"Knowing her, loving her—loveworthy as she was—how could you leave her?"

"I beg your pardon," said Senhouse, "I have never left her." But in the next breath he had to qualify his paradox.

He spoke vehemently. "I had of her all that I dared have. That has never left me. I had all that she could give me—she that was self-sufficing, not to be imparted. She did not love me, as you could understand love: I don't think she could love anybody. But I only could read her thoughts and grasp her troubles for her. She was at ease with me, let me write to her, was glad to see me when I came, but perfectly able to do without me. She was, of course, not human; she inhabited elsewhere. Her 'soul was like a star and dwelt apart.' She remembered things as they had been, yet not as affecting her to pleasure or pain; she remembered them as a tale that is told, as things witnessed. So she remembered me—and so she still does. If I was there, with her, she was glad; if I was not there, she wasn't sorry. I was nothing to her but a momentary solace—and I knew it and taught myself to be contented. I believe that she was the spirit of immortal youth fleeting over the world. I called her Hymnia. What Beatrice was to Dante, the visible incarnation of his dream of holiness, such was she to me. I picture her and Beatrice together in heaven.

'In the clear spaces of heaven, As sisters and lovers, sit Beatrice and Thou embraced— Hand and hand, waist and waist, And smile at the worship given By Earth, and the men in it To whom you were manifest.'

I quote my own poetry, because, oddly enough, nobody else has remarked upon the fact."

He continued: "When she did what it pleased her to do, it was said by fools that I had inspired her. Fool among fools, I thought so myself at the time, and moved Earth and Heaven, and Hell and Ingram, to save her from an act of magnanimity the like of which I have never heard of. Bless you! if I had never lived, she would have acted as she did, because she was incapable of seeing evil, incapable of acting against her heart. Well! and the thing was done—and I had to face it. I had it all out with myself, and decided that no harm could come to her. From that hour I have never seen her with my waking eyes. Yet she is here. She is always here....

"My answer to you is simple. I have all of her of which I am capable. I have never left her because she has never left me....

"I wrote out my heart in my first years of knowing her; but since then I have gone under the harrow of this world, where there can be no singing. Now that I am at peace my voice has come back. I listen to what she tells me, and note it. Like Dante, vo significando: I am a drain-pipe for her spirit. She was Hymnia to me once, and I sang of Open Country; now she is Despoina, Mistress of the Night. Words come thronging to me, phrases, rhythms; but not Form. I shall get out a poem one of these days—when the harrow rests. And that will be its name: Rest Harrow."

He broke out after a pause-"Her beauty! What is it to the purpose to put its semblance into words? Its significance is the heart of the matter. We see the earth as hill and valley, pasture and cloud, sky and sea. Really it is nothing of the kind, but infinitely more. It is tireless energy, yearning, force, profusion, terror, immutability in variety. What are words to such a power? It is to that I stretch out my arms. I must lie folded in that immensity, drown and sink in it, till it and I are one. I must be resumed into the divine energy whose appearance is but a broken hint of it. So it is with Her: not what she appears, but what she stands for is the miracle. Her beauty is not in dimple and curve, though her breasts are softer than the snowy hills, and the liquor of her mouth sweeter than honey of limes. If I lay on the floor of the Aegean and looked up to the sun I should not see such blue as glimmers in her eyes. But these are figures, halting symbols. Her form, her glow, her eager, lovely breath are her soul put into speech for us to read. You might say that her nobility was that of the Jungfrau on a night of stars. So her body's beauty is but a poem written by God about her soul."

Glyde sat up and looked at him across the fire. "I know you. There is but one man who has loved her as you do. You are her poet. You are Senhouse."

Senhouse nodded. "That is my name. You know her, then?" His face glowed darkly. "You have known her—you!"

"I saw her four months ago. I was in servitude in a house where she too was made a servant. For her sake, I tell you again, I downed Ingram."

Senhouse said sharply, "It was for your own. You aren't fit to talk to her. You have unclean lips. You don't hurt her, for you cannot. You hurt yourself infinitely. Why, a dog would do as you did, and possibly be right; but you, not being a dog, have broken your own rules. You have trodden on your own honour, and, like the dull fool that you are, come out wrapped in your silly self-esteem as if it was a flag. I wish that you could see yourself as I see you—or rather I hope you never may; for if you did you would see no reason to live." The words, frozen with scorn, cut like hailstones. The guest cowered, with the whip about his face. Senhouse rose.

"Follow me," he said.

Glyde also rose to his feet, and, as if he was giddy, looked blankly about him. "O God, what have I done? O God, what am I?" He dashed his hand over his eyes. "I can't see. I suppose I never could." He turned upon Senhouse. "You! Why do you harbour such a rat as I?"

Senhouse gave him pitiful eyes. "If you think yourself a rat, you are in the way to be more. Come, we will be friends yet. You're near the end of your tether, I think. Let me tuck you into a blanket."



III

In the morning Glyde, in a humble mood, drank quantities of small beer. In other words, he told his story of Sanchia, of Ingram, and of Mrs. Wilmot. He was so steered by questions from Senhouse that he came, towards the end, to see that if any one had driven his mistress into a life of bondage to Ingram it was himself and his presumptuous arm.

"You must have offended her beyond expression," he was told. "First, her fine esteem in her own spotless robe, which you have smeared with beastly blood and heat; next, her sense of reason clear as day; next, and worst, her logical faculty by which she sees it to be a law of the earth that nothing can be bought without a price. Oh, you precious young donkey! And who the mischief are you, pray, to meddle in the affairs of high ladies— you who can't manage your own better than to do with your foolish muscles what is the work of a man's heart? Love! You don't know how to spell the word. But I am getting angry again, and I don't want to do that. I'll tell you what I shall do with you. You shall stay with me here till you are well, and then you shall go to London and find Despoina—"

"Do you mean Sanchia?" Glyde was still unregenerate at heart.

"I mean whom I say, your mistress and mine. You are not fit to name her by any other name."

"No, no—I know it," said the youth; "but her name is so beautiful."

"Everything about her is beautiful," said Senhouse, "therefore see that you go to her cleansed and sweetened. Now, when you have found her you shall beg her pardon on your knees—"

"Never!" said Glyde, grittily in his teeth.

"On your heart's knees, you fool," cried Senhouse, with a roar which rolled about the hills. "On the knees of your rat's heart. You shall beg her pardon on your knees for your beastly interference, presumption, mulishness, and graceless manhood; and then you shall leave her immediately, and thank God for the breath of her forgiveness. This also is important. You are not to name me who have sent you." His eyes shone with the gleam of tears. "Never name me to her, young Glyde, for I'll tell you now that for every stripe I've dusted your jacket with you owe me forty— and you can lay on when you please."

"For I," he continued, after a pause for breath, while Glyde stared fearfully upon him, "for I, too, have betrayed her."

They said no more at that time, but all day Glyde followed Senhouse about like a dog.

In the evening of what to the undrilled youth was a hard-spent day, Senhouse unfolded his heart and talked long and eloquently of love and other mysteries of our immortal life.

"The attainment of our desires," he said, "appears to every one of us to be a Law of Nature, and so, no doubt, it is. But that is equally valid which says, 'To every man that which he is fit to enjoy.' The task of men is to reconcile the two. That once done you are whole—nay, you are holy."

"I believe that I am in the way of that salvation, look you, for I know now that there is hardly a thing upon the earth which I cannot do without. That being so, and all things of equal value, or of no value, I have them all. They are at the disposal of that part of myself which enters no markets and cannot be chaffered away. Wind, rain, and sun have bleached me; dinners of herbs have reduced my flesh to obedience; incessant toil, with meditation under the stars, have driven my thoughts along channels graved deep by patient plodding of the field. I am become one with Nature. I have watched the wheeling of the seasons until, to escape vertigo, I picture myself as a fixed point, and see the spheres in their courses revolve about me."

Mystic sayings, aphorisms oozed from him like resin from a pine.

"It is error to suppose that discomfort is holy. Holiness is harmony. Men have lost sight of the sanctity of the body. Rightly considered, indigestion is a great sin."

"Passion, which is a state of becoming, is not holy, for holiness is a state of being. But it is noble, because it is a straining after appeasement, which is a harmony.

"Man is an ape, or a god, but certainly a god in this, that he can make himself either. It is by no means certain, however, that this potentiality is not also possessed by the ape.

"Appeasement of passion is fulfilment of our being, which out of ferment makes wine, though riot seeks rest."

He was not always so transcendental. Here we have him closer to the matter.

"A woman when she loves is a seraph winged. When she does not she is a chrysalis, a husk, or a shell. In love she follows the man, but appears to fly him, as a shepherd goes before the sheep he is really driving. Out of it she is an empty vase, to be revered by us for the sacred wine which she may hold, as a priest handles fearfully the chalice.

"She has but one law, the law of her love, which says to her, 'Give, give, give.' See here how she differs from the man, to whom love is but one of many healthy appetites—not a divine mission. Love, hunger, hunting, or a taste for picture-dealing, say to him, 'Take, take.'

"Yet it is no wonder that the sexes go in fear of each other, each a mystery to each. For my part, I have never been close to a woman without a desire to cover my eyes."

And here he got level with her, and showed her radiant beside him.

"A young woman with shining eyes, blown-back hair and face on fire, holding out her heart from the threshold, stretching it out at arms' length, crying, 'Who will take this? To whom may I give it?' A vision here of Heaven's core of light. I have seen it. I, Senhouse, have seen the Holy Grail.

"She stood with me upon the threshold of the world, just so, with blown- back hair and shining eyes. Blessed one, blessed prodigal! She poured out her heart like water-for a dog to lap. He was dog-headed, full in the eye, a rich feeder. She decked him with the fair garlands of her thoughts, she made him glisten with her holy oils. She crowned him with starry beams from her eyes, she sweetened him with the breath of her pure prayers. She robed him in white and scarlet, for he was wrapped in her soul and sprinkled with her passion. And she said, 'I love a divine person. I am ready to die for him. Make haste. Pile the fire, sharpen the knife; bind me with cords, and drive deep. I die that he may live.' O Gods, and Sanchia gave herself for Nevile Ingram!"

