'But I tell you I'm not Patience.'

'Come on! You know the music all right. Then we'll try Ella's bit in the first act. I'll play.'

Millicent arose, shook her hair, and walked to the piano with the mien of a prima donna who has the capitals of Europe at her feet, exultant in her youth, her charm, her voice, revelling unconsciously in the vivacity of her blood, and consciously in her power over Harry, which Harry strove in vain to conceal under an assumed equanimity.

And as Millicent sang the ballad Leonora was beguiled, by her singing, into a mood of vague but overpowering melancholy. It seemed tragic that that fresh and pure voice, that innocent vanity, and that untested self-confidence should change and fade as maturity succeeded adolescence and decay succeeded maturity; it seemed intolerable that the ineffable charm of the girl's youth must be slowly filched away by the thefts of time. 'I was like that once! And Jack too!' she thought, as she gazed absently at the pair in front of the piano. And it appeared incredible to her that she was the mother of that tall womanly creature, that the little morsel of a child which she had borne one night had become a daughter of Eve, with a magic to mesmerise errant glances and desires. She had a glimpse of the significance of Nature's eternal iterance. Then her mood developed a bitterness against Millicent. She thought cruelly that Millicent's magic was no part of the girl's soul, no talent acquired by loving exertion, but something extrinsic, unavoidable, and unmeritorious. Why was it so? Why should fate treat Milly like a godchild? Why should she have prettiness, and adorableness, and the lyric gift, and such abounding confident youth? Why should circumstances fall out so that she could meet her unacknowledged lover openly at all seasons? Leonora's eyes wandered to the figure of Ethel reclining with shut eyes in the arm-chair. Ethel in her graver and more diffident beauty had already begun to taste the sadness of the world. Ethel might not stand victoriously by her lover in the midst of the drawing-room, nor joyously flip his ear when he struck a wrong note on the piano. Ethel, far more passionate than the active Milly, could only dream of her lover, and see him by stealth. Leonora grieved for Ethel, and envied her too, for her dreams, and for her solitude assuaged by clandestine trysts. Those trysts lay heavy on Leonora's mind; although she had discovered them, she had done nothing to prevent them; from day to day she had put off the definite parental act of censure and interdiction. She was appalled by the serene duplicity of her girls. Yet what could she say? Words were so trivial, so conventional. And though she objected to the match, wishing with ardour that Ethel might marry far more brilliantly, she believed as fully in the honest warm kindliness of Fred Ryley as in that of Ethel. 'And what else matters after all?' she tried to think.... Her reverie shifted to Rose, unfortunate Rose, victim of peculiar ambitions, of a weak digestion, and of a harsh temperament that repelled the sympathy it craved but was too proud to invite. She felt that she ought to go upstairs and talk to the prostrate Rose in the curt matter-of-fact tone that Rose ostensibly preferred, but she did not wish to talk to Rose. 'Ah well!' she reflected finally with an inward sigh, as though to whisper the last word and free herself of this preoccupation, 'they will all be as old as me one day.'

'Mr. Twemlow,' said the parlourmaid.

Milly deliberately lengthened a high full note and then stopped and turned towards the door.

'Bravo!' Arthur Twemlow answered at once the challenge of her whole figure; but he seemed to ignore the fact that he had caused an interruption, and there was something in his voice that piqued the cantatrice, something that sent her back to the days of short frocks. She glanced nervously aside at Harry, who had struck a few notes and then dropped his hands from the keyboard. Twemlow's demeanour towards the blushing Ethel when Leonora brought her forward was much more decorous and simple. As for Harry, to whom his arrival was a surprise, at first rather annoying, Twemlow treated the young buck as one man of the world should treat another, and Harry's private verdict upon him was extremely favourable. Nevertheless Leonora noticed that the three young ones seemed now to shrink into themselves, to become passive instead of active, and by a common instinct to assume the character of mere spectators.

'May I choose this place?' said Twemlow, and sat down by Leonora in the other corner of the Chesterfield and looked round. She could see that he was admiring the spacious room and herself in her beautiful afternoon dress, and the pensive and the sprightly comeliness of her daughters. His wandering eyes returned to hers, and their appreciation pleased her and increased her charm.

'I am expecting my husband every minute,' she said.

'Papa's gone out for a walk with Bran,' Milly added.

'Oh! Bran!' He repeated the word in a voice that humorously appealed for further elucidation, and both Ethel and Harry laughed.

'The St. Bernard, you know,' Milly explained, annoyed.

'I wouldn't be surprised if that was a St. Bernard out there,' he said pointing to the French window. 'What a fine fellow! And what a fine garden!'

Bran was to be seen nosing low down at the window; and alternately lifting two huge white paws in his futile anxiety to enter the room.

'Then I dare say John is in the garden,' Leonora exclaimed, with sudden animation, glad to be able to dismiss the faint uneasy suspicion which had begun to form in her mind that John meant after all to avoid Arthur Twemlow. 'Would you like to look at the garden?' she demanded, half rising, and lifting her brows to a pretty invitation.

'Very much indeed,' he replied, and he jumped up with the impulsiveness of a boy.

'It's quite warm,' she said, and thanked Harry for opening the window for them.

'A fine severe garden!' he remarked enthusiastically outside, after he had descanted to Bran on Bran's amazing perfections, and the dog had greeted his mistress. 'A fine severe garden!' he repeated.

'Yes,' she said, lifting her skirt to cross the lawn. 'I know what you mean. I wouldn't have it altered for anything, but many people think it's too formal. My husband does.'

'Why! It's just English. And that old wall! and the yew trees! I tell you——'

She expanded once more to his appreciation, which she took to herself; for none but she, and the gardener who was also the groom, and worked under her, was responsible for the garden. But as she displayed the African marigolds and the late roses and the hardy outdoor chrysanthemums, and as she patted Bran, who dawdled under her hand, she looked furtively about for John. She hoped he might be at the stables, and when in their tour of the grounds they reached the stables and he was not there, she hoped they would find him in the drawing-room on their return. Her suspicion reasserted itself, and it was strengthened, against her reason, by the fact that Arthur Twemlow made no comment on John's invisibility. In the dusk of the spruce stable, where an enamelled name-plate over the manger of a loose box announced that 'Prince' was its pampered tenant, she opened the cornbin, and, entering the loose-box, offered the cob a handful of crushed oats. And when she stood by the cob, Twemlow looking through the grill of the door at this picture which suggested a beast-tamer in the cage, she was aware of her beauty and the beauty of the animal as he curved his neck to her jewelled hand, and of the ravishing effect of an elegant woman seen in a stable. She smiled proudly and yet sadly at Twemlow, who was pulling his heavy moustache. Then they could hear an ungoverned burst of Milly's light laughter from the drawing-room, and presently Milly resumed her interrupted song. Opposite the outer door of the stable was the window of the kitchen, whence issued, like an undertone to the song, the subdued rattle of cups and saucers; and the glow of the kitchen fire could be distinguished. And over all this complex domestic organism, attractive and efficient in its every manifestation, and vigorously alive now in the smooth calm of the English Sunday, she was queen; and hers was the brain that ruled it while feigning an aloof quiescence. 'He is a romantic man; he understands all that,' she felt with the certainty of intuition. Aloud she said she must fasten up the dog.

When they returned to the drawing-room there was no sign of John.

'Hasn't your father come in?' she asked Ethel in a low voice; Milly was still singing.

'No, mother, I thought he was with you in the garden.' The girl seemed to respond to Leonora's inquietude.

Milly finished her song, and Twemlow, who had stationed himself behind her to look at the music, nodded an austere approval.

'You have an excellent voice,' he remarked, 'and you can use it.' To Leonora this judgment seemed weighty and decisive.

'Mr. Twemlow,' said the girl, smiling her satisfaction, 'excuse me asking, but are you married?'

'No,' he answered, 'are you?'

'Mr. Twemlow!' she giggled, and turning to Ethel, who in anticipation blushed once again: 'There! I told you.'

'You girls are very curious,' Leonora said perfunctorily.

Bessy came in and set a Moorish stool before the Chesterfield, on the stool an inlaid Sheraton tray with china and a copper kettle droning over a lamp, and near it a cakestand in three storeys. And Leonora, manoeuvring her bangles, commenced the ritual of refection with Harry as acolyte. 'If he doesn't come—well, he doesn't come,' she thought of her husband, as she smiled interrogatively at Arthur Twemlow, holding a lump of sugar aloft in the tongs.

'The Reverend Simon Quain asked who you were, at dinner to-day,' said Harry. During the absence of Leonora and her guest, Harry had evidently acquired information concerning Arthur.

'Oh, Mr. Twemlow!' Milly appealed quickly, 'do tell Harry and Ethel what Dr. Talmage said to you. I think it's so funny—I can't do the accent.'

'What accent?' he laughed.

She hesitated, caught. 'Yours,' she replied boldly.

'Very amusing!' Harry said judicially, after the episode of the Brooklyn collection had been related. 'Talmage must be a caution.... I suppose you're staying at the Five Towns Hotel?' he inquired, with an implication in his voice that there was no other hotel in the district fit for the patronage of a man of the world. Twemlow nodded.

'What! At Knype?' Leonora exclaimed. 'Then where did you dine to-day?'

'I had dinner at the Tiger, and not a bad dinner either,' he said.

