imagination enough to see the scene between the parting lovers.

They parted.

And now the Onlooker dared not meet her--dared not call at the house as he had used to do. At last--the father pressed him--he went. He met her. And it was as though he had met the ghost of her whom he had loved. Her eyes had blue marks under them, her chin had grown more pointed, her nose sharper. There was a new line on her forehead, and her eyes had changed.

Over the wine he heard from the father that she was pining for the Lover who had inherited heart disease.

"I suppose it was you who saw him, by the way," said he, "a tall, well-set-up young fellow--dark--not bad looking."

"I--I don't remember," lied the Onlooker, with the eyes of his memory on the white face of the man he had stabbed.

Now the Lover and the Onlooker had each his own burden to bear. And the Lover's was the easier. He worked still, though there was now nothing to work for more; he worked as he had never worked in his life, because he knew that if he did not take to work he should take to drink or worse devils, and he set his teeth and swore that her Lover should not be degraded. He knew that she loved him, and there was a kind of fierce pain-pleasure--like that of scratching a sore--in the thought that she was as wretched as he was, that, divided in all else, they were yet united in their suffering. He thought it made him more miserable to know of her misery. But it didn't. He never saw her, but he dreamed of her, and sometimes the dreams got out of hand, and carried him a thousand worlds from all that lay between them. Then he had to wake up. And that was bad.

But the Onlooker was no dreamer, and he saw her about three times a week. He saw how the light of life that his lying lips had blown out was not to be rekindled by his or any man's breath. He saw her slenderness turn to thinness, the pure, healthy pallor of her rounded cheek change to a sickly white, covering a clear-cut mask of set endurance. And there was no work that could shut out that sight--no temptation of the world, the flesh, or the devil to give him even the relief of a fight. He had no temptations; he had never had but the one. His soul was naked to the bitter wind of the actual; and the days went by, went by, and every day he knew more and more surely that he had lied and thrown away his soul, and that the wages of sin were death, and no other thing whatever. And gradually, little by little, the whole worth of life seemed to lie in the faint, far chance of his being able to undo the one triumphantly impulsive and unreasoning action of his life.

But there are some acts that there is no undoing. And the hell that had burned in his heart so fiercely when he had seen her in the other man's arms burned now with new bright lights and infernal flickering flame tongues.

And at last, out of hell, the Onlooker reached out his hands and caught at prayer. He caught at it as a drowning man catches at a white gleam in the black of the surging sea about him--it may be a painted spar, it may be empty foam. The Onlooker prayed.

And that very evening he ran up against the Lover at the Temple Station, and he got into the same carriage with him.

He said, "Excuse me. You don't remember me?"

"I'm not likely to have forgotten you," said the Lover.

"I fear my verdict was a great blow. You look very worried, very ill. News like that is a great shock."

"It _is_ a little unsettling," said the Lover.

"Are you still going on with your usual work?"

"Yes."

"Speaking professionally, I think you are wrong. You lessen your chances of life! Why don't you try a complete change?"

"Because--if you must know, my chances of life have ceased to interest me."

The Lover was short with the Onlooker; but he persisted.

"Well, if one isn't interested in one's life, one may be interested in one's death--or the manner of it. In your place, I should enlist. It's better to die of a bullet in South Africa than of fright in London."

That roused the Lover, as it was meant to do.

"I don't really know what business it is of yours, sir," he said; "but it's your business to know that they wouldn't pass a man with a heart like mine."

"I don't know. They're not so particular just now. They want men. I should try it if I were you. If you don't have a complete change you'll go all to pieces. That's all."

The Onlooker got out at the next station. Short of owning to his own lie, he had done what he could to insure its being found out for the lie it was--or, at least, for a mistake. And when he had done what he could, he saw that the Lover might not find it out--might be passed for the Army--might go to the Front--might be killed--and then--"Well, I've done my best, anyhow," he said to himself--and himself answered him: "Liar--you have _not_ done your best! You will have to eat your lie. Yes--though it will smash your life and ruin you socially and professionally. You will have to tell him you lied--and tell him why. You will never let him go to South Africa without telling him the truth--and you know it."

"Well--you know best, I suppose," he said to himself.

* * * * *

"But are you perfectly certain?"

"Perfectly. I tell you, man, you're sound's a bell, and a fine fathom of a young man ye are, too. Certain? Losh, man--ye can call in the whole College of Physeecians in consultation, an' I'll wager me professional reputation they'll endorse me opeenion. Yer hairt's as sound's a roach. T'other man must ha' been asleep when ye consulted him. Ye'll mak' a fine soldier, my lad."

