Langham searched the dining-room and the hall, and at last found Mr. MacFadden—a fair, flabby, unwholesome youth—in the little study or cloak-room, in a state of collapse, flanked by whisky and water, and attended by two frightened maids, who handed over their charge to Langham and fled.

Then it appeared that the great man had been offended by a change in the programme, which hurt his vanity, had withdrawn from the drawing-room on the brink of hysterics, had called for spirits, which had been provided for him with great difficulty by Mrs. Leyburn's maids, and was there drinking himself into a state of rage and rampant dignity which would soon have shown itself in a melodramatic return to the drawing-room, and a public refusal to sing at all in a house where art had been outraged in his person.

Some of the old disciplinary instincts of the Oxford tutor awoke in Langham at the sight of the creature, and, with a prompt sternness which amazed himself, and nearly set MacFadden whimpering, he got rid of the man, shut the hall door on him, and went back to the drawing-room.

'Well?' said Rose in anxiety, coming up to him.

'I have sent him away,' he said briefly, an eye of unusual quickness and brightness looking down upon her; 'he was in no condition to sing. He chose to be offended, apparently, because he was put out of his turn, and has been giving the servants trouble.'

Rose flushed deeply, and drew herself up with a look half trouble, half defiance, at Langham.

'I trust you will not ask him again,' he said, with the same decision. 'And if I might say so there are one or two people still here whom I should like to see you exclude at the same time.'

They had withdrawn into the bow window out of earshot of the rest of the room. Langham's look turned significantly towards a group near the piano. It contained one or two men whom he regarded as belonging to a low type; men who, if it suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or invent malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and whose standards and instincts represented a coarser world than Rose in reality knew anything about.

Her eyes followed his.

'I know,' she said petulantly, 'that you dislike artists. They are not your world. They are mine.'

'I dislike artists? What nonsense, too! To me personally these men's ways don't matter in the least. They go their road and I mine. But I deeply resent any danger of discomfort and annoyance to you!'

He still stood frowning, a glow of indignant energy showing itself in his attitude, his glance. She could not know that he was at that moment vividly realising the drunken scene that might have taken place in her presence if he had not succeeded in getting that man safely out of the house. But she felt that he was angry, and mostly angry with her, and there was something so piquant and unexpected in his anger!

'I am afraid,' she said, with a queer sudden submissiveness, 'you have been going through something very disagreeable. I am very sorry. Is it my fault?' she added, with a whimsical flash of eye, half fun, half serious.

He could hardly believe his ears.

'Yes, it is your fault, I think!' he answered her, amazed at his own boldness. 'Not that I was annoyed—Heavens! what does that matter?—but that you and your mother and sister were very near an unpleasant scene. You will not take advice, Miss Leyburn,—you will take your own way in spite of what any one else can say or hint to you, and some day you will expose yourself to annoyance when there is no one near to protect you!'

'Well, if so, it won't be for want of a mentor,' she said, dropping him a mock curtsey. But her lip trembled under its smile, and her tone had not lost its gentleness.

At this moment Mr. Flaxman, who had gradually established himself as the joint leader of these musical afternoons, came forward to summon Rose to a quartette. He looked from one to the other, a little surprise penetrating through his suavity of manner.

'Am I interrupting you?'

'Not at all,' said Rose; then, turning back to Langham, she said in a hurried whisper: 'Don't say anything about the wretched man; it would make mamma nervous. He shan't come here again.'

Mr. Flaxman waited till the whisper was over, and then led her off, with a change of manner which she immediately perceived, and which lasted for the rest of the evening.

Langham went home, and sat brooding over the fire. Her voice had not been so kind, her look so womanly, for months. Had she been reading Shirley, and would she have liked him to play Louis Moore? He went into a fit of silent convulsive laughter as the idea occurred to him.

Some secret instinct made him keep away from her for a time. At last, one Friday afternoon, as he emerged from the Museum, where he had been collating the MSS. of some obscure Alexandrian, the old craving returned with added strength, and he turned involuntarily westward.

An acquaintance of his, recently made in the course of work at the Museum, a young Russian professor, ran after him, and walked with him. Presently they passed a poster on the wall, which contained in enormous letters the announcement of Madame Desforets's approaching visit to London, a list of plays, and the dates of performances.

The young Russian suddenly stopped and stood pointing at the advertisement, with shaking derisive finger, his eyes aflame, the whole man quivering with what looked like antagonism and hate.

Then he broke into a fierce flood of French. Langham listened till they had passed Piccadilly, passed the Park, and till the young savant turned southwards towards his Brompton lodgings.

Then Langham slowly climbed Campden Hill, meditating. His thoughts were an odd mixture of the things he had just heard, and of a scene at Murewell long ago when a girl had denounced him for 'calumny.'

At the door of Lerwick Gardens he was informed that Mrs. Leyburn was upstairs with an attack of bronchitis. But the servant thought the young ladies were at home. Would he come in? He stood irresolute a moment, then went in on a pretext of 'inquiry.'

The maid threw open the drawing-room door, and there was Rose sitting well into the fire—for it was a raw February afternoon—with a book.

She received him with all her old hard brightness. He was, indeed, instantly sorry that he had made his way in. Tyrant! was she displeased because he had slipped his chain for rather longer than usual?

However, he sat down, delivered his book, and they talked first about her mother's illness. They had been anxious, she said, but the doctor, who had just taken his departure, had now completely reassured them.

'Then you will be able probably after all to put in an appearance at Lady Charlotte's this evening?' he asked her.

The omnivorous Lady Charlotte of course had made acquaintance with him in the Leyburns' drawing-room, as she did with everybody who crossed her path, and three days before he had received a card from her for this evening.

'Oh yes! But I have had to miss a rehearsal this afternoon. That concert at Searle House is becoming a great nuisance.'

'It will be a brilliant affair, I suppose. Princes on one side of you—and Albani on the other. I see they have given you the most conspicuous part as violinist.'