He was never alone, it appeared, for she was with him constantly, a vivifying principle. He had ensphered her in light; she was unassailable— his fly in amber. Ingram, Chevenix, all Wanless, might have daily converse with her, and one might grudge her her self-sufficiency, and another see her a pretty girl in a mess. To him she was a fairy in harness, "a lovely lady garmented in light," to whom the rubs of the world could do no harm. She wore crystal armour. They did not know her, could not see her, those who used her for their elemental needs. "Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart."

He told young Glyde that he had reached this transcendental eyrie of his by painful degrees. No person of Sanchia's acquaintance had suffered more than he by her desperate affair. He had been her first lover, and her only confidant, for she had been what one calls a "difficult" girl, who gave out nothing and had no friends. Her sisters knew very little about her, her mother nothing. It had been Senhouse who had called up the spirit that was in her—that extraordinary candour of vision which shrank from the judgment of nothing in heaven or earth "upon the merits." He had himself been at first amazed by her quality; but before he had discovered it he had adored her; so it had seemed all of a piece with her exquisite perfection. That first sight he had had of her, in the sun-dappled woodland glade, with her gown above her knees, setting her foot in the unknown depths of a black pool—that she might rescue lilies from suffocation—was surely typical of that which followed—when, barely twenty-one, she trod deliberately, in her world's shocked face, a road which leads without return to a point at which the world says, "I cannot see you, you are dead." But she had never faltered, had seen no shame, and felt none. Nevile was unhappy, and needed her. If there was no other way of serving him, she must take that way. So she told him, Senhouse, her only friend; and he cried aloud in his agony, "God save her," while his soul was saying, "Beatrice never shrank from hell, nor ever looked back. No more, God be thanked, does Sanchia." When the thing was done, and she had gone with unbowed head into the deeps, he had known his hours of desolation; but from that hour she had stood for him "a thing enskied and sainted." He felt that he was set apart for her worship, and only regretted that Beatrice had had a better poet for the business than Sanchia could ever hope for.

For a year after her flight he continued a correspondence with her which had begun with their first acquaintance; and then he had stopped it, not she. His reason shall be admitted, to his credit or not. It appeared that she read his letters, as they came, to Nevile Ingram—she told him so— and, further, that Ingram was bored. Sanchia did not tell him that, but he gathered it; and whether he felt that the intimacy was fatally invaded, or whether he was piqued—he stopped. Within two years or so from that he wrote once more to tell her that he was about to "join fortunes" with Mary Germain, a young widow.

She knew what he meant by that; he was too much of a poet to be anything but shocked at the marriage-bond. She hoped the best for him, but his letter did not encourage her.

He wrote, "She is good, sweet and wholesome. I have taught her what she knows—I mean by that that I have helped her to pick up a clue here and there to take her by some means to the heart of our mystery. She has had a dreadful mauling by the world; but her brain is sound. I intend to make her happy, but not here. We go to Baden a-painting. She vows she will keep the door of my tent like a Bedouin's wife. It's a great test. If she comes through it—with her upbringing—she will show mettle. Farewell, Queen Mab. One does what one must, being man. Pray for us both."

She answered him frankly and kindly. Ingram was away on one of his long absences, and she felt acold. "I shall always wish for your happiness. How could I ever forget what you did to give me mine?" He read that as meaning that she had found and had it still, so wrote no more—not even when his venture, not too hopefully begun, had ended. His head was low in the dust, his zest was gone. It needed his austerities and solitude to restore his tone.

But now, in his hidden valley, she never left him, though she was always veiled. He could not call up her blue eyes' magic, nor her slow smile, nor the touch of her thin fingers. She had no bodily semblance; she was a principle. In his exalted mood, being tiptoe for Mystery, he identified her with the Spirit of all Life. For life to him was a straining at the leash, a reaching for the unattainable, a preparation to soar. He saw all things flowing towards heaven, which to him was Harmony, Rest, what he called Appeasement. And all this straining and yearning in infinite variety was figured to him in Sanchia, as he discerned, but could not perceive, her presence. He made her out in elemental images, into the contours of the hills read her bountiful shape, into the onslaught of the wind her dauntless ardour. In fire leaped her pride, in the mantling snow her chastity was proclaimed. The rain was her largess, her treasure poured to enrich mankind. All flowers were sacred to her—frail beauty salient from the earth. He never looked on one but he blessed her name.

On a later day he read a poem to his guest—which he called the Song of Mab. By this name, it seems, he also figured Sanchia, whose synonyms, threatened to be as many as those of Artemis or the Virgin Mary. From poring for signs of her in the face of earth he was come to see little else. If the west wind was her breath and the hills were her breasts, it needed a mystic to see them so; and he was become a mystic. A glorified and non-natural Sanchia pervaded the poem, which, for the form, was a barbaric, rough-hewn chant, stuffed with words and great phrases which had the effect rather of making music in the hearer than of containing it in themselves. It was poetry by hints, perpetually moving, initiating, lyrical phrases, then breaking off and leaving you with a melody in your ears which your brain could not render. Either the poet was inchoate or the subtlest musician of our day. He said of himself that he was a drain- pipe for the spirit—a dark saying to Glyde, who was himself, we have heard, something of a poet, of the Byronic tradition. The youth was extremely interested, though seldom moved by this chaotic piece. He was for ever on the point to drink, and had the cup snatched away. Senhouse tormented you with possibilities of bliss—where sight merges in sound and both lift together into a triumphant sweep of motion—whirled you, as it were, to the gates of dawn, showed you the amber glories of preparation, thrilled you with the throb of suspense; then, behold! coursing vapours and gathering clouds blot out the miracle—and you end in the clash of thunderstorms and dissonances. Something of this the listener had to urge. Senhouse admitted it, but he said, "You know that the splendour is enacting behind. You guess the opening of the rose. One stalks this earth agog for miracles. It is full of hints—you catch a moment—for flashed instants you are God. Then the mist wraps you, and you blunder forward, two-legged man swaying for a balance. Translate the oracle as you will— with your paint-pans, with your words—we get broken lights, half-phrases. But we guess the rest, and so we strain and grow. Who are you or I, that we should know her!"

He stuffed the pages into the breast of his jelab, and sat brooding over the paling fire for a while; then, by an abrupt transition, he said—"A fatal inclination for instructing the young was, perhaps, my undoing. I believe that I am a prig to the very fibres of me. If I had kept my didactics for my own sex, all might have gone well: I have never doubted but that I had things to teach my generation which it would be the happier of knowing. But it's a dangerous power to put into a man's hands that he shall instruct his betters. I was tempted by that deadliest flattery of all, and I fell. Despoina heard me, smiled at me, and went her way regardlessly; but my poor Mary was a victim. She heard me, and took it seriously. She thought me a man of God. I failed absolutely, and so badly that by rights I ought never to have held up my head again. But she is happy, dear little soul, after her own peculiar fashion,—which she never could have been with me. She writes to me now and then. The man, her husband, is her master, but not a bad one. She knows it, and glories in him. Isn't that extraordinary?"

"Not at all," Glyde said, who knew nothing of Mary. "It's a law of Nature. The woman follows the man. I suppose you treated her as an equal?"

"No, as a superior, which she plainly was," said Senhouse.

"Then," Glyde said, looking at him, "then you made her so. If you fly against Nature, you must get the worst of it." He waited, then asked, "It's against your principles to marry a woman, no doubt."

"Quite," Senhouse said. "It seems to me an insult to propose it to her."

"Your Mary didn't think so."

"She did at first; but she couldn't get used to it."

"She felt naked without the ring? And ashamed?"

"God help me," said Senhouse, "that's true. The moment I realised what had happened, I gave in."

"And then she refused?"

"She neither accepted nor refused. She lived apart. We were in Germany at the time. I was naturalising plants for the Grand Duke of Baden—filling the rocks and glades in the Black Forest. She went into an hotel in Donaueschingen, and I went to see her every day. We were friends. Then we went to England, to London. She held to that way of life, and I did the best I could for myself. At any moment I would have taken her. I considered myself bound in every way. I could have been happy with her. She had great charm for me—great physical charm, I mean—and sweet, affectionate ways. I could have made her a wife and a mother.

"I intended her the highest honour I could show to a woman. To make her your property by legal process and the sanction of custom seems to me like sacrilege. But, however—One day she told me that a former lover of hers wanted to marry her, and left it for me to judge. She wouldn't say whether she wished it herself or not; but I knew that she did, for when I advised her to accept him she got up and put her arms round my neck and kissed both my cheeks. I was her elder brother, I perceived, and said so. She laughed, and owned to it. And yet she had loved me, you know. She had refused that same man for me. She was afraid of him, and gave me her hand before his face."

"That to me," Glyde said, "is proof positive that she loved him. Of course she feared him. It is obvious. My poor master!"

Senhouse serenely replied, "She's happy, and I've done her no harm at all. But it's impossible for me to treat any living creature otherwise than as my better."

"I believe you," said Glyde, "and so it may be in a rarer world than this. In this world, however, a man is the most cunning animal, and in that both are flesh he is the stronger of the sexes. In this world the law is that the woman follows the man." He thought before he spoke, then added, "That applies all this world over. You will marry Sanchia."

Senhouse would not look up. He sat, nursing one leg. He bent his brows, and a hot flush made his skin shine in the firelight.



IV

The poet and his disciple continued their partnership through the sogging rains of Christmas, well into the chill opening of the new year. Then came the snow to fill up the valley in which stood the hut, and blur the outlines of the folded hills. Poetry and Sanchia drew together a pair who could have little in common.