'Oh dear!' Harry murmured, indicating an august sympathy for Arthur Twemlow in affliction.

'If I had only known—I don't know what I was thinking of not to ask you to come here for dinner,' said Leonora. 'I made sure you would be engaged somewhere.'

'Fancy you eating all alone at the Tiger, on Sunday too!' remarked Milly.

'Tut! tut!' Twemlow protested, with a farcical exactness of pronunciation; and Ethel laughed.

'What are you laughing at, my dear?' Leonora asked mildly.

'I don't know, mother—really I don't.' Whereupon they all laughed together and a state of absolute intimacy was established.

'I hadn't the least notion of being at Bursley to-day,' Twemlow explained. 'But I thought that Knype wasn't much of a place—I always did think that, being a native of Bursley. I wouldn't be surprised if you've noticed, Mrs. Stanway, how all the five Five Towns kind of sit and sniff at each other. Well, I felt dull after breakfast, and when I saw the advertisement of Dr. Quain at the old chapel, I came right away. And that's all, except that I'm going to sup with a man at Knype to-night.'

There were sounds in the hall, and the door of the drawing-room opened; but it was only Bessie coming to light the gas.

'Is that your master just come in?' Leonora asked her.

'Yes, ma'am.'

'At last,' said Leonora, and they waited. With noiseless precision Bessie lit the gas, made the fire, drew the curtains, and departed. Then they could hear John's heavy footsteps overhead.

Leonora began nervously to talk about Rose, and Twemlow showed a polite interest in Rose's private trials; Ethel said that she had just visited the patient, who slept. Harry asseverated that to remain a moment longer away from his mother's house would mean utter ruin for him, and with extraordinary suddenness he made his adieux and went, followed to the front door by Millicent. The conversation in the room dwindled to disconnected remarks, and was kept alive by a series of separate little efforts. Footsteps were no longer audible overhead. The clock on the mantelpiece struck five, emphasising a silence, and amid growing constraint several minutes passed. Leonora wanted to suggest that John, having lost the dog, must have been delayed by looking for him, but she felt that she could not infuse sufficient conviction into the remark, and so said nothing. A thousand fears and misgivings took possession of her, and, not for the first time, she seemed to discern in the gloom of the future some great catastrophe which would swallow up all that was precious to her.

At length John came in, hurried, fidgetty, nervous, and Ethel slipped out of the room.

'Ah! Twemlow!' he broke forth, 'how d'ye do? How d'ye do? Glad to see you. Hadn't given me up, had you? How d'ye do?'

'Not quite,' said Twemlow gravely as they shook hands.

Leonora took the water-jug from the tray and went to a chrysanthemum in the farthest corner of the room, where she remained listening, and pretending to be busy with the plant. The men talked freely but vapidly with the most careful politeness, and it seemed to her that Twemlow was annoyed, while Stanway was determined to offer no explanation of his absence from tea. Once, in a pause, John turned to Leonora and said that he had been upstairs to see Rose. Leonora was surprised at the change in Twemlow's demeanour. It was as though the pair were fighting a duel and Twemlow wore a coat of mail. 'And these two have not seen each other for twenty-five years!' she thought. 'And they talk like this!' She knew then that something lay between them; she could tell from a peculiar well-known look in her husband's eyes.

When she summoned decision to approach them where they stood side by side on the hearthrug, both tall, big, formal, and preoccupied, Twemlow at once said that unfortunately he must go; Stanway made none but the merest perfunctory attempt to detain him. He thanked Leonora stiffly for her hospitality, and said good-bye with scarcely a smile. But as John opened the door for him to pass out, he turned to glance at her, and smiled brightly, kindly, bowing a final adieu, to which she responded. She who never in her life till then had condescended to such a device softly stepped to the unlatched door and listened.

'This one yours?' she heard John say, and then the sound of a hat bouncing on the tiled floor.

'My fault entirely,' said Twemlow's voice. 'By the way, I guess I can see you at your office one day soon?'

'Yes, certainly,' John answered with false glib lightness. 'What about? Some business?'

'Well, yes—business,' drawled Twemlow.

They walked away towards the outer hall, and she heard no more, except the indistinct murmur of a sudden brief dialogue between the visitor and the two girls, who must have come in from the garden. Then the front door banged heavily. He was gone. The vast and arid tedium of her life closed in upon her again; she seemed to exist in a colourless void peopled only by ominous dim elusive shapes of disaster.

But as involuntarily she clenched her hands the formidable thought swept through her brain that Arthur Twemlow was not so calm, nor so impassive, nor so set apart, but that her spell over him, if she chose to exert it, might be a shield to the devious man her husband.



CHAPTER IV

AN INTIMACY

'Does father really mean it about me going to the works to-morrow?' Ethel asked that night.

'I suppose so, my dear,' replied Leonora, and she added: 'You must do all you can to help him.'

Ethel's clear gift of interpreting even the most delicate modulations in her mother's voice, instantly gave her the first faint sense of alarm.

'Why, mamma! what do you mean?'

'What I say, dear,' Leonora murmured with neutral calm. 'You must do all you can to help him. We look on you as a woman now.'

'You don't, you don't!' Ethel thought passionately as she went upstairs. 'And you never will. Never!'

The profound instinctive sympathy which existed between her mother and herself was continually being disturbed by the manifest insincerity of that assertion contained in Leonora's last sentence. The girl was in arms, without knowing it, against a whole order of things. She could scarcely speak to Millicent in the bedroom. She was disgusted with her father, and she was disgusted with Leonora for pretending that her father was sagacious and benevolent, for not admitting that he was merely a trial to be endured. She was disgusted with Fred Ryley because he was not as other young men were—Harry Burgess for instance. The startling hint from Leonora that perhaps all was not well at the works exasperated her. She held the works in abhorrence. With her sisters, she had always regarded the works as a vague something which John Stanway went to and came away from, as the mysterious source of food, raiment, warmth. But she was utterly ignorant of its mechanism, and she wished to remain ignorant. That its mechanism should be in danger of breaking down, that it should even creak, was to her at first less a disaster than a matter for resentment. She hated the works as one is sometimes capable of unreasonably hating a benefactor.

On Monday morning, rising a little earlier than usual, she was surprised to find her mother alone at a disordered breakfast-table.

'Has dad finished his breakfast already?' she inquired, determined to be cheerful. Sleep, and her fundamental good-nature, had modified her mood, and for the moment she meant to play the role of dutiful daughter as well as she could.

'He has had to go off to Manchester by the first train,' said Leonora. 'He'll be away all day. So you won't begin till to-morrow.' She smiled gravely.

'Oh, good!' Ethel exclaimed with intense momentary relief.

But now again in Leonora's voice, and in her eye, there was the soft warning, which Ethel seized, and which, without a relevant word spoken, she communicated to her sisters. John Stanway's young women began to reflect apprehensively upon the sudden irregularities of his recent movements, his conferences with his lawyer, his bluffing air; a hundred trifles too insignificant for separate notice collected themselves together and became formidable. A certain atmosphere of forced and false cheerfulness spread through the house.

'Not gone to bed!' said Stanway briskly, when he returned home by the late train and discovered his three girls in the drawing-room. They allowed him to imagine that his jaunty air deceived them; they were jaunty too; but all the while they read his soul and pitied him with the intolerable condescension of youth towards age.

The next day Ethel had a further reprieve of several hours, for Stanway said that he must go over to Hanbridge in the morning, and would come back to Hillport for dinner, and escort Ethel to the works immediately afterwards. None asked a question, but everyone knew that he could only be going to Hanbridge to consult with David Dain. This time the programme was in fact executed. At two o'clock Ethel found herself in her father's office.

As she took off her hat and jacket in the hard sinister room, she looked like a violet roughly transplanted and bidden to blossom in the mire. She knew that amid that environment she could be nothing but incapable, dull, stupid, futile, and plain. She knew that she had no brains to comprehend and no energy to prevail. Every detail repelled her—the absence of fire-irons in the hearth, the business almanacs on the discoloured walls, the great flat table-desk, the dusty samples of tea-pots in the window, the vast green safe in the corner, the glimpses of industrial squalor in the yard, the sound of uncouth voices from the clerks' office, the muffled beat of machinery under the floor, and the strange uninhabited useless appearance of a small room seen through a half-open door near the safe. She would have given a year of life, in that first moment, to be helping her mother in some despised monotonous household task at Hillport.

She felt that she was being outrageously deprived of a natural right, hitherto enjoyed without let, to have the golden fruits of labour brought to her in discreet silence as to their origin.

Stanway struck a bell with determination, and the manager appeared, a tall, thin, sandy-haired man of middle age, who wore a grey tailed-coat and a white apron.

'Ha! Mayer! That you?'

'Yes, sir.... Good afternoon, miss.'

'Good afternoon,' Ethel simpered foolishly, and she had it in her to have slain both men because she felt such a silly schoolgirl.

'I wanted Ryley. Where is he?'

'He's somewhere on the bank,[3] sir—speaking to the mouldmaker, I think.'

[3] Bank = earthenware manufactory. But here the word is used in a limited sense, meaning the industrial, as distinguished from the bureaucratic, part of the manufactory.

'Well, just bring me in that letter from Paris that came on Saturday, will you?' Stanway requested.

