That incident, however, had belonged to a stage in his past life, a stage marked by a certain prolonged tumult of the senses, on which he now looked back with great composure. That tumult had found vent in other adventures more emphatic a good deal than the adventure of the keeper's wife. He believed that one or two of them had been not unknown to Raeburn.

Well, that was done with! His mother's death—that wanton stupidity on the part of fate—and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of travel, and the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the intellectual stimulus which comes of perpetual change, of new heavens, new seas, new societies, had loosened the yoke of the flesh and saved him from himself. The deliverance so begun had been completed at home, by the various chances and opportunities which had since opened to him a solid and tempting career in that Labour movement his mother had linked him with, without indeed ever understanding either its objects or its men. The attack on capital now developing on all sides, the planning of the vast campaign, and the handling of its industrial troops, these things had made the pursuit of women look insipid, coupled as they were with the thrill of increasing personal success. Passion would require to present itself in new forms, if it was now to take possession of him again.

As to his relation to Raeburn, he well remembered that when, after that long break in his life, he and Aldous had met casually again, in London or elsewhere, Aldous had shown a certain disposition to forget the old quarrel, and to behave with civility, though not with friendliness. As to Wharton he was quite willing, though at the same time he had gone down to contest West Brookshire, and, above all, had found himself in the same house as Aldous Raeburn's betrothed, with an even livelier sense than usual of the excitement to be got out of mere living.

No doubt when Raeburn heard that story of the library—if he had heard it—he recognised in it the man and the character he had known of old, and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in bitter and insurmountable disgust. A mere Hebraist's mistake!

"That girl's attraction for me was not an attraction of the senses—except so far that for every normal man and woman charm is charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be! What I played for with her was power—power over a nature that piqued and yet by natural affinity belonged to me. I could not have retained that power, as it happened, by any bait of passion. Even without the Hurd affair, if I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have risen against me and her own treachery. I knew that perfectly well, and took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting, too interesting, to give up. For the moment! then a few days,—a few weeks later—Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!"

And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own idiosyncrasies. It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of mental emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him within the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the Hurd agitation was over. That agitation had brought him vigorously and profitably into public notice at a convenient moment. But what had originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became in the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation. Wharton had no sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself strangely at home there. He had the instinct for debate, the instinct for management, together with a sensitive and contriving ambition. He found himself possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance that astonished him—a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for drudgery, and for making the best of dull men. The omens were all favourable, sometimes startlingly so. He was no longer hampered by the ill-will of a county or a family connection. Here in this new world, every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was worth. Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House, from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise. The anxieties and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.

The quick, elastic nature adjusted itself at once. To some kinds of success, nothing is so important as the ability to forget—to sweep the mind free of everything irrelevant and superfluous. Marcella Boyce, and all connected with her, passed clean out of Wharton's consciousness. Except that once or twice he said to himself with a passing smile that it was a good thing he had not got himself into a worse scrape at Mellor. Good heavens! in what plight would a man stand—a man with his career to make—who had given Marcella Boyce claims upon him! As well entangle oneself with the Tragic Muse at once as with that stormy, unmanageable soul!

So much for a year ago. To-night, however, the past had been thrust back upon him, both by Lady Selina's talk and by the meeting with Raeburn. To smart indeed once more under that old ascendency of Raeburn's, was to be provoked into thinking of Raeburn's old love.

Where was Miss Boyce? Surely her year of hospital training must be up by now?

He turned into St. James Street, stopped at a door not far from the Palace end, let himself in, and groped his way to the second floor. A sleepy man-servant turned out of his room, and finding that his master was not inclined to go to bed, brought lights and mineral water. Wharton was practically a teetotaller. He had taken a whim that way as a boy, and a few experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had only confirmed what had been originally perhaps a piece of notoriety-hunting. He had, as a rule, flawless health; and the unaccustomed headaches and nausea which followed these occasional excesses had disgusted and deterred him. He shook himself easily free of a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and had ever since found his abstinence a source both of vanity and of distinction. Nothing annoyed him more than to hear it put down to any ethical motive. "If I liked the beastly stuff, I should swim in it to-morrow," he would say with an angry eye when certain acquaintance—not those he made at Labour Congresses—goaded him on the point. "As it is, why should I make it, or chloral, or morphia, or any other poison, my master! What's the inducement—eh, you fellows?"

En revanche he smoked inordinately.

"Is that all, sir," said his servant, pausing behind his chair, after candles, matches, cigarettes, and Apollinaris had been supplied in abundance.

"Yes; go to bed, Williams, but don't lock up. Good-night."

The man departed, and Wharton, going to the window which opened on a balcony looking over St. James Street, threw it wide, and smoked a cigarette leaning against the wall. It was on the whole a fine night and warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air. In the street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only just past midnight and the clubs were not yet empty. To his right the turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky covered with light, windy cloud. Beyond it his eye sought instinctively for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless—like some one in a stupid silence. That light of the sitting House had become to him one of the standing pleasures of life. He had never yet been honestly glad of its extinction.

"I'm a precious raw hand," he confessed to himself with a shake of the head as he stood there smoking. "And it can't last—nothing does."

Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the edge of the balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a little, and finally took out a letter. He stooped over the lamp to read it. It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had written him some two or three days after the breach of her engagement. That fact was barely mentioned at the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any kind. Then the letter continued:

"I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and attempted through these many weeks. But for them it must have been plain to us both that we could never rightly meet again. I am very destitute just now—and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing left me. But that scene in the past, which put us both wrong with honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out—thought—suffered away. I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other co-worker and co-thinker—if in the future you ever want my work, if you can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could do—ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.

"But for the present I am going quite away into another world. I have been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go. As soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year's training at a London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and nurse. This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife from seeing Hurd the day before the execution. I knew then that all was over for me at Mellor.

"As for the wretched break-down of everything—of all my schemes and friendships here—I had better not speak of it. I feel that I have given these village-folk, whom I had promised to help, one more reason to despair of life. It is not pleasant to carry such a thought away with one. But if the tool breaks and blunts, how can the task be done? It can be of no use till it has been re-set.

"I should like to know how your plans prosper. But I shall see your paper and follow what goes on in Parliament. For the present I want neither to write nor get letters. They tell me that as a probationer I shall spend my time at first in washing glasses, and polishing bath-taps, on which my mind rests!

"If you come across my friends of whom I have spoken to you—Louis, Anthony, and Edith Craven—and could make any use of Louis for the Labour Clarion, I should be grateful. I hear they have had bad times of late, and Louis has engaged himself, and wants to be married. You remember I told you how we worked at the South Kensington classes together, and how they made me a Venturist?

"Yours very truly,

"MARCELLA BOYCE."

Wharton laid down the letter, making a wry mouth over some of its phrases.

"'Put us both wrong with honour and conscience.' 'One more reason for despair of life'—'All was over for me at Mellor'—dear! dear!—how women like the big words—the emphatic pose. All those little odds and ends of charities—that absurd straw-plaiting scheme! Well, perhaps one could hardly expect her to show a sense of humour just then. But why does nature so often leave it out in these splendid creatures?"

"Hullo!" he added, as he bent over the table to look for a pen; "why didn't that idiot give me these?"

For there, under an evening paper which he had not touched, lay a pile of unopened letters. His servant had forgotten to point them out to him. On the top was a letter on which Wharton pounced at once. It was addressed in a bold inky hand, and he took it to be from Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P., his former colleague at the Birmingham Labour Congress, of late a member of the Labour Clarion staff, and as such a daily increasing plague and anxiety to the Clarion's proprietor.