But Glyde became the slave of the strange man who blended austerity with charitable judgment, and appeased his passion by blood from his heart. He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world's rubs had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or you earn it by practice. Glyde had found out that the less you say to your maltreaters the less, in time, you have to say about it to yourself. He was conscious of his parts and all too ready to be arrogant. Senhouse's goddess had been kind to him, and he had presumed upon that. Senhouse's own method was to alternate extreme friendliness with torrential contempt. He knocked Glyde down and picked him up again with the same hand. He treated him as his equal whenever he was not considering him a worm. There is no better way of gaining the confidence of a youth of his sort. At the end of a fortnight there was nothing Glyde would not have told him; at the end of six months he would have crossed Europe barefoot to serve him.

He was nothing of a mystic, and therefore had his own ideas of what seemed to afford his master so much satisfaction; he was enough of a poet to be sure that Senhouse's romantic raptures were only a makeshift at best. To his mind here was a man aching for a woman. He thought that the poet sang to ease his bleeding heart. He came to picture the mating of these two— Sanchia the salient, beautiful woman, and his master of the clear, long- enduring, searching eyes, and that strange look of second-sight upon him which those only have who live apart from men, under the sky. It is a look you can never mistake. Sailors have it, and shepherds, and dwellers in the desert. The eye sees through you—into you, and beyond you. It is almost impossible for any person to be either so arresting in himself or possessed of such utterance as will cause the weathered eye to check its scanning of distance and concentrate upon an immediate presence. To such an eye, communing with infinite and eternal things, no creature of time and space can interpose solidly. Each must be vain and clear as bubbles of air. Behind it float spirits invisible to other men—essential forms, of whose company the seer into distance really is. He will neither heed you nor hear you; his conversation is other-where. And what then would Senhouse do confronted with Sanchia? Would he look beyond her, towards some horizon where she could never stand? Or would he not see in her blue eyes the goal of all his searching—the content of his own? What would he say but "You!" and take her? What she but sigh her content to be taken? Appeasement is holiness, says Senhouse. And what of their holy life thereafter, breast to breast, fronting the dawn? Glyde's heart, purged of his dishonesty, beat at the thought. He turned all his erotic over to the more generous emotion, and faced with glowing blood the picture of the woman he had coveted in the arms of the master he avowed.

When February began to show a hint of spring, in pairing plovers and breaking eglantine, Senhouse, in a temporary dejection, ceased work upon his poem, and Glyde said that he must know the news. All through the winter they had had little communication with the world beyond their gates. A shepherd homing from the folds, a sodden tinker and his drab, whom he touchingly cherished, a party of rabbit-shooters beating the furze bushes, had been all their hold upon a life where men meet and hoodwink each other. Once in a week one of them ploughed through the drifts to the cottage at the foot of the third valley, and got as he needed flour and candles, soap or matches. It had not yet occurred to either of them—to Senhouse it never did occur—to beg the sight of a newspaper. But Saint Valentine's call stirred the deeps of Glyde, who now said that he must have news. He departed for Sarum, and stayed away until March was in.

He returned with certain information, absorbed by Senhouse with far- sighted patient eyes and in silence. The only indication he afforded was inscrutable. His cheek-bones twitched flickeringly, like summer lightning about the hills.

Sanchia, Glyde said, was well and in London. She was living in a street off Berkeley Square, with an old lady who wore side-curls and shawls, and drove out every afternoon in a barouche with two stout horses and two lean men-servants. Sanchia sometimes accompanied her, stiff and pliant at once, bright-eyed and faintly coloured. She was taken about to parties also, and to the opera—and very often there were parties at the old lady's house— carriage-company, and gentleman in furred coats, who came in hansom cabs. He thought that she had suitors. There was a tall, thin man who came very often in the afternoons. He was sallow and melancholy, and wore a silk muffler day and night. Glyde thought that he was a foreigner, perhaps a Hungarian or Pole.

He had seen Sanchia often, but she could not have caught a glimpse of him. He admitted that he had haunted the house, had seen her come out and go in, knew when she dressed for dinner and when she went to bed. Long practice had acquainted him with the significance of light and darkness seen through chinks in shutters. "I know her room," he said, "and the times of her lights. She looks out over the streets towards the Park twice every night—once when she is dressed, and once before she goes to bed. It is as if she is saying her prayers. She looks long to the west, very seriously. I think her lips move. I believe that she always does it." Senhouse, who may have been listening, bowed his head to his knees, below his clasped hands.

"Twice she looked full at me without knowing me. Why should she know me now? Her pale and serious face, master, was as beautiful as the winter moon, as remote from us and our little affairs. No words of mine can express to you the outward splendour of her neck and bosom. She was uncovered for a party at the house. In the morning she came out to walk. You know her way, how she glides rather than seems to move her feet—the soaring, even motion of a sea-bird. She walked across the Park, and I followed, praising God, whose image she is. On the further side the Pole met her in his furs, and she walked with him for an hour in the sun. She had no wrappage to hide her blissful shape. Close-fitted, erect, free- moving, gracious as a young birch-tree. Master, she is the Holy One."

"You played Peeping Tom, my ingenuous young friend," said Senhouse, who was fastidious in such matters.

But Clyde cried out, "God forbid! Are you prying when you look at the sun! Master, you need not grudge the Pole. He is nothing."

"I grudge no man anything he can get of her," said Senhouse. "He will get precisely what lies within his scope."

"He has the eyes of a rat," Glyde said.

Senhouse answered, "Rats and men alike seek their meat of the earth. And the rats get rat-food, and the men man's food. Despoina's breasts are very large." He turned to his poem, folded his jelab about his middle, and went out over the downs. Glyde saw him no more that day, nor, indeed, till the next morning, when he found him squatted over a pipkin simmering on the fire.

The year went on its course, and windy March broke into a wet, warm April. Glyde sat at the knees of his master, and imbibed learning and fundamental morality. But now and then he absented himself for a day at a time, and was understood to get news from Salisbury market. He came back one day with a newspaper. Senhouse read without falter or comment:

"A marriage is arranged, and will take place in July, between Nevile Ingram of Wanless Hall, Felsboro', Yorks, and Sanchia-Josepha, youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival of—Great Cumberland Place, W., and The Poultry, E.G."

In that night, or very early in the morning, Glyde disappeared without word or sign left behind him.



BOOK IV

SANCHIA IN LONDON



I

London in mid-May, slogging at its pleasures under the pale sun, might read one morning of an affray in Yorkshire, of a magistrate assaulted, or undergardener in arms, and forget it in half-an-hour; but to Sanchia, unaccustomed to cower, some such chance paragraph seemed one spot the more upon her vesture, which contact with the Fulham Road had smirched already. She had never taken cover before—and how could one be in such a place but to hide in it? With contracted brows and bosom oppressed, she watched the drifting millions go by, and her heart sank. Was she become as one of these? Is not to be ashamed to be shameful? And had she not been put to shame? If she was to hold up the head and feel the mouth of the winged steed that she rode, she must stable him elsewhere.

She wished to forget Wanless. Let it be as if it was not, and had never been. But she found that Glyde and his outrageous act made that not possible. They brought her down to London's level—her in her white robe out of stainless air; here she was still, as Glyde had made her there, just a woman for men to quarrel over, or a bone for dogs. Her heart surged hot against Wanless; she could not, if she would, forget it—least of all in the Fulham Road.

She felt spotted in Mrs. Benson's spotless dwelling—largely because it was Mrs. Benson's, partly because a smell of fried herrings drifted in daily from the street. She felt herself the chosen of a servant, one for whom a clown had held battle; and then she found herself resenting the phrases, growing hot over them. A servant—Mrs. Benson, that staunch protectress! A clown—Struan—his thin frame throbbing with fire, and his eyes of a hawk in a cage, farset, communing with invisible things! Why, when he was rapt in his work he never saw her at all. She was a speck at his feet! He had sent her away once. "I'm busy," he had said, without looking at her; and she had gone away on tiptoe. These things vexed her to remember, and she felt that Mrs. Benson's dwelling could not be hers.

Mrs. Benson, too, it must be owned, had an incumbrance, which she kept as far as might be in the lower regions of her house, but which was now and again encountered on the stair—a shambling son, one Joe, mostly in shirt —sleeves, distilling familiarity and beer from every pore. He was a ne'er- do-well, whom it was his mother's cross and crown to keep in complete idleness. He cast dreadful looks, as of an equal in snugness, a fellow- minion, at the chiselled profile of our goddess, and was not long before he tried for a full-faced effect. Sanchia's eyes of clear amaze should have cut him down, but they did not. His "Morning, Miss," was daily reminder of a shared clay. Sanchia made herself inaccessible, and Mrs. Benson agonised.

To apologise for her son had been as futile as to make excuses for death; but she tried it. "You'll overlook the partiality of a mother, Miss Percival? What am I to do? It's not that I want him to lap syrup from a spoon—far from that. Idleness leads to impiety, and impiety anywhere, from Tattersal's to the public, we all know. But think of what stings me. I can't abide the thought that here am I, large Mrs. Benson, with money to spare, turning my back upon my fatherless child. Yet nothing short of that will do it." Sanchia readily excused her; and then she turned her own back upon the Fulham Road. Pimlico found her a lodging, at the gates of whose dingy mysteries were parks, Westminster, the sky and the river, eternal things, making for tranquillity.

It had been her first impulse, the moment she reached London, to go to her father, with whom alone she had corresponded during her years of exile. There was Vicky Sinclair, to be sure, her sister next in age; but Vicky was married to a man she knew nothing of, and she found herself shy. Fought for! Blared across London in a paragraph—championed by a clown! How was she to meet a Captain Sinclair? Her father, surely, was different. She never doubted his love, nor that he would take her to his heart if she asked to go there. But could she? It would have to be done by stealth; she must go to the city, to his office—for her mother ruled in Great Cumberland Place, and she could not go there. She hated secrets, and couldn't pose as a culprit; so she delayed and delayed. It was a comfort to her to know that he was at hand: meantime, she sought about for scope to spread her wings.

