'I couldn't resist it.

'"Don't listen to him, Miss Bretherton," I cried. "If I were you I wouldn't let him spoil your pleasure; the great thing is to feel; defend your feeling against him! It's worth more than his criticisms."

'Forbes's eyes looked laughing daggers at me from under his shaggy white brows. Mrs. Stuart and Wallace kept their countenances to perfection; but I had him, there's no denying it.

'"Oh, I know nothing about it," said Isabel Bretherton, divinely unconscious of the little skirmish going on around her. "You must teach me, Mr. Forbes. I only know what touches me, what I like—that's all I know in anything."

'"It's all we any of us know," said Wallace airily. "We begin with 'I like' and 'I don't like,' then we begin to be proud, and make distinctions and find reasons; but the thing beats us, and we come back in the end to 'I like' and 'I don't like.'"

'The lunch over, we strolled out along the common, through heather which as yet was a mere brown expanse of flowerless undergrowth, and copses which overhead were a canopy of golden oak-leaf, and carpeted underneath with primroses and the young up-curling bracken. Presently through a little wood we came upon a pond lying wide and blue before us under the breezy May sky, its shores fringed with scented fir-wood and the whole air alive with birds. We sat down under a pile of logs fresh-cut and fragrant, and talked away vigorously. It was a little difficult often to keep the conversation on lines which did not exclude Miss Bretherton. Forbes, the Stuarts, Wallace, and I are accustomed to be together, and one never realises what a freemasonry the intercourse even of a capital is until one tries to introduce an outsider into it. We talked the theatre, of course, the ways of different actors, the fortunes of managers. Isabel Bretherton naturally has as yet seen very little; her comments were mainly personal, and all of a friendly, enthusiastic kind, for the profession has been very cordial to her. A month or five weeks more and her engagement at the Calliope will be over. There are other theatres open to her, of course, and all the managers are at her feet; but she has set her heart upon going abroad for some time, and has, I imagine, made so much money this season that the family cannot in decency object to her having her own way. "I am wild to get to Italy," she said to me in her emphatic, impetuous way. "Sir Walter Rutherford has talked to me so much about it that I am beginning to dream of it. I long to have done with London and be off! This English sun seems to me so chilly," and she drew her winter cloak about her with a little shiver, although the day was really an English summer day, and Mrs. Stuart was in cotton. "I come from such warmth, and I loved it. I have been making acquaintance with all sorts of horrors since I came to London—face-ache and rheumatism and colds!—I scarcely knew there were such things in the world. And I never knew what it was to be tired before. Sometimes I can hardly drag through my work. I hate it so: it makes me cross like a naughty child!"

'"Do you know," I said, flinging myself down beside her on the grass and looking up at her, "that it's altogether wrong? Nature never meant you to feel tired; it's monstrous, it's against the natural order of things!"

'"It's London," she said, with her little sigh and the drooping lip that is so prettily pathetic. "I have the roar in my ears all day, and it seems to be humming through my sleep at night. And then the crowd, and the hurry people are in, and the quickness and sharpness of things! But I have only a few weeks more," she added, brightening, "and then by October I shall be more used to Europe—the climate and the life."

'I am much impressed, and so is Mrs. Stuart, by the struggle her nervous strength is making against London. All my nursing of you, Marie, and of our mother has taught me to notice these things in women, and I find myself taking often a very physical and medical view of Miss Bretherton. You see, it is a case of a northern temperament and constitution relaxed by tropical conditions, and then exposed once more in an exceptional degree to the strain and stress of northern life. I rage when I think of such a piece of physical excellence marred and dimmed by our harsh English struggle. And all for what? For a commonplace, make-believe art, vulgarising in the long run both to the artist and the public! There is a sense of tragic waste about it. Suppose London destroys her health—there are some signs of it—what a futile, ironical pathos there would be in it. I long to step in, to "have at" somebody, to stop it.

'A little incident later on threw a curious light upon her. We had moved on to the other side of the pond and were basking in the fir-wood. The afternoon sun was slanting through the branches on to the bosom of the pond; a splendid Scotch fir just beside us tossed out its red-limbed branches over a great bed of green reeds, starred here and there with yellow irises. The woman from the keeper's cottage near had brought us out some tea, and most of us had fallen into a sybaritic frame of mind in which talk seemed to be a burden on the silence and easeful peace of the scene. Suddenly Wallace and Forbes fell upon the question of Balzac, of whom Wallace has been making a study lately, and were soon landed in a discussion of Balzac's method of character-drawing. Are Eugene de Rastignac, le Pere Goriot, and old Grandet real beings or mere incarnations of qualities, mathematical deductions from a given point? At last I was drawn in, and the Stuarts: Stuart has trained his wife in Balzac, and she has a dry original way of judging a novel, which is stimulating and keeps the ball rolling. It was the first time that the talk had not centred in one way or another round Miss Bretherton, who, of course, was the first consideration throughout the day in all our minds. We grew vehement and forgetful, till at last a little movement of hers diverted the general current. She had taken off her hat and was leaning back against the oak under which she sat, watching with parted lips and a gaze of the purest delight and wonder the movements of a nut-hatch overhead, a creature of the woodpecker kind, with delicate purple gray plumage, who was tapping the branch above her for insects with his large disproportionate bill, and then skimming along to a sand-bank a little distance off, where he disappeared with his prey into his nest.

'"Ha!" said Wallace, who is a bird-lover, "a truce to Balzac, and let us watch those nut-hatches! Miss Bretherton's quite right to prefer them to French novels."

'"French novels!" she said, withdrawing her eyes from the branch above her, and frowning a little at Wallace as she spoke. "Please don't expect me to talk about them—I know nothing about them—I have never wished to."

'Her voice had a tone almost of hauteur in it. I have noticed it before. It is the tone of the famous actress accustomed to believe in herself and her own opinion. I connected it, too, with all one hears of her determination to look upon herself as charged with a mission for the reform of stage morals. French novels and French actresses! apparently she regards them all as so many unknown horrors, standing in the way of the purification of dramatic art by a beautiful young person with a high standard of duty. It is very odd! Evidently she is the Scotch Presbyterian's daughter still, for all her profession, and her success, and her easy ways with the Sabbath! Her remark produced a good deal of unregenerate irritation in me. If she were a first-rate artist to begin with, I was inclined to reflect, this moral enthusiasm would touch and charm one a good deal more; as it is, considering her position, it is rather putting the cart before the horse. But, of course, one can understand that it is just these traits in her that help her to make the impression she does on London society and the orthodox public in general.

'Wallace and I went off after the nut-hatches, enjoying a private laugh by the way over Mrs. Stuart's little look of amazement and discomfort as Miss Bretherton delivered herself. When we came back we found Forbes sketching her—she sitting rather flushed and silent under the tree, and he drawing away and working himself at every stroke into a greater and greater enthusiasm. And certainly she was as beautiful as a dream, sitting against that tree, with the brown heather about her and the young oak-leaves overhead. But I returned in an antagonistic frame of mind, a little out of patience with her and her beauty, and wondering why Nature always blunders somewhere!

'However, on the way home she had another and a pleasanter surprise for me. A carriage was waiting for us on the main road, and we strolled towards it through the gorse and the trees and the rich level evening lights. I dropped behind for some primroses still lingering in bloom beside a little brook; she stayed too, and we were together, out of ear-shot of the rest.

'"Mr. Kendal," she said, looking straight at me, as I handed the flowers to her, "you may have misunderstood something just now. I don't want to pretend to what I haven't got. I don't know French, and I can't read French novels if I wished to ever so much."

'What was I to say? She stood looking at me seriously, a little proudly, having eased her conscience, as it seemed to me, at some cost to herself. I felt at first inclined to turn the thing off with a jest, but suddenly I thought to myself that I too would speak my mind.

'"Well," I said deliberately, walking on beside her; "you lose a good deal. There are hosts of French novels which I would rather not see a woman touch with the tips of her fingers; but there are others, which take one into a bigger world than we English people with our parochial ways of writing and seeing have any notion of. George Sand carries you full into the mid-European stream—you feel it flowing, you are brought into contact with all the great ideas, all the big interests; she is an education in herself. And then Balzac! he has such a range and breadth, he teaches one so much of human nature, and with such conscience, such force of representation! It's the same with their novels as with their theatre. Whatever other faults he may have, a first-rate Frenchman of the artistic sort takes more pains over his work than anybody else in the world. They don't shirk, they throw their life-blood into it, whether it's acting, or painting, or writing. You've never seen Desforets, I think?—no, of course not, and you will be gone before she comes again. What a pity!"