'I've several things to speak to you about,' said Mr. Mayer, when he had brought the letter.

'Directly,' Stanway answered, waving him away, and then turning to Ethel: 'Now, young lady, I want this letter translating.' He placed it before her on the table, together with some blank paper.

'Yes, father,' she said humbly.

Three hours a week for seven years she had sat in front of French manuals at the school at Oldcastle; but she knew that, even if the destiny of nations turned on it, she could not translate that letter of ten lines. Nevertheless she was bound to make a pretence of doing so.

'I don't think I can without a dictionary,' she plaintively murmured, after a few minutes.

'Oh! Here's a French dictionary,' he replied, producing one from a drawer, much to her chagrin; she had hoped that he would not have a dictionary.

Then Stanway began to look through a pile of correspondence, and to scribble in a large saffron-coloured diary. He went out to Mr. Mayer; Mr. Mayer came in to him; they called to each other from room to room. The machinery stopped beneath and started again. A horse fell down in the yard, and Stanway, watching from the window, exclaimed: 'Tsh! That carter!'

Various persons unceremoniously entered and asked questions, all of which Stanway answered with equal dryness and certainty. At intervals he poked the fire with an old walking-stick, Ethel never glanced up. In a dream she handled the dictionary, the letter, the blank paper, and wrote unfinished phrases with the thick office pen.

'Done it?' he inquired at last.

'I—I—can't make out the figures,' she stammered. 'Is that a 5 or a 7?' She pushed the letter across.

'Oh! That's a French 7,' he replied, and proceeded to make shots at the meaning of sentences with a flair far surpassing her own skill, though it was notorious that he knew no French whatever. She had a sudden perception of his cleverness, his capacity, his force, his mysterious hold on all kinds of things which eluded her grasp and dismayed her.

'Let's see what you've done,' he demanded. She sighed in despair, hesitating to give up the paper.

'Mr. Twemlow, by appointment,' announced a clerk, and Arthur Twemlow walked into the office.

'Hallo, Twemlow!' said Stanway, meeting him gaily. 'I was just expecting you. My new confidential clerk. Eh?' He pointed to Ethel, who flushed to advantage. 'You've plenty of them over there, haven't you—girl-clerks?'

Twemlow assented, and remarked that he himself employed a 'lady secretary.'

'Yes,' Stanway eagerly went on. 'That's what I mean to do. I mean to buy a type-writer, and Miss shall learn shorthand and type-writing.'

Ethel was astounded at the glibness of invention which could instantly bring forth such an idea. She felt quite sure that until that moment her father had had no plan at all in regard to her attendance at the office.

'I'm sure I can't learn,' she said with genuine modesty, and as she spoke she became very attractive to Twemlow, who said nothing, but smiled at her sympathetically, protectively. She returned the smile. By a swift miracle the violet was back again in its native bed.

'You can go in there and finish your work, we shall disturb you,' said her father, pointing to the little empty room, and she meekly disappeared with the letter, the dictionary, and the piece of paper.

* * * * *

'Well, how's business, Twemlow? By the way, have a cigar.'

Ethel, at the dusty table in the little room, could just see her father's broad back through the door which, in her nervousness, she had forgotten to close. She felt that the door ought to have been latched, but she could not find courage deliberately to get up and latch it now.

'Thanks,' said Arthur Twemlow. 'Business is going right along.'

She heard the striking of a match, and the pleasant twang of cigar-smoke greeted her nostrils. The two men seemed splendidly masculine, important, self-sufficient. The triviality of feminine atoms like herself, Rose, and Millicent, occurred to her almost as a new fact, and she was ashamed of her existence.

'Buying much this trip?' asked Stanway.

'Not much, and not your sort,' said Twemlow. 'The truth is, I'm fixing up a branch in London.'

'But, my dear fellow, surely there's no American business done through London in English goods?'

'No, perhaps not,' said Twemlow. 'But that don't say there isn't going to be. Besides, I've got a notion of coming in for a share of your colonial shipping trade. And let me tell you there's a lot of business done through London between the United States and the Continent, in glass and fancy goods.'

'Oh, yes, I know there is,' Stanway conceded. 'And so you think you're going to teach the old country a thing or two?'

'That depends.'

'On what?'

'On whether the old country's made up her mind yet to sit down and learn.' He laughed.

Ethel saw by the change of colour in her father's neck that the susceptibilities of his patriotism had been assailed.

'What do you mean?' Stanway asked pugnaciously.

'I mean that you are falling behind here,' said Twemlow with cold, nonchalant firmness. 'Every one knows that. You're getting left. Look how you're being cut out in cheap toilet stuff. In ten years you won't be shipping a hundred dollars' worth per annum of cheap toilet to the States.'

'But listen, Twemlow,' said Stanway impressively.

Twemlow continued, imperturbable: 'You in the Five Towns stick to old-fashioned methods. You can't cut it fine enough.'

'Old-fashioned? Not cut it fine enough?' Stanway exclaimed, rising.

Twemlow laughed with real mirth. 'Yes,' he said.

'Give me one instance—one instance,' cried Stanway.

'Well,' said Twemlow, 'take firing. I hear you still pay your firemen by the oven, and your placers by the day, instead of settling all oven-work by scorage.'

'Tell me about that—the Trenton system. I'd like to hear about that. It's been mentioned once or twice,' said Stanway, resuming his chair.

'Mentioned!'

Ethel perceived vaguely that the forceful man who held her in the hollow of his hand had met more than his match. Over that spectacle she rejoiced like a small child; but at the same time Arthur Twemlow's absolute conviction that the Five Towns was losing ground frightened her, made her feel that life was earnest, and stirred faint longings for the serious way. It seemed to her that she was weighed down by knowledge of the world, whereas gay Millicent, and Rose with her silly examinations.... She plunged again into the actuality of the letter from Paris....

'I called really to speak to you about my father's estate.'

Ethel was startled into attention by the sudden careful politeness in Arthur Twemlow's manner and by a quivering in his voice.

'What of it?' said Stanway. 'I've forgotten all the details. Fifteen years since, you know.'

'Yes. But it's on behalf of my sister, and I haven't been over before. Besides, it wasn't till she heard I was coming to England that she—asked me.'

'Well,' said Stanway. 'Of course I was the sole executor, and it's my duty——'

'That's it,' Twemlow broke in. 'That's what makes it a little awkward. No one's got the right to go behind you as executor. But the fact is, my sister—we—my sister was surprised at the smallness of the estate. We want to know what he did with his money, that is, how much he really received before he died. Perhaps you won't mind letting me look at the annual balance-sheets of the old firm, say for 1875, 6, and 7. You see——'

Twemlow stopped as Stanway half-turned to look at the door between the two rooms.

'Go on, go on,' said Stanway in his grandiose manner. 'That's all right.'

Ethel knew in a flash that her father would have given a great deal to have had the door shut, and equally that nothing on earth would have induced him to shut it.

'That's all right,' he repeated. 'Go on.'

Twemlow's voice regained steadiness. 'You can perhaps understand my sister's feelings.' Then a long pause. 'Naturally, if you don't care to show me the balance-sheets——'

'My dear Twemlow,' said John stiffly, 'I shall be delighted to show you anything you wish to see.'

'I only want to know——'

'Certainly, certainly. Quite justifiable and proper. I'll have them looked up.'

'Any time will do.'

'Well, we're rather busy. Say a week to-day—if you're to be here that long.'

'I guess that'll suit me,' said Twemlow.

His tone had a touch of cynical cruel patience.

The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, papa—oh, mother, here's Mr. Twemlow!'

In another moment the office was full of chatter and scent, and Milly had run impulsively to Ethel: 'What has father given you to do?'

'Oh dear!' Ethel sighed, with a fatigued gesture of knowing nothing whatever.

'It's half-past five,' said Leonora, glancing into the inner room, after she had spoken to Mr. Twemlow.

Three hours and a half had Ethel been in thrall! It was like a century to her. She could have dropped into her mother's arms.

'What have you come in, Nora?' asked Stanway, 'the trap?'

'No, the four-wheeled dog-cart, dear.'

'Well, Twemlow, drive up and have tea with us. Come along and have a Five Towns high-tea.'

'Oh, Mr. Twemlow, do!' said Milly, nearly drowning Leonora's murmured invitation.

Arthur hesitated.

'Come along,' Stanway insisted genially. 'Of course you will.'

'Thank you,' was the rather feeble answer. 'But I shall have to leave pretty early.'

'We'll see about that,' said Stanway. 'You can take Mr. Twemlow and the girls, Nora, and I'll follow as quick as I can. I must dictate a letter or two.'

The three women, Twemlow in the midst, escaped like a pretty cloud out of the rude, dingy office, and their bright voices echoed diminuendo down the stair. Stanway rang his bell fiercely. The dictionary and the letter and Ethel's paper lay forgotten on the dusty table of the inner room.

