Chapter VI: A Devonshire Idyl

The old-fashioned yellow coach, top-heavy with pyramidal luggage, rattled along the Devonshire coast, striking its apex against over-arching boughs, and Matthew Strang sat on the box-seat, forgetting London in the prospect of Eleanor Wyndwood and in the view of white and red houses scattered like wild-flowers about a steep green hill overhanging the curve of a lovely bay.

For Rosina had continued obdurate and invisible; she had sent up breakfast from the kitchen without appearing, and with an irritating air of cooking for a gentleman-boarder, and he, fretful and anguished after a wretched wakeful night, had fled, snarling even at Billy, who would have stayed him further. The remembrance of her cantankerousness and of his own ill-humor had accompanied him all the way to Devonshire, but the sight of the sea--rolling vast and green and sun-dimpled--the wrinkled unaging sea, had calmed him. His burdens fell from him. The last vapors of London, the torpid miasma of the packed streets, the cabbage odors of Camden Town, were blown afar; he drew deep breaths of the delicious air.

How lucky it was Rosina had shied at the suggestion which he had thrown out on the reckless impulse of a desperate moment! How could they possibly live together any more? To draw the same atmosphere with her was stifling; and at the thought his deep inspirations took on a new voluptuousness of freedom regained. Decidedly he had not counted the cost when the quixotic proposal sprang to his lips. For that atmosphere meant death to his soul--nothing less; death to all his new stirrings and yearnings--asphyxiation to his Art. Ah! the good salt air, let it blow on his free forehead, let it play among his early-graying locks. Let it whisper the brave dreams of youth till the nimble blood tingles and the eyes are wet with tears. Let him feel the freshness of morning, though the sun is hastening westward, and the best of the day is spent. The coachman blows his horn, and the hills are filled with the echoes of romance. Away with the clogging mists and the moral fogs of the town, away with the moody vision of a narrow-souled virago in a gray house in a drab labyrinth, and ho! for the enchanted cliffs and waters, where loveliness broods like light over earth and sea, and a spirit that is half a woman and half the soul of all beauty waits with swelling bosom and kindling eyes. Oh, the bonny horses, the spanking quartette, how they sweep round the curves and dash down the dales, and how gallantly the ruddy-faced driver holds them in the hollow of his hand! What delightful villages, primitive as the rough stone of which they are built, what quaint old hostels and archaic streets steeped in the mingled scent of the sea and the moors! Here be old-world orchards, here be cosey cottages and sweet homely gardens, gay with nasturtiums and hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, with roses and pansies.

Ta-ra! Ta-ra-ra-ra! Ta-ra! The driver airily salutes the afternoon. Over the ferny walls of the Devonshire lanes, the outside passengers behold the red crags perching picturesquely on the sea-front like petrified monsters of an earlier era, and the trail of redder gold quivering across the great water; the wind rises and flecks the shimmering green as with a flock of skimming sea-birds. Oh, the beauty of the good round earth, the beauty forgotten and blotted out in the reeking back streets of great cities! Oh, gracious privilege of the artist, to seize a moment of the flowing loveliness of all things; to pass it through the alembic of his soul, and give it back transfigured and immortal.

“To feel Beauty growing under one’s hand.” The words were Eleanor’s--they chimed celestially in his ears, not as words, but as _her_ words, stored up as in a phonograph with every dainty intonation, but with their music sweetened rather than deadened. All she had ever said to him he could recall as from a box of heavenly airs. Every syllable had the golden cadence of poesie. To love her was to be young again, fit for every high emprise, sensitive to every tremor of fantasy and romance.

“Stiff collar-work that, sir.”

The driver’s tongue was clattering tirelessly--of his horses, which, more sensible than men, wouldn’t touch a drop more than was good for them; of his life on the box from boyhood, his easy-going content, his pioneer daughter, the first in those parts to wear spectacles; his pleasure in seeing gentlefolk come down to circulate the money, his scorn of chapel-goers; but Matthew Strang’s private phonograph was performing with equal indefatigability, and his spirit leaped incessantly from one to the other, touched to a large geniality for horn-blowing humanity.

The sun was sinking royally in the sea, like a Viking in his burning vessel, when the coach obligingly drew up with a flourish of the horn and a scattering of chickens and a barking of dogs at the farm where Herbert had his headquarters. He was disappointed not to find Herbert there to receive him, as he had telegraphed his advent; but just as he was comfortably installed and was beginning to wonder whether he should start dining alone, that ever-young gentleman galloped up, flushed with health and sun and exercise, and, leaping from his horse, gave Matthew such hearty greeting that the painter had a grateful sense of being welcomed to an ancient seignorial home by a bluff and hospitable squire.

“I’ve been working at the portrait,” Herbert explained, ascending to his room with his hand affectionately on the shoulder of Matthew, who was thus forced to remount the stairs. “Of course I keep my painting kit at their place. And a jolly old place it is, with the sea cleaning the doorsteps, or pretty nearly. They’re beastly comfortable, with their London servants and carriages, and they’ve a motherly old person who seems a combination of cook and chaperon, and turns out delicious dishes, and they’ve taken on a native girl to help them--a sweet simple creature with cheeks like strawberries and cream. Do you remember the lady who said strawberries and cream needed only to be forbidden to be an ecstasy? These _are_ forbidden. Oh, don’t look glum, I haven’t indulged. Forbidden fruit is out of season. I’m tired of it. It’s generally canned. And I have had too much of the foreign brands--ugh! I can see the litter of broken tins. I’m developing a healthy taste for the fresh-growing article, without any prohibitive tariff.”

Matthew turned to grasp his friend’s hand silently, as though sealing some compact. He felt it was Eleanor whose magnetism had uplifted Herbert to that reverence for womanhood he himself had always entertained. It was impossible to live under her spell and remain coarse. And, paradoxically enough, he was glad Herbert was living on a higher plane--it strengthened him in his own purely spiritual devotion to the beautiful friend of his soul. How stupid to have hesitated; how commonplace and ignoble to have gone to see Rosina for fear of Eleanor’s influence upon him. Like the old Roman, he had lost a day. And he had uselessly harrowed his soul to boot.

And yet, perhaps, not altogether uselessly, he reflected consolingly. The visit had laid the ghost of remorse; the full daylight had been turned upon the situation; he had seen beyond reach of further doubt that he was not to blame for it; that he was the victim of the blind tragedy of circumstance. True, the full daylight had also revealed that Rosina was taking the situation far more tragically than he had ever allowed himself to suspect; it was pitiful, but it could not be helped. His own mother had fared far worse, her living death had taught him resentful resignation to the workings of fate. No, Rosina must be put on one side. He had lost happiness; his Art at least must be saved.

