"Are you absolutely sure of that?" she whispered.

"Why, of course! If anybody's spreading that report about, it's a confounded lie."

Sally looked piteously about her. The iron teeth of the trap she had seen were surely fast in her now. As yet, she was unable to discern the deeper motive in Mrs. Durlacher's mind in which the proprietorship of Apsley Manor played so vital a part; but she was none the less certain of the designs that were being carried out so effectually to wrest Traill from her side. She was an encumbrance to his career. Had he told her that himself she would, with bowed head, have accepted the inevitable; but, coming to her in this way, this deep-laid plot and all the machinations of a woman whom, from the very first, she had had good reason to despise, a devil of jealousy was wakened in her. Obedience she might have given; her life she would willingly have offered; yet when it was a subtle poison that was being dropped into his mind to eat away his love for her, all force in her nature rose uppermost and she was driven to ends so foreign, so inconsistent with her whole being, that from that moment Devenish scarcely recognized her as the same woman.

"I can't come to the music hall with you," she said suddenly.

He looked at her suspiciously.

"Why not?" he asked.

"I couldn't—I couldn't sit there—I—"

It was impossible not to feel sympathy for her. The hardest nature in the world must yield its pity when the scourge of circumstance falls upon the weak. Devenish only knew in part what she was suffering. The mistress—deserted—is a position precarious enough, undesirable enough for any man to realize and feel sympathy for. To her mind, seeing that before her, he offered all such pity as he possessed. But of the love wrenched from her life, the heart aching with its overwhelming burden of misery, he saw nothing. She would get over it. He knew that. Women did—women had to. She would settle down into another type of existence. She would become some other man's mistress. She would pull through. He looked at her childish face and hoped she would pull through. The thought crossed his mind that it would be a pity—a spoiling of something not meant to be spoilt—if she lost caste and went on the streets. She deserved a better fate than that. But it would never come to that.

"What are you going to do, then?" he asked quietly.

"Oh, I don't know—anything—I don't know."

"You won't do anything foolish?"

"Foolish? How? Foolish?"

He leant his elbows on the table, bearing his eyes direct upon hers. The slight catch in her voice was breaking almost on a note of hysteria.

"You're excited, you know," he said gently. "You know, you're imagining things. You've got no grounds for them—I assure you you've got no grounds. Come to the music hall with me and forget all about it."

She shook her head.

"I couldn't," she replied; "I couldn't. I—I shan't do anything foolish, but I think I'll go now—now—if you've finished."

"Yes, I've quite finished. But I'm going to say something first."

"What?"

"Don't let your imagination run riot with you; and if I can do anything for you—there's nothing to be done, I mean—but if I can, you let me know. Will you?"

She nodded her head vaguely. It meant nothing to her; but she nodded her head.



CHAPTER VIII

Mrs. Durlacher had asked one of her guests to come early.

"Come at seven," she had said; "before if you can." And Miss Standish-Roe had arrived at a quarter to the hour.

When she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Durlacher kissed her affectionately, then held her at arm's length, her hands on her shoulders and gazed pensively into her eyes.

"Why do you look at me like that?" Coralie asked.

Mrs. Durlacher shrugged her shoulders and turned away to her chair.

"For no reason at all, my dear child, and for a million reasons. I wish I was as pretty as you are."

"What nonsense!"

"Yes, isn't it? But if I had that red hair of yours, and those eyes, I'd be happy for the rest of my life. You can't grow old with that hair as long as you keep thin. Do you mind my telling you something?"

"No, not a bit; what?"

"You've got a little too much on that cheek, and your lips as well; do you mind?"

"Heavens! No! Was that one of the million reasons?" She crossed the room to a well-lighted mirror and, by the aid of its reflection, rubbed her cheeks and lips with a handkerchief taken from the front of her dress. "Was that why you stared at me?" she asked, turning round, looking at Mrs. Durlacher, then at that part of the handkerchief that her lips had touched.

"One of the reasons? Oh no. I only noticed it. That's all right now. I believe you look better without it."

"Well, I felt so fagged this evening."

"I know; that's wretched. If you were a man, you'd drink; being a woman, you make up. It's much more respectable really. By the way, you don't see anything of Devenish now, do you?"

"No, nothing. We saw him that day at Prince's—I hadn't seen him for two or three months before that—I haven't seen him since. I don't think you can ever rely on a married man. Don't you know that line of Kipling's?"

"Which?"

"In 'Barrack Room Ballads'—'Fuzzy Wuzzy,' I think."

"Nothing about a married man, surely?"

"No; but it fits him."

"''E's all 'ot sand and ginger when alive, An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead.'"

Mrs. Durlacher broke into a peal of laughter. "What a quaint creature you are!" she said. "Whatever made you think of that?"

"Well, he is like that—isn't he? I mean, you never know the moment when his wife isn't going to hear a rumour. Then he shams dead, and the next time he sees you, he just manages, with an effort, to recognize you by your appearance."

"Is that what happened to Devenish?" asked Mrs. Durlacher with amusement.

"I expect so. I never heard that his wife knew anything; but from the way he suddenly fell in a heap, I should think it's quite likely. And he's shamming still."

"Well, let him sham. I don't think he's worth anything else." She paused, watching the effect of her words. "Oh, and you never told me what you thought of my brother yesterday?"

"I think he's rather quaint."

"Yes, isn't he? I'm glad you like him."

"But why haven't I met him before? Don't you ever ask him down to Apsley? I never realized you'd got a brother, you know, till the other day you showed me that case in the paper."

"Very few people I know do," replied Mrs. Durlacher, whereby she created a sense of the mysterious, raised curiosity and played a hand that needed all her skill, all her ingenuity. "I shouldn't have told you about him, even then," she continued, "if it hadn't been fairly obvious to me that he was becoming a different sort of person."

"Why, what sort of an individual has he been?"

Mrs. Durlacher told her. Ah, but she made the telling interesting. A man who owns such a place in the country as Apsley Manor, yet prefers to live the life of the Bohemian in town, shunning society, reaping none of the benefits that should naturally accrue to him from such a position, can quite easily be surrounded with a halo of interest if his narrative be placed in the hands of a skilful raconteur. Mrs. Durlacher spared no pains in the telling of her story. Led it up slowly through its various stages to the crisis, the crisis as she made it. He owned Apsley Manor, not they! It was his property, capable of repurchase at any moment! And—she leant back in her chair, covering her face with her hands as though the blow were an unbearable tragedy to her—he had said that he would take the place back. Five thousand pounds was nothing to him. He could find it at a moment's notice. So would any one, when such a place as Apsley was in the balance.

"You can imagine," she concluded—bearing it bravely with the resignation of martyrdom—"what a catastrophe that'll be to us."

"Poor Dolly; I never knew of that. I always thought the place was yours. You always said so."

"Yes; why not? With every right. It is ours—till he repurchases. You see he's beginning to nurse ambition now. I suppose there's no doubt that he'll come up to the top of the ladder. I always knew he'd make a splendid barrister if he once caught hold of the ambition. Now, of course, he'll find that the possession of Apsley's of value to him. He'll have to entertain. A Bohemian can't entertain any one but a Bohemian. Then, I suppose, he'll marry—get a house in Town like we have—and use Apsley, as we've done, for his friends."

"But, my dear Dolly—what on earth will you do?"

"Do?" Mrs. Durlacher rose with a sigh. "Well—there's prayer and fasting; but there'll be considerably more fasting than prayer, I should imagine. I assure you, I do pray that he doesn't make a fool of himself and marry some woman out of the bottomless pit of Bohemia."

"Well, I should think so. It 'ud be an awful pity, wouldn't it?"

"A considerable pity—yes. Here he is." She turned quickly to her friend, but her voice was cleverly pitched on a casual note. "Don't say anything to him about Apsley," she remarked. "He never admits to possession of it—that's one of his peculiarities. I don't suppose he will until he planks down his five thousand pounds. He has what he calls a legal sense of justice. Makes sure of a statement before he delivers it. You'll never catch him out. That's the Scotch blood on the mater's side of the family. I should think it's saved him out of many a difficulty."

Traill strode into the drawing-room as unconscious of the fate that Mrs. Durlacher had so deftly woven for him as is the unwieldy gull that, tumbling down the wind, strikes into the meshes of the fowler's net and finds itself enchained within the web. Coralie, herself, set to the task of winning him, was as unconscious of the subtly diaphonous mechanism of the trap as he. Yet she was versed well enough in human nature in her way. Innocence could not be laid at her door with the hope of finding it again. But it needs the long training of social strategy for any one to realize the cunning knowledge that things are not obtained in this world by asking for them, but by the hidden method of suggestion. That Mrs. Durlacher was in search of a suitable sister-in-law was obvious to the most untrained eye. It was no capable deduction on Coralie's part to have made certain of that. But she hesitated when she came to the wondering of whether she was considered suitable to fill that position herself. The hesitancy was of but little duration. The first time she had seen Traill, he had attracted her; now the attraction was increased a thousandfold. She had often stayed at Apsley Manor. Once her father had gone down for the shooting and had returned glowing with enthusiasm.

"Place I should like to have," he had grunted, "place I should like to have." And after dinner he sat over his port and amused himself with breaking the tenth commandment.

But there was no certainty in Coralie's mind that Mrs. Durlacher, with all her outward show of friendship, would consider her to be the eligible one. Yet here the chance offered. She determined to take it—hand open, ready for the gift.

From the moment then, that he arrived, she began the outset of her campaign. The social manner she knew he hated. That she cast off. The astute woman of the world, he despised. Mrs. Durlacher had well grounded her. She wrapped herself in the simplicity of a girl whose eyes have scarcely opened to a knowledge of life and whose inner consciousness is as yet untouched.