'Miss Bretherton picked one of my primroses ruthlessly to pieces, and flung it away from her with one of her nervous gestures. "I am not sorry," she said. "Nothing would have induced me to go and see her."

'"Indeed!" I said, waiting a little curiously for what she would say next.

'"It's not that I am jealous of her," she exclaimed, with a quick proud look at me; "not that I don't believe she's a great actress; but I can't separate her acting from what she is herself. It is women like that who bring discredit on the whole profession—it is women like that who make people think that no good woman can be an actress. I resent it, and I mean to take the other line. I want to prove, if I can, that a woman may be an actress and still be a lady, still be treated just as you treat the women you know and respect! I mean to prove that there need never be a word breathed against her, that she is anybody's equal, and that her private life is her own, and not the public's! It makes my blood boil to hear the way people—especially men—talk about Madame Desforets; there is not one of you who would let your wife or your sister shake hands with her, and yet how you rave about her, how you talk as if there were nothing in the world but genius—and French genius!"

'It struck me that I had got to something very much below the surface in Miss Bretherton. It was a curious outburst; I remembered how often her critics had compared her to Desforets, greatly to her disadvantage. Was this championship of virtue quite genuine? or was it merely the best means of defending herself against a rival by the help of British respectability?

'"Mme. Desforets," I said, perhaps a little drily, "is a riddle to her best friends, and probably to herself; she does a thousand wild, imprudent, bad things if you will, but she is the greatest actress the modern world has seen, and that's something to have done for your generation. To have moved the feelings and widened the knowledge of thousands by such delicate, such marvellous, such conscientious work as hers—there is an achievement so great, so masterly, that I for one will throw no stones at her!"

'It seemed to me all through as though I were speaking perversely; I could have argued on the other side as passionately as Isabel Bretherton herself; but I was thinking of her dialogue with the Prince, of that feeble, hysterical death-scene, and it irritated me that she, with her beauty, and with British Philistinism and British virtue to back her, should be trampling on Desforets and genius. But I was conscious of my audacity. If a certain number of critics have been plain-spoken, Isabel Bretherton has none the less been surrounded for months past with people who have impressed upon her that the modern theatre is a very doubtful business, that her acting is as good as anybody's, and that her special mission is to regenerate the manners of the stage. To have the naked, artistic view thrust upon her—that it is the actress's business to act, and that if she does that well, whatever may be her personal short-comings, her generation has cause to be grateful to her—must be repugnant to her. She, too, talks about art, but it is like a child who learns a string of long words without understanding them. She walked on beside me while I cooled down and thought what a fool I had been to endanger a friendship which had opened so well,—her wonderful lips opening once or twice as though to speak, and her quick breath coming and going as she scattered the yellow petals of the flowers far and wide with a sort of mute passion which sent a thrill through me. It was as though she could not trust herself to speak, and I waited awkwardly on Providence, wishing the others were not so far off. But suddenly the tension of her mood seemed to give way. Her smile flashed out, and she turned upon me with a sweet, eager graciousness, quite indescribable.

'"No, we won't throw stones at her! She is great, I know, but that other feeling is so strong in me. I care for my art; it seems to me grand, magnificent!—but I think I care still more for making people feel it is work a good woman can do, for holding my own in it, and asserting myself against the people who behave as if all actresses had done the things that Madame Desforets has done. Don't think me narrow and jealous. I should hate you and the Stuarts to think that of me. You have all been so kind to me—such good, real friends! I shall never forget this day—Oh! look, there is the carriage standing up there. I wish it was the morning and not the evening, and that it might all come again! I hate the thought of London and that hot theatre to-morrow night. Oh, my primroses! What a wretch I am! I've lost them nearly all. Look, just that bunch over there, Mr. Kendal, before we leave the common."

'I sprang to get them for her, and brought back a quantity. She took them in her hand—how unlike other women she is after all, in spite of her hatred of Bohemia!—and, raising them to her lips, she waved a farewell through them to the great common lying behind us in the evening sun. "How beautiful! how beautiful! This English country is so kind, so friendly! It has gone to my heart. Good-night, you wonderful place!"

'She had conquered me altogether. It was done so warmly—with such a winning, spontaneous charm. I cannot say what pleasure I got out of those primroses lying in her soft ungloved hand all the way home. Henceforward, I feel she may make what judgments and draw what lines she pleases; she won't change me, and I have some hopes of modifying her; but I am not very likely to feel annoyance towards her again. She is like some frank, beautiful, high-spirited child playing a game she only half understands. I wish she understood it better. I should like to help her to understand it—but I won't quarrel with her, even in my thoughts, any more!

* * * * *

'On looking over this letter it seems to me that if you were not you, and I were not I, you might with some plausibility accuse me of being—what?—in love with Miss Bretherton? But you know me too well. You know I am one of the old-fashioned people who believe in community of interests—in belonging to the same world. When I come coolly to think about it, I can hardly imagine two worlds, whether outwardly or inwardly, more wide apart than mine and Miss Bretherton's.'



CHAPTER V

During the three weeks which elapsed between the two expeditions of the 'Sunday League,' Kendal saw Miss Bretherton two or three times under varying circumstances. One night he took it into his head to go to the pit of the Calliope, and came away more persuaded than before that as an actress there was small prospect for her. Had she been an ordinary mortal, he thought the original stuff in her might have been disciplined into something really valuable by the common give and take, the normal rubs and difficulties of her profession. But, as it was, she had been lifted at once by the force of one natural endowment into a position which, from the artistic point of view, seemed to him hopeless. Her instantaneous success—dependent as it was on considerations wholly outside those of dramatic art—had denied her all the advantages which are to be won from struggle and from laborious and gradual conquest. And more than this, it had deprived her of an ideal; it had tended to make her take her own performance as the measure of the good and possible. For, naturally, it was too much to expect that she herself should analyse truly the sources and reasons of her popularity. She must inevitably believe that some, at least, of it was due to her dramatic talent in itself. 'Perhaps some of it is,' Kendal would answer himself. 'It is very possible that I am not quite fair to her. She has all the faults which repel me most. I could get over anything but this impression of bare blank ignorance which she makes upon me. And as things are at present, it is impossible that she should learn. It might be interesting to have the teaching of her! But it could only be done by some one with whom she came naturally into frequent contact. Nobody could thrust himself in upon her. And she seems to know very few people who could be of any use to her.'

On another occasion he came across her in the afternoon at Mrs. Stuart's. The conversation turned upon his sister, Madame de Chateauvieux, for whom Mrs. Stuart had a warm but very respectful admiration. They had met two or three times in London, and Madame de Chateauvieux's personal distinction, her refinement, her information, her sweet urbanity of manner, had made a great impression upon the lively little woman, who, from the lower level of her own more commonplace and conventional success in society, felt an awe-struck sympathy for anything so rare, so unlike the ordinary type. Her intimacy with Miss Bretherton had not gone far before the subject of 'Mr. Kendal's interesting sister' had been introduced, and on this particular afternoon, as Kendal entered her drawing-room, his ear was caught at once by the sound of Marie's name. Miss Bretherton drew him impulsively into the conversation, and he found himself describing his sister's mode of life, her interests, her world, her belongings, with a readiness such as he was not very apt to show in the public discussion of any subject connected with himself. But Isabel Bretherton's frank curiosity, her kindling eyes and sweet parted lips, and that strain of romance in her which made her so quickly responsive to anything which touched her imagination, were not easy to resist. She was delightful to his eye and sense, and he was as conscious as he had ever been of her delicate personal charm. Besides, it was pleasant to him to talk of that Parisian world, in which he was himself vitally interested, to any one so naive and fresh. Her ignorance, which on the stage had annoyed him, in private life had its particular attractiveness. And, with regard to this special subject, he was conscious of breaking down a prejudice; he felt the pleasure of conquering a great reluctance in her. Evidently on starting in London she had set herself against everything that she identified with the great Trench actress who had absorbed the theatre-going public during the previous season; not from personal jealousy, as Kendal became ultimately convinced, but from a sense of keen moral revolt against Madame Desforets's notorious position and the stories of her private life which were current in all circles. She had decided in her own mind that French art meant a tainted art, and she had shown herself very restive—Kendal had seen something of it on their Surrey expedition—under any attempts to make her share the interest which certain sections of the English cultivated public feel in foreign thought, and especially in the foreign theatre. Kendal took particular pains, when they glided off from the topic of his sister to more general matters, to make her realise some of the finer aspects of the French world of which she knew so little, and which she judged so harshly; the laborious technical training to which the dwellers on the other side of the channel submit themselves so much more readily than the English in any matter of art; the intellectual conscientiousness and refinement due to the pressure of an organised and continuous tradition, and so on. He realised that a good deal of what he said or suggested must naturally be lost upon her. But it was delightful to feel her mind yielding to his, while it stimulated her sympathy and perhaps roused her surprise to find in him every now and then a grave and unpretending response to those moral enthusiasms in herself which were too real and deep for much direct expression.