For a fortnight she drank of the gales of liberty, filled her bosom with beauty, and let art smooth out her brows. She listened to music, looked at pictures, renewed her reader's ticket, and spent whole days browsing under the Bloomsbury dome. Climbing the heights, she planned out schemes of work, felt her critical faculties renewed, studied men and women, and found her old pleasure in quiet chuckling over their shifts. But she had to chuckle alone, for she never spoke to a soul. For a fortnight or so all went well—and then, quite suddenly, without any warning, going, as it were, to the fountain for water, she found there was no bottom to her cruse. She went to bed sanguine, she awoke morose. She saw the day with jaundiced eyes, scorned herself, cried "Liver!" and took medicine. She was glued to her books all day, returned late to her lodging, and found herself in tears. She discovered a tenderness, a yearning; she lay awake dreaming of her childhood, of her girlhood, of Vicky, of her father's knee, of Senhouse, her dear, preposterous friend, whose grey eyes quizzed while they loved her. Golden days with him—golden nights when she dreamed over his eager, profuse, interminable letters! All these sweet, seemly things were dead! Ah, no, not that, else must she die. She cried softly, and stretched out her arms in the dark to the gentle ghosts that peopled it. Then, being practical in grain, she jumped up, lit candles, and wrote deliberately to each of her sisters—finally, after much biting of the pen, to her father. Before her mood could cool she dressed hastily, slipped out, and posted her letters. Coming back to bed, she paused in the act to enter it—one knee upon it. Wide-eyed she wondered why she had not written to Senhouse. To him, of all people in the world, first of all! And his answer—a certainty. Hot came the reply to her question, and smote her in the face. Never to him again—never. There are certain things no woman can bring herself to do. The more she has need of a man the less possible is it to tell him so. She sighed as she got into her bed, and her eyes were very kind.

Of the five fair daughters of Thomas Welbore Percival, East India Merchant in The Poultry, Philippa, the eldest, the trenchant and clear-sighted, lived in Bryanston Square, mother of three children. Her husband, Mr. Tompsett-King, was a solicitor, but he was much more than that, An elderly, quiet gentleman, who talked in a whisper, and seemed to walk in one too, he presided over more than one learned Society, and spoke at Congresses on non-controversial topics. A sound churchman, he deplored Romish advance on the one hand and easy divorce on the other. The salvation of human society lay, he held, within these limits. Distrust the emotions; submit all things to reason-love of God and love of women. On these terms he prospered like his father before him. It all seemed very simple to him. The handsome Philippa respected him, obeyed him particularly, and never differed from him in opinion. But she coloured every compliance with his decrees with an idiosyncrasy so marked as to make them seem her own. Where he held that Rome pandered to the emotions, she laughed it to scorn as a forcing—house of spiritual foppery; where he saw in divorce a treason to the law of contract, she said that it tempted women to fall. Is it not easy enough to sin? Must we legalise it? Why put a tax upon marriage? Mr. Tompsett-King deprecated all dottings of iotas; when Philippa stormed at society he hummed a sad little tune. Before he left for Bedford Row he patted her shoulder and said, "Gently does it." Some such scene must ensue upon the prodigal's letter.

Hawise, Lady Pinwell, next in age to Philippa, lived in the country. Her husband was a baronet, and a handsome blond. A pretty, apple-cheeked, round-eyed girl, very much of a kitten, she was now grown plump, sleek, rather slow to move, and many times a mother. She deferred to her husband in all things, and by his wish received her parents on a formal visit once a year. She saw very little of her sisters, and as for Sanchia—the thing was not to be heard of, not even mentioned to Sir George. As, in fact, she burned the child's letter before she left her bedroom, she does not come into the tale at all.

But the pensive Melusine, three years younger than Philippa, seven older than Sanchia, may be reckoned with. She was also married, to a Mr. Gerald Scales, the son of a baronet. He was not, however, to inherit the title, for he had a brother, Sir Matthew, and frequent nephews. But his means were ample for his rank and discreet amusements, and went further and did more for him than prolific Sir Matthew's; for Melusine gave him no sons. His circle of being, in and through which trailed with charming languor his wife, was of more dappled sheen and of ampler circumference than that of Bryanston Square. Having its centre in Kensington Gore, it reached to Ranelagh on one side, to Maidenhead on the other. There was a riverside villa down there, where Mrs. Scales gave parties in the summertime and was punted about by flushed gentlemen in pink shirts. She was the tallest of the five sisters, and the most graceful; near-sighted enough for lorgnettes, an elegant young woman. She had an instinct for attitudes, turns of the head, which were useful in tete-a-tete conversations. Mentally, she was not strong, and perhaps her manner was too elaborate: she draped herself when she sat down as if her skirts were window- curtains. Toy Pomeranians were a hobby of hers, and the early Florentine masters. She could read off the names of the saints in a sacred conversation as easily as you or I a row of actresses in a photograph shop. Mrs. Jameson's books were at her fingers' ends. Her mother favoured her more than any of her children, and was often at her house on visits. Gerald Scales called her the Dowager, and pleased her vastly. He himself was Tubby to his friends.

Vicky, a year older than Sanchia, had married a Captain Sinclair, who was stationed at Aldershot. She had been the romp of former days and, when the storm had burst, hotly on the culprit's side. But Vicky had been flighty, and marriage changes one. Sanchia's eyes grew wistful as she sat, her letters on the wing, and thought of Vicky.

Her first response was from Melusine, in a telegram from Taplow which read, "Darling, alas!" and no more. Her comment was shrewd: "Mamma is there"—and she was right. Then came her father's letter, to pluck at her heart-strings. He invited her to the Poultry at "any hour of the day—and the sooner the better;" but was clear that she could not visit Great Cumberland Place without writing to Mamma. "Doing the civil" was his jocular way of putting it—one of Papa's little ways when he meant more. She knew that he was right, and postponed the fond man and his injunction. His love might be taken for granted by a favourite child. Just now it was her sisters' judgment she craved.

Philippa wrote with her accustomed steel. It might have been a bayonet: yet she meant to be kind.

BRYANSTON SQUARE, Thursday.

My Dear Sanchia,—I may as well say at once that I am not surprised to hear from you; in fact, I have been expecting some such letter as yours ever since I read in the Times of Claire Ingram's death. Poor unhappy woman, it was time! Some of the Pierpoints (the Godfrey P's) are intimate friends of ours: we dined there last week; no party—just ourselves—and heard all about it. I learned that Mr. Ingram had gone abroad, but imagine that he will be in London before the end of the season. Have you written to Mamma? If not, pray do so. I assure you that it will be taken as it is meant. Nothing but good can come of it. Of that I am sure.

Now, as to your proposals. I think I will ask you to come to me here. I am very busy, with calls a thousand ways. I really have no afternoons free for as far forward as I can see—except Sundays, which I devote entirely to Tertius and religion. No woman ought to separate the two—love of God, love of husband in God. Sooner or later, all women learn it. Then the mornings are naturally occupied with the house and the children. They have Miss Meadows; but she is young and absurdly inconsequent. I don't see how you can expect a girl in her teens to work miracles. In fact, I don't want her to, and am at hand to see that she doesn't.

I have spoken to Tertius, and you must forgive me for saying that we both think, under the circumstances, it would look, and be, better in every way if you came here, in the first instance. Without discussing what is done, and (I pray) done with, you will see, I think, that for me to seek you out would be, to say the least of it, unusual. You left our father's house for reasons of your own; I had left it to be married to Tertius. Forgiveness, if you wish it from me, is yours: countenance of the step you took—never. You will not ask it. So come here any morning that suits you, and I shall be pleased. You will find me ready to do everything I can, to put you on your proper footing in the sphere to which you were born.— Believe me, my dear Sanchia, your affectionate sister, PHILIPPA TOMPSETT- KING.

P. S.—The Church's arms are very wide. One cannot be too thankful, as things have turned out, that Claire Ingram never sued for divorce. God is most merciful.

There was some knitting of brows over this, and some chuckling. Comedy is the Art of the Chuckle; but it is very seldom that one of the persons in the play can practise that which delights us. Sanchia was such a person. She could detach herself from herself, see her own floutings and thwackings, and be amused. At the same time her reply to Philippa was curt.

"You," she wrote, "are busy, and I am not. I will come to you one of these fine mornings, and must trust to Miss Meadows' sense of fitness not to work miracles that day."

A day or two later came a telegram from Vicky Sinclair. "Just got your letter. Coming at twelve. Vicky." Sanchia glowed. "Just like her, the darling." Philippa's astringent proposal was put aside.

At twelve thirty-five there lit from a hansom an eager and pretty little lady, all in gauzy tissues and lace scarf, who knocked at the door like a postman and flew up the stair into Sanchia's arms. "Oh, Sancie, Sancie, how sweet of you to write! Now we are all going to be happy again forever after. Oh, and here's Cuthbert—I forgot." In the doorway stood the erect form, and smiled the bronzed face of Captain Sinclair of the Greys. His "How d'ye do, Miss Sanchia!" was accompanied by a look of such curious enquiry that Sanchia gave him two fingers, said, "Quite well, thank you," and no more. Much more had been expected, and the Captain was somewhat taken aback. He had been ready to welcome the prodigal and admire her too. What's more, he had already very much admired her. To have one's generous motions damped by a coolness of that sort is sickening. But there it was: what could one say? what could one do? He went to the window and stood there, whistling in a whisper until his wife dismissed him. To the Cavalry Club stalked he, working himself into virtuous heat. There, at luncheon with a friend, he expatiated, which was unwise and unmannerly at once. But his own wrongs swallowed up his wife's rights.