* * * * *

Arthur Twemlow felt that he ought to have been annoyed, but he could do no more than keep up a certain reserve of manner. Neither the memory of his humiliating clumsy lies about his sister in broaching the matter of his father's estate to Stanway, nor his clear perception that Stanway was a dishonest and a frightened man, nor his strong theoretical objection to Stanway's tactics in so urgently inviting him to tea, could overpower the sensation of spiritual comfort and complacency which possessed him as he sat between Leonora and Ethel at Leonora's splendidly laden table. He fought doggedly against this sensation. He tried to assume the attitude of a philosopher observing humanity, of a spider watching flies; he tried to be critical, cold, aloof. He listened as one set apart, and answered in monosyllables. But despite his own volition the monosyllables were accompanied by a smile that destroyed the effect of their curtness. The intimate charm of the domesticity subdued his logical antipathies. He knew that he was making a good impression among these women, that for them there was something romantic and exciting about his history and personality. And he liked them all. He liked even Rose, so pale, strange, and contentious. In regard to Milly, whom he had begun by despising, he silently admitted that a girl so vivacious, supple, sparkling, and pretty, had the right to be as pertly foolish as she chose. He took a direct fancy to Ethel. And he decided once for ever that Leonora was a magnificent creature.

In the play of conversation on domestic trifles, the most ordinary phrases seemed to him to be charged with a peculiar fascination. The little discussions about Milly's attempts at housekeeping, about the austere exertions of Rose, Ethel's first day at the office, Bran's new biscuits, the end of the lawn-tennis season, the propriety of hockey for girls, were so mysteriously pleasant to his ears that he felt it a sort of privilege to have been admitted to them. And yet he clearly perceived the shortcomings of each person in this little world of which the totality was so delightful. He knew that Ethel was languidly futile, Rose cantankerous, Milly inane, Stanway himself crafty and meretricious, and Leonora often supine when she should not be. He dwelt specially on the more odious aspects of Stanway's character, and swore that, had Stanway forty womenfolk instead of four, he, Arthur Twemlow, should still do his obvious duty of finishing what he had begun. In chatting with his host after tea, he marked his own attitude with much care, and though Stanway pretended not to observe it, he knew that Stanway observed it well enough.

The three girls disappeared and returned in street attire. Rose was going to the science classes at the Wedgwood Institution, Ethel and Millicent to the rehearsal of the Amateur Operatic Society. Again, in this distribution of the complex family energy, there reappeared the suggestion of a mysterious domestic charm.

'Don't be late to-night,' said Stanway severely to Millicent.

'Now, grumbler,' retorted the intrepid child, putting her gloved hand suddenly over her father's mouth; Stanway submitted. The picture of the two in this delicious momentary contact remained long in Twemlow's mind; and he thought that Stanway could not be such a brute after all.

'Play something for us, Nora,' said the august paterfamilias, spreading at ease in his chair in the drawing-room, when the girls were gone. Leonora removed her bangles and began to play 'The Bees' Wedding.' But she had not proceeded far before Milly ran in again.

'A note from Mr. Dain, pa.'

Milly had vanished in an instant, and Leonora continued to play as if nothing had happened, but Arthur was conscious of a change in the atmosphere as Stanway opened the letter and read it.

'I must just go over the way and speak to a neighbour,' said Stanway carelessly when Leonora had struck the final chord. 'You'll excuse me, I know. Sha'n't be long.'

'Don't mention it,' Arthur replied with politeness, and then, after Stanway had gone, leaving the door open, he turned to Leonora at the piano, and said: 'Do play something else.'

Instead of answering, she rose, resumed her jewellery, and took the chair which Stanway had left. She smiled invitingly, evasively, inscrutably at her guest.

'Tell me about American women,' she said: 'I've always wanted to know.'

He thought her attitude in the great chair the most enchanting thing he had ever seen.

* * * * *

Leonora had watched Twemlow's demeanour from the moment when she met him in her husband's office. She had guessed, but not certainly, that it was still inimical at least to John, and the exact words of Uncle Meshach's warning had recurred to her time after time as she met his reluctant, cautious eyes. Nevertheless, it was by the sudden uprush of an instinct, rather than by a calculated design, that she, in her home and surrounded by her daughters, began the process of enmeshing him in the web of influences which she spun ceaselessly from the bright threads of her own individuality. Her mind had food for sombre preoccupation—the lost battle with Milly during the day about Milly's comic-opera housekeeping; the tale told by John's nervous, effusive, guilty manner; and especially the episode of the letter from Dain and John's disappearance: these things were grave enough to the mother and wife. But they receded like negligible trifles into the distance as she rose so suddenly and with such a radiant impulse from the piano. In the new enterprise of consciously arousing the sympathy of a man, she had almost forgotten even the desperate motive which had decided her to undertake it should she get the chance.

'Tell me about American women,' she said. All her person was a challenge. And then: 'Would you mind shutting the door after Jack?' She followed him with her gaze as he crossed and recrossed the room.

'What about American women?' he said, dropping all his previous reserve like a garment. 'What do you want to know?'

'I've never seen one. I want to know what makes them so charming.'

The fresh desirous interest in her voice flattered him, and he smiled his content.

'Oh!' he drawled, leaning back in his chair, which faced hers by the fire. 'I never noticed they were so specially charming. Some of them are pretty nice, I expect, but most of the young ones put on too much lugs, at any rate for an Englishman.'

'But they're always marrying Englishmen. So how do you explain that? I did think you'd be able to tell me about the American women.'

'Perhaps I haven't met enough of just the right sort,' he said.

'You're too critical,' she remarked, as though his case was a peculiarly interesting one and she was studying it on its merits.

'You only say that because I'm over forty and unmarried, Mrs. Stanway. I'm not at all critical.'

'Over forty!' she exclaimed, and left a pause. He nodded. 'But you are too critical,' she went on. 'It isn't that women don't interest you—they do——'

'I should think they did,' he murmured, gratified.

'But you expect too much from them.'

'Look here!' he said, 'how do you know?'

She smiled with an assumption of the sadness of all knowledge; she made him feel like a boy again: 'If you didn't expect too much from them, you would have married long ago. It isn't as if you hadn't seen the world.'

'Seen the world!' he repeated. 'I've never seen anything half so charming as your home, Mrs. Stanway.'

Both were extremely well satisfied with the course of the conversation. Both wished that the interview might last for indefinite hours, for they had slipped, as into a socket, into the supreme topic, and into intimacy. They were happy and they knew it. The egotism of each tingled sensitively with eager joy. They felt that this was 'life,' one of the justifications of existence.

She shook her head slowly.

'Yes,' he continued, 'it's you who stay quietly at home that are to be envied.'

'And you, a free bachelor, say that! Why, I should have thought——'

'That's just it. You're quite wrong, if you'll let me say so. Here am I, a free bachelor, as you call it. Can do what I like. Go where I like. And yet I would sell my soul for a home like this. Something ... you know. No, you don't. People say that women understand men and what men feel, but they can't—they can't.'

'No,' said Leonora seriously, 'I don't think they can—still, I have a notion of what you mean.' She spoke with modest sympathy.

'Have you?' he questioned.

She nodded. For a fraction of an instant she thought of her husband, stolid with all his impulsiveness, over at David Dain's.

'People say to me, "Why don't you get married?"' Twemlow went on, drawn by the subtle invitation of her manner. 'But how can I get married? I can't get married by taking thought. They make me tired. I ask them sometimes whether they imagine I keep single for the fun of the thing.... Do you know that I've never yet been in love—no, not the least bit.'

He presented her with this fact as with a jewel, and she so accepted it.

'What a pity!' she said, gently.

'Yes, it's a pity,' he admitted. 'But look here. That's the worst of me. When I get talking about myself I'm likely to become a bore.'

Offering him the cigarette cabinet she breathed the old, effective, sincere answer: 'Not at all, it's very interesting.'

'Let me see, this house belongs to you, doesn't it?' he said in a different casual tone as he lighted a cigarette.

Shortly afterwards he departed. John had not returned from Dain's, but Twemlow said that he could not possibly stay, as he had an appointment at Hanbridge. He shook hands with restrained ardour. Her last words to him were: 'I'm so sorry my husband isn't back,' and even these ordinary words struck him as a beautiful phrase. Alone in the drawing-room, she sighed happily and examined herself in the large glass over the mantelpiece. The shaded lights left her loveliness unimpaired; and yet, as she gazed at the mirror, the worm gnawing at the root of her happiness was not her husband's precarious situation, nor his deviousness, nor even his mere existence, but the one thought: 'Oh! That I were young again!'

* * * * *

'Mother, whatever do you think?' cried Millicent, running in eagerly in advance of Ethel at ten o'clock. 'Lucy Turner's sister died to-day, and so she can't sing in the opera, and I am to have her part if I can learn it in three weeks.'

'What is her part?' Leonora asked, as though waking up.

'Why, mother, you know! Patience, of course! Isn't it splendid?'

'Where are father and Mr. Twemlow? Ethel inquired, falling into a chair.



CHAPTER V

THE CHANCE

Leonora was aware that she had tamed one of the lions which menaced her husband's path; she could not conceive that Arthur Twemlow, whatever his mysterious power over John, would find himself able to exercise it now; Twemlow was a friend of hers, and so disarmed. She wished to say proudly to John: 'I neither know nor wish to know the nature of the situation between you and Arthur Twemlow. But be at ease. He is no longer dangerous. I have arranged it.' The thing was impossible to be said; she was bound to leave John in ignorance; she might not even hint. Nevertheless, Leonora's satisfaction in this triumph, her pleasure in the mere memory of the intimate talk by the fire, her innocent joyous desire to see Twemlow again soon, emanated from her in various subtle ways, and the household was thereby soothed back into a feeling of security about John. Leonora ignored, perhaps deliberately, that Stanway had still before him the peril of financial embarrassment, that he was mortgaging the house, and that his colloquies with David Dain continued to be frequent and obviously disconcerting. When she saw him nervous, petulant, preoccupied, she attributed his condition solely to his thought of the one danger which she had secretly removed. She had a strange determined impulse to be happy and gay.

