But Betty was disarmed. The "minx" had lost her colour, and, for the moment, her prettiness. She looked depressed, and talked little. As to her relation to Marcella Betty's inquisitive brain indulged itself in a score of conjectures. "How like her!" she thought to herself, "to forget the wife's existence to begin with, and then to make love to her by way of warding off the husband!"

Meanwhile, aloud, Lady Leven professed herself exceedingly dissatisfied with the entertainment provided for her. Where were the gentlemen? What was the good of one putting on one's best frock to come down to a Maxwell Court Saturday to find only a "hen tea-party" at the end? Marcella protested that there were only too many men somewhere on the premises already, and more—with their wives—were arriving by the next train. But Maxwell had taken off such as had already appeared for a long cross-country walk.

Betty demanded the names, and Marcella gave them obediently. Betty perceived at once that the party was the party of a political chief obliged to do his duty. She allowed herself a good many shrugs of her small shoulders. "Oh, Mrs. Lexham,—very charming, of course,—but what's the good of being friends with a person who has five hundred people in London that call her Kelly? Lady Wendover? I ought to have had notice. A good mother? I should think she is! That's the whole point against her. She always gives you the idea of having reared fifteen out of a possible twelve. To see her beaming on her offspring makes me positively ashamed of being in the same business myself. Don't you agree, Lady Tressady?"

But Letty, whose chief joy a month before would have been to dart in on such a list with little pecking proofs of acquaintance, was leaning back listlessly in her chair, and could only summon a forced smile for answer.

"And Sir George, too, is coming to-night, isn't he?" said Lady Leven.

"Yes, I expect my husband to-night," said Letty, coldly, without looking at her questioner. Betty glanced quickly at the expression of the eyes which were bent upon the further reaches of the park; then, to Letty's astonishment, she bent forward impulsively and laid her little hand on Lady Tressady's arm.

"Do you mind telling me," she said in a loud whisper, with a glance over her shoulder, "your candid opinion of her as a country lady?"

Letty, taken aback, turned and laughed uneasily; but Betty went rattling on. "Have you found out that she treats her servants like hospital nurses; that they go off and on duty at stated hours; that she has workshops and art schools for them in the back premises; and that the first footman has just produced a cantata which has been sent in to the committee of the Worcester Festival (Be quiet, Marcella; if it isn't that, it's something near it); that she teaches the stable boys and the laundry maids old English dances, and the pas de quatre once a fortnight, and acts showman to her own pictures for the benefit of the neighbourhood once a week? I came once to see how she did it, but I found her and the Gairsley ironmonger measuring the ears of the Holbeins—it seems you can't know anything about pictures now unless you have measured all the ears and the little fingers, which I hope you know; I didn't!—so I fled, as she hadn't a word to throw to me, even as one of the public. Then perhaps you don't know that she has invented a whole, new, and original system of game-preserving—she and Frank fight over it by the hour—that she has upset all the wage arrangements of the county—that, perhaps, you do know, for it got into the papers—and a hundred other trifles. Has she revealed these things?"

Letty looked in perplexity from Betty's face, full of sweetness and mirth, to Marcella's.

"She hasn't talked about them," she said, hesitating. "Of course, I haven't understood a good many things that are done here—"

"Don't try," said Marcella, first laughing and then sighing.

Nothing appeased, Lady Leven chattered away, while Letty watched her hostess in silence. She had come down to the Court gloating somewhat, in spite of her very real unhappiness, over the prospect of the riches and magnificence she was to find there. And to discover that wealth might be merely the source of one long moral wrestle to the people who possessed it, burdening them with all sorts of problems and remorses that others escaped, had been a strange and, on the whole, jarring experience to her. Of course there must be rich and poor; of course there must be servants and masters. Marcella's rebellion against the barriers of life had been a sort of fatigue and offence to Letty ever since she had been made to feel it. And daily contact with the simple, and even Spartan, ways of living that prevailed—for the owners of it, at least—in the vast house, with the overflowing energy and humanity that often made its mistress a restless companion, and led her into a fair percentage of mistakes—had roused a score of half-scornful protests in the small, shrewd mind of her guest. Nevertheless, when Marcella was kind, when she put Letty on the sofa, insisting that she was tired, and anxiously accusing herself of some lack of consideration or other; when she took her to her room at night, seeing to every comfort, and taking thought for luxuries that in her heart she despised; or when, very rarely, and turning rather pale, she said a few words—sweet, hopeful, encouraging—about George's return, then Letty was conscious of a strange leap of something till then unknown, something that made her want to sob, that seemed to open to her a new room in the House of Life. Marcella had not kissed her since the day of their great scene; they had been "Lady Maxwell" and "Lady Tressady" to each other all the time, and Letty had but realised her own insolences and audacities the more, as gradually the spiritual dignity of the woman she had raved at came home to her. But sometimes when Marcella stood beside her, unconscious, talking pleasantly of London folk or Ancoats, or trying to inform herself as to Letty's life at Ferth, a half-desolate intuition would flash across the younger woman of what it might be to be admitted to the intimate friendship of such a nature, to feel those long, slender arms pressed about her once more, not in pity or remonstrance, as of one trying to exorcise an evil spirit, but in mere love, as of one asking as well as giving. The tender and adoring friendship of women for women, which has become so marked a feature of our self-realising generation, had passed Letty by. She had never known it. Now, in these unforeseen circumstances, she seemed to be trembling within reach of its emotion; divining it, desiring it, yet forced onward to the question, "What is there in me that may claim it?"

Marcella, indeed, after their first stormy interview, had once more returned to the subject of it. She had told the story of her friendship with George Tressady, very gently and plainly, in a further conversation, held between them at the elder Lady Tressady's house during that odd lady's very odd convalescence; till, indeed, she reached the last scene. She could not bring herself to deliver the truth of that. Nor was it necessary. Letty's jealousy had guessed it near enough long ago. But when all else was told, Letty had been conscious at first of a half-sore resentment that there was so little to tell. In her secret soul she knew very well what had been the effect on George. Her husband's mind had been gradually absorbed by another ideal in which she had no part; nor could she deny that he had suffered miserably. The memory of his face as he asked her to "forgive him" when she fled past him on that last wretched night was enough. But suffered for what? A few talks about politics, a few visits to poor people, an office of kindness after a street accident that any stranger must have rendered, a few meetings in the House and elsewhere!

Letty's vanity was stabbed anew by the fact that Lady Maxwell's offence was so small. It gave her a kind of measure of her own hold upon her husband.