'Yes,' she said with a little satirical tightening of the lip. 'Yes—I suppose I ought to be much flattered.'

'Of course,' he said, smiling, but embarrassed. 'To many people you must be at this moment one of the most enviable persons in the world. A delightful art—and every opportunity to make it tell!'

There was a pause. She looked into the fire.

'I don't know whether it is a delightful art,' she said presently, stifling a little yawn. 'I believe I am getting very tired of London. Sometimes I think I shouldn't be very sorry to find myself suddenly spirited back to Burwood!'

Langham gave vent to some incredulous interjection. He had apparently surprised her in a fit of ennui which was rare with her.

'Oh no, not yet!' she said suddenly, with a return of animation. 'Madame Desforets comes next week, and I am to see her.' She drew herself up and turned a beaming face upon him. Was there a shaft of mischief in her eye? He could not tell. The firelight was perplexing.

'You are to see her?' he said slowly. 'Is she coming here?'

'I hope so. Mrs. Pierson is to bring her. I want mamma to have the amusement of seeing her. My artistic friends are a kind of tonic to her—they excite her so much. She regards them as a sort of show—much as you do, in fact, only in a more charitable fashion.'

But he took no notice of what she was saying.

'Madame Desforets is coming here?' he sharply repeated, bending forward, a curious accent in his tone.

'Yes!' she replied, with apparent surprise. Then with a careless smile: 'Oh, I remember when we were at Murewell, you were exercised that we should know her. Well, Mr. Langham, I told you then that you were only echoing unworthy gossip. I am in the same mind still. I have seen her, and you haven't. To me she is the greatest actress in the world, and an ill-used woman to boot!'

Her tone had warmed with every sentence. It struck him that she had wilfully brought up the topic—that it gave her pleasure to quarrel with him.

He put down his hat deliberately, got up, and stood with his back to the fire. She looked up at him curiously. But the dark regular face was almost hidden from her.

'It is strange,' he said slowly, 'very strange—that you should have told me this at this moment! Miss Leyburn, a great deal of the truth about Madame Desforets I could neither tell, nor could you hear. There are charges against her proved in open court, again and again, which I could not even mention in your presence. But one thing I can speak of. Do you know the story of the sister at St. Petersburg?'

'I know no stories against Madame Desforets,' said Rose loftily, her quickened breath responding to the energy of his tone. 'I have always chosen not to know them.'

'The newspapers were full of this particular story just before Christmas. I should have thought it must have reached you.'

'I did not see it,' she replied stiffly; 'and I cannot see what good purpose is to be served by your repeating it to me, Mr. Langham.'

Langham could have smiled at her petulance, if he had not for once been determined and in earnest.

'You will let me tell it, I hope?' he said quietly. 'I will tell it so that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself thought it incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, it has just this afternoon been repeated to me by a man who was an eyewitness of part of it.'

Rose was silent. Her attitude was hauteur itself, but she made no further active opposition.

'Three months ago,' he began, speaking with some difficulty, but still with a suppressed force of feeling which amazed his hearer, 'Madame Desforets was acting in St. Petersburg. She had with her a large company, and amongst them her own young sister, Elise Romey, a girl of eighteen. This girl had been always kept away from Madame Desforets by her parents, who had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest daughter's artistic success for the infamy of her life.'

Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to speak.

'Elise Romey, however, had developed a passion for the stage. Her parents were respectable—and you know young girls in France are brought up strictly. She knew next to nothing of her sister's escapades. But she knew that she was held to be the greatest actress in Europe—the photographs in the shops told her that she was beautiful. She conceived a romantic passion for the woman whom she had last seen when she was a child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry affection, partly by her own longing wish to become an actress, she escaped from home and joined Madame Desforets in the South of France. Madame Desforets seems at first to have been pleased to have her. The girl's adoration pleased her vanity. Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing. I believe,' and Langham gave a little dry laugh, 'they were photographed together at Marseilles with their arms round each other's necks, and the photograph had an immense success. However, on the way to St. Petersburg, difficulties arose. Elise was pretty, in a blonde childish way, and she caught the attention of the jeune premier of the company, a man'—the speaker became somewhat embarrassed—'whom Madame Desforets seems to have regarded as her particular property. There were scenes at different towns on the journey. Elise became frightened—wanted to go home. But the elder sister, having begun tormenting her, seems to have determined to keep her hold on her, as a cat keeps and tortures a mouse—mainly for the sake of annoying the man of whom she was jealous. They arrived at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. The girl was worn out with travelling, unhappy, and ill. One night in Madame Desforets's apartment there was a supper party, and after it a horrible quarrel. No one exactly knows what happened. But towards twelve o'clock that night Madame Desforets turned her young sister in evening dress, a light shawl round her, out into the snowy streets of St. Petersburg, barred the door behind her, and revolver in hand dared the wretched man who had caused the fracas to follow her.'

Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight was not revealing.

Langham turned away from her towards the blaze, holding out his hands to it mechanically.

'The poor child,' he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, 'wandered about for some hours. It was a frightful night—the great capital was quite strange to her. She was insulted—fled this way and that—grew benumbed with cold and terror, and was found unconscious in the early morning under the archway of a house some two miles from her sister's lodgings.'

There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering breath.

'I do not believe it!' she said passionately. 'I cannot believe it!'

'It was amply proved at the time,' said Langham drily, 'though of course Madame Desforets tried to put her own colour on it. But I told you I had private information. On one of the floors of the house where Elise Romey was picked up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an important Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made friends with him there. He walked home with me this afternoon, saw the announcement of Madame Desforets's coming, and poured out the story. He and his wife nursed the unfortunate girl with devotion. She lived just a week, and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life heard anything so pitiful as his description of her delirium, her terror, her appeals, her shivering misery of cold.'

There was a pause.

'She is not a woman,' he said presently, between his teeth. 'She is a wild beast.'

Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the flame which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round.

'I have told you a shocking story,' he said hurriedly. 'Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking so lightly, so gaily, it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable that that woman should ever sit here in this room—talk to you—call you by your name—laugh with you—touch your hand! Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so far—you shall not do it!'

He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a passionate sense of physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure fair youth and something malodorous and corrupt. And there was besides a wild unique excitement in claiming for once to stay—to control her.

Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw the tears in her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl's awful story. But through the tears something gleamed—a kind of exultation—the exultation which the magician feels when he has called spirits from the vasty deep, and after long doubt and difficult invocation they rise at last before his eyes.

'I will never see her again,' she said in a low wavering voice, but she too was hardly conscious of her own words. Their looks were on each other; the ruddy capricious light touched her glowing cheeks, her straight-lined grace, her white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of another's misery into which they had both been looking there had sprung up, by the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from them like a golden mist. 'Be always thus!' her parted lips, her liquid eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed to fail him; he was lost in bewilderment.

There were sounds outside—Catherine's voice. He roused himself with a supreme effort.

'To-night—at Lady Charlotte's?'

'To-night,' she said, and held out her hand.

A sudden madness seized him—he stooped—his lips touched it—it was hastily drawn away, and the door opened.



CHAPTER XXXV

'In the first place, my dear aunt,' said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte's drawing-room fire, 'you may spare your admonitions, because it is becoming more and more clear to me that, whatever my sentiments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a serious thought to me.'

He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His tone and manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was puzzled by him.

'Stuff and nonsense!' replied the lady with her usual emphasis; 'I never flatter you, Hugh, and I don't mean to begin now, but it would be mere folly not to recognise that you have advantages which must tell on the mind of any girl in Miss Leyburns position.'

Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection of his irreproachable trouser-knees.

'I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,' he said, still stooping, 'but Miss Leyburn doesn't care twopence about my advantages.'

'Very proper of you to say so,' returned Lady Charlotte sharply; 'the remark, however, my good sir, does more credit to your heart than your head.'

'In the next place,' he went on undisturbed, 'why you should have done your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn and me together, if you meant in the end to oppose my marrying her, I don't quite see.'

He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so slightly.

'You know my weaknesses,' she said presently, with an effrontery which delighted her nephew. 'She is my latest novelty, she excites me, I can't do without her. As to you, I can't remember that you wanted much encouragement, but, I acknowledge, after all these years of resistance—resistance to my most legitimate efforts to dispose of you—there was a certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last!'

'Upon my word!' he said, throwing back his head with a not very cordial laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She was sitting opposite to him, her powerful loosely-gloved hands crossed over the rich velvet of her dress, her fair large face and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty cap, as vigorous, shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age as could be found. The room behind her and the second and third drawing-rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were awaiting the arrival of the evening's guests upstairs.

Lady Charlotte's mind had been evidently much perturbed by the conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the latter half. She was labouring under an uncomfortable sense of being hoist with her own petard—an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning of her husband's, delivered at Murewell.

'And now,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'having confessed in so many words that you have done your best to bring me up to the fence, will you kindly recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion I should not jump it?'

'Society, amusement, flirtation, are one thing,' she replied with judicial imperativeness, 'marriage is another. In these democratic days we must know everybody; we should only marry our equals.'

The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Mr. Flaxman's expression changed.

'I do not agree with you,' he said calmly, 'and you know I do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon that argument.'

'Good gracious, Hugh!' cried Lady Charlotte crossly; 'you talk as if I were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been amusing myself—I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last few weeks since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, that I have got you into the scrape—now I want to get you out of it! I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses—and you know what the duke will say.'

'The duke be—translated!' said Flaxman coolly. 'Nothing of what you have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the duke than you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care—or I am very much mistaken—for somebody else.'

He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.

'What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend? Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of hers?'

'I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,' replied her nephew. 'However, he is not a nonentity. Far from it! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.

'Another instance of what university reputation is worth!' said Lady Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by the force majeure of a rival—and that a rival whom she regarded as an utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.

Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical amused eyes.

'I should like to know,' he said presently, with a curious slowness and suavity, 'I should greatly like to know why you asked him here to-night?'

'You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody—a convict, a crossing-sweeper—if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with him!'

Flaxman laughed.

'Well, it may be convenient to-night,' he said reflectively. 'What are we to do—some thought-reading?'

'Yes. It isn't a crush. I have only asked about thirty or forty people. Mr. Denman is to manage it.'

She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request at the moment.

Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little plan to his aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed.

'I want to make a few notes,' he said drily, when it was arranged; 'I should be glad to satisfy myself.'

When the Misses Leyburn were announced, Rose, though the younger, came in first. She always took the lead by a sort of natural right, and Agnes never dreamt of protesting. To-night the sisters were in white. Some soft creamy stuff was folded and draped about Rose's slim shapely figure in such a way as to bring out all its charming roundness and grace. Her neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously. Her red-gold hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte's innumerable candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a Japanese fan of the same colour, gave just that touch of purpose and art which the spectator seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in the dress of a young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession, distributing a few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced towards Lady Charlotte. Any one with a discerning eye could have seen that she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening there, planing away awkwardness, emphasising grace, disengaging as it were, week by week, and month by month, all the beauty of which the original conception was capable. And the process is one attended always by a glow and sparkle, a kind of effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes beauty more beautiful and grace more graceful.

The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, which had already begun to mark her entrance into a room, surrounded Rose as she walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing absently silent, woke up directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his aunt.

'You failed us at rehearsal,' he said with smiling reproach; 'we were all at sixes and sevens.'

'I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. Lady Charlotte, Catherine couldn't come. Agnes and I are alone in the world. Will you chaperon us?'

'I don't know whether I will accept the responsibility to-night—in that new gown,' replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting up her eyeglass to look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the scrutiny with a light smiling silence, even though she knew Mr. Flaxman was looking too.