An episode at an extra Monday night rehearsal of the Amateur Operatic Society seemed to point to the prevalence of certain sinister rumours about Stanway's condition. Milly, inspired by dreams of the future, had learnt her part perfectly in five days. She sang and acted with magnificent assurance, and with a vivid theatrical charm which awoke enthusiasm in the excitable breasts of the male chorus. Harry Burgess lost his air of fatigued worldliness, and went round naively demanding to be told whether he had not predicted this miracle. Even the conductor was somewhat moved.

'She'll do, by gad!' said that man of few illusions to his crony the accompanist.

But it is not to be imagined that such a cardinal event as the elevation of a chit like Millicent Stanway to the principal role could achieve itself without much friction and consequent heat. Many ladies of the chorus thought that the committee no longer deserved the confidence of the society. At least three suspected that the conductor had a private spite against themselves. And one, aged thirty-five, felt convinced that she was the victim of an elaborate and scandalous plot. To this maid had been offered Milly's old part of Ella; it was a final insult—but she accepted it. In the scene with Angela and Bunthorne in the first act, the new Ella made the same mistake three times at the words, 'In a doleful train,' and the conductor grew sarcastic.

'May I show you how that bit goes, Miss Gardner?' said Milly afterwards with exquisite pertness.

'No, thank you, Milly,' was the freezing emphasised answer; 'I dare say I shall be able to manage without your assistance.'

'Oh, ho!' sang Milly, delighted to have provoked this exhibition, and she began a sort of Carmen dance of disdain.

'Girls grow up so quick nowadays!' Miss Gardner exclaimed, losing control of herself; 'who are you, I should like to know!' and she proceeded with her irrelevant inquiries: 'who's your father? Doesn't every one know that he'll have gone smash before the night of the show?' She was shaking, insensate, brutal.

Millicent stood still, and went very white.

'Miss Gardner!'

'Miss Stanway!'

The rival divas faced each other, murderous, for a few seconds, and then Milly turned, laughing, to Harry Burgess, who, consciously secretarial, was standing near with several others.

'Either Miss Gardner apologises to me at once,' she said lightly, 'at once, or else either she or I leave the Society.'

Milly tapped her foot, hummed, and looked up into Miss Gardner's eyes with serene contempt. Ethel was not the only one who was amazed at the absolute certitude of victory in little Millicent's demeanour. Harry Burgess spoke apart with the conductor upon this astonishing contretemps, and while he did so Milly, still smiling, hummed rather more loudly the very phrase of Ella's at which Miss Gardner had stumbled. It was a masterpiece of insolence.

'We think Miss Gardner should withdraw the expression,' said Harry after he had coughed.

'Never!' said Miss Gardner. 'Good-bye all!'

Thus ended Miss Gardner's long career as an operatic artist—and not without pathos, for the ageing woman sobbed as she left the room from which she had been driven by a pitiless child.

* * * * *

According to custom Harry Burgess set out from the National School, where the rehearsals were held, with Ethel and Milly for Hillport. But at the bottom of Church Street Ethel silently fell behind and joined a fourth figure which had approached. The two couples walked separately to Hillport by the field-path. As Harry and Milly opened the wicket at the foot of Stanway's long garden, Ethel ran up, alone again.

'That you?' cried a thin voice under the trees by the gate. It was Rose, taking late exercise after her studies.

'Yes, it's us,' replied Harry. 'Shall you give me a whisky if I come in?'

And he entered the house with the three girls.

'I'm certain Rose saw you with Fred in the field, and if she did she's sure to split to mother,' Milly whispered as she and Ethel ran upstairs. They could hear Harry already strumming on the piano.

'I don't care!' said Ethel callously, exasperated by three days of futility at the office, and by the manifest injustice of fate.

'My dear, I want to speak to you,' said Leonora to Ethel, when the informal supper was over, and Harry had buckishly departed, and Rose and Milly were already gone upstairs. Not a word had been mentioned as to the great episode of the rehearsal.

'Well, mother?' Ethel answered in a tone of weary defiance.

Leonora still sat at the supper-table, awaiting John, who was out at a meeting; Ethel stood leaning against the mantelpiece like a boy.

'How often have you been seeing Fred Ryley lately?' Leonora began with a gentle, pacific inquiry.

'I see him every day at the works, mother.'

'I don't mean at the works; you know that, Ethel.'

'I suppose Rose has been telling you things.'

'Rose told me quite innocently that she happened to see Fred in the field to-night.'

'Oh, yes!' Ethel sneered with cold irony. 'I know Rose's innocence!'

'My dear girl,' Leonora tried to reason with her. 'Why will you talk like that? You know you promised your father——'

'No, I didn't, ma,' Ethel interrupted her sharply. 'Milly did; I never promised father anything.'

Leonora was astonished at the mutinous desperation in Ethel's tone. It left her at a loss.

'I shall have to tell your father,' she said sadly.

'Well, of course, mother,' Ethel managed her voice carefully. 'You tell him everything.'

'No, I don't, my dear,' Leonora denied the charge like a girl. 'A week last night I heard Fred Ryley talking to you at your window. And I have said nothing.'

Ethel flushed hotly at this disclosure.

'Then why say anything now?' she murmured, half daunted and half daring.

'Your father must know. I ought to have told him before. But I have been wondering how best to act.'

'What's the matter with Fred, mother?' Ethel demanded, with a catch in her throat.

'That isn't the point, Ethel. Your father has distinctly said that he won't permit any'—she stopped because she could not bring herself to say the words; and then continued: 'If he had the slightest suspicion that there was anything between you and Fred Ryley he would never have allowed you to go to the works at all.'

'Allowed me to go! I like that, mother! As if I wanted to go to the works! I simply hate the place—father knows that. And yet—and yet——' She almost wept.

'Your father must be obeyed,' Leonora stated simply.

'Suppose Fred is poor,' Ethel ran on, recovering herself. 'Perhaps he won't be poor always. And perhaps we shan't be rich always. The things that people are saying——' She hesitated, afraid to proceed.

'What do you mean, dear?'

'Well!' the girl exclaimed, and then gave a brief account of the Gardner incident.

'My child,' was Leonora's placid comment, 'you ought to know that Florence Gardner will say anything when she is in a temper. She is the worst gossip in Bursley. I only hope Milly wasn't rude. And really this has got nothing to do with what we are talking about.'

'Mother!' Ethel cried hysterically, 'why are you always so calm? Just imagine yourself in my place—with Fred. You say I'm a woman, and I am, I am, though you don't think so, truly. Just imagine——No, you can't! You've forgotten all that sort of thing, mother.' She burst into gushing tears at last. 'Father can kill me if he likes! I don't care!'

She fled out of the room.

'So I've forgotten, have I!' Leonora said to herself, smiling faintly, as she sat alone at the table waiting for John.

She was not at all hurt by Ethel's impassioned taunt, but rather amused, indulgently amused, that the girl should have so misread her. She felt more maternal, protective, and tender towards Ethel than she had ever felt since the first year of Ethel's existence. She seemed perfectly to comprehend, and she nobly excused, the sudden outbreak of violence and disrespect on the part of her languid, soft-eyed daughter. She thought with confidence that all would come right in the end, and vaguely she determined that in some undefined way she would help Ethel, would yet demonstrate to this child of hers that she understood and sympathised. The interview which had just terminated, futile, conflicting, desultory, muddled, tentative, and abrupt as life itself, appeared to her in the light of a positive achievement. She was not unhappy about it, nor about anything. Even the scathing speech of Florence Gardner had failed to disturb her.

'I want to tell you something, Jack,' she began, when her husband at length came home.

'Who's been drinking whisky?' was Stanway's only reply as he glanced at the table.

'Harry brought the girls home. I dare say he had some. I didn't notice,' she said.

'H'm!' Stanway muttered gloomily, 'he's young enough to start that game.'

'I'll see it isn't offered to him again, if you like,' said Leonora. 'But I want to tell you something, Jack.'

'Well?' He was thoughtlessly cutting a piece of cheese into small squares with the silver butter-knife.

'Only you must promise not to say a word to a soul.'

'I shall promise no such thing,' he said with uncompromising bluntness.

She smiled charmingly upon him. 'Oh yes, Jack, you will, you must.'

He seemed to be taken unawares by her sudden smile. 'Very well,' he said gruffly.

She then told him, in the manner she thought best, of the relations between Ethel and Fred Ryley, and she pointed out to him that, if he had reflected at all upon the relations between Harry Burgess and Millicent, he would not have fallen into the error of connecting Milly, instead of her sister, with Fred.

'What relations between Milly and young Burgess?' he questioned stolidly.

'Why, Jack,' she said, 'you know as much as I do. Why does Harry come here so often?'

'He'd better not come here so often. What's Milly? She's nothing but a child.'

Leonora made no attempt to argue with him. 'As for Ethel,' she said softly, 'she's at a difficult age, and you must be careful——'

'As for Ethel,' he interrupted, 'I'll turn Fred Ryley out of my office to-morrow.'

