"Well," said the old woman, "what is he now?" This time Sanchia did not reply.

Lady Maria drew her lips in until her mouth looked like a dimple in her face. "Oho! That's it, is it? He's neglected you, and now you don't care?"

"I care for some things very much," said Sanchia. "I want to please Papa, and Vicky, my sister, you know—and I think I want to put myself right with the world. But—"

"But you don't care two pins about him?"

Sanchia shook her head sadly. Her brows were arched to her hair. "No," she said, "I don't care one pin."

Lady Maria was no fool. She saw exactly what was going to happen, and no reason why she should not declare it. She had formed already a high enough opinion of Sanchia—which is to say no more than that she liked her—to be sure that it would not influence her conduct. "I'll tell you what the end of this will be," she said. "You'll have him on the floor, kissing your toes. He'll be mad to have you—and you'll marry him. Then he'll be your slave for life. And they tell me that's the happiest state a woman can live in. I have some reason for believing it. I and the judge got along admirably, though the poor man might have bored me to extinction. Oh, you'll do very well. But don't make him jealous."

Sanchia considered this. "I don't think he would be jealous," she decided; "but we are rather premature, aren't we?" And then she related, as if they were an anecdote, the circumstances of her departure from Wanless.

Lady Maria listened carefully, nodding a dispassionate head at details which would have raised Philippa's hair, and depilated Mrs. Percival. "I think he's a human being, if you'll allow me to say so," was the conclusion she came to. "It was no affair of the gardener's that I can see; and to be battered in your own drive by your own servant, even you must allow to be provoking."

"Oh," Sanchia assured her, "I didn't at all mind his being vexed. But he accused me of—all sorts of things."

"Of course he did, my dear," cried Lady Maria. "He was in a towering rage. How was he to know that you hadn't egged on the gardener?"

"By what he knew of me already," said Sanchia with spirit. Lady Maria twinkled; but her scrutiny was keen. "I don't think you have explained the gardener," she told her. Sanchia blushed.

"He's a boy," was her suggestion: but Lady Maria's comment on that was, "And a bruiser it seems."

Sanchia smiled gently. "Poor Struan! He was very difficult. He made me furiously angry. What he did was outrageous. But I am sure he is a genius."

"What!" cried her ladyship. "A genius at gardening? or at thrashing gentlemen?"

Sanchia said simply, "It's extraordinary what he can do with plants. He's certainly a genius there. He's like a plant himself. He never goes to bed, but walks about the garden all night, talking to them."

"Like a burglar," said Lady Maria. "Pray, what does he talk to them about? Growing?"

"Sometimes, I think. I don't know what he says to them. But he talks about all sorts of things."

"You, for instance?" Lady Maria asked, suddenly; and Sanchia blushed again, and presently looked at Lady Maria. "He's always nice to me," she said, mildly.

"I think," her ladyship resumed, "I think I like to think of him best in prison;" and then washed him out of her memory as she faced more serious topics.

"It will be much better for you to come to me," she told Sanchia. "I'm an old woman, and an old tyrant, I daresay, but I'm somebody, you know. And I'm pretty lonely, and happen to want company just now. It will be good that you have a foothold to your name when your Nevile Ingram comes after you. I shall bring him to reason quicker than most people, I don't doubt. Your quarrel is absurd; you can't afford to quarrel with your bread and cheese. You've your father, you'll say; but my answer is that it's not very decent to live upon your father when you've got yourself kicked out of his house. I quite see your point of view, mind you. These things will happen, and in theory you're perfectly in the right. It's your practice that won't do. All for love and the world well lost—very fine indeed. But so long as we're in the world, you see, we can't lose it. There it is. Now you've had your kisses, and can afford to settle down; but you must do it in the world's way if you want peace and quietness; and I'm very ready to help you. Really, I don't see anything better for you—short of your own home."

"I shall never go there again," Sanchia told her, directly.

"Very right, my dear," said the old lady. "Then you had better come to me."

Sanchia said, "I should like that," and Lady Maria, taking her by the chin, patted her cheek.

"And so should I, my dear," she said—and the thing was as good as settled.

Mrs. John, released from her stair-head, came up presently; Bill Chevenix was with her. "Dear Aunt Wenman," she said, "I haven't had a word with you since you came; but I'm sure you've been happy."

"Miss Sanchia and I have been swearing eternal friendship," said Lady Maria.

"Exchanging drops of blood, eh, Aunt?" chirped the cheerful youth. "Nothing like it."

"I have no blood to spare, William," she replied, "and if I had, Miss Sanchia has too much. Now you can take her away while I talk to Helen. Good-by, my dear," she bade Sanchia.

"Good-by, Lady Maria," the girl replied, with deeply sincere eyes. "You've been very kind to me."

"Fiddlesticks," said Lady Maria. "I like you. Now run away, the pair of you."

"Right, Aunt," said Chevenix, and crooked his arm.

After a decent interval, in which we may suppose formal visits exchanged between Charles Street and Great Cumberland Place, Sanchia set up her rest in the former mansion. The time was full June.



V

The string of episodes which discovered before the autumn was over the heart of Mr. Cyrus Worthington at her feet hardly deserves record in her history but for the fillip which it gave to her spirits. Tribute is tribute, and Mr. Worthington was a warrantable gentleman. The tarnish she had discerned upon her armour, the foxmarks upon her fair page, dispersed under his ardent breath; she realised herself desirable and loveworthy; she arose from the thicket in which she cowered with the light of triumph prophetic in her eyes, the flush of victory after victory prophetic in her cheeks. Therefore Mr. Worthington's career in the Charles Street lists shall be chronicled.

He was a portly widower, a banker, a father, who made his bow to Lady Maria some three times a year when he dined in Charles Street. In return, he received her ladyship once during a summer at his mansion of Fallowlea, Walton-on-Thames. On such occasions the Misses Worthington and their cousins, the Pascoe girls, who lived at Esher, would enact a pastoral play in the shrubberies with various entangled curates, with young Sam Worthington from Oxford and friends of his. Mr. Worthington himself, master of the difficult art of declining verse as if it were bad prose, rehearsed the Prologue and Epilogue in a master's gown and mortarboard, which he would retain for the rest of the afternoon. It was in that guise that, his caution deserting him, he allowed himself to dwell upon Sanchia's beauty.

Lady Maria had taken her down to Walton in mid-July; she had chanced to meet Melusine there, and the two had embraced as sisters should. It is to be owned that her adoption by Charles Street had restored her credit with her family more certainly than any white sheet and taper which she could have supported would have done. Her mother was highly gratified, though she affected a shrug when good Mr. Percival, in the simplicity of his heart, overflowed with the joy of it. "Sancie in Berkeley Square—where Lord Rosebery lives: think of that, my dear!" And Mrs. Percival, who knew where Lord Rosebery lived as well as anybody, would reply, "These things will be balanced hereafter. Neither you nor I, Welbore, are assessing angels, I believe. I pray to God that she has made her peace with our Church." "Chapel Royal," said Mr. Percival, "will be her ladyship's ticket—or St. James's, Piccadilly. They tell me that the great world go there now in the evenings, dressed for dinner." Privately he vowed that, should his Sancie be one of those immaculate worshippers, she should not fail in toilet. And he had not missed the point so far as you might think. Philippa Tompsett-King, who had been present when these things were discussing, had lifted an inflamed face over the dinner-table. "I only know," she had said, "that I would rather live in Bloomsbury than have her conscience. Cynicism has always seemed to me the sin against the Holy Ghost." But Melusine Scales, the gentle creature, had written meekly of her joy; and Vicky Sinclair said to her husband, the captain—"Sancie always tumbles on her feet. She always did—like a sweet cat." Shrewd and affectionate at once, she alone had discerned the god's prerogative immanent in the youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival.

But the picture of Sanchia and Melusine, two fair girls, standing together embraced under the cedarn shade had smitten deep into the well-cased heart of Cyrus Worthington. He had come upon them at a pretty moment, when Melusine, the willowy and tall, having opened her arms to the dear truant, one arm still about her, with her free hand touched her cheek that lips might meet lips. "Darling, I'm so glad—so very glad," she was whispering, and Sanchia, with the same light laughing in her eyes, "Dear old Melot— how sweet you are to me." Mr. Worthington pushed back his mortarboard and revealed the crimson chevron which it had bitten into his bald brow. "A charming scene—two charming young ladies! Mrs. Gerald Scales and her sister, I think. Lady Maria's adoption—charming, charming!" A right instinct sent him tiptoe over his lawn, another made him doff his mortarboard.

"Mrs. Scales, we begin. The hunt is up. Poesy calls, 'Follow, follow, follow!' Your sister, I think?"

Sanchia played the rogue. "Oh, Mr. Worthington, have you forgotten already? Lady Maria explained me half-an-hour-ago. Must Melusine introduce me again?"