'On the contrary,' she said, 'one always feels so particularly good and prim in a new frock.'

'Really? I should have thought it one of Satan's likeliest moments,' said Flaxman, laughing—his eyes, however, the while saying quite other things to her, as they finished their inspection of her dress.

Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at Rose's smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests.

'I have made a muddle as usual,' she said to herself in disgust, 'perhaps even a worse one than I thought!'

Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman's state of mind, however, he never showed greater self-possession than on this particular evening.

A few minutes after Rose's entry he introduced her for the first time to his sister Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just come up to town for the opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen had come to-night to Martin Street, all ardour to see Hugh's new adoration, and the girl whom all the world was beginning to talk about—both as a beauty and as an artist. She rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to anything so light and airy as Lady Helen's movements, caught the girl's hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised admiration, said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive things possible. Rose—who with all her lithe shapeliness, looked over-tall and even a trifle stiff beside the tiny bird-like Lady Helen—took the advances of Hugh Flaxman's sister with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked down at the small radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.

Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, to be introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who was behind her sister, saw Rose's eyes wandering from Lady Helen to the door, restlessly searching and then returning.

Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance Agnes spied a well-known form emerging.

'Mr. Langham! But Rose never told me he was to be here to-night, and how dreadful he looks!'

Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely across the room. Rose had seen him at once; and they had greeted each other across the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, trying to analyse what had struck her so. The face was always melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was ghastly, and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the jet-black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would have remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose's attention was claimed by the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman had brought up. Mr. Denman was a fair-haired young Hercules, whose tremulous agitated manner contrasted oddly with his athlete's looks. Among other magnetisms he was clearly open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking to Rose, staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy lids,—much longer than the girl thought fair.

'Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new force before?' he asked her, with a solemnity which sat oddly on his commonplace bearded face.

'Oh yes!' she said flippantly. 'We have tried it sometimes. It is very good fun.'

He drew himself up. 'Not fun,' he said impressively, 'not fun. Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend upon it. If established it will revolutionise our whole views of life. Even a Huxley could not deny that!'

She studied him with mocking eyes. 'Do you imagine this party to-night looks very serious?'

His face fell.

'One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he admitted, sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man. Why was he not cricketing or shooting or exploring, or using the muscles Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away?

'Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!' and he gave Langham a cool greeting. 'Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings with the devil?'

'Nothing. Are you a believer?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of any kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. 'Come, Denman.'

And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside Rose, while old Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the Queen's Speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all elderly men.

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young emotion, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she noticed none of that change which had struck Agnes.

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's silence! An hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him to Lady Charlotte's that night. And yet here he was, riveted to her side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the teasing difficult creature of the last few months.

At Murewell his chagrin had been not to feel, not to struggle, to have been cheated out of experience. Well, here is the experience in good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how little the exquisite child beside him knows of it, or of the man on whom she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.

The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended them all, his restless eye wandering every other minute to the farther drawing-room in which the lights had been lowered, catching there always the same patch of black and white,—Rose's dress and the dark form beside her.

'Are you convinced? Do you believe?' said Rose, merrily looking up at her companion.

'In telepathy? Well—so far—I have not got beyond the delicacy and perfection of Mr. Denman's—muscular sensation. So much I am sure of!'

'Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous!' she said gaily. 'We know that some people have an extraordinary power over others.'

'Yes, that certainly we know!' he answered, his voice dropping, an odd strained note in it. 'I grant you that.'

She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood together, conscious only of each other.

'Now,' said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between the two drawing-rooms, 'I have done all I can—I am exhausted. But let me beg of you all to go on with some experiments amongst yourselves. Every fresh discovery of this power in a new individual is a gain to science. I believe about one in ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will arrange everything, if any one will volunteer?'

The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting this and that. Presently Lady Charlotte's loud dictatorial voice made itself heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand looking round the circle of her guests.

'Somebody must venture—we are losing time.'

Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall and radiant on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees. 'Miss Leyburn—you are always public-spirited—will you be victimised for the good of science?'

The girl got up with a smile.

'And Mr. Langham—will you see what you can do with Miss Leyburn? Hugh—we all choose her task, don't we—then Mr. Langham wills?'

Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose—a wild fury with Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him. But there was no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the large figure and towering cap bent towards him. Refusal was impossible.

'Command me!' he said with a sudden straightening of the form and a flush on the pale cheek. 'I am afraid Miss Leyburn will find me a very bad partner.'

'Well, now then!' said Flaxman; 'Miss Leyburn, will you please go down into the library while we settle what you are to do!'

She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed out unconscious of him—rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the ground.

'Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do?' asked Lady Charlotte in the same loud emphatic tone.

'If I might suggest something quite different from anything that has been yet tried,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'suppose we require Miss Leyburn to kiss the hand of the little marble statue of Hope in the far drawing-room. What do you say, Langham?'

'What you please!' said Langham, moving up to him. A glance passed between the two men. In Langham's there was a hardly sane antagonism and resentment, in Flaxman's an excited intelligence.

'Now then, said Flaxman coolly, 'fix your mind steadily on what Miss Leyburn is to do—you must take her hand—but except in thought, you must carefully follow and not lead her. Shall I call her?'

Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of being watched—tricked. Why were he and she to be made a spectacle for this man and his friends! A mad irrational indignation surged through him.

Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the air in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. Flaxman and Mr. Denman prepared, note-book in hand, to watch the experiment. Langham moved desperately forward.

But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though by enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, were blotted out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot everything but her and this thing she was to do. He had her in his grasp—he was the man, the master—and what enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying pliant form! In the distance far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on tiptoe, one outstretched arm just visible from where he stood.

There was a moment's silent expectation. Every eye was riveted on the two figures—on the dark handsome man—on the blindfolded girl.