However, the letter was not from Wilkins. It was from the secretary of a Midland trades-union, with whom Wharton had already been in communication. The union was recent, and represented the as yet feeble organisation of a metal industry in process of transition from the home-workshop to the full factory, or Great Industry stage. The conditions of work were extremely bad, and grievances many; wages were low, and local distress very great. The secretary, a young man of ability and enthusiasm, wrote to Wharton to say that certain alterations in the local "payment lists" lately made by the employers amounted to a reduction of wages; that the workers, beginning to feel the heartening effects of their union, were determined not to submit; that bitter and even desperate agitation was spreading fast, and that a far-reaching strike was imminent. Could they count on the support of the Clarion? The Clarion had already published certain letters on the industry from a Special Commissioner—letters which had drawn public attention, and had been eagerly read in the district itself. Would the Clarion now "go in" for them? Would Mr. Wharton personally support them, in or out of Parliament, and get his friends to do the same? To which questions, couched in terms extremely flattering to the power of the Clarion and its owner, the secretary appended a long and technical statement of the situation.

Wharton looked up from the letter with a kindling eye. He foresaw an extremely effective case, both for the newspaper and the House of Commons. One of the chief capitalists involved was a man called Denny, who had been long in the House, for whom the owner of the Clarion entertained a strong personal dislike. Denny had thwarted him vexatiously—had perhaps even made him ridiculous—on one or two occasions; and Wharton saw no reason whatever for forgiving one's enemies until, like Narvaez, one had "shot them all." There would be much satisfaction in making Denny understand who were his masters. And with these motives there mingled a perfectly genuine sympathy with the "poor devils" in question, and a desire to see them righted.

"Somebody must be sent down at once," he said to himself. "I suppose," he added, with discontent, "it must be Wilkins."

For the man who had written the articles for the Labour Clarion, as Special Commissioner, had some three weeks before left England to take command of a colonial newspaper.

Still pondering, he took up the other letters, turned them over—childishly pleased for the thousandth time by the M.P. on each envelope and the number and variety of his correspondence—and eagerly chose out three—one from his bankers, one from his Lincolnshire agent, and one from the Clarion office, undoubtedly this time in Wilkins's hand.

He read them, grew a little pale, swore under his breath, and, angrily flinging the letters away from him, he took up his cigarette again and thought.

The letter from his bankers asked his attention in stiff terms to a largely overdrawn account, and entirely declined to advance a sum of money for which he had applied to them without the guarantee of two substantial names in addition to his own. The letter from his agent warned him that the extraordinary drought of the past six weeks, together with the general agricultural depression, would certainly mean a large remission of rents at the June quarter day, and also informed him that the holders of his co-operative farm would not be able to pay their half-yearly interest on the capital advanced to them by the landlord.

As to the third letter, it was in truth much more serious than the two others. Wilkins, the passionate and suspicious workman, of great natural ability, who had been in many ways a thorn in Wharton's side since the beginning of his public career, was now member for a mining constituency. His means of support were extremely scanty, and at the opening of the new Parliament Wharton had offered him well-paid work on the Clarion newspaper. It had seemed to the proprietor of the Clarion a way of attaching a dangerous man to himself, perhaps also of controlling him. Wilkins had grudgingly accepted, understanding perfectly well what was meant.

Since then the relation between the two men had been one of perpetual friction. Wilkins's irritable pride would yield nothing, either in the House or in the Clarion office, to Wharton's university education and class advantages, while Wharton watched with alarm the growing influence of this insubordinate and hostile member of his own staff on those labour circles from which the Clarion drew its chief support.

In the letter he had just read Wilkins announced to the proprietor of the Clarion that in consequence of the "scandalous mismanagement" of that paper's handling of a certain trade arbitration which had just closed, he, Wilkins, could no longer continue to write for it, and begged to terminate his engagement at once, there being no formal agreement between himself and Wharton as to length of notice on either side. A lively attack on the present management and future prospects of the Clarion followed, together with the threat that the writer would do what in him lay henceforward to promote the cause of a certain rival organ lately started, among such working men as he might be able to influence.

"Brute! jealous, impracticable brute!" exclaimed Wharton aloud, as he stood chafing and smoking by the window. All the difficulties which this open breach was likely to sow in his path stood out before him in clear relief.

"Personal leadership, there is the whole problem," he said to himself in moody despair. "Can I—like Parnell—make a party and keep it together? Can I through the Clarion—and through influence outside the House—coerce the men in the House? If so, we can do something, and Lady Cradock will no longer throw me her smiles. If not the game is up, both for me and for them. They have no cohesion, no common information, no real power. Without leaders they are a mere set of half-educated firebrands whom the trained mind of the country humours because it must, and so far as they have brute force behind them. Without leadership, I am a mere unit of the weakest group in the House. Yet, by Jove! it looks as though I had not the gifts."

And he looked back with passionate chagrin on the whole course of his connection with Wilkins, his unavailing concessions and small humiliations, his belief in his own tact and success, all the time that the man dealt with was really slipping out of his hands.

"Damn the fellow!" he said at last, flinging his cigarette away. "Well, that's done with. All the same, he would have liked that Midland job! He has been hankering after a strike there for some time, and might have ranted as he pleased. I shall have the satisfaction of informing him he has lost his opportunity. Now then—who to send? By Jove! what about Miss Boyce's friend?"

He stood a moment twisting the quill-pen he had taken up, then he hastily found a sheet of paper and wrote:

"Dear Miss Boyce,—It is more than a year since I have heard of you, and I have been wondering with much interest lately whether you have really taken up a nursing life. You remember speaking to me of your friends the Cravens? I come across them sometimes at the Venturist meetings, and have always admired their ability. Last year I could do nothing practical to meet your wishes. This year, however, there is an opening on the Clarion, and I should like to discuss it with you. Are you in town or to be found? I could come any afternoon next week, early—I go down to the House at four—or on Saturdays. But I should like it to be Tuesday or Wednesday, that I might try and persuade you to come to our Eight Hours debate on Friday night. It would interest you, and I think I could get you a seat. We Labour members are like the Irishmen—we can always get our friends in.

"I must send this round by Mellor, so it may not reach you till Tuesday. Perhaps you will kindly telegraph. The Clarion matter is pressing.

"Yours sincerely,

"H.S. WHARTON."

When he had finished he lingered a moment over the letter, the play of conflicting motives and memories bringing a vague smile to the lips.

Reverie, however, was soon dispersed. He recollected his other correspondents, and springing up he began to pace his room, gloomily thinking over his money difficulties, which were many. He and his mother had always been in want of money ever since he could remember. Lady Mildred would spend huge sums on her various crotchets and campaigns, and then subside for six months into wretched lodgings in a back street of Southsea or Worthing, while the Suffolk house was let, and her son mostly went abroad. This perpetual worry of needy circumstances had always, indeed, sat lightly on Wharton. He was unmarried, and so far scarcity had generally passed into temporary comfort before he had time to find it intolerable. But now the whole situation was becoming more serious. In the first place, his subscriptions and obligations as a member of Parliament, and as one of the few propertied persons in a moneyless movement, were considerable. Whatever Socialism might make of money in the future, he was well aware that money in the present was no less useful to a Socialist politician than to any one else. In the next place, the starting and pushing of the Clarion newspaper—originally purchased by the help of a small legacy from an uncle—had enormously increased the scale of his money transactions and the risks of life.

How was it that, with all his efforts, the Clarion was not making, but losing money? During the three years he had possessed it he had raised it from the position of a small and foul-mouthed print, indifferently nourished on a series of small scandals, to that of a Labour organ of some importance. He had written a weekly signed article for it, which had served from the beginning to bring both him and the paper into notice; he had taken pains with the organisation and improvement of the staff; above all, he had spent a great deal more money upon it, in the way of premises and appliances, than he had been, as it turned out, in any way justified in spending.

