"What, you have been getting into scrapes again?" she said—"how many since we met last?"

"There! you make fun of it!" he said indignantly from behind his fingers—"you're like all the rest."

Marcella teased him a little more till at last she was astonished by a flash of genuine wrath from the hastily uncovered eyes.

"If you're only going to chaff a fellow let's go over there and talk! And yet I did want to tell you about it—you were awfully kind to me down at home. I want to tell you—and I don't want to tell you—perhaps I oughtn't to tell you—you'll think me a brute, I dare say, an ungentlemanly brute for speaking of it at all—and yet somehow—"

The boy, crimson, bit his lips. Marcella, arrested and puzzled, laid a hand on his arm. She had been used to these motherly ways with him at Mellor, on the strength of her seniority, so inadequately measured by its two years or so of time!

"I won't laugh," she said, "tell me."

"No—really?—shall I?"

Whereupon there burst forth a history precisely similar it seemed to some half dozen others she had already heard from the same lips. A pretty girl—or rather "an exquisite creature!" met at the house of some relation in Scotland, met again at the "Boats" at Oxford, and yet again at Commemoration balls, Nuneham picnics, and the rest; adored and adorable; yet, of course, a sphinx born for the torment of men, taking her haughty way over a prostrate sex, kind to-day, cruel to-morrow; not to be won by money, yet, naturally, not to be won without it; possessed like Rose Aylmer of "every virtue, every grace," whether of form or family; yet making nothing but a devastating and death-dealing use of them—how familiar it all was!—and how many more of them there seemed to be in the world, on a man's reckoning, than on a woman's!

"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's so frightfully pretty—well, frightfully fetching, rather—and well dressed and all the rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls—not she. She's read a lot of things—a lot! I'm sure, Miss Boyce"—he looked at her confidently,—"if you were to see her you'd think her awfully clever. And yet she's so little—and so dainty—and she dances—my goodness! you should see her dance, skirt-dance I mean—Letty Lind isn't in it! She's good too, awfully good. I think her mother's a most dreadful old bore—well, no, I didn't mean that—of course I didn't mean that!—but she's fussy, you know, and invalidy, and has to be wrapped up in shawls, and dragged about in bath chairs, and Betty's an angel to her—she is really—though her mother's always snapping her head off. And as to the poor—"

Something in his tone, in the way he had of fishing for her approval, sent Marcella into a sudden fit of laughter. Then she put out a hand to restrain this plunging lover.

"Look here—do come to the point—have you proposed to her?"

"I should rather think I have!" said the boy, fervently. "About once a week since Christmas. Of course she's played with me—that sort always does—but I think I might really have a chance with her, if it weren't for her mother—horrible old—no, of course I don't mean that! But now it comes in—what I oughtn't to tell you—I know I oughtn't to tell you! I'm always making a beastly mess of it. It's because I can't help talking of it!"

And shaking his curly head in despair, he once more plunged his red cheeks into his hands and fell abruptly silent.

Marcella coloured for sympathy. "I really wish you wouldn't talk in riddles," she said. "What is the matter with you?—of course you must tell me."

"Well, I know you won't mind!" cried the lad, emerging. "As if you could mind! But it sounds like my impudence to be talking to you about—about—You see," he blurted out, "she's going to Italy with the Raeburns. She's a connection of theirs, somehow, and Miss Raeburn's taken a fancy to her lately—and her mother's treated me like dirt ever since they asked her to go to Italy—and naturally a fellow sees what that means—and what her mother's after. I don't believe Betty would; he's too old for her, isn't he? Oh, my goodness!"—this time he smote his knee in real desperation—"now I have done it. I'm simply bursting always with the thing I'd rather cut my head off than say. Why they make 'em like me I don't know!"

"You mean," said Marcella, with impatience—"that her mother wants her to marry Mr. Raeburn?"

He looked round at his companion. She was lying back in a deep chair, her hands lightly clasped on her knee. Something in her attitude, in the pose of the tragic head, in the expression of the face stamped to-night with a fatigue which was also a dignity, struck a real compunction into his mood of vanity and excitement. He had simply not been able to resist the temptation to talk to her. She reminded him of the Raeburns, and the Raeburns were in his mind at the present moment by day and by night. He knew that he was probably doing an indelicate and indiscreet thing, but all the same his boyish egotism would not be restrained from the headlong pursuit of his own emotions. There was in him too such a burning curiosity as to how she would take it—what she would say.

Now however he felt a genuine shrinking. His look changed. Drawing his chair close up to her he began a series of penitent and self-contradictory excuses which Marcella soon broke in upon.

"I don't know why you talk like that," she said, looking at him steadily. "Do you suppose I can go on all my life without hearing Mr. Raeburn's name mentioned? And don't apologise so much! It really doesn't matter what I suppose—that you think—about my present state of mind. It is very simple. I ought never to have accepted Mr. Raeburn. I behaved badly. I know it—and everybody knows it. Still one has to go on living one's life somehow. The point is that I am rather the wrong person for you to come to just now, for if there is one thing I ardently wish about Mr. Raeburn, it is that he should get himself married."

Frank Leven looked at her in bewildered dismay.

"I never thought of that," he said.

"Well, you might, mightn't you?"

For another short space there was silence between them, while the rush of talk in the centre of the room was still loud and unspent.

Then she rated herself for want of sympathy. Frank sat beside her shy and uncomfortable, his confidence chilled away.

"So you think Miss Raeburn has views?" she asked him, smiling, and in her most ordinary voice.

The boy's eye brightened again with the implied permission to go on chattering.

"I know she has! Betty's brother as good as told me that she and Mrs. Macdonald—that's Betty's mother—she hasn't got a father—had talked it over. And now Betty's going with them to Italy, and Aldous is going too for ten days—and when I go to the Macdonalds Mrs. Macdonald treats me as if I were a little chap in jackets, and Betty worries me to death. It's sickening!"

"And how about Mr. Raeburn?"

"Oh, Aldous seems to like her very much," he said despondently. "She's always teasing and amusing him. When she's there she never lets him alone. She harries him out. She makes him read to her and ride with her. She makes him discuss all sorts of things with her you'd never think Aldous would discuss—her lovers and her love affairs, and being in love!—it's extraordinary the way she drives him round. At Easter she and her mother were staying at the Court, and one night Betty told me she was bored to death. It was a very smart party, but everything was so flat and everybody was so dull. So she suddenly got up and ran across to Aldous. 'Now look here, Mr. Aldous,' she said; 'this'll never do! you've got to come and dance with me, and push those chairs and tables aside'—I can fancy the little stamp she'd give—'and make those other people dance too.' And she made him—she positively made him. Aldous declared he didn't dance, and she wouldn't have a word of it. And presently she got to all her tricks, skirt-dancing and the rest of it—and of course the evening went like smoke."

Marcella's eyes, unusually wide open, were somewhat intently fixed on the speaker.

"And Mr. Raeburn liked it?" she asked in a tone that sounded incredulous.

"Didn't he just? She told me they got regular close friends after that, and he told her everything—oh, well," said the lad, embarrassed, and clutching at his usual formula—"of course, I didn't mean that. And she's fearfully flattered, you can see she is, and she tells me that she adores him—that he's the only great man she's ever known—that I'm not fit to black his boots, and ought to be grateful whenever he speaks to me—and all that sort of rot. And now she's going off with them. I shall have to shoot myself—I declare I shall!"

