Bennett, who listened easily, was glad to help her make her guest talk. Frank Leven left the group near the sofa and came to listen, too. Tressady was more and more spurred, carried out of himself. Lady Maxwell's fine eyes and stately ways were humanised after all by a quick responsiveness, which for most people, however critical, made conversation with her draw like a magnet. Her intelligence, too, was competent, left the mere feminine behind in these connections that Tressady offered her, no less than in others. She had not lived in the world of high politics for nearly five years for nothing; so that unconsciously, and indeed quite against his will, Tressady found himself talking to her, after a while, as though she had been a man and an equal, while at the same time taking more pains than he would ever have taken for a man.

"Well, you have seen a lot!" said Frank Leven at last, with a rather envious sigh.

Bennett's modest face suddenly reddened.

"If only Sir George will use his eyes to as good purpose at home—" he said involuntarily, then stopped. Few men were more unready and awkward in conversation; yet when roused he was one of the best platform speakers of his day.

George laughed.

"One sees best what appeals to one, I am afraid," he said, only to be instantly conscious that he had made a rather stupid admission in face of the enemy.

Lady Maxwell's lip twitched; he saw the flash of some quick thought cross her face. But she said nothing.

Only when he got up to go, she bade him notice that she was always at home on Sundays, and would be glad that he should remember it. He made a rather cold and perfunctory reply. Inwardly he said to himself, "Why does she say nothing of Letty, whom she knows—and of our marriage—if she wants to make friends?"

Nevertheless, he left the house with the feeling of one who has passed an hour not of the common sort. He had done himself justice, made his mark. And as for her—in spite of his flashes of dislike he carried away a strong impression of something passionate and vivid that clung to the memory. Or was it merely eyes and pose, that astonishingly beautiful colour, and touch of classic dignity which she got—so the world said—from some remote strain of Italian blood? Most probably! All the same, she had fewer of the ordinary womanly arts than he had imagined. How easy it would have been to send that message to Letty she had not sent! He thought simply that for a clever woman she might have been more adroit.

* * * * *

The door had no sooner closed behind Tressady than Betty Leven, with a quick look after him, bent across to her hostess, and said in a stage whisper:

"Who? Post me up, please."

"One of Fontenoy's gang," said her husband, before Lady Maxwell could answer. "A new member, and as sharp as needles. He's been exactly to all the places where I want to go, Betty, and you won't let me."

He glanced at his wife with a certain sharpness. For Tressady had spoken in passing of nilghai-shooting in the Himalayas, and the remark had brought the flush of an habitual discontent to the young man's cheek.

Betty merely held out a white child's wrist.

"Button my glove, please, and don't talk. I have got ever so many questions to ask Marcella."

Leven applied himself rather sulkily to his task while Betty pursued her inquiries.

"Isn't he going to marry Letty Sewell?"

"Yes," said Lady Maxwell, opening her eyes rather wide. "Do you know her?"

"Why, my dear, she's Mr. Watton's cousin—isn't she?" said Betty, turning towards that young man. "I saw her once at your mother's."

"Certainly she is my cousin," said that young man, smiling, "and she is going to marry Tressady at Easter. So much I can vouch for, though I don't know her so well, perhaps, as the rest of my family do."

"Oh!" said Betty, drily, releasing her husband and crossing her small hands across her knee. "That means—Miss Sewell isn't one of Mr. Watton's favourite cousins. You don't mind talking about your cousins, do you? You may blacken the character of all mine. Is she nice?"

"Who—Letty? Why, of course she is nice," said Edward Watton, laughing. "All young ladies are."

"Oh goodness!" said Betty, shaking her halo of gold hair. "Commend me to cousins for letting one down easy."

"Too bad, Lady Leven!" said Watton, getting up to escape. "Why not ask Bayle? He knows all things. Let me hand you over to him. He will sing you all my cousin's charms."

"Delighted!" said Bayle as he, too, rose—"only unfortunately I ought at this moment to be at Wimbledon."

He had the air of a typical official, well dressed, suave, and infinitely self-possessed, as he held out his hand—deprecatingly—to Lady Leven.

"Oh! you private secretaries!" said Betty, pouting and turning away from him.

"Don't abolish us," he said, pleading. "We must live."

"Je n'en vois pas la necessite!" said Betty, over her shoulder.

"Betty, what a babe you are!" cried her husband, as Bayle, Watton, and Bennett all disappeared together.

"Not at all!" cried Betty. "I wanted to get some truth out of somebody. For, of course, the real truth is that this Miss Sewell is—"

"Is what?" said Leven, lost in admiration all the time, as Lady Maxwell saw, of his wife's dainty grace and rose-leaf colour.

"Well—a—minx!" said Betty, with innocent slowness, opening her blue eyes very wide; "a mischievous—rather pretty—hard-hearted—flirting—little minx!"

"Really, Betty!" cried Lady Maxwell. "Where have you seen her?"

"Oh, I saw her last year several times at the Wattons' and other places," said Betty, composedly. "And so did you too, please, madam. I remember very well one day Mrs. Watton brought her into the Winterbournes' when you and I were there, and she chattered a great deal."

"Oh yes!—I had forgotten."

"Well, my dear, you'll soon have to remember her! so you needn't talk in that lofty tone. For they're going to be married at Easter, and if you want to make friends with the young man, you'll have to realise the wife!"

"Married at Easter? How do you know?"

"In the first place Mr. Watton said so, in the next there are such things as newspapers. But of course you didn't notice such trifles, you never do."

"Betty, you're very cross with me to-day!" Lady Maxwell looked up at her friend with a little pleading air.

"Oh no! only for your good. I know you're thinking of nothing in the world but how to make that man take a reasonable view of Maxwell's Bill. And I want to impress upon you that he's probably thinking a great deal more about getting married than about Factory Bills. You see, your getting married was a kind of accident. But other people are different. And oh, dear, you do know so little about them when they don't live hi four pair backs! There, don't defend yourself—you sha'n't!"

And, stooping, Betty stifled her friend's possible protest by kissing her.

"Now then, come along, Frank—you've got your speech to write—and I've got to copy it out. Don't swear! you know you're going to have two whole days' golfing next week. Good-bye, Marcella! My love to Aldous—and tell him not to be so late next time I come to tea. Good-bye!"

And off she swept, pausing, however, on the landing to open the door again and put in an eager face.

"Oh! and, by the way, the young man has a mother—Frank reminded me. His womenkind don't seem to be his strong point—but as she doesn't earn even four-and-sixpence a week—very sadly the contrary—I won't tell you any more now, or you'll forget. Next time!"

When Marcella Maxwell was at last left alone, she began to pace slowly up and down the large bare room, as it was very much her wont to do.

She was thinking of George Tressady, and of the personality his talk had seemed to reveal.

"His heart is all in power—in what he takes for magnificence." she said to herself. "He talks as if he had no humanity, and did not care a rap for anybody. But it is a pose—I think it is a pose. He is interesting—he will develop. One would like—to show him things."

After another pensive turn or two she stopped beside a photograph that stood upon her writing-table. It was a photograph of her husband—a tall, smoothfaced man, with pleasant eyes, features of no particular emphasis, and the free carriage of the country-bred Englishman. As she looked at it her face relaxed unconsciously, inevitably; under the stimulus of some habitual and secret joy. It was for his sake, for his sake only that she was still thinking of George Tressady, still pondering the young man's character and remarks.

So much at least was true—no other member of Fontenoy's party had as yet given her even the chance of arguing with him. Once or twice in society she had tried to approach Fontenoy himself, to get somehow into touch with him. But she had made no way. Lord Fontenoy had simply turned his square-jawed face and red-rimmed eyes upon her with a stupid irresponsive air, which Marcella knew perfectly well to be a mask, while it protected him none the less effectively for that against both her eloquence and her charm. The other members of the party were young aristocrats, either of the ultra-exclusive or of the sporting type. She had made her attempts here and there among them, but with no more success. And once or twice, when she had pushed her attack to close quarters, she had been suddenly conscious of an underlying insolence in her opponent—a quick glance of bold or sensual eyes which seemed to relegate the mere woman to her place.

But this young Tressady, for all his narrowness and bitterness, was of a different stamp—or she thought so.

She began to pace up and down again, lost in reverie, till after a few minutes she came slowly to a stop before a long Louis Quinze mirror—her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes half consciously studying what she saw.

Her own beauty invariably gave her pleasure—though very seldom for the reasons that would have affected other women. She felt instinctively that it made life easier for her than it could otherwise have been; that it provided her with a natural and profitable "opening" in any game she might wish to play; and that even among the workmen, unionist leaders, and officials of the East End it had helped her again and again to score the points that she wanted to make. She was accustomed to be looked at, to be the centre, to feel things yielding before her; and without thinking it out, she knew perfectly well what it was she gained by this "fair seeming show" of eye and lip and form. Somehow it made nothing seem impossible to her; it gave her a dazzling self-confidence.

The handle of the door turned. She looked round with a smiling start, and waited.

A tall man in a grey suit came in, crossed the room quickly, and put his arms round her. She leant back against his shoulder, putting up one hand to touch his cheek caressingly.

"Why, how late you are! Betty left reproaches for you."

"I had a walk with Dowson. Then two or three people caught me on the way back—Rashdell among others." (Lord Rashdell was Foreign Secretary.) "There are some interesting telegrams from Paris—I copied them out for you."

The country happened to be at the moment in the midst of one of its periodical difficulties with France. There had been a good deal of diplomatic friction, and a certain amount of anxiety at the Foreign Office. Marcella lit the silver kettle again and made her man some fresh tea, while he told her the news, and they discussed the various points of the telegrams he had copied for her, with a comrade's freedom and vivacity. Then she said:

"Well, I have had an interesting time too! That young Tressady has been to tea."