Hence, indeed, these tears. Rather more than a year before, while the Clarion was still enjoying a first spurt of success and notoriety, he had, with a certain recklessness which belonged to his character, invested in new and costly machinery, and had transferred the paper to larger offices. All this had been done on borrowed money.

Then, for some reason or other, the Clarion had ceased to answer to the spur—had, indeed, during the past eight months been flagging heavily. The outside world was beginning to regard the Clarion as an important paper. Wharton knew all the time that its advertisements were falling off, and its circulation declining. Why? Who can say? If it is true that books have their fates, it is still more true of newspapers. Was it that a collectivist paper—the rival organ mentioned by Wilkins—recently started by a group of young and outrageously clever Venturists and more closely in touch than the Clarion with two or three of the great unions, had filched the Clarion's ground? Or was it simply that, as Wharton put it to himself in moments of rage and despondency, the majority of working men "are either sots or block-heads, and will read and support nothing but the low racing or police-court news, which is all their intelligences deserve?" Few people had at the bottom of their souls a more scornful distrust of the "masses" than the man whose one ambition at the present moment was to be the accepted leader of English labour.

Finally, his private expenditure had always been luxurious; and he was liable, it will be seen, to a kind of debt that is not easily kept waiting. On the whole, his bankers had behaved to him with great indulgence.

He fretted and fumed, turning over plan after plan as he walked, his curly head sunk in his shoulders, his hands behind his back. Presently he stopped—absently—in front of the inner wall of the room, where, above a heavy rosewood bookcase, brought from his Lincolnshire house, a number of large framed photographs were hung close together.

His eye caught one and brightened. With an impatient gesture, like that of a reckless boy, he flung his thoughts away from him.

"If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will take me out of it! What a gorgeous time we had on that glacier!"

He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had spent four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very grain and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could feel the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind. The man seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself. And there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of the glacier. Ah, those had been years of life, those Wanderjahre! He ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.

"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,'" he thought. "Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?"

And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! Somewhere, while we toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is air, there is sea, the joy of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying! This interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose—why! they could be shaken off at a moment's notice!

"However"—he turned on his heel—"suppose we try a few other trifles first. What time? those fellows won't have gone to bed yet!"

He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped before a well-known fashionable club, extremely small, and extremely select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had introduced him when he was young and tender, and his mother's relations still cherished hopes of snatching him as a brand from the burning.

The front rooms of the club were tolerably full still. He passed on to the back. A door-keeper stationed in the passage stepped back and silently opened a door. It closed instantly behind him, and Wharton found himself in a room with some twenty other young fellows playing baccarat, piles of shining money on the tables, the electric lamps hung over each, lighting every detail of the scene with the same searching disenchanting glare.

"I say!" cried a young dark-haired fellow, like a dishevelled Lord Byron. "Here comes the Labour leader—make room!"

And amid laughter and chaffing he was drawn down to the baccarat table, where a new deal was just beginning. He felt in his pockets for money; his eyes, intent and shining, followed every motion of the dealer's hand. For three years now, ever since his return from his travels, the gambler's passion had been stealing on him. Already this season he had lost and won—on the whole lost—large sums. And the fact was—so far—absolutely unknown except to the men with whom he played in this room.



CHAPTER III.

"If yer goin' downstairs, Nuss, you'd better take that there scuttle with yer, for the coals is gittin' low an' it ull save yer a journey!"

Marcella looked with amusement at her adviser—a small bandy-legged boy in shirt and knickerbockers, with black Jewish eyes in a strongly featured face. He stood leaning on the broom he had just been wielding, his sleeves rolled up to the shoulder showing his tiny arms; his expression sharp and keen as a hawk's.

"Well, Benny, then you look after your mother while I'm gone, and don't let any one in but the doctor."

And Marcella turned for an instant towards the bed whereon lay a sick woman too feeble apparently to speak or move.

"I aint a goin' ter," said the boy, shortly, beginning to sweep again with energy, "an' if this 'ere baby cries, give it the bottle, I s'pose?"

"No, certainly not," said Marcella, firmly; "it has just had one. You sweep away, Benny, and let the baby alone."

Benny looked a trifle wounded, but recovered himself immediately, and ran a general's eye over Marcella who was just about to leave the room.

"Now look 'ere, Nuss," he said in a tone of pitying remonstrance, "yer never a goin' down to that 'ere coal cellar without a light. Yer'll 'ave to come runnin' up all them stairs again—sure as I'm alive yer will!"

And darting to a cupboard he pulled out a grimy candlestick with an end of dip and some matches, disposed of them at the bottom of the coal-scuttle that Marcella carried over her left arm, and then, still masterfully considering her, let her go.

Marcella groped her way downstairs. The house was one of a type familiar all over the poorer parts of West Central London—the eighteenth-century house inhabited by law or fashion in the days of Dr. Johnson, now parcelled out into insanitary tenements, miserably provided with air, water, and all the necessaries of life, but still showing in its chimney-piece or its decaying staircase signs of the graceful domestic art which had ruled at the building and fitting of it.

Marcella, however, had no eye whatever at the moment for the panelling on the staircase, or the delicate ironwork of the broken balustrade. Rather it seemed to her, as she looked into some of the half-open doors of the swarming rooms she passed, or noticed with disgust the dirt and dilapidation of the stairs, and the evil smells of the basement, that the house added one more to the standing shames of the district—an opinion doubly strong in her when at last she emerged from her gropings among the dens of the lower regions, and began to toil upstairs again with her filled kettle and coal-scuttle.

The load was heavy, even for her young strength, and she had just passed a sleepless night. The evening before she had been sent for in haste to a woman in desperate illness. She came, and found a young Jewess, with a ten days old child beside her, struggling with her husband and two women friends in a state of raging delirium. The room, was full to suffocation of loud-tongued, large-eyed Jewesses, all taking turns at holding the patient, and chattering or quarrelling between their turns. It had been Marcella's first and arduous duty to get the place cleared, and she had done it without ever raising her voice or losing her temper for an instant. The noisy pack had been turned out; the most competent woman among them chosen to guard the door and fetch and carry for the nurse; while Marcella set to work to wash her patient and remake the bed as best she could, in the midst of the poor thing's wild shrieks and wrestlings.

It was a task to test both muscular strength and moral force to their utmost. After her year's training Marcella took it simply in the day's work. Some hours of intense effort and strain; then she and the husband looked down upon the patient, a woman of about six-and-twenty, plunged suddenly in narcotic sleep, her matted black hair, which Marcella had not dared to touch, lying in wild waves on the clean bed-clothes and night-gear that her nurse had extracted from this neighbour and that—she could hardly have told how.

"Ach, mein Gott, mein Gott!" said the husband, rising and shaking himself. He was a Jew from German Poland, and, unlike most of his race, a huge man, with the make and the muscles of a prize-fighter. Yet, after the struggle of the last two hours he was in a bath of perspiration.

"You will have to send her to the infirmary if this comes on again," said Marcella.

The husband stared in helpless misery, first at his wife, then at the nurse.

"You will not go away, mees," he implored, "you will not leaf me alone?"

Wearied as she was, Marcella could have smiled at the abject giant.

"No, I will stay with her till the morning and till the doctor comes. You had better go to bed."

It was close on three o'clock. The man demurred a little, but he was in truth too worn out to resist. He went into the back room and lay down with the children.

Then Marcella was left through the long summer dawn alone with her patient. Her quick ear caught every sound about her—the heavy breaths of the father and children in the back room, the twittering of the sparrows, the first cries about the streets, the first movements in the crowded house. Her mind all the time was running partly on contrivances for pulling the woman through—for it was what a nurse calls "a good case," one that rouses all her nursing skill and faculty—partly on the extraordinary misconduct of the doctor, to whose criminal neglect and mismanagement of the case she hotly attributed the whole of the woman's illness; and partly—in deep, swift sinkings of meditative thought—on the strangeness of the fact that she should be there at all, sitting in this chair in this miserable room, keeping guard over this Jewish mother and her child!