Waiting for Herbert to change his clothes, he looked out of the ivy-wreathed, diamond-paned casement, and saw a lonely white wraith of a moon glimmering in the great spaces over the great lonely deep, and heard the moan of the waves under the wind’s lash, and watched the sunset dying in pale greens and pinks and saffrons; and so, in an exalted mood, went down to dinner.

It was getting towards nine o’clock when the cousins lit their cigars and strolled along the cliffs, their feet taking them westwards, where phosphorescent streaks of light green lingered in the sky, sending out thinner lucent shoots to join the eastern gray.

“I’ll show you the house--it’s not more than a mile,” Herbert volunteered.

“We can’t call to-night,” said Matthew.

“What! Not with a madcap like Olive? You don’t mind my calling her Olive, do you, old man?”

“No,” laughed Matthew.

“Well, then! If I may call her Olive, why mayn’t I call on her in the evening? But that’s an argument rather in Olive’s vein, though it appears to puzzle you--ha! ha! ha! But you mustn’t bring your London etiquette down here with you, my boy,” he went on in a harangue tempered by puffs--”you’d better send it back by the carrier to-morrow if you packed it in your luggage by mistake. We’re in another world, and in an earlier century. What a superficial view to think contemporaries live in the same century! These people--as yet unsophisticated by the tourist--are living in the seventeenth century A.D. at the latest; they’d burn Olive for a witch if they knew her as I do, the droll elf, with her masculine brain and her tricksy femininity. I think I’ve lived in every place and time under the sun. I’ve been with fourteenth-century brigands and sixth-century monks. And in Jerusalem with the Jews I was back in the B.C. ages. I really think all the centuries live side by side. There must have been A.D. people in the B.C. times, just as there are B.C. people living in A.D. times. Fancy thinking these bucolics an evolutionary advance on Pericles and Horace. Evolution must move like those waves down below, sending scouts out here and there far in advance of the general march of the waters, whenever there’s a hollow curve in the coast. I’m a twenty-fifth century man myself, which makes the nineteenth call me godless and immoral. But what were we talking about?”

“Goodness knows. Oh, I know--”

“I’m aware you are goodness incarnate,” interpolated Herbert.

“I was saying we couldn’t call on Mrs. Wyndwood to-night.”

“Ah, but why shouldn’t Mrs. Wyndwood want a stroll after dinner as much as we? I told her of your wire. What more natural than that they should stroll eastward?” And Herbert smiled mysteriously, as one with experience. “I told you we made our own etiquette--laws are for the benefit of the community. _We_ are the community, we four, the only civilized beings in a loutish world. We began as a triumvirate, but your coming has changed the form of government. You are the fourth party. We are now--what shall I say?--a constitutional quartette.”

As Herbert rattled on, Matthew felt more and more the fascination of his gay cousin, whose white teeth flashed as facetiously as in the days of yore, and whose lissome figure was a continuous pleasure to the artistic eye. Gratitude mingled with his admiration; but for Herbert’s ingenuity he would never have been a citizen of the earthly paradise that was opening before him. The smoke of his cigar rose like incense on the solemn air, upon which the sound of the wind and the sea broke like a hush. Under foot were gorse and bracken, mixed with sparse sprouts of grass; overhead a rich yellow half-moon, partly hidden by scowling clouds, but throwing a band of pale gold, that changed with the deepening dusk to rippling silver, across the sombre bay, in whose distant cliffs the lights of vague scattered villages twinkled mysteriously, suggesting romantic windows of illumined hollow chambers in the steep rock. And presently white figures were seen advancing slowly to meet them, pausing each instant as if to drink in the beauty of the night.

“Ah, there they are!” cried Herbert.

“No, there are three of them,” said Matthew, in disappointed tones.

“That’s the maid, carrying a reserve of wraps, you duffer! Don’t throw away your cigar. There’s Olive herself with a cigarette, if my eyes do not deceive me.”

But Matthew Strang’s cigar went out ere the two parties--sauntering more slowly than before they had become unconscious of each other--were startled to find themselves face to face. His heart was beating furiously as if he were really startled by the apparition of a queenly figure and a lovely flushed face on the background of the night. A smile danced in the eyes and parted the red lips with an expression of more eager welcome than had ever been accorded him in town; and there was a more intimate pressure in the clasp of the warm hand, subtly heralding a new phase in their friendship, in this disappearance of the conventional stage properties of the fashionable human scene, in this isolation amid the primitiveness of nature, and of a humanity simpler than their own; while Miss Regan’s cigarette and her frank laugh and hand-shake indicated less subtly, but no less pleasantly, the commencement of a semi-Bohemian artistic period which loomed more agreeably to Matthew than any of the periods Herbert had boasted of living in.

“Welcome to the Creamery,” said Olive, “or rather to the Ice-Creamery, as we’ve had to call it lately.”

“Then why don’t you put on your wraps?” said Matthew, anxiously.

“Oh, it’s comparatively tropical to-night, and we had to give Primitiva a pretext for accompanying us. This is Primitiva (_née_ Rose) the ex-post.” The pretty lass made a courtesy. “She was the post, you know, when we first came. She used to bring letters from the post-office, which is near you, and our first acquaintance with the post was to find it in tears because it had lost a letter of ours. She had dropped it _en route_.”

“Was it an important letter?” asked Matthew.

“That is very nearly a bull, Mr. Strang,” replied Olive. “However, as the letter was picked up by a coast-guard, I am able to tell you it wasn’t of the slightest importance--merely a request from Mr. Harold Lavender to be allowed to dedicate his next book of poems to Nor. Still it might have been important; it might have contained a P.O.M.”

“Do you mean a poem or a post-office order?” laughed Mrs. Wyndwood, turning a flippant face towards Matthew’s, over which a cloud had come like that now entirely over the moon.

“Neither,” said Olive, gravely; “a P.O.M., a proposal of marriage. But wasn’t it odd to see the post crying? I fell in love with her at once. I saw that such a quaint creature would do more good to me than to Her Majesty’s service, and so, hey, presto! she was whisked from the post-office and changed into a tire-woman.”

“And, oh! what a refreshing contrast with the London servant,” added Mrs. Wyndwood. “Primitiva is really a servant, not a critic on the hearth.”

“Yes,” said Olive, “she believes that all London ladies smoke, and considers Nor eccentric for not indulging. And whatever I tell her is gospel; she thinks I’m like George Washington--invariably truthful.”