"I'll be damned, Jack," he took up his parable, "I'll be damned if ever I do a woman a good turn any more. Never, never again. Gel I know—relative of mine she is, by marriage—goes a purler with a chap. Knew something of the chap too—so did you, I expect. Not a bad chap, by any means, barring this sort of thing. Well, now she's in town—all over—settled down, y'know. Writes to my wife. Well, I thought it was no good bein' stiff in these things. Against the spirit of the age—what? So I said we'd do the handsome thing and go up. We both wanted a spell of easy—so it was handy. Besides, I wanted to see the gel. I own to that. And there's no doubt she's a clinker; quiet, you know, and steady; looks right at you, far in; sees the lot at a glance. Palish gel, not too big; but well set up. Square shoulders—deep-chested gel. That sort." He stared at the table-cloth hard.

"I was taken by her, mightily taken. So when she and my wife had done kissin', I put in my little oar. 'How d'ye do, Miss—' I won't mention names, though upon my dick I don't know why I should be squeamish. But there it was; and I'd have kissed her, as you do kiss your wife's—well, cousin, let's say—if you want to. Bless you, not a bit of it. Proud as pepper. Gives me a finger. 'Quite well,' says she. 'Quite well, thank you —' and drops me. Drops me! Good Lord!"

He drank deeply of beer. "Well now, I tell you, that's the last time, absolutely the last time I do the civil thing to—well, to that sort, if she's my wife's grandmother." He stared out of window, mist over his blue eyes. "They're all for marrying her now. It seems it can be done. Chap's to be screwed up. Then she'll be patronising me, you'll see. Because I was decently civil—that was as far as I was prepared to go; bare civility— and two fingers for it—'Quite well, thank you!' Oh, damn it. Waiter—more beer."



II

Vicky was enchanting; for half-an-hour Sanchia was at the top of bliss. To be petted and diminutived by a butterfly—it was like that; for though the child was a year older than she, six years of marriage had made a baby of her. Her audacities of old had become artless prattle, her sallies were skips in the air. Yet to be purred over by a kitten was pure joy. "You darling!' You darling little Sancie! You beautiful, pale, Madame-de-Watte- ville kind of person! Oh, my treasure—and I thought I should never see you again!" So she cooed while she cuddled, Sanchia, for her part, saying little, but kissing much. Her lips were famished; but Vicky's must be free for moments if her words were to be intelligible. During such times she stroked or patted the prodigal, and let her browse on her cheeks.

By-and-by, raptures subsiding, the pair settled down for talk, and the discrepancies which eight years had made began to show up, like rocks and boulders in a strand left bare by the ebb. Grotesque the shapes of some of them, comical others; but wrecks and dead things come to light at low water—spectral matter, squalid, rueful matter. And there are chasms set yawning, too, which you cannot bridge. Sanchia was to be lacerated.

No doubt it was laughable at first, as naivete is. "Cuthbert was very funny about it"—for instance. "He was awfully anxious to see you, you know—you had never met, I think?—and yet not quite liking it. He said it was a great risk; he seemed to think I ought not to be there. He takes great care of me, the darling. And there was little Dickie, you see. Sancie! he can just walk—a kind of totter from my knees to Cuthbert's— and then so proud of himself! Cuthbert said that my duty was to Dickie; but I told him that I meant to come."

Yes, it was comical. "Did Captain Sinclair think I should give him a complaint?" Sanchia was smiling, with eyes and mouth; but the smile was fixed.

Vicky hugged her. "You dear one! prettiness is your complaint. I should like him to have some of that." She held her at arms' length, looked and glowed, and kissed. She took a serious tone, for the matter was serious. "You know, Sancie, you're the only beauty in our family, the only real beauty. Philippa's awfully handsome, I know, and greatly admired—and I've always said that Melot was lovely. There are those three sorts of women, you know. Philippa's handsome, Melot's lovely, and you're beautiful. Then there's prettiness. I know I'm rather pretty: everybody says so. Besides, there's Cuthbert. Oh, you can always tell! For one thing—he's so fussy about my clothes—you've no idea." She preened herself, like a pigeon in the sun, before she returned to her praises. "But you! You're quite different. You're like a goddess." She touched her curiously. "Yes, I thought so. Exactly like a goddess." She sighed. "I can't think how you do it. Swedish exercises? I know it's wonderful what they do for you—in no time. But you have to think about them all the while, and I think of Cuthbert—and Dickie—and the horses—and, oh, all sorts of things! Those sort, I mean,—nice things." She pondered Sanchia's godhead, shaking her pretty draperies out, then recalled herself. "Oh, yes, about coming here. Of course I knew that Mamma would make a fuss—but I had determined long ago, before I dreamed that it would ever happen, not to tell her a word. It was only Cuthbert who made me feel—well, serious. He is so wise, such a man of the world! But I told him that I meant to come whatever he could say—and afterwards it turned out that he wanted to come too. He was really quite keen. Wasn't that sweet of him? You would adore Cuthbert if you knew him as well as I do. But, of course, that's absurd." She suddenly became intense. "Sancie!" she said, then stopped and peered.

"Yes?" It was a sobered goddess who waited for close quarters. Vicky put her question, but peered no more.

"I wish you would tell me one thing, which—has always puzzled me. But don't, if you would rather not. How did you—I simply can't understand it —how did you ever—? I suppose you loved him very much?"

Sanchia was in a hard stare. "Yes," she said slowly, "I suppose I did." Vicky's head darted back.

"Ah! But now you don't a bit. I knew you didn't! Sancie, that's what I can't understand. Because, you know, when you're married you do. You always love the same person. You must—you can't help it. He's so natural; he knows things that you know. He knows—everything. Oh, Sancie, I can't talk about it, but you understand, don't you?"

Poor Sancie nodded, not able to look up. Alas for her secrets, offered, taken, and forgotten! But Vicky's vivacious fingers groped in her empty cupboard. "And then, as well as that, you ought to love him. You see, you've promised; it's all been made so sacred. You never forget it—the clergyman, and the altar, and the hymns. You're all in white—veiled. And you kneel there—before the altar—and he holds your hand. And the ring, oh, Sancie, the feeling of the ring!" She opened her little hand and looked down at the smoothed gold, coiled below the diamonds and pearls. "You never forget the first feel of that. It means—everything!" She blushed, and said, in a hushed sort of way, "It meant—Dickie, to me."

Sanchia drooped and bled. Vicky, deep in her holy joys, was remorseless. Even when she turned once more to her sister's affairs her consolation made wounds.

"Cuthbert said that it would come all right now—now that Mrs. Ingram-the wife—was—That's rather horrible. Even you must feel that. Instead of being sorry that his wife is dead, one has to be awfully glad. I suppose you felt that at once; and of course he did. Poor woman! I wonder if she was buried in her ring." She eyed her own. "No one would dare take it off. I made Cuthbert promise me this morning. But—of course people do marry again, and it will be practically the same as that." She reflected. "Yes, practically, it will, but—oh, it's very extraordinary! You've had all your fun of engagement and all that, long ago." She looked down deeply at her hand; and then she gazed at her sister. "And, oh, Sancie, you've had your honeymoon!" Before the deadly simplicity of that last stroke Sanchia fell, and lay quivering. She could not ask for mercy, she could explain, extenuate, nothing. Huddled she lay. At this aching moment the one thing that the world held worth her having seemed to be the approbation of this butterfly child. For Vicky's happiness was specific. Nuptial bliss lay, as it were, crystallised within it. There are moments in one's life when love itself seems lust, and safety the only holy thing. Vicky, tearing at her heart, had turned her head.

Vicky once gone, with promise of frequent intercourse by letter and otherwise, it was to Philippa's fine house and respectable man-servant she next surrendered herself. The meeting was cool, but not intolerable to a goddess sore from Vicky's whip. Philippa could ply a longer lash, but not by the same right, nor with the same passion to drive it home. Sanchia's eyes met hers upon the level; and if the elder had a firmly modelled chin, so had the younger sister. Her strength, too, lay, as it always had, in saying little, whereas Philippa's forte was dialogue. But it needs two for that. After the first greeting there came a pause, in which the embarrassment, upon the whole, was Mrs. Tompsett-King's.

The trenchant lady had had her sailing orders, and was going to follow them. Mr. Tompsett-King had told her that Sanchia must be led, not driven, into Ingram's arms. "Assume the best of her, my dear friend," he had said, "if you wish to get the best out of her. Take right intentions for granted. It is very seldom that a woman can resist that kind of flattery. So far as I can read your sister's mind, she has suffered from your mother's abrupt methods. I beg of you not to repeat them. Nothing but mischief could come of it." When Mr. Tompsett-King called her his dear friend, she knew that he was serious.

But Sanchia's mood had not been reckoned with: Philippa was not Vicky. In the old days, in a wonderfully harmonious household, there had been a latent rivalry between her and all her juniors. The greatest trouble had been with Sanchia, the deliberate. And so it was now that when the elder warmed to her task of making bad best, she was suddenly chilled by that old pondering and weighing which had always offended her. Sanchia replied to her assumptions and suppositions by saying simply that she didn't know where Mr. Ingram was, and that he was no better informed of her than she of him. But surely—Philippa raised her brows—but surely she knew when he was coming to London? Sanchia's head-shake shocked her. There was but one conclusion to be drawn from it.

"There's been a quarrel," then said she.

"No," Sanchia answered—as if thinking it out—"no, I shouldn't say that. I should say, a difference of opinion."

"My dear," said Philippa—and the phrase with her was one of reproof—"on essentials there can have been none. He will wait a year, of course. Under the circumstances, a full year. But—"

Sanchia had replied, "I don't know what he means to do. I have left Wanless."

"Oh, of course, of course. But—I was going to say—I fully expect that he has written to Mamma." Sanchia's eyebrows and her, "I should think that unlikely. Why should he write to Mamma?" frightened Philippa, while to Mr. Tompsett-King's mind they were clear gain. It was necessary, after it, to get on to surer ground. The interview terminated by an understanding that Sanchia should write to her mother.