'Whenever I am next in Paris, she said to him, when she perforce rose to go, with that pretty hesitation of manner which was so attractive in her, 'would you mind—would Madame de Chateauvieux,—if I asked you to introduce me to your sister? It would be a great pleasure to me.'

Kendal made a very cordial reply, and they parted knowing more of each other than they had yet done. Not that his leading impression of her was in any way modified. Incompetent and unpromising as an artist, delightful as a woman,—had been his earliest verdict upon her, and his conviction of its reasonableness had been only deepened by subsequent experience; but perhaps the sense of delightfulness was gaining upon the sense of incompetence? After all, beauty and charm and sex have in all ages been too much for the clever people who try to reckon without them. Kendal was far too shrewd not to recognise the very natural and reasonable character of the proceeding, and not to smile at the first sign of it in his own person. Still, he meant to try, if he could, to keep the two estimates distinct, and neither to confuse himself nor other people by confounding them. It seemed to him an intellectual point of honour to keep his head perfectly cool on the subject of Miss Bretherton's artistic claims, but he was conscious that it was not always very easy to do—a consciousness that made him sometimes all the more recalcitrant under the pressure of her celebrity.

For it seemed to him that in society he heard of nothing but her—her beauty, her fascination, and her success. At every dinner-table he heard stories of her, some of them evident inventions, but all tending in the same direction—that is to say, illustrating either the girl's proud independence and her determination to be patronised by nobody, not even by royalty itself, or her lavish kind-heartedness and generosity towards the poor and the inferiors of her own profession. She was for the moment the great interest of London, and people talked of her popularity and social prestige as a sign of the times and a proof of the changed position of the theatre and of those belonging to it. Kendal thought it proved no more than that an extremely beautiful girl of irreproachable character, brought prominently before the public in any capacity whatever, is sure to stir the susceptible English heart, and that Isabel Bretherton's popularity was not one which would in the long run affect the stage at all. But he kept his reflections to himself, and in general talked about her no more than he was forced to do. He had a sort of chivalrous feeling that those whom the girl had made in any degree her personal friends ought, as far as possible, to stand between her and this inquisitive excited public. And it was plain to him that the enormous social success was not of her seeking, but of her relations.

One afternoon, between six and seven, Kendal was working alone in his room with the unusual prospect of a clear evening before him. He had finished a piece of writing, and was standing before the fire deep in thought over the first paragraphs of his next chapter, when he heard a knock; the door opened, and Wallace stood on the threshold.

'May I come in? It's a shame to disturb you; but I've really got something important to talk to you about. I want your advice badly.'

'Oh, come in, by all means. Here's some cold tea; will you have some? or will you stay and dine? I must dine early to-night for my work. I'll ring and tell Mason.'

'No, don't; I can't stay. I must be in Kensington at eight.' He threw himself into Kendal's deep reading-chair, and looked up at his friend standing silent and expectant on the hearth-rug. 'Do you remember that play of mine I showed you in the spring?'

Kendal took time to think.

'Perfectly; you mean that play by that young Italian fellow which you altered and translated? I remember it quite well. I have meant to ask you about it once or twice lately.'

'You thought well of it, I know. Well, my sister has got me into the most uncomfortable hobble about it. You know I hadn't taken it to any manager. I've been keeping it by me, working it up here and there. I am in no want of money just now, and I had set my heart on the thing's being really good—well written and well acted. Well, Agnes, in a rash moment two or three days ago, and without consulting me, told Miss Bretherton the whole story of the play, and said that she supposed I should soon want somebody to bring it out for me. Miss Bretherton was enormously struck with the plot, as Agnes told it to her, and the next time I saw her she insisted that I should read some scenes from it to her—'

'Good heavens! and now she has offered to produce it and play the principal part in it herself,' interrupted Kendal.

Wallace nodded. 'Just so; you see, my relations with her are so friendly that it was impossible for me to say no. But I never was in a greater fix. She was enthusiastic. She walked up and down the room after I'd done reading, repeating some of the passages, going through some of the situations, and wound up by saying, "Give it me, Mr. Wallace! It shall be the first thing I bring out in my October season—if you will let me have it." Well, of course, I suppose most people would jump at such an offer. Her popularity just now is something extraordinary, and I see no signs of its lessening. Any piece she plays in is bound to be a success, and I suppose I should make a good deal of money out of it; but then, you see, I don't want the money, and—'

'Yes, yes, I see,' said Kendal, thoughtfully; 'you don't want the money, and you feel that she will ruin the play. It's a great bore certainly.'

'Well, you know, how could she help ruining it? She couldn't play the part of Elvira—you remember the plot?—even decently. It's an extremely difficult part. It would be superb—I think so, at least—in the hands of an actress who really understood her business; but Miss Bretherton will make it one long stagey scream, without any modulation, any shades, any delicacy. It drives one wild to think of it. And yet how, in the name of fortune, am I to get out of it?'

'You had thought,' said Kendal, 'I remember, of Mrs. Pearson for the heroine.'

'Yes; I should have tried her. She is not first-rate, but at least she is intelligent; she understands something of what you want in a part like that. But for poor Isabel Bretherton, and those about her, the great points in the play will be that she will have long speeches and be able to wear "medieval" dresses! I don't suppose she ever heard of Aragon in her life. Just imagine her playing a high-born Spanish woman of the fifteenth century! Can't you see her?'

'Well, after all,' said Kendal, with a little laugh, 'I should see what the public goes for mostly—that is to say, Isabel Bretherton in effective costume. No, it would be a great failure—not a failure, of course, in the ordinary sense. Her beauty, the medieval get-up, and the romantic plot of the piece, would carry it through, and, as you say, you would probably make a great deal by it. But, artistically, it would be a ghastly failure. And Hawes! Hawes, I suppose, would play Macias? Good heavens!'

'Yes,' said Wallace, leaning his head on his hands and looking gloomily out of window at the spire of St. Bride's Church. 'Pleasant, isn't it? But what on earth am I to do? I never was in a greater hole. I'm not the least in love with that girl, Kendal, but there isn't anything she asked me to do for her that I wouldn't do if I could. She's the warmest-hearted creature—one of the kindest, frankest, sincerest women that ever stepped. I feel at times that I'd rather cut my hand off than hurt her feelings by throwing her offer in her face, and yet, that play has been the apple of my eye to me for months; the thought of seeing it spoilt by clumsy handling is intolerable to me.'

'I suppose it would hurt her feelings,' said Kendal meditatively, 'if you refused?'

'Yes,' said Wallace emphatically; 'I believe it would wound her extremely. You see, in spite of all her success, she is beginning to be conscious that there are two publics in London. There is the small fastidious public of people who take the theatre seriously, and there is the large easy-going public who get the only sensation they want out of her beauty and her personal prestige. The enthusiasts have no difficulty, as yet, in holding their own against the scoffers, and for a long time Miss Bretherton knew and cared nothing for what the critical people said, but of late I have noticed at times that she knows more and cares more than she did. It seems to me that there is a little growing soreness in her mind, and just now if I refuse to let her have that play it will destroy her confidence in her friends, as it were. She won't reproach me, she won't quarrel with me, but it will go to her heart. Do, for heaven's sake, Kendal, help me to some plausible fiction or other!'

'I wish I could,' said Kendal, pacing up and down, his gray hair falling forward over his brow. There was a pause, and then Kendal walked energetically up to his friend and laid his hand on his shoulder.