She tried to look grave and sympathetic, to use all her tact. 'But won't that make difficulties with Uncle Meshach? And people might say you had dismissed him because Uncle Meshach had altered his will.'

'D——n Fred Ryley!' he swore, unable to reply to this. 'D——n him!'

He walked to and fro in the room, and all his secret, profound resentment against Ryley surged up, loose and uncontrolled.

'Wouldn't it be better to take Ethel away from the works?' Leonora suggested.

'No,' he answered doggedly. 'Not for a moment! Can't I have my own daughter in my own office because Fred Ryley is on the place? A pretty thing!'

'It is awkward,' she admitted, as if admitting also that what puzzled his sagacity was of course too much for hers.

'Fred Ryley!' he repeated the hateful syllables bitterly. 'And I only took him out of kindness! Simply out of kindness! I tell you what, Leonora!' He faced her in a sort of bravado. 'It would serve 'em d——n well right if Uncle Meshach died to-morrow, and Aunt Hannah the day after. I should be safe then. It would serve them d——n well right, all of 'em—Ryley and Uncle Meshach; yes, and Aunt Hannah too! She hasn't altered her will, but she'd no business to have let uncle alter his. They're all in it. She's bound to die first, and they know it.... Well, well!' He was a resigned martyr now, and he turned towards the hearth.

'Jack!' she exclaimed, 'what's the matter?'

'Ruin's the matter,' he said. 'That's what's the matter. Ruin!'

He laughed sourly, undecided whether to pretend that he was not quite serious, or to divulge his real condition.

Her calm confident eyes silently invited him to relieve his mind, and he could not resist the temptation.

'You know that mortgage on the house,' he said quickly. 'I got it all arranged at once. Dain was to have sent the deed in last Tuesday night for you to sign, but he sent in a letter instead. That's why I had to go over and see him. There was some confounded hitch at the last moment, a flaw in the title——'

'A flaw in the title!' It was the phrase only that alarmed her.

'Oh! It's all right,' said Stanway, wondering angrily why women should always, by the trick of seizing on trifles, destroy the true perspective of a business affair. 'The title's all right, at least it will be put right. But it means delay, and I can't wait. I must have money at once, in three days. Can you understand that, my girl?'

By an effort she conquered the impulses to ask why, and why, and why; and to suggest economy in the house. Something came to her mysteriously out of her memory of her own father's affairs, a sudden inspiration; and she said:

'Can't you deposit my deeds at the bank and get a temporary advance?' She was very proud of this clever suggestion.

He shook his head: 'No, the bank won't.'

The fact was that the bank had long been pressing him to deposit security for his over-draft.

'I tell you what might be done,' he said, brightening as her idea gave birth to another one in his mind. 'Uncle Meshach might lend some money on the deeds. You shall go down to-morrow morning and ask him, Nora.'

'Me!' She was scared at this result.

'Yes, you,' he insisted, full of eagerness. 'It's your house. Ask him to let you have five hundred on the house for a short while. Tell him we want it. You can get round him easily enough.'

'Jack, I can't do it, really.'

'Oh yes, you can,' he assured her. 'No one better. He likes you. He doesn't like me—never did. Ask him for five hundred. No, ask him for a thousand. May as well make it a thousand. It'll be all the same to him. You go down in the morning, and do it for me.'

Stanway's animation became quite cheerful.

'But about the title—the flaw?' she feebly questioned.

'That won't frighten uncle,' said Stanway positively. 'He knows the title is good enough. That's only a technical detail.'

'Very well,' she agreed, 'I'll do what I can, Jack.'

'That's good,' he said.

And even now, the resolve once made, she did not lose her sense of tranquil optimism, her mild happiness, her widespreading benevolence. The result of this talk with John aroused in her an innocent vanity, for was it not indirectly due to herself that John had been able to see a way out of his difficulties?

They soon afterwards dismissed the subject, put it with care away in a corner; and John finished his supper.

'Is Mr. Twemlow still in the district?' she asked vivaciously.

'Yes,' said John, and there was a pause.

'You're doing some business together, aren't you, Jack?' she hazarded.

John hesitated. 'No,' he said, 'he only wanted to see me about old Twemlow's estate—some details he was after.'

'I felt it,' she mused. 'I felt all the time it was that that was wrong. And John is worrying over it! But he needn't—he needn't—and he doesn't know!'

She exulted.

She could read plainly the duplicity in his face. She knew that he had done some wicked thing, and that all his life was a maze of more or less equivocal stratagems. But she was so used to the character of her husband that this aspect of the situation scarcely impressed her. It was her new active beneficent interference in John's affairs that seemed to occupy her thoughts.

'I told you I wouldn't say anything about Ethel's affair,' said John later, 'and I won't.' He was once more judicial and pompous. 'But, of course, you will look after it. I shall leave it to you to deal with. You'll have to be firm, you know.'

'Yes,' she said.

* * * * *

Not till after breakfast the next day did Leonora realise the utter repugnance with which she shrank from the mission to Uncle Meshach. She had declined to look the project fairly in the face, to examine her own feelings concerning it. She had said to herself when she awoke in the dark: 'It is nothing. It is a mere business matter. It isn't like begging.' But the idea, the absurd indefensible idea, of its similarity to begging was precisely what troubled her as the moment approached for setting forth. She pondered, too, upon the intolerable fact that such a request as she was about to prefer to Uncle Meshach was a tacit admission that John, with all his ostentations, had at last come to the end of the tether. She felt that she was a living part of John's meretriciousness. She had the fancy that she should have dressed for the occasion in rusty black. Was it not somehow shameful that she, a suppliant for financial aid, should outrage the ugly modesty of the little parlour in Church Street by the arrogant and expensive perfection of her beautiful skirt and street attire?

Moreover, she would fail.

The morning was fine, and with infantile pusillanimity she began to hope that Uncle Meshach would be taking his walks abroad. In order to give him every chance of being out she delayed her departure, upon one domestic excuse or another, for quite half an hour. 'How silly I am!' she reflected. But she could not help it, and when she had started down the hill towards Bursley she felt sick. She had a suspicion that her feet might of their own accord turn into a by-road and lead her away from Uncle Meshach's. 'I shall never get there!' she exclaimed. She called at the fishmonger's in Oldcastle Street, and was delighted because the shop was full of customers and she had to wait. At last she was crossing St. Luke's Square and could distinguish Uncle Meshach's doorway with its antique fanlight. She wished to stop, to turn back, to run, but her traitorous feet were inexorable. They carried her an unwilling victim to the house. Uncle Meshach, by some strange accident, was standing at the window and saw her. 'Ah!' she thought, 'if he had not been at the window, if he had not caught sight of me, I should have walked past!' And that chance of escape seemed like a lost bliss.

Uncle Meshach himself opened the door.

'Come in, lass,' he said, looking her up and down through his glasses. 'You're the prettiest thing I've seen since I saw ye last. Your aunt's out, with the servant too; and I'm left here same as a dog on the chain. That's how they leave me.'

She was thankful that Aunt Hannah was out: that made the affair simpler.

'Well, uncle,' she said, 'I haven't seen you since you came back from the Isle of Man, have I?'

Some inspiration lent her a courage which rose far beyond embarrassment. She saw at once that the old man was enchanted to have her in the house alone, and flattered by the apparatus of feminine elegance which she always displayed for him at its fullest. These two had a sort of cult for each other, a secret sympathy, none the less sincere because it seldom found expression. His pale blue eyes, warmed by her presence, said: 'I'm an old man, and I've seen the world, and I keep a few of my ideas to myself. But you know that no one understands a pretty woman better than I do. A glance is enough.' And in reply to this challenge she gave the rein to her profoundest instincts. She played the simple feminine to his masculine. She dared to be the eternal beauty who rules men, and will ever rule them, they know not why.

'My lass,' he said in a tone that granted all requests in advance, after they had talked a while, 'you're after something.'

His wrinkled features, ironic but benevolent, intimated that he knew she wished to take an unfair advantage of the gifts which Nature had bestowed on her, and that he did not object.

She allowed herself to smile mysteriously, provocatively at him.

'Yes,' she admitted frankly, 'I am.'

'Well?' He waited indulgently for the disclosure.

She paused a moment, smiling steadily at him. The contrast of his wizened age made her feel deliciously girlish.

'It's about my house, at Hillport,' she began with assurance. 'I want you——'

And she told him, with no more than a sufficiency of detail, what she wanted. She did not try to conceal that the aim was to help John, that, in crude fact, it was John who needed the money. But she emphasised 'my house,' and 'I want you to lend me.' The thing was well done, and she knew it was well done, and felt satisfied accordingly. As for Meshach, he was decidedly caught unawares. He might, perhaps, have suspected from the beginning that she was only an emissary of John's, but the form and magnitude of her proposal were a violent surprise to him. He hesitated. She could see clearly that he sought reasons by which to justify himself in acquiescence.

'It's your affair?' he questioned meditatively.

'Quite my own,' she assured him.

'Let me see——'

'I shall get it!' she said to herself, and she was astounded at the felicitous event of the enterprise. She could scarcely believe her good luck, but she knew beyond any doubt that she was not mistaken in the signs of Meshach's demeanour. She thought she might even venture to ask him for an explanation of his warning letter about Arthur Twemlow.