"Oh! has he? They say there is a lot of stuff in him, and he may do us a great deal of mischief. How did you find him?"

"Oh, very clever, very limited—and a mass of prejudices," she said, laughing. "I never saw an odder mixture of knowledge and ignorance."

"What? Knowledge of India and the East?—that kind of thing?"

She nodded.

"Knowledge of everything except the subject he has come home to fight about! Do you know, Aldous—"

She paused. She was sitting on a stool beside him, her arm upon his knee.

"What do I know?" he said, his hand seeking hers.

"Well, I can't help feeling that that man might live and learn. He isn't a mere obstructive block—like the rest."

Maxwell laughed.

"Then Fontenoy is not as shrewd as usual. They say he regards him as their best recruit."

"Never mind. I rather wish you'd try to make friends with him."

Maxwell, however, helped himself to cake and made no response. On the two or three occasions on which he had met George Tressady, he had been conscious, if the truth were told, of a certain vague antipathy to the young man.

Marcella pondered.

"No," she said, "no—I don't think after all he's your sort. Suppose I see what can be done!"

And she got up with her flashing smile—half love, half fun—and crossed the room to summon her little boy, Hallin, for his evening play. Maxwell looked after her, not heeding at all what she was saying, heeding only herself, her voice, the atmosphere of charm and life she carried with her.



CHAPTER VII

Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now filled all the horizon of her life. At the time when Aldous Raeburn, as he then was—the grandson and heir of old Lord Maxwell—came across her first she was a handsome, undeveloped girl, of a type not uncommon in our modern world, belonging by birth to the country-squire class, and by the chances of a few years of student life in London to the youth that takes nothing on authority, and puts to fierce question whatever it finds already on its path—Governments, Churches, the powers of family and wealth—that takes, moreover, its social pity for the only standard, and spends that pity only on one sort and type of existence. She accepted Raeburn, then the best parti in the county, without understanding or loving him, simply that she might use his power and wealth for certain social ends to which the crude philanthropy of her youth had pledged itself. Naturally, they were no sooner engaged than Raeburn found himself launched upon a long wrestle with the girl who had thus—in the selfishness of her passionate idealist youth—opened her relation to him with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had stormy passages, and was for a time wholly broken off. Aldous was made bitterly jealous, or miserably unhappy. Marcella left the old house in the neighbourhood of the Maxwell property, where her lover had first seen and courted her. She plunged into London life, and into nursing, that common outlet for the woman at war with herself or society. She suffered and struggled, and once or twice she came very near to throwing away all her chances of happiness. But in the end, Maxwell tamed her; Maxwell recovered her. The rise of love in the unruly, impetuous creature, when the rise came, was like the sudden growth of some great forest flower. It spread with transforming beauty over the whole nature, till at last the girl who had once looked upon him as the mere tool of her own moral ambitions threw herself upon Maxwell's heart with a self-abandoning passion and penitence, which her developed powers and her adorable beauty made a veritable intoxication.

And Maxwell was worthy that she should do this thing. When he and Marcella first met, he was a man of thirty, very able, very reserved, and often painfully diffident as to his own powers and future. He was the only young representative of a famous stock, and had grown up from his childhood under the shadow of great sorrows and heavy responsibilities. The stuff of the poet and the thinker lay hidden behind his shy manners; and he loved Marcella Boyce with all the delicacy, all the idealising respect, that passion generates in natures so strong and so highly tempered. At the same time, he had little buoyancy or gaiety; he had a belief in his class, and a constitutional dislike of change, which were always fighting in his mind with the energies of moral debate; and he acquiesced very easily—perhaps indifferently—in many outward conventions and prejudices.

The crisis through which Marcella put him developed and matured the man. To the influences of love, moreover, were added the influences of friendship—of such a friendship as our modern time but seldom rears to perfection. In Raeburn's college days, a man of rare and delicate powers had possessed himself of Raeburn's tenacious affection, and had thenceforward played the leader to Raeburn's strength, physical and moral, availing himself freely, wherever his own failed him, of the powers and capacities of his friend. For he himself bore in him from his youth up the seeds of physical failure and early death. It was partly the marvellous struggle in him of soul with body that subdued to him the homage of the stronger man. And it was clearly his influence that broke up and fired Raeburn's slower and more distrustful temper, informing an inbred Toryism, a natural passion for tradition, and the England of tradition with that "repining restlessness" which is the best spur of noble living.

Hallin was a lecturer and an economist; a man who lived in the perception of the great paradox that in our modern world political power has gone to the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast between the huge and growing "tyranny" of the working class and the individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn and the young revolts and compassions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin's death, in their sore and tender wish to make his thoughts tell upon the English world.

* * * * *

The Maxwells had now been married some five years, years of almost incredible happiness. The equal comradeship of marriage at its best and finest, all the daily disciplines, the profound and painless lessons of love, the covetous bliss of parentage, the constant anxieties of power nobly understood, had harmonised the stormy nature of the woman, and had transformed the somewhat pessimist and scrupulous character of the man. Not that life with Marcella Maxwell was always easy. Now as ever she remained on the moral side a creature of strain and effort, tormented by ideals not to be realised, and eager to drive herself and others in a breathless pursuit of them.

But if in some sort she seemed to be always dragging those that loved her through the heart of a tempest, the tempest had such golden moments! No wife had ever more capacity for all the delicacies and depths of passion towards the man of her choice. All the anxieties she brought with her, all the perplexities and difficulties she imposed, had never yet seemed to Maxwell anything but divinely worth while. So far, indeed, he had never even remotely allowed himself to put the question. Her faults were her; and she was his light of life.

For some time after their marriage, which took place about a year after his accession to the title and estates, they had lived at the stately house in Brookshire belonging to the Maxwells, and Marcella had thrown herself into the management of a large household and property with characteristic energy and originality. She had tried new ways of choosing and governing her servants; new ways of entertaining the poor, and of making Maxwell Court the centre, not of one class, but of all. She ran up a fair score of blunders, but not one of them was the blunder of meanness or vulgarity. Her nature was inventive and poetic, and the rich fulfilment that had overtaken her own personal desires did but sting her eager passion to give and to serve.

Meanwhile the family house in town was sold, and what with the birth of her son, and the multiplicity of the rural interests to which she had set her hand, Marcella felt no need of London. But towards the end of the second year she perceived—though he said little about it—that there was in her husband's mind a strong and persistent drawing towards his former political interests and associations. The late Lord Maxwell had sat in several Conservative cabinets, and his grandson, after a distinguished career in the House as a private member, had accepted a subordinate place in the Government only a few months before his grandfather's death transferred him to the Lords. After that event, a scrupulous conscience had forced him to take landowning as a profession and an arduous one. The Premier made him flattering advances, and his friends remonstrated, but he had none the less relinquished office, and buried himself on his land.

Now, however, after some three years' hard and unremitting work, the estate was in excellent condition; the "new ways" of the new owners had been well started; and both Maxwell and Marcella had fitting lieutenants who could be left in charge. Moreover, matters were being agitated at the moment in politics which had special significance for the man's idealist and reflective mind. His country friends and neighbours hardly understood why.

For it was merely a question of certain further measures of factory reform. A group of labour leaders were pressing upon the public and the Government a proposal to pass a special Factory Act for certain districts and trades of East London. In spite of Commissions, in spite of recent laws, "sweating," so it was urged, was as bad as ever—nay, in certain localities and industries was more frightful and more oppressive than ever. The waste of life and health involved in the great clothing industries of East London, for instance, which had provoked law after law, inquiry after inquiry, still went—so it was maintained—its hideous way.

"Have courage!" cried the reformers. "Take, at last, the only effectual step. Make it penal to practise certain trades in the houses of the people—drive them all into factories of a certain size, where alone these degraded industries can be humanised and controlled. Above all, make up your mind to a legal working day for East London men as well as East London women. Try the great experiment first of all in this omnivorous, inarticulate London, this dustbin for the rubbish of all nations. Here the problem is worst—here the victims are weakest and most manageable. London will bear what would stir a riot in Birmingham or Leeds. Make the experiment as partial and as tentative as you please—give the Home Office power to extend or revoke it at will—but try it!"

The change proposed was itself of vast importance, and was, moreover, but a prelude to things still more far-reaching. But, critical as it was, Maxwell was prepared for it. During the later years of his friend Hallin's life the two men had constantly discussed the industrial consequences of democracy with unflagging eagerness and intelligence. To both it seemed not only inevitable, but the object of the citizen's dearest hopes, that the rule of the people should bring with it, in ever-ascending degree, the ordering and moralising of the worker's toil. Yet neither had the smallest belief that any of the great civilised communities would ever see the State the sole landlord and the sole capitalist; or that Collectivism as a system has, or deserves to have, any serious prospects in the world. To both, possession—private and personal possession—from the child's first toy, or the tiny garden where it sows its passionately watched seeds, to the great business or the great estate, is one of the first and chiefest elements of human training, not to be escaped by human effort, or only at such a cost of impoverishment and disaster that mankind would but take the step—supposing it conceivable that it should take it—to retrace it instantly.