'You oughtn't to let her have that play, Wallace; I'm quite clear on that. You know how much I like her. She's all you say, and more; but art is art, and acting is acting. I, at any rate, take these things seriously, and you do too. We rejoice in it for her sake; but, after all, when one comes to think of it, this popularity of hers is enough to make one despair. Sometimes I think it will throw back the popular dramatic taste for years. At any rate, I am clear that if a man has got hold of a fine work of art, as you have in that play, he has a duty to it and to the public. You are bound to see it brought out under the best possible conditions, and we all know that Miss Bretherton's acting, capped with Hawes's, would kill it, from the artistic point of view.'

'Perfectly true, perfectly true,' said Wallace. 'Well, would you have me tell her so?'

'You must get out of it somehow. Tell her that the part is one you feel won't suit her—won't do her justice.'

'Much good that would do! She thinks the part just made for her—costumes and all.'

'Well, then, say you haven't finished your revision, and you must have time for more work at it; that will postpone the thing, and she will hear of something else which will put it out of her head.'

'There are all sorts of reasons against that,' said Wallace; 'it's hardly worth while going through them. In the first place, she wouldn't believe me; in the second, she won't forget it, whatever happens, and it would only put the difficulty off a few weeks at most. I feel so stupid about the whole thing. I like her too much. I'm so afraid of saying anything to hurt her, that I can't finesse. All my wits desert me. I say, Kendal!'

'Well?'

Wallace hesitated, and glanced up at his friend with his most winning expression.

'Do you think you could earn my eternal gratitude and manage the thing for me? You know we're going to Oxford next Sunday, and I suppose we shall go to Nuneham, and there will be opportunities for walks, and so on. Could you possibly take it in hand? She has an immense respect for you intellectually. If you tell her that you're sure the part won't suit her, that she won't do herself justice in it; if you could lead the conversation on to it and try to put her out of love for the scheme without seeming to have a commission from me in any way, I should be indeed everlastingly obliged! You wouldn't make a mess of it, as I should be sure to do. You'd keep your head cool.'

'Well!' said Kendal, laughing, balancing himself on the table facing Wallace. 'That's a tempting prospect! But if I don't help you out you'll give in, I know; you're the softest of men, and I don't want you to give in.'

'Yes, of course I shall give in,' said Wallace, with smiling decision. 'If you don't want me to, suppose you take the responsibility. I've known you do difficult things before; you manage somehow to get your own way without offending people.'

'H'm,' said Kendal; 'I don't know whether that's flattering or not.' He began to walk up and down the room again cogitating. 'I don't mind trying,' he said at last, 'in a very gingerly way. I can't, of course, undertake to be brutal. It would be impossible for any one to treat her roughly. But there might be ways of doing it. There's time to think over the best way of doing it. Supposing, however, she took offence? Supposing, after Sunday next, she never speaks to either of us again?'

'Oh!' said Wallace, wincing, 'I should give up the play at once if she really took it to heart. She attaches one to her. I feel towards her as though she were a sister—only more interesting, because there's the charm of novelty.'

Kendal smiled. 'Miss Bretherton hasn't got to that yet with me. Sisters, to my mind, are as interesting as anybody, and more so. But how on earth, Wallace, have you escaped falling in love with her all this time?'

'Oh, I had enough of that last year,' said Wallace abruptly, rising and looking for his overcoat, while his face darkened; 'it's an experience I don't take lightly.'

Kendal was puzzled; then his thoughts quickly put two and two together. He remembered a young Canadian widow who had been a good deal at Mrs. Stuart's house the year before; he recalled certain suspicions of his own about her and his friend—her departure from London and Wallace's long absence in the country. But he said nothing, unless there was sympathy in the cordial grip of his hand as he accompanied the other to the door.

On the threshold Wallace turned irresolutely. 'It will be a risk next Sunday,' he said; 'I'm determined it shan't be anything more. She is not the woman, I think, to make a quarrel out of a thing like that.'

'Oh no,' said Kendal; 'keep your courage up. I think it may be managed. You give me leave to handle Elvira as I like.'

'Oh heavens, yes!' said Wallace; 'get me out of the scrape any way you can, and I'll bless you for ever. What a brute I am never to have asked after your work! Does it get on?'

'As much as any work can in London just now. I must take it away with me somewhere into the country next month. It doesn't like dinner-parties.'

'Like me,' said Wallace, with a shrug.

'Nonsense!' said Kendal; 'you're made for them. Good-night.'

'Good-night. It's awfully good of you.'

'What? Wait till it's well over!'

Wallace ran down the stairs and was gone. Kendal walked back slowly into his room and stood meditating. It seemed to him that Wallace did not quite realise the magnificence of his self-devotion. 'For, after all, it's an awkward business,' he said to himself, shaking his head over his own temerity. 'How I am to come round a girl as frank, as direct, as unconventional as that, I don't quite know! But she ought not to have that play; it's one of the few good things that have been done for the English stage for a long time past. It's well put together, the plot good, three or four strongly marked characters, and some fine Victor Hugoish dialogue, especially in the last act. But there is extravagance in it, as there is in all the work of that time, and in Isabel Bretherton's hands a great deal of it would be grotesque: nothing would save it but her reputation and the get-up, and that would be too great a shame. No, no; it will not do to have the real thing swamped by all sorts of irrelevant considerations in this way. I like Miss Bretherton heartily, but I like good work, and if I can save the play from her, I shall save her too from what everybody with eyes in his head would see to be a failure!'

It was a rash determination. Most men would have prudently left the matter to those whom it immediately concerned, but Kendal had a Quixotic side to him, and at this time in his life a whole-hearted devotion to certain intellectual interests, which decided his action on a point like this. In spite of his life in society, books and ideas were at this moment much more real to him than men and women. He judged life from the standpoint of the student and the man of letters, in whose eyes considerations, which would have seemed abstract and unreal to other people, had become magnified and all-important. In this matter of Wallace and Miss Bretherton he saw the struggle between an ideal interest, so to speak, and a personal interest, and he was heart and soul for the ideal. Face to face with the living human creature concerned, his principles, as we have seen, were apt to give way a little, for the self underneath was warm-hearted and impressionable, but in his own room and by himself they were strong and vigorous, and would allow of no compromise.

He ruminated over the matter during his solitary meal, planning his line of action. 'It all depends,' he said to himself, 'on that,—if what Wallace says about her is true, if my opinion has really any weight with her, I shall be able to manage it without offending her. It's good of her to speak of me as kindly as she seems to do; I was anything but amiable on that Surrey Sunday. However, I felt then that she liked me all the better for plain-speaking; one may be tolerably safe with her that she won't take offence unreasonably. What a picture she made as she pulled the primroses to pieces—it seemed all up with one! And then her smile flashing out—her eagerness to make amends—to sweep away a harsh impression—her pretty gratefulness—enchanting!'

On Saturday, at lunch-time, Wallace rushed in for a few minutes to say that he himself had avoided Miss Bretherton all the week, but that things were coming to a crisis. 'I've just got this note from her,' he said despairingly, spreading it out before Kendal, who was making a scrappy bachelor meal, with a book on each side of him, at a table littered with papers.

'Could anything be more prettily done? If you don't succeed to-morrow, Kendal, I shall have signed the agreement before three days are over!'

It was indeed a charming note. She asked him to fix any time he chose for an appointment with her and her business manager, and spoke with enthusiasm of the play. 'It cannot help being a great success,' she wrote; 'I feel that I am not worthy of it, but I will do my very best. The part seems to me, in many respects, as though it had been written for me. You have never, indeed, I remember, consented in so many words to let me have Elvira. I thought I should meet you at Mrs. Stuart's yesterday, and was disappointed. But I am sure you will not say me nay, and you will see how grateful I shall be for the chance your work will give me.'

'Yes, that's done with real delicacy,' said Kendal. Not a word of the pecuniary advantages of her offer, though she must know that almost any author would give his eyes just now for such a proposal. Well, we shall see. If I can't make the thing look less attractive to her without rousing her suspicions, and if you can't screw up your courage to refuse—why, you must sign the agreement, my dear fellow, and make the best of it; you will find something else to inspire you before long.'

'It's most awkward,' sighed Wallace, as though making up his perplexed mind with difficulty. 'The great chance is that by Agnes's account she is very much inclined to regard your opinion as a sort of intellectual standard; she has two or three times talked of remarks of yours as if they had struck her. Don't quote me at all, of course. Do it as impersonally as you can—'

'If you give me too many instructions,' said Kendal, returning the letter with a smile, 'I shall bungle it. Don't make me nervous. I can't promise you to succeed, and you mustn't bear me a grudge if I fail.'