At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange wavering motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly parted lips; her bright colour was ebbing. She was conscious of nothing but the grasp in which her hand was held—otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state during the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one under the partial influence of an anaesthetic; a benumbing grip was laid on all her faculties; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she was going.

Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half an hour or five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing beside a small marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and her lips had on them a slight sense of chill, as though they had just been laid to something cold.

She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her was Langham's face, a marvellous glow and animation in every line of it.

'Have I done it?' she asked in a tremulous whisper.

For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still bewildered.

He nodded, smiling.

'I am so glad,' she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing at him. There was the most adorable abandon in her whole look and attitude. He could but just restrain himself from taking her in his arms, and for one bright flashing instant each saw nothing but the other.

The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the little old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and through which they had swept without heeding, was drawn back with a rattle.

'She has done it! Hurrah!' cried Mr. Flaxman. 'What a rush that last was, Miss Leyburn! You left us all behind.'

Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her eyes. A rush? She had known nothing about it!

Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report to his aunt, who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the experiment from the main drawing-room. His face was a curious mixture of gravity and the keenest excitement. The gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged certain instincts of breeding and refinement which were now revenging themselves.

'Did she do it exactly?' said Lady Helen eagerly.

'Exactly,' he said, standing still.

Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would not see her look.

'Lady Charlotte, where is my sister?' said Rose, coming up from the back room, looking now nearly as white as her dress.

It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady who lived on Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had been obliged to go at the beginning of the last experiment. Agnes, torn between her interest in what was going on and her desire to get back to her mother, had at last hurriedly accepted this Mrs. Sherwood's offer of a seat in her carriage, imagining that her sister would want to stay a good deal later, and relying on Lady Charlotte's promise that she should be safely put into a hansom.

'I must go,' said Rose, putting her hand to her head. 'How tiring this is! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman?'

'Exactly three minutes,' he said, his gaze fixed upon her with an expression that only Lady Helen noticed.

'So little! Good-night, Lady Charlotte!' and giving her hand first to her hostess then to Mr. Flaxman's bewildered sister, she moved away into the crowd.

'Hugh, of course you are going down with her?' exclaimed Lady Charlotte under her breath. 'You must. I promised to see her safely off the premises.'

He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look made a step forward, but he caught her arm.

'Don't spoil sport,' he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and sister.

They looked at him—the one amazed, the other grimly observant—and caught a slight significant motion of the head towards Langham's distant figure.

Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned his back, Lady Helen's large astonished eyes followed him to the door.

'Oh, Hugh!' was all she could say as they came back to her brother.

'Never mind, Nellie,' he whispered, touched by the bewildered sympathy of her look; 'I will tell you all about it to-morrow. I have not been behaving well, and am not particularly pleased with myself. But for her it is all right. Poor, pretty little thing!'

And he walked away into the thick of the conversation.

Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for their carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming out of the cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale child-like fatigue in her looks which set his heart beating faster than ever.

'Miss Leyburn, how are you going home?'

'Will you ask for a hansom, please?'

'Take my arm,' he said, and she clung to him through the crush till they reached the door.

Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street seemed blocked, a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and shouting men with lanterns. Which of them suggested, 'Shall we walk a few steps?' At any rate, here they were, out in the wind and the darkness, every step carrying them farther away from that moving patch of noise and light behind.

'We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,' he said. 'Are you warm?'

'Perfectly.'

A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the colour was coming back. She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.

Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they passed within the power of the lamps, each saw with noonday distinctness every line and feature in the other's face. They swept on—the night, with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen's voices; before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight. London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this wandering of theirs.

A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could close it again, an arm was flung around her. She could not speak or move, she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry wind, and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.

'Oh, stay there!' a voice said close to her ear. 'Rest there—pale tired child—pale tired little child!'

That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing and protecting her from the cold—not kissing her—till at length she looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.

'Are you sure at last?' she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the far depths of her own thought to his.

'Sure!' he said, his expression changing. 'What can I be sure of? I am sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor, insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be miserably throwing yourself away!'

She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm, holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.

'Do you know,' he repeated—a tone of intense melancholy replacing the tone of passion,—'how little I have to give you?'

'I know,' she answered, her face turned shyly away from him, her words coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. 'I know that—that—you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that——'

'Oh, hush,' he said, and his voice was full of pain. 'You know so little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself, till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell, though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from you. There is something paralysing in me, which is always forbidding me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical disability—the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort. Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony? Oh, impossible!' he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him. 'You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It is a crime—an infamy—that I should be speaking to you like this!'

Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.

'No, no,' she said wistfully; 'not if you love me.'

He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very passion beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.

'You will not say you love me!' she cried, with hurrying breath. 'But I know—I know—you do.'

Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from him—'At least, if you don't, I am very—very—unhappy.'

The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself saved, like Faust,—saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment's impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.



CHAPTER XXXVI

Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. She would not let him take her any farther.

'I will say nothing,' she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, 'till I see you again. To-morrow?'

'To-morrow morning,' he said, waving his hand to her, and in another instant he was facing the north wind alone.

He walked on fast towards Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where the fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his large reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay littered on the floor.

He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long passed—incredible almost.

And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent, insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love. Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal note also that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.

So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt the torturing thrill of passion—he has evoked such an answer as all men might envy him,—and fresh from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty, the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of gratitude and tenderness; the next—is nothing what it promises to be?—and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent upper room. Nothing caught Langham's ear. He was absorbed in the dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.

'But I love her!—I love her! A little courage—a little effort—and I too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not forced her love—it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it, if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope thrown to him?'

To which the pale spectre self said scornfully—

'Courage and effort may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two others—habit and character. Slave as you are of habit, of the character you have woven for yourself out of years of deliberate living—what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can recreate! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden, but for God's sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you with theirs!'

'But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so warm a heart! Poor child—poor child! I have played on her pity. I have won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face—oh monstrous—oh inhuman!' and the cold drops stood on his forehead.