The year in hospital had rushed—dreamless sleep by night, exhausting fatigue of mind and body by day. A hospital nurse, if her work seizes her, as it had seized Marcella, never thinks of herself. Now, for some six or seven weeks she had been living in rooms, as a district nurse, under the control of a central office and superintendent. Her work lay in the homes of the poor, and was of the most varied kind. The life was freer, more elastic; allowed room at last to self-consciousness.

* * * * *

But now the night was over. The husband had gone off to work at a factory near, whence he could be summoned at any moment; the children had been disposed of to Mrs. Levi, the helpful neighbour; she herself had been home for an hour to breakfast and dress, had sent to the office asking that her other cases might be attended to, and was at present in sole charge, with Benny to help her, waiting for the doctor.

When she reached the sick-room again with her burdens, she found Benjamin sitting pensive, with the broom across his knees.

"Well, Benny!" she said as she entered, "how have you got on?"

"Yer can't move the dirt on them boards with sweepin'," said Benny, looking at them with disgust; "an' I ain't a goin' to try it no more."

"You're about right there, Benny," said Marcella, mournfully, as she inspected them; "well, we'll get Mrs. Levi to come in and scrub—as soon as your mother can bear it."

She stepped up to the bed and looked at her patient, who seemed to be passing into a state of restless prostration, more or less under the influence of morphia. Marcella fed her with strong beef tea made by herself during the night, and debated whether she should give brandy. No—either the doctor would come directly, or she would send for him. She had not seen him yet, and her lip curled at the thought of him. He had ordered a nurse the night before, but had not stayed to meet her, and Marcella had been obliged to make out his instructions from the husband as best she could.

Benny looked up at her with a wink as she went back to the fire.

"I didn't let none o' them in," he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. "They come a whisperin' at the door, an' a rattlin' ov the handle as soon as ever you gone downstairs. But I tole 'em just to take theirselves off, an' as 'ow you didn't want 'em. Sillies!"

And taking a crust smeared with treacle out of his pocket, Benny returned with a severe air to the sucking of it.

Marcella laughed.

"Clever Benny," she said, patting his head; "but why aren't you at school, sir?"

Benjamin grinned.

"'Ow d'yer s'pose my ma's goin' to git along without me to do for 'er and the babby?" he replied slily.

"Well, Benny, you'll have the Board officer down on you."

At this the urchin laughed out.

"Why, 'e wor here last week! Ee can't be troublin' 'isself about this 'ere bloomin' street every day in the week."

There was a sharp knock at the door.

"The doctor," she said, as her face dismissed the frolic brightness which had stolen upon it for a moment. "Run away, Benny."

Benny opened the door, looked the doctor coolly up and down, and then withdrew to the landing, where his sisters were waiting to play with him.

The doctor, a tall man of thirty, with a red, blurred face and a fair moustache, walked in hurriedly, and stared at the nurse standing by the fire.

"You come from the St. Martin's Association?"

Marcella stiffly replied. He took her temperature-chart from her hand and asked her some questions about the night, staring at her from time to time with eyes that displeased her. Presently she came to an account of the condition in which she had found her patient. The edge on the words, for all their professional quiet, was unmistakable. She saw him flush.

He moved towards the bed, and she went with him. The woman moaned as he approached her. He set about his business with hands that shook. Marcella decided at once that he was not sober, and watched his proceedings with increasing disgust and amazement. Presently she could bear it no longer.

"I think," she said, touching his arm, "that you had better leave it to me—and—go away!"

He drew himself up with a start which sent the things he held flying, and faced her fiercely.

"What do you mean?" he said, "don't you know your place?"

The girl was very white, but her eyes were scornfully steady.

"Yes—I know my place!"

Then with a composure as fearless as it was scathing she said what she had to say. She knew—and he could not deny—that he had endangered his patient's life. She pointed out that he was in a fair way to endanger it again. Every word she said lay absolutely within her sphere as a nurse. His cloudy brain cleared under the stress of it.

Then his eyes flamed, his cheeks became purple, and Marcella thought for an instant he would have struck her. Finally he turned down his shirt-cuffs and walked away.

"You understand," he said thickly, turning upon her, with his hat in his hand, "that I shall not attend this case again till your Association can send me a nurse that will do as she is told without insolence to the doctor. I shall now write a report to your superintendent."

"As you please," said Marcella, quietly. And she went to the door and opened it.

He passed her sneering:

"A precious superior lot you lady-nurses think yourselves, I dare say. I'd sooner have one old gamp than the whole boiling of you!"

Marcella eyed him sternly, her nostrils tightening. "Will you go?" she said.

He gave her a furious glance, and plunged down the stairs outside, breathing threats.

Marcella put her hand to her head a moment, and drew a long breath. There was a certain piteousness in the action, a consciousness of youth and strain.

Then she saw that the landing and the stairs above were beginning to fill with dark-haired Jewesses, eagerly peering and talking. In another minute or two she would be besieged by them. She called sharply, "Benny!"

Instantly Benny appeared from the landing above, elbowing the Jewesses to right and left.

"What is it you want, Nuss? No, she don't want none o' you—there!"

And Benjamin darted into the room, and would have slammed the door in all their faces, but that Marcella said to him—

"Let in Mrs. Levi, please."

The kind neighbour, who had been taking care of the children, was admitted, and then the key was turned. Marcella scribbled a line on a half-sheet of paper, and, with careful directions, despatched Benny with it.

"I have sent for a new doctor," she explained, still frowning and white, to Mrs. Levi. "That one was not fit."

The woman's olive-skinned face lightened all over. "Thanks to the Lord!" she said, throwing up her hands. "But how in the world did you do 't, miss? There isn't a single soul in this house that doesn't go all of a tremble at the sight of 'im. Yet all the women has 'im when they're ill—bound to. They thinks he must be clever, 'cos he's such a brute. I do believe sometimes it's that. He is a brute!"

Marcella was bending over her patient, trying so far as she could to set her straight and comfortable again. But the woman had begun to mutter once more words in a strange dialect that Marcella did not understand, and could no longer be kept still. The temperature was rising again, and another fit of delirium was imminent. Marcella could only hope that she and Mrs. Levi between them would be able to hold her till the doctor came. When she had done all that was in her power, she sat beside the poor tossing creature, controlling and calming her as best she could, while Mrs. Levi poured into her shrinking ear the story of the woman's illness and of Dr. Blank's conduct of it. Marcella's feeling, as she listened, was made up of that old agony of rage and pity! The sufferings of the poor, because they were poor—these things often, still, darkened earth and heaven for her. That wretch would have been quite capable, no doubt, of conducting himself decently and even competently, if he had been called to some supposed lady in one of the well-to-do squares which made the centre of this poor and crowded district.

"Hullo, nurse!" said a cheery voice; "you seem to have got a bad case."

The sound was as music in Marcella's ears. The woman she held was fast becoming unmanageable—had just shrieked, first for "poison," then for a "knife," to kill herself with, and could hardly be prevented by the combined strength of her nurse and Mrs. Levi, now from throwing herself madly out of bed, and now from tearing out her black hair in handfuls. The doctor—a young Scotchman with spectacles, and stubbly red beard—came quickly up to the bed, asked Marcella a few short questions, shrugged his shoulders over her dry report of Dr. Blank's proceedings, then took out a black case from his pocket, and put his morphia syringe together.

For a long time no result whatever could be obtained by any treatment. The husband was sent for, and came trembling, imploring doctor and nurse, in the intervals of his wife's paroxysms, not to leave him alone.