Maxwell's heart, however, was much less concerned with this belief, tenaciously as he held it, than with its relative—the limitation of private possession by the authority of the common conscience. That "we are not our own" has not, indeed, been left to Lassalle or Marx to discover. But if you could have moved this quiet Englishman to speak, he would have said—his strong, brooding face all kindled and alive—that the enormous industrial development of the past century has shown us the forces at work in the evolution of human societies on a gigantic scale, and by thus magnifying them has given us a new understanding of them. The vast extension of the individual will and power which science has brought to humanity during the last hundred years was always present to him as food for a natural exultation—a kind of pledge of the boundless prospects of the race. On the other hand the struggle of society brought face to face with this huge increment of the individual power, forced to deal with it for its own higher and mysterious ends, to moralise and socialise it lest it should destroy itself and the State together; the slow steps by which the modern community has succeeded in asserting itself against the individual, in protecting the weak from his weakness, the poor from his poverty, in defending the woman and child from the fierce claims of capital, in forcing upon trade after trade the axiom that no man may lawfully build his wealth upon the exhaustion and degradation of his fellow—these things stirred in him the far deeper enthusiasms of the moral nature. Nay more! Together with all the other main facts which mark the long travail of man's ethical and social life, they were among the only "evidences" of religion a critical mind allowed itself—the most striking signs of something "greater than we know" working among the dust and ugliness of our common day. Attack wealth as wealth, possession as possession, and civilisation is undone. But bring the force of the social conscience to bear as keenly and ardently as you may, upon the separate activities of factory and household, farm and office; and from the results you will only get a richer individual freedom, one more illustration of the divinest law man serves—that he must "die to live," must surrender to obtain.

Such at least was Maxwell's persuasion; though as a practical man he admitted, of course, many limitations of time, occasion, and degree. And long companionship with him had impressed the same faith also on Marcella. With the natural conceit of the shrewd woman, she would probably have maintained that her social creed came entirely of mother-wit and her own exertions—her experiences in London, reading, and the rest. In reality it was in her the pure birth of a pure passion. She had learnt it while she was learning to love Aldous Raeburn; and it need astonish no one that the more dependent all her various philosophies of life had become on the mere personal influence and joy of marriage, the more agile had she grown in all that concerned the mere intellectual defence of them. She could argue better and think better; but at bottom, if the truth were told, they were Maxwell's arguments and Maxwell's thoughts.

So that when this particular agitation began, and he grew restless in his silent way, she grew restless too. They took down the old worn portfolios of Hallin's papers and letters, and looked through them, night after night, as they sat alone together in the great library of the Court. Both Marcella and Aldous could remember the writing of many of these innumerable drafts of Acts, these endless memoranda on special points, and must needs try, for love's sake, to forget the terrible strain and effort with which a dying man had put them together. She was led by them to think of the many workmen friends she had made during the year of her nursing life; while he had remembrances of much personal work and investigation of his own, undertaken during the time of his under-secretaryship, to add to hers. Another Liberal government was slipping to its fall—if a Conservative government came in, with a possible opening in it for Aldous Maxwell, what then? Was the chance to be seized?

One May twilight, just before dinner, as the two were strolling up and down the great terrace just in front of the Court, Aldous paused and looked at the majestic house beside them.

"What's the good of talking about these things while we live there?" he said, with a gesture towards the house, half impatient, half humorous.

Marcella laughed. Then she sprang away from him, considering, a sudden brightness in her eye. She had an idea.

The idea after all was a very simple one. But the probability is that, had she not been there to carry him through, Maxwell would have neither found it nor followed it. However that may be, in a very few days she had clothed it with fact, and made so real a thing of it that she was amazed at her own success. She and Maxwell had settled themselves in a small furnished house in the Mile End Road, and Maxwell was once more studying the problems of his measure that was to be in the midst of the populations to whom it applied. The house had been recently let in "apartments" by a young tradesman and his wife, well known to Marcella. In his artisan days the man had been her friend, and for a time her patient. She knew how to put her hand on him at once.

They spent five months in the little house, while the London that knew them in St. James's Square looked on, and made the comments—half amused, half inquisitive—that the act seemed to invite. There was of course no surprise. Nothing surprises the London of to-day. Or if there were any, it was all Marcella's. In spite of her passionate sympathy with the multitude who live in disagreeable homes on about a pound a week, she herself was very sensitive to the neighbourhood of beautiful things, to the charm of old homes, cool woods, green lawns, and the rise and fall of Brookshire hills. Against her wish, she had thought of sacrifice in thinking of the Mile End Road in August.

But there was no sacrifice. Frankly, these five months were among the happiest of her life. She and Maxwell were constantly together, from morning till night, doing the things that were congenial to them, and seeing the things that interested them. They went in and out of every factory and workshop in which certain trades were practised, within a three-mile radius; they became the intimate friends of every factory inspector and every trade-union official in the place. Luckily, Maxwell's shyness—at least in Mile End—was not of the sort that can be readily mistaken for a haughty mind. He was always ready to be informed; his diffident kindness asked to be set at ease; while in any real ardour of debate his trained capacity and his stores of knowledge would put even the expert on his mettle.

As for Marcella, it was her idiosyncrasy that these tailors, furriers, machinists, shirtmakers, by whom she was surrounded in East London, stirred her imagination far more readily than the dwellers in great houses and the wearers of fine raiment had ever stirred it. And Marcella, in the kindled sympathetic state, was always delightful to herself and others. She revelled in the little house and its ugly, druggetted rooms; in the absence of all the usual paraphernalia of their life; in her undisturbed possession of the husband who was at once her lover and the best company she knew or could desire. On the few days when he left her for the day on some errand in which she could not share, to meet him at the train in the evening like any small clerk's wife, to help him carry the books and papers with which he was generally laden along the hot and dingy street, to make him tea from her little spirit kettle, and then to hear the news of the day in the shade of the little smutty back-garden, while the German charwoman who cooked for them had her way with the dinner—there was not an incident in the whole trivial procession that did not amuse and delight her. She renewed her youth; she escaped from the burdensome "glories of our birth, and state"; from that teasing "duty to our equals" on which only the wisest preachers have ever laid sufficient stress; and her one trouble was that the little masquerade must end.

One other drawback indeed, one more blight upon a golden time, there was. Not even Marcella could make up her mind to transplant little Hallin, her only child, from Maxwell Court to East London. It was springtime, and the woods about the Court were breaking into sheets of white and blue. Marcella must needs leave the boy to his flowers and his "grandame earth," sadly warned thereto by the cheeks of other little boys in and about the Mile End Road. But every Friday night she and Maxwell said good-bye to the two little workhouse girls, and the German charwoman, and the village boy from Mellor, who supplied them with all the service they wanted in Mile End, took with them the ancient maid who had been Marcella's mother's maid, and fled home to Brookshire. So on Saturday mornings it generally happened that little Hallin went out to inform his particular friend among the garden boys, that "Mummy had tum ome," and that he was not therefore so much his own master as usual. He explained that he had to show mummy "eaps of things"—the two new kittens, the "edge-sparrer's nest," and the "ump they'd made in the churchyard over old Tom Collins from the parish ouses," the sore place on the pony's shoulder, the "ole that mummy's orse had kicked in the stable door," and a host of other curiosities. By way of linking the child with the soil and its people, Marcella had taken care to give him nursemaids from the village. And the village being only some thirty miles from London, talked in the main the language of London, a language which it soon communicated to the tongue of Maxwell's heir. Marcella tried to school her boy in vain. Hallin chattered, laughed, broadened his a's and dropped all his h's into a bottomless limbo none the less.

What days of joy those Saturdays were for mother and child! All the morning and till about four o'clock, he and she would be inseparable, trailing about together over field and wood, she one of the handsomest of women, he one of the plainest of children—a little square-faced chubby fellow, with eyes monstrously black and big, fat cheeks that hung a little over the firm chin, a sallow complexion, and a large humorous mouth.

But in the late afternoon, alas! Hallin was apt to find the world grow tiresome. For against all his advice "mummy" would allow herself to be clad by Annette, the maid, in a frock of state; carriages would drive up from the 5.10 train; and presently in the lengthening evening the great lawns of the Court would be dotted with strolling groups, or the red drawing-room, with its Romneys and Gainsboroughs, would be filled with talk and laughter circling round mummy at the tea-table; so that all that was left to Hallin was that seat on mummy's knee—his big, dark head pressed disconsolately against her breast, his thumb in his mouth for comfort—which no boy of any spirit would ever consent to occupy, so long as there was any chance of goading a slack companion into things better worth while.

Marcella herself was no less rebellious at heart, and would have asked nothing better than to be left free to spend her weekly holiday in roaming an April world with Hallin. But our country being what it is, the plans that are made in Mile End or Shoreditch have to be adopted by Mayfair or Mayfair's equivalent; otherwise they are apt to find an inglorious tomb in the portfolios that bred them. We have still, it seems, a "ruling class"; and in spite of democracy it is still this "ruling class" that matters. Maxwell was perfectly aware of it; and these Sundays to him were the mere complements of the Mile End weekdays. Marcella ruefully admitted that English life was so, and she did her best. But on Monday mornings she was generally left protesting in her inmost soul against half the women whom these peers and politicians, these administrators and journalists, brought with them, or wondering anxiously whether her particular share in the social effort just over might not have done Aldous more harm than good. She understood vaguely, without vanity, that she was a power in this English society, that she had many warm friends, especially among men of the finer and abler sort. But when a woman loved her, and insisted, as it were, on making her know it—and, after all, the experience was not a rare one—Marcella received the overture with a kind of grateful surprise. She was accustomed, without knowing why, to feel herself ill at ease with certain types of women; even in her own house she was often aware of being furtively watched by hostile eyes; or she found herself suddenly the goal of some sharp little pleasantry that pricked like a stiletto. She supposed that she was often forgetful and indiscreet. Perhaps the large court she held so easily on these occasions beneath the trees or in the great drawing-rooms of the old house had more to do with the matter. If so, she never guessed the riddle. In society she was conscious of one aim, and one aim only. Its very simplicity made other women incredulous, while it kept herself in the dark.