"Well, not yet," said Marcella, in a soothing voice; "the case isn't clear enough. Wait till they come back. Shall we move? I'm going over there to listen to that talk. But—first—come and see me whenever you like—3 to 4.30, Brown's Buildings, Maine Street—and tell me how this goes on?"

She spoke with a careless lightness, laughing at him with a half sisterly freedom. She had risen from her seat, and he, whose thoughts had been wrapped up for months in one of the smallest of the sex, was suddenly struck with her height and stately gesture as she moved away from him.

"By Jove! Why didn't she stick to Aldous," he said to himself discontentedly as his eyes followed her. "It was only her cranks, and of course she'll get rid of them. Just like my luck!"

* * * * *

Meanwhile Marcella took a seat next to Miss Hallin, who looked up from her knitting to smile at her. The girl fell into the attitude of listening; but for some minutes she was not listening at all. She was reflecting how little men knew of each other!—even the most intimate friends—and trying to imagine what Aldous Raeburn would be like, married to such a charmer as Frank had sketched. His friendship for her meant, of course, the attraction of contraries—one of the most promising of all possible beginnings. On the whole, she thought Frank's chances were poor.

Then, unexpectedly, her ear was caught by Wharton's name, and she discovered that what was going on beside her was a passionate discussion of his present position and prospects in the Labour party—a discussion, however, mainly confined to Wilkins and the two workmen. Bennett had the air of the shrewd and kindly spectator who has his own reasons for treating a situation with reserve; and Hallin was lying back in his chair flushed and worn out. The previous debate, which had now merged in these questions of men and personalities, had made him miserable; he had no heart for anything more. Miss Hallin observed him anxiously, and made restless movements now and then, as though she had it in her mind to send all her guests away.

The two Socialist workmen were talking strongly in favour of an organised and distinct Labour party, and of Wharton's leadership. They referred constantly to Parnell, and what he had clone for "those Irish fellows." The only way to make Labour formidable in the House was to learn the lesson of Unionism and of Parnellism, to act together and strike together, to make of the party a "two-handed engine," ready to smite Tory and Liberal impartially. To this end a separate organisation, separate place in the House, separate Whips—they were ready, nay clamorous, for them all. And they were equally determined on Harry Wharton as a leader. They spoke of the Clarion with enthusiasm, and declared that its owner was already an independent power, and was, moreover, as "straight" as he was sharp.

The contention and the praise lashed Wilkins into fury. After making one or two visible efforts at a sarcastic self-control which came to nothing, he broke out into a flood of invective which left the rest of the room staring. Marcella found herself indignantly wondering who this big man, with his fierce eyes, long, puffy cheeks, coarse black hair, and North-country accent, might be. Why did he talk in this way, with these epithets, this venom? It was intolerable!

Hallin roused himself from his fatigue to play the peace-maker. But some of the things Wilkins had been saying had put up the backs of the two workmen, and the talk flamed up unmanageably—Wilkins's dialect getting more pronounced with each step of the argument.

"Well, if I'd ever ha' thowt that I war coomin' to Lunnon to put myself and my party oonder the heel o' Muster Harry Wharton, I'd ha' stayed at home, I tell tha," cried Wilkins, slapping his knee. "If it's to be the People's party, why, in the name o' God, must yo put a yoong ripstitch like yon at the head of it? a man who'll just mak use of us all, you an' me, and ivery man Jack of us, for his own advancement, an' ull kick us down when he's done with us! Why shouldn't he? What is he? Is he a man of us—bone of our bone? He's a landlord, and an aristocrat, I tell tha! What have the likes of him ever been but thorns in our side? When have the landlords ever gone with the people? Have they not been the blight and the curse of the country for hun'erds of years? And you're goin' to tell me that a man bred out o' them—living on his rent and interest—grinding the faces of the poor, I'll be bound if the truth were known, as all the rest of them do—is goin' to lead me, an' those as'll act with me to the pullin' down of the landlords! Why are we to go lickspittlin' to any man of his sort to do our work for us? Let him go to his own class—I'm told Mr. Wharton is mighty fond of countesses, and they of him!—or let him set up as the friend of the working man just as he likes—I'm quite agreeable!—I shan't make any bones about takin' his vote; but I'm not goin' to make him master over me, and give him the right to speak for my mates in the House of Commons. I'd cut my hand off fust!"

Leven grinned in the background. Bennett lay back in his chair with a worried look. Wilkins's crudities were very distasteful to him both in and out of the House. The younger of the Socialist workmen, a mason, with a strong square face, incongruously lit somehow with the eyes of the religious dreamer, looked at Wilkins contemptuously.

"There's none of you in the House will take orders," he said quickly, "and that's the ruin of us. We all know that. Where do you think we'd have been in the struggle with the employers, if we'd gone about our business as you're going about yours in the House of Commons?"

"I'm not saying we shouldn't organise," said Wilkins, fiercely. "What I'm sayin' is, get a man of the working class—a man who has the wants of the working class—a man whom the working class can get a hold on—to do your business for you, and not any bloodsucking landlord or capitalist. It's a slap i' the face to ivery honest working man i' the coontry, to mak' a Labour party and put Harry Wharton at t' head of it!"

The young Socialist looked at him askance. "Of course you'd like it yourself!" was what he was thinking. "But they'll take a man as can hold his own with the swells—and quite right too!"

"And if Mr. Wharton is a landlord he's a good sort!" exclaimed the shoemaker—a tall, lean man in a well-brushed frock coat. "There's many on us knows as have been to hear him speak, what he's tried to do about the land, and the co-operative farming. E's straight is Mr. Wharton. We 'aven't got Socialism yet—an' it isn't 'is fault bein' a landlord. Ee was born it."

"I tell tha he's playin' for his own hand!" said Wilkins, doggedly, the red spot deepening on his swarthy cheek—"he's runnin' that paper for his own hand—Haven't I had experience of him? I know it—And I'll prove it some day! He's one for featherin' his own nest is Mr. Wharton—and when he's doon it by makkin' fools of us, he'll leave us to whistle for any good we're iver likely to get out o' him. He go agen the landlords when it coom to the real toossle,—I know 'em—I tell tha—I know 'em!"

A woman's voice, clear and scornful, broke into the talk.

"It's a little strange to think, isn't it, that while we in London go on groaning and moaning about insanitary houses, and making our small attempts here and there, half of the country poor of England have been re-housed in our generation by these same landlords—no fuss about it—and rents for five-roomed cottages, somewhere about one and fourpence a week!"

Hallin swung his chair round and looked at the speaker—amazed!

Wilkins also stared at her under his eyebrows. He did not like women—least of all, ladies.

He gruffly replied that if they had done anything like as much as she said—which, he begged her pardon, but he didn't believe—it was done for the landlords' own purposes, either to buy off public opinion, or just for show and aggrandisement. People who had prize pigs and prize cattle must have prize cottages of course—"with a race of slaves inside 'em!"

Marcella, bright-eyed, erect, her thin right hand hanging over her knee, went avengingly into facts—the difference between landlords' villages and "open" villages; the agrarian experiments made by different great landlords; the advantage to the community, even from the Socialist point of view of a system which had preserved the land in great blocks, for the ultimate use of the State, as compared with a system like the French, which had for ever made Socialism impossible.