Once, indeed, Marcella's voice and colour had wavered when she made herself describe how, on the Mile End evening, she had been conscious of pressing the personal influence to gain the political end. But good heavens!—Letty hardly understood what the speaker's evident compunction was about. Why, it was all for Maxwell! What had she thought of all through but Maxwell? Letty's humiliation grew as she understood, and as in the quiet of Maxwell Court she saw the husband and wife together.

Her anger and resentment might very well only have transferred themselves the more hotly to George. But this new moral influence upon her had a kind of paralysing effect. The incidents of the weeks before the crisis excited in her now a sick, shamed feeling whenever she thought of them. For contact with people on a wholly different plane of conduct, if such persons as Letty can once be brought to submit to it, will often produce effects, especially on women, like those one sees produced every day by the clash of two standards of manners. It means simply the recognition that one is unfit to be of certain company, and perhaps there are few moral ferments more penetrating. Probably Letty would have gone to her grave knowing nothing of it, but for the accident which had opened to her the inmost heart of a woman with whom, once known, not even her vanity dared measure itself.

George and she had already met since the day when he had gone off to Paris in search of Ancoats. The telegram sent to him by Marcella on the night of his mother's violent illness had, indeed, been recalled next day. Lady Tressady, following the idiosyncrasies of her disease, sprang from death to life—and life of the sprightliest kind—in the course of a few hours. The battered, grey-haired woman—so old, do what she would, under the betraying hand of physical decay!—no sooner heard that George had been sent for than she at once and peremptorily telegraphed to him herself to stay away. "I'm not dead yet," she wrote to him afterwards, "in spite of all the fuss they've made with me. I was simply ashamed to own such a cadaverous-looking wretch as you were when you came here last, and if you take my advice you'll stay at Trouville with Lord Ancoats and amuse yourself. As to that young man, of course it's no good, and his mother's a great fool to suppose that you or anybody else can prevent his enjoying himself. But these High Church women are so extraordinary."

Letty, indeed, remembering her mother-in-law's old ways, and finding them little changed as far as she herself was concerned, was puzzled and astonished by the new relations between mother and son. On the smallest excuse or none, Lady Tressady, a year before, would have been ready to fetch him back from furthest land without the least scruple. Now, however, she thought of him, or for him, incessantly. And one day Letty actually found her crying over an official intimation from the lawyer concerned that another instalment of the Shapetsky debt would be due within a month. But she angrily dried her tears at sight of Letty, and Letty said nothing.

George, however, came back within about ten days of his departure, having apparently done what he was commissioned to do, though Letty took so little interest in the Ancoats affair that she barely read those portions of his letters in which he described the course of it. His letters, indeed, with the exception of a few ambiguous words here and there, dealt entirely with Trouville, Ancoats, or the ups and downs of public opinion on the subject of his action and speech in the House. Letty could only gather from a stray phrase or two that he enjoyed nothing; but evidently he could not yet bring himself to speak of what had happened.

When he did come back, the husband and wife saw very little of each other. It was more convenient that he should stay in Upper Brook Street while she remained at her mother-in-law's; and altogether he was hardly three days in London. He rushed up to Market Malford to deliver his promised speech to his constituents, and immediately afterwards, on the urgent advice of the doctors, he went off to Wildheim with his mother and the elderly cousin whose aid he had already invoked. Before he went, he formally thanked his wife—who hardly spoke to him unless she was obliged—for her attention to his mother, and then lingered a little, looking no less "cadaverous," certainly, than when he had gone away, and apparently desiring to say more.

"I suppose I shall be away about a fortnight," he said at last, "if one is to settle her comfortably. You haven't told me yet what you would like to do. Couldn't you get Miss Tulloch to go down with you to Ferth, or would you go to your people for a fortnight?"

He was longing to ask her what had come of that promised visit of Lady Maxwell's. But neither by letter nor by word of mouth had Letty as yet said a word of it. And he did not know how to open the subject. During the time that he was with his wife and mother, nothing was seen of Marcella in Warwick Square, and an interview that he was to have had with Maxwell, by way of supplement to his numerous letters, had to be postponed because of overcrowded days on both sides. So that he was still in the dark.

Letty at first made no answer to his rather lame proposals for her benefit. But just as he was turning away with a look of added worry, she said:

"I don't want to go home, thank you, and I still less want to go to Ferth."

"But you can't stay in London. There isn't a soul in town; and it would be too dull for you."

He gazed at her in perplexity, praying, however, that he might not provoke a scene, for the carriage that was to take him and his mother to the station was almost at the door.

Letty rose slowly, and folded up some embroidery she had been playing with. Then she took a note from her work-basket, and laid it on the table.

"You may read that if you like. That's where I'm going."

And she quickly went out of the room.

George read the note. His face flushed, and he hurriedly busied himself with some of his preparations for departure. When his wife came into the room again he went up to her.

"You could have done nothing so likely to save us both," he said huskily, and then could think of nothing more to say. He drew her to him as though to kiss her, but a blind movement of the old rage with him or circumstance leapt in her, and she pulled herself away. The thought of that particular moment had done more perhaps than anything else to thin and whiten her since she had been at Maxwell Court.

And now he would be here to-night. She knew both from her host himself and from George's letters that Lord Maxwell had specially written to him begging him to come to the Court on his return, in order to join his wife and also to give that oral report of his mission for which there had been no time on his first reappearance. Maxwell had spoken to her of his wish to see her husband, without a tone or a word that could suggest anything but the natural friendliness and good-will of the man who has accepted a signal service from his junior. But Letty avoided Maxwell when she could; nor would he willingly have been left alone with this thin, sharp-faced girl whose letter to him had been like the drawing of an ugly veil from nameless and incredible things. He was sorry for her; but in his strong, deep nature he felt a repulsion for her he could not explain; and to watch Marcella with her amazed him.

* * * * *

Immediately after tea, Lady Leven's complaints of her entertainment became absurd. Guests poured in from the afternoon train, and a variety of men, her husband foremost among them, were soon at her disposal, asking nothing better than to amuse her.

Letty Tressady meanwhile looked on for a time at the brilliant crowd about her on the terrace, with a dull sense of being forgotten and of no account. She said to herself sullenly that of course no one would want to talk to her; it was not her circle, and she had even few acquaintances among them.

Then, to her astonishment, she began to find herself the object of an evident curiosity and interest to many people among the throng. She divined that her name was being handed from one to the other, and she soon perceived that Marcella had been asked to introduce to her this person and that, several of them men and women whose kindness, a few weeks before, would have flattered her social ambitions to the highest point. Colour and nerve returned, and she found herself sitting up, forgetting her headache, and talking fast.