At that moment Aunt Hannah and the middle-aged servant re-entered the house, and the servant had to pass through the parlour to reach the kitchen. The atmosphere which Meshach and Leonora had evolved in solitude from their respective individualities was dissipated instantly. The parlour became nothing but the parlour, with its glass partition, its antimacassars, its Meshach by the hob, and its diminutive Hannah uttering fatuous, affectionate exclamations of pleasure.

Leonora's heart was pierced by a sudden stab of doubt, as she waited for the result.

'Sister,' said Meshach, 'what dost think? Here's your nephew been speculating in stocks and shares till he can't hardly turn round——'

'Uncle!' Leonora exclaimed horrified, 'I never said such a thing!'

'Sh!' said Hannah in an awful whisper, as she shut the kitchen door.

'Till he can't hardly turn round,' Meshach continued; 'and now he wants Leonora here to mortgage her house to get him out of his difficulties. Haven't I always told you as John would find himself in a rare fix one of these days?'

Few human beings could dominate another more completely than Meshach dominated his sister. But here, for Leonora's undoing, was just a case where, without knowing it, Hannah influenced her brother. He had a reputation to keep up with Hannah, a great and terrible reputation, and in several ways a loan by him through Leonora to John would have damaged it. A few minutes later, and he would have been committed both to the loan and to the demonstration of his own consistency in the humble eyes of Hannah; but the old spinster had arrived too soon. The spell was broken. Meshach perceived the danger of his position, and retired.

'Nay, nay!' Hannah protested. 'That's very wrong of John. Eh, this speculation!'

'But, really, uncle,' Leonora said as convincingly as she could. 'It's capital that John wants.'

She saw that all was lost.

'Capital!' Meshach sarcastically flouted the word, and he turned with a dubious benevolence to Leonora. 'No, my lass, it isn't,' he said, pausing. 'John'll get out of this mess as he's gotten out of many another. Trust him. He's your husband, and he's in the family, and I'm saying nothing against him. But trust him for that.'

'No,' Hannah inserted, 'John's always been a good nephew.... If it wasn't——'

Meshach quelled her and proceeded: 'I'll none consent to John raising money on your property. It's not right, lass. Happen this'll be a lesson to him, if anything will be.'

'Five hundred would do,' Leonora murmured with mad foolishness.

Of what use to chronicle the dreadful shame which she endured before she could leave the house, she who for a quarter of an hour had been a queen there, and who left as the pitied wife of a wastrel nephew?

'You're not short, my dear?' Hannah asked at the end in an anxious voice.

'Not he!' Uncle Meshach testily ejaculated, fastening the button of that droll necktie of his.

'Oh dear no!' said Leonora, with such dignity as she could assume.

As she walked home she wondered what 'speculation' really was. She could not have defined the word. She possessed but a vague idea of its meaning. She had long apprehended, ignorantly and indifferently and uneasily, that John was in the habit of tampering with dangerous things called stocks and shares. But never before had the vital import of these secret transactions been revealed to her. The dramatic swiftness of the revelation stunned her, and yet it seemed after all that she only knew now what she had always known.

When she reached home John was already in the hall, taking off his overcoat, though the hour of one had not struck. Was this a coincidence, or had he been unable to control his desire to learn what she had done?

In silence she smiled plaintively at him, shaking her head.

'What do you mean?' he asked harshly.

'I couldn't arrange it,' she said. 'Uncle Meshach refused.'

John gave a scarcely perceptible start. 'Oh! That!' he exclaimed. 'That's all right. I've fixed it up.'

'This morning?'

'Eh? Yes, this morning.'

During dinner he showed a certain careless amiability.

'You needn't go to the works any more to-day,' he said to Ethel.

To celebrate this unexpected half-holiday, Ethel and Millicent decided that they would try to collect a scratch team for some hockey practice in the meadow.

'And, mother, you must come,' said Millicent. 'You'll make one more anyway.'

'Yes,' John agreed, 'it will do your mother good.'

'He will never know, and never guess, and never care, what I have been through!' she thought.

Before leaving for the works John helped the girls to choose some sticks.

When he reached his office, the first thing he did was to build up a good fire. Next he looked into the safe. Then he rang the bell, and Fred Ryley responded to the summons.

This family connection, whom he both hated and trusted, was a rather thickset, very neatly dressed man of twenty-three, who had been mature, serious, and responsible for eight years. His fair, grave face, with its short thin beard, showed plainly his leading qualities of industry, order, conscientiousness, and doggedness. It showed, too, his mild benevolence. Ryley was never late, never neglectful, never wrong; he never wasted an hour either of his own or his employer's time. And yet his colleagues liked him, perhaps because he was unobtrusive and good-natured. At the beginning of each year he laid down a programme for himself, and he was incapable of swerving from it. Already he had acquired a thorough knowledge of both the manufacturing and the business sides of earthenware manufacture, and also he was one of the few men, at that period, who had systematically studied the chemistry of potting. He could not fail to 'get on,' and to win universal respect. His chances of a truly striking success would have been greater had he possessed imagination, humour, or any sort of personal distinction. In appearance, he was common, insignificant; to be appreciated, he 'wanted knowing'; but he was extremely sensitive and proud, and he could resent an affront like a Gascon. He had apparently no humour whatever. The sole spark of romance in him had been fanned into a small steady flame by his passion for Ethel. Ryley was a man who could only love once for all.

'Did you find that private ledger for me out of the old safe?' Stanway demanded.

'Yes,' said Ryley, 'and I put it in your safe, at the front, and gave you the key back this morning.'

'I don't see it there,' Stanway retorted.

'Shall I look?' Ryley suggested quietly, approaching the safe, of which the key was in the lock.

'Never mind, now! Never mind, now!' Stanway stopped him. 'I don't want to be bothered now. Later on in the afternoon, before Mr. Twemlow comes.... Did you write and ask him to call at four thirty?'

'Yes,' said Ryley, departing without a sign on his face, the model clerk.

'Fool!' whispered Stanway. It would have been impossible for Ryley to breathe without irritating his employer, and the fact that his plebeian cousin's son was probably the most reliable underling to be got in the Five Towns did not in the slightest degree lessen Stanway's dislike of him; it increased it.

Stanway had been perfectly aware that the little ledger was in his safe, and as soon as Ryley had shut the door he jumped up, unlatched the safe, removed the book, and after tearing it in two stuck first one half and then the other into the midst of the fire.

'That ends it, anyhow!' he thought, when the leaves were consumed.

Then he selected some books of cheque counterfoils, a number of prospectuses of companies, some share certificates (exasperating relic of what rich dreams!), and a lot of letters. All these he burnt with much neatness and care, putting more coal on the fire so as to hide every trace of their destruction. Then he opened a drawer in the desk, and took out a revolver which he unloaded and loaded again.

'I'm pretty cool,' he flattered himself.

He was the sort of flamboyant man who keeps a loaded revolver in obedience to the theory that a loaded revolver is a necessary and proper part of the true male's outfit, like a gold watch and chain, a gold pencil case, a razor for every day in the week, and a cigar-holder with a bit of good amber to it. He had owned that revolver for years, with no thought of utilising the weapon. But in justice to him, it must be said that when any of his contemporaries—Titus Price, for instance—had made use of revolvers or ropes in a particular way, he had always secretly justified and commended them.

He put the revolver in his hip-pocket, the correct location, and donned his 'works' hat. He did not reflect. Memories of his past life did not occur to him, nor visions of that which was to come. He did not feel solemn. On the contrary he felt cross with everyone, and determined to pay everyone out; in particular he was vexed, in a mean childish way, with Uncle Meshach, and with himself for having fancied for a moment that an appeal to Uncle Meshach could be successful. One other idea struck him forcibly by reason of its strangeness: namely, that the works was proceeding exactly as usual, raw material always coming in, finished goods always going out, the various shops hot and murmurous with toil, money tinkling in the petty cash-box, the very engine beneath his floor beating its customary monotonous stroke; and his comfortable home was proceeding exactly as usual, the man hissing about the stable yard, the servants discreetly moving in the immaculate kitchens, Leonora elegant with sovereigns in her purse, the girls chattering and restless; not a single outward sign of disaster; and yet he was at the end, absolutely at the end at last. There was going to be a magnificent and unparalleled sensation in the town of Bursley ... He seemed for an instant dimly to perceive ways, or incomplete portions of ways, by which he might still escape ... Then with a brusque gesture he dismissed such futile scheming and yielded anew to the impulse which had suddenly and piquantly seized him, three hours before, when Leonora said: 'Uncle Meshach won't,' and he replied, 'I've fixed it up.' His dilemma was too complicated. No one, not even Dain, was aware of its intricacies; Dain knew a lot, Leonora a little, and sundry other persons odd fragments. But he himself could scarcely have drawn the outlines of the whole sinister situation without much reference to books and correspondence. No, he had finished. He was bored, and he was irritable. The impulse hurried him on.

'In half an hour that ass Twemlow will be here,' he thought, looking at the office dial over the mantelpiece.

And then he left his room, calling out to the clerks' room as he passed: 'Just going on to the bank. I shall be back in a minute or two.'