Hallin's astonishment almost swept away his weariness.

"Where in the world did she get it all from, and is she standing on her head or am I?"

After an animated little debate, in which Bennett and the two workmen joined, while Wilkins sat for the most part in moody, contemptuous silence, and Marcella, her obstinacy roused, carried through her defence of the landlords with all a woman's love of emphasis and paradox, everybody rose simultaneously to say good-night.

"You ought to come and lead a debate down at our Limehouse club," said Bennett pleasantly to Marcella, as she held out her hand to him; "you'd take a lot of beating."

"Yet I'm a Venturist, you know," she said, laughing; "I am."

He shook his head, laughed too, and departed.

When the four had gone, Marcella turned upon Hallin.

"Are there many of these Labour members like that?"

Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.

"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,—it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"

And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.

"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing—slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.

He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.

"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it teases.' We know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House I'm always having rows with—and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"

Marcella flushed.

"Never mind where I got it!" she said.

In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.

* * * * *

When the door closed upon her and upon Frank Leven, who was to escort her home, Hallin walked quickly over to the table, and stood looking for a moment in a sort of bitter reverie at Raeburn's photograph.

His sister followed him, and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Do go to bed, Edward! I am afraid that talk has tired you dreadfully."

"It would be no good going to bed, dear," he said, with a sigh of exhaustion. "I will sit and read a bit, and see if I can get myself into sleeping trim. But you go, Alice—good-night."

When she had gone he threw himself into his chair again with the thought—"She must contradict here as she contradicted there! She—and justice! If she could have been just to a landlord for one hour last year—"

He spent himself for a while in endless chains of recollection, oppressed by the clearness of his own brain, and thirsting for sleep. Then from the affairs of Raeburn and Marcella, he passed with a fresh sense of strain and effort to his own. That discussion with those four men which had filled the first part of the evening weighed upon him in his weakness of nerve, so that suddenly in the phantom silence of the night, all life became an oppression and a terror, and rest, either to-night or in the future, a thing never to be his.

He had come to the moment of difficulty, of tragedy, in a career which so far, in spite of all drawbacks of physical health and cramped activities, had been one of singular happiness and success. Ever since he had discovered his own gifts as a lecturer to working men, content, cheerfulness, nay, a passionate interest in every hour, had been quite compatible for him with all the permanent limitations of his lot. The study of economical and historical questions; the expression through them of such a hunger for the building of a "city of God" among men, as few are capable of; the evidence not to be ignored even by his modesty, and perpetually forthcoming over a long period of time, that he had the power to be loved, the power to lead, among those toilers of the world on whom all his thoughts centred—these things had been his joy, and had led him easily through much self-denial to the careful husbanding of every hour of strength and time in the service of his ideal end.

And now he had come upon opposition—the first cooling of friendships, the first distrust of friends that he had ever known.

Early in the spring of this year a book called To-morrow and the Land had appeared in London, written by a young London economist of great ability, and dealing with the nationalisation of the land. It did not offer much discussion of the general question, but it took up the question as it affected England specially and London in particular. It showed—or tried to show—in picturesque detail what might be the consequences for English rural or municipal life of throwing all land into a common or national stock, of expropriating the landlords, and transferring all rent to the people, to the effacement of taxation and the indefinite enrichment of the common lot. The book differed from Progress and Poverty, which also powerfully and directly affected the English working class, in that it suggested a financial scheme, of great apparent simplicity and ingenuity, for the compensation of the landlords; it was shorter, and more easily to be grasped by the average working man; and it was written in a singularly crisp and taking style, and—by the help of a number of telling illustrations borrowed directly from the circumstances of the larger English towns, especially of London—treated with abundant humour.

The thing had an enormous success—in popular phrase, "caught on." Soon Hallin found, that all the more active and intelligent spirits in the working-class centres where he was in vogue as a lecturer were touched—nay, possessed—by it. The crowd of more or less socialistic newspapers which had lately sprung up in London were full of it; the working men's clubs rang with it. It seemed to him a madness—an infection; and it spread like one. The book had soon reached an immense sale, and was in every one's hands.

To Hallin, a popular teacher, interested above all in the mingled problems of ethics and economics, such an incident was naturally of extreme importance. But he was himself opposed by deepest conviction, intellectual and moral, to the book and its conclusions. The more its success grew, the more eager and passionate became his own desire to battle with it. His platform, of course, was secured to him; his openings many. Hundreds and thousands of men all over England were keen to know what he had to say about the new phenomenon.

And he had been saying his say—throwing into it all his energies, all his finest work. With the result that—for the first time in eleven years—he felt his position in the working-class movement giving beneath his feet, and his influence beginning to drop from his hand. Coldness in place of enthusiasm; critical aloofness in place of affection; readiness to forget and omit him in matters where he had always hitherto belonged to the inner circle and the trusted few—these bitter ghosts, with their hard, unfamiliar looks, had risen of late in his world of idealist effort and joy, and had brought with them darkness and chill. He could not give way, for he had a singular unity of soul—it had been the source of his power—and every economical or social conviction was in some way bound up with the moral and religious passion which was his being—his inmost nature. And his sensitive state of nerve and brain, his anchorite's way of life, did not allow him the distractions of other men. The spread of these and other similar ideas seemed to him a question of the future of England; and he had already begun to throw himself into the unequal struggle with a martyr's tenacity, and with some prescience of the martyr's fate.

Even Bennett! As he sat there alone in the dim lamp-light, his head bent over his knees, his hands hanging loosely before him, he thought bitterly of the defection of that old friend who had stood by him through so many lesser contests. It was impossible that Bennett should think the schemes of that book feasible! Yet he was one of the honestest of men, and, within a certain range, one of the most clear-headed. As for the others, they had been all against him. Intellectually, their opinion did not matter to him; but morally it was so strange to him to find himself on the side of doubt and dissent, while all his friends were talking language which was almost the language of a new faith!

He had various lecturing engagements ahead, connected with this great debate which was now surging throughout the Labour world of London. He had accepted them with eagerness; in these weary night hours he looked forward to them with terror, seeing before him perpetually thousands of hostile faces, living in a nightmare of lost sympathies and broken friendships. Oh, for sleep—for the power to rest—to escape this corrosion of an ever active thought, which settled and reconciled nothing!

"The tragedy of life lies in the conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it." These words, written by one whose thought had penetrated deep into his own, rang in his ears as he sat brooding there. Not the hidden fate, or the hidden evil, but the hidden wisdom. Could one die and still believe it? Yet what else was the task of faith?



CHAPTER VI.

"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven. "This is Friday—say Monday?"

Wharton nodded. He and Craven were sitting in Marcella's little sitting-room. Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that the two men might be left alone a while. The interview between them had gone smoothly, and Louis Craven had accepted immediate employment on the Labour Clarion, as the paper's correspondent in the Midlands, with special reference to the important strike just pending. Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and had offered two hundred a year. So far as that went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.

"And I understand from you," he said, "that the paper goes in for the strike, that you will fight it through?"

He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion. Louis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm. Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.

"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with emphasis—"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case. The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up. There are two of the masters in the House. Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going."

He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.

"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just one according to his lights. There are plenty worse than he."

Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood—of not, even in small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody. He was conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.

"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his stick—"you see there is talk of arbitration."

"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind. The men have been done by it twice before. They get some big-wig from the neighbourhood—not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it—and, of course, the award goes against the men."

"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"

Craven took out a note-book.

"No!—The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff. The men are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live. It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down. We must go for them! I mean to go for them hot and strong. Poor devils! did you read the evidence in that Bluebook last year? Arbitration? no, indeed! let them live first!"

Craven looked up absently.

"And I think," he said, "you gave me Mr. Thorpe's address?" Mr. Thorpe was the secretary.

Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance. If he chose to be expansive, it was not for Craven to take no notice.

Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart. A deep disdain for what had always seemed to him the cheapest form of self-advertisement, held him back. It was this dryness, combined with an amazing disinterestedness, which had so far stood in his way.

Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave the minutest attention.

"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.

"By all means," said Wharton, with a complete change of tone. "Business is up and I am off!"

He took up his hat as he spoke.

"Not at all! Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red-haired Daisy who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea-table.

Wharton looked at her irresolute. He had spent half an hour with her tete-a-tete before Louis Craven arrived, and he was really due at the House. But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away. How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He hesitated and stayed.

"All well?" said Marcella, in a half whisper, as she passed Louis Craven on her way to get some cake.

He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea-table with an eye all gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.

The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough. Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality. Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded. Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?

"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent.—"You must be there early, for there will be a crush. Miss Craven comes too? Excellent! I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you. Good-bye!—good-bye!"

And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in which they had been sitting, he went.

He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother, who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.

"Well—any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.

"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room. "I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley strike that is to be. A month's trial, and then a salary—two hundred a year. Oh! it'll do."

He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure. But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face.

"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" said Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.

"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing. "Anna's got to work out her shirt-making time. She only left the tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago. And she was to have a month at each."

Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations. She had not yet seen Louis's betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a better authority on many Labour questions than he.

Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the benefit of an East End newspaper. She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to shirts. Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this heat.

"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith pensively. "Louis was lodging on the second floor, she in the third floor back, and they used to pass on the stairs. One day she heard him imploring the little slavey to put some buttons on his shirts. The slavey tossed her head, and said she'd see about it. When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs, calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey under her thumb, got them, walked off with them, and mended them all. When Louis came home he discovered a neat heap reposing on his table. Of course he wept—whatever he may say. But next morning Miss Anna found her shoes outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a note inside one of them. Affecting! wasn't it? Thenceforward, as long as they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked. Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."

Marcella laughed.

"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.

"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can get hold of her. But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or trying to set up Unions. She does the work of six. She'll earn nearly as much as I do when we're married. Oh! we shall swim!"

Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect—so unlike the gentle or satirical detachment which made his ordinary manner—with a darkening eye, as though annoyed by his effusion.

"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what Mr. Harry Wharton spends on his clothes, I should think. The Labour men tell me he is superb in that line. And for the same sum that he spends on his clothes, he is able to buy you, Louis, body and soul, and you seem inclined to be grateful."

"Never mind," said Louis recklessly. "He didn't buy some one else—and I am grateful!"

"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone. "You the dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent on him."

Marcella gave an angry start. Louis protested.

"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have to bear it from me, I tell you—unless you muzzle me too with an Anna."

"But I don't see why I should bear it," said Marcella, turning upon him. "I think you know that I owe Mr. Wharton a debt. Please remember it!"

Anthony looked at her an instant in silence. A question crossed his mind concerning her. Then he made her a little clumsy bow.

"I am dumb," he said. "My manners, you perceive, are what they always were."

"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming. "How can a man who has reached the position he has in so short a time—in so many different worlds—be disposed of by calling him an ugly name? It is more than unjust—it is absurd! Besides, what can you know of him?"

"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread and butter, "that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all. I watched his beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did. And most of them—as he knows!—have pretty strong opinions by now about the man."

"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a man of that type to be the pure-eyed patriot. But neither you nor I can deny that he has done some good service. Am I asked to take him to my bosom? Not at all! He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me. I like the job, and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a bit of decent work."

"You—use Harry Wharton!" said the cripple, with a sarcasm that brought the colour to Louis's thin cheek and made Marcella angrier than before. She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill-will. It was natural enough, that a man of Anthony Craven's type—poor, unsuccessful, and embittered—should dislike a popular victorious personality.

"Suppose we leave Mr. Wharton alone?" she said with emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself back in his chair, and was silent.

It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men, especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a mere impotent bitterness. While Louis had renounced his art, and devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle, Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design. Yet he was probably the more fierce Venturist and anticapitalist of the two. Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony a counsel of despair. He loathed wealth more passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in his kind. Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot.

In the few talks that he had had with Marcella since she left the hospital, she had allowed him to gather more or less clearly—though with hardly a mention of Aldous Raeburn's name—what had happened to her at Mellor. Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it a fit food for a caustic temper. Poor devil—the lover! To fall a victim to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard. And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of it. At any rate he believed in her no more than before. But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate. He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years' interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.

After watching his three companions for a while, he broke in upon their chat with an abrupt—

"What is this job, Louis?"

"I told you. I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."

"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are too strong. I had a talk with Denny yesterday."

The Denny he meant, however, was not Wharton's colleague in the House, but his son—a young man who, beginning life as the heir of one of the most stiff-backed and autocratic of capitalists, had developed socialist opinions, renounced his father's allowance, and was now a member of the "intellectual proletariat," as they have been called, the free-lances of the Collectivist movement. He had lately joined the Venturists. Anthony had taken a fancy to him. Louis as yet knew little or nothing of him.

"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I don't know. I think the Clarion can do something. The press grows more and more powerful in these things."

And he repeated some of the statements that Wharton had made—that Wharton always did make, in talking of the Clarion—as to its growth under his hands, and increasing influence in Labour disputes.

"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum! My own belief is that the Clarion is a rotten property, and that he knows it!"

At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out. Extravagance after a certain point becomes amusing. They dropped their vexation, and Anthony for the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious person whom one humours but does not argue with. He accepted the part, saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing from one to the other.

However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell. It was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and her pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the right to be rude.

"How are you getting on?" he said to her abruptly as he dropped her hand.

"Oh, very well! my superintendent leaves me almost alone now, which is a compliment. There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good woman,' and a sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice. Those are my chief grievances, I think."

"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"

She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her say:—

"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."

He laughed.

"How like a woman! A few ill-housed villagers made you a democrat. A few well-paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class. Your people were wise to let you take this work."

"Do you suppose I nurse none but well-paid artisans?" she asked him, mocking. "And I didn't say 'money' or 'comfort,' did I? but 'happiness.' As for my 'democracy,' you are not perhaps the best judge."

She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of storm in her great eyes.

"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.

"Because I have every right to be! I joined a society, pledged to work 'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what poor work I can in that spirit."

"You are not a Socialist. Half the things you say, or imply, show it. And we are Socialists."

She hesitated, looking at him steadily.