"Not for the world, Miss Percival, not for the world!" the banker protested. "I was in a sense explaining myself. Pray, do not suppose that I forget either you or my manners so completely. No, no. But I am a little near-sighted, I fear; there is a little difficulty of focussing; nothing organic, no loss of function." He cleared his throat, and to give himself assurance, jingled half-crowns with his plunged hand. "No loss of function whatever." He took the thing a little more seriously than he need, was in danger of labouring it. Melusine turned the talk. He invited them to the play, as "master of the revels," and walked between them, looking a very decent figure of a don on a college lawn, substantial, serene, and with an air of displaying his possessions: "Parva sed apta mihi; Deus nobis haec otia fecit!" He still possessed the rags of his Latin. "This little bay- tree will interest you, Miss Percival. It was planted many years ago by the late Lord Meeke—the uncle of the present peer. We had had some business relations; they were happily cemented into something more intimate by this little fellow." He touched it tenderly. "A sturdy growth! Like my affection for my noble but departed friend. Dear me! Labuntur anni, indeed!" His fig tree, which some one else had planted, his laburnum—a slip from one at Rickmansworth, the seat of the late Lord Mayor Burgess—a catalpa seedling from Panshanger, which the late Lady Cowper did him the honour to present with her own hands: as Sanchia said afterwards to Melot, his garden was rather like a cemetery of dead friendships....

Then they sat to witness the revels. Sanchia's fancy, uplifted by her contentment, played with the play, and suggested flights undreamed of for many a year. She sat by Melusine and her husband, and Mr. Worthington watched her in the long intervals of his duty. Charming indeed, and most high-bred: now where did old Welbore Percival, whom he met daily in Throgmorton Street, fetch up such a strain of blood? His wife, too, Kitty Blount, as she had been—what had Kitty Blount been but a high-coloured, bouncing romp of a girl when they had all been paddling together at Broadstairs? Extraordinary! And now here was one of his girls sister-in- law of a county baronet—none of your city knights, mind you—and the other, with the lift of a princess and the clear sight which is hers by title. Extraordinary!

And there was another thing: where had old Welbore and Kitty Blount kept her all this time? And why wasn't she married, a girl like that? She came next to Mrs. Scales, he supposed. Well, but there was another, younger still, married only the other day—to an army man. He remembered Welbore chirping about it at a Board meeting. What was that in the Bible—what was it? Ha!—"But thou hast kept the good wine until now." By George, he must remember that for old Welbore. And now he came to think of it, old Jack Etherington had come in one morning full of Percival's daughter—"A lovely gal"—he had said, that old Jack—"colour of a Mildred Grant—quiet as the truth."

Such were the ruminations of Cyrus Worthington at his own garden-party, and he pursued them at favoured moments—with his glass of port at dessert, with his last cigar, with his whisky night-cap. In the city next day he rallied Thomas Welbore, who betrayed unlimited relish for the diversion; and within a few days more he left a card in Charles Street and took a late train to Walton-on-Thames. Asked in due course to dinner, he handed Sanchia to the table, and spent the evening by her side. He begged her better acquaintance with his daughters, made the most of that which he had with Melusine Scales, and ended a successful adventure by winning Lady Maria's acceptance "for herself and her young friend," of a banquet at the Cooper's Company of which he was warden. The occasion was a great one-a foreign potentate, the Prime Minister, Lord Mayor, and Sheriffs. The Coopers were to distinguish themselves, or be extinguished. He could promise them of the best. Sanchia, new to courtship, was quietly elated, and her amusement did nothing to diminish her elation. She had never been wooed before: there had been nothing of the kind in those shuddering days when she and Ingram, trembling in each other's sight, had mutely cried across the waste of London for balm upon their wounds. The flattery of attentions had never been hers, nor the high credit of admiration so respectful as the good merchant's. He esteemed her the fairest and holiest of women, was as timid as a boy in her company, gasped like a fish and grew unmannerly hot; but I defy a young woman to be anything but gratified. Miranda shunned Caliban; but had she not rather he had been there to be shunned?

Thus, under Lady Maria's watchful eye, the thing proceeded, and Mr. Worthington, within an ace of committing himself, scared his family. The climax was reached at Kissingen, whither the infatuated gentleman had followed his charmer.

She was very kind to him, but perfectly clear that she could not, and would not, make him the happiest of men. She said that she was flattered, which I believe to have been true, though he deprecated the phrase. "My dear young lady—ha! I must really be allowed—I assure you that you overwhelm me. Flattered—oh, Lord!" He limped the conclusion, and left for England that night.

She felt the thing to have been rather ridiculous, and yet she was pleased. She was gently elated, and had a kindly eye for herself as she dressed before her glass. Power lay with her; she could choose and weigh, accept or refuse. She was loveworthy yet. In spite of her disaster, a man had sought her. Others would do that same, moved by what had moved him. Shining eyes, body's form, softness, roundness—she had hardly thought of these things before, nor looked at them with an eye to their value. Mr. Worthington's ardent glances had illuminated her own, and by-and-by she found, oddly enough, that they threw a backward beam, and illuminated others. She found herself smiling tenderly as she thought of Jack Senhouse, and repeating some of that poetry which he had literally poured into her lap. It was so long ago! But when she remembered how much it had puzzled her, she now found that she was not puzzled by it at all.

Your eyes are twin mountain lakes, and the lashes of them Like the swishing sedge That hideth the water's edge....

Were her eyes, then, so fair! Mr. Worthington had found them so. Others would—others had.

"Thy face drinketh the light,"—he had written that of her—and now she knew that he had believed it. Had Nevile felt these things? Could Nevile— as she knew him? Her lip curved back. If she could not think of herself without thinking of Nevile—who wanted to mangle her—better take the veil.

But she felt the strange reality behind that wild and adoring passion of Jack Senhouse's, which had made him so incalculable a mixture. He advised her, and adored, he received her confidences, and emptied verses out of his heart into her lap. And she had had nothing to give him, who had given her all! All indeed; for now she saw that he had loved her beyond measure, reason, or stint.

There had been that last of his letters—a despairing cry from Chanctonbury, written when she was Nevile's shadow, and he hers. She felt stabbed to the heart to remember how perfunctorily she had read that. How did it go? What had he said? She could not recall the words, but their sense beat upon her. Oh, he had set her too high! He had called her Artemis—the chaste, the bright. Artemis the Bright had been one of his names for her—and Queen Mab another. He had set her too high! And how far had she fallen? She bowed her burning head, and even as she did so, remembered another phrase of his, sent with flowers—a line from the Anthology, begging her to grant his rose "the grace of a fair breast." No longer fair, no longer fair—except to Nevile, who craved it—and to a Mr. Worthington.

The bravest gentleman, a poet, a thinker, a man like a beacon-fire, had loved her and cried her aloud as a goddess out of his reach. "Farewell, Sanchia, too dear for my possessing!" She had the words. And she had passed him by for Nevile, who made her a housekeeper, and loved her when he wanted solace. What more had Jack said? What, indeed, had he not said? That her life was like the scent of bean-flowers over a hedgerow—a fragrance caught in passing by wayfarers, whereby men and women might thank God for a fair sight who had chanced upon her in the street. Praise indeed! But he had loved her, and saw her so—and all that was gone for ever. He had left her because he dared not do otherwise, and now he was happy without her. Her new-found elation was like to die in self-pity. It required more than the complacency inspired by Mr. Worthington to clear her eyes.

Thus were the flowers laid up for her by an honest merchant changed for a wreath of rue as he was reminded of his better—his better and (she thought) hers, alas! A wave of desire to catch back at far-off things played her a trick. She found herself yearning for her childhood, found herself crying for her innocence, for the sweet scent of opening life. Even as she longed and strained, she knew herself vain. But the temptation for the semblance of what was gone was strong and took a subtle form. If she could not have the thing, she would have the thing's name; if she could not be innocent again, she would ape innocency. Prodigal of Pity as she has been, she could say to Senhouse's ghost, I am no more worthy of thee; and from that to being worthy was but a short step. The rest of her sojourn abroad was preparation for what was to be done on her return home.

Her treasure lay hidden there, in a desk in her room: three portly packets of letters, tied with ribbon, and labelled "Jack to Me." Stained and yellow, she now turned over the pages, and inhaled the faint, sweet scent of them—a scent as of lavender and tears. Her eyes filled, her heart beat; but she read on and on. Impossible praises! Love beyond reason, without bounds—immeasurable homage! Did any man ever—save Dante—love a woman so greatly, set her so high? So presently she was caught up into a kind of heaven of wonder, and spent a night with the past.... From that she arose clear-eyed to meet the future. If she had been so loved, so served by man so generous and so fine, the rest of her life might well be spent in testimony. Her single aim now should be to recover herself, to be what he had once seen her. And for all this high remembrance and high hope—thanks to Mr. Cyrus Worthington!