If she had given him any impression of a want of innocence the day before when they discussed the case in the divorce court which he had won, she now swept it from his mind. He found her ingenuousness charming. Her eyes helped her. They were big, grey, wide-open like a child's. He found himself looking interestedly for the simple questions that they turned upon him. In the box at the theatre, they leant back in their seats and talked in undertones through the acts and Mrs. Durlacher, leaning out to watch the piece, heard not a word that the actors said. Her ears were strained to catch the progress of their conversation. During the intervals, she levelled her glasses at the house and was apparently too pre-occupied to interrupt their enjoyment. In the interval that followed the second act, her glasses, roaming aimlessly across the stalls, became riveted to her eyes. After a moment, she looked hastily away, then stealthily looked again. Finally she turned round to her brother, curbing the surprise which, notwithstanding her efforts, forced itself into the expression of her face.

Then she beckoned to him. He rose from his chair and came to her side.

"In the interval after the next act," she whispered, "look through the glasses at the third row in the pit. Not now—not now! It might be noticed now."

"Who is it?" he asked.

"I don't know—I'm not certain."

The lights in the theatre were put out just as he was about to turn his head in the direction. He went back to his seat and in five minutes had forgotten about it.

When that act was over and the lights revived again, Mrs. Durlacher handed him the glasses. He came to the edge of the box. Coralie followed him, looking down on the rows of heads below her.

"Look round the house first," Mrs. Durlacher whispered.

He swept the glasses right and left, about the theatre in an indiscriminate manner—seeing nothing. Then he turned them in the direction his sister had indicated. From one face to another he passed along the third row of the pit, seeing only clerks and their young girls, shop-keepers and their wives. At last he stopped. There was a girl sitting by herself. Her head was down, her face hidden; but he recognized her. Then she looked up quickly—straight to the box—turned direct to his glasses a pair of dark eyes that were burning, cheeks that were pale, almost unhealthy in the pallor, and white lips, half-parted to the breaths he could almost hear her talking.

It was Sally!

Directly she thought that he had seen her, her head lowered guiltily again. She kept it bent, hidden from him, lifting a programme to shield her utterly from his gaze.

He put down his glasses on the ledge of the box.

"Do you allow that sort of thing?" Mrs. Durlacher whispered as she took them up.

"My God—no!" he exclaimed.

She smiled in her mind. That word—allow—was chosen with discretion.



CHAPTER IX

As the curtain fell Traill proposed supper at a restaurant. They readily agreed. Mrs. Durlacher, in the best of spirits, thanking Providence for the weakness of human nature that had driven Sally to follow Traill to the theatre, still thrilling with the sound of his exclamation in her ears, would have lit the dullest entertainment in the world with the humour of her mood. There was a part for her to play. She played it. All her remarks, bristling with the pointed satires of spiteful criticism, were a foil to the gentle temper of Coralie's conversation.

"My God!" said Traill, as they walked down one of the passages to the foyer, and he listened to his sister's verdict upon a woman who had gone out before them. "Do you women allow a stitch of respectability to hang on each other's backs?"

"She'd want more than a stitch," Mrs. Durlacher replied, "if she's not going to put on more clothes than that."

Traill shrugged his shoulders, half conscious of a comparison between his sister and the quiet reserve of this girl beside him. He had thought her pretty, seeing her at a distance on the night when he had dined with Dolly. Meeting her the day before, in the dim light of the drawing-room at Sloane Street, he had found her still more attractive; but on this evening, in the glamour of bright lights—young, fresh, charming as she seemed to him—his senses were swept by her fascination.

At all times a beautiful woman is wonderful—the thing of beauty and the joy for ever; the phrase that comes naturally to the mind. But when, conscious of her own attractions, she lends that beauty to the expression of pleasure which she finds in the company of the man beside her, then, to possibly that man alone, but certainly to him, she is doubly beautiful. Nature indeed had been generous with Coralie Standish-Roe. Nature has her moods and her devilish humours. She was more than amiable when she bestowed her gifts upon Coralie. You may talk about the value of a noble heart beating in an empty corset, shining out of pinched and tired eyes; but it is a value, unmarketable, where the good things in a woman's life are given in exchange. Janet Hallard and her like have learnt the realization of that. And of the qualities of noble-heartedness, Coralie possessed but very few. Her disposition was intensely selfish. She took all the admiration that she could get—and it was infinitely more than some women dream of—with a grace of gratitude whose parallel may be found in the schoolboy galloping through one helping of food that he may begin another. Her hunger for it was insatiable, but she was too young as yet for any such reputation to have fastened itself upon her; too young for the manner which becomes the natural expression of women of this type to have blotted out her undeniable charm of youth. Youth saved her from Traill's critical appreciation of women. Two years later he would have passed her with a momentary lifting of interest which she herself would unconsciously have dispelled at the first touch of acquaintance. Now, he was not only thrilled, he was interested. She was a child. He found her so—as much a child as Sally had been. Add her beauty to that—a beauty unquestionably greater than the simple charm of Sally's baby features—and add still again that fallacious sense of social position by which Traill realized that such a girl he could not ask promiscuously out to dinner, could not casually persuade to come to his rooms, and you have, besides the unavoidable comparison between the two in his mind, that subtle difference which a life of ease and a life of labour makes in the position of women to a man's conception of the sex.

Immediately they stepped outside the theatre into the blaze of light where the attendants were rushing for carriages, and men and women, in a confused mass, jostled each other to fight free of the crowd, Traill's eyes searched quickly for a sight of Sally. Mrs. Durlacher also was alert to the possibility of finding her watching their movements. But they saw no trace of her.

In the mouth of a little alley, deep with shadows, on the other side of St. Martin's Lane, she was standing, her heart throbbing, half timidly, half jealously, yet secure in the knowledge that she was safe from observation. With eyes, burnt in the fever of a fierce emotion, she watched them as they stepped into the car that drew up beneath the lighted portico. When she saw Mrs. Durlacher's gesture inviting Traill to sit between them on the back seat; when she saw him willingly accept, notwithstanding that there was more room, more comfort in the seat opposite, she drew in a breath between her teeth, and the nails of her fingers bit into the palms of her hands. Now, from what little she had seen in the theatre, and taking into greatest consideration of all the proof of her own eyes that the woman was beautiful, eclipsing herself at every point of attraction, Sally was full-swept into the mad whirlpool of unreasoning jealousy. Every action and every incident that her starved eyes fed upon were distorted, embittered to the taste as though the taint of aloes had crept into everything.

She thought she saw him lay his hand upon hers as he took the place beside her. In that position she knew that they would be wedged close together, their limbs touching, thrilling his senses as she well knew she herself had thrilled them by even slighter proximity than that. Here, too, she judged again by the lowest of standards, if judgment it can be said of a wild flinging of thoughts—vitriol hurled in a moment of madness. Yet against him she could find no bitterness. The woman, kissing the hand that strikes her, to shield it from the falling of the law, is a type that has made no history; but in the hearts of men she is to be found with her ineffaceable record.

It was against the two women, against Mrs. Durlacher with her damnable cunning, against the other with her still more damnable fascination, that all the blinding acid of Sally's thoughts was cast. The woman who had hoodwinked him with her lies about her husband, the woman who had crept in, seizing the moment of his blindness—these were the two people in the world whom she could willingly have strangled with her little hands that gripped and loosened in the mad emotion of her rage. Under her breath she muttered—hissing the words—the vain things that she would do. All the civilized refinement of humanity was burnt out of her. She was not human. She had lost control. The thoughts that revelled in her brain were animal; the savage fury of the beast starved of its food and then deprived of the flesh and blood that are snatched from the very clutching of its claws.

It is not so far a call, even now, for this divine humanity, weaned upon the nutritious food of intelligence, nursed in the refining lap of civilization, to hark back, driven by one rush of events, to the lowest forms of nature that exist. If, in the hour of death, seeking immunity from peril, there live men who have trodden down the bodies of women, beaten them with naked fists, severed arms from their bleeding hands that held to safety in order that they might find their own escape; then, surely it is no very wonderful thing for a woman, threatened with the destruction of all her happiness, to give herself over to the mad riot of murderous intent that shouts the cry of bloody revolution through her brain!

In these moments nothing human could have been accounted for in Sally. In these moments the fire of the enraged animal glittered in her eyes, the incoherent mutterings of dumb passion vibrated in her breath.

A man passing down through the dark shadows of the alley into the street, turned and gazed at her. She took no notice. Did not even see him. The car was just beginning to move out into the traffic. As it turned, too eager to follow it, she stepped on to the pavement.

Traill's eyes caught her then, saw her begin to quicken her steps, break even into a run following their tardy progress as they squeezed a way through the press of other vehicles. He looked out through the small, square window in the back of the hood and could still see her, forcing her way through the crowds of people, sometimes jostling them upon the path, then running in the gutter for the greater freedom of passage.

"God!" he muttered under his breath, as he turned back again.

"What is it?" asked Coralie.

"Oh, nothing," he replied; "nothing."

Mrs. Durlacher caught her lips between her teeth to crush the smile that rose to them. Now she was sure at least that Sally's power was broken. Her subtle use of that word "allow" had served its double purpose. Not only had it delicately questioned the possession of that authority which she knew he held above all things; but also, in permitting it, the admission had been deftly drawn from him that Sally was his mistress. She had known it before, as women do know things. Now she was certain of it and, in her certainty, realized that this was the moment—to strike when he was weakest. A man, shaken free of the ties that bind him to one woman, is more ready than another in the reaction of indifference which follows to fetter himself again in order that life may seem less void, less hollow than he finds it.

To Coralie, then, in the dressing-room of the restaurant, as they took off their cloaks, she said—

"My dear girl, you're making that brother of mine in love with you."

And to Traill, she jested as they said good night—

"My dear boy, considering your obligations to other women, do you think it's fair? The girl's losing her heart to you, or will be if she sees you again."