"I am delighted to have this opportunity of telling you, Lady Tressady, how much I admired your husband's great speech," said the deep and unctuous voice of the grey-haired Solicitor-General as he sank into a chair beside her. "It was not only that it gave us our Bill, it gave the House of Commons a new speaker. Manner, voice, matter—all of it excellent! I hope there'll be no nonsense about his giving up his seat. Don't you let him! He will find his feet and his right place before long, and you'll be uncommonly proud of him before you've done."

"Lady Tressady, I'm afraid you've forgotten me," said a plaintive voice; and, on turning, Letty saw the red-haired Lady Madeleine asking with smiles to be remembered. "Do you know, I was lucky enough to get into the House on the great day? What a scene it was! You were there, of course?"

When Letty unwillingly said "No," there was a little chorus of astonishment.

"Well, take my advice, my dear lady," said the Solicitor-General, speaking with lazy patronage somewhere from the depths of comfort,—he was accustomed to use these paternal modes of speech to young women,—"don't you miss your husband's speeches. We can't do without our domestic critics. But for the bad quarters of an hour that lady over there has given me, I should be nowhere."

And he nodded complacently towards the wife as stout as himself, who was sitting a few yards away. She, hearing her name, nodded back, with smiles aside to the bystanders. Most of the spectators, however, were already acquainted with a conjugal pose which was generally believed to be not according to facts, and no one took the cue.

Then presently Mr. Bennett—the workmen's member from the North—was at Letty's elbow saying the most cordial things of the absent George. Bayle, too, the most immaculate and exclusive of private secretaries, who was at the Court on a wedding visit with a new wife, chose to remember Lady Tressady's existence for the first time for many months, and to bestow some of his carefully adapted conversation upon her. While, last of all, Edward Watton came up to her with a cousinly kindness she had scarcely yet received from him, and, drawing a chair beside her, overflowed with talk about George, and the Bill, and the state of things at Market Malford. In fact, it was soon clear even to Letty's bewildered sense that till her husband should arrive she was perhaps, for the moment, the person of most interest to this brilliant and representative gathering of a victorious party.

Meanwhile she was made constantly aware that her hostess remembered her. Once, as Marcella passed her, after introducing someone to her, Letty felt a hand gently laid on her shoulder and then withdrawn. Strange waves of emotion ran through the girl's senses. When would George be here? About seven, she thought, when they would all have gone up to dress. He would have arrived from Wildheim in the morning, and was to spend the day doing business in town.



CHAPTER XXII

Letty was lying on a sofa in her bedroom. Her maid was to come to her shortly, and she was impatiently listening to every sound that approached or passed her door. The great clock in the distant hall struck seven, and it seemed to her intolerably long before she heard movements in the passage, and then Maxwell's voice outside.

"Here is your room, Sir George. I hope you don't mind a few ghosts! It is one of the oldest bits of the house."

Letty sprang up. She heard the shutting of the passage door, then immediately afterwards the door from the dressing-room opened, and George came through.

"Well!" she said, staring at him, her face flushing; "surely you are very late?"

He came up to her, and put his arms round her, while she stood passive. "Not so very," he said, and she could hear that his voice was unsteady. "How are you? Give me a kiss, little woman—be a little glad to see me!"

He looked down upon her wistfully. On the journey he had been conscious of great weariness of mind and body, a longing to escape from struggle, to give and receive the balm of kind looks and soft words. He had come back full of repentance towards her, if she had only known, full too of a natural young longing for peace and good times.

She let him kiss her, but as he stooped to her it suddenly struck her that she had never seen him look so white and worn. Still; after all this holiday-making! Why? For love of a woman who never gave him a thought, except of pity. Bitterness possessed her. She turned away indifferently.

"Well, you'll only just have time to dress. Is someone unpacking for you?"

He looked at her.

"Is that all you have to say?"

She threw back her head and was silent.

"I was very glad to come back to you," he said, with a sigh, "though I—I wish it were anywhere else than here. But, all things considered, I did not see how to refuse. And you have been here the whole fortnight?"

"Yes."

"Have you"—he hesitated—"have you seen a great deal of Lady Maxwell?"

"Well, I suppose I have—in her own house." Then she broke out, her heart leaping visibly under her light dressing-gown. "I don't blame her any more, if you want to know that; she doesn't think of anyone in the world but him."

The gesture of her hand seemed to pursue the voice that had been just speaking in the corridor.

He smiled.

"Well, at least I'm glad you've come to see that!" he said quietly. "And is that all?"

He had walked away from her, but at his renewed question he turned back quickly, his hands in his pockets. Something in the look of him gave her a moment of pleasure, a throb of possession. But she showed nothing of it.

"No, it's not all"—her pale blue eyes pierced him. "Why did you go and see her that morning, and why have you never told me since?"

He started, and shrugged his shoulders.

"If you have been seeing much of her," he replied, after a pause, "you probably know as much as I could tell you."

"No," she said steadily; "she has told me much about everything—but that."

He walked restlessly about for a few seconds, then returned, holding out his hands.

"Well, my dear, I said some mad and miserable things. They are as dead now as if they had never been spoken. And they were not love-making—they were crying for the moon. Take me, and forget them. I am an unsatisfactory sort of fellow, but I will do the best I can."

"Wait a bit," she said, retreating, and speaking with a hard incisiveness. "There are plenty of things you don't know. Perhaps you don't know, for instance, that I wrote to Lord Maxwell? I sat up writing it that night—he got it the same morning you saw her."

"You wrote to Maxwell!" he said in amazement—then, under his breath—"to complain of her. My God!"

He walked away again, trying to control himself.

"You didn't suppose," she said huskily, "I was going to sit down calmly under your neglect of me? I might have been silly in not—not seeing what kind of a woman she was; that's different—besides, of course, she ought to have thought more about me. But that's not all!"

Her hand shook as she stood leaning on the sofa. George turned, and looked at her attentively.

"The day you left I went to Hampton Court with the Lucys. Cathedine was there. Of course I flirted with him all the time, and as we were going through a wood near the river he said abominable things to me, and kissed me."

Her brows were drawn defiantly. Her eyes seemed to be riveted to his. He was silent a moment, the colour dyeing his pale face deep. Then she heard his long breath.

"Well, we seem to be about quits," he said, in a bitter voice. "Have you seen him since?"

"No. That's Grier knocking—you'd better go and dress."

He paused irresolutely. But Letty said, "Come in," and he retreated into his dressing-room.

Husband and wife hurried down together, without another word to each other. When George at last found himself at table between Lady Leven and Mr. Bayle's new and lively wife, he had never been so grateful before to the ease of women's tongues. In his mental and physical fatigue, he could scarcely bear even to let himself feel the strangeness of his presence in this room—at her table, in Maxwell's splendid house. Not to feel!—somehow to recover his old balance and coolness—that was the cry of the inner man.