However, by dint of great pains, she had not yet done Aldous any harm that counted. During all the time of their East End sojourn, a Liberal government, embarrassed by large schemes it had not force enough to carry, was sinking towards inevitable collapse. When the crash came, a weak Conservative government, in which Aldous Maxwell occupied a prominent post, accepted office for a time without a dissolution. They came in on a cry of "industrial reform," and, by way of testing their own party and the country, adopted the Factory Bill for East London, which had now, by the common consent of all the workers upon it, passed into Maxwell's hands. The Bill rent the party in twain; but the Ministry had the courage to go to the country with a programme in which the Maxwell Bill held a prominent place. Trade-unionism rallied to their support; the forces both of reaction and of progress fought for them, in strangely mingled ways; and they were returned with a sufficient, though not large, majority. Lord Ardagh, the veteran leader of the party, became Premier. Maxwell was made President of the Council, while his old friend and associate, Henry Dowson, became Home Secretary, and thereby responsible for the conduct of the long-expected Bill through the Commons.

When Maxwell came back to her on the afternoon of his decisive interview with Lord Ardagh, she was waiting for him in that same inner room where Tressady paid his first visit. At the sound of her husband's step outside, she sprang up, and they met half-way, her hands clasped in his, against his breast, her face looking up at him.

"Dear wife! at last we have our chance—our real chance," he said to her.

She clung to him, and there was a moment of high emotion, in which thoughts of the past and of the dead mingled with the natural ambition of two people in the prime of life and power. Then Maxwell laughed and drew a long breath.

"The eggs have been all put into my basket in the most generous manner. We stand or fall by the Bill. But it will be a hard fight."

And, in his acute, deliberate way, he began to sum up the forces against him—to speculate on the action of this group and that—Fontenoy's group first and foremost.

Marcella listened, her beautiful hand pensive against her cheek, her eyes on his. Half trembling, she realised what failure, if after all failure should come, would mean to him. Something infinitely tender and maternal spoke in her, pledging her to the utmost help that love and a woman could give.

* * * * *

Such for Maxwell and his wife had been the antecedents of a memorable session.

And now the session was here—was in full stream, indeed, rushing towards the main battle still to come. On the second night of Fontenoy's debate, George Tressady duly caught the Speaker's eye, and made a very fair maiden speech, which earned him a good deal more praise, both from his party and the press, than he—in a disgusted mood—thought at all reasonable. He had misplaced half his notes, and, in his own opinion, made a mess of his main argument. He remarked to Fontenoy afterwards that he had better hang himself, and stalked home after the division pleased with one thing only—that he had not allowed Letty to come.

In reality he had done nothing to mar the reputation that was beginning to attach to him. Fontenoy was content; and the scantiness of the majority by which the Resolution was defeated served at once to make the prospects of the Maxwell Bill, which was to be brought in after Easter, more doubtful, and to sharpen the temper of its foes.



CHAPTER VIII

"Goodness!—what an ugly place it is! It wants five thousand spent on it at once to make it tolerable!"

The remark was Letty Tressady's. She was standing disconsolate on the lawn at Ferth, scanning the old-fashioned house to which George had brought her just five days before. They had been married a fortnight, and were still to spend another week in the country before going back to London and to Parliament. But already Letty had made up her mind that Ferth must be rebuilt and refurnished, or she could never endure it.

She threw herself down on a garden seat with a sigh, still studying the house. It was a straight barrack-like building, very high for its breadth, erected early in the last century by an architect who, finding that he was to be allowed but a very scanty sum for his performance, determined with considerable strength of mind to spend all that he had for decoration upon the inside rather than the outside of his mansion. Accordingly the inside had charm—though even so much Letty could not now be got to confess; panellings, mantelpieces, and doorways showed the work of a man of taste. But outside all that had been aimed at was the provision of a central block of building carried up to a considerable height so as to give the rooms demanded, while it economised in foundations and general space; an outer wall pierced with the plainest openings possible at regular intervals; a high-pitched roof to keep out the rain, whereof the original warm tiles had been long since replaced by the chilliest Welsh slates; and two low and disfiguring wings which held the servants and the kitchens. The stucco with which the house had been originally covered had blackened under the influence of time, weather, and the smoke from the Tressady coalpits. Altogether, what with its pitchy colour, its mean windows, its factory-like plainness and height, Ferth Place had no doubt a cheerless and repellent air, which was increased by its immediate surroundings. For it stood on the very summit of a high hill, whereon the trees were few and windbeaten; while the carriage drives and the paths that climbed the hill were all of them a coaly black. The flower garden behind the house was small and neglected; neither shrubberies nor kitchen garden, nor the small park, had any character or stateliness; everything bore the stamp of bygone possessors who had been rich neither in money nor in fancy; who had been quite content to live small lives in a small way.

Ferth's new mistress thought bitterly of them, as she sat looking at their handiwork. What could be done with such a place? How could she have London people to stay there? Why, their very maids would strike! And, pray, what was a country house worth, without the usual country-house amenities and accessories?

Yet she already began to feel fretted and hampered about money. The inside of the house had been to some extent renovated. She had helped George to choose papers and curtains for the rooms that were to be her special domain, while they were in London together before Easter. But she knew that George had at one time meant to do much more than had actually been done; and he had been in a mood of lover-like apology on the first day of their arrival. "Darling, I had hoped to buy you a hundred pretty things!—but times is bad—dreadful bad!" he had said to her with a laugh. "We will do it by degrees—you won't mind?"

Then she had tried to make him tell her why it was that he had abandoned some of the schemes of improvement that had certainly been in his mind during the first weeks of their engagement. But he had not been very communicative, and had put the blame mostly, as she understood him, on the "beastly pits" and the very low dividends they had been earning during the past six months.

Letty, however, did not in the least believe that the comparatively pinched state of their finances, which, bride as she was, she was already brooding over, was wholly or even mainly due to the pits. She set her little white teeth in sudden anger as she said to herself that it was not the pits—it was Lady Tressady! George was crippled now because of the large sums his mother had not been ashamed to wring from him during the last six months. Letty—George's wife—was to go without comforts and conveniences, without the means of seeing her friends and taking her proper position in the world, because George's mother—a ridiculous, painted old woman, who went in for flirtations and French gowns, when she ought to be subsiding quietly into caps and Bath chairs—would sponge upon his very moderate income, and take what did not belong to her.

"I am certain there is something in the background!" said Letty to herself, as she sat looking at the ugly house—"something that she is ashamed of, and that she doesn't tell George. She couldn't spend all that money on dress! I believe she is a wicked old woman—she has the most extraordinary creatures at her parties."

The girl's delicate face stiffened vindictively as she fell brooding for the hundredth time over Lady Tressady's enormities.

Then suddenly the garden door opened, and Letty, looking up, saw that George was on the threshold, waving his hand to her. He had left her that morning—almost for the first time since their marriage—to go and see his principal agent and discuss the position of affairs.

As he approached her, she noticed instantly that he was looking tired and ruffled. But the sight of her smoothed his brow. He threw himself down on the grass at her feet, and pressed his lips to the delicately tended hand that lay upon her lap.

"Have you missed me, madame?" he said, peremptorily.

Preoccupied as she was, Letty must needs flush and smile, so well she knew from his eager eye that she pleased him, that he noticed the pretty gown she had put on for luncheon, and that all the petting his absence had withdrawn from her for an hour or two had come back to her. Other women—more or less of her type—had found his ways beguiling before now. He took courtship as an art, and had his own rooted ideas as to how women should be treated. Neither too gingerly nor too sentimentally—but, above all, with variety!

He repeated his question insistently; whereupon Letty said, with her pert brightness, thinking all the time of the house, "I'm not going to make you vain. Besides, I have been frightfully busy."

"You're not going to make me vain? But I choose to be vain. I'll go away for the whole afternoon if I'm not made vain this instant. Ah! that's better. Do you know that you have the softest little curl on your soft little neck, and that your hair has caught the sun on it this morning?"

Letty instinctively put up a hand to tuck away the curl. But he seized the hand. "Little vandal!—What have you been busy with?"

"Oh! I have been over the house with Mrs. Matthews," said Letty, in another tone. "George, it's dreadful—the number of things that want doing. Do you know, positively, we could not put up more than two couples, if we tried ever so. And as for the state of the attics! Now do listen, George!"

And, holding his hand tight in her eagerness, she went through a vehement catalogue of all that was wanted—new furniture, new decoration, new grates, a new hot-water system, the raising of the wings, and so on to the alteration of the stables and the replanning of the garden. She had no sooner begun upon her list than George's look of worry returned. He got up from the grass, and sat on the bench beside her.

"Well, I'm sorry you dislike the place so much," he said, when her breath failed her, staring rather gloomily at his despised mansion. "Of course, it's quite true—it is an ugly hole. But the worst of it is, darling, I don't quite see how we're to do all this you talk about. I don't bring any good news from the pits, alas!"

He turned quickly towards her. The thought flashed through his mind—could he be justly charged with having married her on false pretences as to his affairs? No! There had been no misrepresentation of his income or his risks. Everything had been plainly and honestly stated to her father, and therefore to her. For Letty knew all that she wanted to know, and had managed her family since she was a baby.

Letty flushed at his last words.

"Do you mean to say," she said with emphasis, "that those men are really going to strike?"

"I am afraid so. We must enforce a reduction, to avoid working at sheer loss, and the men vow they'll come out."

"They want you to make them a present of the mines, I suppose!" said Letty, bitterly. "Why, the tales I hear of their extravagance and laziness! Mrs. Matthews says they'll have none but the best cuts of meat, that they all of them have an harmonium or a piano in the house, that their houses are stuffed with furniture—and the amount of money they spend in betting on their dogs and their football matches is perfectly sickening. And now, I suppose they'll ruin themselves and us, rather than allow you to make a decent profit!"