CHAPTER X

The congestion of the traffic, the knotted lines of carriages conveying to their houses the thousands of people whom the theatres had disgorged into the streets, enabled Sally to keep Mrs. Durlacher's car in sight until it passed through the wide portals of a restaurant in the Strand where, from the street, she could see them dismount and pass into the building. They had gone to supper. Traill had told her nothing about that. Then it had only been decided since he had met them; he must be enjoying himself in the society of these very people whose society he professed to abhor. That they might have pressed him to accompany them so that he found it impossible to refuse, did not enter the argument in her mind. All thoughts tended in one direction—instinct guiding them—instinct, drunk with the noxious ferment of jealousy, whipping her mind down paths where no reason could follow, yet bringing her invariably to the truth with that same generosity of Providence which watches over the besotted wanderings of a drunken man.

For some moments she stood there, watching the doors which a powdered flunkey had swung to after their entrance. Wild suggestions flung themselves before her consideration. She would go back to her room, dress herself in the best frock that Traill had given her and go to supper there herself. She would wait there an hour, an hour and a half if necessary, to see if he went home with them. That she had almost decided on, when a man of whose presence, passing behind her once or twice upon the pavement, she had been unaware, stopped by her side.

"Waiting for some one?" he said, with that insinuating tone of voice which disposes of any need for introduction.

She drew away from him quickly in horror, fear driving cold through the hot blood of her jealousy. Then she turned, as he laughed to conceal his momentary embarrassment, and hurried off in the direction of Trafalgar Square.

That incident proved her waiting to be impossible. She walked slowly home, all the spirit within her sinking down into an impenetrable mood of depression from which not even the persistent hope that love must win her back her happiness in the end had any power to raise her. Now she was crushed—burnt out. Only the charred cinders and the ashes of herself were left behind from the flames of that furnace which had torn its way through her.

Lighting just one candle, she sat in his room waiting for his return. An hour passed, and at last she blew the candle out. He might think it strange to find her there, sitting up for him; he might suspect, and as yet she was sublimely unconscious that he had seen her. She was sure when she had covered her face with the programme in the theatre that the action had been in time; moreover, she was by no means certain that from that distance his glasses had covered her at all.

Mounting the uncarpeted stairs from his room to the floor above, she stopped once or twice, thinking she heard a hansom pulling up in the street. Her heart stopped with her and she held a breath in suspense; but on each occasion it jingled on, losing the noise of its bells in the murmuring night sounds which never quite die into silence in that quarter.

When she reached her room, she lit a candle, holding it up before the mirror on the dressing-table and gazing at her face in its reflection.

"My God!" she whispered.

Truly, in the light of that one candle, she hardly recognized herself. Violent sensations, deep emotions, these are the accelerations of time. They produce—momentarily no doubt—the same effect as do the passing of years over which such intensity of feeling is more evenly distributed. In those few hours, since she had heard from Devenish that another woman was claiming the attentions of Traill's mind, Sally had aged—withered almost—in the fierce stress of her passion of jealousy. It had passed over her like the sirocco of the desert, leaving her parched, dried, shrivelled, as a child grown old before its years. No colour was there in her cheeks, no vestige of the sign that beneath a mere fraction's measurement of that white skin, the blood was flowing through her veins. Yet the skin was not really white. It was an ugly grey, smirched with a colour that bore but the faintest resemblance to animation. Beneath the eyes deep shadows lay, smeared into the sockets. She lifted the candle to their level, but they did not disappear. Pain had cast them, and no shifting of material light would wipe them out. But it was the eyes themselves that startled her. When she looked into them—deep into the pupils—she realized how close she had drifted to the moment beyond which control is of no account—the moment of absolute madness. Even then, they glittered unnaturally. A gleam from the candle again? She moved it once more—this way and that—but still the light flickered there, frightening her into a sudden effort of restraint. She tried to pull herself together; put down the candle hurriedly and, feeling the leathern dryness in her mouth, caught at a carafe of water, drinking from it without use of the glass.

That steadied her. Thoughts drifted back into their channels and, coming with them, looming with its portentous realization above the others, the remembrance that only the evening before, he had drawn out the settlement upon her life. Now she knew why he had done it. Now she found the absolute trending of his mind. He had said if he died! That was only to blind, only to tie a bandage about her eyes in order to conceal from her the true motive that had instigated him. But she saw the true motive now. Under the bandages she had already tried to peer; now circumstance itself had wrenched them from her.

With feverish movements, she opened a drawer and took from it a little slip of paper. This was a copy of the settlement as he had drawn it out. He had presented it to her.

"You'd better keep it as a memorandum of the details," he had said and, without glancing at its contents, she had thrust it into this drawer. Now she hurriedly spread it open.

"In the event of my death, or the discontinuance of the relations which now exist between Miss Sally Bishop and myself—"

These were the first words that met her eyes. Her fingers closed automatically over the paper, crushing it into her palm. Could she need any more proof than that? That a settlement and dealing with a relationship such as theirs must be worded in such a way, carried no weight with it to her mind. She knew then, that when he had alluded to the event of his death, it had been farthest from his thoughts. He had meant their separation. In three years—a little more than three years it had come. He was tired of her. She knew well then how useless had been her efforts to move him to passion the night before. Her cheeks flamed, thinking that it had not been because he was unconscious of her attempt. He had seen it. There was no doubt in her mind that when he had told her to fasten her dressing-gown, when he had noticed the perfumes of scent from her hair, he had realized the motive that was acting within her. But he was tired—satiated. And how he must have loathed her! Yet no greater than she, at that moment, loathed herself. He knew—of course he knew—that her coming down to get the book had all been an excuse. He had probably thought that her desire had been for herself. How could he possibly have known that she felt no desire, had been frigid, cold, without a strain of passion in her thoughts, seeking only to tempt him to her side, for his pleasure alone, with the delights of her body? How could he have known? He did not know! Of a certainty he must have thought that it was her own satisfaction she was seeking. The blood raced back from her cheeks, leaving her shivering and cold. Oh, how he must have loathed her! Why had she done it? Why was there not some illuminating power to point out the intricacy of the ways when people came to such a maze in life as this?

In a torture of shame that blent with all her misery, she flung herself, dressed as she was, on to the bed. Let him find her there—what did it matter! She realized that she had lost everything. And there she lay, eyes burning and dry, heart just beating faintly in her breast. But when she heard his footsteps mounting the stairs, she suddenly got up. If he knew that she had followed them, he would never forgive her. So, in the midst of her misery, she still found the strength to hope. Jumping up from the bed she stood before her mirror and began to take off her hat as though she had that moment returned.

When his knock fell on the door, she forced fear from her voice, drove eagerness into the place of it, and called him to enter.

The door opened. In the mirror's reflection, she could see him stop abruptly as he came into the room. With hands still lifted, extricating the pins from her hat, she turned. His lips were tight closed, his eyes merciless. So he had looked that day at Apsley when he had returned to find his sister with her in the dining-room. So he had directed his gaze upon the woman whom she had heard him cross-examine in the Law Courts. The suspicion leapt to her mind that he knew, that he had seen her; but having steeled herself to tell the lie, she did not attempt, in the sudden moment, to reconstruct her mind to a hasty admission of the truth. She must tell the lie, clinging to it through everything.

"Have you only just come in?" he asked.

The tone in his voice seemed to question her right to come in at all. And she was no actress. Another woman in her place, even knowing all she knew, suspecting all she did, would have turned to him in amazement; questioning his right to speak to her like that; covered her guilt with a cloak of astonished innocence and paraded her injury before him. Sally took it for granted; did not even argue from it the certainty that he had seen her. Her mind was made up for the lie and she did not possess that agility of purpose which, at a moment's notice, could enable her to twist her intentions—a mental somersault that needs the double-jointedness of cunning and all the consummate flexibility of tact. He might know that she had followed them, but she must never admit it. It seemed a feasible argument to her, in the whirling panic of her thoughts, that her admission would be fatal—just as the prisoner in the dock pleads "not guilty" against all the damning evidence of every witness who can be brought against him.

"I've been in about half an hour," she replied.

"Did you dine with Devenish?"

The same direct form of question, thrown at her with the same implacable scrutiny of his eyes.

"Yes," she replied.

"Where?"

She mentioned the name of the restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue.

"Where did you go afterwards?"

It was all prepared on her tongue. She did not hesitate.

"To the Palace," she replied.

"To the Palace?" He repeated it. His eyes burnt into her. Then she knew that he had seen her in the theatre; but only in the theatre where she could still swear to him that he was mistaken. Every instinct she possessed forced her to deny it until the last; beyond that if breath were left her.

"Did you see it out? Did you see the performance out?" he continued.

"Yes—we waited till the end."

A note of warning despatched to Devenish would ensure his confirmation of all she had said. He had told her that if ever she needed a friend—now indeed she wanted one.

"What did you do then if you only came in half an hour ago? It's just one o'clock."

A thought rushed exultingly to her mind that he was jealous—jealous of Devenish. He had not seen her at all. This was jealousy. Her heart cried out in thankfulness. She crossed the room to him, all the whole wealth of her love alive and bright in her eyes.

"Jack"—she whispered—"you're not jealous of Devenish, are you?"

A laugh broke out from his lips, striking her with the sting of its harshness.

"Where did you go afterwards?" he repeated.

"To supper—we went to supper—the same place where we had dined. Why wouldn't you tell me if you were jealous? Do you think I should mind?"

"Jealous?" He took her arm and led her nearer to the light of the solitary candle. There he faced her, looking down into the weary pupils of her eyes. "All these things you've been saying," he said brutally—"are lies—the whole—blessed—pack of them. You never went to the Palace Theatre, you went to the Duke of York's. You sat in the third row of the pit and covered your face with a programme whenever you thought we were looking in your direction. You never went to supper afterwards. You tracked Dolly's car into the Strand—running in the gutter to keep pace with it. Jealous? Great God! No! What have I to be jealous about? What did you think you were doing—eh? What did you think you were going to gain by it?"