But the situation conquered him. Why was he here? It was barely a month since in her London drawing-room he had found words for an emotion, a confession it now burnt him to remember. And here he was, breaking bread with her and Maxwell, a few weeks afterwards, as though nothing lay between them but a political incident. Oh! the smallness, the triviality of our modern life!

Was it only four weeks, or nearly? What he had suffered in that time! An instant's shudder ran through him, during an interval, while Betty's unwilling occupation with her left-hand neighbour left memory its chance. All the flitting scenes of the past month, Ancoats's half-vicious absurdities, the humours of the Trouville beach, the waves of its grey sea, his mother's whims and plaints, the crowd and heat of the little German watering-place where he had left her—was it he, George Tressady, that had been really wrestling with these things and persons, walking among them, or beside them? It seemed hardly credible. What was real, what remained, was merely the thought of some hours of solitude, beside the Norman sea, or among the great beech-woods that swept down the hills about Bad Wildheim. Those hours—they only—had stung, had penetrated, had found the shrinking core of the soul.

What in truth was it that had happened to him? After weeks of a growing madness he had finally lost his self-command, had spoken passionately, as only love speaks, to a married woman, who had no thought for any man in the world but her husband, a woman who had immediately—so he had always read the riddle of Maxwell's behaviour—reported every incident of his conversation with her to the husband, and had then tried her best, with an exquisite kindness and compunction, to undo the mischief her own charm had caused. For that effort, in the first instance, George, under the shock of his act and her pain, had been, at intervals, speechlessly grateful to her; all his energies had gone into pitiful, eager response. Now, her attempt, and Maxwell's share in it, seemed to have laid him under a weight he could no longer bear. His acceptance of Maxwell's invitation had finally exhausted his power of playing the superhuman part to which she had invited him. He wished with all his heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting—with its mixture of shrinking and sweetness—he had realised the folly, the humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise—it was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it—to what she seemed to ask of him.

What had he been in love with? He looked at her once or twice in bewilderment. Had not she herself, her dazzling, unconscious purity, debarred him always from the ordinary hopes and desires of the sensual man? His very thought had moved in awe of her, had knelt before her. Throughout there had been this half-bitter glorying in the strangeness of his own case. The common judgment in its common vileness mattered nothing to him. He had been in love with love, with grace, with tenderness, with delight. He had seen, too late, a vision of the best; had realised what things of enchantment life contains for the few, for the chosen—what woman at her richest can be to man. And there had been a cry of personal longing—personal anguish.

Well!—it was all done with. As for friendship, it was impossible, grotesque. Let him go home, appease Letty, and mend his life. He constantly realised now, with the same surprise, as on the night before his confession, the emergence within himself, independent as it were of his ordinary will, and parallel with the voice of passion or grief, of some new moral imperative. Half scornfully he discerned in his own nature the sort of paste that a man inherits from generations of decent dull forefathers who have kept the law as they understood it. He was conscious of the same "ought" vibrating through the moral sense as had governed their narrower lives and minds. It is the presence or the absence indeed of this dumb compelling power that in moments of crisis differentiates one man from another. He felt it; wondered perhaps that he should feel it; but knew, nevertheless, that he should obey it. Yes, let him go home, make his wife forgive him, rear his children—he trusted to God there would be children!—and tame his soul. How strange to feel this tempest sweeping through him, this iron stiffening of the whole being, amid this scene, in this room, within a few feet of that magic, that voice—

* * * * *

"Thank goodness I have got rid of my man at last!" said Betty's laughing whisper in his ear. "Three successive packs of hounds have I followed from their cradles to their graves. Make it up to me, Sir George, at once! Tell me everything I want to know!"

George turned to her smiling.

"About Ancoats?"

"Of course. Now don't be discreet!—I know too much already. How did he receive you?"

George laughed—not noticing that instead of laughing with him, little Betty was staring at him open-eyed over her fan.

"To begin with, he invited me to fight—coffee and pistols before eight, on the following morning, in the garden of his chalet, which would not have been at all a bad place, for he is magnificently installed. I came from his enemies, he said. They had prevented the woman he loved from joining him, and covered him with ridicule. As their representative I ought to be prepared to face the consequences like a man. All this time he was storming up and down, in a marvellous blue embroidered smoking suit—"

"Of course, to go with the hair," put in Betty.

"I said I thought he'd better give me some dinner before we talked it out. Then he looked embarrassed and said there were friends coming. I replied, 'Tant mieux.' He inquired fiercely whether it was the part of a gentleman to thrust himself where he wasn't wanted. I kept my temper, and said I was too famished to consider. Then he haughtily left the room, and presently a servant came and asked for my luggage, which I had left at the station, and showed me a bedroom. Ancoats, however, appeared again to invite me to withdraw, and to suggest the names of two seconds who would, he assured me, be delighted to act for me. I pointed out to him that I was unpacked, and that to turn me out dinnerless would be simply barbarous. Then, after fidgeting about a little, he burst out laughing in an odd way, and said, 'Very well—only, mind, I didn't ask you.' Sure enough, of course I found a party."

George paused.

"You needn't tell me much about the party," said Betty, nervously, "unless it's necessary."

"Well, it wasn't a very reputable affair, and two young women were present."

"No need to talk about the young women," said Betty, hastily.

George bowed submission.

"I only mentioned them because they are rather necessary to the story. Anyway, by the time the company was settled Ancoats suddenly threw off his embarrassment, and, with some defiant looks at me, behaved himself, I imagine, much as he would have done without me. When all the guests were gone, I asked him whether he was going to keep up the farce of a grande passion any more. He got in a rage and vowed that if 'she' had come, of course all those creatures, male and female, would be packed off. I didn't suppose that he would allow the woman he loved to come within a mile of them? I shrugged my shoulders and declined to suppose anything about his love affairs, which seemed to me too complicated. Then, of course, I had to come to plain speaking, and bring in his mother."

"That she should have produced such a being!" cried Betty; "that he should have any right in her at all!"