"I think not," said the Lover--and he went out from the presence. This time he reeled like a man too drunk to care how drunk he looks.

He drove in cabs from Harley Street to Wimpole Street, and from Wimpole Street to Brooke Street--and he saw Sir William this and Sir Henry that, and Mr. The-other-thing, the great heart specialist.

And then he bought a gardenia, and went home and dressed himself in his most beautiful frock-coat and his softest white silk tie, and put the gardenia in his button-hole--and went to see the Girl.

"Looks like as if he was going to a wedding," said his landlady.

When he had told the Girl everything, and when she was able to do anything but laugh and cry and cling to him with thin hands, she said--

"Dear--I do so hate to think badly of anyone. But do you really think that man was mistaken? He's very, very clever."

"My child--Sir Henry--and Sir William and Mr.--"

"Ah! I don't mean _that_. I _know_ you're all right. Thank God! Oh, thank God! I mean, don't you think he may have lied to you to prevent your--marrying me?"

"But why should he?"

"He asked me to marry him three weeks ago. He's a very old friend of ours. I do hate to be suspicious--but--it is odd. And then his trying to get you to South Africa. I'm certain he wanted you out of the way. He wanted you to get killed. Oh, how can people be so cruel!"

"I believe you're right," said the Lover thoughtfully; "I couldn't have believed that a man could be base like that, through and through. But I suppose some people _are_ like that--without a gleam of feeling or remorse or pity."

"You ought to expose him."

"Not I--we'll just cut him. That's all I'll trouble to do. I've got _you_--I've got you in spite of him--I can't waste my time in hunting down vermin."

THE DUEL

"BUT I wasn't doing any harm," she urged piteously. She looked like a child just going to cry.

"He was holding your hand."

"He wasn't--I was holding his. I was telling him his fortune. And, anyhow, it's not your business."

She had remembered this late and phrased it carelessly.

"It is my Master's business," said he.

She repressed the retort that touched her lips. After all, there was something fine about this man, who, in the first month of his ministrations as Parish Priest, could actually dare to call on her, the richest and most popular woman in the district, and accuse her of--well, most people would hardly have gone so far as to call it flirting. Propriety only knew what the Reverend Christopher Cassilis might be disposed to call it.

They sat in the pleasant fire-lit drawing-room looking at each other.

"He's got a glorious face," she thought. "Like a Greek god--or a Christian martyr! I wonder whether he's ever been in love?"

He thought: "She is abominably pretty. I suppose beauty _is_ a temptation."

"Well," she said impatiently, "you've been very rude indeed, and I've listened to you. Is your sermon quite done? Have you any more to say? Or shall I give you some tea?"

"I have more to say," he answered, turning his eyes from hers. "You are beautiful and young and rich--you have a kind heart--oh, yes--I've heard little things in the village already. You are a born general. You organise better than any woman I ever knew, though it's only dances and picnics and theatricals and concerts. You have great gifts. You could do great work in the world, and you throw it all away; you give your life to the devil's dance you call pleasure. Why do you do it?"

"Is that your business too?" she asked again.

And again he answered--

"It is my Master's business."

Had she read his words in a novel they would have seemed to her priggish, unnatural, and superlatively impertinent. Spoken by those thin, perfectly curved lips, they were at least interesting.

"That wasn't what you began about," she said, twisting the rings on her fingers. The catalogue of her gifts and graces was less a novelty to her than the reproaches to her virtue.

"No--am I to repeat what I began about? Ah--but I will. I began by saying what I came here to say: that you, as a married woman, have no right to turn men's heads and make them long for what can never be."

"But you don't know," she said. "My husband--"

"I don't wish to know," he interrupted. "Your husband is alive, and you are bound to be faithful to him, in thought, word, and deed. What I saw and heard in the little copse last night--"

"I do wish you wouldn't," she said. "You talk as if--"

"No," he said, "I'm willing--even anxious, I think--to believe that you would not--could not--"

"Oh," she cried, jumping up, "this is intolerable! How dare you!"

He had risen too.

"I'm not afraid of you," he said. "I'm not afraid of your anger, nor of your--your other weapons. Think what you are! Think of your great powers--and you are wasting them all in making fools of a pack of young idiots--"

"But what could I do with my gifts--as you call them?"

"Do?--why, you could endow and organise and run any one of a hundred schemes for helping on God's work in the world."

"For instance?" Her charming smile enraged him.