But the other self was inexorable. 'You have acted as you were bound to act—as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What in God's name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such ambitions? You are poor—you must go back to Oxford—you must take up the work your soul loathes—grow more soured, more embittered—maintain a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the world! Think of the little house—the children—the money difficulties—she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,—you incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck—submit—refuse that long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time. Kismet—Kismet!'

And spread out before Langham's shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures, two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with cold and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.

The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, a cold and bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of manhood, had been alike powerless to save.

The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table and wrote.

Then for hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done—it was also a strange thing psychologically; and at intervals he tried to understand it, to track it to its causes.

At nine o'clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.

On his way back he passed a gunsmith's, and stood looking fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy—become farcical even.

'I should only stand a month—arguing—with my finger on the trigger.'

In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging books and boxes about as though he were packing.

A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27, looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through the fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose's mood answered to that of Nature.

Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two, was in a chair by the fire reading some letters forwarded to her from Bedford Square.

He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of her behaviour to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh blow! 'But afterwards, when she has got over it,—when she knows that it makes me happy,—that nothing else would make me happy,—then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. I won't be angry or hard over it—poor Cathie!'

And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly towards her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte's house the night before had been a very different matter from the royally attended leave-takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. 'I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.'

But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself. So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by the clamour, will take up very much the same line.

What matter! The girl's spirit seemed to rise against all the world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.

Besides—success! To make a man hope and love, and live again—that shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling, her heart very soft.

Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterwards the dining-room door opened.

'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.

Rose took it—glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush—a surreptitious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a wandering letter from Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and opened it.

Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.

'Rose,' she said, looking up, 'was that some one brought you a note?'

The girl turned with a start—a letter fell to the ground. She made a faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.

'Rose—darling!' cried Catherine, springing up, 'are you ill?'

Rose looked at her with a perfectly colourless fixed face, made a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them.

Catherine stood over her aghast. 'My darling—what is it? Come and lie down—take this water.'

She put some close to her sister's hand, but Rose pushed it away. 'Don't talk to me,' she said with difficulty.

Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek resting against her sister's shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once recognised Langham's handwriting. But before she could combine any rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister's arm.

'I was startled,' she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 'Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him—I expected him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me that—he made a mistake—and he is very sorry! So am I! It is so—so—bewildering!'

She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The elder sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her, pressed the slim irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips quivering.

'That he should dare!' she cried. 'Rose—my poor little Rose.'

'Don't blame him!' said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while Catherine fell into the armchair again. 'It doesn't seem to count, from you—you have always been so ready to blame him!'

Her brow contracted; she looked frowning into the fire, her still colourless mouth working painfully.

Catherine was cut to the heart. 'Oh, Rose!' she said, holding out her hands, 'I will blame no one, dear. I seem hard—but I love you so. Oh, tell me—you would have told me everything once!'

There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell towards Catherine.

'Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him—he kissed me—I could kill myself and him.'

Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour that followed—the little familiar morning sounds in and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells ringing,—and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose—a sense of shock, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation, and a strange intervening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question filling her own indignant heart, 'Does she love him?'

At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from eyes that were dry and feverish.

'If I could only be angry—downright angry,' she said, more to herself than Catherine, 'it would do one good.'

'Give others leave to be angry for you!' cried Catherine.

'Don't!' said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 'You don't know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you must—you misjudge him—you always have. No, no'—and she nervously crushed the letter in her hand—'not yet. But you shall read it some time—you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is due to him, perhaps due to me too,' and a hot flush transfigured her paleness for an instant. 'Oh, my head! Why does one's mind affect one's body like this? It shall not—it is humiliating! "Miss Leyburn has been jilted and cannot see visitors,"—that is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me practise my last Raff—I am going. Good-bye.'

She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.

'Miserable!' she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, 'I must go and lie down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine, not a word to any one but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not to speak to me! No, don't come—I will go alone.'

And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the letter in her hand,—the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished sentence pleaded with her—even in the first smart of her wrong—for pardon, for compassion, as towards something maimed and paralysed from birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over her cheeks.

'I was not good enough—I was not good enough—God would not let me!'

And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what? To save?

How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that shakes her as she kneels and weeps, nor is it mere wounded woman's pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she is—more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive—he could not have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of character stir within her. She feels herself judged,—and with a righteous judgment—issuing inexorably from the facts of life and circumstance.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert, who had come over early to see how the household fared.

Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonishment and dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had gone out of his mind for some time. He had been busy in his East End work. Catherine had been silent. Over how many matters they would once have discussed with open heart was she silent now?

'I ought to have been warned,' he said with quick decision, 'if you knew this was going on. I am the only man among you, and I understand Langham better than the rest of you. I might have looked after the poor child a little.'

Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart the more. However, what had she known? She had seen nothing unusual of late, nothing to make her think a crisis was approaching. Nay, she had flattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, whom she liked, was gaining ground.

Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be done. Could anything be done?

'I must go and see him,' he said presently. 'Yes, dearest, I must. Impossible the thing should be left so! I am his old friend,—almost her guardian. You say she is in great trouble—why, it may shadow her whole life! No—he must explain things to us—he is bound to—he shall. It may be something comparatively trivial in the way after all—money or prospects or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you say? It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for her—but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him——'

He turned to her—appealing, remonstrating. Catherine stood pale and rigid. Incredible that he should think it right to intermeddle—to take the smallest step towards reversing so plain a declaration of God's will! She could not sympathise—she would not consent. Robert watched her in painful indecision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to her true reason for finding some comfort even in her sister's trouble—that he seemed to her mindful only of the passing human misery, indifferent to the eternal risk.

They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched up his hat.

'I must go,' he said in a low voice; 'it is right.'

And he went—stepping, however, with the best intentions in the world, into a blunder.

Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had left her. Then some one came into the room—some one with pale looks and flashing eyes. It was Agnes.