Lady Maria, as the weeks went by, watched her carefully, and marked the change. Sanchia was very subdued, and now went to church. This to the old lady, who did not, was remarkable. She was not aware, naturally, of a passage in a letter which pictured her in church—with her "dear obsequious head, bowed in a fair place to a fair emblem." She could not have understood, if she had had it explained, that the girl, conscious of her stiff neck, was teaching herself obsequiousness for the sake of him who had seen her so and found her dear. None of these things were for Lady Maria's comprehension; but she reflected aloud upon church-going, and got her young friend to explanations.

"Yes," Sanchia said, "I do go to church. For a long time, you see, I couldn't—but now I feel that I can. We were all brought up to go to church."

"So was I," said Lady Maria, "and that, I take it, is why I don't go now. I was taught to take it as physic."

Sanchia's explanation, which she yielded on pressure, of why she had stopped, was very artless. "I wanted to do something that they thought wicked, but which I thought quite good. If I went to confession, I should have been told that I was wicked. So I couldn't go. It was a difference of opinion, you see."

"Beg pardon," said Lady Maria, "but I don't see. What you mean is that, if you'd told your priest you were going off with Ingram, he'd have said, Don't, and put you under the necessity of disobeying him." She owned to it. And then she owned to something more. If the difficult choice came before her again, she would think twice. "I can't see, even now, that I was wrong in what I did. I am sure it must be right, somehow, to follow your own conscience. But I do see that it's a pity to break rules. Yes, I see that."

"I didn't suppose myself religious," Lady Maria had replied, "but if that is what your religion tells you, I agree with it. It's common sense. What's a heart or two compared with peace and quietness? And how, pray, is a child of eighteen to know what her conscience is worth?"

"It is all she has to go upon," said Sanchia; but the old lady retorted, "Nothing of the kind. She's got the experience of all Nature behind her, from the poultry-yard to the House of Lords. You'll find that the Ten Commandments are rigidly enforced among the cocks and hens. If a member of the zenana breaks bounds there, she rues it. How else do you suppose this world is to be peopled? Read the history of marriage, my dear. You'll find that the more primitive your man the more complicated his marriage laws. Why, bless my soul, I don't need the Church to tell me that I mustn't run away with a married man. I can learn that from the pigeons in the piazza at Venice. But I suppose I'm an old pagan. Now, you run away to your priest and make a clean breast of it."

Perhaps Lady Maria was fanciful, but she put down this return to the Church's knees to the fact that Mr. Worthington had gone upon his. "The child finds that she's a valuable article," she said to herself; "so she locks herself up in the cupboard, like the best china." Sanchia's resolution persisted, and enthusiasm followed its growth. She frequented the churches early in the mornings, and one fine day presented herself in the vestry of one of them. Upon her knees, but with unbent head and eyes fixed steadily to the grille, she rehearsed her tale from the beginning, neither faltering nor losing countenance. What followed upon that was not communicated to her protectress, nor do I care to pry. I imagine that she had always said her prayers, but that now she was answering them.

That is, when one thinks upon it, the first office of prayer.



VI

Lady Maria Wenman grew to be extremely fond of Sanchia, really as fond of her as she was capable of becoming of anybody. She had been good to travel with, and was good to live with. She found her so reasonable, she said. One could discuss anything without shocking her, or without fear of being made uncomfortable by seeing her discomfort. Lady Maria, in fact, being entirely without prejudice, experienced the little luxury of being able to express herself without trampling.

On her side also, Sanchia sincerely liked her old protectress, and found Charles Street agree with her. There was a primordial air about it, which made habits seem like laws of Nature; an absence of fuss which soothed her nerves, and did much better than slay her monsters for her, when it exposed them for no monsters at all, but simple, everyday, rather tiresome concomitants of our makeshift existence.

"You will, of course, marry Nevile Ingram,"—thus Lady Maria disposed of the most dread of all monsters—"because it is, on the whole, more agreeable to avoid scandal, and because it is certainly more decent to pay one's bills. Long credit is a mistake; but you found it a convenience, I suppose; and now you are in funds, you will, of course, get out of debt. If only that you may run into it again at need, you will draw a cheque. Now, you had eight years of it at Wanless, you tell me? Very well, my dear, that must be written off Society's books. Meanwhile, the more you see of amusing, emancipated people like Alexis Morosine the better."

This man was understood to be a Pole in exile, though his title to that distinction could only have been on the side of the distaff, since his father's descent from a ducal family of Venice was not denied; but neither nationality nor expatriation was very obvious upon him. At first sight you would have supposed him a sallow Englishman, spare of flesh and too narrow in the chest; you might have put down his dead complexion and his leanness to India or Jamaica, and been inclined to attribute his dry cynicism to the same superfervent experience. But presently you would be alive to his hungry mind, to his hungry, raging air, his restless habit and large way of looking at circumstance—as if by no possibility could it be any concern of his. And then the trick he had of considering our people as Europeans, of dividing the races of the world by continents rather than kingdoms; and that other of judging all cases, including yours and his own, upon their merits—such traits, to an experienced mind, would have established him for a foreigner, one of a people who had had too much elbowing for breath to have time or space for prejudice or minute classification. Superficially, to be sure, he was English enough—from his speech to his tailoring; and his phlegm (of which we boast) was unassailable. Nobody knew much of his history; Bill Chevenix used to say that he was born whole, and thirty, out of an egg dropped upon our coasts by a migratory roc; that he stepped out, exquisitely dressed, and ordered a whisky and Apollinaris at the nearest buffet. This, said Chevenix, was his ordinary breakfast. When Sanchia objected that he might have stepped out in the afternoon, he replied that it also formed his usual tea, and, so far as he knew, was the staple of all his meals. "And cigarettes," he added. "But he would have had those with him. I bet you what you like he came out smoking."

It was certain that he had been to Eton and to Oxford, and was member of two good clubs. He was extremely rich, and he was by profession, said Chevenix, a prince. He had no territory, and was not apparently scheming to get any, either of his own or other people's. Nobody at the Foreign Office believed that he corresponded with any intransigent; he used to go there often and exchange urbane gossip with under-secretaries. He lodged in Duke Street, gave dinner-parties at the Bachelors, had a large visiting-list, and was, as they say, always "about." One saw him everywhere—in the city, in Mayfair drawing-rooms, at Kensington tea- parties, and at Lambeth Palace. Chevenix swore that he had met him at a Church Congress—and the only answer to that was that if Chevenix had truly been there to see, Morosine might well have been there to be seen. But this catholicity of experience was characteristic of the man; his attraction to the nice observer lay precisely in that, that he was a nomad, unappeased and unappeasable, ranging hungrily. There was a probability, too, that below a surface exquisitely calm there lurked corrosive tooth and claw. Here are sufficient elements of danger to draw any woman; so Sanchia found herself presently drawn.

He came to Charles Street one evening late in November, to what Lady Maria called a little party. There was an autumn session that year, and London full. To her little party, then, came a solid wedge of three hundred people into rooms capable of holding with comfort fifty.

Chevenix was by Sanchia's side at the top of the stair, chatting pleasantly about every new-comer, when he suddenly stopped. "Hulloa," he said, "here's Morosine, as smooth as a glass stiletto. He'll amuse you. I'll introduce him."

Sanchia followed the leading of his eyes. She saw a tall and slim young man, inordinately thin, slightly bald, with a moustache like a rake, and heavy-browed, mournful eyes, pushing his way slowly upstairs. Without effort, his hands behind his back, working from the shoulders, he made room for himself, but so quietly that nobody seemed to observe how aggressively he was at it. Occasionally some ousted dowager turned redly upon him, or it might be some pushing gentleman smothered an oath as he faced the attack. But Morosine's mournful eyes gazed calmly their fill, seemed to be communing beyond the surging guests, beyond the wall, with the eternal stars, and, without faltering, the narrow frame glided forward into the space which indignation had cleared. Sanchia, above him, and out of the game, was highly amused.

"He's very selfish, your friend. He takes care of himself; but no one seems to know it."

Chevenix chuckled. "That's the beauty of Alexis. But, as he asks, whom else should he take care of? It's not queer if the Poles have learned that lesson."

"Oh," said Sanchia. "Is he a Pole?" Jack Senhouse had been in Poland.

"Half of him is hungry Pole. The other part is bad Italian—pampered Italian, fed for generations on oil and polenta. He's always dining out, but he eats nothing because the Pole is feeding on the Venetian all day." Then he told her about the miraculous birth, the whisky and Apollinaris, and concluded, "Oh, he'll amuse you vastly. Stay where you are. I'll net him at the top."

Presently after she saw the process. It consisted in violent effort on Chevenix's part, languid attention from the other. Morosine dreamed over the speaker as if he were a lost soul. Then, his consideration being caught, he looked about him, and presently fixed upon her his melancholy eyes. She felt a little shiver, the sensation of goose-flesh in the spine —not unpleasantly. It was as if a light wind had ruffled her blood. Shortly afterwards Morosine was bowing before her. In this, perhaps, he betrayed himself; his hat covered his heart, he inclined from the hips, and his head bent with his body. An Englishman bows with the head only, and does not nowadays carry his hat upstairs.