"For instance? Well--_for instance_--you might start a home for those women who began as you have begun, and who have gone down into hell, as you will go--unless you let yourself be warned."

She was for the moment literally speechless. Then she remembered how he had said: "I am not afraid of--your weapons." She drew a deep breath and spoke gently--

"I believe you don't mean to be insulting--I believe you mean kindly to me. Please say no more now. I'll think over it all. I'm not angry--only--do you really think you understand everything?"

He might have answered that he did not understand her. She did not mean him to understand. She knew well enough that she was giving him something to puzzle over when she smiled that beautiful, troubled, humble, appealing half-smile.

He did not answer at all. He stood a moment twisting his soft hat in his hands: she admired his hands very much.

"Forgive me if I've pained you more than was needed," he said at last, "it is only because--" here her smile caught him, and he ended vaguely in a decreasing undertone. She heard the words "king's jewels," "pearl of great price."

When he was gone she said "_Well!_" more than once. Then she ran to the low mirror over the mantelpiece, and looked earnestly at herself.

"You do look rather nice to-day," she said. "And so he's not afraid of any of your weapons! And I'm not afraid of any of his. It's a fair duel. Only all the provocation came from him--so the choice of weapons is mine. And they shall be _my_ weapons: he has weapons to match them right enough, only the poor dear doesn't know it." She went away to dress for dinner, humming gaily--

"My love has breath o' roses,
O' roses, o' roses;
And arms like lily posies
To fold a lassie in!"

Not next day--she was far too clever for that, but on the day after that he received a note. Her handwriting was charming; no extravagances, every letter soberly but perfectly formed.

"I have been thinking of all you said the other day. You are quite mistaken about some things--but in some you are right. Will you show me how to work? I will do whatever you tell me."

Then the Reverend Christopher was glad of the courage that had inspired him to denounce to his parishioners all that seemed to him amiss in them.

"I am glad," he said to himself, "that I had the courage to treat her exactly as I have done the others--even if she _has_ beautiful hair, and eyes like--like--"

He stopped the thought before he found the simile--not because he imagined that there could be danger in it, but because he had been trained to stop thoughts of eyes and hair as neatly as a skilful boxer stops a blow.

She had not been so trained, and she admired his eyes and hair quite as much as he might have admired hers if she had not been married.

So now the Reverend Christopher had a helper in his parish work; and he needed help, for his plain-speaking had already offended half his parish. And his helper was, as he had had the sense to know she could be, the most accomplished organiser in the country. She ran the parish library, she arranged the school treat, she started evening classes for wood carving and art needlework. She spent money like water, and time as freely as money. Quietly, persistently, relentlessly, she was making herself necessary to the Reverend Christopher. He wrote to her every day--there were so many instructions to give--but he seldom spoke with her. When he called she was never at home. Sometimes they met in the village and exchanged a few sentences. She was always gravely sweet, intensely earnest. There was a certain smile which he remembered--a beautiful, troubled, appealing smile. He wondered why she smiled no more.

Her friends shrugged their shoulders over her new fancy.

"It is odd," her bosom friend said. "It can't be the parson, though he's as beautiful as he can possibly be, because she sees next to nothing of him. And yet I can't think that Betty of all people could really--"

"Oh--I don't know," said the bosom friend of her bosom friend. "Women often do take to that sort of thing, you know, when they get tired of--"

"Of?"

"The other sort of thing, don't you know!"

"How horrid you are," said Betty's bosom friend. "I believe you're a most dreadful cynic, really."

"Not at all," said the friend, complacently stroking his moustache.

Betty certainly was enjoying herself. She had the great gift of enjoying thoroughly any new game. She enjoyed, first, the newness; and, besides, the hidden lining of her new masquerade dress enchanted her. But as her new industries developed she began to enjoy the things for themselves. It is always delightful to do what we can do well, and the Reverend Christopher had been right when he said she was a born general.

"How easy it all is," she said, "and what a fuss those clergy-hags make about it! What a wife I should be for a bishop!" She smiled and sighed.

It was pleasant, too, to wake in the morning, not to the recollection of the particular stage which yesterday's flirtation happened to have reached, but to the sense of some difficulty overcome, some object achieved, some rough place made smooth for her Girls' Friendly, or her wood carvers, or her Parish Magazine. And within it all the secret charm of a purpose transfiguring with its magic this eager, strenuous, working life.