"No!—so far as Socialism means a political system—the trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it—I find myself slipping away from it more and more. No!—as I go about among these wage-earners, the emphasis—do what I will—comes to lie less and less on possession—more and more on character. I go to two tenements in the same building. One is Hell—the other Heaven. Why? Both belong to well-paid artisans with equal opportunities. Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and pleasant life of it. But one is a man—the other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond. That is not all, I know—oh! don't trouble to tell me so!—but it is more than I thought. No!—my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the Socialists that I know here—saving your presence! but—with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation! and get all the abuse from all sides."

Anthony laughed scornfully.

"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers."

"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the thought of many days finding defiant expression—"it seems to me like all other interesting and important things—destined to help something else! Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods—it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state. The Crusades—they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord!—what they did was to increase trade and knowledge. And so with Socialism. It talks of a new order—what it will do is to help to make the old sound!"

Anthony clapped her ironically.

"Excellent! When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold of you—ask me to come and hear!"

Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in his blinking eyes. He really had a contempt for what a handsome half-taught girl of twenty-three might think. Anthony only pretended or desired to have it.

Nevertheless, Louis said good-bye to his hostess with real, and, for him, rare effusion. Two years before, for the space of some months, he had been in love with her. That she had never responded with anything warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed him wholly. But there was a deep and gentle chivalry at the bottom of all his stern social faiths; and the woman towards whom he had once felt as he had towards Marcella Boyce could never lose the glamour lent her by that moment of passionate youth. And now, so kindly, so eagerly!—she had given him his Anna.

When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment to think. Her wrath with Anthony was soon dismissed. But Louis's thanks had filled her with delicious pleasure. Her cheek, her eye had a child's brightness. The old passion for ruling and influencing was all alive and happy.

"I will see it is all right," she was saying to herself. "I will look after them."

What she meant was, "I will see that Mr. Wharton looks after them!" and through the link of thought, memory flew quickly back to that tete-a-tete with him which had preceded the Cravens' arrival.

How changed he was, yet how much the same! He had not sat beside her for ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of the other. She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious claim to confidence, to intimacy—on the other hand a new atmosphere, a new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties of power, a great position—everything fitted to touch such an imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was noble, both in quality and range. The brow beneath the bright chestnut curls had gained lines that pleased her—lines that a woman marks, because she thinks they mean experience an I mastery.

Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was pleasure; so too was his new connection with her old friends. And a pleasure which took nothing from self-respect; which was open, honourable, eager. As for that ugly folly of the past, she frowned at the thought of it, only to thrust the remembrance passionately away. That he should remember or allude to it, would put an end to friendship. Otherwise friends they would and should be; and the personal interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and suffering. Why not? Such equal friendships between men and women grow more possible every day. While, as for Hallin's distrust, and Anthony Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either of them? Could any one suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's would be congenial to Hallin or to Craven—or—to yet another person, of whom she did not want to think? Besides, who wished to make a hero of him? It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made its force.

* * * * *

So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who came to clear away the tea.

"Why, it is close on the half-hour!" cried Marcella, springing up. "Where are my things?"

She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.

Suddenly—the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the tea—by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on Hallin's table flashed into her mind—its look—the grizzled hair. With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her—a dumb gesture of contrition and of grief.

She!—she talk of social reform and "character," she give her opinion, as of right, on points of speculation and of ethics, she, whose main achievement so far had been to make a good man suffer! Something belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self-conceit. Quietly, with downcast eyes, she went her way.



CHAPTER VII.

Her first case was in Brown's Buildings itself—a woman suffering from bronchitis and heart complaint, and tormented besides by an ulcerated foot which Marcella had now dressed daily for some weeks. She lived on the top floor of one of the easterly blocks, with two daughters and a son of eighteen.

When Marcella entered the little room it was as usual spotlessly clean and smelt of flowers. The windows were open, and a young woman was busy shirt-ironing on a table in the centre of the room. Both she and her mother looked up with smiles as Marcella entered. Then, they introduced her with some ceremony to a "lady," who was sitting beside the patient, a long-faced melancholy woman employed at the moment in marking linen handkerchiefs, which she did with extraordinary fineness and delicacy. The patient and her daughter spoke of Marcella to their friend as "the young person," but all with a natural courtesy and charm that could not have been surpassed.

Marcella knelt to undo the wrappings of the foot. The woman, a pale transparent creature, winced painfully as the dressing was drawn off; but between each half stifled moan of pain she said something eager and grateful to her nurse. "I never knew any one, Nurse, do it as gentle as you—" or—"I do take it kind of you, Nurse, to do it so slow—oh! there were a young person before you—" or "hasn't she got nice hands, Mrs. Burton? they don't never seem to jar yer."

"Poor foot! but I think it is looking better," said Marcella, getting up at last from her work, when all was clean and comfortable and she had replaced the foot on the upturned wooden box that supported it—for its owner was not in bed, but sitting propped up in an old armchair. "And how is your cough, Mrs. Jervis?"

"Oh! it's very bad, nights," said Mrs. Jervis, mildly—"disturbs Emily dreadful. But I always pray every night, when she lifts me into bed, as I may be took before the morning, an' God ull do it soon."

"Mother!" cried Emily, pausing in her ironing, "you know you oughtn't to say them things."

Mrs. Jervis looked at her with a sly cheerfulness. Her emaciated face was paler than usual because of the pain of the dressing, but from the frail form there breathed an indomitable air of life, a gay courage indeed which had already struck Marcella with wonder.

"Well, yer not to take 'em to heart, Em'ly. It ull be when it will be—for the Lord likes us to pray, but He'll take his own time—an' she's got troubles enough of her own, Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off her ring?"

Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over, and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.

"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last two days," she said with low vehemence—"as I'm never goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn me!"

Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the brutal ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen, had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from his earnings enough to teach Emily "the shirt-ironing," denying himself every indulgence till her training was over.

Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back; her earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease; while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness and care.

Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's speech.

"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that held down the shirt on the board.

Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's eyes glowed with things unsaid and inexpressible—the "eternal passion, eternal pain," which in half the human race have no voice.

"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband," said Mrs. Jervis, in her delicate thoughtful voice—"a very uncultivated man."

Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them apparently to express what had to be said.

"It's a sad thing is want of edication," Mrs. Jervis went on in the same tone. "Now there's that lady there"—with a little courtly wave of her hand towards Mrs. Burton—"she can't read yer know, Nurse, and I'm that sorry for her! But I've been reading to her, an' Emily—just while my cough's quiet—one of my ole tracks."

She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use. It was called "A Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?" Marcella looked at it in respectful silence as she put on her cloak. Such things were not in her line.

"I do love a track!" said Mrs. Jervis, pensively. "That's why I don't like these buildings so well as them others, Em'ly. Here you never get no tracks; and there, what with one person and another, there was a new one most weeks. But"—her voice dropped, and she looked timidly first at her friend, and then at Marcella—"she isn't a Christian, Nurse. Isn't it sad?"

Mrs. Burton, a woman of a rich mahogany complexion, with a black "front," and a mouth which turned down decisively at the corners, looked up from her embroidery with severe composure.

"No, Nurse, I'm not a Christian," she said in the tone of one stating a disagreeable fact for which they are noways responsible. "My brother is—and my sisters—real good Christian people. One of my sisters married a gentleman up in Wales. She 'as two servants, an' fam'ly prayers reg'lar. But I've never felt no 'call,' and I tell 'em I can't purtend. An' Mrs. Jervis here, she don't seem to make me see it no different."