Up to a moment, she met his eyes; but when he railed at her thoughts of his jealousy, then all courage fell from her. "Jealous? Great God! No!" She knew it was finished when he had said that and, beneath the weight of his contempt, she crumbled into the dust of pitiful obsession.

"Did you imagine," he went on mercilessly—"that I undertook the arrangement of this life with you with the thought for a moment in my mind that you would institute a close vigil over all my actions?"

"It was only because I knew you were being deceived," she said brokenly.

"How being deceived? By whom?"

"By your sister."

"How has she deceived me?" He forced her eyes to his. "How?" he repeated.

To defend her case, just as the woman in the Courts had done, she told him of what Devenish had said; notwithstanding that she herself had pleaded with Devenish to repeat nothing of what had passed between them. Then, in the cold glittering of his eyes, she saw how she had doubly wronged her cause.

"So you speak to outsiders," he said quietly, "about the things which I have told you in confidence. My God! It's well that you and I are not married; well for you and well for me that we haven't to smirch our names in order to get the release of a divorce."

"Divorce?"

"Yes. Great heavens! Do you think I'm going to live on with you now? Do you think I'm going to be followed in all my actions—tracked, trapped—and dandle the private detective on my knee?"

"Ah, but Jack!" She flung arms around his neck, her head bent close to his chest. "I was jealous—can't you see that? I was jealous of that girl."

He put her firmly away from him. "Oh, that be damned for a tale!" he exclaimed.

She shuddered. She had sought for pity—the last hope. In his voice there was none. If only she had had some one to guide her, some one to show her that it would all lead to this. She would have held him longer; she would still have held him, had she not given way to let jealousy wrestle with her soul, flinging it at his feet for him to trample on. Whatever had been the attitude of his mind before, she had afforded him no reason to leave her. Now there was cause—cause enough. She could only see the enormity of her guilt with his eyes, so completely did he dominate her. That a thousand circumstances had mitigated her action, had goaded her, as the unwilling beast is driven through the noise and smoke of battle, until, in the fury of fear, it plunges headlong towards the murderous cannonade—that these things should be taken into account did not enter her conception of the situation. She had wronged him. That was all she felt. And now, clutching his hand, raising it to her lips, drenching it with her tears and kisses, she begged his forgiveness, humbling herself down to the very dust.

He took his hand away. "What's the good of talking about forgiveness?" he said unemotionally. "The thing's done. I was not the only person who saw you."

"Your sister?"

"Yes; she pointed you out first."

"I might have guessed that!" Sally exclaimed bitterly.

"Why?"

"Because she hates me. She knew it 'ud make you angry if you saw me there."

"Oh, that's nonsense! Why should she hate you?"

"Why, because she wants you for that other girl. And you do care for her now, don't you—don't you?"

Traill turned away with annoyance. "We'll leave that matter alone," he said. "I haven't the slightest intention of discussing it. To-morrow morning I shall see about letting my rooms. According to the terms of the settlement I drew out last night, you retain these—rent free—to the expiration of the lease. That's three years. But you mayn't sub-let."

Sub-let! He could talk about sub-letting! The irony of it dragged a laugh through her lips.

"Do you think I shall want to sub-let?" she said stridently. "Do you think I shall care what I do, where I live, how I live?"

"You'll be a fool if you don't," he remarked.

The hysterical note in her voice had jarred through him. Once before in his life he had had a woman screaming about his ears. There was no desire in his mind to relish the enjoyment of it again. He turned slowly towards the door. This was the worst of women. A man's relations with them were bound to end something after this fashion. In common with most men, he shared a hatred of that termination of all intimacies which one calls a scene.

But, really, he had no cause for apprehension. The tears now were streaming down her face, sobs were choking her, convulsive shudderings that shook her body in a merciless grip. Her spirit was utterly broken. No worse could happen to her now. But through all her misery, she could still think first of him. That tentative drawing away, the hand stretching out for the door, she knew the meaning of that; she saw that he had had enough—enough of her weeping, enough of her despair. Just as when, watching the fight, she had struggled against her weakness lest it should spoil his pleasure, so now she fought down the hysteria of her mind to give him ease. Very wearily she crossed the room and stood beside him, forcing back tears with lips that were trembling and contorted. It was no show of bravado, no spurious bravery, aping self-respect, taking it well, as the phrase has it. She was not brave. She felt a coward to all of life that offered. Her heart was that of a derelict—numbed, inert, no spirit left in it—just lifting its head with sluggish weariness above the body of the waves. But simply out of love for him she could not bear to see him annoyed by her suffering.

"You needn't hurry to go," she said finely; "I shan't make a fool of myself—the way you think. I shan't be a drag on you—I promise you that. And if you're going to-morrow, wouldn't you stop just a little while and talk?"

At any other moment the simplicity of that would have touched him; but the affection that Devenish had seen to be tiring had been snapped—a thread in a flame—when he had found her watching his actions, dogging his footsteps. His liberty—that which a man of his type most prizes when he finds it being encroached upon—had been threatened. There was no forgiveness in the heart of him for that. In the sudden freedom of his affections—just as Mrs. Durlacher had so deftly anticipated—he had let them drift—a moth to the nearest candle, a floating seed to the nearest shore—and Coralie Standish-Roe had claimed them.

"Can anything be gained by talking?" he asked, quietly.

"Yes—perhaps it's the last time."

"But nothing can be gained by it. You'll only make yourself more miserable. What is the good of that?"

"Do you think I could be more miserable?" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders.

This scarcely, without seeking defence for Traill, is the most difficult part for a man to play well. He had never offered, in the first beginning of their acquaintance, to deceive her. He was not a man who had respect for marriage, he had said quite honestly. He had told her to go—have no truck with him; and if she had gone, if she had not taken upon herself to return his present, he would have seen no more of her. She had known of his love of liberty, and she herself had threatened it; yet now, seemingly, he was playing a mean part, deserting her, casting her off, when she loved him with every breath her trembling lips drew through her body. It is hard to play such a part well. Even the least sensitive of men, conscious of their own cruelty, will seek to end it as quickly as may be. Wherefore, how could he be expected to see the good gained by staying and talking? What good, in God's name, did talking do? With the agony prolonged, the strain drawn out, how were they—either of them—to benefit? Here, indeed, is a judgment of the head. But it was with her heart alone that Sally craved for its continuance. It was the last she was to see of him; the last time that he would be in her bedroom where all the passionate associations of her life would always lie buried. Can it be wondered that she would willingly have dragged the misery of it through all that night, if only to keep him for the moments as they passed, by her side?

Yet he was driven to play the mean part—the part for which there never will be—perhaps never should be—any sympathy. And he must play it with the best grace he could. A man is always a spectator to his own actions; a woman, in her emotions—never. So women lose their self-respect more easily than men.

But Traill was not the type to allow these abstract considerations to worry him. The love in him she found to be dead. He was not even moved by the piteousness of her appeal. There, then, it must end. It was not his nature to choose the most graceful, the kindest way to end it. He snapped it off as, across the knees, you break a faggot for the burning. And that, too, is the only way to do it.

"I didn't come up here," he said, "to discuss anything. The whole thing's discussed in my mind. When I saw you running after the car, pushing your way along the gutter—that ended it. You'd better read through your settlement now and if you don't think I've been generous enough, tell me to-morrow morning. I shall be downstairs till eleven."

He opened the door—passed through—closed it. She listened to each one of his steps as he descended the stairs, her mouth hanging open, her eyes struck in a fixed glare at the spot where he had stood. Then, when she heard him close his door below, she just crumpled up in an abandoned heap upon the floor, and with each breath she moaned—"Oh—oh—oh."

Traill, undressing below, heard it. With a muttered exclamation, he dragged his shirt over his head and flung it violently into the corner of the room amongst the bundle of dirty linen.

END OF BOOK II



BOOK III

DERELICT



CHAPTER I

Virtue is the personality of many women. Rob them of it, those of them whose value it enhances, and you prize a jewel from its setting, you wrench a star out of the mystery of the heavens and bring it down to earth. It is a common trend of the mind in these modern days to make nobility out of the women whose personality needs no virtue to lift it to a pedestal of fame. But really, it is they who make the nobility for themselves. Phryne of Athens, Helen of Troy, Catherine of Russia, Mary of Scotland—these are women who have ennobled themselves without aid of eulogy. Personality has been theirs without necessity for the robe of virtue to grace them in the eyes of the world. But with the seemingly lesser women, the women of seemingly no vast account—with those whose whole individuality depends upon the invaluable possession of their virtue, no great epic can well be sung, no loud paean sounded. You may find just a lyric here, a rondel there, set to the lilt of a phrase in an idle hour and sung in a passing moment to send a tired heart asleep. But that is all. Yet they are the women upon whom the world has spent six thousand years in the making; they are the women at whose breasts are fed the sons of men. The whole race has been weaned by them; every country has been nursed into manhood in their arms. But they are too normal or they are too much a class to have men sing of them. There is not one mother of children in the vast calendars of history who stands out now for our eyes to reverence. Upon the stage of the world their part is played, and what eye is there can grasp in comprehensive glance the whole broad sweep of power which their frail hands have wielded? Only upon that mimic platform of fame, raised where the eyes of all can watch the figure as it treads the boards, have women stood apart where the recorder can jot their names upon a scroll of history for the world to read. There is no virtue essential here; virtue indeed but adds a glamour with its absence.