"That's about it," said George, flinging himself back on the bench. "That's about it."

There was a pause of silence. The eyes of both were turned to the colliery village far below, at the foot of the hill. From this high stretch of garden one looked across the valley and its straggling line of houses, to the pits on the further hillside, the straight black line of the "bank," the pulley wheels, and tall chimneys against the sky. To the left, along the ascending valley, similar chimneys and "banks" were scattered at long intervals, while to the right the valley dipped in sharp wooded undulations to a blue plain bounded by far Welsh hills. The immediate neighbourhood of Ferth, for a coal country, had a woodland charm and wildness which often surprised a stranger. There were untouched copses, and little rivers and fern-covered hills, which still held their own against the ever-encroaching mounds of "spoil" thrown out by the mines. Only the villages were invariably ugly. They were the modern creations of the coal, and had therefore no history and no originality. Their monotonous rows of red cottages were like fragments from some dingy town suburb, and the brick meeting-houses in which they abounded did nothing to abate the general unloveliness.

This view from the Ferth hill was one which had great familiarity for Tressady, and yet no charm. As a boy he had had no love for his home and very few acquaintances in the village. His mother hated the place and the people. She had married very young—for the sake of money and position—to his dull old father, who nevertheless managed to keep his flighty wife in order by dint of a dumb, continuous stubbornness and tyranny, which would have overborne a stronger nature than Lady Tressady's. She was always struggling to get away from Ferth; he to keep her tied there. He was never at ease away from his estate and his pits; she felt herself ten years younger as soon as she had lost sight of the grim black house on its hilltop.

And this one opinion of hers she was able to impress upon her son—George, too, was always glad to turn his back on Ferth and its people. The colliers seemed to him a brutal crew, given over to coarse sports, coarse pleasures, and an odious religion. As to their supposed grievances and hardships, his intimate conviction as a boy had always been that the miner got the utmost both out of his employers and out of society that he was worth.

"Upon my word, I often think," he said at last, his inward reverie finding speech, "I often think it was a great pity my grandfather discovered the coal at all! In the long run I believe we should have done better without it. We should not at any rate have been bound up with these hordes, with whom you can no more reason than with so many blocks of their own coal!"

Letty made no answer. She had turned back towards the house. Suddenly she said, with an energy that startled him,

"George, what are we to do with that place? It gives me a nightmare. The extraordinary thing is the way that everything in it has gone to ruin. Did your mother really live here while you were away?"

George's expression darkened.

"I always used to suppose she was here," he said. "That was our bargain. But I begin to believe now that she was mostly in London. One can't wonder at it—she always hated the place."

"Of course she was in London!" thought Letty to herself, "spending piles of money, running shamefully into debt, and letting the house go to pieces. Why, the linen hasn't been darned for years!"

Aloud she said:

"Mrs. Matthews says a charwoman and a little girl from the village used to be left alone in the house for months, to play any sort of games, with nobody to look after them—nobody—while you were away!"

George looked at his wife—and then would only slip his arm round her for answer.

"Darling! you don't know how I've been worried all the morning—don't let's make worry at home. After all it is rather nice to be here together, isn't it?—and we shall do—we sha'n't starve! Perhaps we shall pull through with the pits after all—it is difficult to believe the men will make such fools of themselves—and—well! you know my angel mother can't always be swooping upon us as she has done lately. Let's just be patient a little—very likely I can sell a few bits of land before long that will give us some money in hand—and then this small person shall bedizen herself and the house as much as she pleases. And meanwhile, madame ma femme, let me point out to you that your George never professed to be anything but a very bad match for you!"

Letty remembered all his facts and figures perfectly. Only somehow she had regarded them with the optimism natural to a girl who is determined to be married. She had promptly forgotten the adverse chances he had insisted upon, and she had converted all his averages into minima. No, she could not say she had not been warned; but nevertheless the result promised to be quite different from what she had expected.

However, with her husband's arm round her, it was not easy to maintain her ill-humour, and she yielded. They wandered on into the wood which fringed the hill on its further side, she coquetting, he courting and flattering her in a hundred ways. Her soft new dress, her dainty lightness and freshness, made harmony in his senses with the April day, the building rooks, the breaths of sudden perfume from field and wood, the delicate green that was creeping over the copses, softening all the edges of the black scars left by the pits. The bridal illusion returned. George eagerly—hungrily—gave himself up to it. And Letty, though conscious all the while of a restless feeling at the back of her mind that they were losing time, must needs submit.

However, when the luncheon gong had sounded and they were strolling back to the house, he bethought himself, knit his brows again, and said to her:

"Do you know, darling, Dalling told me this morning"—Dalling was the Tressadys' principal agent—"that he thought it would be a good thing if we could make friends with some of the people here? The Union are not—or were not—quite so strong in this valley as they are in some other parts. That's why that fellow Burrows—confound him!—has come to live here of late. It might be possible to make some of the more intelligent fellows hear reason. My uncles have always managed the thing with a very high hand—very natural!—the men are a set of rough, ungrateful brutes, who talk impossible stuff, and never remember anything that's done for them—but after all, if one has to make a living out of them, one may as well learn how to drive them, and what they want to be at. Suppose you come and show yourself in the village this afternoon?"

Letty looked extremely doubtful.

"I really don't get on very well with poor people, George. It's very dreadful, I know, but there!—I'm not Lady Maxwell—and I can't help it. Of course, with the poor people at home in our own cottages it's different—they always curtsy and are very respectful—but Mrs. Matthews says the people here are so independent, and think nothing of being rude to you if they don't like you."

George laughed.

"Go and call upon them in that dress and see! I'll eat my hat if anybody's rude. Beside, I shall be there to protect you. We won't go, of course, to any of the strong Union people. But there are two or three—an old nurse of mine I really used to be rather fond of—and a fireman that's a good sort—and one or two others. I believe it would amuse you."

Letty was quite certain that it would not amuse her at all. However, she assented unwillingly, and they went in to lunch.

* * * * *

So in the afternoon the husband and wife sallied forth. Letty felt that she was being taken through an ordeal, and that George was rather foolish to wish it. However, she did her best to be cheerful, and to please George she still wore the pretty Paris frock of the morning, though it seemed to her absurd to be trailing it through a village street with only colliers and their wives to look at it.

"What ill luck," said George, suddenly, as they descended their own hill, "that that fellow Burrows should have settled down here, in one's very pocket, like this!"

"Yes, you had enough of him at Malford, didn't you?" said Letty. "I don't yet understand how he comes to be here."

George explained that about the preceding Christmas there had been, temporarily, strong signs of decline in the Union strength of the Perth district. A great many miners had quietly seceded; one of the periodical waves of suspicion as to funds and management to which all trade unions are liable had swept over the neighbourhood; and wholesale desertion from the Union standard seemed likely. In hot haste the Central Committee sent down Burrows as organising agent. The good fight he had made against Tressady at the Market Malford election had given him prestige; and he had both presence and speaking power. He had been four months at Perth, speaking all over the district, and now, instead of leaving the Union, the men had been crowding into it, and were just as hot—so it was said—for a trial of strength with the masters as their comrades in other parts of the county.

"And before Burrows has done with us, I should say he'll have cost the masters in this district hundreds of thousands. I call him dear at the money!" said George, finally, with a dismal cheerfulness.

He was really full of Burrows, and of the general news of the district which his agent had been that morning pouring into his ear. But he had done his best not to talk about either at luncheon. Letty had a curious way of making the bearer of unpleasant tidings feel that it was somehow all his own fault that things should be so; and George, even in this dawn of marriage, was beginning, half consciously, to recognise two or three such peculiarities of hers.

"What I cannot understand," said Letty, vigorously, "is why such people as Mr. Burrows are allowed to go about making the mischief he does."

George laughed, but nevertheless repressed a sudden feeling of irritation. The inept remark of a pretty woman generally only amused him. But this Burrows matter was beginning to touch him home.

"You see we happen to be a free country," he said drily, "and Burrows and his like happen to be running us just now. Maxwell & Co. are in the shafts. Burrows sits up aloft and whips on the team. The extraordinary thing is that nothing personal makes any difference. The people here know perfectly well that Burrows drinks—that the woman he lives with is not his wife—"

"George!" cried Letty, "how can you say such dreadful things!"

"Sorry, my darling! but the world is not a nice place. He picked her up somehow—they say she was a commercial traveller's wife—left on his hands at a country inn. Anyway she's not divorced, and the husband's alive. She looks like a walking skeleton, and is probably going to die. Nevertheless they say Burrows adores her. And as for my resentments—don't be shocked—I'm inclined to like Burrows all the better for that little affair. But then I'm not pious, like the people here. However, they don't mind—and they don't mind the drink—and they believe he spends their money on magnificent dinners at hotels—and they don't mind that. They don't mind anything—they shout themselves hoarse whenever Burrows speaks—they're as proud as Punch if he shakes hands with them—and then they tell the most gruesome tales of him behind his back, and like him all the better, apparently, for being a scoundrel. Queer but true. Well, here we are—now, darling, you may expect to be stared at!"