She held her head erect, however, as though the unusually high sense of probity involved, was, after all, some consolation. Mrs. Jervis looked at her with pathetic eyes. But Emily coloured hotly. Emily was a churchwoman.

"Of course you're a Christian, Mrs. Burton," she said indignantly. "What she means, Nurse, is she isn't a 'member' of any chapel, like mother. But she's been baptised and confirmed, for I asked her. And of course she's a Christian."

"Em'ly!" said Mrs. Jervis, with energy.

Emily looked round trembling. The delicate invalid was sitting bolt upright, her eyes sparkling, a spot of red on either hollow cheek. The glances of the two women crossed; there seemed to be a mute struggle between them. Then Emily laid down her iron, stepped quickly across to her mother, and kneeling beside her, threw her arms around her.

"Have it your own way, mother," she said, while her lip quivered; "I wasn't a-goin' to cross you."

Mrs. Jervis laid her waxen cheek against her daughter's tangle of brown hair with a faint smile, while her breathing, which had grown quick and panting, gradually subsided. Emily looked up at Marcella with a terrified self-reproach. They all knew that any sudden excitement might kill out the struggling flame of life.

"You ought to rest a little, Mrs. Jervis," said Marcella, with gentle authority. "You know the dressing must tire you, though you won't confess it. Let me put you comfortable. There; aren't the pillows easier so? Now rest—and good-bye."

But Mrs. Jervis held her, while Emily slipped away.

"I shall rest soon," she said significantly. "An' it hurts me when Emily talks like that. It's the only thing that ever comes atween us. She thinks o' forms an' ceremonies; an' I think o' grace."

Her old woman's eyes, so clear and vivid under the blanched brow, searched Marcella's face for sympathy. But Marcella stood, shy and wondering in the presence of words and emotions she understood so little. So narrow a life, in these poor rooms, under these crippling conditions of disease!—and all this preoccupation with, this passion over, the things not of the flesh, the thwarted, cabined flesh, but of the spirit—wonderful!

* * * * *

On coming out from Brown's Buildings, she turned her steps reluctantly towards a street some distance from her own immediate neighbourhood, where she had a visit to pay which filled her with repulsion and an unusual sense of helplessness. A clergyman who often availed himself of the help of the St. Martin's nurses had asked the superintendent to undertake for him "a difficult case." Would one of their nurses go regularly to visit a certain house, ostensibly for the sake of a little boy of five just come back from the hospital, who required care at home for a while, really for the sake of his young mother, who had suddenly developed drinking habits and was on the road to ruin?

Marcella happened to be in the office when the letter arrived. She somewhat unwillingly accepted the task, and she had now paid two or three visits, always dressing the child's sore leg, and endeavouring to make acquaintance with the mother. But in this last attempt she had not had much success. Mrs. Vincent was young and pretty, with a flighty, restless manner. She was always perfectly civil to Marcella, and grateful to her apparently for the ease she gave the boy. But she offered no confidences; the rooms she and her husband occupied showed them to be well-to-do; Marcella had so far found them well-kept; and though the evil she was sent to investigate was said to be notorious, she had as yet discovered nothing of it for herself. It seemed to her that she must be either stupid, or that there must be something about her which made Mrs. Vincent more secretive with her than with others; and neither alternative pleased her.

To-day, however, as she stopped at the Vincents' door, she noticed that the doorstep, which was as a rule shining white, was muddy and neglected. Then nobody came to open, though she knocked and rang repeatedly. At last a neighbour, who had been watching the strange nurse through her own parlour window, came out to the street.

"I think, miss," she said, with an air of polite mystery, "as you'd better walk in. Mrs. Vincent 'asn't been enjyin' very good 'ealth this last few days."

Marcella turned the handle, found it yielded, and went in. It was after six o'clock, and the evening sun streamed in through a door at the back of the house. But in the Vincents' front parlour the blinds were all pulled down, and the only sound to be heard was the fretful wailing of a child. Marcella timidly opened the sitting-room door.

The room at first seemed to her dark. Then she perceived Mrs. Vincent sitting by the grate, and the two children on the floor beside her. The elder, the little invalid, was simply staring at his mother in a wretched silence; but the younger, the baby of three, was restlessly throwing himself hither and thither, now pulling at the woman's skirts, now crying lustily, now whining in a hungry voice, for "Mama! din-din! Mama! din-din!"

Mrs. Vincent neither moved nor spoke, even when Marcella came in. She sat with her hands hanging over her lap in a desolation incapable of words. She was dirty and unkempt; the room was covered with litter; the breakfast things were still on the table; and the children were evidently starving.

Marcella, seized with pity, and divining what had happened, tried to rouse and comfort her. But she got no answer. Then she asked for matches. Mrs. Vincent made a mechanical effort to find them, but subsided helpless with a shake of the head. At last Marcella found them herself, lit a tire of some sticks she discovered in a cupboard, and put on the kettle. Then she cut a slice of bread and dripping for each of the children—the only eatables she could find—and after she had dressed Bertie's leg she began to wash up the tea things and tidy the room, not knowing very well what to be at, but hoping minute by minute to get Mrs. Vincent to speak to her.

In the midst of her labours, an elderly woman cautiously opened the door and beckoned to her.

Marcella went out into the passage.

"I'm her mother, miss! I 'eered you were 'ere, an' I follered yer. Oh! such a business as we 'ad, 'er 'usband an' me, a gettin' of 'er 'ome last night. There's a neighbour come to me, an' she says: 'Mrs. Lucas, there's your daughter a drinkin' in that public 'ouse, an' if I was you I'd go and fetch her out; for she's got a lot o' money, an' she's treatin' everybody all round.' An' Charlie—that's 'er 'usband—ee come along too, an' between us we got holt on her. An' iver sence we brought her 'ome last night, she set there in that cheer, an' niver a word to nobody! Not to me 't any rate, nor the chillen. I believe 'er 'usband an' 'er 'ad words this mornin'. But she won't tell me nothin'. She sits there—just heart-broke"—the woman put up her apron to her eyes and began crying. "She ain't eatin' nothink all day, an' I dursen't leave the 'ouse out o' me sight—I lives close by, miss—for fear of 'er doing 'erself a mischief."

"How long has she been like this?" said Marcella, drawing the door cautiously to behind her.

"About fourteen month," said the woman, hopelessly. "An' none of us knows why. She was such a neat, pretty girl when she married 'im—an' ee such a steady fellow. An' I've done my best. I've talked to 'er, an' I've 'id 'er 'at an' her walking things, an' taken 'er money out of 'er pockets. An', bless yer, she's been all right now for seven weeks—till last night. Oh, deary, deary, me! whatever 'ull become o' them—'er, an' 'im, an' the children!"

The tears coursed down the mother's wrinkled face.

"Leave her to me a little longer," said Marcella, softly; "but come back to me in about half an hour, and don't let her be alone."

The woman nodded, and went away.

Mrs. Vincent turned quickly round as Marcella came back again, and spoke for the first time:

"That was my mother you were talkin' to?"

"Yes," said Marcella, quietly, as she took the kettle off the fire. "Now I do want you to have a cup of tea, Mrs. Vincent. Will you, if I make it?"