"That she should keep such a heart for him!" said George, raising his eyebrows. "He turned rather white, I was relieved to see, when I told him from her that she would leave his house if the London affair went on. Well, we walked up and down in his garden, smoking, the greater part of the night, till I could have dropped with fatigue. Every now and then Ancoats would make a dash for the brandy and soda on the verandah; and in between I had to listen to tirades against marriage, English prudery, and English women,—quotations from Gautier and Renan,—and Heaven knows what. At last, when we were both worn out, he suddenly stood still and delivered his ultimatum. 'Look here—if you think I've no grievances, you're much mistaken. Go back and tell my mother that if she'll marry Fontenoy straight away I'll give up Marguerite!' I said I would deliver no such impertinence. 'Very well,' he said; 'then I will. Tell her I shall be in Paris next week, and ask her to meet me there. When are you going?' 'Well,' I said, rather taken aback, 'there is such an institution as the post. Now I've come so far, suppose you show me Trouville for a few days?' He muttered something or other, and we went to bed. Afterwards, he behaved to me quite charmingly, would not let me go, and I ended by leaving him at the door of an hotel in Paris where he was to meet his mother. But on the subject of Fontenoy it is an idee fixe. He chafes under the whole position, and will yield nothing to a man who, as he conceives, has no locus standi. But if his pride were no longer annoyed by its being said that his mother had sacrificed her own happiness to him, and if the situation were defined, I think he might be more amenable. I think they might marry him."

"That's how the man puts it!" said Betty, tightening her lip. "Of course any marriage is desirable for any woman!"

"I was thinking of Mrs. Allison," said George, defensively. "One can't think of a Lady Ancoats till she exists."

"Merci! Never mind. Don't apologise for the masculine view. It has to be taken with the rest of you. Do you understand that matrimony is in the air here to-night? Have you been talking to Lady Madeleine?"

"No, not yet. But how handsome she's grown! I see Naseby's not far off."

George turned smiling to his companion. But, as he did so, again something cold and lifeless in his own face and in the expression underlying the smile pricked little Betty painfully. Marcella had made her no confidences, but there had been much gossip, and Letty Tressady's mere presence at the Court set the intimate friend guessing very near the truth.

She did her best to chatter on, so as to keep him at least superficially amused. But both became more and more conscious of two figures, and two figures only, at the crowded table—Letty Tressady, who was listening absently to Edward Watton with oppressed and indrawn eyes, and Lady Maxwell.

George, indeed, watched his wife constantly. He hungered to know more of that first scene between her and Lady Maxwell, or he thought with bitter repulsion of the letter she had confessed to him. Had he known of it,—in spite of that strange, that compelling letter of Maxwell's, so reticent, and yet in truth so plain,—he could hardly have come as a guest to Maxwell's house. As for her revelations about Cathedine, he felt little resentment or excitement. For the future a noxious brute had to be kept in order—that was all. It was his own fault, he supposed, much more than hers. The inward voice, as before, was clear enough. "I must just take her home and be good to her. She shirked nothing—now, no doubt, she expects me to do my part."

"Do you notice those jewels that Lady Maxwell is wearing to-night?" said Betty at last, unable to keep away from the name.

"I imagine they are a famous set?"

"They belonged to Marie Antoinette. At last Maxwell has made her have them cleaned and reset. What a pity to have such desperate scruples as she has about all your pretty things!"

"Must diamonds and rubies, then, perish out of the world?" he asked her, absently, letting his eyes rest again upon the beautiful head and neck.

Betty made some flippant rejoinder, but as she watched him, she was not gay.

* * * * *

George had had but a few words with his hostess before dinner, and afterwards a short conversation was all that either claimed. She had hoped and planned so much! On the stage of imagination before he came—she had seen his coming so often. All was to be forgotten and forgiven, and this difficult visit was to lead naturally and without recall to another and happier relation. And now that he was here she felt herself tongue-tied, moving near him in a dumb distress. Both realised the pressure of the same necessities, the same ineluctable facts; and tacitly, they met and answered each other, in the common avoidance of a companionship which could after all avail nothing. Once or twice, as they stood together after dinner, he noticed amid her gracious kindness, her inquiries after Mrs. Allison or his mother, the search her eyes made for Letty, and presently she began to talk with nervous, almost appealing, emphasis—with a marked significance and intensity indeed—of Letty's fatigue after her nursing, and the need she had for complete change and rest. George found himself half resenting the implications of her manner, as the sentences flowed on. He felt her love of influence, and was not without a hidden sarcasm. In spite of his passionate gratitude to her, he must needs ask himself, did she suppose that a man or a marriage was to be remade in a month, even by her plastic fingers? Women envisaged these things so easily, so childishly, almost.

When he moved away, a number of men who had already been talking to him after dinner, and some of the most agreeable women of the party besides, closed about him, making him, as it were, the centre of a conversation which was concerned almost entirely with the personalities and chances of the political moment. He was scarcely less astonished than Letty had been by his own position amongst the guests gathered under Maxwell's roof. Never had he been treated with so much sympathy, so much deference even. Clearly, if he willed it so, what had seemed the dislocation might only be the better beginning of a career. Nonsense! He meant to throw it all up as soon as Parliament met again in February. The state of his money affairs alone determined that. The strike was going from bad to worse. He must go home and look after his own business. It was a folly ever to have attempted political life. Meanwhile he felt the stimulus of his reception in a company which included some of the keenest brains in England. It appealed to his intelligence and virility, and they responded. Letty once, glancing at him, saw that he was talking briskly, and said to herself, with contradictory bitterness, that he was looking as well as ever, and was going, she supposed, to behave as if nothing had happened.

"What is the matter with you to-night, my lady?" said Naseby, taking a seat beside his hostess. "May I be impertinent and guess?—you don't like your gems? Lady Leven has been telling me tales about them. They are the most magnificent things I ever saw. I condole with you."

She turned rather listlessly to meet his bantering look.

"'Come you in friendship, or come you in war?'" she said, pointing to a seat beside her. "I have no fight in me. But I have a great many things to say to you."

He reddened for an instant, then recovered himself.

"So have I to you," he said briskly. "In the first place, I have some fresh news from Mile End."

She half laughed, as who should say, "You put me off," then surrendered herself with eagerness to the pleasure of his report. At the moment of his approach, under pretence of talking to an elderly cousin of Maxwell's, she had been lost in such an abstraction of powerless pity for George Tressady—whose fair head, somehow, never escaped her, wherever it moved—that she had hardly been able to bear with her guests or the burden of the evening.

But Naseby roused her. And, indeed, his story so far was one to set the blood throbbing in the veins of a creature who, on one side pure woman, was on the other half poet, half reformer. Since the passage of the Maxwell Bill, indeed, Naseby and a few friends of his, some "gilded youths" like himself, together with some trade-union officials of a long experience, had done wonders. They had been planning out the industrial reorganisation of a whole district, through its two staple trades, with the enthusiastic co-operation of the workpeople themselves; and the result so far struck the imagination. Everywhere the old workshops were to be bought up, improved, or closed; everywhere factories in which life might be decent, and work more than tolerable, were to be set up; everywhere the prospective shortening of hours, and the doing away with the most melancholy of the home trades was working already like the incoming of a great slowly surging tide, raising a whole population on its breast to another level of well-being and of hope.