Her avoidance of the Reverend Christopher struck him at first as modest, discreet, and in the best possible taste. But presently it seemed to him that she rather overdid it. There were many things he would have liked to discuss with her, but she always evaded talk with him. Why? he began to ask himself why. And the question wormed through his brain more and more searchingly. He had seen her at work now; he knew her powers, and her graces--the powers and the graces that made her the adored of her Friendly girls and her carving boys. He remembered, with hot ears and neck crimson above his clerical collar, that interview. The things he had said to her! How could he have done it? Blind idiot that he had been! And she had taken it all so sweetly, so nobly, so humbly. She had only needed a word to turn her from the frivolities of the world to better things. It need not have been the sort of word he had used. And at a word she had turned. That it should have been at _his_ word was not perhaps a very subtle flattery--but the Reverend Christopher swallowed it and never tasted it. He was not trained to distinguish the flavours of flatteries. He never tasted it, but it worked in his blood, for all that. And why, why, why would she never speak to him? Could it be that she was afraid that he would speak to her now as he had once spoken? He blushed again.

Next time he met her she was coming up to the church with a big basket of flowers for the altar. He took the basket from her and carried it in.

"Let me help you," he said.

"No," she said in that sweet, simple, grave way of hers. "I can do it very well. Indeed, I would rather."

He had to go. The arrangement of the flowers took more than an hour, but when she came out with the empty basket, he was waiting in the porch. Her heart gave a little joyful jump.

"I want to speak to you," said he.

"I'm rather late," she said, as usual; "couldn't you write?"

"No," he said, "I can't write this. Sit down a moment in the porch."

She loved the masterfulness of his tone. He stood before her.

"I want you to forgive me for speaking to you as I did--once. I'm afraid you're afraid that I shall behave like that again. You needn't be."

"Score number one," she said to herself. Aloud she said--

"I am not afraid," and she said it sweetly, seriously.

"I was wrong," he went on eagerly. "I was terribly wrong. I see it quite plainly now. You do forgive me--don't you?"

"Yes," said she soberly, and sighed.

There was a little silence. Her serious eyes watched the way of the wind dimpling the tall, feathery grass that grew above the graves.

"Are you unhappy?" he asked; "you never smile now."

"I am too busy to smile, I suppose!" she said, and smiled the beautiful, humble, appealing smile he had so longed to see again, though he had not known the longing by its right name.

"Can't we be friends?" he ventured. "You--I am afraid you can never trust me again."

"Yes, I can," she said. "It was very bitter at the time, but I thought it was so brave of you--and kind, too--to care what became of me. If you remember, I did want to trust you, even on that dreadful day, but you wouldn't let me."

"I was a brute," he said remorsefully.

"I do want to tell you one thing. Even if that boy had been holding my hand I should have thought I had a right to let him, if I liked--just as much as though I were a girl, or a widow."

"I don't understand. But tell me--please tell me anything you _will_ tell me." His tone was very humble.

"My husband was a beast," she said calmly. "He betrayed me, he beat me, he had every vile quality a man can have. No, I'll be just to him: he was always good tempered when he was drunk. But when he was sober he used to beat me and pinch me--"

"But--but you could have got a separation, a divorce," he gasped.

"A separation wouldn't have freed me--really. And the Church doesn't believe in divorce," she said demurely. "_I_ did, however, and I left him, and instructed a solicitor. But the brute went mad before I could get free from him; and now, I suppose, I'm tied for life to a mad dog."

"Good God!" said the Reverend Christopher.

"I thought it all out--oh, many, many nights!--and I made up my mind that I would go out and enjoy myself. I never had a good time when I was a girl. And another thing I decided--quite definitely--that if ever I fell in love I would--I should have the right to--I mean that I wouldn't let a horrible, degraded brute of a lunatic stand between me and the man I loved. And I was quite sure that I was right."

"And do you still think this?" he asked in a low voice.

"Ah," she said, "you've changed everything! I don't think the same about anything as I used to do. I think those two years with him must have made me nearly as mad as he is. And then I was so young! I am only twenty-three now, you know--and it did seem hard never to have had any fun. I did want so much to be happy."

She had not intended to speak like this, but even as she spoke she saw that this truth-telling far outshone the lamp of lies she had trimmed ready.

"You _will_ be happy," he said; "there are better things in the world than--"

"Yes," she said; "oh, yes!"

Betty did nothing by halves. She had kept a barrier between her and him till she had excited him to break it down. The barrier once broken, she let it lie where he had thrown it, and became, all at once, in the most natural, matter-of-fact, guileless way, his friend.