At the south-western corner of the works was a disused enamel-kiln which had been built experimentally and had proved a failure. He walked through the yard, crept with some difficulty into the kiln, and closed the iron door. A pale silver light came down the open chimney. He had decided as he crossed the yard that he should place the mouth of the revolver between his eyes, so that he had nothing to do in the kiln but to put it there and touch the trigger. The idea of this simple action preoccupied him. 'Yes,' he reflected, taking the revolver from his pocket, 'that is where I must put it, and then just touch the trigger.' He thought neither of his family, nor of his sins, nor of the grand fiasco, but solely of this physical action. Then, as he raised the revolver, the fear troubled him that he had not burnt a particular letter from a Jew in London, received on the previous day. 'Of course I burnt it,' he assured himself. 'Did I, though?' He felt that a mysterious volition over which he had no control would force him to return to his office in order to make sure. He gave a weary curse at the prospect of having to put back the revolver, leave the kiln, enter the kiln again, and once more raise the revolver.

As he passed by the archway near the packing house the afternoon postman appeared and gave him a letter. Without thinking he halted on the spot and opened it. It was written in haste, and ran: 'My Dear Stanway,—I am called away to London and may have to sail for New York at once. Sorry to have to break the appointment. We must leave that affair over. In any case it could only be a mere matter of form. As I told you, I was simply acting on behalf of my sister. My kindest regards to your wife and your daughters. Believe me, yours very truly,—ARTHUR TWEMLOW.'

He read the letter a second time in his office, standing up against the shut door. Then his eye wandered to the desk and he saw that an envelope had been placed with mathematical exactitude in the middle of his blotting-pad. 'Ryley!' he thought. This other letter was marked private, and as the envelope said 'John Stanway, Esq.,' without an address, it must have been brought by special messenger. It was from David Dain, and stated that the difficulty as to the title of the house had been settled, that the mortgage would be sent in for Mrs. Stanway to sign that night, and that Stanway might safely draw against the money to-morrow.

'My God!' he exclaimed, pushing his hat back from his brow. 'What a chance!'

In five minutes he was drawing cheques, and simultaneously planning how to get over the disappearance of the old private ledger in case Twemlow should after all, at some future date, ask to see original documents.

'What a chance!' The thought ran round and round in his brain.

As he left the works by the canal side, he paused under Shawport Bridge and furtively dropped the revolver into the water. 'That's done with!' he murmured.

He saw now that his preparations for departure, which at the moment he had deemed to be so well designed and so effective, were after all ridiculous. No amount of combustion could have prevented the disclosure at an inquest of the ignominious facts.

* * * * *

During tea he laughed loudly at Milly's descriptions of the hockey match, which had been a great success. Leonora had kept goal with distinction, and admitted that she rather enjoyed the game.

'So it is arranged?' said Leonora, with a hint of involuntary surprise, when he handed her the mortgage to sign.

'Didn't I tell you so this morning?' he answered loftily. There is always a despicable joy in resuscitating a lie which events have changed into a truth.

He insisted on retiring early that night. In the bedroom he remarked: 'Your friend Twemlow's had to go to London to-day, and may return straight from there to New York. I had a note from him. He sent you his kindest regards and all that sort of thing.'

'Then we mayn't see him again?' she said, delicately fingering her hair in front of the pier-glass.



CHAPTER VI

COMIC OPERA

Early one evening a few weeks later, Leonora, half attired for the gala night of the operatic performance, was again delicately fingering her hair in that large bedroom whose mirrors daily reflected the leisured process of her toilette. Her black skirt trimmed with yellow made a sudden sharp contrast with the pale tints of her corset and her long bare arms. The bodice lay like a trifling fragment on the blue-green eiderdown of her bed, a pair of satin shoes glistened in front of the fire, and two chairs bore the discarded finery of the day. The dressing-table was littered with silver and ivory. A faint and charming odour of violets mingled mysteriously with the warmth of the fire as Leonora moved away from the pier-glass between the two curtained windows where the light was centred, and with accustomed hands picked up the bodice apparently so frail that a touch might have ruined it.

The door was brusquely opened, and some one entered.

'Not dressed, Rose?' said Leonora, a little startled. 'We ought to be going in ten minutes.'

'Oh, mother! I mustn't go. I mustn't really!'

The tall slightly-stooping girl, with her flat figure, her plain shabby serge frock, her tired white face, and the sinister glance of the idealist in her great, fretful eyes, seemed to stand there and accuse the whole of Leonora's existence. Utterly absorbed in the imminent examination, her brain a welter of sterile facts, Rose found all the seriousness of life in dates, irregular participles, algebraic symbols, chemical formulas, the altitudes of mountains, and the areas of inland seas. To the cruelty of the too earnest enthusiast she added the cruelty of youth, and it was with a merciless justice that she judged everyone with whom she came into opposition.

'But, my dear, you'll be ill if you keep on like this. And you know what your father said.'

Rose smiled, bitterly superior, at the misguided creature whose horizons were bounded by domesticity on one side and by dress on the other.

'I shall not be ill, mother,' she said firmly, sniffing at the scent in the room. 'I can't help it. I must work at my chemistry again to-night. Father knows perfectly well that chemistry is my weak point. I must work. I just came in to tell you.'

She departed slowly, as it were daring her mother to protest further.

Leonora sighed, overpowered by a feeling of impotence. What could she do, what could any person do, when challenged by an individuality at once so harsh and so impassioned? She finished her toilette with minute care, but she had lost her pleasure in it. The sense of the contrariety of things deepened in her. She looked round the circle of her environment and saw hope and gladness nowhere. John's affairs were perhaps running more smoothly, but who could tell? The shameful fact that the house was mortgaged remained always with her. And she was intimately conscious of a soilure, a moral stain, as the result of her recent contacts with the man of business in her husband. Why had she not been able to keep femininely aloof from those puzzling and repellent matters, ignorant of them, innocent of them? And Ethel, too! Twelve days of the office had culminated for Ethel in a slight illness, which Doctor Hawley described as lack of tone. Her father had said airily that she must resume her clerkship in due season, but the entire household well knew that she would not do so, and that the experiment was one of the failures which invariably followed John's interference in domestic concerns. As for Milly's housekeeping, it was an admitted absurdity. Millicent had lived of late solely for the opera, and John resented any preoccupation which detached the girls' interest from their home. When Ethel recovered in the nick of time to attend the final rehearsals, he grew sarcastic, and irrelevantly made cutting remarks about the letter from Paris which Ethel had never translated and which she thought he had forgotten. Finally he said he probably could not go to the opera at all, and that at best he might look in at it for half an hour. He was careful to disclaim all interest in the performance.

Carpenter had driven the two girls to the Town Hall at seven o'clock, and at a quarter to eight he returned to fetch his mistress. Enveloped in her fur cloak, Leonora climbed silently into the cart.

'I did hear,' said Carpenter, respectfully gossiping, 'as Mr. Twemlow was gone back to America; but I seed him yesterday as I was coming back from taking the mester to that there manufacturers' meeting at Knype.... Wonderful like his mother he is, mum.'

'Oh, indeed!' said Leonora.

Her first impatient querulous thought was that she would have preferred Mr. Twemlow to be in America.

The illuminated windows of the Town Hall, and the knot of excited people at the principal portico, gave her a sort of preliminary intimation that the eternal quest for romance was still active on earth, though she might have abandoned it. In the corridor she met Uncle Meshach, wearing an antique frock-coat. His eye caught hers with quiet satisfaction. There was no sign in his wrinkled face of their last interview.

'Your aunt's not very well,' he answered her inquiry. 'She wasn't equal to coming, she said. I bid her go to bed. So I'm all alone.'

'Come and sit by me,' Leonora suggested. 'I have two spare tickets.'

'Nay, I think not,' he faintly protested.

'Yes, do,' she said, 'you must.'

As his trembling thin hands stole away her cloak, disclosing the perfection and dark magnificence of her toilette, and as she perceived in his features the admiration of a connoisseur, and in the eyes of other women envy and astonishment, she began to forget her despondencies. She lived again. She believed again in the possibility of joy. And perhaps it was not strange that her thought travelled at once to Ethel—Ethel whom she had not questioned further about her lover, Ethel whom till then she had figured as the wretched victim of love, but whom now she saw wistfully as love's elect.

* * * * *

The front seats of the auditorium were filled with all that was dashing, and much that was solidly serious, in Bursley. Hoarded wealth, whose religion was spotless kitchens and cash down, sat side by side with flightiness and the habit of living by credit on rather more than one's income. The members of the Society had exerted themselves in advance to impress upon the public mind that the entertainment would be nothing if not fashionable and brilliant; and they had succeeded. There was not a single young man, and scarcely an old one, but wore evening-dress, and the frocks of the women made a garden of radiant blossoms. Supreme among the eminent dandies who acted as stewards in that part of the house was Harry Burgess, straight out of Conduit Street, W., with a mien plainly indicating that every reserved seat had been sold two days before. From the second seats the sterling middle classes, half envy and half disdain, examined the glittering ostentation in front of them; they had no illusions concerning it; their knowledge of financial realities was exact. Up in the gloom of the balcony the crowded faces of the unimportant and the obscure rose tier above tier to the organ-loft. Here was Florence Gardner, come incognito to deride; here was Fred Ryley, thief of an evening's time; and here were sundry dressmakers who experienced the thrill of the creative artist as they gazed at their confections below.