There is some subtle attraction in a Catherine of Russia or a Manon Lescaut which tempts the cunning lust of men to cry their praise for the nobility of heart that lies beneath. But what elusive charm is there in the mother of children whose stainless virtue is her only personality? None? Yet to the all-seeing eye, to the all-comprehending brain—to that omniscience whom some call God, be it in Trinity or in Unity, and others know not what to call—these are the women who lift immeasurably above fame, infinitely above repute.

So, therefore, rob them of their virtue and you prize a jewel from its setting, you wrench a star from the mystery of the heavens and bring it down to earth, you filch from the generous hand of Nature that very possession which she holds most dear. For without virtue, these women are nothing. Without virtue, you may see them dragging the bed of the streets for the bodies they can find. It is the last task which Nature sets them—bait to lure men from the theft of that virtue in others which they can in no wise repay.

And this very virtue itself needs no little power of subtle comprehension to understand; for intrinsically it is a fixed quality while outwardly it changes, just as the tide of custom ebbs or flows. Intrinsically then, it is that quality in a woman which breeds respect in men—respect, the lure of which is so often their own vanity. And the pure, the chaste, the untouched woman, whether it be vanity or not, is she whom men most venerate. Of these they make mothers—for these alone they will live continently. And however much love a man may bear in his heart for a woman whom some other than himself has possessed, the knowledge of it will corrupt like a poison in the blood though he forgive her a thousand times.

Such a woman, pure, chaste, and untouched, had been Sally Bishop. But to one man alone can a woman be this, and then, only so long as she remains with him. Once he has cast her off, when once she is discarded, she becomes to all who know her, a woman of easy virtue, prey to the first hungry hands that are ready to claim her. This, in an age when the binding sacrament of matrimony is being held up to ridicule both in theory and in practice, is perhaps the only reasonable argument that can be utilized in its defence. It is surely not pedantic to hope that the purity of some women is still essential for the race, and it is surely not illogical to suppose that marriage is the means, in such cases as that of Sally Bishop, to this humble end.

Pure, certainly, she had been, even in the eyes of such a man as Devenish; but in the light of a discarded mistress, all her virtue vanished. Innate in the mind of the worst of men is the timid hesitation before he brands a virtuous woman; but when once he knows that she has fallen, conscience lifts, like a feather on the breeze. With a light heart, he reaps the harvest of tares which some other than himself must be blamed for sowing, and with a light heart he goes his way, immune to remorse.

This then is the Tragedy which, like some insect in the heart of the rose, had eaten its way into the romance of Sally Bishop.

For three days after Traill had left her, she broke under the flood of her despair. For those three days she did not move out of her rooms, taking just what nourishment there was to be found in the cupboards where they stored the food for their breakfasts. On the side of her bed she sometimes sat, biting a dry piece of bread—anything that she could find—in that unconscious instinct with which the body prompts the mind for its own preservation. But these meals—if such they can be called—she took at no stated times. Crusts of bread lay about on the table, showing how indiscriminately of order she had fed herself. For two hours together, she would sit in awful silence, with eyes strained staringly before her. Of tears, there were none. Sometimes a sob broke through her lips when a sound downstairs reminded her of him; but no tears accompanied it. It was more like the complaining cry of some animal in its sleep.

For the first two nights she just flung herself on her bed when the darkness came. She did not undress. The nights were warm then, or cold might have driven her between the clothes. But, on the third evening, she disrobed. This was habit reasserting itself. She did it unconsciously, only remembering as she crept, shuddering, between the sheets, that for the two previous nights she had not gone to bed at all.

The toppling fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child's. Another day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her eyes—fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration—would have burnt up in the sudden panic-flare as the reason guttered out, then smouldered down into that pitiable lightless flickering where all glimmer of intelligence is dead.

Inevitably this must have followed, had not Janet visited her late in the evening of the fourth day. Two days before, she had written saying that she would come if Traill were not likely to be there.

Her note finished abruptly, characteristic of all her letters.

"If I don't hear from you to the contrary," it concluded, "I shall arrive."

She heard nothing to the contrary. The letter had lain, since its arrival, in the box downstairs. Sally had not moved out of her room. The possibility of a letter from Traill might have drawn her forth; but she knew that such a possibility did not exist. The woman who attended to their rooms she had sent away.

"I shall be able to look after these two rooms myself," she had thought vaguely. Then she had locked herself into her bedroom, taken up a duster to begin the morning's work and, after five minutes, idly lifting each thing in her hand, she had seated herself by the side of the bed, allowing the duster to fall limply from her fingers. Then, throwing herself on to the pillows, had given way with tearless eye to her despair.

When Janet's knock fell, she was lying in bed, eyes gaping at the ceiling above her in a gaze that scarcely wandered or moved from the spot upon which they were fixed. At the unexpected sound, she sat up. Intelligence struggled for the mastery in her mind. There, in her eyes, you could see it fight for victory.

"Who's that?" she called out querulously in a thin voice.

"Janet! Do you mean to say you're not up yet?"

"No."

"Well, come and unlock the door. I can't get in."

Sally drove the energy into her limbs with an effort and tumbled from the bed. As her feet touched the floor, she lurched forward with weakness. She clutched at the clothes and held herself erect; but her knees trembled, knocking together like wooden clubs that are shaken by reckless vibration.

With a little moan of weakness she stumbled to the door, holding to the end of the bed, the back of a chair, the handle of the door in her uncertain progress.

As soon as she heard the key turned, Janet entered and found Sally in her night-dress, a white ghost of what she was, swinging unsteadily before her—so a dead body, swung from a gallows, eddies in a lifting wind.

"Sally!" she exclaimed.

Sally stared at her. Her dry lips half-parted to make Janet's name. Her eyes, burnt out in the deep black hollows, flickered with a light of thankful recognition. Then she swung forward, a dead weight on to Janet's shoulder.

For a moment, Janet held her there, looking over the shoulders that crumbled against her thin breast, at the disordered room before her. She saw the crusts of bread, she saw the bed-clothes hanging to the floor. She gazed down at the unkempt head of hair that dragged lifelessly on her shoulder, and her eyes were wide in bewildered amazement.

"Great God!" she exclaimed.

And she realized how inadequate that was.



CHAPTER II

For three weeks Janet stayed with her, sleeping with her, arms tight-locked about her yielding body as they had often slept together in the days at Kew. With her own hands, she fed her; in the warmth of her big, generous heart, she nursed her back to life, as you revive some little bird, starved and cold, in the heat of your two hands.

During the first fortnight, she asked no questions. What had happened was obvious. She learnt from the people on the second floor in the office of the railway company that Traill had left his rooms; but under what circumstances and why, she made no inquiries. Brought face to face with the exigencies in the lives of others, there is a fund of common sense to be found in the character of the revolutionary woman. That Janet Hallard was an artist, now with a studio of sorts of her own, says nothing for her temperament and less for her art. She had no conception of the higher life, and to her mind the inner mysticism was a jumble of confused nonsense—the blind leading the blind, for whom the ultimate ditch was a bastard theosophy. As a matter of fact, Janet had no mean ideas of design; but they were vigorous and, for her living, she had to struggle against the overwhelming sentimentalism of the nouveau art.

In dealing with Sally then, a subject needing tact, common sense and an unyielding strength of purpose, she was more than eminently fitted to save her from the edge of the precipice towards which she had found her so blindly stumbling. It was just such a moment as when one sees one's dearest friend walking blindly to the verge of an abyss and knows that too sudden a cry, too swift a movement to save them, may plunge their reckless body for ever into eternity. In this moment, Janet kept her wits. With infinite care, with infinite tenderness, never weakening to the importunate demands that were made of her, giving up her work, giving up every other interest that she had, she slowly drew Sally back into the steady current of existence; saw day by day the life come tardily again into the bloodless cheeks, and watched the smearing shadows beneath the hollow eyes as they disappeared.

Then, at the end of a fortnight, she learnt in quavering sentences from Sally's lips, trembling as they told it, the story of her desertion.

"You shouldn't have followed him, Sally," she whispered gently at its conclusion.

"I know I shouldn't—I know I shouldn't. And so I know of course he isn't to blame. It's that woman—his sister. I always knew she hated me—knew it! She used to look at me like you look at soiled things in a shop! She pointed me out to him in the theatre. I can guess the things she said. She brought the other—the other one to see him. Oh, wasn't it cunning of her? Mustn't she be a brute! Think what she's done to me! Look how wretched she's made my life! And she's got every single thing she can want. Oh, I don't wonder that people have their doubts about this marvellous mercy of God! I don't see any mercy in what's happened to me. I never saw any mercy in what happened to father; and yet he only did what he ought to have done."

The excitement was rising within her—a steady torrent lifting to the flood. Janet watched its progress steadily in her eyes. When it reached this point, she adroitly changed the current of her thoughts.

"What did your father do?" she asked with interest.

Sally looked up and the expression in her eyes changed.

"Have I never told you?"

"No."

"He consecrated too much wine one Easter Sunday where he was taking a locum tenens—and afterwards, when he had to drink it—it went to his head."

She told it so seriously that Janet was driven to choke the rush of laughter rising within her.

"Why did he have to drink it?" she asked.

"They have to. Consecrated wine mustn't be kept."

"But why not? Does it go bad?"

"Janet! No—but, don't you see?—they do keep it in the Roman Catholic Church—on the altar—that's why the little red lamp is always burning in front. That's why the people bow when they first come into the church. And don't you see they're afraid in the Anglican Church, that if the Bread and Wine were kept, people might venerate it as the real Presence, which of course it isn't."

"Isn't it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"Then he had to drink it all himself?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't he get somebody to help him?"

"He did try. He asked the warden—but the warden was a total abstainer."

Janet looked sternly out of the window.

"Then he asked a man he saw outside the church—but he was apparently an atheist. At any rate, he didn't believe in that."

"P'raps he thought the wine wasn't good?" Janet suggested.