Marcella, absorbed in the tragic horror of the case, took no note of the passage of time. Everything that the doctor suggested she carried out with a deftness, a tenderness, a power of mind, which keenly affected his professional sense. Once, the poor mother, left unguarded for an instant, struck out with a wild right hand. The blow caught Marcella on the cheek, and she drew back with a slight involuntary cry.

"You are hurt," said Dr. Angus, running up to her.

"No, no," she said, smiling through the tears that the shock had called into her eyes, and putting him rather impatiently aside; "it is nothing. You said you wanted some fresh ice."

And she went into the back room to get it.

The doctor stood with his hands in his pockets, studying the patient.

"You will have to send her to the infirmary," he said to the husband; "there is nothing else for it."

Marcella came back with the ice, and was able to apply it to the head. The patient was quieter—was, in fact, now groaning herself into a fresh period of exhaustion.

The doctor's sharp eyes took note of the two figures, the huddled creature on the pillows and the stately head bending over her, with the delicately hollowed cheek, whereon the marks of those mad fingers stood out red and angry. He had already had experience of this girl in one or two other cases.

"Well," he said, taking up his hat, "it is no good shilly-shallying. I will go and find Dr. Swift." Dr. Swift was the parish doctor.

When he had gone, the big husband broke down and cried, with his head against the iron of the bed close to his wife. He put his great hand on hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois. They had been eight years married, and she had never had a day's serious illness till now. Marcella's eyes filled with tears as she moved about the room, doing various little tasks.

At last she went up to him.

"Won't you go and have some dinner?" she said to him kindly. "There's Benjamin calling you," and she pointed to the door of the back room, where stood Benny, his face puckered with weeping, forlornly holding out a plate of fried fish, in the hope of attracting his father's attention.

The man, who in spite of his size and strength was in truth childishly soft and ductile, went as he was bid, and Marcella and Mrs. Levi set about doing what they could to prepare the wife for her removal.

Presently parish doctor and sanitary inspector appeared, strange and peremptory invaders who did but add to the terror and misery of the husband. Then at last came the ambulance, and Dr. Angus with it. The patient, now once more plunged in narcotic stupor, was carried downstairs by two male nurses, Dr. Angus presiding. Marcella stood in the doorway and watched the scene,—the gradual disappearance of the helpless form on the stretcher, with its fevered face under the dark mat of hair; the figures of the straining men heavily descending step by step, their heads and shoulders thrown out against the dirty drabs and browns of the staircase; the crowd of Jewesses on the stairs and landing, craning their necks, gesticulating and talking, so that Dr. Angus could hardly make his directions heard, angrily as he bade them stand back; and on the top stair, the big husband, following the form of his departing and unconscious wife with his eyes, his face convulsed with weeping, the whimpering children clinging about his knees.

How hot it was!—how stifling the staircase smelt, and how the sun beat down from that upper window on the towzled unkempt women with their large-eyed children.



CHAPTER IV.

Marcella on her way home turned into a little street leading to a great block of model dwellings, which rose on the right hand side and made everything else, the mews entrance opposite, the lines of squalid shops on either side, look particularly small and dirty. The sun was beating fiercely down, and she was sick and tired.

As she entered the iron gate of the dwellings, and saw before her the large asphalted court round which they ran—blazing heat on one side of it, and on the other some children playing cricket against the wall with chalk marks for wickets—she was seized with depression. The tall yet mean buildings, the smell of dust and heat, the general impression of packed and crowded humanity—these things, instead of offering her rest, only continued and accented the sense of strain, called for more endurance, more making the best of it.

But she found a tired smile for some of the children who ran up to her, and then she climbed the stairs of the E. block, and opened the door of her own tenement, number 10. In number 9 lived Minta Hurd and her children, who had joined Marcella in London some two months before. In sets 7 and 8, on either side of Marcella and the Hurds, lived two widows, each with a family, who were mostly out charing during the day.

Marcella's Association allowed its District Nurses to live outside the "home" of the district on certain conditions, which had been fulfilled in Marcella's case by her settlement next door to her old friends in these buildings which were inhabited by a very respectable though poor class. Meanwhile the trustees of the buildings had allowed her to make a temporary communication between her room and the Hurds, so that she could either live her own solitary and independent life, or call for their companionship, as she pleased.

As she shut her door behind her she found herself in a little passage or entry. To the left was her bedroom. Straight in front of her was the living room with a small close range in it, and behind it a little back kitchen.

The living room was cheerful and even pretty. Her art-student's training showed itself. The cheap blue and white paper, the couple of oak flap tables from a broker's shop in Marchmont Street, the two or three cane chairs with their bright chintz cushions, the Indian rug or two on the varnished boards, the photographs and etchings on the walls, the books on the tables—there was not one of these things that was not in its degree a pleasure to her young senses, that did not help her to live her life. This afternoon as she opened the door and looked in, the pretty colours and forms in the tiny room were as water to the thirsty. Her mother had sent her some flowers the day before. There they were on the tables, great bunches of honey-suckles, of blue-bells, and Banksia roses. And over the mantelpiece was a photograph of the place where such flowers as Mellor possessed mostly grew—the unkempt lawn, the old fountain and grey walls of the Cedar Garden.

The green blind over the one window which looked into the court, had been drawn down against the glare of the sun, as though by a careful hand. Beside a light wooden rocking chair, which was Marcella's favourite seat, a tray of tea things had been put out. Marcella drew a long breath of comfort as she put down her bag.

"Now, can I wait for my tea till I have washed and dressed?"

She argued with herself an instant as though she had been a greedy child, then, going swiftly into the back kitchen, she opened the door between her rooms and the Hurds.

"Minta!"

A voice responded.

"Minta, make me some tea and boil an egg! there's a good soul! I will be back directly."

And in ten minutes or so she came back again into the sitting-room, daintily fresh and clean but very pale. She had taken off her nurse's dress and apron, and had put on something loose and white that hung about her in cool folds.

But Minta Hurd, who had just brought in the tea, looked at her disapprovingly.

"Whatever are you so late for?" she asked a little peevishly. "You'll get ill if you go missing your dinner."

"I couldn't help it, Minta, it was such a bad case."

Mrs. Hurd poured out the tea in silence, unappeased. Her mind was constantly full of protest against this nursing. Why should Miss Boyce do such "funny things"—why should she live as she did, at all?

Their relation to each other was a curious one. Marcella, knowing that the life of Hurd's widow at Mellor was gall and bitterness, had sent for her at the moment that she herself was leaving the hospital, offering her a weekly sum in return for a little cooking and house service. Minta already possessed a weekly pension, coming from a giver unknown to her. It was regularly handed to her by Mr. Harden, and she could only imagine that one of the "gentlemen" who had belonged to the Hurd Reprieve Committee, and had worked so hard for Jim, was responsible for it, out of pity for her and her children. The payment offered her by Miss Boyce would defray the expense of London house-rent, the children's schooling, and leave a trifle over. Moreover she was pining to get away from Mellor. Her first instinct after her husband's execution had been to hide herself from all the world. But for a long time her precarious state of health, and her dependence first on Marcella, then on Mary Harden, made it impossible for her to leave the village. It was not till Marcella's proposal came that her way was clear. She sold her bits of things at once, took her children and went up to Brown's buildings.