For they had entered on the village street, and Ferth Magna, by some quick freemasonry, had become suddenly conscious of the bride and bridegroom. Here and there a begrimed man in his shirt-sleeves would open his front door cautiously and look at them; the children and womenkind stood boldly on the doorsteps and stared; while the people in the little shops ran back into the street, parcels and baskets in hand. The men working the morning shift had just come back from the pits, and their wives were preparing to wash their blackened lords, before the whole family sat down to tea. But both tea and ablutions were forgotten, so long as the owner of Ferth Place and the new Lady Tressady were in sight. The village eyes took note of everything; of the young man's immaculate serge suit and tan waistcoat, his thin, bronzed face and fair moustache; of the bride's grey gown, the knot of airy pink at her throat, the coils of bright brown hair on which her hat was set, and the buckles on her pretty shoes. Then the village retreated within doors again; and each house buzzed and gossiped its fill. There had been a certain amount of not very cordial response to George's salutations; but to Letty's thinking the women had eyed her with an unpleasant and rather hostile boldness.

"Mary Batchelor's house is down here," said George, turning into a side lane, not without a feeling of relief. "I hope we sha'n't find her out—no, there she is. You can't call these people affectionate, can you?"

They were close on a group of three brick cottages all close together. Their doors were all open. In one cottage a stout collier's wife was toiling through her wash. At the door of another the sewing-machine agent was waiting for his weekly payment; while on the threshold of the third stood an elderly tottering woman shading her eyes from the light as she tried to make out the features of the approaching couple.

"Why, Mary!" said George, "you haven't forgotten me? I have brought my wife to see you."

And he held out his hand with a boyish kindness.

The old woman looked at them both in a bewildered way. Her face, with its long chin and powerful nose, was blanched and drawn, her grey hair straggling from under her worn black-ribboned cap; and her black dress had a neglected air, which drew George's attention. Mary Batchelor, so long as he remembered her, whether as his old nurse, or in later days as the Bible-woman of the village, had always been remarkable for a peculiar dignity and neatness.

"Mary, is there anything wrong?" he asked her, holding her hand.

"Coom yer ways in," said the old woman, grasping his arm, and taking no notice of Letty. "He's gone—he'll not freeten nobody—he wor here three days afore they buried him. I could no let him go—but it's three weeks now sen they put him away."

"Why, Mary, what is it? Not James!—not your son!" said George, letting her guide him into the cottage.

"Aye, it's James—it's my son," she repeated drearily. "Will yer be takkin a cheer—an perhaps"—she looked round uncertainly, first at Letty, then at the wet floor where she had been feebly scrubbing—"perhaps the leddy ull be sittin down. I'm nobbut in a muddle. But I don't seem to get forard wi my work a mornins—not sen they put im away."

And she dropped into a chair herself, with a long sigh—forgetting her visitors apparently—her large and bony hands, scarred with their life's work, lying along her knees.

George stood beside her silent a moment.

"I hardly like to say I hadn't heard," he said at last, gently. "You'll think I ought to have heard. But I didn't know. I have been in town and very busy."

"Aye," said Mary, without looking up, "aye, an yer've been gettin married. I knew as yer didn't mean nothin onkind."

Then she stopped again—till suddenly, with a furtive gesture, she raised her apron, and drew it across her eyes, which had the look of perennial tears.

On the other side of the cottage meanwhile a boy of about fourteen was sitting. He had just done his afternoon's wash, and was resting himself by the fire, enjoying a thumbed football almanac. He had not risen when the visitors entered, and while his grandmother was speaking his lips still moved dumbly, as he went on adding up the football scores. He was a sickly, rather repulsive lad with a callous expression.

"Let me wait outside, George," said Letty, hurriedly.

Some instinct in her shrank from the poor mother and her story. But George begged her to stay, and she sat down nervously by the door, trying to protect her pretty skirt from the wet boards.

"Will you tell me how it was?" said George, sitting down himself in front of the bowed mother, and bending towards her. "Was it in the pit? Jamie wasn't one of our men, I know. Wasn't it for Mr. Morrison he worked?"

Mrs. Batchelor made a sign of assent. Then she raised her head quickly, and a flash of some passionate convulsion passed through her face.

"It wor John Burgess as done it," she said, staring at George. "It wor him as took the boy's life. But he's gone himsel—so theer—I'll not say no more. It wor Jamie's first week o hewin—he'd been a loader this three year, an taken a turn at the hewin now an again—an five weeks sen John Burgess—he wor butty for Mr. Morrison, yer know, in the Owd Pit—took him on, an the lad wor arnin six an sixpence a day. An he wor that pleased yo cud see it shinin out ov im. And it wor on the Tuesday as he went on the afternoon shift. I saw im go, an he wor down'earted. An I fell a cryin as he went up the street, for I knew why he wor down'earted, an I asked the Lord to elp him. And about six o'clock they come runnin—an they towd me there'd bin an accident, an they wor bringin im—an he wor alive—an I must bear up. They'd found him kneelin in his place with his arm up, an the pick in it—just as the blast had took him—An his poor back—oh! my God—scorched off him—scorched off him."

A shudder ran through her. But she recovered herself and went on, still gazing intently at Tressady, her gaunt hand raised as though for attention.

"An they braat him in, an they laid him on that settle"—she pointed to the bench by the fire—"an the doctors didn't interfere—there wor nowt to do—they left me alone wi un. But he come to, a minute after they laid im down—an I ses, 'Jamie, ow did it appen' an he ses, 'Mother, it wor John Burgess—ee opened my lamp for to light hissen as had gone out—an I don't know no more.' An then after a bit he ses, 'Mother, don't you fret—I'm glad I'm goin—I'd got the drink in me,' he ses. An then he give two three little breaths, as though he wor pantin—an I kiss him."

She stopped, her face working, her trembling hands pressed hard against each other on her knee. Letty felt the tears leap to her eyes in a rush that startled herself.

"An he would a bin twenty-one year old, come next August—an allus a lad as yer couldn't help gettin fond on—not sen he were a little un. An when he wor layin there, I ses to myself, 'He's the third as the coal-gettin ha took from me.' An I minded my feyther an uncle—how they was braat home both togither, when I wor nobbut thirteen years old—not a scar on em, nobbut a little blood on my feyther's forehead—but stone dead, both on em—from the afterdamp. Theer was thirty-six men killed in that explosion—an I recolleck how old Mr. Morrison—Mr. Walter's father—sent the coffins round—an how the men went on because they warn't good ones. Not a man would go down the pit till they was changed—if a man got the life choked out of im, they thowt the least the masters could do was to give un a dacent coffin to lie in. But theer—nobody helped me wi Jamie—I buried him mysel—an it wor all o the best."

She dried her eyes again, sighing plaintively. George said what kind and consoling things he could think of. Mary Batchelor put up her hand and touched him on the arm as he leant over her.

"Aye, I knew yo'd be sorry—an yor wife—"

She turned feebly towards Letty, trying with her blurred and tear-dimmed sight to make out what Sir George's bride might be like. She looked for a moment at the small, elegant person in the corner,—at the sheaf of nodding rosebuds on the hat—the bracelets—the pink cheeks under the dainty veil,—looked with a curious aloofness, as though from a great distance. Then, evidently, another thought struck her like a lash. She ceased to see or think of Letty. Her grip tightened on George's arm.

"An I'm allus thinkin," she said, with a passionate sob, "of that what he said about the drink. He'd allus bin a sober lad, till this lasst winter it did seem as though he cudna keep hiself from it—it kep creepin on im—an several times lately he'd broke out very bad, pay-days—an he knew I'd been frettin. And who was ter blame—I ast yo, or onybody—who was it ter blame?"

Her voice rose to a kind of cry.

"His feyther died ov it, and his grandfeyther afore that. His grandfeyther wor found dead i the roadside, after they'd made him blind-drunk at owd Morse's public-house, where the butty wor reckonin with im an his mates. But he'd never ha gone near the drink if they'd hadn't druv him to't, for he wasn't inclined that way. But the butty as gave him work kep the public, an if yer didn't drink, yer didn't get no work. You must drink yoursel sick o Saturdays, or theer'd be no work for you o Mondays. 'Noa, yer can sit at ome,' they'd say to un, 'ef yer so damned pertickler.' I ast yor pardon, sir, for the bad word, but that's ow they'd say it. I've often heerd owd John say as he'd a been glad to ha given the butty back a shillin ov is pay to be let off the drink. An Willum, that's my usband, he wor allus at it too—an the doctor towd me one day, as Willum lay a-dyin, as it ran in the blood—an Jamie heard im—I know he did—for I fouu im on the stairs—listenin."

She paused again, lost in a mist of incoherent memories, the tears falling slowly.

After a minute's silence, George said—not indeed knowing what to say—"We're very sorry for you, Mary—my wife and I—we wish we could do anything to help you. I am afraid it can't make any difference to you—I expect it makes it all the worse—to think that accidents are so much fewer—that so much has been done. And yet times are mended, aren't they?"

Mary made no answer.

George sat looking at her, conscious, as he seldom was, of raw youth and unreadiness—conscious, too, of Letty's presence in a strange, hindering way—as of something that both blunted emotion and made one rather ashamed to show it.

He could only pursue the lame topic of improvement, of changed times. The disappearance of old abuses, of "butties" and "tommy-shops"; the greater care for life; the accident laws; the inspectors. He found himself growing eloquent at last, yet all the time regarding himself, as it were, from a distance—ironically.

Mary Batchelor listened to him for a while, her head bent with something of the submission of the old servant, till something he said roused again the quick shudder, the look of anguished protest.

"Aye, I dessay it's aw reet, Mr. George—I dessay it is—what yer say. The inspectors is very cliver—an the wages is paid proper. But theer—say what yer will! I've a son on the railway out Lichfield way—an he's allus taakin about is long hours—they're killing im, he says—an I allus ses to im, 'Yer may jest thank the Lord, Harry, as yer not in the pits.' He never gets no pity out o me. An soomtimes I wakes in the morning, an I thinks o the men, cropin away in the dark—down theer—under me and my bed—for they do say the pits now runs right under Ferth village—an I think to mysel—how long will it be before yo poor fellers is laying like my Jim? Yer may be reet about the accidents, Mr. George—but I know, ef yer wor to go fro house to house i this village—it would be like tis in the Bible—I've often thowt o them words—'Theer was not a house—no, nary one!—where there was not one dead.'"