“Then she thinks you eccentric, too,” said Herbert, smiling back.

Olive’s eyes danced; her lips quivered trying to keep back the smile of response.

“Save your cynicism for town, sir,” she said. “Primitiva doesn’t think anything of the kind. The world is not a whited sepulchre to her. It is lucky I removed her from the sphere of your blighting influence.”

“Yes,” grumbled Herbert. “She’s our farmer’s daughter, Matt. And she might have hovered about our dinner-table.”

“I couldn’t leave Marguerite in the way of Faust,” said Olive, plumply.

Matthew Strang winced; Miss Regan’s plain speaking grated upon him, and he saw that Mrs. Wyndwood had lowered her eyes in like annoyance and had commenced to walk homewards. And he resented this preoccupation with Primitiva; he feared she was going to play the part of the dog, Roy. Herbert hummed an operatic bar or two and broke off laughing: “I wish I had Faust’s voice. A lovely tenor voice was apparently among the profits of his bargain with the devil.”

Miss Regan laughed merrily. “Are you going back, Nor?” she called out.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “We must say good-night.”

“Oh, we must see you home,” protested Matthew, as he moved to her side.

“There’s really no need,” she returned. “We sha’n’t meet anybody.”

“But it’s so dark,” said Matthew, for the moon still dallied behind its cloud-rack, and threw only a faint wavering circle of light on the weird water, though the stars were now clear enough.

“Then, come along!” cried Olive, bounding forwards, from Herbert’s side, rather to his disgust. “Run straight home, Primitiva.” And, waving her cigarette-tip in the darkness, she disappeared in the earth like a red witch.

Herbert dashed after her down the cliff descent. The exhilaration of their spirits caught Eleanor. She was swallowed down abruptly. Matthew followed more cautiously, wondering. And then began a mad, unforgetable, breakneck, joyous scramble in the darkness down the steepest and craggiest of roughly worn paths, diversified by great sheer gaps without foothold for a goat, down which they had to drop. At first Matthew tried to steady and help himself by clutching at the vegetation and bushes through which the path broke, but it was all blackberry-bushes and prickly gorse, and his involuntary interjections were answered by peals of mocking laughter from the invisible pioneer below.

“How do you like seeing us home?” she called up.

But Matthew was rapt far beyond the sting of taunts and blackberry-bushes. Mrs. Wyndwood was only a few inches ahead of him; every moment she turned to cheer him on, and her face was close to his, and the divine darkness was filled with light and perfume. Twice or thrice in this topsy-turvy harum-scarum descent she gave him a helping hand, as one familiar with the ground, and he took it with no sense of unmanliness. “Be careful here,” she said once, “or the brambles will scratch your face,” and she looked up adorably from her insecure perch below, holding the prickly net-work apart with her upper arm as he slid cautiously towards her, blissfully conscious that this sharing of common--if petty--peril was bringing them together beyond the reach of ceremonial coldness for evermore. Sometimes the gray sea showed below through the interstices on the left, and its dull boom mingled with the gentle swish of the wind and the gurgle of a little water-fall. The last twenty feet were the worst, and they were aggravated by the banter of the couple safely below. Herbert had never caught up with Olive, who had skeltered down like a wild-cat, leaving a trail of gay ejaculations; but Mrs. Wyndwood herself had to be helped in the precipitous windings of the base, with its tiny niches of crumbling stone at long intervals, and now in sweet revenge Matthew held her hand to steady her from above, while below Herbert waited with open arms for her final jump. An odd recollection of his climbing down the steeple in Economy flashed through his brain, as he himself half slipped, half leaped to the ground, hot and red and breathless; and gratitude for the miraculous metamorphosis in his fortunes added to the tenderness of his mood. How good it was to be alive--there in the brave night, moneyed and famous and still young, glowing with physical well-being--amid a joyous human company, with a delightful friend and cousin, and two brilliant and beautiful ladies, both members of that fashionable world which had once filled him with envious bitterness, and one of them a woman whose presence made everything magical. Rosina was very shadowy now.

They seemed in a great closed circle, walled by cliffs, with a roof fretted by stars. Two glooming pools made dark patches in the lighter soil, and they heard the stir of fish.

“A deserted stone quarry,” Olive explained.

“There are carp in the pools,” said Herbert.

“We live outside,” said Mrs. Wyndwood.

“It’s nearer over the cliff and more ladylike,” added Olive.

“It was hardly fair to Mr. Matthew Strang, though,” Eleanor remarked, smiling. “We’ve all learned the way in the daylight. When you see it in the morning, Mr. Strang, you’ll find it sometimes within a few inches of the sheer precipice, and if you had caught hold of the bushes to stay your fall you would have dropped them like a hornet’s nest. We ought to have warned him--in the dark, too.”

“If we had warned him he would have fallen,” laughed Olive, gayly. “Anybody could walk a four-inch plank over a precipice if he thought it was on the ground. Ignorance is salvation. But you will have to come in, Strangs, and brush yourselves before you go. What a nuisance your both having the same name. When I insult Mr. Herbert I shall excite the animosity of Mr. Matthew, and vice versa. I really think, Nor, we shall have to call them by their Christian names.”

“Only when they’re together,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, smiling.

“We must always stick together, Matt,” cried Herbert, with jocose enthusiasm. “Your hand, Matt.”

“We might call one the Painter,” began Mrs. Wyndwood, “and the other--”

“No, that’s ungrateful,” Olive remonstrated, “after the beautiful success Mr. Herbert has made of you.”

“I meant Mr. Herbert,” replied Eleanor, roguishly, and for once Olive had no retort ready.

“No, even taking the portrait into account, Matt’s the Painter,” said Herbert, placing his hand lovingly on the shoulder of his friend, who thrilled with a sense of his cousin’s large-heartedness. “Call me the Playwright.”

“You are both Painters,” Miss Regan persisted. “But the problem is solved--one is Mr. Herbert and the other Mr. Matthew.” She took Eleanor’s arm and led the way to the house.

“Since when are you a playwright, Mr. Herbert?” asked Matthew, as they fell a little into the rear.

“None of _your_ sarcasm, you beggar. I’ve always been a playwright. Don’t you remember my doing a burlesque for the Academy students? I’m writing a comedy in the evenings--the lessee of the Folly is a friend of mine--I must make some money now--there’s that hundred pounds I owe you--and I know I’m not going to make it by painting.”

“But surely you will let me know if you want anything,” said Matthew, with genuine concern, for there seemed something immoral in the idea of Herbert feeling the pinch of need, to say nothing of his shock at finding that his cousin had run through all that money. Herbert had, indeed, several times hinted at his impecuniosity, but Matthew had never taken him seriously.