Marcella met her with the tenderness, the tragic tremor of feeling from which the peasant's wife shrank anew, bewildered, as she had often shrunk from it in the past. Jim's fate had made her an old woman at thirty-two. She was now a little shrivelled consumptive creature with almost white hair, and a face from which youth had gone, unless perhaps there were some traces of it in the still charming eyes, and small open mouth. But these changes had come upon her she knew not why, as the result of blows she felt but had never reasoned about. Marcella's fixed mode of conceiving her and her story caused her from the beginning of their fresh acquaintance a dumb irritation and trouble she could never have explained. It was so tragic, reflective, exacting. It seemed to ask of her feelings that she could not have, to expect from her expression that was impossible. And it stood also between her and the friends and distractions that she would like to have. Why shouldn't that queer man, Mr. Strozzi, who lived down below, and whose name she could not pronounce, come and sit sometimes of an evening, and amuse her and the children? He was a "Professor of Elocution," and said and sung comic pieces. He was very civil and obliging too; she liked him. Yet Miss Boyce was evidently astonished that she could make friends with him, and Minta perfectly understood the lift of her dark eyebrows whenever she came in and found him sitting there.

Meanwhile Marcella had expected her with emotion, and had meant through this experiment to bring herself truly near to the poor. Minta must not call her Miss Boyce, but by her name; which, however, Minta, reddening, had declared she could never do. Her relation to Marcella was not to be that of servant in any sense, but of friend and sister; and on her and her children Marcella had spent from the beginning a number of new womanish wiles which, strangely enough, this hard, strenuous life had been developing in her. She would come and help put the children to bed; she would romp with them in their night-gowns; she would bend her imperious head over the anxious endeavour to hem a pink cotton pinafore for Daisy, or dress a doll for the baby. But the relation jarred and limped perpetually, and Marcella wistfully thought it her fault.

Just now, however, as she sat gently swaying backwards and forwards in the rocking-chair, enjoying her tea, her mood was one of nothing but content.

"Oh, Minta, give me another cup. I want to have a sleep so badly, and then I am going to see Miss Hallin, and stay to supper with them."

"Well, you mustn't go out in them nursin' things again," said Minta, quickly; "I've put you in some lace in your black dress, an' it looks beautiful."

"Oh, thank you, Minta; but that black dress always seems to me too smart to walk about these streets in."

"It's just nice," said Minta, with decision. "It's just what everybody that knows you—what your mamma—would like to see you in. I can't abide them nursin' clothes—nasty things!"

"I declare!" cried Marcella, laughing, but outraged; "I never like myself so well in anything."

Minta was silent, but her small mouth took an obstinate look. What she really felt was that it was absurd for ladies to wear caps and aprons and plain black bonnets, when there was no need for them to do anything of the kind.

"Whatever have you been doing to your cheek?" she exclaimed, suddenly, as Marcella handed her the empty cup to take away.

Marcella explained shortly, and Minta looked more discontented than ever. "A lot of low people as ought to look after themselves," that was how in her inmost mind she generally defined Marcella's patients. She had been often kind and soft to her neighbours at Mellor, but these dirty, crowded Londoners were another matter.

"Where is Daisy?" asked Marcella as Minta was going away with the tea; "she must have come back from school."

"Here I am," said Daisy, with a grin, peeping in through the door of the back kitchen. "Mother, baby's woke up."

"Come here, you monkey," said Marcella; "come and go to sleep with me. Have you had your tea?"

"Yes, lots," said Daisy, climbing up into Marcella's lap. "Are you going to be asleep a long time?"

"No—only a nap. Oh! Daisy, I'm so tired. Come and cuddlie a bit! If you don't go to sleep you know you can slip away—I shan't wake."

The child, a slight, red-haired thing, with something of the ethereal charm that her dead brother had possessed, settled herself on Marcella's knees, slipped her left thumb into her mouth, and flung her other arm round Marcella's neck. They had often gone to sleep so. Mrs. Hurd came back, drew down the blind further, threw a light shawl over them both, and left them.

An hour and a half later Minta came in again as she had been told. Daisy had slipped away, but Marcella was still lying in the perfect gentleness and relaxation of sleep.

"You said I was to come and wake you," said Minta, drawing up the blind; "but I don't believe you're a bit fit to be going about. Here's some hot water, and there's a letter just come."

Marcella woke with a start, Minta put the letter on her knee, and dream and reality flowed together as she saw her own name in Wharton's handwriting.

She read the letter, then sat flushed and thinking for a while with her hands on her knees.

A little while later she opened the Hurds' front-door.

"Minta, I am going now. I shall be back early after supper, for I haven't written my report."

"There—now you look something like!" said Minta, scanning her approvingly—the wide hat and pretty black dress. "Shall Daisy run out with that telegram?"

"No, thanks. I shall pass the post. Good-bye."

And she stooped and kissed the little withered woman. She wished, ardently wished, that Minta would be more truly friends with her!

After a brisk walk through the June evening she stopped—still within the same district—at the door of a house in a long, old-fashioned street, wherein the builder was busy on either hand, since most of the long leases had just fallen in. But the house she entered was still untouched. She climbed a last-century staircase, adorned with panels of stucco work—slender Italianate reliefs of wreaths, ribbons, and medallions on a pale green ground. The decoration was clean and cared for, the house in good order. Eighty years ago it was the home of a famous judge, who entertained in its rooms the legal and literary celebrities of his day. Now it was let out to professional people in lodgings or unfurnished rooms. Edward Hallin and his sister occupied the top floor.

Miss Hallin, a pleasant-looking, plain woman of about thirty-five, came at once in answer to Marcella's knock, and greeted her affectionately. Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.

"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had forgotten us!"

"I didn't get home till four, and then I had to have a sleep," she explained, half shyly.

"What! you haven't been night-nursing?"

"Yes, for once."

"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let's look after her."

He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window—the charming circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of the room and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of back gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane trees here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs of another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of line against the blue and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.

Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The walls, indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair, the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching over her brother.

"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have rested you more."

"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly hoped to find them alone.

"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away. Then, after supper, one or two people asked if they might come in. There are some anxious things going on."

He leant his head on his hand for a moment with a sigh, then forcibly wrenched himself from what were evidently recurrent thoughts.

"Do tell me some more of what you are doing!" he said, bending forward to her. "You don't know how much I have thought of what you have told me already."

"I'm doing just the same," she said, laughing. "Don't take so much interest in it. It's the fashion just now to admire nurses; but it's ridiculous. We do our work like other people—sometimes badly, sometimes well. And some of us wouldn't do it if we could help it."

She threw out the last words with a certain vehemence, as though eager to get away from any sentimentalism about herself. Hallin studied her kindly.

"Is this miscellaneous work a relief to you after hospital?" he asked.

"For the present. It is more exciting, and one sees more character. But there are drawbacks. In hospital everything was settled for you—every hour was full, and there were always orders to follow. And the 'off' times were no trouble—I never did anything else but walk up and down the Embankment if it was fine, or go to the National Gallery if it was wet."

"And it was the monotony you liked?"

She made a sign of assent.

"Strange!" said Hallin, "who could ever have foreseen it?"

She flushed.

"You might have foreseen it, I think," she said, not without a little impatience. "But I didn't like it all at once. I hated a great deal of it. If they had let me alone all the time to scrub and polish and wash—the things they set me to at first—I thought I should have been quite happy. To see my table full of glasses without a spot, and my brass-taps shining, made me as proud as a peacock! But then of course I had to learn the real work, and that was very odd at first."

"How? Morally?"

She nodded, laughing at her own remembrances. "Yes—it seemed to me all topsy-turvy. I thought the Sister at the head of the ward rather a stupid person. If I had seen her at Mellor I shouldn't have spoken two words to her. And here she was ordering me about—rating me as I had never rated a house-maid—laughing at me for not knowing this or that, and generally making me feel that a raw probationer was one of the things of least account in the whole universe. I knew perfectly well that she had said to herself, 'Now then I must take that proud girl down a peg, or she will be no use to anybody;' and I had somehow to put up with it."

"Drastic!" said Hallin, laughing; "did you comfort yourself by reflecting that it was everybody's fate?"

Her lip twitched with amusement.