Philippa took her husband to dine in Great Cumberland Place that night; and there, he with Mr. Percival, she with the lady, obtained the terms of a settlement. Sanchia was to be allowed a hundred a year—for the present. (Mr. Percival intended privately to make it two.) Everything was to be assumed in her favour; but she was not to be asked to meet company. Neither Mrs. Percival nor Philippa could be brought to that, and Mr. Percival, so far as he was concerned, had no desire for any sort of company but hers. He was one of those men made rosy-gilled for happiness. Good fellowship, the domestic affections—if they were not there, they must appear to be. His friends of the city were always on his lips—Old Tom Peters—Old Jack Summers—Old Bob—Old Dick. Good fellows every one. All the pet names in the family had been his. To him belonged Pippa and Sancie, Melot and Vicky. "My girls," or "My rascals," he used to call them to Tom Peters or Jack Summers, and bring them home jerky little tin pedestrians from the city, or emus pulling little carts; or (later on) bowls of goldfish or violet nosegays from Covent Garden. If he had a nearer passion, it was to stand well with all the world. That's two passions, however, to his score; and the struggle between them, in Sanchia's case, had taken him as near tragedy as the easy man could go. Heaven be praised, the good times were come again. Now he was all for the return of the prodigal, without conditions—"and no questions asked," as he put it.

But in this he could not get his dear desire. Philippa's sense of justice was inflamed, as well as her moral sense. What! you eat a cake, and then, instead of sitting down to your plain bread and butter—away you flounce, and get ready to eat another cake! That's dead against the proverb, that's monstrous, that's offensive. "Mamma, mamma," Philippa had protested, "you can never have her back to flourish her sin in all our faces."

"Thank you, Philippa, for reminding me, however gratuitously, of my duties to society," had been Mrs. Percival's acknowledgment. She liked sin as little as Philippa, but she liked being lectured a great deal less. Poor Mr. Percival had pulled his whiskers throughout the debate, and now sighed as he bit them. His girl was to be denied him—but he could give her two hundred a year, and go to see her often. That was comfort.

And then the meeting took place. First with Mamma, who had never liked her, and was now a little afraid of what she might do. For Philippa had made it quite plain that if Sanchia was not humoured, she would have nothing to say to Ingram. "She's exhausted her criminal passion—that's what it comes to," was Philippa's judgment. "Now she will have to be cajoled." So Mrs. Percival was cowed into civility.

The pair conversed, rather painfully, for perhaps an hour. They had tea. All the effort to talk was made by Sanchia, who broached the children— Philippa's three, Vicky's one—and got nothing but perfunctory enthusiasm in reply. Mrs. Percival was far too sincerely interested in herself to care for children. The sons-in-law proved a better subject. Here she could point a moral inwards. She extolled them highly—never was woman so blessed in her daughters' husbands. Mr. Tompsett-King—"Tertius, the soul of honour: the most delicate-minded man I have ever known. And sensitive to a fault! I assure you—" Captain Sinclair was "our gallant Cuthbert," or "my soldier son." "Sweet little Vicky's knight! chivalry lives again in him. It has been the greatest blessing in my days of trouble to be sure of the ideal happiness of those two young lives. Ah! one does have one's consolations."

Such eulogium seemed to leave little to be said for Melusine and her prize; and yet it was certain that Mrs. Percival favoured Gerald Scales above the others. A lift of the voice was observable—"Gerald, who, naturally, is quite at home at Marlborough House..." "Gerald, with that charming old-world courtesy of his..." "Dear Lady Scales told me that of her two sons, Gerald should have been the baronet. Poor Sir Matthew suffers from hay-fever to that extent.... But Gerald is a splendid young man. Darling Melot is, I need not tell you, fully appreciated at Winkley." This was the seat of Sir Matthew, in Essex.

Sanchia, for her part, having regained the throne of her serenity—from which Vicky had toppled her of late—by means of Philippa, was able to contemplate this singular parent of hers with the interest due to a curious object, and some internal amusement. She was too far removed from her to be moved, too much estranged to be hurt. She wondered at herself for feeling so little of what, in the days of babyhood, she had firmly held to be the devout opinion. She found that, from a child, she had always judged her mother, and was sure now that her mother knew it. She remembered how hopeless she had always known it to be, to explain any attitude of mind she may have exhibited and been blamed for. So now, though it was abundantly clear to her what was hoped of her, and though she could see perfectly well that the chance of her doing it was so risky that she must be handled like a heavy fish on a light line, she made no effort whatever to show why what was to be hoped for was absurdly impossible. She watched her mother sail about it and about in ever narrowing circles, heard herself commended for her promptitude in leaving Wanless, answered enquiries as to Ingram's behaviour under what Mrs. Percival otiosely called "his bereavement," echoed speculations at to his whereabouts—played, in short, vacantly an empty part, and kept her mother upon tenterhooks. She gained civil entreaty this way.

But her father's bustling entry changed all this. She had not known of herself how susceptible she still was. Vicky had made her cower; but her father made her cry.

He affected a bluff ease in his manner of greeting her. "Well, Sancie, well, my dear, well, well"—and then he cleared his throat; but he did not dare to look at her. Sancie answered him by jumping into his arms, and upset him altogether. "Oh, my girl, my girl—my little Sancie—" and then the pair of them mingled tears, while Mrs. Percival, who thought this exhibition out of place "under the circumstances," and not in the best possible taste, tapped her foot on the carpet, and wished that Philippa had been here.

But, once they were beyond a certain flood mark, as she know by long acquaintance, Mr. Percival's emotions must be given play. She retired, therefore, and left the clinging pair. Directly she was gone, the good gentleman's embrace of his child grew straighter, and his kisses of her brows and hair more ardent. He humbled himself before her, thanked her for coming back to him. "My darling, it was fine of you to come! 'Pon my soul, it was fine!"

"No, darling, no," she protested, smiling sadly at his fondness.

"I always loved you, my child! My Sancie—you know that of your old father, hey?" He pinched her cheek before he kissed it again. "'Pon my life, it cut me down like a frost to do—what was done."

"I know, I know," Sanchia murmured, and then begged him not to speak of it.

"Ah, but I must, you know," he vowed. "What! A damned unnatural father!..." And then he held her closely, while he whispered his anxiety. "Sancie—tell me, my lamb—put my mind at rest. He—that fellow—that Ingram—he was good to you, hey? He didn't—hey?"

She vowed in her turn. "Oh, yes, dearest, yes. Of course he was. I was very happy, except for—what couldn't be helped, you know."

"Yes, yes—it couldn't be helped. I know that you felt that. I was bound— for the others, don't you see?—sake of example. That sort of thing, don't you see?" He shook his head. "We can't have that, you know. It don't do— in the long run. Very irregular, hey? And your mother, you know—she takes these things to heart. Goes too far, I say. Sometimes goes a little to extremes, you know." He grew quite scared as he recalled the scene. "I shall never forget"—shuddering, he clasped her close. "My darling girl, let's be happy again! It shall be right as—well, as rain, you know—now. We'll have you with a child on your knee in no time,—hey?" He seemed to think that marriage alone could work this boon. Again—as before with Vicky—Sanchia had not the heart to gainsay him. She allowed him to speculate as he would; and her mother, returning, found the pair, one on the other's knee, with the future cut and dried.

But Sanchia rose at her entry.

"Dearest, I must go now," she told him, "but I'll see you again very soon."

He urged her to stay and dine. "We're quite alone, you know! No ceremony with our child, hey!"

But she smilingly refused. "No, darling, I won't stop now. I'll come again—" her mother's stretched lips, stomaching what she could not sanction, stood, as it were, before the home doors.

He looked wistfully at her—aware, he too, of the sentries at the gate. "You might—we are pretty lonely here, we old people—I should have said you might come back—there's your old room, you know—eating its head off, hey?"

Sanchia kissed him. "Darling—we'll see. We'll talk about it soon. But I must go now—to my books. I'm working very hard, at my Italian. I've forgotten—lots."

He had to let her go—but, manlike, he must relieve himself in a man's way. He drew her into his study, bade her "see what she should see." He went to his desk and sat to his cheque-book. He returned with the slip wet in his hand. "There, my child, there. That will keep the wolf from the door, I hope. For a day or two, you know." She read, "Miss Sanchia Percival—two hundred pounds sterling." It brought the tears to her eyes again. It was so exactly like him.

"You darling—how ridiculous of you—but how sweet!"

He glowed under her praises. "Plenty more where that came from, Sancie,"— then piously added, "Thank God, of course."

Sanchia, in the hall, turned to her mother. "Good-bye, mother," she said, and held her hand out. Her mother took it, drew her in, and kissed her forehead. "Good-bye, my child"; she could not, for her life, be more cordial than that. The offence itself seemed a pinprick beside the rankle of the wound to her pride. This child had set up for herself, and was now returned—without extenuation, without plea for mercy. Mrs. Percival was one of those people who cannot be happy unless their right to rule be unquestioned. Had the girl humbled herself to the dust, grovelled at her feet, she would have taken her to her breast. But Sanchia stood upright, and Mrs. Percival felt the frost gripe at her heart. It must be so.

Her father went with her to the door—his arm about her waist. "Come soon," he pleaded, and when she promised, whispered in her ear—"Come to The Poultry, if you'd rather: I'm always there—as you know. Come, and we'll lunch together. You'll be like a nosegay in the dusty old place."

"Yes, yes, I shall come—often," she told him, and nestled to his side. Then she put up her cheek for his kiss. "Good-night, Papa dear," He wept over her, and let her go. Then he returned to his hearth and his wife. In his now exalted mood he was really master of both, and Mrs. Percival knew it. "You gave her the money, I suppose?" she said; and he, "Yes, my dear, I gave her two hundred pounds." He had doubled the sum agreed, but Mrs. Percival let it pass.