"Oh no—he offered to drink it; but of course as he didn't believe—"

"Didn't believe in what? He believed it was wine, didn't he?"

"Oh yes—but he didn't believe in the Communion. So father had to drink it himself. And then, the Bishop came into the vestry and found him."

"What happened then?"

"Nothing then—but a few months later, he was appointed to the chaplaincy of a Union—of course a much smaller position than the one he had occupied."

"Didn't they give any reasons?"

"Oh yes—in a sort of a way. They said that they thought the rectorship of Cailsham was rather too responsible a post for him. They asked him to accept the other in such a way that it would have been hard to refuse. Of course, they couldn't actually turn him out. But mother hated him for going. It was soon after we left there that I came up to you in London. They were getting so poor. My brother couldn't be kept up at Oxford. The governess had to go. Father died not long after I left. I know what he died of. They called it a general break-up."

"Oh—I know that," said Janet. "There's the shot-gun prescription—all the pharmacopoeia ground into a pill and fired down the patient's throat. It must hit something. That general break-up is the double-barrelled diagnosis. You believe it was the resignation of the rectorship that finished him."

"Yes—I'm sure of it. I remember, the day I went away from home—when I came in to say good-bye to him, he was writing a sermon for Easter. It was just Easter then, don't you remember? I went to the little church on Kew Green. He read a bit of it out to me—something about there being the promise of everlasting life in the rising of Christ from the dead—and yet I know, in his heart, he was cast down in the very lowest depth of despair."

Janet shook her head up and down. Not one of us is too old to learn some new mystery in the inner workings of the human machine. To Janet it was a fairy tale, what had been life and death to the Rev. Samuel Bishop. But she had achieved her object. Sally was quieter after the relation of that little story and, seeing in her mood a good opportunity for suggesting some plans about the future, Janet said quietly—

"What are your mother and sisters doing now?"

"They've gone back to Cailsham. They've got a school there for little boys—sons of gentlemen—preparatory for the Grammar School at Maidstone. The sort of thing that nearly every woman takes up when she gets as poor as mother is."

Janet left it at that, and set about the getting of a meal, talking all the time in a light and flippant way about her studio; pointing humorous descriptions of the managers of firms with whom she had to deal in her business of designing.

"There's one man," she said. "You know the place up the Tottenham Court Road—he weighs seventeen stone if he weighs an ounce, and he comes up to business in the morning, all the way from Turnham Green in a motor-car that makes the noise of thirty horses galloping over a hard road, with the power of six of them in its inside. He asked me down to dinner one night; I went. It meant business. His wife weighs the ounce that he ought to weigh if he didn't weigh seventeen stone, and they sit at each end of a huge table in a tiny room filled with maroon plush against a green carpet, and all through dinner they talk about carburetters and low-tension magnetos, and Mr. Cheeseman discusses what friend living in the row of houses, of which theirs is one, they would get most out of in return for a drive in the motor next Sunday. 'There's one fellow I know,' I remember him saying. 'He's something to do with the stage—his brother's in the booking-office at Daly's. He might get us some seats if we took him out.'"

Sally laughed. The first moment that her lips had parted to the sound since Janet had been with her.

"It's true," said Janet. "I'm not making it up. He got that car—allowing for his trade discount—for a hundred and thirty-five pounds—cape-cart hood and all. It only costs him thirteen pounds a year in tyres—and it can do twenty-five miles to a gallon of petrol with him inside, and he reckons he's been saved five shillings a week regularly in dinners since he got it. Well, what else do you think a man buys a motor-car for if he can't afford it? Some one has to pay for it—why not his friends? That's the English system of hospitality—what I buy you pay for; what you pay for I get, and what I've got I must have bought, otherwise I shouldn't have it. It's the principle of the reductio ad absurdum, if you know what that is. Everybody gets what they want, everybody else pays for it, and everybody's happy. I'll do your washing if you'll do mine. Can you have a more generous hospitality than that?"

Sally laughed again, and then Janet launched her boat of enterprise.

"You're fond of kiddies, aren't you, Sally?" she asked suddenly.

A tender look crept into Sally's eyes. "You know I am," she replied.

"Well—why don't you go down to your people at Cailsham and help them for a little while in the school?"

The look of tenderness died out. Her eyes roamed pitiably about the room.

"I couldn't leave here," she said powerlessly.

"Why not?"

"I couldn't. It's all reminding me I know; but I couldn't be happy anywhere else. I should be miserable away from here."

The meeting of such obstacles as this, Janet had anticipated. She knew well that slough of the mind which sucks in its own despair, and with all the concentration of her persuasion, she strove to lift Sally out of the morass. Failing on that occasion, she turned the conversation into another channel—let it drift as it pleased; but the next day she led it back again. At all costs Sally must be removed from the association of her surroundings, and no means offered better than these. Yet at the end of three weeks, notwithstanding all the patient persuasion that she employed, her object was as far from being reached as at the beginning.

"If you spoil your life, Sally," she said, as she was going, "it'll be the bitterest disappointment to me that I can think of. No man is worth it to a woman—no woman's worth it to a man. Can't you get some ambition to do something? All your time's your own, and you haven't got to work for your living. He's been generous enough—I'll admit that. Let me give you lessons in drawing."

"I could never learn anything like that," said Sally, wearily. "Haven't got it in me."

This mood of wilful depression, bordering upon melancholia, can be perhaps the most trying test to friendship that exists. To throw life into the balance of chance—to fling it absolutely away in a moment of heroism for a friend one loves, is a simple task compared with the unwearying patience that is needed to face the lightless gloom of another's misery. It taints all life, discolours all pleasures, tracks one—dogs one, like a shadow on the wall. Yet Janet passed the test with love the greater, even at the end of the gauntlet of those three weeks.

"I'll be with you all day, the day after to-morrow," she said, as she departed; "and think about teaching the kiddies—I would if I were you. You'd get awfully fond of them—as if they were your own. Sons of gentlemen! Think of them! Dear little chaps! My God—the mothers bore them, though."



CHAPTER III

It should not be lightly touched upon, this heroism of Janet Hallard's in sacrificing three weeks of her work—every hour of which meant some living to her—in order to save Sally from that ultimate dark world of dementia towards which she was inevitably drifting. It was not the sacrifice of time alone, not the fact that on her return she was compelled to sell some of her valued possessions in order to meet the rent of her studio which the work she had left undone would have amply supplied. Much rather was it the noble perseverance of effort through the dim, impenetrable gloom of Sally's wide-eyed misery, her own spirits never cast down by the seeming impossibility of the task, her resources never exhausted by the persistent drain that was made upon them. Here was the strength of her masculinity united with the patient endurance of the woman in her heart. No man, of his own nature alone, could have won through the sweating labour of those three weeks—few women either. But that very combination of sex, that very duality of her nature which, as a woman, made her unlovable to any man, and endeared her so closely to Sally's life, had succeeded where a thousand others of her sex would have failed.

She left Sally, it is true, a woman with a wounded heart to nurse, an aching misery to bear; but she left her with a sanity of purpose which can take up the tangled threads and, however blinded be the eyes with weeping, with fingers feeling their way, can unravel the knotted mass that lies before her.

So she slowly returned to the common factors of existence, and in six weeks from the time of Traill's departure, was ready to smile at any moment to the humour of Janet's dry criticisms of life. But to move from her rooms, to disassociate herself from the past with every sorrow and every joy that it contained, was more than she could bring herself to do. Through all Janet's persuasions, Sally remained obdurate.

"I've only got the rooms for three years," she replied finally. "I can't think of it as really past until that time's gone by; Then, I will. I'll go anywhere you like. I'll come and share your studio with you."

They entered into a formal agreement on that and, knowing the Romance in Sally's nature, Janet pursued her quest of success on the other point no further.

But circumstance, with an arm stronger than Janet could ever wield, succeeded where she had failed.

One evening, as Sally was preparing to go out alone to dinner, she heard footsteps mounting the stairs to her floor. On the moment, her heart leapt, beating to her throat. Her hands, raising the hat to her head, so trembled that she had to put it back upon the dressing-table. A cold dew damped her forehead. She put her hand up and found it wet. Then the knock fell and, shaking in every limb, she set her lips and walked as firmly as she could to the door. There she stopped, taking a deep breath. Then she swung it open.

It was Devenish.

He took off his hat and held a hand out to her. She accepted it, confused in her mind as to the reason of his coming. Did he know? Or was he utterly unconscious? He must have known; he had come to her door.

"Do you mind my coming in?" he asked.

"No, not at all."

She made way for him to pass into her sitting-room. There followed an awkward pause which he tried to fill with the laying down of his hat and the discarding of his gloves. Sally stood there where she had closed the door, waiting for him to explain his presence. Had he brought a message for her from Jack? Had he come to see Jack—knowing nothing—and, finding the rooms below occupied by another tenant, had he come to learn the reason of her? Why had he come? And at last he turned frankly to her.

"Miss Bishop, I saw Jack the other day. He told me."

Sally lifted her head with an assumption of pride, a strained effort to show the pride that Janet had urged her to possess. She crossed the room and dropped into a chair.

"Aren't you going to sit down?" she asked.

"Thanks." He took the nearest chair, winding his watch-chain about his finger to convey the air that he was at ease.

"Did Jack send you to see me?" she asked then.

"No."

"You've no message from him?"

"No."

"Then, why do you come here?" She wanted to put the question firmly, but in her ears it sounded wavering; in his, touched only with surprise.

"Do you remember that evening we dined together?" he asked in reply.

Could she forget it? She nodded her head in silence.

"If you recollect, I said I wished to offer my friendship?"

Her head nodded again. She did not make it easy for him; but the social training inures one to the difficulties of forging conversation. He ploughed through with a straight, undeviating edge that in no way displeased her.