"Not for a long time. I used to have the most absurd ideas!—sometimes looking back I can hardly believe it—perhaps it was partly a queer state of nerves. When I was at school and got in a passion I used to try and overawe the girls by shaking my Speaker great-uncle in their faces. And so in hospital; it would flash across me sometimes in a plaintive sort of way that they couldn't know that I was Miss Boyce of Mellor, and had been mothering and ruling the whole of my father's village—or they wouldn't treat me so. Mercifully I held my tongue. But one day it came to a crisis. I had had to get things ready for an operation, and had done very well. Dr. Marshall had paid me even a little compliment all to myself. But then afterwards the patient was some time in coming to, and there had to be hot-water bottles. I had them ready of course; but they were too hot, and in my zeal and nervousness I burnt the patient's elbow in two places. Oh! the fuss, and the scolding, and the humiliation! When I left the ward that evening I thought I would go home next day."

"But you didn't?"

"If I could have sat down and thought it out, I should probably have gone. But I couldn't think it out—I was too dead tired. That is the chief feature of your first months in hospital—the utter helpless fatigue at night. You go to bed aching and you wake up aching. If you are healthy as I was, it doesn't hurt you; but, when your time comes to sleep, sleep you must. Even that miserable night my head was no sooner on the pillow than I was asleep; and next morning there was all the routine as usual, and the dread of being a minute late on duty. Then when I got into the ward the Sister looked at me rather queerly and went out of her way to be kind to me. Oh! I was so grateful to her! I could have brushed her boots or done any other menial service for her with delight. And—then—somehow I pulled through. The enormous interest of the work seized me—I grew ambitious—they pushed me on rapidly—everybody seemed suddenly to become my friend instead of my enemy—and I ended by thinking the hospital the most fascinating and engrossing place in the whole world."

"A curious experience," said Hallin. "I suppose you had never obeyed any one in your life before?"

"Not since I was at school—and then—not much!"

Hallin glanced at her as she lay back in her chair. How richly human the face had grown! It was as forcible as ever in expression and colour, but that look which had often repelled him in his first acquaintance with her, as of a hard speculative eagerness more like the ardent boy than the woman, had very much disappeared. It seemed to him absorbed in something new—something sad and yet benignant, informed with all the pathos and the pain of growth.

"How long have you been at work to-day?" he asked her.

"I went at eleven last night. I came away at four this afternoon."

Hallin exclaimed, "You had food?"

"Do you think I should let myself starve with my work to do?" she asked him, with a shade of scorn and her most professional air. "And don't suppose that such a case occurs often. It is a very rare thing for us to undertake night-nursing at all."

"Can you tell me what the case was?"

She told him vaguely, describing also in a few words her encounter with Dr. Blank.

"I suppose he will make a fuss," she said, with a restless look, "and that I shall be blamed."

"I should think your second doctor will take care of that!" said Hallin.

"I don't know. I couldn't help it. But it is one of our first principles not to question a doctor. And last week too I got the Association into trouble. A patient I had been nursing for weeks and got quite fond of had to be removed to hospital. She asked me to cut her hair. It was matted dreadfully, and would have been cut off directly she got to the ward. So I cut it, left her all comfortable, and was to come back at one to meet the doctor and help get her off. When I came, I found the whole court in an uproar. The sister of the woman, who had been watching for me, stood on the doorstep, and implored me to go away. The husband had gone out of his senses with rage because I had cut his wife's hair without his consent. 'He'll murder you, Nuss!' said the sister, 'if he sees you! Don't come in!—he's mad—he's been going round on 'is 'ands and knees on the floor!'"—Hallin interrupted with a shout of laughter. Marcella laughed too; but to his amazement he saw that her hand shook, and that there were tears in her eyes.

"It's all very well," she said with a sigh, "but I had to come away in disgrace, all the street looking on. And he made such a fuss at the office as never was. It was unfortunate—we don't want the people set against the nurses. And now Dr. Blank!—I seem to be always getting into scrapes. It is different from hospital, where everything is settled for one."

Hallin could hardly believe his ears. Such womanish terrors and depressions from Marcella Boyce! Was she, after all, too young for the work, or was there some fret of the soul reducing her natural force? He felt an unwonted impulse of tenderness towards her—such as one might feel towards a tired child—and set himself to cheer and rest her.

He had succeeded to some extent, when he saw her give a little start, and following her eyes he perceived that unconsciously his arm, which was resting on the table, had pushed into her view a photograph in a little frame, which had been hitherto concealed from her by a glass of flowers. He would have quietly put it out of sight again, but she sat up in her chair.

"Will you give it me?" she said, putting out her hand.

He gave it her at once.

"Alice brought it home from Miss Raeburn the other day. His aunt made him sit to one of the photographers who are always besieging public men. We thought it good."

"It is very good," she said, after a pause. "Is the hair really—as grey as that?" She pointed to it.

"Quite. I am very glad that he is going off with Lord Maxwell to Italy. It will be ten days' break for him at any rate. His work this last year has been very heavy. He has had his grandfather's to do really, as well as his own; and this Commission has been a stiff job too. I am rather sorry that he has taken this new post."

"What post?"

"Didn't you hear? They have made him Under-secretary to the Home Department. So that he is now in the Government."

She put back the photograph, and moved her chair a little so as to see more of the plane trees and the strips of sunset cloud.

"How is Lord Maxwell?" she asked presently.

"Much changed. It might end in a sudden break-up at any time."

Hallin saw a slight contraction pass over her face. He knew that she had always felt an affection for Lord Maxwell. Suddenly Marcella looked hastily round her. Miss Hallin was busy with a little servant at the other end of the room making arrangements for supper.

"Tell me," she said, bending over the arm of her chair and speaking in a low, eager voice, "he is beginning to forget it?"

Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile suggested an answer from which she turned away.

"If he only would!" she said, speaking almost to herself, with a kind of impatience. "He ought to marry, for everybody's sake."

"I see no sign of his marrying—at present," said Hallin, drily.

He began to put some papers under his hand in order. There was a cold dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood. Ever since that day—that never-forgotten day—when he had come to her the morning after her last interview with Aldous Raeburn—come with reluctance and dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him—and had gone away her friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had ever been in the days of the engagement, their relation on this subject had been the same. His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life during the past eighteen months, had been very great. In that first interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry, something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly difficult task—its simplicity, its delicate respect for her personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the stress of emotion—this something had suddenly broken down his pale, proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as amazed them both.

Experiences of this kind were not new to him. His life consecrated to ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him off from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially cut him off from marriage—together with the ardent temperament, the charm, the imaginative insight which had been his cradle-gifts—these things ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide and prop of natures stronger and stormier than his own. Often the unwilling guide; for he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of the man who has set himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will have power and time to finish it. The claims made upon him seemed to him often to cost him physical and brain energy he could ill spare.

But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey in such matters. Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and there was no help for it. Since their first memorable interview, at long intervals, he had written to her and she to him. Of her hospital life, till to-night, she had never told him much. Her letters had been the passionate outpourings of a nature sick of itself, and for the moment of living; full of explanations which really explained little; full too of the untaught pangs and questionings of a mind which had never given any sustained or exhaustive effort to any philosophical or social question, and yet was in a sense tortured by them all—athirst for an impossible justice, and aflame for ideals mocked first and above all by the writer's own weakness and defect. Hallin had felt them interesting, sad, and, in a sense, fine; but he had never braced himself to answer them without groans. There were so many other people in the world in the same plight!

Nevertheless, all through the growth of friendship one thing had never altered between them from the beginning—Hallin's irrevocable judgment of the treatment she had bestowed on Aldous Raeburn. Never throughout the whole course of their acquaintance had he expressed that judgment to her in so many words. Notwithstanding, she knew perfectly well both the nature and the force of it. It lay like a rock in the stream of their friendship. The currents of talk might circle round it, imply it, glance off from it; they left it unchanged. At the root of his mind towards her, at the bottom of his gentle sensitive nature, there was a sternness which he often forgot—she never.