He began to talk quietly and at once, and maintained a perfectly even flow of comment, reflection, anecdote, reminiscence, and sudden, flashing turns of inference. He seemed always to be searching after general principles, cosmic laws, and to be always jumping at them, testing them, finding them not comprehensive enough, and letting them drift behind him as he pursued his search. She remarked on this afterwards to Lady Maria, who said that principles were the last thing to interest Morosine. He had none! at all, said Lady Maria, unless his own immediate gratification was a principle; and perhaps with men you might almost say that it was.

Chevenix remained, chuckling and interjecting here and there an exclamation, just (as he told her later) to "start the chap on his meander," and presently betook himself elsewhere. It was then to be observed that Morosine allowed himself to drift into the discussion of matters not usually subjects of ordinary conversation; but he did so without consciousness, and therefore without offence. Sanchia neither disapproved nor felt uncomfortable. They were, moreover, interesting, and rather material.

It began with Poland, a country which, the less it existed politically, he said, was the better to live in, and be of. We live by our emotions, the beasts by their appetites—a material distinction. Now, the condition of the Poles was perfectly adapted to the quickening of the emotional parts. Shorten time, you make love a precious ecstasy; restrict liberty, freedom is a lust—none the worse for being lawful. No Pole knows how long he may have to live: Russia or phthisis will have him late or soon. What he pursues, then, must be fleeting—imagine with what rapture he takes it to his breast! with what frenzy he guards it, never knowing when it will be required of him again. Feverish? (This was upon a remark from her.) Yes, and why not? Are not dreams more vivid than waking life? Can you gallop your material horse as your courser of the mind? Better to burn than to rust. That's the secret of life—which all the laws of bureaucrats are directed to destroy. The establishments want to see us as fixed as themselves. They are tentacled, stationary creatures, feeding at ease. They would have us handy of access, falsely secure, so that they can fasten on us one by one and suck our juices. But the world is changing, thrones and churches are slackening in their hold. Men are discovering how short a time they have to live, and that eternity is more than questionable. A mild Epicureanism is gaining ground. Instincts founded on the patriarchal system must give way to that. "Have you ever considered," he asked abruptly, "that the flocks and herds of the Semitic patriarch are the sole cause of the moral code which we still profess? Thou shalt not steal. Why not? Because you injure the patriarch. Not murder? You might attack one of his family. You have the habit in England of tracing prejudices to the Feudal System: believe me, there is hardly anything in Europe so modern. I should date at 4000 B.C. nearly all our present conventions, from the British Sunday to the law of conspiracy. So long as you say that property is sacred, you uplift the Patriarch and lose sight of the man."

Sanchia, reminded of Senhouse—a Senhouse with his tongue dipped in vinegar—objected that society may have demanded some of these laws in defiance of the engrossing patriarch; but Morosine shook his head. "Society is the patriarch's weapon. Society is a syndicate of patriarchs who cannot live unless all men are enslaved. Man is not by nature gregarious; he's solitary, like all the nobler beasts. Wolves and dogs hunt in herds, but not the great cats; oxen and buffaloes, but not elephants; rooks, but not eagles; bream, never salmon. And the time is not so very far when man will discover why it is that he is herded and marshalled hither and thither by police, legislatures, and monstrous assemblies called armies or fleets. He has but to know it to abolish these things; they fade like dreams in the morning. But hitherto everything has been banded to make his sleep secure—his religion, his cupidity, his timidity, his affections. Religion tells him it is wrong to love without the Church; patriotism, that it is glorious to bleed in making other men bleed; timidity, that property keeps the wolf from the door; appetite, that under cover of the law you may devour your neighbour and fear no indigestion. Finally, there are the affections of a man which have been so guided that they see the aged more venerable than the young, the old thing more sacred than the new 'Woodman, spare that tree,' they cry: 'it dates from at least 2000 B.C.' Because old wine is good, they argue, old laws must needs be. As well might a man say, Because I relish old wine, I will love only old women. And so we go on!" He shrugged and broke off—to talk shrewdly of books. They got to Leopardi, from him to Dante; he heard of her studies at the British Museum, and hoped he might meet her there. She reads there often? Mostly in the afternoons? The light was bad: he usually devoted his mornings to what work he had there. He was studying Persian, he said, but fitfully, as the mood took him.

So far he had scarcely looked at her, but had talked out his monologue as if he had been alone, clasping one thin ankle, staring wide-eyed over the heads of guests, occasionally, when he was vehement, throwing his head up, shooting his words at the ceiling as if they had been Greek fire. Now, as he got up to leave her, his eyes dwelt earnestly on her. "It will be a pleasure, to which I shall aspire—that of meeting you again. There or elsewhere."

She thanked him as she gave him her hand. Excitement made her eyes bright, mantled her cheeks. She felt that she was communing with Senhouse at third hand.

"Then—it is understood—we meet again," he concluded. He bowed over her hand, on a second thought kissed her fingers, then left her immediately and went downstairs. He paid no farewell to Lady Maria; was ascertained to have left the house at once.



VII

Morosine had been called emancipated by Lady Maria, who after a week or so found it proper to explain that he was by no means so free from chains as he appeared. Sanchia, she thought, was seeing a good deal of him. "He's the victim, like the rest of us, of his constitution. His, as you may see, is deplorable. Weak heart, they say—but it may be lungs. I never heard of a Pole who could live in any climate, least of any his own. As for his mind, that follows his wasted body; it's hectic. He affects a detachment which he will never have. It's a pose. He is exceedingly sentimental, has an imagination which—if you could follow it—might alarm you. I have no doubt at all but that, in imagination, he has you safe in some island of Cythera or another, and has slain every other male inhabitant of it lest some one of them should happen to look at your footprints in the sand. Jealous! He would sicken at the word—not because he would be ashamed, but because it would conjure up the vision of some satyr-shape, and haunt him day and night. He has no need to study Persian poetry, I assure you. He has rose-gardens enough and to spare; for, if you are inclined to be flattered at my suggestion of Cythera, I hasten to assure you that yours is not the only island of his dominion. Bless you, he'll have an archipelago. But I have no fear for you; you can afford a sentimental education."

Sanchia did not tell her old friend how far that education was proceeding —not because she was afraid, still less because she was ashamed, but in obedience to her nature, which was extremely reserved. She spoke of herself and her affairs with difficulty—never unless she was forced. But it had become a custom just now—in the dull days on either side of Christmas—to look for Morosine in the reading-room about noon, to stroll the galleries for half-an-hour, to receive and to agree to a lightly- offered proposition that they should lunch together, and (it might well be) to accept his escort homewards. This, I say, had become the rule of three days in the week, more or less. And it's not to be supposed that so clear-sighted a young lady could see so much of so keen-sighted a man without a good deal of self-communing.

Her capacity for silent meditation, during which she would sit before her fire, gazing far, smiling at her thoughts, into the glowing coals, had never left her. But there was a slight difference to be noted. She could not think of Ingram—the past, the present, or any future Ingram—without contraction of the brows. Smooth-browed she thought of Morosine.

He interested her greatly; she was conscious of anxiety to learn his opinion, of a wave of warm feeling when she awaited it. She credited him with insight, had a notion, for instance, that she could discuss her own affairs without any preliminary apology. He took so much for granted— surely he would take her youth into full account. She had never said to him a word of herself as yet; but there had been times when she had felt near it—had seen herself rowing a boat, as it were, within range of a weir, been conscious of effort to keep a straight course, and of the fruitlessness of effort. There had been moments when she had been tempted to throw down her oars with a sigh—by no means of despair. Morosine seemed to her so extraordinarily reasonable, so ready, with well-known laws, to account for unheard of vagaries, that it would have been real luxury to her to find herself and her escapade the mere creatures of some such law. To be discovered normal: what a relief from strain!

Lady Maria, it seems, charged him with Oriental aptitudes. Sanchia gave that judgment careful attention, studied her friend in the light of it, weighed every word of his to her, watched him closely in company when he could not be aware of it. She decided against the opinion. His manners with women were his manners with men, those of urbane indifference to sex. To sex! To much more than that. He was, in fact, outwardly polite to the point of formality; but his attitude of mind towards the person he happened to be with seemed to her—when she examined it closely—to be sublimely insulting. No created thing, with the passions and affections common to his kind, ought to take up such a position with his fellow- creature—that which says, "I infer your existence from my sensations: apart from them, I cannot bring myself to believe in it." She was aware that he must needs regard her from this stand-point, and the knowledge piqued her. If she did not exist for him, why did he seek her out? If she did, why did he pretend she did not? Or was Lady Maria right? Were his sensations awake, and had they fired his imagination, to carry her to Cythera, and keep her hidden there? These questions amused her, and she made no attempt to answer them. Amusement might cease that way: she indulged herself and left her questions open. One thing may be added. Morosine no longer reminded her of Senhouse. Quite otherwise—for of Senhouse just now she dared not think.