Most of what had been done or designed was of course already well known to Maxwell's wife; she had indeed given substantial help to Naseby throughout. But Naseby had some fresh advances to report since she was last in East London, and she drank them in with an eagerness, which somehow assuaged a hidden smart; while he wondered a little perhaps in his philosopher's soul at the woman of our English day, with her compunctions and altruisms, her entanglement with the old scheme of things, her pining for a new. It had often seemed to him that to be a Nihilist nurse among a Russian peasantry would be an infinitely easier task than to reconcile the social remorses and compassions that tore his companion's mind with the social pageant in which her life, do what she would, must needs be lived. He knew that, intellectually, she no more than Maxwell saw any way out of unequal place, unequal spending, unequal recompense, if civilisation were to be held together; but he perceived that morally she suffered. Why? Because she and not someone else had been chosen to rule the palace and wear the gems that yet must be? In the end, Naseby could but shrug his shoulders over it. Yet even his sceptical temper made no question of sincerity.

When all his budget was out, and her comments made, she leant back a little in her chair, studying him. A smile came to play about her lips.

"What do you want to say to me?" he asked her quickly.

She looked round her to see that they were not overheard.

"When did you see Madeleine last?"

"At her brother's house, a fortnight ago."

"Was she nice to you?"

He bit his lip, and drew his brows a little together, under her scrutiny.

"Do you imagine I am going to be cross-examined like this?"

"Yes—reply!"

"Well, I don't know what her conception of 'niceness' may be; it didn't fit mine. She had got it into her head that I 'pitied' her, which seemed to be a crime. I didn't see how to disprove it, so I came away."

He spoke with a dry lightness, but she perceived anxiety and unrest under his tone. She bent forward.

"Do you know where Madeleine is now?"

"Not in the least."

"In the Long Gallery. I sent her there."

"Upon my word!" he said, after a pause. "Do you want to rule us all?" His cheek had flushed again; his look was half rebellious.

A flash of pain struck through her brightness.

"No, no!" she said, protesting. "But I know—you don't!"

He rose deliberately, and bowed with the air of obeying her commands. Then suddenly he bent down to her.

"I knew perfectly well that she was in the Long Gallery! But I also knew that Mrs. Bayle had chosen to join her there. The coast, you may perceive, is now clear."

He walked away. Marcella looked round, and saw an elegant little bride, Mr. Bayle's new wife, rustling into the room again. She leant back in her chair, half laughing, yet her eyes were wet. The new joy brought a certain ease to old regrets. Only that word "rule" rankled a little.

Yet the old regrets were all sharp and active again. It seemed to be impossible now to talk with George Tressady, to make any real breach in the barrier between them; but how impossible also not to think of him!—of the young fellow, who had given Maxwell his reward, and said to herself such sad, such agitating things! She did think of him. Her heart ached to serve him. The situation made a new and a very troubling appeal to her womanhood.

* * * * *

The night was warm, and still, and the windows were open to it as they had been on that May night at Castle Luton. Maxwell came to look for Tressady, and took him out upon a flagged terrace that ran the length of the house.

They talked first of the Ancoats incident, George supplementing his letters by some little verbal pictures of Ancoats's life and surroundings that made Maxwell laugh grimly from time to time. As to Mrs. Allison, Maxwell reported that Ancoats seemed to have gained his point. There was talk of the marriage coming off some time in the winter.

"Well, Fontenoy has earned his prize," said George.

"There are more than twelve years between them. But she seems to be one of the women who don't age. I have seen her go through griefs that would kill most women; and it has been like the passage of a storm over a flower."

"Religion, I suppose, carried to that point, protects one a good deal," said George, not, in truth, feeling much interest in the matter or in Mrs. Allison now that his task was done.

"And especially religion of the type that allows you to give your soul into someone else's keeping. There is no such anodyne," said Maxwell, musing. "I have often noticed how Catholic women keep their youth and softness. But now, do allow me a few words about yourself. Is what I hear about your withdrawal from Parliament irrevocable?"

George's reply led to a discussion in which Maxwell, without any attempt at party proselytism, endeavoured to combat all that he could understand of the young man's twofold disgust, disgust with his own random convictions no less than with the working of the party machine.

"Where do I belong?" he said. "I don't know myself. I ought never to have gone in. Anyway, I had better stand aside for a time."

"But evidently the Malford people want to keep you."

"Well, and of course I shall consult their convenience as much as I can," said George, unwillingly, but would say no more.

Nothing, indeed, could be more flattering, more healing, than all that was implied in Maxwell's earnestness, in the peculiar sympathy and kindness with which the elder man strove to win the younger's confidence; but George could not respond. His whole inner being was too sore; and his mind ran incomparably more upon the damnable letter that must be lying somewhere in the archives of the memory of the man talking to him, than upon his own political prospects. The conversation ended for Maxwell in mere awkwardness and disappointment,—deep disappointment if the truth were known. Once roused his idealism was little less stubborn, less wilful than Marcella's.

When the ladies withdrew, a brilliant group of them stood for a moment on the first landing of the great oak staircase, lighting candles and chattering. Madeleine Penley took her candle absently from Marcella's hand, saying nothing. The girl's curious face under its crown of gold-red hair was transformed somehow to an extraordinary beauty. The frightened parting of the lips and lifting of the brows had become rather a look of exquisite surprise, as of one who knows at last "the very heart of love."

"I am coming to you, presently," murmured Marcella, laying her cheek against the girl's.

"Oh, do come!" said Madeleine, with a great breath, and she walked away, unsteadily, by herself, into the darkness of the tapestried passage, her white dress floating behind her.

Marcella looked after her, then turned with shining eyes to Letty Tressady. Her expression changed.

"I am afraid your headache has been very bad all the evening," she said penitently. "Do let me come and look after you."

She went with Letty to her room, and put her into a chair beside the wood fire, that even on this warm night was not unwelcome in the huge place. Letty, indeed, shivered a little as she bent towards it.

"Must you go so early?" said Marcella, hanging over her. "I heard Sir George speak of the ten o'clock train."

"Oh, yes," said Letty, "that will be best."

She stared into the fire without speaking. Marcella knelt down beside her.

"You won't hate me any more?" she said, in a low, pleading voice, taking two cold hands in her own.

Letty looked up.

"I should like," she said, speaking with difficulty, "if you cared—to see you sometimes."