'A grudge! No, I should think not. By the way, have you heard from Agnes about the trains to-morrow?'

'Yes, Paddington, 10 o'clock, and there is an 8.15 train back from Culham. Mrs. Stuart says we're to lunch in Balliol, run down to Nuneham afterwards, and leave the boats there, to be brought back.'

'Yes, we lunch with that friend of ours—I think you know him—Herbert Sartoris. He has been a Balliol don for about a year. I only trust the weather will be what it is to-day.'

The weather was all that the heart of man could desire, and the party met on the Paddington platform with every prospect of another successful day. Forbes turned up punctual to the moment, and radiant under the combined influence of the sunshine and of Miss Bretherton's presence; Wallace had made all the arrangements perfectly, and the six friends found themselves presently journeying along to Oxford, at that moderated speed which is all that a Sunday express can reach. The talk flowed with zest and gaiety; the Surrey Sunday was a pleasant memory in the background, and all were glad to find themselves in the same company again. It seemed to Kendal that Miss Bretherton was looking rather thin and pale, but she would not admit it, and chattered from her corner to Forbes and himself with the mirth and abandon of a child on its holiday. At last the 'dreaming spires' of Oxford rose from the green, river-threaded plain, and they were at their journey's end. A few more minutes saw them alighting at the gate of the new Balliol, where stood Herbert Sartoris looking out for them. He was a young don with a classical edition on hand which kept him up working after term, within reach of the libraries, and he led the way to some pleasant rooms overlooking the inner quadrangle of Balliol, showing in his well-bred look and manner an abundant consciousness of the enormous good fortune which had sent him Isabel Bretherton for a guest. For at that time it was almost as difficult to obtain the presence of Miss Bretherton at any social festivity as it was to obtain that of royalty. Her Sundays were the objects of conspiracies for weeks beforehand on the part of those persons in London society who were least accustomed to have their invitations refused, and to have and to hold the famous beauty for more than an hour in his own rooms, and then to enjoy the privilege of spending five or six long hours on the river with her, were delights which, as the happy young man felt, would render him the object of envy to all at least of his fellow-dons below forty.

In streamed the party, filling up the book-lined rooms and startling the two old scouts in attendance into an unwonted rapidity of action. Miss Bretherton wandered round, surveyed the familiar Oxford luncheon-table, groaning under the time-honoured summer fare, the books, the engravings, and the sunny, irregular quadrangle outside, with its rich adornings of green, and threw herself down at last on to the low window-seat with a sigh of satisfaction.

'How quiet you are! how peaceful! how delightful it must be to live here! It seems as if one were in another world from London. Tell me what that building is over there; it's too new, it ought to be old and gray like the colleges we saw coming up here. Is everybody gone away—"gone down" you say? I should like to see all the learned people walking about for once.'

'I could show you a good many if there were time,' said young Sartoris, hardly knowing however what he was saying, so lost was he in admiration of that marvellous changing face. 'The vacation is the time they show themselves; it's like owls coming out at night. You see, Miss Bretherton, we don't keep many of them; they're in the way in term time. But in vacation they have the colleges and the parks and the Bodleian to themselves, and you may study their ways, and their spectacles, and their umbrellas, under the most favourable conditions.'

'Oh yes,' said Miss Bretherton, with a little scorn, 'people always make fun of what they are proud of. But I mean to believe that you are all learned, and that everybody here works himself to death, and that Oxford is quite, quite perfect!'

'Did you hear what Miss Bretherton was saying, Mrs. Stuart?' said Forbes, when they were seated at luncheon. 'Oxford is perfect, she declares already; I don't think I quite like it: it's too hot to last.'

'Am I such a changeable creature, then?' said Miss Bretherton, smiling at him. 'Do you generally find my enthusiasms cool down?'

'You are as constant as you are kind,' said Forbes, bowing to her; 'I am only like a child who sighs to see a pleasure nearing its highest point, lest there should be nothing so good afterwards.'

'Nothing so good!' she said, 'and I have only had one little drive through the streets. Mr. Wallace, are you and Mrs. Stuart really going to forbid me sight-seeing?'

'Of course!' said Wallace emphatically. 'That's one of the fundamental rules of the society. Our charter would be a dead letter if we let you enter a single college on your way to the river to-day.'

'The only art, my dear Isabel,' said Mrs. Stuart, 'that you will be allowed to study to-day, will be the art of conversation.'

'And a most fatiguing one, too!' exclaimed Forbes; 'it beats sight-seeing hollow. But, my dear Miss Bretherton, Kendal and I will make it up to you. We'll give you an illustrated history of Oxford on the way to Nuneham. I'll do the pictures, and he shall do the letterpress. Oh! the good times I've had up here—much better than he ever had'—nodding across at Kendal, who was listening. 'He was too proper behaved to enjoy himself; he got all the right things, all the proper first-classes and prizes, poor fellow! But, as for me, I used to scribble over my note-books all lecture-time, and amuse myself the rest of the day. And then, you see, I was up twenty years earlier than he was, and the world was not as virtuous then as it is now, by a long way.'

Kendal was interrupting, when Forbes, who was in one of his maddest moods, turned round upon his chair to watch a figure passing along the quadrangle in front of the bay-window.

'I say, Sartoris, isn't that Camden, the tutor who was turned out of Magdalen a year or two ago for that atheistical book of his, and whom you took in, as you do all the disreputables? Ah, I knew it!

"By the pricking of my thumbs Something wicked this way comes."

That's not mine, my dear Miss Bretherton; it's Shakespeare's first, Charles Lamb's afterwards. But look at him well—he's a heretic, a real, genuine heretic. Twenty years ago it would have been a thrilling sight; but now, alas! it's so common that it's not the victim but the persecutors who are the curiosity.'

'I don't know that,' said young Sartoris. 'We liberals are by no means the cocks of the walk that we were a few years ago. You see, now we have got nothing to pull against, as it were. So long as we had two or three good grievances, we could keep the party together and attract all the young men. We were Israel going up against the Philistines, who had us in their grip. But now, things are changed; we've got our own way all round, and it's the Church party who have the grievances and the cry. It is we who are the Philistines and the oppressors in our turn, and, of course, the young men as they grow up are going into opposition.'

'And a very good thing, too!' said Forbes. 'It's the only thing that prevents Oxford becoming as dull as the rest of the world. All your picturesqueness, so to speak, has been struck out of the struggle between the two forces. The Church force is the one that has given you all your buildings and your beauty, while, as for you liberals, who will know such a lot of things that you're none the happier for knowing—well, I suppose you keep the place habitable for the plain man who doesn't want to be bullied. But it's a very good thing the other side are strong enough to keep you in order.'

The conversation flowed on vigorously—Forbes guiding it, now here, now there, while Kendal presently turned away to talk in an undertone to Mrs. Stuart, who sat next him, at the farther corner of the table from Miss Bretherton.

'Edward has told you of my escapade,' said Mrs. Stuart. 'Yes, I have put my foot in it dreadfully. I don't know how it will turn out, I am sure. She's so set upon it, and Edward is so worried. I don't know how I came to tell her. You see, I've seen so much of her lately, it slipped out when we were talking.'

'It was very natural,' said Kendal, glad to notice from Mrs. Stuart's way of attacking the subject that she knew nothing of his own share in the matter. It would have embarrassed him to be conscious of another observer. 'Oh, a hundred things may turn up; there are ways out of these things if one is determined to find them.'

Mrs. Stuart shook her head. 'She is so curiously bent upon it. She is possessed with the idea that the play will suit her better than any she has had yet. Don't you think her looking very tired? I have come to know her much better these last few weeks, and it seems absurd; but I get anxious about her. Of course, she is an enormous success, but I fancy the theatrical part of it has not been quite so great as it was at first.'

'So I hear, too,' said Kendal; 'the theatre is quite as full, but the temper of the audience a good deal flatter.'

'Yes,' said Mrs. Stuart; 'and then there is that curious little sister of hers, whom you haven't seen, and who counts for a good deal. I believe that in reality she is very fond of Isabel, and very proud of her, but she's very jealous of her too, and she takes her revenge upon her sister for her beauty and her celebrity by collecting the hostile things people say about her acting, and pricking them into her every now and then, like so many pins. At first Isabel was so sure of herself and the public that she took no notice—it seemed to her only what every actress must expect. But now it is different. She is not so strong as she was when she came over, nor so happy, I think, and the criticisms tell more. She is heartily sick of the White Lady, and is bent upon a change, and I believe she thinks this play of Edward's is just what she wants to enable her to strengthen her hold upon the public.'