Her friend Bill Chevenix gave her no warnings. Even when she sounded for them, he gave none. "I like Alexis," he said once. "He's not so original as he makes out, but there's enough to give him a relish. A handy chap, too, in a dozen ways—he'll model you in wax, or draw you in pastels, or sing about you on the guitar, or whistle you off on the piano; but he's not strong, isn't Alexis. The one thing he can do—no, there are two. He can ride anything, and he can use a revolver. I saw him empty the ten of hearts once: very pretty. I dare say, if he was put to it, he could use an iron to some purpose; but we don't stick each other here, so he'd be out of practice. I rather wish we did, you know. It's far more gentlemanly than laying for a chap outside his club with a hunting-crop, and getting summoned for assault at Vine Street. Not a bit more vicious, barring the Ten Commandments."

"Prince Morosine doesn't believe in them," Sanchia said. "He's vowed to abolish them."

"So he may tell you, my dear. Don't you believe it. So long as they are good form they will be Alexis' form. He'd sooner die than covet his neighbour's wife." She reserved this for consideration. Meantime, she saw more of Morosine than of any other man, and got through January very well by his help.

She particularly liked his company in galleries, because, though he never allowed himself raptures—of which she, too, was incapable—he was always seeking the roots of rapture. Sanchia had a fund of enthusiasm for art all the richer, perhaps, for being denied expression. It was comfortable to have that securely based.

"Do you ever consider," he asked her once, when they stood before the great group of the Pediment, "why it is that these things are so beautiful; why, although they are bare of colour and all that stands for life to us in art, they are more than life? It's because they point to a state of being exquisitely conform to the laws of being. Such a perfect conformity soothes us into believing that while we witness it we are of it—ourselves conforming. These splendid creatures here, so superbly static—idle, you might say (only they wouldn't understand you), indulging their strength—are strong and able precisely because they have submitted themselves—-"

"Unlike the Poles?" She reminded him of their first conversation, and saw that he remembered it. He bowed to her.

"Let me finish. These existences, emanations, essences, what you will, are submiss, not to man, but to Nature. They are as passive as Earth herself, and as immune. They derive their strength from her. That's our only reasonable service." Whether he intended it or not, the effect of this kind of talk was to make her view submission to the world's voice as a reasonable service.

It was not so odd as it may seem that her intimates had always been men. That reticence of hers which repelled her own sex was precisely that in her which attracted, by provoking, the other. After her dumb childhood, to which she never looked back, came her opening girlhood, and on the threshold of that stood Jack Senhouse, the loyal servitor, the one man who had loved her without an ounce of self-seeking. Then came Nevile Ingram, and swallowed her up for a while, and when he had tired of her she was once more without a friend. To Chevenix afterwards, rather than to Mrs. Devereux, she had struggled to utter herself. That cry of distress, "he wants me, to ravage me," would never have been made by her to a woman. She would have died of it sooner. And now came the Pole, Morosine, and by taking for granted (as even Lady Maria could not have done) much that could not have been explained, put her at her ease. She found him a Jack without the spirit—without the divine spark. She could never have loved him, though she liked him well, and she had no idea that he thought of nothing but the greatness of his reward when, after patient toiling, she might fall into his arms. Every nerve in her body was now strung up to obedience to Jack's idea of her. She saw, as clearly as if it was printed, her fate before her. She was to put herself under the law. Jack should not have loved in vain her "dear obsequious head." Nevile would come back and require her. For Jack's sake, who had seen her too noble to be touched by sin, she would dip herself deep in sin.

Morosine, who frankly desired her to be the wife of a man she did not love in order that she might the more easily find consolation in himself afterwards, had the wit to see that she needed some of his sophistry, though not enough to know exactly why. It was perfectly true. Her churchgoing was an ointment. It could soothe but not heal her. Sanchia had a mind. To do wrong by the world because it had seemed right to her was not to be remedied by doing a right by it now, which to her reasoning would glare before her as a monstrous sin. She forgot that Senhouse had also taught her that the great sin of all was insincerity. She could not have afforded to remember that. All her present desire was to be, as nearly as she might, what she had been when Jack had seen her first, what he had found excellent in her and love-worthy—pious, bowing her head in a fair place, obsequious, obedient to the law. He had loved her, of course, whatever she did—outraging the law as well as keeping it, loving Nevile, letting himself go away. She could not remember that. He had loved her meek; she would be meek. That was what her heart told her; and Morosine, to serve his own ends, lulled her head with his sophisticated anodynes, and sent her brain to sleep.

That he should know her story, as he obviously did, was not so disconcerting to her as it would have been to most young women. Taciturn as she was, it was not by reason of timidity, but rather that her own motives seemed too clear to her to be worth stating. She was, perhaps, rather given to assume her prerogative right to be different. Her first thought, therefore, was that she was saved the trouble of explaining herself, and her second that it was satisfactory to have a friend who understood her without explanations.

As for Morosine, he may or may not have felt that he had broken the ice; he pushed forward, at any rate, as if he had clear water in front of him. Sanchia felt, when she next met him, that their acquaintance had entered on a new phase.

Then suddenly, before she knew where she was, her fate was upon her.

It was in the Park on a fine Sunday forenoon in February. She was with Lady Maria, and had met with Melusine and Gerald Scales. Morosine also, seeing her and meeting her eyes, instantly left his companion and came to greet her, hat in hand. He addressed himself to her exclusively, having saluted Lady Maria; but she named her sister, and he saluted her too. Gerald Scales, bronzed, plump, and very full in the eye, having looked the newcomer over, decided against him, and gave him a shoulder. "Foreign beggar," was the conclusion he came to, which does credit to his perspicacity, because the Pole had a very English appearance, and Scales himself the look of a Jew.

When they turned to walk, Morosine took the side next Sanchia, and though he talked to both ladies, so contrived that she should read more in what he said than her sister. He did it deftly, but continuously. Sanchia was entertained, slightly excited, and ended by taking part in the game of skill. It is impossible to say by how much this sort of thing increased the intimacy already established between the pair. It was by so much, at least, that when Melusine joined her husband, by dropping behind and waiting for him to come up with, the old lady, it came as no sort of shock to Sanchia that he took up the talk where he had ended it in the gallery.

"You have been to church, I see. But you are not a Christian?" He did not look at her.

Nor did she turn her head to reply. "I don't know. Nominally, at least; fitfully, at the most."

"That must be the outside of it," he continued. "The thing is the antithesis of the Hellenic ideal—which is yours. Your seemingly passive martyr is really in an ecstasy. He aims at outraging Nature; begins by despising and ends by dreading it. Nature, however, has ways of revenging herself."

"Yes, indeed," said Sanchia soberly.

They walked on together, she by this time very much absorbed. She was not conscious of the shifting crowd, the lifting of hats, the chatter, the yapping dogs that ran in and out of women's skirts.

Presently he spoke again. "You believe that you failed?"

Her voice came low. "I know that I failed."

Then he looked at her, and spoke with vehemence. "And what is that to you? What is, failure in such a cause, to such as you?" But she could not meet his face, kept hers rigidly to the front.

"The cause," Morosine told her, "is everything, the aim, the loyalty, the great surrender. Beside this failure is nothing at all. Do you say that the sapling fails that springs out of a cleft rock and towers—seeking, as we all seek, the sun, the light in heaven? A gale gathers it up and tears it out: over it goes, and lies shattered. Is that failure? How can it be when nothing dies?"

Sanchia, very pale, turned her face to his at last. Her mouth was drawn down at the corners, to the tragic droop. She almost whispered the words, "Something did die."

His intuition worked like a woman's, in flashes. He knew immediately what she meant.

"I know, I know," he said. "You were mistaken. But you never faltered. You followed a call."

"You tell me," she said, "that there was none."

"I do."

"But," she argued, "that with which I began failed me. I was entirely certain, at the time; I could not possibly have hesitated. And then—it died." Her eyes loomed large. "It is quite dead now, and I feel that I have betrayed myself—broken faith with myself."

He shook his head. "You could not break faith; you are the soul of truth."

This praise she accepted. "I don't tell lies, I hope—and I don't shirk things. But you see that I can stultify my own acts. I believed, and acted on my belief; and then I ceased to believe, and acted on that. I cannot trust myself—I ought to be ashamed to say so, and I hope I am."

Morosine met her eyes again, and held them. "I can never believe that you would fail. I tell you that you have not failed. It is that you have been failed. You cannot give if what you give is not taken. Failed—you! Ah, no, you have succeeded, I think."

She bent her brows as she faced resolutely forward. "I must take the consequences of what I have done. I see that."

"Ah," said Morosine, "that is a question of courage. Courage you have."

"I need it," she said in a hush, and stopped dead. Ingram stood before her, and took off his hat.

"Well, Sanchia," he said, "here I am."