She hung her head again, muttering to herself. George made out with difficulty that she was going through one phantom scene after another—of burning, wounds, and sudden death. One or two of the phrases—of the fragmentary details that dropped out without name or place—made his flesh creep. He was afraid lest Letty should hear them, and was just putting out his hand for his hat, when Mrs. Batchelor gripped his arm again. Her face—so white and large-featured—had the gleam of something like a miserable smile upon it.

"Aye, an the men theirsels ud say jest as you do. 'Lor. Mrs. Batchelor,' they'd say, 'why, the pits is as safe as a church'—an they'd laff—Jamie ud laff at me times. But it's the women, Mr. George, as knows—it's the women that ave to wash the bodies."

A great trembling ran through her again. George instinctively rose, and motioned to Letty to go. She too rose, but she did not go. She stood by the door, her wide grey eyes fixed with a kind of fascination on the speaker; while behind her a ring of children could be seen in the street, staring at the pretty lady.

Mary Batchelor saw nothing but Tressady, whom she was still holding by the arm—looking up to him.

"Aye, but I didna disturb my Jamie, yer know. Noa!—I left im i the owd coat they'd thrown over im i the pit—I dursn't ha touched is back. Noa, I dursn't. But I made his shroud mysen, an I put it ower his poor workin clothes, an I washed his face, an is hands an feet—an then I kissed him, an I said, 'Jamie, yo mun go an tell the Lord as yo ha done your best, an He ha dealt hardly by you!—an that's the treuth—He ha dealt hardly by yer!'"

She gave a loud sob, and bowed her head on her hands a moment. Then, pushing back her grey locks from her face, she rose, struggling for composure.

"Aye, aye, Mr. George—aye, aye, I'll not keep yer no longer."

But as she took his hand, she added passionately:

"An I towd the vicar I couldn't be Bible-woman no more. Theer's somethin broken in me sen Jamie died. I must keep things to mysen—I ain't got nuthin good to say to others—I'm allus grievin at the Lord. Good-bye to yer—good-bye to yer."

Her voice had grown absent, indifferent. But when George asked her, just as they were leaving the cottage, who was the boy sitting by the fire, her face darkened. She came hurriedly to the door with them, and said in George's ear:

"He's my darter's child—my darter by my first usband. His feyther an mother are gone, an he come up from West Bromwich to live wi me. But he isn't no comfort to me. He don't take no notice of anybody. He set like that, with his football, when Jamie lay a-dyin. I'd as lief be shut on him. But theer—I've got to put up wi im."

Letty meanwhile had approached the boy and looked at him curiously.

"Do you work in the pits too?" she asked him.

The boy stared at her.

"Yes," he said.

"Do you like it?"

He gave a rough laugh.

"I reckon yo've got to like it," he said. And turning his back on his questioner, he went back to his almanac.

"Don't let us do any more visiting," said George, impatiently, as they emerged into the main street. "I'm out of love with the village. We'll do our blandishments another day. Let's go a little further up the valley and get away from the houses."

Letty assented, and they walked along the village, she looking curiously into the open doors of the houses, by way of return for the inquisitive attention once more lavished upon herself and George.

"The houses are quite comfortable," she said presently. "And I looked into Mrs. Batchelor's back room while you were talking. It was just as Mrs. Matthews said—such good carpets and curtains, two chests of drawers, and an harmonium—and pictures—and flowers in the windows. George! what are 'butties'?"

"'Butties' are sub-contractors," he said absently—"men who contract with the pit-owners to get the coal, either on a large or a small scale—now mostly on a small scale. They engage and pay the colliers in some pits, in others the owners deal direct."

"And what is a 'tommy-shop'?"

"'Tommy' is the local word for 'truck'—paying in kind instead of in money. You see, the butties and the owners between them used to own the public-houses and the provision-shops, and the amount of coin of the realm the men got in wages in the bad old times was infinitesimal. They were expected to drink the butty's beer, and consume the butty's provisions—at the butty's prices, of course—and the butty kept the accounts. Oh! it was an abomination! but of course it was done away with long ago."

"Of course it was!" said Letty, indignantly. "They never remember what's done for them. Did you see what excellent teas there were laid out in some of the houses—and those girls with their hats smothered in feathers? Why, I should never dream of wearing so many!"

She was once more her quick, shrewd self. All trace of the tears that had surprised her while Mary Batchelor was describing her son's death had passed away. Her half-malicious eyes glanced to right and left, peering into the secrets of the village.

"And these are the people that talk of starving!" she said to George, scornfully, as they emerged into the open road. "Why, anyone can see—"

George, suddenly returned from a reverie, understood what she was saying, and remarked, with an odd look:

"You think their houses aren't so bad? One is always a little surprised—don't you think?—when the poor are comfortable? One takes it as something to one's own credit—I detect it in myself scores of times. Well!—one seems to say—they could have done without it—one might have kept it for oneself—what a fine generous fellow I am!"

He laughed.

"I didn't mean that at all," said Letty, protesting.

"Didn't you? Well, after all, darling—you see, you don't have to live in those houses, nice as they are—and you don't have to do your own scrubbing. Ferth may be a vile hole, but I suppose you could put a score of these houses inside it—and I'm a pauper, but I can provide you with two housemaids. I say, why do you walk so far away from me?"

And in spite of her resistance, he took her hand, put it through his arm, and held it there.

"Look at me, darling," he said imperiously. "How can anyone spy upon us with these trees and high walls? I want to see how pretty and fresh you look—I want to forget that poor thing and her tale. Do you know that somewhere—far down in me—there's a sort of black pool—and when anything stirs it up—for the moment I want to hang myself—the world seems such an awful place! It got stirred up just now—not while she was talking—but just as I looked back at that miserable old soul, standing at her door. She used to be such a jolly old thing—always happy in her Bible—and in Jamie, I suppose—quite sure that she was going to a nice heaven, and would only have to wait a little bit, till Jamie got there too. She seemed to know all about the Almighty's plans for herself and everybody else. Her drunken husband was dead; my father left her a bit of money, so did an old uncle, I believe. She'd gossip and pray and preach with anybody. And now she'll weep and pine like that till she dies—and she isn't sure even about heaven any more—and instead of Jamie, she's got that oafish lad, that changeling, hung round her neck—to kick her and ill-treat her in another year or two. Well! and do you ever think that something like that has got to happen to all of us—something hideous—some torture—something that'll make us wish we'd never been born? Darling, am I a mad sort of a fool? Stop here—in the shade—give me a kiss!"

And he made her pause at a shady corner in the road, between two oak copses on either hand—a river babbling at the foot of one of them. He put his arm round her, and stooping kissed her red lips with a kind of covetous passion. Then, still holding her, he looked out from the trees to the upper valley with its scattered villages, its chimneys and engine-houses.

"It struck me—what she said of the men under our feet. They're at it now, Letty, hewing and sweating. Why are they there, and you and I here? I'm precious glad, aren't you? But I'm not going to make believe that there's no difference. Don't let's he hypocrites, whatever we are."

Letty was perplexed and a little troubled. He had only shown her this excitability once before—on that odd uncomfortable night when he made her sit with him on the Embankment. Whenever it came it seemed to upset her dominant impression of him. But yet it excited her too—it appealed to something undeveloped—some yearning, protecting instinct which was new to her.

She suddenly put up her hand and touched his hair.

"You talk so oddly, George. I think sometimes"—she laughed with a pretty gaiety—"you'll go bodily over to Lady Maxwell and her 'set' some day!"

George made a contemptuous sound.

"May the Lord preserve us from quacks," he said lightly. "One had better be a hypocrite. Look, little woman, there is a shower coming. Shall we turn home?"

They walked home, chatting and laughing. At their own front door the butler handed George a telegram. He opened it and read:

"Must come down to consult you on important business—shall arrive at Perth about 9.30.—Amelia Tressady."

Letty, who was looking over George's shoulder, gave a little cry of dismay.

Then, to avoid the butler's eyes and ears, they turned hurriedly into George's smoking-room which opened off the hall, and shut the door.

"George! she has come to get more money out of you!" cried Letty, anger and annoyance written in every line of her little frowning face.

"Well, darling, she can't get blood out of a stone!" said George, crushing the telegram in his hand and throwing it away. "It is a little too bad of my mother, I think, to spoil our honeymoon time like this. However, it can't be helped. Will you tell them to get her room ready?"



CHAPTER IX

"Now, my dear George! I do think I may claim at least that you should remember I am your mother!"—the speaker raised a fan from her knee, and used it with some vehemence. "Of course I can't help seeing that you don't treat me as you ought to do. I don't want to complain of Letty—I daresay she was taken by surprise—but all I can say as to her reception of me last night is, that it wasn't pretty—that's all; it wasn't pretty. My room felt like an ice-house—Justine tells me nobody has slept there for months—and no fire until just the moment I arrived; and—and no flowers on the dressing-table—no little attentions, in fact. I can only say it was not what I am accustomed to. My feelings overcame me; that poor dear Justine will tell you what a state she found me in. She cried herself, to see me so upset."