'There never was a greater delusion,' said Kendal; 'it's the last part in the world she ought to attempt. Properly speaking, unless she puts it in, there's no posing in it, none of that graceful attitudinising she does so well. It's a long tragic part—a tremendous strain, and would take all the powers of the most accomplished art to give it variety and charm.'

'Oh, I know,' sighed Mrs. Stuart, 'I know. But what is to be done?'

Kendal shrugged his shoulders with a smile, feeling as hopeless as she did. The paleness of the beautiful face opposite indeed had touched his sympathies very keenly, and he was beginning to think the safety of Wallace's play not such a desperately important matter after all. However, there was his promise, and he must go on with it. 'But I'll be hanged,' he said to himself, 'if I come within a thousand miles of hurting her feelings. Wallace must do that for himself if he wants to.'

It had been arranged that Miss Bretherton should be allowed two breaches, and two only, of the law against sight-seeing—a walk through the schools'-quadrangle, and a drive down High Street. Mr. Sartoris, who had been an examiner during the summer term, and had so crept into the good graces of the Clerk of the Schools, was sent off to suborn that functionary for the keys of the iron gates which on Sunday shut out the Oxford world from the sleepy precincts of the Bodleian. The old clerk was in a lax vacation mood, and the envoy returned key in hand. Mrs. Stuart and Forbes undertook the guidance of Miss Bretherton, while the others started to prepare the boats. It was a hot June day, and the gray buildings, with their cool shadows, stood out delicately against a pale blue sky dappled with white cloud. Her two guides led Miss Bretherton through the quadrangle of the schools, which, fresh as it was from the hands of the restorer, rose into the air like some dainty white piece of old-world confectionery. For the windows are set so lightly in the stone-work, and are so nearly level with the wall, that the whole great building has an unsubstantial card-board air, as if a touch might dint it.

'The doctrinaires call it a fault,' said Forbes indignantly, pointing out the feature to his companions. 'I'd like to see them build anything nowadays with half so much imagination and charm.'

They looked enviously at the closed door of the Bodleian, they read the Latin names of the schools just freshly painted at intervals round the quadrangle, and then Forbes led them out upon the steps in front of the Radcliffe and S. Mary's, and let them take their time a little.

'How strange that there should be anything in the world,' cried Miss Bretherton, 'so beautiful all through, so all of a piece as this! I had no idea it would be half so good. Don't, don't laugh at me, Mr. Forbes. I have not seen all the beautiful things you other people have seen. Just let me rave.'

'I laugh at you!' said Forbes, standing back in the shadow of the archway, his fine lined face, aglow with pleasure, turned towards her. 'I, who have got Oxford in my bones and marrow, so to speak! Why, every stone in the place is sacred to me! Poetry lives here, if she has fled from all the world besides. No, no; say what you like, it cannot be too strong for me.'

Mrs. Stuart, meanwhile, kept her head cool, admired all that she was expected to admire, and did it well, and never forgot that the carriage was waiting for them, and that Miss Bretherton was not to be tired. It was she who took charge of the other two, piloted them safely into the fly, carried them down the High Street, sternly refused to make a stop at Magdalen, and finally landed them in triumph to the minute at the great gate of Christchurch. Then they strolled into the quiet cathedral, delighted themselves with its irregular bizarre beauty, its unexpected turns and corners, which gave it a capricious fanciful air for all the solidity and business-like strength of its Norman framework, and as they rambled out again, Forbes made them pause over a window in the northern aisle—a window by some Flemish artist of the fifteenth century, who seems to have embodied in it at once all his knowledge and all his dreams. In front sat Jonah under his golden-tinted gourd—an ill-tempered Flemish peasant—while behind him the indented roofs of the Flemish town climbed the whole height of the background. It was probably the artist's native town; some roof among those carefully-outlined gables sheltered his own household Lares. But the hill on which the town stood, and the mountainous background and the purple sea, were the hills and the sea not of Belgium, but of a dream country—of Italy, perhaps, the medieval artist's paradise.

'Happy man!' said Forbes, turning to Miss Bretherton; 'look, he put it together four centuries ago, all he knew and all he dreamt of. And there it is to this day, and beyond the spirit of that window there is no getting. For all our work, if we do it honestly, is a compound of what we know and what we dream.'

Miss Bretherton looked at him curiously. It was as though for the first time she connected the man himself with his reputation and his pictures, that the great artist in him was more than a name to her. She listened to him sympathetically, and looked at the window closely, as though trying to follow all he had been saying. But it struck Mrs. Stuart that there was often a bewilderment in her manner which had been strange to it on her first entrance into London. Those strong emphatic ways Kendal had first noticed in her were less frequent. Sometimes she struck Mrs. Stuart as having the air of a half-blindfold person trying to find her way along strange roads.

They passed out into the cool and darkness of the cloisters, and through the new buildings, and soon they were in the Broad Walk, trees as old as the Commonwealth bending overhead, and in front the dazzling green of the June meadows, the shining river in the distance, and the sweep of cloud-flecked blue arching in the whole.

The gentlemen were waiting for them, metamorphosed in boating-clothes, and the two boats were ready. A knot of idlers and lookers-on watched the embarkation, for on Sunday the river is forsaken, and they were the only adventurers on its blue expanse. Off they pushed, Miss Bretherton, Kendal, Mr. Stuart, and Forbes in one boat, the remaining members of the party in the other. Isabel Bretherton had thrown off the wrap which she always carried with her, and which she had gathered round her in the cathedral, and it lay about her in green fur-edged folds, bringing her white dress into relief, the shapely fall of the shoulders and all the round slimness of her form. As Kendal took the stroke oar, after he had arranged everything for her comfort, he asked her if Oxford was what she had expected.

'A thousand times better!' she said eagerly.

'You have a wonderful power of enjoyment. One would think your London life would have spoilt it a little.'

'I don't think anything ever could. I was always laughed at for it as a child, I enjoy everything.'

'Including such a day as you had yesterday? How can you play the White Lady twice in one day? It's enough to wear you out.'

'Oh, everybody does it. I was bound to give a matinee to the profession some time, and yesterday had been fixed for it for ages. But I have only given three matinees altogether, and I shan't give another before my time is up.'

'That's a good hearing,' said Kendal. 'Do you get tired of the White Lady?'

'Yes,' she said emphatically; 'I am sick of her. But,' she added, bending forward with her hands clasped on her knee, so that what she said could be heard by Kendal only; 'have you heard, I wonder, what I have in my head for the autumn? Oh well, we must not talk of it now; I have no right to make it public yet. But I should like to tell you when we get to Nuneham, if there's an opportunity.'

'We will make one,' said Kendal, with an inward qualm. And she fell back again with a nod and a smile.

On they passed, in the blazing sunshine, through Iffley lock and under the green hill crowned with Iffley village and its Norman church. The hay was out in the fields, and the air was full of it. Children, in tidy Sunday frocks, ran along the towing-path to look at them; a reflected heaven smiled upon them from the river depths; wild rose-bushes overhung the water, and here and there stray poplars rose like land-marks into the sky. The heat, after a time, deadened conversation. Forbes every now and then would break out with some comment on the moving landscape, which showed the delicacy and truth of his painter's sense, or set the boat alive with laughter by some story of the unregenerate Oxford of his own undergraduate days; but there were long stretches of silence when, except to the rowers, the world seemed asleep, and the regular fall of the oars like the pulsing of a hot dream.

It was past five before they steered into the shadow of Nuneham woods. The meadows just ahead were a golden blaze of light, but here the shade lay deep and green on the still water, spanned by a rustic bridge, and broken every now and then by the stately whiteness of the swans. Rich steeply-rising woods shut in the left-hand bank, and foliage, grass, and wild flowers seemed suddenly to have sprung into a fuller luxuriance than elsewhere.

'It's too early for tea,' said Mrs. Stuart's clear little voice on the bank; 'at least, if we have it directly it will leave such a long time before the train starts. Wouldn't a stroll be pleasant first?'

Isabel Bretherton and Kendal only waited for the general assent before they wandered off ahead of the others. 'I should like very much to have a word with you,' she had said to him as he handed her out of the boat. And now, here they were, and, as Kendal felt, the critical moment was come.