VIII

The scattered party was suddenly strung to tensity; Morosine drew himself up, stiff as steel, but stood his ground. Here was the man he had waited for, who was necessary to him. Lady Maria, blinking her little black eyes, Melusine, with hers in a blur of mist, Gerald Scales, level and impassive, joined the other three.

Ingram, with a stretched smile, was volubly explaining. "I've been in London a week—to-day's the first glimpse of the sun I've had. I do think they might make better arrangements for a man home from Africa. I met your mother last night at a play. She told me that I might see you here." He turned, without effrontery, to greet Melusine. "Ages since we have met. Ah, Scales, how are you?"

The tall Melusine stooped her head; Scales nodded, then, by an afterthought, shook hands. "I'm very fit, thanks," he said. "Been travelling?"

Sanchia sought the side of Lady Maria, to whom she named Ingram. His exaggerated bow was accepted. "So you've arrived, I see," said Lady Maria.

"One does, you know." Ingram shrugged at the inevitable. "All roads lead to Rome."

"Most roads lead to Lady Maria," Morosine said to Sanchia, who replied from her heart, "I'm very glad that mine did." Moved either by loyalty to his friendship, or touched by his recent words, she then brought him bodily into play. "Mr. Nevile Ingram; Prince Morosine."

The two men inclined; Morosine lifted his hat, Ingram touched his brim.

Ingram, whom Morosine judged as a hard worker just now, supported his part with great gallantry. If he was naked to all these people who knew him, he appeared quite unashamed. Morosine, watching him carefully, believed that he had devoted a night's vigil to getting word perfect. He described Khartoum with vivacity—the English drill sergeant reigning over mudheaps, flies, and prowling dogs; getting up cricket-matches for the edification of contemptuous blacks. "They judge us, those fellows, you know. They are measuring us with their glazed eyes. The cud they chew has gall in it. I don't suppose anything offends them more deeply than our idiotic games. Is there a more frivolous race in the world than ours?"

Lady Maria suggested that the Boers might ask that question; Morosine that the Germans might answer it. Sanchia standing between these two, faced by Ingram, kept silent. She was conscious of being closely under observation. Morosine did not once lose sight of her. Whatever he said was addressed to her. Once, when she looked at him, she saw the gleam of knowledge in his eyes. He and Ingram never spoke to each other directly; indirectly Morosine capped whatever Ingram said. It was these two who maintained the talk through her sensitive frame.

Melusine and her husband exchanged glances—she in obedience to his fidgety heels. He had dug a hole in the gravel deep enough to bury a kitten. Her curtsey—it was almost that—to Lady Maria was very pretty. She drew in her suffering sister, almost embraced her. "Dearest, dearest!" she whispered. Sanchia, who was very pale, made no answer, and hardly returned the salute.

"Insufferable beggar," was Gerald Scales' outburst. "I could have shot him at sight. But you women will go through with it, I suppose."

"Oh, Gerald," faltered Melusine, "it's dreadful—but what can she do?"

"Pon my soul, I'd take Morosov—the Polish party—what's-his-name—first. I would indeed—on the whole."

There was nothing to say. Melusine knew that could not be.

Lady Maria, however, who never made a fuss over spilt milk, lost no time in ladling up what might be possible. She asked Ingram to luncheon, and was accepted with a cheerful, "Thanks, most happy." It may have been malice which turned her to Morosine with the question. "And you? Will you join us?"

Morosine promptly excused himself. He had guests, and must consider them. He took ceremonious leave. "You remember, I hope, that I am to see you on Thursday, Lady Maria. And Miss Percival?" He looked to Sanchia, who did not turn him her eyes.

"Perfectly," said her ladyship. "What's your hour?"

"We will dine at half-past eight." He named the restaurant. He turned to pay his farewells to Sanchia. She looked him No, being unable to speak to him. Her eyes, deep lakes of woe, were crying to him. His answered.

He held out his hand and received hers. "Thursday," he repeated, and left her with her fate.

Lady Maria, at luncheon, made what she called the best of a bad business. She treated Ingram to a brisk curiosity. "So you're a wanderer, I hear— like the Gay Cavalier of my childhood. Your mother may have heard the song. Mine sang it. I believe that that kind of thing was considered heroic in her day; in ours, heroism is more difficult, and much more dull. You might try heroism, Mr. Ingram."

"I might, no doubt," Ingram said. "Hitherto, I've preferred to travel. But I'm home for good now, so far as I can see."

"We all hope so," said Lady Maria. "But that remains to be seen."

"Of course it does," said Ingram blandly, and turned to Sanchia. "I thought your mother looking very well. Your father wasn't there. I saw Philippa, by the way; but I suppose she didn't remember me. That was her husband with her, I take it. Stiff old boy." So he went on, letting bygones be bygones. It was after luncheon that her ordeal came.

Lady Maria having departed for her siesta, he came instantly to Sanchia with his hand out for her. "Sancie, I couldn't talk before all those people. You must forgive me, my dear. You are too good a sort—you must forgive me."

He had to wait; but slowly she lifted her hand and let him take it. "I have forgiven you," she said. He stroked her arm.

"That's nice of you—that's like you. I know that I behaved like a brute. I was awfully cut up about it afterwards—but, as you know, I had great provocation."

"Not from me, I think." Her eyes were upon him now.

"No, no," he admitted; "certainly not from you; but—well, perhaps I may say that I had some ground for thinking that you—possibly—No, I don't think I ought to say that. At any rate, I thought then that I had. As for that young friend of yours—but he's nothing. It's you I want to make my peace with."

"It's not difficult," she said. "I tell you that I don't bear any malice. I bore none at the time. I wanted to go."

He let her hand slide from his, and plunged his own into his pockets. "I know you did; I felt that at the time. That hurt me a good bit. I had come to rely upon you so much—oh, for every mortal thing. I expect the whole place has gone to the devil now. You had your hand on the tiller, by Jove! You kept a straight course, You see, I'd got into the way of thinking we were—married, don't you know, and all that—-"

"I think you had, indeed," she said. He saw her wry smile.

"I know what you mean by that. You mean, if that's marriage—many thanks! Well, my dear, all I can say is, you were absolutely wrong. It was not marriage—it never had been, and you know it couldn't have been. But if it had been, Sancie, you'd have been as right as rain. You know you would. Your own place—everything to your hand—Society—all that kind of thing. Why, you'd never have thought it amiss in me to go off tiger-shooting for a bit. You'd have had your whack of travelling, playing the grass widow; you'd have entertained, had all sorts of little games—and both of us been all the better. No! But it was just because our relationship was so infernally irregular that you felt those separations—took them, if I may say it, so hard. Depend upon it, that was it."

Her lip curled back, though she said nothing. She wondered if he had always been quite so fatuous as this, quite so sublimely unhumorous. If he had, what under heaven had she been about? That she could have believed this smug cockscomb to have loved her—to have been capable of anything but hunger and thirst for her—incredible! It made her out precisely as fatuous as he. And yet she said nothing. With the likes of him nothing seemed worth doing except to forget him.

And she was to marry him, to live in his house, to see him daily—ah, and more than that; and yet she said nothing of what her curled back lip expressed. She was in the presence of her fate, and, as ever, was dumb before it. To make him shrivel under scorn, to wind her tongue about him like a whip till he writhed; to play the honest woman and tell him quietly that she did not love and had nothing more to say to him; or to ask him urgently for release—she did none of these things: none of them entered her head. She had never shirked the apportioning of the Weaving Women. Destiny was unquestionable. She felt that she abhorred Ingram. What she was to suffer from him she knew but too well. And yet she knew also that she was going to marry him, to be neglected by him, put to scorn, betrayed. All these things she would undergo, because they could not be avoided. She was bound as well as gagged. Her destiny was before her, as her character was within. The one had begotten the other. She had sowed, and now she was to reap. Her stony mind contemplated the harvest, and saw that it was just.

Therefore she said nothing, but stood with her foot on the fender, shading her face from the fire with her thin hand. In this attitude, though able to see sideways what was coming upon her, she stood nerveless to his approach. "Sancie, my own Sancie," he said, and put his arm about her, and drew her bodily to his side. She stiffened, but allowed it.

"Dearest girl, tell me that you forgive me—tell me that. I am wretched without you—I can't go on like this. It's not good for me; my health suffers. Darling Sancie, forgive poor old Nevile. He was once your boy— you loved him so much. For the sake of old times, Sancie, my dear."

She could only say, "I have forgiven you—you know that. I have told you so." He pressed her closely to him, feeling his urgent need to make the most of what she had to give him. Her apathy struck him mortally chill; he wooed her the more desperately.

Holding her to his heart—an inanimate burden—he kissed her cold lips, her eyelids, her hair; called her by names whose use she had long forgotten, whose revival caused her pain like nausea. If he could have known it, this was the last way to win her. It was like pressing upon a queasy invalid the sweets which had made him sick. But he, remembering their ancient potency, seeing himself the triumphant wielder of charms, felt secure in them still; therefore she was his darling, his hardy little lover, his Queen of Love, his saucy Sancie, his lass. On fire himself by his own blowing, at last he fell upon his knees and clasped hers: "Dearest, most beautiful, my own, I love you more than ever. Comfort me, be my salvation—I pray that I may be worth your while. Marry me, Sancie, and save my soul alive."