"Only tell me when," said Marcella, laying her lips lightly on the hands, "and I will come." Then she hesitated. "Oh, do believe," she broke out at last, but still in the same low voice, "that all can be healed! Only show him love,—forget everything else,—and happiness must come. Marriage is so difficult—such an art—even for the happiest people, one has to learn it afresh day by day."

Letty's tired eyes wavered under the other's look.

"I can't understand it like that," she said. Then she moved restlessly in her chair. "Ferth is a terrible place! I wonder how I shall bear it!"

* * * * *

An hour later Marcella left Madeleine Penley and went back to her own room. The smile and flush with which she had received the girl's last happy kisses disappeared as she walked along the corridor. Her head drooped, her arms hung listlessly beside her.

Maxwell found her in her own little sitting-room almost in the dark. He sat down by her and took her hand.

"You couldn't make any impression on him as to Parliament?" she asked him, almost whispering.

"No. He persists that he must go. I think his private circumstances at Ferth have a great deal to do with it."

She shook her head. She turned away from him, took up a paper-knife, and let it fall on the table beside her. He thought that she must have been in tears, before he found her, and he saw that she could find no words in which to express herself. Lifting her hand to his lips, he held it there, silently, with a touch all tenderness.

"Oh, why am I so happy!" she broke out at last, with a sob, almost drawing her hand away. "Such a life as mine seems to absorb and batten upon other people's dues—to grow rich by robbing their joy, joy that should feed hundreds and comes all to me! And that besides I should actually bruise and hurt—"

Her voice failed her.

"Fate has a way of being tolerably even, at last," said Maxwell, slowly, after a pause. "As to Tressady, no one can say what will come of it. He has strange stuff in him—fine stuff I think. He will pull himself together. And for the wife—probably, already he owes you much! I saw her look at you to-night—once as you touched her shoulder. Dear!—what spells have you been using?"

"Oh! I will do all I can—all I can!" Marcella repeated in a low, passionate voice, as one who makes a vow to her own heart.

"But after to-morrow he will not willingly come across us again," said Maxwell, quietly. "That I saw."

She gave a sad and wordless assent.



CHAPTER XXIII

Letty Tressady sat beside the doorway of one of the small red-brick houses that make up the village of Ferth. It was a rainy October afternoon, and through the door she could see the black main street —houses and road alike bedabbled in wet and mire. At one point in the street her eye caught a small standing crowd of women and children, most of them with tattered shawls thrown over their heads to protect them from the weather. She knew what it meant. They were waiting for the daily opening of the soup kitchen, started in the third week of the great strike by the Baptist minister, who, in the language of the Tory paper, was "among the worst firebrands of the district." There was another soup kitchen further down, to which George had begun to subscribe immediately on his return to the place. She had thought it a foolish act on his part thus to help his own men to fight him the better. But—now, as she watched the miserable crowd outside the Baptist chapel, she felt the teasing pressure of those new puzzles of her married life which had so far done little else, it seemed, than take away her gaiety and her power of amusing herself.

Near her sat an oldish woman with an almost toothless mouth, who was chattering to her in a tone that Letty knew to be three parts hypocritical.

"Well, the treuth is the men is that fool 'ardy when they gets a thing into their yeds, there's no taakin wi un. There's plenty as done like the strike, my lady, but they dursent say so—they'd be afeard o' losin the skin off their backs, for soom o' them lads o' Burrows's is a routin rough lot as done keer what they doos to a mon, an yo canna exspeck a quiet body to stan up agen 'em. Now, my son, ee comes in at neet all slamp and downcast, an I says to 'im, 'Is there noa news yet o' the Jint Committee, John?' I ses to un. 'Noa, mither,' ee says, 'they're just keepin ov it on.' An ee do seem so down'earted when ee sees the poor soart ov a supper as is aw I can gie un to 'is stomach. Now, I'm wun o' thoase as wants nuthin. The doctor ses, 'Yo've got no blude in yer, Missus 'Ammersley, what 'ull yer 'ave?' An I says, 'Nuthin! it's sun cut, an it's sun cooked, nuthin!' Noa, I've niver bin on t' parish—an I might—times. An I don't 'old wi strikes. Lor, it is a poor pleace, is ours—ain't it?—an nobbut a bit o' bread an drippin for supper."

The old woman threw her eyes round her kitchen, bringing them back slyly to Letty's face. Letty ended by leaving some money with her, and walking away as dissatisfied with her own charity as she was with its recipient. Perhaps this old body was the only person in the village who would have begged of "Tressady's wife" at this particular moment. Letty, moreover, had some reason to believe that her son was one of the roughest of Burrows's bodyguard; while the old woman was certainly no worse off than any of her neighbours.

Outside, she was disturbed to find as she walked home, that the street was full of people, in spite of the rain—of gaunt men and pinched women, who threw her hostile and sidelong glances as she passed. She hurried through them. How was it that she knew nothing of them—except, perhaps, of the few toadies and parasites among them? How was one to penetrate into this ugly, incomprehensible world of "the people"? The mere idea of trying to do so filled her with distaste and ennui. She was afraid of them. She wished she had not stayed so long with that old gossip, Mrs. Hammersley, and that there were not so many yards of dark road between her and her own gate. Where was George? She knew that he had gone up to the pits that afternoon to consult his manager about some defect in the pumping arrangements. She wished she had secured his escort for the walk home.

But before she left the village she paused irresolutely, then turned down a side street, and went to see Mary Batchelor, George's old nurse, the mother who had lost her only son in his prime.

When, a few minutes later, she came up the lane, she was flatly conscious of having done a virtuous thing—several virtuous things—that afternoon, but certainly without any pleasure in them. She did not get on with Mary, nor Mary with her. The tragic absorption of the mother—little abated since the spring—in her dead boy seemed somehow to strike Letty dumb. She felt pity, but yet the whole emotion was beyond her, and she shrank from it. As for Mary, she had so far received Lady Tressady's visits with a kind of dull surprise, always repeated and not flattering. Letty believed that, in her inmost heart, the broken woman was offended each time that it was not George who came. Moreover, though she never said a word of it to Tressady's wife, she was known to be passionately on the side of the strikers, and her manner gave the impression that she did not want to be talking with their oppressors. Perhaps it was this feeling that had reconciled her to the loutish lad who lived with her, and had been twice "run in" by the police for stone-throwing at non-union men since the beginning of the strike. At any rate, she took a great deal more notice of him than she had done.