'I only wanted to tell you,' she said, as they paused in the heart of the wood, a little out of breath after a bit of steep ascent, 'that I have got hold of a play for next October that I think you are rather specially interested in—at least, Mr. Wallace told me you had heard it all, and given him advice about it while he was writing it. I want so much to hear your ideas about it. It always seems to me that you have thought more about the stage and seen more acting than any one else I know, and I care for your opinion very much indeed—do tell me, if you will, what you thought of Elvira!'

'Well,' said Kendal quietly, as he made her give up her wrap to him to carry, 'there is a great deal that's fine in it. The original sketch, as the Italian author left it, was good, and Wallace has enormously improved upon it. Only—'

'Isn't it most dramatic?' she exclaimed, interrupting him; 'there are so many strong situations in it, and though one might think the subject a little unpleasant if one only heard it described, yet there is nothing in the treatment but what is noble and tragic. I have very seldom felt so stirred by anything. I find myself planning the scenes, thinking over them this way and that incessantly.'

'It is very good and friendly of you,' said Kendal warmly, 'to wish me to give you advice about it. Do you really want me to speak my full mind?'

'Of course I do,' she said eagerly; 'of course I do. I think there are one or two points in it that might be changed. I shall press Mr. Wallace to make a few alterations. I wonder what were the changes that occurred to you?'

'I wasn't thinking of changes,' said Kendal, not venturing to look at her as she walked beside him, her white dress trailing over the moss-grown path, and her large hat falling back from the brilliant flushed cheeks and queenly throat. 'I was thinking of the play itself, of how the part would really suit you.'

'Oh, I have no doubts at all about that,' she said, but with a quick look at him; 'I always feel at once when a part will suit me, and I have fallen in love with this one. It is tragic and passionate, like the White Lady, but it is quite a different phase of passion. I am tired of scolding and declaiming. Elvira will give me an opportunity of showing what I can do with something soft and pathetic. I have had such difficulties in deciding upon a play to begin my October season with, and now this seems to me exactly what I want. People prefer me always in something poetical and romantic, and this is new, and the mounting of it might be quite original.'

'And yet I doubt,' said Kendal; 'I think the part of Elvira wants variety, and would it not be well for you to have more of a change? Something with more relief in it, something which would give your lighter vein, which comes in so well in the White Lady, more chance?'

She frowned a little and shook her head. 'My turn is not that way. I can play a comedy part, of course—every actor ought to be able to—but I don't feel at home in it, and it never gives me pleasure to act.'

'I don't mean a pure light-comedy part, naturally, but something which would be less of a continuous tragic strain than this. Why, almost all the modern tragic plays have their passages of relief, but the texture of Elvira is so much the same throughout,—I cannot conceive a greater demand on any one. And then you must consider your company. Frankly, I cannot imagine a part less suited to Mr. Hawes than Macias; and his difficulties would react on you.'

'I can choose whom I like,' she said abruptly; 'I am not bound to Mr. Hawes.'

'Besides,' he said cautiously, changing his ground a little, 'I should have said—only, of course, you must know much better—that it is a little risky to give the British public such very serious fare as this, and immediately after the White Lady. The English theatre-goer never seems to me to take kindly to medievalism—kings and knights and nobles and the fifteenth century are very likely to bore him. Not that I mean to imply for a moment that the play would be a failure in point of popularity. You have got such a hold that you could carry anything through; but I am inclined to think that in Elvira you would be rather fighting against wind and tide, and that, as I said before, it would be a great strain upon you.'

'The public makes no objection to Madame Desforets in Victor Hugo,' she answered quickly, even sharply. 'Her parts, so far as I know anything about them, are just these romantic parts, and she has made her enormous reputation out of them.'

Kendal hesitated. 'The French have a great tradition of them,' he said. 'Racine, after all, was a preparation for Victor Hugo.'

'No, no!' she exclaimed, with sudden bitterness and a change of voice which startled him; 'it is not that. It is that I am I, and Madame Desforets is Madame Desforets. Oh, I see! I see very well that your mind is against it. And Mr. Wallace—there were two or three things in his manner which have puzzled me. He has never said yes to my proposal formally. I understand perfectly what it means; you think that I shall do the play an injury by acting it; that it is too good for me!'

Kendal felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen; the sombre passion of her manner affected him indescribably.

'Miss Bretherton!' he cried.

'Yes, yes!' she said, almost fiercely, stopping in the path. 'It's that, I know. I have felt it almost since your first word. What power have I, if not tragic power? If a part like Elvira does not suit me, what does suit me? Of course, that is what you mean. If I cannot act Elvira, I am good for nothing—I am worse than good for nothing—I am an impostor, a sham!'

She sat down on the raised edge of the bank, for she was trembling, and clasped her quivering hands on her knees. Kendal was beside himself with distress. How had he blundered so, and what had brought this about? It was so unexpected, it was incredible.

'Do—do believe me!' he exclaimed, bending over her. 'I never meant anything the least disrespectful to you; I never dreamt of it. You asked me to give you my true opinion, and my criticism applied much more to the play than to yourself. Think nothing of it, if you yourself are persuaded. You must know much better than I can what will suit you. And as for Wallace—Wallace will be proud to let you do what you will with his play.'

It seemed to him that he would have said anything in the world to soothe her. It was so piteous, so intolerable to him to watch that quivering lip.

'Ah, yes,' she said, looking up, a dreary smile flitting over her face, 'I know you didn't mean to wound me; but it was there, your feeling; I saw it at once. I might have seen it, if I hadn't been a fool, in Mr. Wallace's manner. I did see it. It's only what every one whose opinion is worth having is beginning to say. My acting has been a nightmare to me lately. I believe it has all been a great, great mistake.'

Kendal never felt a keener hatred of the conventions which rule the relations between men and women. Could he only simply have expressed his own feeling, he would have knelt beside her on the path, have taken the trembling hands in his own, and comforted her as a woman would have done. But as it was, he could only stand stiff and awkward before her, and yet it seemed to him as if the whole world had resolved itself into his own individuality and hers, and as if the gay river party and the bright friendly relations of an hour before were separated from the present by an impassable gulf. And, worst of all, there seemed to be a strange perversity in his speech—a fate which drove him into betraying every here and there his own real standpoint whether he would or no.

'You must not say such things,' he said, as calmly as he could. 'You have charmed the English public as no one else has ever charmed it. Is not that a great thing to have done? And if I, who am very fastidious and very captious, and over-critical in a hundred ways—if I am inclined to think that a part is rather more than you, with your short dramatic experience, can compass quite successfully, why, what does it matter? I may be quite wrong. Don't take any notice of my opinion: forget it, and let me help you, if I can, by talking over the play.'

She shook her head with a bitter little smile. 'No, no; I shall never forget it. Your attitude only brought home to me, almost more strongly than I could bear, what I have suspected a long, long time—the contempt which people like you and Mr. Wallace feel for me!'

'Contempt!' cried Kendal, beside himself, and feeling as if all the criticisms he had allowed himself to make of her were recoiling in one avenging mass upon his head. 'I never felt anything but the warmest admiration for your courage, your work, your womanly goodness and sweetness.'

'Yes,' she said, rising and holding out her hand half-unconsciously for her cloak, which she put round her as though the wood had suddenly grown cold; 'admiration for me as a woman, contempt for me as an artist! There's the whole bare truth. Does it hold my future in it, I wonder? Is there nothing in me but this beauty that people talk of, and which I sometimes hate?'

She swept her hair back from her forehead with a fierce dramatic gesture. It was as though the self in her was rising up and asserting itself against the judgment which had been passed upon it, as if some hidden force hardly suspected even by herself were beating against its bars. Kendal watched her in helpless silence. 'Tell me,' she said, fixing her deep hazel eyes upon him, 'you owe it me—you have given me so much pain. No, no; you did not mean it. But tell me, and tell me from the bottom of your heart—that is, if you are interested enough in me—what is it I want? What is it that seems to be threatening me with failure as an artist? I work all day long, my work is never out of my head; it seems to pursue me all night. But the more I struggle with it the less successful I seem even to myself.'

Her look was haunting: there was despair and there was hope in it. It implied that she had set him up in her impulsive way as a sort of oracle who alone could help her out of her difficulty. In presence of that look his own conventionality fell away from him, and he spoke the plain, direct truth to her.