This hard fact in their relation had insensibly influenced her greatly, was constantly indeed working in and upon her, especially since the chances of her nursing career had brought her to settle in this district, within a stone's throw of him and his sister, so that she saw them often and intimately. But it worked in different ways. Sometimes—as to-night—it evoked a kind of defiance.

A minute or two after he had made his remark about Aldous, she said to him suddenly,

"I had a letter from Mr. Wharton to-day. He is coming to tea with me to-morrow, and I shall probably go to the House on Friday with Edith Craven to hear him speak."

Hallin gave a slight start at the name. Then he said nothing; but went on sorting some letters of the day into different heaps. His silence roused her irritation.

"Do you remember," she said, in a low, energetic voice, "that I told you I could never be ungrateful, never forget what he had done?"

"Yes, I remember," he said, not without a certain sharpness of tone. "You spoke of giving him help if he ever asked it of you—has he asked it?"

She explained that what he seemed to be asking was Louis Craven's help, and that his overtures with regard to the Labour Clarion were particularly opportune, seeing that Louis was pining to be able to marry, and was losing heart, hope, and health for want of some fixed employment. She spoke warmly of her friends and their troubles, and Hallin's inward distaste had to admit that all she said was plausible. Since the moment in that strange talk which had drawn them together, when she had turned upon him with the passionate cry—"I see what you mean, perfectly! but I am not going to marry Mr. Wharton, so don't trouble to warn me—for the matter of that he has warned me himself:—but my gratitude he has earned, and if he asks for it I will never deny it him "—since that moment there had been no word of Wharton between them. At the bottom of his heart Hallin distrusted her, and was ashamed of himself because of it. His soreness and jealousy for his friend knew no bounds. "If that were to come on again"—he was saying to himself now, as she talked to him—"I could not bear it, I could not forgive her!"

He only wished that she would give up talking about Wharton altogether. But, on the contrary, she would talk of him—and with a curious persistence. She must needs know what Hallin thought of his career in Parliament, of his prospects, of his powers as a speaker. Hallin answered shortly, like some one approached on a subject for which he cares nothing.

"Yet, of course, it is not that; it is injustice!" she said to herself, with vehemence. "He must care; they are his subjects, his interests too. But he will not look at it dispassionately, because—"

So they fell out with each other a little, and the talk dragged. Yet, all the while, Marcella's inner mind was conscious of quite different thoughts. How good it was to be here, in this room, beside these two people! She must show herself fractious and difficult with Hallin sometimes; it was her nature. But in reality, that slight and fragile form, that spiritual presence were now shrined in the girl's eager reverence and affection. She felt towards him as many a Catholic has felt towards his director; though the hidden yearning to be led by him was often oddly covered, as now, by an outer self-assertion. Perhaps her quarrel with him was that he would not lead her enough—would not tell her precisely enough what she was to do with herself.



CHAPTER V.

While she and Hallin were sitting thus, momentarily out of tune with each other, the silence was suddenly broken by a familiar voice.

"I say, Hallin—is this all right?"

The words came from a young man who, having knocked unheeded, opened the door, and cautiously put in a curly head.

"Frank!—is that you? Come in," cried Hallin, springing up.

Frank Leven came in, and at once perceived the lady sitting in the window.

"Well, I am glad!" he cried, striding across the room and shaking Hallin's hand by the way. "Miss Boyce! I thought none of your friends were ever going to get a sight of you again! Why, what—"

He drew back scanning her, a gay look of quizzing surprise on his fair boy's face.

"He expected me in cap and apron," said Marcella, laughing; "or means to pretend he did."

"I expected a sensation! And here you are, just as you were, only twice as—I say, Hallin, doesn't she look well!"—this in a stage aside to Hallin, while the speaker was drawing off his gloves, and still studying Marcella.

"Well, I think she looks tired," said Hallin, with a little attempt at a smile, but turning away. Everybody felt a certain tension, a certain danger, even in the simplest words, and Miss Hallin's call to supper was very welcome.

The frugal meal went gaily. The chattering Christchurch boy brought to it a breath of happy, careless life, to which the three others—over-driven and over-pressed, all of them—responded with a kind of eagerness. Hallin especially delighted in him, and would have out all his budget—his peacock's pride at having been just put into the 'Varsity eleven, his cricket engagements for the summer, his rows with his dons, above all his lasting amazement that he should have just scraped through his Mods.

"I thought those Roman emperors would have done for me!" he declared, with a child's complacency. "Brutes! I couldn't remember them. I learnt them up and down, backwards and forwards—but it was no good; they nearly dished me!"

"Yet it comes back to me," said Hallin, slily, "that when a certain person was once asked to name the winner of the Derby in some obscure year, he began at the beginning, and gave us all of them, from first to last, without a hitch."

"The winner of the Derby!" said the lad, eagerly, bending forward with his hands on his knees; "why, I should rather think so! That isn't memory; that's knowledge!—Goodness! who's this?"

The last remark was addressed sotto voce to Marcella. Supper was just over, and the two guests, with Hallin, had returned to the window, while Miss Hallin, stoutly refusing their help, herself cleared the table and set all straight.

Hallin, hearing a knock, had gone to the door while Leven was speaking. Four men came crowding in, all of them apparently well known both to Hallin and his sister. The last two seemed to be workmen; the others were Bennett, Hallin's old and tried friend among the Labour-leaders, and Nehemiah Wilkins, M.P. Hallin introduced them all to Marcella and Leven; but the new-comers took little notice of any one but their host, and were soon seated about him discussing a matter already apparently familiar to them, and into which Hallin had thrown himself at once with that passionate directness which, in the social and speculative field, replaced his ordinary gentleness of manner. He seemed to be in strong disagreement with the rest—a disagreement which troubled himself and irritated them.

Marcella watched them with quick curiosity from the window where she was sitting, and would have liked to go forward to listen. But Frank Leven turned suddenly round upon her with sparkling eyes.

"Oh, I say! don't go. Do come and sit here with me a bit. Oh, isn't it rum! isn't it rum! Look at Hallin,—those are the people whom he cares to talk to. That's a shoemaker, that man to the left—really an awfully cute fellow—and this man in front, I think he told me he was a mason, a Socialist of course—would like to string me up to-morrow. Did you ever see such a countenance? Whenever that man begins, I think we must be precious near to shooting. And he's pious too, would pray over us first and shoot us afterwards—which isn't the case, I understand, with many of 'em. Then the others—you know them? That's Bennett—regular good fellow—always telling his pals not to make fools of themselves—for which of course they love him no more than they are obliged—And Wilkins—oh! Wilkins"—he chuckled—"they say it'll come to a beautiful row in the House before they've done, between him and my charming cousin, Harry Wharton. My father says he backs Wilkins."

Then suddenly the lad recollected himself and his clear cheek coloured a little after a hasty glance at his companion. He fell to silence and looking at his boots. Marcella wondered what was the matter with him. Since her flight from Mellor she had lived, so to speak, with her head in the sand. She herself had never talked directly of her own affairs to anybody. Her sensitive pride did not let her realise that, notwithstanding, all the world was aware of them.

"I don't suppose you know much about your cousin!" she said to him with a little scorn.

"Well, I don't want to!" said the lad, "that's one comfort! But I don't know anything about anything!—Miss Boyce!"

He plunged his head in his hands, and Marcella, looking at him, saw at once that she was meant to understand she had woe and lamentation beside her.

Her black eyes danced with laughter. At Mellor she had been several times his confidante. The handsome lad was not apparently very fond of his sisters and had taken to her from the beginning. To-night she recognised the old symptoms.