Herbert shook his head. “I know you’re a brick, old chap, but a hundred pounds is as much as I care to owe any one man.”

“But you don’t consider me _any_ one man.”

“Ah! it’s awfully good of you to remember that I did as much for you--comparatively speaking--in your tenpenny times, but still it isn’t quite agreeable to find one’s bread on the waters after many days. I never did like soaked bread, even in milk. The most I could do would be to let you settle up every week with Primitiva’s father. But it’s really halves, mind you, and when my comedy is produced, you’ll have to reckon with me. They like what I’ve written--the women--they think it’ll make a hit--I read them the night’s work after lunch the next day--of course, I always lunch with them after the morning’s sitting. Ah, here we are!”

They had emerged from the sheltered quarry and met the smack of the salt wind from the moaning sea-front. A lawn ran out to meet the pebbly beach, from which it was separated by a low stone wall; the ancient slate-roofed house stood out radiantly cheerful against the dusky background of the night and the cliffs. Primitiva was at the door looking out anxiously, and a man-servant shared her anxiety, or at least her vigil.

“How delightful!” exclaimed Matthew.

“Yes, weren’t we lucky?” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “It’s an old family residence. The owner kept it untenanted for thirty years, and has never consented to let it before.”

The ladies took off their things while the men brushed themselves in the hall, where, divided by a heavily carved barometer, a pair of faded oil-paintings hung--a gentleman in a wig and a lady in a coif. These reminded Miss Regan that Matthew must see how splendidly Herbert’s portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood had turned out after all. “The rogue!” she cried. “As soon as he thought the sittings were to cease, the picture picked up wonderfully! And now he’s dilly-dallying with it again!”

So they wandered through the large rambling house with its old-fashioned belongings till they reached the room which Herbert had been allowed to use as a studio. Matthew saw with joy that Herbert had let the glorious face and figure be as he himself had painted them in that spurt of inspiration, and had confined his own attention to the minutiæ of the dress, which was nearly finished. Olive held a lamp to it, awaiting his praises. He had a moment of embarrassment.

“She is very beautiful,” he said, ambiguously, but rapturously. Then, turning to Herbert, he added, heartily, “If your comedy is only as good, old fellow--”

“It will be,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, enthusiastically. “Who should write comedy if not a man like Mr. Strang--I mean Mr. Herbert--a man who has seen the manners of men and cities? I should think he could do it even better than he can paint.”

“But he has one disadvantage,” said Olive, gloomily. “He is witty.”

Herbert stood bowing with his hand on his breast in mock acknowledgment. His boyish face looked flushed and handsome in the lamplight. Matthew had a spasm of despair--a momentary sense of being an outsider.

“Don’t practise your footlights bow here,” said Olive. “No one has called ‘author!’”

“‘Many are called, but few chosen,’” quoted Herbert.

“I wonder how I should come out under _your_ brush?” said Eleanor, turning to Matthew. His black fit vanished; he was taken back again into the charmed circle. But the question remained awkward.

“Not more beautiful than this,” he murmured. “Perhaps you will give me the pleasure. I am here to paint--partly, that is.”

“Perhaps in town; not here. I want to be out and about. Olive, we must give them something before they go back through the cold night.”

Olive rang the bell and ordered refreshment. They adjourned to the drawing-room, a spacious apartment, with strange heavy antique furniture and curious bronzes and vases, the _ensemble_ made more quaint by the irrelevant presence of a grandfather’s chair, with its high, stiff canvas back.

“I fished that up from the kitchen,” said Olive. “It’s jolly to sit there and imagine one’s self an old crone nodding to one’s last sleep.”

She seated herself upon it forthwith, nid-nodding, and against the white canvas her dark face shone, lovely and young and more provoking by the suggestive contrast.

Herbert stood over her, fidgeting, his fingers drumming nervously on the canvas awning.

She sprang up and threw back the lid of a mahogany instrument, and began to play a joyous melody.

Matthew had seated himself in an arm-chair near the window. Eleanor, her superb arms and neck bare, was opposite him, a wonderful white vision in the soft-toned light. He caught her eyes and they smiled at him, the friendly smile that means nothing and everything.

As Olive touched the keys, his breast grew tenderer; where had he heard those tinkling harmonies before? His dead childhood came back to him for a moment--it was a harpsichord, and the last person he had heard playing it was Ruth Hailey. A vision of her girlish figure flitted before him, then passed into the picture of the young woman with the sweet earnest eyes that Billy had conjured up, then faded into the sweeter vision of reality, as, through eyes still misty, he saw Eleanor’s bosom softly rising and falling with the melody, the joyous soul of which sparkled in her eager eyes. The tune grew merrier, madder. Herbert was at the player’s side now; he was talking to her as her long, white fingers darted among the keys. Suddenly the music jarred and stopped; Olive leaped up and ran to the window and threw it open, and a cold wind swept in, and the solemn sobbing of the waves.

“There it is,” she cried, “the great lonely blackness, roaring outside like a wild beast in its lonely agony. We shut it out with our walls, and hang them with pictures and plaques, but there it is all the same, and all our tapestries cannot quite deaden its wail. Don’t you hear it in the darkness, don’t you hear it crying out there--the pain of the world?”

Mrs. Wyndwood sprang up in alarm and closed the window.

“Olive, Olive, calm yourself,” she said, tenderly, pressing the girl’s face to her bosom.

Olive broke from her with a peal of laughter. “You look as if you had seen a ghost, Nor. Are you afraid of the black night that you shut it out? Are you out of tune with it already?”

“You exaggerate the pain of the world, dearest,” said Eleanor, soothingly.

Herbert looked startled. “The pain of the world?” he said. “The futility of the world, you mean. People eat and drink and go to theatres, and over their graves the parson prates of infinities and immortalities. Religion is too big for us. We’re like mice in a cathedral.”

“You are right.” Olive dropped wearily into the grandfather’s chair. “God said, ‘Let man be,’ and _nascitur ridiculus mus_.”

Eleanor’s eyes kindled. “We are small most times,” she said. “But there are moments when, as Wordsworth says:

“‘Through Love, through Hope, and Faith’s transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.’

I’m not afraid, Olive. There! I open the window again. Come and look--not at the black night, but up at the stars.”

Matthew’s soul melted in worship. He moved to her side and, refreshed by the cool sea air, lifted his eyes to the far-sprinkled vault where the moon had now suffused the dark clouds, which seemed to have grown light and porous. The two infinities of sky and sea brooded together in the night, ineffably solemn.