'What you want,' he said slowly, as if the words were forced from him, 'is knowledge! London has taught you much, and that is why you are dissatisfied with your work—it is the beginning of all real success. But you want positive knowledge—the knowledge you could get from books, and the knowledge other people could teach you. You want a true sense of what has been done and what can be done with your art, and you want an insight into the world of ideas lying round it and about it. You are very young, and you have had to train yourself. But every human art nowadays is so complicated that none of us can get on without using the great stores of experience others have laid up for us.'

It was all out now. He had spoken his inmost mind. They had stopped again, and she was looking at him intently; it struck him that he could not possibly have said what he had been saying unless he had been led on by an instinctive dependence upon a great magnanimity of nature in her. And then the next moment the strange opposites the matter held in it flashed across him. He saw the crowded theatre, the white figure on the stage, his ear seemed to be full of the clamour of praise with which London had been overwhelming its favourite. It was to this spoilt child of fortune that he had been playing the schoolmaster—he, one captious man of letters, against the world.

But she had not a thought of the kind, or rather, the situation presented itself to her in exactly the contrary light. To her Kendal's words, instead of being those of a single critic, were the voice and the embodiment of a hundred converging impressions and sensations, and she felt a relief in having analysed to the full the vague trouble which had been settling upon her by this unraveling of her own feelings and his.

'I am very grateful to you,' she said steadily; 'very. It is strange, but almost when I first saw you I felt that there was something ominous in you to me. My dream, in which I have been living, has never been so perfect since, and now I think it has gone. Don't look so grieved,' she cried, inexpressibly touched by his face, 'I am glad you told me all you thought. It will be a help to me. And as for poor Elvira,' she added, trying to smile for all her extreme paleness, 'tell Mr. Wallace I give her up. I am not vexed, I am not angry. Don't you think now we had better go back to Mrs. Stuart? I should like a rest with her before we all meet again.'

She moved forward as she spoke, and it seemed to Kendal that her step was unsteady and that she was deadly white. He planted himself before her in the descending path, and held out a hand to her to help her. She gave him her own, and he carried it impetuously to his lips.

'You are nobleness itself!' he cried, from the depths of his heart. 'I feel as if I had been the merest pedant and blunderer—the most incapable, clumsy idiot.'

She smiled, but she could not answer. And in a few more moments voices and steps could be heard approaching, and the scene was over.



CHAPTER VI

The Sunday party separated at Paddington on the night of the Nuneham expedition, and Wallace and Eustace Kendal walked eastward together. The journey home had been very quiet. Miss Bretherton had been forced to declare herself 'extremely tired,' and Mrs. Stuart's anxiety and sense of responsibility about her had communicated themselves to the rest of the party.

'It is the effect of my long day yesterday,' she said apologetically to Forbes, who hovered about her with those affectionate attentions which a man on the verge of old age pays with freedom to a young girl. 'It won't do to let the public see so much of me in future. But I don't want to spoil our Sunday. Talk to me, and I shall forget it.'

Wallace, who had had his eyes about him when she and Eustace Kendal emerged from the wood in view of the rest of the party, was restless and ill at ease, but there was no getting any information, even by a gesture, from Kendal, who sat in his corner diligently watching the moonlight on the flying fields, or making every now and then some disjointed attempts at conversation with Mrs. Stuart.

At the station Miss Bretherton's carriage was waiting; the party of gentlemen saw her and Mrs. Stuart, who insisted on taking her home, into it; the pale, smiling face bent forward; she waved her hand in response to the lifted hats, and she was gone.

'Well?' said Wallace, with a world of inquiry in his voice, as he and Kendal turned eastward.

'It has been an unfortunate business,' said Kendal abruptly. 'I never did a thing worse, I think, or spent a more painful half-hour.'

Wallace's face fell. 'I wish I hadn't bored you with my confounded affairs,' he exclaimed. 'It was too bad!'

Kendal was inclined to agree inwardly, for he was in a state of irritable reaction; but he had the justice to add aloud, 'It was I who was the fool to undertake it. And I think, indeed, it could have been done, but that circumstances, which neither you nor I had weighed sufficiently, were against it. She is in a nervous, shaken state, mentally and physically, and before I had had time to discuss the point at all, she had carried it on to the personal ground, and the thing was up.'

'She is deeply offended, then?'

'Not at all, in the ordinary sense; she is too fine a creature; but she talked of the "contempt" that you and I feel for her!'

'Good heavens!' cried Wallace, feeling most unjustly persuaded that his friend had bungled the matter horribly.

'Yes,' said Kendal deliberately; '"contempt," that was it. I don't know how it came about. All I know is, that what I said, which seemed to me very harmless, was like a match to a mine. But she told me to tell you that she made no further claim on Elvira. So the play is safe.'

'D—— the play!' cried Wallace vigorously, a sentiment to which perhaps Kendal's silence gave consent. 'But I cannot let it rest there. I must write to her.'

'I don't think I would, if I were you,' said Kendal. 'I should let it alone. She looks upon the matter as finished. She told me particularly to tell you that she was not vexed, and you may be quite sure that she isn't, in any vulgar sense. Perhaps that makes it all the worse. However, you've a right to know what happened, so I'll tell you, as far as I remember.'

He gave an abridged account of the conversation, which made matters a little clearer, though by no means less uncomfortable, to Wallace. When it was over, they were nearing Vigo Street, the point at which their routes diverged, Wallace having rooms in the Albany, and Kendal hailed a hansom.

'If I were you,' he said, as it came up, 'I should, as I said before, let the thing alone as much as possible. She will probably speak to you about it, and you will, of course, say what you like, but I'm pretty sure she won't take up the play again, and if she feels a coolness towards anybody, it won't be towards you.'

'There's small consolation in that!' exclaimed Wallace.

'Anyhow, make the best of it, my dear fellow,' said Kendal, as though determined to strike a lighter key. 'Don't be so dismal, things will look differently to-morrow morning—they generally do—there's no tremendous harm done. I'm sorry I didn't do your bidding better. Honestly, when I come to think over it, I don't see how I could have done otherwise. But I don't expect you to think so.'

Wallace laughed, protested, and they parted.

A few moments later Kendal let himself into his rooms, where lights were burning, and threw himself into his reading-chair, beside which his books and papers stood ready to his hand. Generally, nothing gave him a greater sense of bien-etre than this nightly return, after a day spent in society, to these silent and faithful companions of his life. He was accustomed to feel the atmosphere of his room when he came back to it charged with welcome. It was as though the thoughts and schemes he had left warm and safe in shelter there started to life again after a day's torpor, and thronged to meet him. His books smiled at him with friendly faces, the open page called to him to resume the work of the morning—he was, in every sense, at home. Tonight, however, the familiar spell seemed to have lost its force. After a hasty supper he took up some proofs, pen in hand. But the first page was hardly turned before they had dropped on to his knee. It seemed to him as if he still felt on his arm the folds of a green, fur-edged cloak, as if the touch of a soft cold hand were still lingering in his. Presently he fell to recalling every detail of the afternoon scene,—the arching beech trees, the rich red and brown of the earth beneath, tinged with the winter sheddings of the trees, the little raised bank, her eyes as she looked up at him, the soft wisps of her golden brown hair under her hat. What superb, unapproachable beauty it was! how living, how rich in content and expression!

'Am I in love with Isabel Bretherton?' he asked himself at last, lying back on his chair with his eyes on the portrait of his sister. 'Perhaps Marie could tell me—I don't understand myself. I don't think so. And if I were, I am not a youngster, and my life is a tolerably full one. I could hold myself in and trample it down if it were best to do so. I can hardly imagine myself absorbed in a great passion. My bachelor life is a good many years old—my habits won't break up easily. And, supposing I felt the beginnings of it, I could stop it if reason were against it.'

He left his chair, and began to pace up and down the room, thinking. 'And there is absolutely no sort of reason in my letting myself fall in love with Isabel Bretherton! She has never given me the smallest right to think that she takes any more interest in me than she does in hundreds of people whom she meets on friendly terms, unless it may be an intellectual interest, as Wallace imagines, and that's a poor sort of stepping-stone to love! And if it were ever possible that she should, this afternoon has taken away the possibility. For, however magnanimous a woman may be, a thing like that rankles: it can't help it. She will feel the sting of it worse to-morrow than to-day, and, though she will tell herself that she bears no grudge, it will leave a gulf between us. For, of course, she must go on acting, and, whatever depressions she may have, she must believe in herself; no one can go on working without it, and I shall always recall to her something harsh and humiliating!'