III

Upon this footing her affairs now stood; she was to be one of the family, with two hundred pounds a year to her credit, the run of her teeth in the house, and (by a secret arrangement) as often in her father's company as she could find time to be. Meantime, by her own deliberate choice, she maintained her lodging in Pimlico, and read at the Museum most days of the week. She prepared herself to be happy, and under a buoyant impulse, due to the softening of her affections, wrote to her friend Mr. Chevenix, and asked him to come to see her. That he briskly did.

She received him cordially. It was good to see the cheerful youth again, and to be able to rejoice in the man of the world he affected to be. A man of the world—throned, at it were, upon the brows of a suckling.

Wisdom was justified of her child. "So you cut it? Thought you would. Wanless Hall is all very well in its little way—when the rainbows are jumping, what? D'you remember that fish? And old Devereux—Salmo deverox? My certy, what a lady! But Nevile—" he shook his head. "No, no. Some devil had entered into him: he was a gloomy kind of tyrant. I don't know, by the way, what's happened to him. Travelling, or something, I fancy. He was always a rolling stone, as you know. But he'll come round, you'll see. Oh, Lord, yes. He'll sulk out his devil—and be the first to apologise. Well—never mind old Nevile. You'll see, one of these days. Now, I say, what are you doing with yourself up here? Any good?"

She named her Italian studies, and made him open his eyes.

"Italian? Tante grazie, and all that! But that don't take you very far, you know. Your teeth will crack a tougher nut. Now, I'll tell you what you do. You come and see my old Aunt Wenman—"

She was highly amused. "Why should I see your old Aunt Wenman? Does she know Italian?"

"Italian! God bless you, if she knows English, it's as much as she does. Learnt the Catechism once, I s'pose. She's a good old sort—Lady Maria Wenman, widow of my old Uncle Charles, and my mother's sister at that. She'll take to you—she'll take to you."

"I don't see—" said Sanchia, puzzled. The youth explained.

"Well, you see—you'll forgive me, I know—it's tone you want just now. She'll give you that. She's something to pull against. You get your back up against her, and hang on. That's the ticket. She's a good soul, is Aunt Maria—lots of tone—gives parties to all and sundry. You meet some rare fish in those waters—Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics. They'll amuse you—give you bones to pick. I don't get on with 'em myself—too simple, I am, you know. They talk their politics, or domestic afflictions, and I feel so delicate I don't know what to do. There was one chap I remember— Golowicz his name was—big, red-whiskered, conspiracy chap ... told me all about his mother—tears running down his cheeks. I didn't know her from Adam, you know, but still—Oh, you'll like Aunt Wenman. She'll want you to live with her, and you might do much worse." Sanchia listened, smiled, and pondered. It was not her way to be disposed of so simply.

What was impressive to her about this conversation was the real reticence underlying the chatter of her friend. She could feel his conviction of her want of tone; she was convinced of it herself. Her purpose in life seemed gone. Once it had been love, next it had been the ordering of affairs. The second had been so absorbing that she had not missed the first; indeed, she had believed it there until the very end, when she had called it up, and had no answer. But now—what aim had she, in this lonely, empty life she was leading, whose hours were so many that she had to fill them up with Italian got out of books? Without knowing it, it was life she wanted, not books. She with her brains, vitality, beauty, and charm had been growing in these graces unawares, flowering in secret at Wanless under her aprons, behind her account-books and garden gloves. Now that all these swaddling bands were stripped off her, behold her, armed at all points for the lists. So Chevenix had beheld her, it seems. Let her see the world, approve her mettle, run her career. Chevenix, watching her, judged in those pondering eyes, in that half-smile which had charmed him before, a kind of quivering expectancy new to her. He judged her tempted, and renewed his suggestions on a later day.

"What you want," he then told her, "is to try a fall or two with the world. You've been too snug, you know—too long under glass. You left the school-room to go to Wanless—and where were you there? Under cover. You want the sun, the wind, and the rain; you want to know what these things feel like—and how the rest of us take 'em. And you want to be seen, if you let me say that. We all like being looked at, I believe. I know that I do, when I'm quite sure about my hat. Now you won't get much of that in a Warwick Street two-pair front, let me tell you—no, nor in your B 17, or whatever your seat is, at the Museum. You're a star—you're to shine. Well, give 'em a turn in Charles Street. I'll fix it up for you. I wish you'd think it over."

She gave him grateful looks, but said little. Nevertheless, he went away encouraged. A week or so later she found a card upon her table: that of a Mrs. John Chevenix.

"That's my sister-in-law," the friendly youth presently told her. "That's Mrs. John. You go and see her. She's a good sort of woman. You'll meet Aunt Wenman there. I thought it all out, and that's the way to get at it. She'll jump at you, in my opinion. She loves orphans. Collects 'em. You go!"

She was due in the city on a visit to her father, was, in fact, dressed for it in her best white frock, roses in her hat. She promised to think of it—and of course would return Mrs. John's call. The amiable Chevenix accompanied her as far eastward as it was possible for him to go. He went, indeed, farther, and in full view of Saint Paul's decided upon a visit to that sanctuary. You never know your luck, he said. He might meet Senhouse there. He had been hunting the recessed philosopher high and low.

"Great sport if we met him now—you, who look like lunching at the Savoy or somewhere, and he like a fakir! What should you do? Fall in his arms?" Sanchia had mist over the eyes.

"I believe I should," she admitted. "I should love to see him again."

"He'll turn up at Aunt Wenman's, I'll bet you," Chevenix felt sure. "She rakes 'em in—all sorts. Do you think about her, now, there's a dear. You won't be able to stick it at home, you know."

"I am sure that I shan't go home," Sanchia said. "And I am thinking about your aunt."

"Right," cried Chevenix, and briskly mounted the steps of the cathedral.

Mr. Percival had provided a tea for her which had the appearance of a banquet. The table seemed sunk in flowers; a great urn held the tea. There were buns in pyramids, snow-mantled cakes, apricot jam, strawberries, clotted cream. Nothing was too good for his beloved, as he cried aloud when he saw her, fresh and glowing in her lace frock and flower-wreathed hat.

"My girl—and upon my soul, a picture!"

She blushed at his praises, and came within kissing distance. "You make a school-treat of me, dearest. You mustn't be wicked with your money, or I shan't come any more to see you. I won't be spoiled."

"No, my dear, no—and you can't be," he assured her. "Good Lord, my child, you're the only one I've got left. All my birds flown but you! And I had five of the sweetest, sauciest, happiest girls in England once upon a time.... Now, come you and pour out a cup of tea for your foolish old father. We're snug here—hey? Better than Great Cumberland—hey? You monkey!" He pinched her ear—and felt that they shared a secret.

She caught his happiness, and bathed in his praises, feeling as it were the sun upon her cheeks. How she loved to be loved! How she loved to be praised for her good looks! The world had grown suddenly kind again; the world was good. There, ahead of her, stood Mrs. John Chevenix and a friendly Lady Maria, beckoning her to London delights, a friendly world of admiring eyes. She was to be looked at—she was to listen—and be heard. Her heart beat, eyes shone starry. Life, which had seemed behind her, now danced before, a gay procession. She told her father what seemed to be in the wind. He listened and stared.

"Lady Maria, hey! We are going up in the world. The peerage! Charles Street, Berkeley Square! I remember young Chevenix: he had swell connections—yes, yes. How things come about. This will please your mother, my dear. She sets a store by such things." Their eyes met, and she nodded.

"Yes, I thought of that. But what do you feel about it, Papa? You see—I couldn't very well come back to Great Cumberland Place."

He did see that, poor man. "No, chick, no. That wouldn't work out—that sum. You and your mother never did add up very well—No, no. Much as I should have liked it. But Charles Street? Hum. I'm a plain man, you see, a plain, old comfortable merchant—and the older I grow, the more comfortable I get, I believe. Now, I don't see myself in Berkeley Square, making a bow to Lady Maria. My poor old back's too stiff for that. But if you're contented—if you're to have your deserts—for you're a little beauty, my love, and there's no mistake about it—why, what can I say? And I know you won't forget Papa in The Poultry—hey?"

She held him her hand across the tea-cups, smiling with her eyes. "Do you really think I shall?"

He caught fast to the little hand. "No, child, no! Though, mind you, I deserve it. When I think that I let you be packed out of my house—neck and crop—to the devil, for aught I knew—I grow cold. My dear, it's taken me suddenly at night—when I've been wakeful—and I've groaned in my agony. It don't do to think of—hideous! Women make fools of us men, and knaves as well. But there! You know your mother's way. I mustn't speak against her, of course. No, no. She's a good woman." He looked as if he tried hard to believe it.

Sanchia, her hand still held, had grown serious. "Papa," she said, "I want you to understand me altogether. I should do it again, I believe, if I really loved somebody."

He looked at her anxiously, then away from her, while he patted her caught hand. "Yes, my dear, yes. I understand that you feel like that. It's queer—to me, you know. I don't pretend to see it as you do. But I trust you. I know you're a good girl. Only—it's not the old-fashioned way; and your mother—"

"Mamma,"' she said, "is different. She thinks I'm wicked; you think I'm good. I don't know what I am—I don't understand myself at all; but I'm quite sure that I should do it again, if it had to be done." Her eyes grew large with the certainty of her argument. She had a divine seriousness, a rapt look, as of one inspired from within. "I don't see how you can help it, if you see quite clearly that the person needs you. It seems disloyalty. It seems making too much of yourself—as if what happened to that part of you mattered! And it seems making too little of yourself, too—as if you shrank, as if you were afraid of vile people. One can't afford to be afraid—for the sake of such a small thing."

Mr. Percival, nodding, patting her hand, put in a gentle remonstrance. "I shouldn't say that, Sancie, I shouldn't indeed. It used to be considered everything in the world, to a woman."