The poor creature did not speak, but she followed Marcella's movements with her weary eyes. At last when Marcella knelt down beside her holding out a cup of tea and some bread and butter, she gave a sudden cry. Marcella hastily put down what she carried, lest it should be knocked out of her hand.

"He struck me this morning!—Charlie did—the first time in seven years. Look here!"

She pulled up her sleeve, and on her white, delicate arm she showed a large bruise. As she pointed to it her eyes filled with miserable tears; her lips quivered; anguish breathed in every feature. Yet even in this abasement Marcella was struck once more with her slim prettiness, her refined air. This woman drinking and treating in a low public-house at midnight!—rescued thence by a decent husband!

She soothed her as best she could, but when she had succeeded in making the wretched soul take food, and so in putting some physical life into her, she found herself the recipient of an outburst of agony before which she quailed. The woman clung to her, moaning about her husband, about the demon instinct that had got hold of her, she hardly knew how—by means it seemed originally of a few weeks of low health and small self-indulgences—and she felt herself powerless to fight; about the wreck she had brought upon her home, the shame upon her husband, who was the respected, well-paid foreman of one of the large shops of the neighbourhood. All through it came back to him.

"We had words, Nurse, this morning, when he went out to his work. He said he'd nearly died of shame last night; that he couldn't bear it no more; that he'd take the children from me. And I was all queer in the head still, and I sauced him—and then—he looked like a devil—and he took me by the arm—and threw me down—as if I'd been a sack. An' he never, never,—touched me—before—in all his life. An' he's never come in all day. An' perhaps I shan't ever see him again. An' last time—but it wasn't so bad as this—he said he'd try an' love me again if I'd behave. An' he did try—and I tried too. But now it's no good, an' perhaps he'll not come back. Oh, what shall I do? what shall I do!" she flung her arms above her head. "Won't anybody find him? won't anybody help me?"

She dropped a hand upon Marcella's arm, clutching it, her wild eyes seeking her companion's.

But at the same moment, with the very extremity of her own emotion, a cloud of impotence fell upon Marcella. She suddenly felt that she could do nothing—that there was nothing in her adequate to such an appeal—nothing strong enough to lift the weight of a human life thus flung upon her.

She was struck with a dryness, a numbness, that appalled her. She tried still to soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, but with no efficacy—no power.

At last Mrs. Vincent sank into miserable quiet again. The mother came in, and silently began to put the children to bed. Marcella pressed the wife's cold hand, and went out hanging her head. She had just reached the door when it opened, and a man entered. A thrill passed through her at the sight of his honest, haggard face, and this time she found what to say.

"I have been sitting by your wife, Mr. Vincent. She is very ill and miserable, and very penitent. You will be kind to her?"

The husband looked at her, and then turned away.

"God help us!" he said; and Marcella went without another word, and with that same wild, unaccustomed impulse of prayer rilling her being which had first stirred in her at Mellor at the awful moment of Hurd's death.

* * * * *

She was very silent and distracted at tea, and afterwards—saying that she must write some letters and reports—she shut herself up, and bade good-night to Minta and the children.

But she did not write or read. She hung at the window a long time, watching the stars come out, as the summer light died from the sky, and even the walls and roofs and chimneys of this interminable London spread out before her took a certain dim beauty. And then, slipping down on the floor, with her head against a chair—an attitude of her stormy childhood—she wept with an abandonment and a passion she had not known for years. She thought of Mrs. Jervis—the saint—so near to death, so satisfied with "grace," so steeped in the heavenly life; then of the poor sinner she had just left and of the agony she had no power to stay. Both experiences had this in common—that each had had some part in plunging her deeper into this darkness of self-contempt.

What had come to her? Daring the past weeks there had been something wrestling in her—some new birth—some "conviction of sin," as Mrs. Jervis would have said. As she looked back over all her strenuous youth she hated it. What was wrong with her? Her own word to Anthony Craven returned upon her, mocked her—made now a scourge for her own pride, not a mere, measure of blame for others. Aldous Raeburn, her father and mother, her poor—one and all rose against her—plucked at her—reproached her. "Aye! what, indeed, are wealth and poverty?" cried a voice, which was the voice of them all; "what are opinions—what is influence, beauty, cleverness?—what is anything worth but character—but soul?"

And character—soul—can only be got by self-surrender; and self-surrender comes not of knowledge but of love.

A number of thoughts and phrases, hitherto of little meaning to her, floated into her mind—sank and pressed there. That strange word "grace" for instance!

A year ago it would not have smitten or troubled her. After her first inevitable reaction against the evangelical training of her school years, the rebellious cleverness of youth had easily decided that religion was played out, that Socialism and Science were enough for mankind.

But nobody could live in hospital—nobody could go among the poor—nobody could share the thoughts and hopes of people like Edward Hallin and his sister, without understanding that it is still here in the world—this "grace" that "sustaineth"—however variously interpreted, still living and working, as it worked of old, among the little Galilean towns, in Jerusalem, in Corinth. To Edward Hallin it did not mean the same, perhaps, as it meant to the hard-worked clergymen she knew, or to Mrs. Jervis. But to all it meant the motive power of life—something subduing, transforming, delivering—something that to-night she envied with a passion and a yearning that amazed herself.

How many things she craved, as an eager child craves them! First some moral change, she knew not what—then Aldous Raeburn's pardon and friendship—then and above all, the power to lose herself—the power to love.

Dangerous significant moment in a woman's life—moment at once of despair and of illusion!



CHAPTER VIII.

Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him, and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon; questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there, and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that he might verify a quotation.

An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar House-of-Commons acquaintance.

"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.

Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.

"Not particularly."

"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.

Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.

When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for pleasure—their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way. What had he been about all this time? Forget?—such a creature? Why, it was the merest wantonness! As if such women—with such a brow, such vitality, such a gait—passed in every street!

What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to recover the old intimacy—and as to what might come out of it, let the gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.

As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much her metier as it was the metier of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and live democracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. Il ne faut pas sortir de son caractere.

The sight of Bennett approaching distracted him.

Bennett's good face showed obvious vexation.

"He sticks to it," he said, as Wharton jumped up to meet him. "Talks of his conscience—and a lot of windy stuff. He seems to have arranged it with the Whips. I dare say he won't do much harm."

"Except to himself," said Wharton, with dry bitterness. "Goodness! let's leave him alone!"

He and Bennett lingered a few minutes discussing points of tactics. Wilkins had, of course, once more declared himself the enfant terrible of a party which, though still undefined, was drawing nearer day by day to organised existence and separate leadership. The effect of to-night's debate might be of far-reaching importance. Wharton's Resolution, pledging the House to a Legal Eight Hours' Day for all trades, came at the end of a long and varied agitation, was at the moment in clear practical relation to labour movements all over the country, and had in fact gained greatly in significance and interest since it was first heard of in public, owing to events of current history. Workable proposals—a moderate tone—and the appearance, at any rate, of harmony and a united front among the representatives of labour—if so much at least could be attained to-night, both Wharton and Bennett believed that not only the cause itself, but the importance of the Labour party in the House would be found to have gained enormously.

"I hope I shall get my turn before dinner," said Bennett, as he was going; "I want badly to get off for an hour or so. The division won't be till half-past ten at earliest."