Olive would not budge. “The stars!” she shuddered. “Big, lonely worlds.”

Mrs. Wyndwood did not hear her. “Ah, there’s the Plough,” she said; “and there’s the Polar Star in a straight line, and there’s Cassiopeia. And that’s all I know. But, oh! surely they are havens of rest, where the tears are wiped from all faces.” Her voice faltered, her face was rapt as in prayer.

“Won’t you put something over your shoulders?” Matthew said, anxiously.

“No; it’s quite warm. Unless perhaps we take a turn up and down the beach before you go; shall we? It looks so divine out there.”

He was startled and intoxicated by the proposal.

“Won’t you come, too, Olive? It’s nearly ten o’clock. We must be sending them home to their farm, or Primitiva’s father will bar the door. Already we have a reputation for witchcraft because our house shines afar at eleven o’clock, a beacon of evil to all the neighboring hamlets. In London we should just be preparing to go out.”

“I am tired, Nor. You can have a turn, if you like. You go, too, Mr. Herbert.”

Herbert hesitated. “No, it wouldn’t be fair to leave you alone.”

“Does company prevent one from being alone?”

“I’ve _got_ to have a turn in a moment, anyhow,” said Herbert, weakly. “A _re_turn, alas!”

“We’ll leave them to fight it out.” And Mrs. Wyndwood laid her hand a moment on Matthew’s shoulder, thrilling him. They went out under the stars. She had taken only a light, fleecy wrap, beneath which the white shoulders were half defined, half divined. They went across the lawn and through the gate, and crunching lightly over the little pebbles, walked towards where the surf bubbled white in the grayness. All was very still, save for the eternal monotone of the sea. There were a few yellow glimmers from the villages on the cliffs. Far to the east a light-house sent watery rays across the night. They stood without speaking, in a religious ecstasy, breathing in the salt air.

At last the delicious silence was broken by her more delicious voice.

“I am so glad you came,” she said, simply.

His breast swelled painfully.

“You are very good to me.”

“Oh, I mean your cousin will have company.”

“Is that all?” he said, audaciously.

“And then, he likes to be with Miss Regan.”

“Is that all?”

She smiled.

“You are too ambiguous. The plain truth is that your cousin prefers to talk to Miss Regan alone, and I didn’t care about appearing a marplot. You know the proverb.”

He was never shrewd. Harassed as he had been by his own affairs, Herbert’s admiration of Olive had never struck him as a serious passion. He conceived his cousin as a philandering person, a man of many flirtations. But now the suggestion that came from Eleanor’s lips seemed to throw a flood of light on everything, even on Herbert’s remark about forbidden fruit. For once Herbert was veritably in love. In his relief at the butterfly’s choice of a definite flower he forgot to resent Mrs. Wyndwood’s reason for giving himself her company.

“Are you sure it isn’t you he admires?” he asked, merely for the pleasure of her denial.

“Oh no! I’m an old, staid, prosaic, mature widow. My romance is over,” she sighed.

She never looked more spiritual than thus in the moonlight. But he could never bring himself to the conventional compliments. He asked, simply:

“And what about Miss Regan?”

“Ah! I should not tell you if I knew, and I don’t know. I don’t profess to understand Miss Regan. I never knew any one so easy to live with and so difficult to understand. But, as she doesn’t understand herself, I don’t feel humiliated. Of course she has always had men at her feet, and she has refused one of the most brilliant _partis_ in the kingdom. I was afraid she hated men, and I’m still uncertain. If she ever does marry I think it will be to spite her relatives, to make them lament she has thrown herself away. Did I tell you that she quarrelled with them all and came to live with me?”

“Yes, you told me. And you were unhappy then?”

She passed her hand across her eyes, but did not speak.

“You are not unhappy now?”

She smiled. “Are you fishing for compliments?”

“Indeed not. Only I am so sorry for you.” His voice trembled.

“Let us walk along,” she said.

He obeyed. “You are not angry with me for being sorry?” he faltered.

“No, sympathy is always sweet. Though I do not deserve it, some people will tell you.”

“What people?” he asked, fiercely.

“Olive’s people. They all say I saddened my husband’s last hours. He was brought home dead from the hunting-field, you know. He had been--but, no! _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_.”

“Tell me,” he said, softly.

She began to speak, then broke off. “No, why should I tell you?” she said, gently.

“Because--because--I want to be your friend.”

Her bosom heaved. She caught her breath.

“It was a vile sporting-house.” She shuddered. “He left me with an oath on his lips.”

Matthew Strang was at boiling-point. He ground the pebbles furiously under his foot. Oh, the infamy of Society! That this lily should have been handled roughly! It was sacrilege. And yet, in some subtle way, he felt her more human than before. She, too--painful as it was to realize it--had known the mire of life; she, too, this delicate flower of womanhood! though it had left her unsullied, ethereal still. Then she would understand what he had gone through, she would know how coarse and unlovely life could be. He felt strangely nearer to her heart at this moment; some icy partition had melted away.

She ceased walking, and put both hands over her face. The fleecy wrap quivered on her shoulders. He waited in silent reverence.

“Perhaps I _was_ inconsiderate,” she said at last, lifting her face dimmed with tears, “not forbearing enough.”

“You angel!” he whispered.

“You’ll hear another story from his people. All--except Olive. They will tell you that--that I am a--” she smiled wistfully--”a flirt.”

He had no words hot enough. He kicked a stone savagely. “The vile slanderers!” he cried. “They are all tarred with the same brush. You’re lucky to be done with them.”

“There was young Gerard Brode staying in the house, a mere boy up from Oxford and bubbling over with Socialism. I was interested in his theories and we had long talks, and I tried to convert Douglas--that was my poor husband--and to persuade him that we ought to divide our property with everybody; but he met me with coarse ribaldry, and said he wasn’t going to divide his wife with any man, least of all a whipper-snapper like Gerard Brode, and feeble taunts like that, and that was the beginning of our dissensions.”

“Poor Mrs. Wyndwood!” he said, and felt it a sweet privilege to pity her. “And so you spent your fortune on the movement.”

She smiled sadly. “Scarcely my fortune. Poor Douglas never lived to inherit, and I wasn’t born with a gold spoon in my mouth, though it had a crest on it. But who has been telling you about my indiscretions?” She did not wait for an answer, adding: “But, there, you know all about me now,” and her pathetic smile had a dazzling _camaraderie_, though it flickered away as she wound up meditatively: “I wonder why I told you. Shall we go in?”