Lady Tressady was sitting upright on the straight-backed sofa of George's smoking-room. George, who was walking up and down the room, thought, with discomfort, as he glanced at her from time to time, that she looked curiously old and dishevelled. She had thrown a piece of white lace round her head, in place of the more elaborate preparation for the world's gaze that she was wont to make. Her dress—a study in purples—had been a marvel, but was now old, and even tattered; the ruffles at her wrist were tumbled; and the pencilling under her still fine eyes had been neglected. George, between his wife's dumb anger and his mother's folly, had passed through disagreeable times already since Lady Tressady's arrival, and was now once more endeavouring to get to the bottom of her affairs.

"You forget, mother," he said, in answer to Lady Tressady's complaint, "that the house is not mounted for visitors, and that you gave us very short notice."

Nevertheless he winced inwardly as he spoke at the thought of Letty's behaviour the night before.

Lady Tressady bridled.

"We will not discuss it, if you please," she said, with an attempt at dignity. "I should have thought that you and Letty might have known I should not have broken in on your honeymoon without most pressing reasons. George!"—her voice trembled, she put her lace handkerchief to her eyes—"I am an unfortunate and miserable woman, and if you—my own darling son—don't come to my rescue, I—I don't know what I may be driven to do!"

George took the remark calmly, having probably heard it before. He went on walking up and down.

"It's no good, mother, dealing in generalities, I am afraid. You promised me this morning to come to business. If you will kindly tell me at once what is the matter, and what is the figure, I shall be obliged to you."

Lady Tressady hesitated, the lace on her breast fluttering. Then, in desperation, she confessed herself first reluctantly, then in a torrent.

During the last two years, then, she said, she had been trying her luck for the first time in—well, in speculation!

"Speculation!" said George, looking at her in amazement. "In what?"

Lady Tressady tried again to preserve her dignity. She had been investing, she said—trying to increase her income on the Stock Exchange. She had done it quite as much for George's sake as her own, that she might improve her position a little, and be less of a burden upon him. Everybody did it! Several of her best women-friends were as clever at it as any man, and often doubled their allowances for the year. She, of course, had done it under the best advice. George knew that she had friends in the City who would do anything—positively anything—for her. But somehow—

Then her tone dropped. Her foot in its French shoe began to fidget on the stool before her.

Somehow, she had got into the hands of a reptile—there! No other word described the creature in the least—a sort of financial agent, who had treated her unspeakably, disgracefully. She had trusted him implicitly, and the result was that she now owed the reptile who, on the strength of her name, her son, and her aristocratic connections, had advanced her money for these adventures, a sum—

"Well, the truth is I am afraid to say what it is," said Lady Tressady, allowing herself for once a cry of nature, and again raising a shaky hand to her eyes.

"How much?" said George, standing over her, cigarette in hand.

"Well—four thousand pounds!" said Lady Tressady, her eyes blinking involuntarily as she looked up at him.

"Four thousand pounds!" exclaimed George. "Preposterous!"

And, raising his hand, he flung his cigarette violently into the fire and resumed his walk, hands thrust into his pockets.

Lady Tressady looked tearfully at his long, slim figure as he walked away, conscious, however, even at this agitated moment, of the quick thought that he had inherited some of her elegance.

"George!"

"Yes—wait a moment—mother"—he faced round upon her decidedly. "Let me tell you at once, that at the present moment it is quite impossible for me to find that sum of money."

Lady Tressady flushed passionately like a thwarted child.

"Very well, then," she said—"very well. Then it will be bankruptcy—and I hope you and Letty will like the scandal!"

"So he threatens bankruptcy?"

"Do you think I should have come down here except for something like that?" she cried. "Look at his letters!"

And she took a tumbled roll out of the bag on her arm and gave it to him. George threw himself into a chair, and tried to get some idea of the correspondence; while Lady Tressady kept up a stream of plaintive chatter he could only endeavour not to hear.

As far as he could judge on a first inspection, the papers concerned a long series of risky transactions,—financial gambling of the most pronounced sort,—whereof the few gains had been long since buried deep in scandalous losses. The outrageous folly of some of the ventures and the magnitude of the sums involved made him curse inwardly. It was the first escapade of the kind he could remember in his mother's history, and, given her character, he could only regard it as adding a new and real danger to his life and Letty's.

Then another consideration struck him.

"How on earth did you come to know so much about the ins and outs of Stock Exchange business," he asked her suddenly, with surprise, in the midst of his reading. "You never confided in me. I never supposed you took an interest in such things."

In truth, he would have supposed her mentally incapable of the kind of gambling finance these papers bore witness of. She had never been known to do a sum or present an account correctly in her life; and he had often, in his own mind, accepted her density in these directions as a certain excuse for her debts. Yet this correspondence showed here and there a degree of financial legerdemain of which any City swindler might have been proud—so far, at least, as he could judge from his hasty survey.

Lady Tressady drew herself up sharply in answer to his remark, though not without a flutter of the eyelids which caught his attention.

"Of course, my dear George, I always knew you thought your mother a fool. As a matter of fact, all my friends tell me that I have a very clear head."

George could not restrain, himself from laughing aloud.

"In face of this?" he said, holding up the final batch of letters, which contained Mr. Shapetsky's last formidable account; various imperious missives from a "sharp-practice" solicitor, whose name happened to be disreputably known to George Tressady; together with repeated and most explicit assurances on the part both of agent and lawyer, that if arrangements were not made at once by Lady Tressady for meeting at least half Mr. Shapetsky's bill—which had now been running some eighteen months—and securing the other half, legal steps would be taken immediately.

Lady Tressady at first met her son's sarcasm in angry silence, then broke into shrill denunciation of Shapetsky's "villanies." How could decent people, people in society, protect themselves against such creatures!

George walked to the window, and stood looking out into the April garden. Presently he turned, and interrupted his mother.

"I notice, mother, that these transactions have been going on for nearly two years. Do you remember, when I gave you that large sum at Christmas, you said it would 'all but' clear you; and when I gave you another large sum last month, you professed to be entirely cleared? Yet all the time you were receiving these letters, and you owed this fellow almost as much as you do now. Do you think it was worth while to mislead me in that way?"

He stood leaning against the window, his fingers drumming on the sill. The contrast between the youth of the figure and the absence of youth in face and voice was curious. Perhaps Lady Tressady felt vaguely that he looked like a boy and spoke like a master, for her pride rose.

"You have no right to speak to me like that, George! I did everything for the best. I always do everything for the best. It is my misfortune to be so—so confiding, so hopeful. I must always believe in someone—that's what makes my friends so extremely fond of me. You and your poor darling father were never the least like me—" And she went off into a tearful comparison between her own character and the characters of her husband and son—in which of course it was not she that suffered.

George did not heed her. He was once more staring out of window, thinking hard. So far as he could see, the money, or the greater part of it, would have to be found. The man, of course, was a scoundrel, but of the sort that keeps within the law; and Lady Tressady's monstrous folly had given him an easy prey. When he thought of the many sacrifices he had made for his mother, of her ample allowance, her incorrigible vanity and greed—and then of the natural desires of his young wife—his heart burned within him.

"Well, I can only tell you," he said at last, turning round upon her, "that I see no way out. How is that man's claim to be met? I don't know. Even if I could meet it—which I see no chance of doing—by crippling myself for some time, how should I be at liberty to do it? My wife and her needs have now the first claim upon me."

"Very well," said Lady Tressady, proudly, raising her handkerchief, however, to hide her trembling lips.

"Let me remind you," he continued, ceremoniously, "that the whole of this place is in bad condition, except the few rooms we have just done up, and that money must be spent upon it—it is only fair to Letty that it should be spent. Let me remind you also, that you are a good deal responsible for this state of things."

Lady Tressady moved uneasily. George was now speaking in his usual half-nonchalant tone, and he had provided himself with another cigarette. But his eye held her.

"You will remember that you promised me while I was abroad to live here and look after the house. I arranged money affairs with you, and other affairs, upon that basis. But it appears that during the four years I was away you were here altogether, at different times, about three months. Yet you made me believe you were here; if I remember right, you dated your letters from here. And of course, in four years, an old house that is totally neglected goes to the bad."

"Who has been telling you such falsehoods?" cried Lady Tressady. "I was here a great deal more than that—a great deal more!"

But the scarlet colour, do what she would, was dyeing her still delicate skin, and her eyes alternately obstinate and shuffling, tried to take themselves out of the range of George's.

As for George, as he stood there coolly smoking, he was struck—or, rather, the critical mind in him was struck—by a sudden perception of the meanness of aspect which sordid cares of the kind his mother was now plunged in can give to the human face. He felt the rise of a familiar disgust. How many scenes of ugly battle over money matters could he not remember in his boyhood between his father and mother! And later—in India—what things he had known women do for money or dress! He thought scornfully of a certain intriguing lady of his acquaintance at Madras—who had borrowed money of him—to whom he had given ball-dresses; and of another, whose selfish extravagance had ruined one of the best of men. Did all women tend to be of this make, however poetic might be their outward seeming?

Aloud, he said quietly, in answer to his mother's protest:

"I think you will find that is about accurate. I mention it merely to show you how it is that I find myself now plunged in so many expenses. And, now, doesn't it strike you as a little hard that I should be called upon to strip and cripple myself still further—not to give my wife the comforts and conveniences I long to give her, but to pay such debts as those?"

Involuntarily he struck his hand on the papers lying in the chair where he had been sitting.

Lady Tressady, too, rose from her seat.

"George, if you are going to be violent towards your mother, I had better go," she said, with an attempt at dignity. "I suppose Letty has been gossiping with her servants about me. Oh! I knew what to expect!" cried Lady Tressady, gathering up fan and handkerchief from the sofa behind her with a hand that shook. "I always said from the beginning that she would set you against me! She has never treated me as—as a daughter—never! And that is my weakness—I must be cared for—I must be treated with—with tenderness."