Wharton stood for a moment in a brown study, with his hands in his pockets, after Bennett left him. It was by no means wholly clear to him what line Bennett would take—with regard to one or two points. After a long acquaintance with the little man, Wharton was not always, nor indeed generally, at his ease with him. Bennett had curious reserves. As to his hour off, Wharton felt tolerably certain that he meant to go and hear a famous Revivalist preacher hold forth at a public hall not far from the House. The streets were full of placards.

Well!—to every man his own excitements! What time? He looked first at his watch, then at the marked question paper Bennett had left behind him. The next minute he was hurrying along passages and stairs, with his springing, boyish step, to the Ladies' Gallery.

The magnificent doorkeeper saluted him with particular deference. Wharton was in general a favourite with officials.

"The two ladies are come, sir. You'll find them in the front—oh! not very full yet, sir—will be directly."

Wharton drew aside the curtain of the Gallery, and looked in. Yes!—there was the dark head bent forward, pressed indeed against the grating which closes the front of the den into which the House of Commons puts its ladies—as though its owner were already absorbed in what was passing before her.

She looked up with an eager start, as she heard his voice in her ear.

"Oh! now, come and tell us everything—and who everybody is. Why don't we see the Speaker?—and which is the Government side?—oh, yes, I see. And who's this speaking now?"

"Why, I thought you knew everything," said Wharton as, with a greeting to Miss Craven, he slipped in beside them and took a still vacant chair for an instant. "How shall I instruct a Speaker's great-niece?"

"Why, of course I feel as if the place belonged to me!" said Marcella, impatiently; "but that somehow doesn't seem to help me to people's names. Where's Mr. Gladstone? Oh, I see. Look, look, Edith!—he's just come in!—oh, don't be so superior, though you have been here before—you couldn't tell me heaps of people!"

Her voice had a note of joyous excitement like a child's.

"That's because I'm short-sighted," said Edith Craven, calmly; "but it's no reason why you should show me Mr. Gladstone."

"Oh, my dear, my dear!—do be quiet! Now, Mr. Wharton, where are the Irishmen? Oh! I wish we could have an Irish row! And where do you sit?—I see—and there's Mr. Bennett—and that black-faced man, Mr. Wilkins, I met at the Hallins—you don't like him, do you?" she said, drawing back and looking at him sharply.

"Who? Wilkins? Perhaps you'd better ask me that question later on!" said Wharton, with a twist of the lip; "he's going to do his best to make a fool of himself and us to-night—we shall see! It's kind of you to wish us an Irish row!—considering that if I miss my chance to-night I shall never get another!"

"Then for heaven's sake don't let's wish it!" she said decidedly. "Oh, that's the Irish Secretary answering now, is it?"—a pause—"Dear me, how civil everybody is. I don't think this is a good place for a Democrat, Mr. Wharton—I find myself terribly in love with the Government. But who's that?"

She craned her neck. Wharton was silent. The next instant she drew hurriedly back.

"I didn't see," she murmured; "it's so confusing."

A tall man had risen from the end of the Government bench, and was giving an answer connected with the Home Secretary's department. For the first time since their parting in the Mellor drawing-room Marcella saw Aldous Raeburn.

She fell very silent, and leant back in her chair. Yet Wharton's quick glance perceived that she both looked and listened intently, so long as the somewhat high-pitched voice was speaking.

"He does those things very well," he said carelessly, judging it best to take the bull by the horns. "Never a word too much—they don't get any change out of him. Do you see that old fellow in the white beard under the gallery? He is one of the chartered bores. When he gets up to-night the House will dine. I shall come up and look for you, and hand you over to a friend if I may—a Staffordshire member, who has his wife here—Mrs. Lane. I have engaged a table, and I can start with you. Unfortunately I mustn't be long out of the House, as it's my motion; but they will look after you."

The girls glanced a little shyly at each other. Nothing had been said about dining; but Wharton took it for granted; and they yielded. It was Marcella's "day off," and she was a free woman.

"Good-bye, then," he said, getting up. "I shall be on in about twenty minutes. Wish me well through!"

Marcella looked round and smiled. But her vivacity had been quenched for the moment; and Wharton departed not quite so well heartened for the fray as he could have wished to be. It was hard luck that the Raeburn ghost should walk this particular evening.

Marcella bent forward again when he had gone, and remained for long silent, looking down into the rapidly filling House. Aldous Raeburn was lying back on the Treasury bench, his face upturned. She knew very well that it was impossible he should see her; yet every now and then she shrank a little away as though he must. The face looked to her older and singularly blanched; but she supposed that must be the effect of the light; for she noticed the same pallor in many others.

"All that my life can do to pour good measure—down—running over—into yours, I vowed you then!"

The words stole into her memory, throbbing there like points of pain. Was it indeed this man under her eyes—so listless, so unconscious—who had said them to her with a passion of devotion it shamed her to think of.

And now—never so much as an ordinary word of friendship between them again? "On the broad seas of life enisled"—separate, estranged, for ever? It was like the touch of death—the experience brought with it such a chill—such a sense of irreparable fact, of limitations never to be broken through.

Then she braced herself. The "things that are behind" must be left. To have married him after all would have been the greatest wrong. Nor, in one sense, was what she had done irreparable. She chose to believe Frank Leven, rather than Edward Hallin. Of course he must and should marry! It was absurd to suppose that he should not. No one had a stronger sense of family than he. And as for the girl—the little dancing, flirting girl!—why the thing happened every day. His wife should not be too strenuous, taken up with problems and questions of her own. She should cheer, amuse, distract him. Marcella endeavoured to think of it all with the dry common-sense her mother would have applied to it. One thing at least was clear to her—the curious recognition that never before had she considered Aldous Raeburn, in and for himself, as an independent human being.

"He was just a piece of furniture in my play last year," she said to herself with a pang of frank remorse. "He was well quit of me!"

But she was beginning to recover her spirits, and when at last Raeburn, after a few words with a minister who had just arrived, disappeared suddenly behind the Speaker's chair, the spectacle below her seized her with the same fascination as before.

The House was filling rapidly. Questions were nearly over, and the speech of the evening, on which considerable public expectation both inside and outside Parliament had been for some time concentrated, was fast approaching. Peers were straggling into the gallery; the reporters were changing just below her: and some "crack hands" among them, who had been lounging till now, were beginning to pay attention and put their paper in order. The Irish benches, the Opposition, the Government—all were full, and there was a large group of members round the door.

"There he is!" cried Marcella, involuntarily, with a pulse of excitement, as Wharton's light young figure made its way through the crowd. He sat down on a corner seat below the gangway and put on his hat.

In five minutes more he was on his feet, speaking to an attentive and crowded House in a voice—clear, a little hard, but capable of the most accomplished and subtle variety—which for the first moment sent a shudder of memory through Marcella.

Then she found herself listening with as much trepidation and anxiety as though some personal interest and reputation depended for her, too, on the success of the speech. Her mind was first invaded by a strong, an irritable sense of the difficulty of the audience. How was it possible for any one, unless he had been trained to it for years, to make any effect upon such a crowd!—so irresponsive, individualist, unfused—so lacking, as it seemed to the raw spectator, in the qualities and excitements that properly belong to multitude! Half the men down below, under their hats, seemed to her asleep; the rest indifferent. And were those languid, indistinguishable murmurs what the newspapers call "cheers"?