“Not yet,” he pleaded, hastily. “Oh, if you knew how proud I am of your confidences! That they should be made to me--to me! Oh, if you knew what my life has been!” He felt choking.

“You terrify me,” she returned, lightly. “Nothing very dreadful, I trust.”

“I am nothing, nobody.” He struggled with his voice. “I have slept in the streets. I have consorted with the vilest.”

“All the more honor to you that you are fine.”

“Oh, if I had met you before! You would have inspired me, uplifted me.”

“No higher than you are.”

“Ah, you don’t understand. I have been so poor.”

“Poverty is not a crime.”

“I have been in prison.”

“You were innocent!” Her face shone.

“It was only for debt. I was the victim of a bankruptcy, and I have paid it all off since. But the stain remains.”

“On the laws that put you there.”

He gulped down the great lump that made his throat dry and painful. “I was born in a poor Nova-Scotian village. No one cared for Art.”

She stooped down and plucked up a sea-pink. “See! how sturdily it grows among the stones!”

Now all the pent-up self-pity of the long, solitary years burst forth in a great torrent, breaking through the proud, passionate reserve that no living being had ever penetrated; his soul yielded up its secrets in a strange blend of pride, self-depreciation, and yearning for the woman’s sympathy.

“I have had to carry the hod, to climb the mast.”

“You climbed nearer heaven.”

“Ah, but I swabbed the deck.”

“You touched life at first hand. I have never envied you so much as now. We never get near its secret, we idle rich.”

“You glorify my past for me. I see it now as a divine education. I have been living for false ideals. Oh, if you could glorify my future!”

“I should be proud to inspire it!” The flash in her eyes passed to his.

“If I could see you every day, if I could tell you my hopes, my dreams. But what am I asking? It is impossible. You are the beautiful Mrs. Wyndwood, and I--”

“A genius, a Master! Towering over a humble slave!”

Her eyes, swimming in tears, but shining still, like stars through rain, sought his in humble adoration. Never had he pictured such a look from her. He shook, divining undreamed-of possibilities. For a moment he forgot everything. He caught her hot hand and held it to his lips. In that frenzy of divine fever, half fire, half tears, he felt again that love rationalized life. An infinity of thought and emotion was concentred in the instant; his long, sordid struggles, his craving for happiness, the infinite yearning with which as a boy in a lonely forest he had looked up at the stars. This was the secret of his yearning, this the flash that illumined life. And underlying and intertangled with everything, an astonishment at the vast sweep of life, the possibilities it held. Last night Rosina and Camden Town; to-night Eleanor and the sea and the stars.

She drew her hand away gently, though there was no rebuke in the withdrawal, murmuring, “We must be going in,” and straightway the image of Rosina arose sinister and vindictive, her voice raucous and strained to a ghastly jocosity, crying, “Kisses, they’re off!” And then, as he moved silently towards the house, thrilling with the memory of her hand and her look, prisoned sobs still fluttering at his throat, he had a sudden paradoxical intuition that if he spoke of his wife, as he had been on the point of doing, something would go out of the magic of those touches and glances, all spiritual though they were. The figure of Rosina--sinister and vindictive--would stand between their souls, troubling their most transcendental moments. Was not a man’s wife the natural recipient of his confidences, the nurse of his Art? And then, if Eleanor knew that he was ashamed of his wife, that he had always passed as a bachelor, would she not deem him contemptible? The fine ethical sense that had refused to despise him for material degradations, would it not certainly scorn him for moral weaknesses? A great temptation took him not to imperil by indiscreet speech the footing he had won. But his soul had been moved to its depths. To be false--and with her!

“I have not told you all, Mrs. Wyndwood.”

“You can tell me nothing nobler.”

That was like an icy wind. He walked on storm-tossed. They came to a jutting crag, skirted it, and the house rose radiant in the hollow of the cliff. He had an aching vision of their living there together, she and he, with all the dear domesticities of wedded union. His fancy feigned them re-entering now their joint domain. The pretence left his heart sick and empty. They walked across the lawn. “You would not call me noble,” he said, coming to an abrupt stand-still, “if you knew that I--”

He flinched under the sceptical, confident smile she threw over her shoulder.

“That I am married.”

The half-mocking smile faded from the beautiful face, and with it the color. She turned her head again towards the house, but she was not moving forward.

He was glad he had not to meet her eyes. The sea broke solemnly with a fused roar of irregular waves, and he wondered why the sound was so continuous. A cricket’s chirp in the cliff-bushes seemed to him extraordinarily loud. He looked up at the stars. Were the tears, indeed, wiped from all eyes in those shining islands, he thought, or were they only dead, lonely worlds? Or were they alive and full of unhappy people like the star he stood on?

She spoke at last, with a catch in her breath and a strained smile in her voice.

“Why should that make me think less of you?”

He caught only the celestial reassurance of her reply. How fine, how sympathetic she was! But he hastened to immolate himself. Her unexpected question had thrown him off the track; he forgot that his _concealment_ of his marriage was the only circumstance for which he had foreseen the world’s blame, and he answered, desperately,

“Because I married for money.”

“For money,” she repeated, in a toneless voice.

He was cold and sick with shame. Despite her experience of the coarser side of life, such a contingency was, he felt, quite beyond her comprehension. That money played no part in her consciousness he would have divined, even if her friend had not informed him of the fact in their first talk. An impulse had driven him to humble himself, a counter-instinct now spurred him to excuse himself.

“It was to pursue my art career,” he said, deprecatingly. Even now he would not speak of the younger children he had had to support.

She turned her head again, and the smile was struggling back, and her voice had an echo of the old enthusiastic ring.

“Then you married for Art, not for money!”

“Ah, do not comfort me! My God, how I am punished!”

She veered round now. Her tones were low and trembling with compassion.

“Is she a bad woman?”

“She is worse! She is a good woman. All her thoughts are on the household; it is unbearable. Never a thought of anything but the kitchen and cabbages.”

“Poor woman!” she said.

The prisoned sobs could hardly be choked back now.

“The world does not know. I have been ashamed of her. Now you see how low I am, you cannot respect me.”

Her voice was almost a whisper.

“I respect you the more for what you have done in despite of her. You have had a hard life.”

“Oh, have I not?” and a sob escaped at last.

“Compose yourself. We must go in.”

“You will be my friend all the same?”

“Yes, I will be your friend. Your confidences are safe in my keeping. There is my hand.”

He took it again and held it fast, feeling its warm response. “You make me so happy! Life will not be empty now.” He struggled with the lump in his throat. “With your friendship, what can I not achieve? You shall tell me what I am to strive for.”