Honestly, for the moment, he believed himself irresistible, and so far succeeded with her that her disgust hid itself in a cloud of pity. She felt pity for a man abject at her feet, and could speak more kindly to him.

But she could not bring herself to touch him. Looking down at him there, her eyes were softer and her lips took a gentler curve. "You mustn't be down there," she said. "I don't like to see you there—and can't talk to you till you get up. Let's sit down and talk—if you will." He rose obediently and stood with heaving chest, while she drew a chair to the fire and seated herself. Then he took to the hearthrug, and possessed himself of her hand.

"What a cold hand, my dear! Oh, Sancie, how I could have warmed you once! Is that never to be again? Don't tell me so, for God's sake."

"Oh, how can I tell!" cried she. "Surely you can understand me better than that? Do you ask me to forget everything that has has happened in eight years?"

"I asked you to forgive me, my dear."

"And I have forgiven."

"But do you store these things up against me? That's not too generous, is it?"

"I don't store anything," she assured him; "but it wouldn't be honest of me to pretend I am what I was—once. I was a child then, and now I'm a woman. You have made me that. I am what you made me."

He stared into the fire, dropped her hand, which she instantly hid under the other.

"You mean to tell me, then," he said, "that I have made you cease to care?"

She tried to soften the verdict. "You seemed to me not to care very much yourself. You left me for a year together—"

"Once, my dear. I left you for one year."

"One whole year, you know," she replied, "and for other times too."

"I never ceased to love you," he vowed. "You must be aware how much I depended upon you. You were always with me."

She could have laughed at him. "I don't pretend to the same state of mind. During those absences of yours I learned to be happy alone—and I was happy, too."

This seemed horrible to him. "I could not have believed it of you," he said, aghast. "You must have changed indeed."

"I have changed," she owned. He started to his knees and clasped her.

"Beloved, I can change you again—I am the man who had your heart. I must do it—it's my right as well as my duty. Trust me again, my own; give me your dear hand again—and you shall see. If you are changed for the worse, I am changed for the better. You have redeemed me. What is it they say in the Bible? By your stripes I am healed. Yes, yes—that's precisely it. Kiss me, my own girl; kiss me." His eyes implored: she stooped her sad head that he might kiss her. He strained upwards and held her until she broke away with a sob. "Oh, leave me, leave me for a little while," she prayed him brokenly. "I can't talk any more now; I assure you I can't."

He begged her pardon for his vehemence. "I'm pretty bad myself, you know. This kind of thing plays the deuce with a man's heart."

She could thank him with a woman's for this naive assurance. "I don't doubt you for a moment," she said. "You have been rather eloquent."

"Eloquent, my dear!" He raised his eyebrows. "You might spare me congratulations upon my eloquence. I don't deserve very much, perhaps— though God knows I tried to make you comfortable; but perhaps I deserve credit for sincerity."

She was not to be drawn that way. "I don't doubt your sincerity in the least," she said. "But I wish you to allow for mine. I am changed, and have told you so."

"I can see that you are. Heaven knows that. Perhaps I deserve it: I don't know. It's hardly for me to talk about my own points, is it? Criticism, from whichever side it comes, does seem to me out of place in a love- scene. And you found me eloquent in spite of it! Surely I may congratulate myself upon that."

She looked at him standing before her, his arms folded; she showed him a face too dreary to be moved by sarcasm. "You may congratulate yourself on lots of things, I'm sure."

Annoyance began to prick him; he showed spirit. "You are tired—and I may have tired you. I won't do that any longer. I think I'll go, if you'll excuse me to your Lady Maria. Sensible lady, that. She goes to sleep...." He took a turn over the room, then came back and stood over her. "I have not had my answer yet. I'll come for it in a few days' time. May I hope you'll have it for me—say, to-day week?"

"What is the question I have to answer?" She looked up for it, though she knew what it was to be quite well.

"Do you wish it repeated?" He was perfectly cool by now. "I'll put it categorically. I have wronged you, and wish to repair my fault: will you allow it? I love you more than before: will you permit me to prove it? I believe that I can make you happy: may I try?"

She had scarcely listened, and when she answered him, did not lift her head. "I can't answer you now, Nevile. Don't ask me."

"I have not asked you. I have simply put my questions fairly. I will come for my answer next Sunday afternoon. Good-bye, Sanchia."

He held out his hand and received hers, which he kissed. Then he turned and left her alone.

* * * * *

"I should swallow him, if I were you," was Lady Maria's spoken reflection upon what her young friend was able to tell her. "I should swallow him like a pill. You won't taste him much, and he'll do you worlds of good. The world? I'm not talking of the world. I never do. He'll put you right with yourself. That's much more to the point. He's in love with you, I believe. From what you tell me, that's new. You suppose that he was in love with you before. I do not. He was in love with himself, as you presented him. Most men are. Now you are to occupy that exceedingly comfortable position of a woman out of love with her husband, extravagantly beloved by him. Next to being a man's mistress there's no surer ground for you than that, with respectability added, mind you. No mean addition. Take my advice, my dear, and you won't regret it."

But Sanchia knew at the bottom of her heart that Ingram was not in love with her. He wanted her restored to his collection.



IX

On the Monday morning, after a night of broken sleep, she received a letter from her mother.

"MY DEAR CHILD," Mrs. Percival wrote, "I met Nevile Ingram, quite unexpectedly, on Saturday evening. Yesterday he called here, after he had seen you in the house where you choose to remain. Our interview was naturally distressing, and I should be glad to feel sure that you could spare me a third. I need not remind you of the first.

"But I feel bound to own, from what I could learn from him of his discussion (as I must call it) with you, that I am most uneasy. If I were to say unhappy, tho' it would be less than the truth, you might accuse me of exaggeration. That I could not bear. Therefore, let 'uneasy' be the word. Is it possible, I ask myself, that my youngest child—my latest-born—can find it in her heart to torture the already agonised heart of her mother? I put the question to you, Sanchia, for I am incapable myself of finding the answer. I blush to write it—but such is the terrible fact. I can only beg you to put me out of suspense as gently as may be. I am growing old. There are limits to what a grey-haired mother's heart can bear.

"Mr. Ingram's proposals towards a settlement of the untold ruin he has wrought in a once smiling and contented household were (I must say) liberal. That they were all that they should be, I must not declare—for how could that ever be? He put himself, however, and his extremely handsome fortune unreservedly in my hands and those of your father, who was not present at our interview. He was resting, I believe—his own phrase. Philippa came in to tea, with her trusty, honourable Tertius, and was more than gracious to N. You know her way. She stoops more charmingly than any woman I have ever met. Her manners, certainly, are to be copied.

"His position in the county—I return to Nevile—I need not dwell upon. It may be brilliant. A Justice of the Peace at thirty-two! I leave you to imagine what he might become, building upon that, if he were blessed with the loving companionship of a tender, chaste and Xtian wife. Such an one could guide him into Green Pastures—and such an one only. Secure in the gratitude of his inferiors, the respect of his peers, reconciled to the Altar, and his God, one sees before Nevile the upright, prosperous, honoured career of an English Gentleman. There is no higher, I believe. But it is clear to all of those who truly love you, my child, that you only can ensure him these advantages. He is sincerely penitent now—of that I am sure. Who can tell, however, what relapse there may be unless he is taken in hand?

"You have been his curse, but may be his Blessing. You have my prayers.

"I beg my compliments to Lady Maria Wenman if she condescends to recognise the existence of—Your affect. Mother, CATHERINE WELBORE PERCIVAL."

"P.S.—Nevile assures me that his cousin, the Bishop, would perform the rite. This would be a great thing. One must think of N's position in the county."

"Venus, wounded in the side ..." is the opening line of an old poem of Senhouse's, one of those "Greek Idylls" with which he made his bow to the world—old placid stories illuminated by modern romantic fancy; nursery- rhyme versions, we may call them, of the myths. "Venus, wounded in the side," recounts how the Dame, struck by a shaft of her son's, ran moaning from one ally to another seeking Pity, the only balm that could assuage her wound. To the new lover, to the old, to the fresh-wedded, to the long- mated: from one to the other she ran—hand clapt to throbbing heart. None could help her. "Pity! What's that?" cried the first. "I triumph: rejoice with me. Is she not like the sun in a valley?" The second cursed her for a procuress. The bride stirred in her sleep, and whispered, "Kiss me again, Beloved." As for the fourth, he said, "All my Pity was for myself. It is gone; now I am frost-bound." Venus wept: Adonis healed the wound.

Sanchia, reading long afterwards, saw in it a parallel to her case, when she, stricken deep, ran about London ways for a soothing lotion. She saw herself trapped; felt the steel bite to the bone. Tears might have helped her, but she had none: pray she could not, nor crave mercy. It was not Ingram who held her caged, but Destiny; and there's no war with him.