'She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,' said the girl—her whole, even, cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. 'What are such creatures made for, Catherine—why do they exist?'

Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty morning streets to Langham's lodgings. His mood was very hot by the time he reached his destination, and he climbed the staircase to Langham's room in some excitement. When he tried to open the door after the answer to his knock bidding him enter, he found something barring the way. 'Wait a little,' said the voice inside, 'I will move the case.'

With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. Seeing his visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre astonishment. The room was littered with books and packing-cases with which he had been busy.

'Come in,' he said, not offering to shake hands.

Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, stood leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to him. Langham paused opposite to him, his waving jet-black hair falling forward over the marble pale face which had been Robert's young ideal of manly beauty.

The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong is old association that Robert's feeling towards his friend had always remained in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate towards the don. His sense of it now filled him with a curious awkwardness.

'I know why you are come,' said Langham slowly, after a scrutiny of his visitor.

'I am here by a mere accident,' said the other, thinking perfect frankness best. 'My wife was present when her sister received your letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had gone up to ask after them all, and came on to you,—of course on my own responsibility entirely! Rose knows nothing of my coming—nothing of what I have to say.'

He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man before him. Whatever he had done during the past twenty-four hours he had clearly had the grace to suffer in the doing of it.

'You can have nothing to say!' said Langham, leaning against the chimney piece and facing him with black, darkly-burning eyes. 'You know me.'

Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the despair, all the bitterness hidden under the languid student's exterior of every day, had, as it were, risen to the surface. He stood at bay, against his friend, against himself.

'No!' exclaimed Robert stoutly, 'I do not know you in the sense you mean. I do not know you as the man who could beguile a girl on to a confession of love, and then tell her that for you marriage was too great a burden to be faced!'

Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. Robert repented him a little. Langham's strange individuality always impressed him against his will.

'I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,' he went on, 'though I confess to being very hot! I came to try and find out—for myself only, mind—whether what prevents you from following up what I understand happened last night is really a matter of feeling, or a matter of outward circumstance. If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling for Rose is not what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion about your conduct—but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply afraid of yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities of practical married life, I cannot help begging you to talk the matter over with me, and let us face it together. Whether Rose would ever, under any circumstances, get over the shock of this morning I have not the remotest idea. But'—and he hesitated—'it seems the feeling you appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well what havoc a thing of this kind may make in a girl's life. I don't say it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!'

There was a moment's dead silence.

'You cannot pretend to believe,' said Langham at last, with the same sombre self-containedness, 'that a marriage with me would be for your sister-in-law's happiness?'

'I don't know what to believe!' cried Robert. 'No,' he added frankly, 'no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; a priori, I never thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when a thing is wholly in the air looks very different when a man has committed himself and another, as you have done.'

Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.

'Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even greater fiend and weakling than you think me if, in cold blood, I could let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust myself—you may think of the statement as you like—I should make her miserable. Last night I had not parted from her an hour before I was utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are my masters. I believe,' he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond Robert, 'I could even grow to hate what came between me and them!'

Was it the last word of the man's life? It struck Robert with a kind of shiver.

'Pray heaven,' he said with a groan, getting up to go, 'you may not have made her miserable already!'

'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham almost inaudibly, turning away, Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in the subtle brain tissue.

'I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly; 'but when I came in I found my wife—who has no light tears—weeping for her sister.'

His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too pitiful and too intimate for speech.

Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.

'Good-bye!' said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having got foolishly through a fool's errand. 'As I said to you before, what Rose's feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And I see that you will not talk to me—you will not take me into your confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend. And—and—are you going? What does this mean?'

He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.

'I am going back to Oxford,' said the other briefly. 'I cannot stay in these rooms, in these streets.'

Robert was sore perplexed. What real—nay, what terrible suffering—in the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over human life.

'It is very hard,' he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that our old friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You are always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities? Your own perceptions are all warped!'

Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.

'I will write to you, Elsmere,' he said, holding out his hand, 'speech is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.'

Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.

But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the middle of the day sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again more feverishly than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose, suffering and paling.

And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his mental balance.

He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last rehearsal at Searle House. Afterwards her custom was to come back from St. James's Park to High Street, Kensington, and walk up the hill to her own home. He knew it, for on two occasions after these rehearsals he had been at Lerwick Gardens, waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she go this afternoon? A subtle instinct told him that she would.

* * * * *

It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Rose, stepping out from the High Street station, crossed the main road and passed into the darkness of one of the streets leading up the hill. She had forced herself to go, and she would go alone. But as she toiled along she felt weary and bruised all over. She carried with her a heart of lead—a sense of utter soreness—a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill? She flushed hotly at the thought, and then realised again, with a sense of childish comfort, the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in shielding her from any unnecessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of the hand with which he had put her into the cab that took her to the Underground.

Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she saw a man standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was Langham.

'You!' she cried, stopping.

He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway of a large detached house not far off, which threw a certain illumination over him, though it left her in shadow. He said nothing, but he held out both his hands mutely. She fancied rather than saw the pale emotion of his look.

'What?' she said, after a pause. 'You think to-night is last night! You and I have nothing to say to each other, Mr. Langham.'

'I have everything to say,' he answered, under his breath; 'I have committed a crime—a villainy.'

'And it is not pleasant to you?' she said, quivering. 'I am sorry—I cannot help you. But you are wrong—it was no crime—it was necessary and profitable, like the doses of one's childhood! Oh! I might have guessed you would do this; No, Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an interesting decline. I have just played my concerto very fairly. I shall not disgrace myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at peace—I have learnt several things to-day that have been salutary—very salutary.'

She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him,—unresisting, helplessly silent.

'Don't come any farther,' she said resolutely after a minute, turning to face him. 'Let us be quits! I was a temptingly easy prey. I bear no malice. And do not let me break your friendship with Robert; that began before this foolish business—it should outlast it. Very likely we shall be friends again, like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine your wound is very deep, and——'

But no! Her lips closed; not even for pride's sake, and retort's sake, will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first love.