“It is too great a responsibility. It was all very well to criticise. I sha’n’t know what to say.”

“You need say nothing. I shall look into your eyes and read it there.”

He looked into them now, and they were not lowered. They were full of sympathetic sweetness, glistening behind tears.

“I am afraid they are rather red,” she said, with a melancholy smile. “If I am not careful they may betray your confidences.”

She moved forward in the direction of the water, and he, turning on his heel, followed, wondering. By a salt pool near the rim of the billows she bent down and bathed her face. To see her half kneeling in the moonlight affected him like reading poetry; and as she washed off the traces of the tears he had made her shed, it seemed to him as if their spiritual friendship were being consecrated by some mystic baptism.

They went in. Olive had not moved from her indolent attitude in the grandfather’s chair. Herbert was standing at the window-curtain.

“I’m so glad you’ve come in,” she said, yawning. “Mr. Herbert has been sulking at having been left behind, and I have been snapping his head off for not leaving me to myself.”

“Yes; Miss Regan speaks the truth for once,” said Herbert, audaciously.

“Oh, I am glad Primitiva is not here to have her ideal shattered. Good-night--before you get ruder.”

“Good-night,” he responded, “before you get truthfuller.”

“Take care of him to-night, Mr. Matthew. He is irresponsible. Don’t go by the cliff route.”

“Not I. Good-night, Miss Regan. Good-night, Mrs. Wyndwood.” And that dear secret pressure thrilled his palm again.

In a few moments the two cousins were marching with measured step along the winding road. Herbert had lit a cigar, but Matthew was busy enough chewing the cud of his memories.

“Olive was rather strange to-night,” said Herbert, breaking the silence of the cliff-tops.

“Not more than usual, surely?” answered Matthew.

“That’s your conventionality and your ignorance of women. I never found her strange except to-night with her nonsense about the pain of the world.”

“She’s talked to me like that before several times; she thinks people with souls can’t be happy. I suppose it’s Mrs. Wyndwood’s influence over her natural flippancy.”

“Ah, perhaps so. But why so formal, Matt? You have my permission to call her Eleanor.”

“Thank you,” said Matthew, with a forced smile.

“I hope you enjoyed your _tête-à-tête_ more than I did. Not that there isn’t a certain fascination in sparring. But perhaps you fought, too.”

He returned a staccato “No.”

After a silence accentuated by the tramp, tramp of their automatic feet as they swung along, he said: “I told her I was married.”

Herbert gave a long whistle. “The devil you did! And you don’t call that fighting? What a knock-down blow!”

“What do you mean?” Matthew murmured.

“D’ you mean to say you don’t know the woman is in love with you?”

Matthew’s blood made delicious riot in his veins. He saw that strange look of worship in her eyes again.

“Nonsense!” he jerked, thickly. “The Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood in love with me!”

“I didn’t say the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood. I said the woman. Trust me. Behind all the titles and the purple and the fine linen--there’s flesh and blood.”

“It is impossible. In love with _me_!”

“You may well be astonished, you duffer. To fix her affections on you with me in the neighborhood! But women were always strange. And men were deceivers ever.”

“All the more reason I shouldn’t deceive her. How glad I am I told her the truth. I breathe easier, there’s a weight off my mind.”

“You selfish beggar! And now it’s all over between you, I suppose, and our nice little constitutional quartette is broken up. And I thought it was going to be so jolly when you came down. Heigho!”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Matthew, with a touch of bitterness. “Eleanor--Mrs. Wyndwood and I are going to be better friends than ever--thank God!”

“Thank whom? Don’t be blasphemous.”

“Thank God,” repeated Matthew, firmly.

“Oh, well, you were always a Methodist parson. But if I were a Jew, I wouldn’t say grace over pork. Not a bad epigram that; I must get it into my comedy.”

Matthew shuddered. Herbert’s tone was desecrating. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t plume yourself on your superior intelligence, old man. Mine’s quite equal to the study of Plato. It isn’t such Greek to me as you imagine.”

“Well, whatever you think, you are quite wrong,” he replied, with spirit. “Our friendship is on a different plane. It is based on our common interest in Art--and Mrs. Wyndwood’s not the sort of woman you’ve had experience of.”

“Well, that’s cool! How do you know what sort of women I’ve had experience of? Besides, a woman is a woman. The world--our world, that is--is full of Greek scholars who study Plato. Strictly under the rose. Society is only an incarnate wink.”

“I should put that into the comedy,” sneered Matthew.

“It’s a quotation from it,” laughed Herbert. “Had you there, my boy.”

It nearly came to a quarrel. But Herbert good-naturedly said he must save Matthew from himself, and he fervently hoped his cousin would not confide in any more women. “You can’t syndicate a secret,” he said, sternly.

At the house they had left, things were equally disturbed. Mrs. Wyndwood retired at once to bed, throwing herself upon it in her clothes; and her delicate white shoulders, which, like her emotions, had no need to be covered up now, rose and fell spasmodically. After a while she got up, bathed her eyes again, in fresh water this time, and went into Olive’s room. Miss Regan was brushing her dusky tresses savagely. She had sent her maid to bed.

“Nice hours,” she growled.

“You’ll catch cold, dear,” Eleanor replied, gently, for a window was wide open at the bottom.

“Nonsense, Nor,” said Olive, petulantly. “I should like to sleep on the beach.”

“What, in this costume?”

“One bathes in less. Still, while you’re here--”

She closed the window with a bang.

“Olive! You make my heart jump.”

“Really? I’m not a man.”

Mrs. Wyndwood colored painfully, then looked at her with brimming eyes of reproach. “And this is my reward for leaving you _tête-à-tête_.”

“Leaving _me tête-à-tête_. I thought that was a by-product.”

Mrs. Wyndwood controlled her vexation. “I said just now I had never known any one so easy to live with. Don’t make me change my opinion, dear.”

“So you’ve been discussing me with Matthew! And what right have you to discuss me with anybody? Oh, how hateful everybody is! I know what it is. You’d like to see me brought down to your level.”

“Good-night, Miss Regan. You will apologize in the morning.”

“Don’t glare. The level of womanhood, if you like. You’ve loved a man.”

Eleanor’s face flushed. “That is the height of womanhood, Olive.”

“Oh yes--fine phrases! The height of womanhood!” She drew a comb fiercely through her hair. “To hang on a man’s lips, to feel a foolish sense of blankness when he isn’t there, and a great wave of joyful pain when he heaves in sight again. To kiss his every little note! To think of him and your trivial self as the centre of the universe, and to want the planets to spin for your joint happiness--oh!” She pulled the comb viciously through a knot.