She consulted him about everything. Let him call when he would, she always received him. She surrounded him with the dainty feminine spider webs from which his life, almost monastic till now, had been quite free. She imported a knitting aunt, so that he should not take fright at long tete-a-tetes. The knitting aunt was deafish and blindish, and did not walk much in the rose garden. Betty knew a good deal about roses, and she taught the Reverend Christopher all she knew. She knew a little of the hearts of men, and she gently pushed him on the road to forgiveness from that half of the parish whom his first enthusiastic denunciations had offended. She rounded his angles. She turned a wayward ascetic into a fairly good parish priest. And he talked to her of ideals and honour and the service of God and the work of the world. And she listened, and her beauty spoke to him so softly that he did not know that he heard.

One day after long silence she turned quickly and met his eyes. After that she ceased to spin webs, for she saw. Yet she was as blind as he, though she did not know it any more than he did.

At last he saw, in his turn, and the flash of the illumination nearly blinded him.

It was late evening: Betty was nailing up a trailing rose, and he was standing by the ladder holding the nails and the snippets of scarlet cloth. The ladder slipped, and he caught her in his arms. As soon as she had assured him that she was not hurt, he said good night and left her.

Betty went indoors and cried. "What a pity!" she said. "Oh, what a pity! Now he'll be frightened, and it's all over. He'll never come again."

But the next evening he came, and when they had walked through the rose garden and had come to the sun-dial he stopped and spoke--

"I've been thinking of nothing else since I saw you. When I caught you last night. Forgive me if I'm a fool--but when I held you--don't be angry--but it seemed to me that you loved me--"

"Nothing of the sort," said Betty very angrily.

"Then I must be mad," he said; "the way you caught my neck with your arm, and your face was against mine, and your hair crushed up against my ear. Oh, Betty, if you don't love me, what shall I do? For I can't live without you."

Betty had won.

"But--even if I had loved you--I'm married," she urged softly.

"Yes--do you suppose I've forgotten that? But you remember what you said--about being really free, and not being bound to that beast. I see that you were right--right, right. It's the rest of the world that's wrong. Oh, my dear--I can't live without you. Couldn't you love me? Let's go away--right away together. No one will love you as I do. No one knows you as I do--how good and strong and brave and unselfish you are. Oh, try to love me a little!"

Betty had leaned her elbows on the sun-dial, and her chin on her hands.

"But you used to think ..." she began.

"Ah--but I know better now. You've taught me everything. Only I never knew it till last night when I touched you. It was like a spark to a bonfire that I've been piling up ever since I've known you. You've taught me what life is, and love. Love can't be wrong. It's only wrong when it's stealing. We shouldn't be robbing anybody. We should both work better--happiness makes people work--I see that now. I should have to give up parish work--but there's plenty of good work wants doing. Why, I've nearly finished that book of mine. I've worked at it night after night--with the thought of you hidden behind the work. If you were my wife, what work I could do! Oh, Betty, if you only loved me!"

She lifted her face and looked at him gravely. He flung his arm round her shoulders and turned her face up to his. She was passive to his kisses. At last she kissed him, once, and drew herself from his arms.

"Come," she said.

She led him to the garden seat in the nut-avenue.

"Now," she said, when he had taken his place beside her, "I'm going to tell you the whole truth. I was very angry with you when you came to me that first day. You were quite right. That boy had been holding my hand: what's more, he had been kissing it. It amused me, and if it hurt him I didn't care. Then you came. And you said things. And then you said you weren't afraid of me or my weapons. It was a challenge. And I determined to make you love me. It was all planned, the helping in your work--and keeping out of your way at first was to make you wish to see me. And, you see, I succeeded. You _did_ love me."

"I do," he said. He caught her hand and held it fiercely. "I deserved it all. I was a brute to you."

"I meant you to love me--and you did love me. I lied to you in almost everything--at first."

"About that man--was that a lie?" he asked fiercely.

"No," she laughed drearily. "That was true enough. You see, it was more effective than any lie I could have invented. No lie could have added a single horror to _that_ story! And so I've won--as I swore I would!"

"Is that all," he said, "all the truth?"

"It's all there's any need for," she said.

"I want it all. I want to know where I am--whether I really was mad last night. Betty--in spite of all your truth I can't believe one thing. I can't believe that you don't love me."

"Man's vanity," she began, with a flippant laugh.

"Don't!" he said harshly. "How dare you try to play with me? Man's vanity! But it's your honour! I know you love me. If you didn't you would be--"

"How do you know I'm not?"

"Silence," he said. "If you can't speak the truth hold your tongue and let me speak it. I love you--and you love me--and we are going to be happy."