"Well, I don't want to distress you by going over the whole business which, as you might quite justly say, was none of mine. I thought you might find it a bit lonely, and so, as I'd taken you out to dinner before"—he raised his eyes, finishing the sentence with a smile and lifting eyebrows. "Were you going out to dinner now?" he added, before she had time to reply.

"Yes, I was."

"Then will you come with me?"

She met his gaze with frank speculation. What did it matter where she went? Who was there to care? Janet, the only one, would urge her to it if she knew. There was no doubt in her mind that friendship had prompted him. It was a considerate thought on his part to come and offer to take her out because he had imagined she might be lonely. She felt grateful to him, but with no desire to show it. If it pleased him to be generous on her behalf, why should she refuse to profit by it? But here was no thought of giving in return. A woman seldom meets but one man in the world to whom she will give without a shadow of the desire for the value in return. What was there in the world now to prevent her from taking what life offered of its small, distracting pleasures? A moment of recklessness brought a deceptive lift to her spirits.

"I shall be very glad to," she said.

In her mind was no unfaithfulness to the memory of Traill. Unfaithful, even to a slender memory, it was not in her nature to be. The benefit of the Church now was the only door through which she could pass out of his life. She considered no likelihood of it; for, in common with those of her sex in whom the strong waters of emotion run deep in the vein of sentiment, she felt—being once possessed by him—that he was the lord of her life.

"But I warn you," she added, with a pathetic smile, "I shan't be good company. You'll have to do all the talking. You'll have to make all the jokes."

"I'm prepared to do as much and more," he said lightly.

"Then you must wait while I put on my hat. Play the piano—can you?"

"No—not I. Can you?"

"Yes—just a little."

"Sing?"

"Yes—sometimes."

"Ah, that settles it. We come back here after dinner, and you sing every song in your repertoire."

She laughed brightly at his enthusiasm. "You're really fond of music?" she said.

"Yes, passionately. And I suffer little for my passion because I know absolutely nothing about it. That's a promise, then? You'll sing to me after dinner?"

"Yes, I should love to."

So much had her spirits lifted in this deceptive atmosphere of diversion that Devenish even heard her humming a tune in the other room. And he smiled, looking up to the ceiling with hands spread out and fingers lightly playing one upon the other.

At a restaurant in Great Portland Street, shut off from the rest of the room by the astute arrangement of a screen—ranged around every table, presumably to ward off the draught—they dined in comparative seclusion. Into the selection of that dinner Devenish put a great part of his ingenuity. The man who knows how to choose a meal and savour those intervals between the courses with anecdote, has reached a high-water mark of social excellence. Devenish was the type. He was not hampered with the possession of intelligence. Wit he had, but it was not his own. The man, after all, who can echo the wit of others and suit its application to the moment is a man of no little accomplishment. The least that can be said of him is that he is worthy of his place at a dinner-table where conversation is as empty as the bubbles that shoot through the glittering wine to the frothy surface. To suffer from intelligence in such an atmosphere as this is a disease—the silent sickness—of which such symptoms as the lips tight bound, the heart heavy, and an aching void behind the eyes, are common to all its victims. Later, in the course of its development, if the attack is acute, comes the forced speech from lips now scarcely opened—forced speech recognizable by its various degrees of imbecility. The man, for instance, who asks you if you have been to a theatre lately when you have just deftly foisted upon the company the latest joke you heard in a musical comedy, has reached that stage of the disease when retirement is the only cure. Like quinine in fever districts, there is one drug which may ward off the icy fingers of the complaint—champagne—but it should be administered at frequent intervals.

From such a malady as this, Devenish was not only immune, but he carried with him that lightness of spirit which may go far to relieve others of their suffering. Add to this a face well-featured, a figure well-planned with all the alertness of an athlete, an immaculate taste in dress, and you have the type which the 'Varsity mould offers yearly to the ephemeral needs of her country. The impression remains, stamped upon the man until he is well-nigh forty. He knows how to get drunk in the most gentlemanly way and his judgment about women is sometimes very shrewd. A knowledge of the classics is of service to him if he does nothing. If, on the other hand, he sets about the earning of his living—a drudgery that some of these youths are compelled to submit to—the classics are only the peas in the shoe which, as a pilgrim to the far-off shrine of utility, he is compelled to wear.

Not having to earn his own livelihood, or rather, having already earned it in the profession of matrimony into which he had entered in partnership with a wealthy woman, Devenish was a pride to the college which had turned him out.

He knew most of those people in London who range in the category of—worth knowing. Anecdotes of them all—those little personal insights into private domestic relations of which surely there must somewhere be an illicit still, hidden in the mountains where gossip echoes—he had at the tips of his fingers.

"Surely you've heard that last thing that Mrs. —— said at the first night of ——;" and thereafter follows some quaint conceit—smuggled, God knows how, from the illicit still in the mountains, stamped with a fictitious year to give it flavour—which the well-known actress in question would have offered her soul to have said on the occasion alluded to in the story, but which she had never even thought of.

It may be concluded, then, from these apparently needless digressions that Devenish was good company. He did his best to amuse Sally—he succeeded. When they were halfway through the dinner and he had casually refilled her glass with champagne, she was prepared to see humour in everything he said.

There is a mood of recklessness—wild determined recklessness—that strikes, like a light in the heavens, across the face of despair. In such a mood was Sally then. Her mind, empty of the vice which so often accompanies it, was echoing with the cry—What does it matter? What does it matter? When he filled her glass a second time, she half raised a hand from her lap to stop him. But what did it matter? It would put her in good spirits, and in good spirits she felt the strong desire to be. Between this and the harmful result of the wine, so far a call was stretched in her mind that she never let it enter her consideration. Let him fill her glass a second time! She was to return to rooms empty but of the bitterest of associations. The whole long night had to be passed through with that haunting speculation—which now so frequently beset her—the wondering of what Traill was doing, the questioning in what woman's arms he was finding the joy of desire which he had found in hers.

What did it signify then, this evening in which she let go the strained reserve which at any other time she would have retained? What did it signify, so long as the deepest beating of her heart was unmoved by the quickened pulses and the eyes alight with a reckless laughter?

It mattered nothing to her who knew its meaning; but to Devenish, seeing the colour lifting to her cheeks, watching the sparkling in those eyes which had met his but an hour or more ago, when disappointed hope had thrown them into deep shadows, there was a tentative significance. It appealed to the lowest nature of his senses to see her, whom he had long desired, unbending in her reticence. Her laughter was a whip about his body; her lips, parted—losing that expression of restraint—were becoming an obsession to his eyes. But he guarded all his actions with a steady hand.

When her glass was empty for the second time, he stretched out his hand to refill it again.

"Oh—I'd better not have any more," she said lightly. "Whatever would you do with me if I took too much?" And she laughed. Laughed, he imagined, at the possibilities that rose to her mind, and it was on the edge of his lips to say the things he would do.

"Another glass can't hurt you," he said, laughing with her. "Here—I'll fill mine—there"—he held up the bottle for her to see—"Now you have the remainder. You don't want me to drink it all, do you? I should like to know what you'd do—I suppose you'd give me in charge of the head waiter? I guess you'd shirk your responsibilities more than I would." And as he talked, he emptied the bottle into her glass beneath the fringe of the conversation.

"Ever hear that story," he began again, and caught her attention once more with an idle tale that had worn its way through half the clubs in Town. His yarns were all fresh to her, and, moreover, he spun them amazingly well. There was none of that disconcerting fear of their staleness to thwart him—no need for the tentative preface—"You'll say if you've heard this before." One suggested another—they rolled off his tongue. And while she sipped her champagne, he kept her amused; never allowed her the moments of inaction in which to relent. He amused himself. The old, worn-out story has all the humour still keen in it for you—if you tell it. It was no effort, no strain to Devenish. He laughed as heartily as she did over the stale old jests. Their novelty to her made them new to him. She leant her elbows on the table and watched his face as he told them.

"Now," he said, when they had finished their coffee, "how about the songs? I've done my share of the entertainment. As soon as I've got the bill, we'll go back, and you can supply the more serious items of the programme."

"Really—I'm afraid I couldn't. I believe you think I sing well—I don't. I did think of going on the stage once—into musical comedy—but not because I was musical."

"Well—of course not. It isn't a refuge for the art. But I have my belief in your being able to sing. You're not going to shake that."

"Very well—I suppose I'll try." Her hands lifted to her face. "My cheeks are burning. Do they look very red?"

"No—not particularly—the room's warm, I think."

She permitted herself to be satisfied with that explanation. Had a mirror been near at hand, she would have realized in its reflection that the warmth of the room was not the only cause for the flushed scarlet of her cheeks, or the light that glittered in the expanded pupils of her eyes.

When Devenish had paid the bill, they departed. A hansom conveyed them back to Sally's rooms in Regent Street. Once seated in it, she leaned back in the corner, and her eyes closed.

"I do feel so awfully sleepy," she said, ingenuously.

He glanced at her swiftly. Was that simplicity, or a veiled request for him to close his arms about her? How could she be simple? The mistress of a man for three years—what simplicity could be left in her now? Undoubtedly she must know—of course she knew by now—the thoughts that were travelling wildly through his mind.

"Poor child," he said considerately—"I suppose you are."

Her eyes opened to that. She sat a little straighter in the corner. There was a tone in his voice more subtle than friendship. Her ears had heard it, but her senses were too drowsy then to dwell for long upon its consideration.

He would have said more—in another moment, he would have slipped his arm around her waist, had it not been for her sudden movement of reserve. That warned him. Unconsciously a woman gives out of herself the impression of whether she be easy of winning or not. With Sally, notwithstanding all the circumstances that ranged against her in his mind, Devenish realized that an inconsidered step would be fatal to his desires. That did not thwart him. He admired her the more for it; wanted her the more.