“You describe it very accurately, Olive,” said her friend, maliciously.

“I’m quoting the novels. This passion that they crack up so much seems nothing more than selfishness at compound interest.”

“Selfishness! When you yourself say it makes you yearn for the other person’s happiness.”

“So that it may subserve yours.”

“You are a cynic.”

“What is a cynic? An accurate observer of life. Oh, you needn’t smile. I know I’m quoting, but one can’t put quotation marks into one’s conversation. You can’t face the facts of life, Nor. You like dull people without insight.”

“I like you.”

“That’s too cheap. You like socialists and spiritualists and poets and painters--the whole spawn of idealists. Bah! They ought to have a month’s experience of a hospital.”

“The world isn’t a hospital ward, Olive. The people I like have the truer insight.”

“What insight has your Matthew Strang?”

“He is as much yours as mine.”

“Don’t shuffle out of the question.”

“His insight expresses itself through his work. He doesn’t talk.”

“Is that a hit at his cousin?” queried Olive, savagely. “If so, it falls remarkably flat, considering Herbert Strang paints as well as talks.”

“Olive, why will you put words into my mouth? You know how much I admire Herbert Strang.”

“Ah, then you have more insight than I gave you credit for. You may even understand that a cynic is only a disappointed idealist, a saint plus insight. His soul is a palace of truth; society and its shams come to the test, yield up their implicit falseness, and are scornfully rejected. The stroke of wit is made with the sword of judgment. Its shaft is the lightning of righteous indignation.”

Mrs. Wyndwood felt this might pass well enough for an analysis of Olive’s own cynicism, but she had her doubts as to its applicability to Herbert’s.

Olive puzzled her frequently, and shocked her not seldom, but she felt instinctively that hers were the aberrations of a noble nature, while the cynicisms of Herbert jarred upon her without such reassurance of sweet bells jangled. Not that she doubted but that he, too, was much more idealistic than he made himself out--did he not write charming comedy love-scenes? Still he was a man who had seen the world, not a crude girl like Olive, and in the face of Olive’s affectionate analysis of Herbert--which she rightly divined owed less to reason than to the growing love for him which she had long suspected in her turbulent friend--Eleanor felt vaguely that while jarring notes may be struck from the soundest keyboard, they may also be the index of an instrument hopelessly out of tune. Of course Herbert was not that, she was sure; he lacked Matthew’s idealism and manly beauty, but he was handsome, too, in his daintier way, and charming and gifted, and probably the very husband to put an end to Olive’s psychical growing-pains. All this mixture of acute and feeble insight occupied Eleanor’s consciousness.

But all she said was, “Is that Emerson?”

“No, it’s me. Now go to bed and sleep on it.”

“I sha’n’t. I couldn’t sleep on anything so hard. Dear me, what a lot of hair-pins you have! What nice ones! I must borrow some.”

“Take them all and go.”

“Not yet.”

“I shall blow out the candles,” snapped Olive.

“I love talking in the dark. I’m pining for feminine conversation to soothe my overwrought nerves. How pretty that lace is!” Eleanor touched her friend’s shoulder cajolingly. “What exquisite things you have! Everything--from hair-pins to carving-knives--perfect after its kind, like the animals that went into the ark. It will be difficult to give you a wedding present.”

Olive laughed, despite herself.

“The only wedding present a woman wants is a husband.”

“You have had plenty of those presents offered you, dear.”

Olive shuddered violently. “Imagine existence with a Guardsman or--worse!--with that doddering young Duke! Dulness without idealism. Your Matthew Strang is endurable--he has at least the family idealism, the Strang goodness, though he carries it so much more heavily than his cousin. But a lifetime with a dull man--who wouldn’t understand a joke--who would smile and smile and be a hypocrite! Oh, ye gods! I should shriek! In a year I should be in a lunatic asylum, or the Divorce Court. Oh, why do you women who have been through the mill egg us girls on? Is it the same instinct that makes an ex-fag send his boy to Eton? Or do you think it improves our health? I know you think me hysterical.”

Mrs. Wyndwood flushed.

“Your tongue runs away with you, Olive. You’d do better to say your prayers. I’ll leave you to them.”

Olive laughed hilariously. “Aha! I thought that would get you to go. You always will forget that I’ve been in a hospital. Say my prayers, eh? Let me see, what shall I say? The one I used to say in the hospital, ‘O Lord, I beseech Thee, let not this be counted unto me for righteousness, for Thou knowest, O Lord, that I can’t help it.’ But that’s not applicable now. Suppose I say just what’s in my heart, as the theologians recommend.” She went down on her knees and said solemnly: “O Lord, don’t you think you are sometimes a little hard upon us? Don’t you think we are born into a very confusing world? It would be so easy to do Thy will, to make Thy will our will, if we only knew what it was. Don’t you think that half our life that might be devoted to Thy service is wasted because of the mist through which we grope, bearing the offering of our life in quest of we know not what Divine altar, and blurring the road more thickly with our tears?” She sprang up. “How’s that for an addition to the Liturgy, Nor?”

“I am disgusted,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, sternly. “Both blasphemous _and_ ungrammatical.”

Olive threw herself back on the bed, laughing unrestrainedly: “You delightful, stupid old thing. Ha! ha! ha! Blasphemous _and_ ungrammatical! You Dissenting Hellenist! Sacrilege and Syntax! Ha! ha! ha! No, you sha’n’t escape. You must abide the question. Tell me, O friend of my soul, why do women who have been unhappily married want to see other women victimized equally, like people who have been fooled in a penny show and come out laughing to beguile the other people?”

“That’s not a fair analogy,” said Eleanor, more gently.

Olive looked up archly, her arms under her head.

“No, perhaps not in your case. I dare say you’re quite capable of marrying again, yourself. The triumph of hope over experience. Quotation marks, please. You’re looking awfully handsome, Nor, and that saucy tilt of your nose spoils you for a saint. Speaking as an ex-sculptress, it’s like a blunt pencil.” She sprang up remorsefully: “Oh, I’m a beast. I apologize to your nose. I forgot the tip was a sore point.”

Mrs. Wyndwood drew back in sorrowful hauteur. “I shall never marry again, Olive,” she said, solemnly. There was an under-tone of self-pity, and her eyes were moist. She turned hastily and walked from the room with a firm, stately step.

Olive watched the sweep of the gown till it reached the door. Then she gave chase and renewed her apologies, and let Eleanor sob out sweet reconciliation on her shoulder.

After which she opened the window, sat on the side of the bed, and screwed up her ripe red lips to produce a perplexed whistle.