She thought of Vicky, of Melusine. Their kisses would have been sweet, but she knew what they would say. Melusine's sideways head, her sighed, "Dearest, how sad! But life is so serious, isn't it?" She saw the gleam in Vicky's eyes, and heard her "Dear old Sancie, how splendid! Now you'll be all right." Then she would clasp her round the neck and whisper in her ear, "Do make me an aunt—I shall adore your baby. Quick, darling!" She turned her back on Kensington and Camberley, and went into the City, to The Poultry, with her griefs.

Poor Mr. Percival's rosy gills and white whiskers, his invariable, "Well, Sancie—well, my dear, well, well—" called her home. She ran forward, clung to him, and lay a while in his arms, short-breathing, breathless for the advent of peace. To his, "What is it, my love? Tell your old father all about it," she could only murmur, "Oh, dearest, what shall I do?" He urged her again to tell him what the matter was—"What has hurt you? Who has dared to hurt my darling? Show me that scoundrel—" but she was luxuriating in new comfort and would say nothing. Into her false peace she snuggled and lay still; and the honest man, loving her to be there, let her be.

Presently she opened her weary eyes, looked up, and smiled, then snuggled again. He led her to his office chair, and took her on his knee. "Lie here, my bird, make your pillow of my shoulder. That's more comfortable, I hope. Why, Sancie, you've not been here, in my arms, since you hurt your foot at Sidmouth deuce knows how long ago—and I kissed it well! Do you remember that? Ah, but I do. I'm a foolish old chap, with nothing else to think about but my girls. And you're the only one left—the only one, Sancie. And I always loved you best—and behaved as if you were the worst —God forgive me!" She put her hand up and touched his cheek. "Hush, dearest. We don't talk about that."

"No, no, my darling—that's over, thank God. You have forgiven me, I know —my great-hearted Sancie. Now, if you feel stronger, tell me all your troubles." She murmured what follows.

"He came to see me. Nevile came."

"I know, my love. Your mother told me."

"She wrote to me. Rather a dreadful letter. She's on his side—she talks about his position in the county."

"I daresay, I daresay. But you know, your mother thinks a great deal of that kind of thing. She says we owe a deal to our station, you know. There's something in it, my dear. I'm bound to say that."

"Papa, he—wants me again. He thinks he does."

"Oh, my dear, there's no doubt about that—none at all. He proposes—well, it's carte blanche; there's no other word for it. A blank cheque, you know. We must do Master Nevile justice. It is the least he can do; but he does it."

"What am I to do, Papa?" The poor gentleman looked rather blank.

"Do, my dear? Do?" He puzzled; then, as the light broke on him, could not help showing his dismay. "Why, you don't mean to say—Oh, my child, is that what you mean?"

She clung to him convulsively, buried her face.

"God help us all!" His thought, his pity, his love whirled him hither and thither. He shivered in the blast. "'Pon my soul, I don't know how we shall break it to your mother. I don't, indeed." He stared miserably, then caught her to him. "It breaks my heart to see you like this—my child; it cuts me to the heart. Sancie, what are we to do?"

She sat up and brushed her dry eyes with her handkerchief. "I know. There's nothing to do. It's my fate."

This was rather shocking to old Mr. Percival, who shared the common opinion of matrimony, that it should be marked by champagne at luncheons. It was a signal for rejoicing—therefore you must rejoice. White stood for a wedding all the world over, black for a funeral. To go scowling to church, or tearless to the cemetery, was to fail in duty.

"We mustn't look at it like that, my darling. I don't think we ought, indeed. Fate, you know! That's a gloomy view of an affair of the sort. I don't pretend to understand you, quite, my love. You see, a year or two ago, you would have asked nothing better—and now you call it fate. Oh, my dear—"

She could not have hoped that he would understand, and yet she felt more like crying than at any time yet. "My heart is cold," she said. "It's dead, I think."

He echoed her, whispering, "Not dead, Sancie, not dead, my child. Numbed. He'll warm it asleep, he'll kiss it awake. He loves you."

She moaned as she shook her head. "No, no. He wants me—that's all."

"Well, my dear," pleaded good Mr. Percival, "and so he may. We do want what we love, don't we now? He's come to his senses by this time, found out the need of you. And I don't wonder at it. You're a beautiful girl, my dear—you're the pick of my bevy. But I must bring back the roses to those cheeks—Mildred Grant, eh? Jack Etherington used to call you that: he was a great rose-fancier—old Jack. Do you remember our tea-party last summer? And how happy we were? Let's be happy again, my lamb! Come, my child, can't you squeeze me out one little smile? You'll make the sun shine in this foggy old den of mine." He pinched her cheek, peered for the dimple which a smile must bring; then he drew her closer to him and whispered his darling thought: "Shall I tell you something, Sancie? What your old dad prays for when he's by himself? I want another grandchild, my dear—one I can spoil. I ought to be a happy man with what I've got—I know that. But you were always the pet, my love; you know you were—until, until—ah, Sancie! And one of yours! Aren't you going to indulge your old father? He's only got a few years left, mind you. Don't want any more. To see his darling happy, smiling down on her baby—bless me, I'm getting foolish." He blinked his bravest, but had to wipe his glasses. She rewarded him with a kiss, and did not leave till she could leave him at ease.



X

Sanchia, after many nights' stony vigil, decided that she must fight her beasts by herself. She was going to make her parents and sisters happy; she was going through with her bargain; but there was no need to tell them any more about it. In her hard mood she told herself that that was the only wear. If she should be wept over, she might well recant. When the fatal word was once spoken, she would write to her mother—that was all that she could do. For the same reason—that she dreaded a tender moment— she did not go to church with her griefs. The Gods there were too human— the Man of Sorrows, the Mother with the swords in her bosom. It was Destiny that had her by the heel. As ye sow, ye shall reap. Vaster gods, heartless, blind, immortal shapes, figuring the everlasting hills, were her need. She was going to her fate, because the Fates called her. There's no war with them.

There had been one who would have had it all out of her in a trice. But he was remote, a part of her childhood. She hardly called him to mind at this hour. It was dangerous work to think of him, she knew—and her old fortitude stood by her, which said, Turn your mind resolutely away from that which may influence your judgment. Senhouse was not a stoic; he was an epicurean, she now considered. She wanted something flintier than Senhouse. He might have tried to dissuade her; but her mind was now made up. She intended to marry Nevile.

She breakfasted alone, and immediately afterwards went upstairs to write her agreement. The thing was to be gone through with, and the sooner the better.

"MY DEAR NEVILE," she wrote, "if it can ever be right to marry without love, it must be in my case. I don't blame you in the least for what happened. It was as much my doing as yours—and I still think that I was right. And now I think that it is right to fulfil one's bargain—as it would have been if I had married you. If I had been married to you, I should not have left you unless you told me to go, and I don't think that I ought to now. If you really wish it, you shall marry me when you please, and I will do my duty by you always. Whatever arrangements you make will suit me quite well; but the less fuss we make the better. I am sure that you will think so too. Don't come to see me for a few days if you don't mind. I want to think.—Yours affectionately, SANCHIA."

It was not a very gracious letter, it must be owned. So young and so untender! One would have said that the man must be a courageous lover who would take marriage on such terms; but either Ingram was very much in love, or honestly hoped to be loved again. I incline to the opinion of Bill Chevenix, to whom he showed it. "Nevile, old chap," he said, "you take her on any terms. You've no idea how set up you'll feel by everybody saying you've done the square thing. I tell you frankly that she's too good for you. Look how she's shaped in Charles Street! As if she'd been born to it. And never once—never once—allowed to anybody that she's been in the wrong. Not to a soul. And neither you nor I believe that she has— nor did old Dosshouse, or whatever his name was." Ingram knew quite well to whom he so airily referred.

"I shall have landed that chap once for all, anyhow," he said.

"Landed him!" cried the other. "Why, bless you, didn't you know? He landed himself two years after you did. He's married."

"Married, is he?" Ingram asked, not thinking of Senhouse in particular. "Who did he marry?"

"He married a rather pretty woman, a widow, a Mrs. Germain."

Ingram looked sharply up. "I'll take my oath he didn't. I met her the other day. She's Mrs. Duplessis."

Chevenix stared at him. "Why, I know the chap. Where did you meet her? Where do they live?" he asked his friend.

But Ingram had other things to think of, and returned to his letter. "I shall take this as she means it, Bill. She wants me to go slow—I can take a hint. She shall have her head. When I get her down to Wanless we shall be all right. The place isn't fit to live in now, you know. I was up there last week—and found everything going to pot. Not a horse fit to ride—not a sound one amongst 'em. Plantations all to pieces—gardens—tenants in arrears—oh, beastly! She'll have it all to rights in no time, and she'll simply revel in it. She'll come round—you leave that to me. If I can't get a girl round I ought to."