She mused, then decided. "No. I can't understand that. It's not everything in the world. It's almost nothing compared to other things—like freedom. To me the only thing that seems to matter is one's mind. Freedom for that! You can give up anything else. But that you must have—if you are to live at all."

He made a loyal effort to follow her thought, but it led him into dismal regions where he found himself unnerved. "I don't know, upon my soul, where you get these notions of yours, my dear. I don't indeed. Not from me, I believe."

She smiled gently at him, but with a wistful tinge, as if she felt her isolation. "I don't know, either—but there they are. I always know what I've got to do. I see it, or feel it, ahead of me. There's a path that way, a path the other. I see the fork, and have to follow one of them. I always know which."

That was equally beyond him. He left it, and returned to a more practical puzzlement. "But when—when you make up your mind about—him, you know? I wish you would tell me."

"I'll tell you everything I can, dearest, of course."

"Well, now, your freedom, you know. Your freedom of mind. Now, you gave him your freedom, didn't you! And your mind too? Didn't you, now?"

She had to consider that, and he watched her with anxiety. But she looked him fairly in the face with her answer, so that he read the truth in her eyes. "No," she told him. "No. He never had that, luckily for me. I always knew what I had to do before he did. I could always see where he was right and I was wrong—or the other way about. I don't think I could ever give up my judgment. At least—" She had to think again; and again she answered him, but with heightened colour. "If I did—it would be a different sort of person altogether. Quite a different person."

His face fell. This didn't sound like marriage-bells. "Oh, my dear!" he said ruefully. "You don't mean to tell me—"

She jumped up and hugged him. "You darling old thing, of course not." But she kept her face buried in his whiskers. "If I ever did that—give up my mind, I mean—I believe I should be happier."

Mr. Percival had no doubt about that. He had old-fashioned opinions.



IV

Mrs. John Chevenix, a young and lively woman with ash-coloured hair, audacious nose, and a clear complexion, was devoted to her husband's family, and especially tender to our young friend and Sanchia's, with whom she had a strong alliance. Her husband had a sense of humour, which he indulged for the most part in silence. He spoke rarely, swallowed his laughter, and yet was good company. You felt his sympathy, found yourself depending on it. You gauged his relish by a twinkle, by a deeper shade of purple in his cheeks, by a twitching ear. The Stock Exchange gave him a sufficiency, and his wife, with her taste for dinner-parties, saw to it that it gave him no more. "Let's bleed old John," was Bill Chevenix's pleasant way of suggesting an escapade which might run into hundreds. "It will do him good," Mrs. John used to agree; and John Chevenix would chuckle internally, and say, "Go it, you two." On these terms they were all very happy.

Bill Chevenix had told his sister-in-law as much about Sanchia as he thought fitting. To begin with, he took all responsibility upon himself for the opening scene of her wild adventure. He had introduced "the chap" into the Percival household, and it was he, too, who had not introduced the fact of his unhappy marriage. "Took it all for granted—thought they knew it—forgot they didn't belong to that gang—your gang, my gang, Nevile's gang. Rotten of me, my dear, but there you are." Mrs. John understood him to feel more contrite than he appeared. And next he lauded Sanchia, after his own manner. As thus: "A queer young fish. You can't judge her by the rules of the game. She shows her strength by breaking 'em. She'd break anything and anybody. Oh, she's as deep as the Dogger. But mighty pleasant with it, you know, Fine, quiet style of her own. And a beauty. My word, but she's like a rose." Then his eyes met hers confidentially. A wink passed. "No. We're great friends. That's all there is to it, on my honour. But you can't leave a girl like that stranded, can you now? Especially when you've run her aground yourself—in a way. So I thought of old Aunt Wenman in a minute. In fact, I've seen her about it, and, by George, she hit on a phrase in a trice. 'Unfortunate attachment.' She's perfectly happy with that, and rather keen. Now all you have to do is to give a party, and I'll ask Sancie."

Mrs. John thought that was too casual. "You mustn't treat her like a dancing man," she told him. "I shall call on her, and you can tell her I'm coming. We'll do the thing in form."

All this had been done, and the call returned. Sanchia's still serenity, seen through the rosy mist of her momentary confusion, pleased Mrs. John. The invitation was made and accepted in parting.

"Do come. We shan't have many people, you know; but I won't let you be dull. And Bill will be there, of course—and you rather like Bill—and a queer old Aunt of ours who knows everybody. So I hope you won't mind."

"I'm sure I shan't," Sanchia said, and then they shook hands.

Bill Chevenix, who had been present, waved himself away from the doorstep. "By-by, my dear," he said. "You've done bravely by me. Isn't she splendid?"

"I like her," said Mrs. John. "But she's rather unapproachable."

Bill chuckled. "That's her little way. She don't kiss easily."

Mrs. John said that he ought to know.

The party was anything but dull. Lady Maria dined with seven other people, the best that could be mustered on short notice—and Sanchia came in at ten o'clock, when the drawing-room was full. She came with an elderly friend, a Mrs. Quantock, whose acquaintance she had made in an omnibus, and renewed at the British Museum. Mrs. Quantock was an authoress by profession, a poetess by temperament. Her emotions, not always under control, consorted oddly with her broad and placid face. She knew Lady Maria Wenman, and it was she who actually performed the introduction, Mrs. John being fast at her stair-head.

"I particularly want you to know my dear friend—Miss Sanchia Percival— Lady Maria Wenman. A great heart, Lady Maria, in a frame of steel."

"Oh, indeed," said Lady Maria. Then, "Come and sit with me, my dear; I've heard about you. But I hope you've left your steels at home."

"If I had a trumpet," said good Mrs. Quantock, "instead of a penny whistle, all the world should hear what I think of Sanchia."

"Then it's a very good thing you haven't," said Lady Maria. "The less young ladies are trumpeted in public the better!"

Sanchia, during this interchange, had stood smiling and self-possessed; but she was a little fluttered, and looked none the worse for that. Without a word she obeyed the twinkling and puckered old lady, sat by her on the sofa and awaited, her hands folded in her lap, what might be in store for her. She liked the looks of Lady Maria, and had no disrelish for her sharp tongue, nor fear of what might fall to her share when Mrs. Quantock took herself off. She liked the little, deep-set, dark grey eyes, the beaked nose, like the prow of a trireme, and the drawn-in mouth, which seemed to be victim of the astringencies it was driven to utter. And then she liked the signs of race, the disregard of opinion, the keen look which lit on a man or woman and saw him negligible and left him in the road. She had herself an artist's eye for style, and saw in Lady Maria the grand manner. The praise or blame of such as she would be worth having; awaiting either, she felt herself braced. She could envisage the past, collect it, display it in her lap without fear. "Here's my life's work, so far as it has gone. Now beat me, if you will; I'm not afraid of honest blows." She knew there would be no sham outcries from this high-looking old dame.

Lady Maria Wenman was rich, imperious, whimsical, and afraid only of boredom. By birth a daughter of Lord Starcross, by fate the widow of a judge, she was strongly of opinion that she could do as she pleased. It was not so clear to her that other people could also; but the reason of that was that other people, not immediately about her, were not themselves clear. She once said of a prime minister, "My dear, he seemed to me a very good sort of man"; and that was her attitude all the world over towards those not connected with her by blood or the affections. Marks of race she had, but not pride of it. She was her own fountain of honour, and were you omnibus-tout or commander-in-chief, if she liked you you were in being, if not, you didn't exist. One consequence of this was that she hated nobody, and was offended at nothing. The vices or crimes of a non-existent world were mere shadows, naturally; those of her circle of cognizance she had a way, very much her own, of accounting for. A trick of hers, which had become inveterate, was to explain states of being by phrases. These not only explained, they seemed to condone; and to her there's no doubt, they accounted for everything. Mr. William Chevenix, aware of her foible, did not scruple to turn it to his ends when putting before her Sanchia's case. "You see, Aunt, one rather admires her loyalty to the chap. He was precious miserable, and she pitied him. Well, we know what comes of that, don't we? It turns to liking, and gratitude, and all those swimmy feelings; and then they swim together, all in a flux, eh? And there you are." To which, when Lady Maria had nodded her head of kindly vulture sagely, and mused aloud, "I see; an unfortunate attachment. Very common, I believe, and quite sad," he knew that he had scored a point. When she had added, "We must do what we can, of course; I'll see her; I've nobody with me just now," he presumed that he had won the rubber.

Apart from the comfortable cliche in which she was seen enfolded, Sanchia pleased the eye. Her father, in league with her throughout, had "stood" her a frock, the cunningest that Madame Freluche could supply, and would have added pearls for her hair and neck if she had not tenderly refused them. She took his counsels in the general—that she was to show them what was what, "for the honour of the Percival girls"—and her own for the particular; would have no ornaments at all. By an entirely right instinct she chose to wear black. It set her off as dazzlingly fair, as more delicate than she was. Her eyes, from her pale brows and faintly tinted cheeks, gleamed intensely, burningly blue. Her strength appeared in her shut lips and firm chin—subtle, and, as Mrs. Quantock said, like that of steel wire.

She did not talk much, but what she said was simple and direct. She seemed to be reticent about herself, not by any means from shame, but because her acts and intentions appeared too obvious to be worth rehearsing. Once or twice her laugh, low and musical, showed that she relished a joke. Lady Maria occasionally made jokes. Here was a girl who understood them.

To the old gentlewoman, who never beat about bushes, but mostly walked through them, Sanchia's bluntness made immediate appeal. Her reply, for instance, to the enquiry, What had induced her to go on with the affair, was a counter-question. "What else could I do?" she had asked, with pencilled brows arched. "I thought it made no difference. I wanted to, you see. What you do is nothing compared with what you want to do."

"Then why do it, my dear?" said Lady Maria. Sanchia did not blink the answer, "Nevile wanted me. He was very unhappy."