When they reached her rooms and, taking off her hat, she seated herself at the piano, creating in the susceptibility of his mind a greater sense of the intimacy of their relations, he stood at the other side of the room watching her, content to let his anticipations slowly drift upon the quiet stream of events to the ultimate cataract of their realization.

This is the true nature of the sensualist. Woman or man, whatever sex, you may know them by their feline delight in the procrastination of the moment. It is an evolution of the intellect. The raw, unbridled forces of nature have no dealings with such as these. They are people of pleasure. They have taken the gifts that Nature has offered and, with the subtle cunning of their minds, have torn the inviolable parchment of her laws to shreds before her face. With no inheritance of the intellect, Devenish possessed all the other qualities. Sensualist as he was, with that strain of refinement induced by the easy circumstances of life, the paid women disgusted him. Of mere animalism, he had none. Here in this widest essential, his nature marked its contrast with Traill. To admit the beast in every man would have been beyond him; simply because the admission of a generalization such as that, would most directly have implied himself. In Traill's concession of it, such an admission may easily be read. And this is the type of man, such as Devenish, most dangerous to society.

If the threadbare hypocrisy of this country of England could but bring itself to don the acknowledgment that the hired woman has her place in the scheme of things, such men as Devenish would find the virtuous woman more closely guarded from their strategies than she is.

When her first song was finished, Sally turned in her chair, laughing frankly to his eyes.

"You needn't suffer on account of your passion for music by having to criticize," she said. "I know it was awful."

He crossed the room to her side. "As you like," he said, bringing his eyes full to hers. "You can call it anything you please—but I want some more." He picked up the pieces of music that lay on the top of the piano. "Do you sing that song out of the Persian Garden—Beside the Shalimar? I forget the words of it?"

Her fingers ran through the pile of music. "'Pale Hands I Loved.' Is that it?" She lifted her face and looked up at him.

"Yes—yes—sing that!"

"I'm afraid I haven't got the music—can't play without the music."

He drew a deep breath. "That's a pity," he said.

"Well—listen—I'll sing this."

She placed the music before her on the rest, and with one hand on the back of her chair, the other resting on the piano, he bent over her, eyes wandering from the gold of her hair to the parting of her lips as she sang. It was just such a song as he had asked for; filled with the abandoned sentimentalism of decadent passion—

"Lord of my life, than whom none other shareth The deep, red, silent wine that fills my soul— Take thou and drain, till not one drop remaineth To wet thy lips—then turn thou down the bowl.

"Lord of my heart—this boon I crave—this only, That all my worth may be possessed by thee; Make thou my life a chalice, drained, that lonely Stands on the altar of Eternity."

She looked up at him as her fingers wandered to the final chord. His lips were set in a thin line, and he was breathing quickly.

"Why did you sing that?" he asked.

She blindly shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know—why shouldn't I? The music's a good deal nicer than the words, I think. Don't you find the words are rather silly? They are of most songs, I think."

"And you call that silly," he said. "I suppose it's a woman's song—but, my God! do you know I could sing that to you?"

His arm was round her then, dragging her towards him in a lithe grip, the fierce strength of which she too well understood. She struggled, breathing heavily, for her freedom; but he caught her face in his hand, dragged it to his lips and covered her with kisses.

Then she broke free, rising to her feet, overturning the chair behind her, pushing back the disordered hair from her forehead.

"How dare you!" she breathed.

Countless women have said it, in countless moments similar to this. And with it, often, seeing all the circumstances that have led up to it in their different light, comes the knowledge—as it came also to Sally—the understanding of how the man has dared. Recklessness had led her. In her heart, she blamed herself. She might have known men now; known them from her knowledge at least of one man. Undoubtedly she was to blame, taking everything into account—the defencelessness of her position, the fact that he had known of her relationship with Traill and its termination; yet her eyes flamed with contempt as they met his.

"Your hat is over on that chair." she said presently in a strident voice. "Will you go?"

He crossed the room quietly—no want of composure—and picked it up.

"Would you rather I didn't come and see you again?" he asked, brushing the hat casually with his sleeve.

"I never want to see you again!" she exclaimed.

He smiled amiably. "Don't you think you're rather foolish?"

"Foolish!"

"Yes—the unmarried man who keeps a woman is bound to leave her some time or other—that's not half as likely to be the case with—"

"What do you mean?" She was white to the lips.

He looked puzzled. "I'm afraid I can't understand you," he said.

She tried to answer him, but the words mingled in a stammering of confusion before she could utter them.

"You don't think there's a chance of Traill coming back to you, do you?" he went on. "I shouldn't be here, I assure you, if there were."

Sally's knees trembled with weakness. An overwhelming nausea shook her till she shuddered.

"Did he tell you to come here?" she whispered.

"Heavens, no! I don't suppose he'd do that. He wouldn't do a thing like that. But I'm pretty sure he's in love with that Miss Standish-Roe—the beautiful Coralie. He knows it. He won't admit it; but I'm certain he is, and I rather think I'd better open his eyes a little."

That last remark did not fall within her understanding. She took no notice of it.

"And so you came here of your own accord?"

"Yes—why not? I had an apparently erroneous idea that you liked me. When you let me come back here after dinner, I was sure of it. I saw no reason why we shouldn't get along together just as well as you and Traill did."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and she hid her face in her hand.

"Oh yes—I see my mistake by this time," he said easily. All passion was cooled in him now. "I'm sorry. There was no intention of insulting you in my mind." He moved to the door. "I—I thought you understood it."

Sally dropped into a chair, her face still covered; shame—the deepest sense of it—beating through all her pulses.

"Well—I must only hope you'll excuse my—my ignorance of women, though I must admit you're a bit different to the rest. Well—I suppose I'd better say good night, then."

She heard him take the step forward. She could see in her mind the hand held out, but she did not look up. He turned again to the door. She heard it open. She heard it close. She heard his footsteps slowly descending the stairs. And still she sat there with her face close-buried in her hands.



CHAPTER IV

You are never to know how deep the iron has entered your soul until Fate begins to draw it out.

When Traill had left her, Sally's mind had been numbed with misery. The despair of such loneliness as hers is often a narcotic, that drugs all power of thought. In the beating of her pulses, when she had first heard Devenish's footsteps mounting the stairs, she was forced to the realization that hope was not yet dead in the heart of her. That undoubtedly was why, despite all Janet's efforts, she had refused to leave her rooms. The hope that Traill would one day return, that one evening she would hear his steps on the stairs, his knock on the door, had needed only such a coincidence as the unexpected visit of Devenish to stir it into vivid animation. Just so had the Rev. Samuel Bishop hoped, in the fulfilment of his duties as chaplain, that one day the rectorship of Cailsham would return to his possession; just so had he been imbued with faith, the same as hers, when he had shuddered at his narrow avoidance of sacrilege in the vestry of the little church at Steynton. To him, at that moment, it would have been as impossible to pour back the consecrated into the unconsecrated wine, as it had been for Sally to lose assurance that Traill would one day return to her.

But now it was different. The iron, in the sure grasp of the fingers of Fate, was being torn out of her. She could feel it wrenching its way from the very depths. Traill would never come back. It was not so much because she had heard he was in love, that she realized it; that—even then—her faith, in its ashes, repudiated. But when Devenish had said—alluding to the faintest chance of his return—"I shouldn't be here, I assure you, if there were," she had been made conscious of Traill's tacit permission—unspoken no doubt—to Devenish which had prompted his visit to her rooms.

But last and most poignant of all in the bitterness of this lesson that she had learnt, was her understanding of the place she held in the eyes of such men as Devenish. With those who knew of her life, no friendship was possible. One relationship, one only could exist—a relationship, at the thought of which her whole nature shuddered in violent disgust.

Janet was right. Janet had seen things from their proper point of view. As a trade she should have looked at it. As the leaving of one master to labour in the service of another she should have weighed its issue. Yet, even now, the cruelty of that outlook revolted her. Had she viewed it thus, those three years of absolute happiness could never have been and she could not even forego the memory of them.

But the knowledge that had come to her, brought decision with it. She could stay no longer where she was. The thought of meeting just those few people whom she knew, who knew her, in the streets, drove the blood burning to her forehead. She must go away—away from London—away from every chance incident that might fling back in her face the tragedy of her existence. Away from all its associations she would be able to hide it; not from herself, not from the biting criticism of her own thoughts. But from others; she could hide it from them.

That night she wrote to Janet asking her to come and see her; and the next day they sat opposite to each other at a table in a quiet restaurant up West.

"I'm going to take your advice," Sally began.

"You're going away?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"At once; in a day or two, as soon as I hear from mother. I wrote to her this morning."

"What did you say?"

"I said that I'd saved up some money and, as I hadn't been very well, I wanted to come down and stay with her for a change. I suggested that I might be of some use in the school."

"Yes, that's all right. But for goodness' sake don't let her see that you've got a lot of money. The wives of clergymen, as far as I've ever seen, are weaned on the milk of suspicion. They'll never believe anybody's properly married but themselves; I suppose that's because they're in the trade. I know Mr. Cheeseman thinks nobody's furniture genuine, except his own. That's always a little business failing. But you ought to be careful."

"But I haven't any too much money," said Sally quietly.

Janet gazed up at her in unsympathetic surprise. "That's rather unlike you," she said abruptly. "I think he was very generous. A hundred and fifty a year, free of rent for three years, is more, I imagine, than most men would drag out of their pockets. You could make what living you liked beside that, if you chose to. I know I should jolly-well think myself a Croesus with that capital."

Her tone of voice was hard with criticism.

"But do you think I take all he's offered me?" asked Sally.

"Do you mean to say you don't?"

"No, I take the very least I can. A pound a week is all I want for my food; what else should I want? I wouldn't touch another penny of it but that till the three years are over. I have all the clothes I could possibly want. You thought I was mean, didn't you, Janet?"