She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see nothing among her furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. The whole personality seemed centred in the voice—the half-mocking vibrating voice. He took her hand and dropped it instantly.

'You do not understand,' he said hopelessly—feeling as though every phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally fatuous, equally shameful. 'Thank heaven, you never will understand.'

'I think I do,' she said with a change of tone, and paused. He raised his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. What was the expression in them? It was yearning—but not the yearning of passion. 'If things had been different—if one could change the self—if the past were nobler!'—was that the cry of them? A painful humility—a boundless pity—the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither measure nor explain—these were some of the impressions which passed from her to him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her transformed on the farther side, with, as it were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature, than had ever yet been hers.

He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for an instant to his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and was gone.

He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his books, his only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever tampered with any other?

'It was not love—not love!' he said to himself, with an accent of infinite relief as he sank into his chair. 'Her smart will heal.'



BOOK VI

NEW OPENINGS



CHAPTER XXXVII

Ten days after Langham's return to Oxford Elsmere received a characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to be considered as still existing or at an end. The calm and even proud melancholy of the letter showed a considerable subsidence of that state of half-frenzied irritation and discomfort in which Elsmere had last seen him. The writer, indeed, was clearly settling down into another period of pessimistic quietism such as that which had followed upon his first young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all the vital forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, half-angry, half-relenting, put down the letter, he felt the conviction that no fresh influence from outside would ever again be allowed to penetrate the solitude of Langham's life. In comparison with the man who had just addressed him, the tutor of his undergraduate recollections was a vigorous and sociable human being.

The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible affectionate letter in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings of resentment, he said, he could not realise, now that the crisis was past, that he cared less about his old friend. 'As far as we two are concerned, let us forget it all. I could hardly say this, you will easily imagine, if I thought that you had done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife and I agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to her own surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no doubt, before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal to her past. But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send you our opinion for what it is worth, believing that it will and must be welcome to you.'

Rose, however, was not so long in admitting it. One marked result of that new vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of that February morning was a great softening towards Catherine. Whatever might have been Catherine's intense relief when Robert returned from his abortive mission, she never afterwards let a disparaging word towards Langham escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy itself, and Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, and against the noisy world of flattery and excitement in which she had been living, turned to Catherine as she had never done since she was a tiny child. She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square drawing-room, pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality recovering, like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing influence of thought and silence.

One day, when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine by saying with one of her old odd smiles—

'Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great astonishment, there is no bone broken!'

And she held herself back from Catherine's knee lest her sister should attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow an answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.

In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Langham had been a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and longing, when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities. His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl's immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the interval of angry resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it. As to the months in London, they had been one long duel between herself and him—a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncertainty, but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large proportion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory, Langham's endangered habits and threatened individuality had asserted themselves once for all. And from the whole long struggle—passion, exultation, and crushing defeat—it often seemed to her that she had gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character, a soul!

It may be easily imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen interest in Langham's disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's coming in a state of extraordinary irritation. He expected a blushing fiancee, in a fool's paradise, asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him. And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some double-edged congratulations.

Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale tired girl, who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.

His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way up to her, and was her watchful unobtrusive guardian for the rest of the afternoon.

He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient conjecture.

'As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot—and if he did, a fortiori, for clearly she is miserable. But what a brave child! How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that I saw nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!'

Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had left London.

Gone! But not without a crisis—that was evident. During the din of preparations for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings which it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the house of some other connection of his—for the concert was the work of his friends, and given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel—he had many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft indefinable change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been so marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was to his fancy absent and distraite, pursuing through the tumult of which she was often the central figure some inner meditations of which neither he nor any one else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over the girl's light self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.

Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very near the truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received his own conjectures amused himself.

'To think,' he said to himself once with a long breath, 'that that creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without any one of the kickings due to him!'

Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude towards this same 'creature,' towards the man who had released a prize he had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. Free again—to be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.

His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask of her friends was not to be made to feel.

He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh's behalf, Lady Helen had been dumfoundered by the sudden emergence of Langham at Lady Charlotte's party for their common discomfiture. Who was the man?—why, what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love, and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected, that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for him which at the moment he could not play for himself.

So in the cheeriest daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally, to Mrs. Pierson's disgust, became the girls' chief chaperon in a fast-filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend or amuse his sister's proteges—always there, but never in the way. He was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone towards her which made his companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose's health, a few unexplained stares and 'humphs' and grunts, a few irrelevant disquisitions on her nephew's merits of head and heart, were all she was able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething with a mass of sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant to give expression—anger with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous as to prefer some one else to Hugh; anger with Hugh for his persistent disregard of her advice and the duke's feelings; and a burning desire to know the precise why and wherefore of Langham's disappearance. She was too lofty to become Rose's aunt without a struggle, but she was not too lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs.

* * * * *

But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited most by Rose's shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming over, restless under her own smart, would fall to watching the trial of the woman and the wife, and would often perforce forget herself and her smaller woes in the pity of it. She stayed in Bedford Square once for a week, and then for the first time she realised the profound change which had passed over the Elsmeres' life. As much tenderness, between husband and wife as ever—perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though from an instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from each other and from the world. But Robert went his way, Catherine hers. Their spheres of work lay far apart; their interests were diverging fast; and though Robert at any rate was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh invading silences were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the number of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in the East End under Murray Edwardes's auspices. He was already known to certain circles as a seceder from the Church who was likely to become both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the Nineteenth Century, on disputed points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made their mark, and several of the veterans of philosophical debate had already taken friendly and flattering notice of the new writer. Meanwhile Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon's Sunday school, and attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert's energies became, the more she suffered, and the more the small daily opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could hardly bear to hear him talk about his work, and she never opened the number of the Nineteenth Century which contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to ask her to read them.