No—they were not very satisfactory, these attempts of Letty's in the village. She thought of them with a kind of inner exasperation as she walked home. She had been going to a few old and sick people, and trying to ignore the strike. But at bottom she felt an angry resentment towards these loafing, troublesome fellows, who filled the village street when they ought to have been down in the pits—who were starving their own children no less than disturbing and curtailing the incomes of their betters. Did they suppose that people were going to run pits for them for nothing? Their drink and their religion seemed to her equally hideous. She hated the two Dissenting ministers of the place only less than Valentine Burrows himself, and delighted to pass their wives with her head high in air.

With these general feelings towards the population in her mind, why these efforts at consolation and almsgiving? Well, the poor old people were not responsible; but she did not see that any good had come of it. She had said nothing about her visits to George, nor did-she suppose that he had noticed them. He had been so incessantly busy since their arrival with conferences and committees that she had seen very little of him. It was generally believed that the strike was nearing its end, and that the men were exhausted; but she did not think that George was very hopeful yet.

Presently, as she neared a dark slope of road, bordered with trees on one side and the high "bank" of the main pit on the other, her thoughts turned back to their natural and abiding subject—herself. Oh, the dulness of life at Ferth during the last three weeks! She thought of her amusements in town, of the country houses where they might now be staying but for George's pride, of Cathedine, even; and a rush of revolt and self-pity filled her mind. George always away, nothing to do in the ugly house, and Lady Tressady coming directly—she said to herself, suffocating, her small hands stiffening, that she felt fit to kill herself.

Half-way down the slope she heard steps behind her in the gathering darkness, and at the same moment something struck her violently on the shoulder. She cried out, and clutched at some wooden railings along the road for support, as the lump of "dirt" from the bank which had been flung at her dropped beside her.

"Letty, is that you?" shouted a voice from the direction of the village—her husband's voice. She heard running. In a few seconds George had reached her and was holding her.

"What is it struck you? I see! Cowards! damned cowards! Has it broken your arm? Try and move it."

Sick with pain she tried to obey him. "No," she said faintly; "it is not broken—I think not."

"Good!" he cried, rejoicing; "probably only a bad bruise. The brute mercifully picked up nothing very hard"—and he pushed the lump with his foot. "Take my scarf, dear; let me sling it. Ah!—what was that? Letty! can you be brave—can you let me go one minute? I sha'n't be out of your sight."

And he pointed excitedly to a dark spot moving among the bushes along the lower edge of the "bank."

Letty nodded. "I can stay here."

George leapt the palings and ran. The dark spot ran too, but in queer leaps and bounds. There was the sound of a scuffle, then George returned, dragging something or someone behind him.

"I knew it," he said, panting, as he came within earshot of his wife; "it was that young ruffian, Mary Batchelor's grandson! Now you stand still, will you? I could hold two of the likes of you with one hand. Madan!"

He had but just parted from his manager on the path which led sideways up the "bank," and waited anxiously to see if his voice would reach the Scotchman's ears. But no one replied. He shouted again; then he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly towards the pit, holding the struggling lad all the time.

At the same moment a couple of heavily built men, evidently colliers, came down the road from the village. George at once called to them from across the palings.

"Here, you there! this young rascal has been throwing a lump of dirt at Lady Tressady, and has hit her badly on the arm. Will you two just walk him up to the police-station for me, while I take my wife home?"

The two men stopped and stared at the lady by the railings and at Sir George holding the boy, whose white but grinning face was just visible in the growing dusk.

"Noa," said one of them at last, "it's noa business ov ourn—is it, Bill?"

"Noa," said the other, stolidly; and on they tramped.

"Oh, you heroes!" George flung after them. "Attacking a woman in the dark is about what you understand!—Madan!"

He whistled again, and this time there was a hurrying from overhead.

"Sir George!"

"Come down here, will you, at once!"

In a few more minutes the boy was being marched up the road to the police-station in charge of the strong-wristed Scotch manager, and George was free to attend to Letty.

He adjusted a sling very fairly, then made her cling to him with her sound arm; and they were soon inside their own gates.

"You can't climb this hill," he said to her anxiously. "Rest at the lodge, and let me go for the brougham."

"I can walk perfectly well—and it will be much quicker."

Involuntarily, he was surprised to find her rather belittling than exaggerating the ill. As they climbed on in the dark, he helping her as much as he could, both could not but think of another accident and another victim. Letty found herself imagining again and again what the scene with Lady Maxwell, after the East End meeting, might have been like; while, as for him, a face drew itself upon the rainy dusk, which the will seemed powerless to blot out. It was a curious and unwelcome coincidence. His secret sense of it made him the more restlessly kind.

"What were you in the village for?" he asked, bending to her; "I did not know you had anything to do there!"

"I had been to see old Bessie Hammersley and Mrs. Batchelor," she said, in a tone that tried to be stiff or indifferent. "Bessie begged, as usual."

"That was very good of you. Have you been doing visiting, then, during all these days I have been away?"

"Yes—a few people."

George groaned.

"What's the use of it—or of anything? They hate us and we them. This strike begins to eat into my very being. And the men will be beaten soon, and the feeling towards the employers will be worse than ever."

"You are sure they will be beaten?"

"Before Christmas, anyway. I daresay there will be some bad times first. To think a woman even can't walk these roads without danger of ill-treatment! How is one to have any dealings with the brutes, or any peace with them?"

His rage and bitterness made her somehow feel her bruises less. She even looked up in protest.

"Well, it was only a boy, and you used to think he wasn't all there."

"Oh! all there!" said George, scornfully. "There'd be half of them in Bedlam if one had to make that excuse for them. There isn't a day passes without some devilry against the non-union men somewhere. It was only this morning I heard of two men being driven into a reservoir near Rilston, and stoned in the water."

"Perhaps we should do the same," she said unwillingly.

"Lean on me more heavily—we shall soon be there. You think we should be brutes too? Probably. We seem to be all brutes for each other—that's the charming way this competitive world is managed. So you have been looking after some of the old people, have you? You must have had a dull time of it this last three weeks—don't think I don't know that!"

He spoke with emotion. He thought he felt her grasp waver a little on his arm, but she did not speak.

"Suppose—when this business was over—I were to cut the whole concern—let the pits and the house, and go right away? I daresay I could."

"Could you?" she said eagerly.

"We shouldn't get so much money, you know, as in the best years. But then it would be certain. What would you say to a thousand a year less?" he asked her, trying to speak lightly.

"Well, it doesn't seem easy to get on with what we have—even if we had it," she said sharply.

He understood the reference to his mother's debts, and was silent.

But evidently the recollection, once introduced, generated the usual heat and irritation in her, for, as they neared the front door, she suddenly said, with an acerbity he had not heard for some weeks:

"Of course, to have a country house, and not to be able to spend a farthing upon it—to ask your friends, or have anything decent—is enough to make anyone sick of it. And, above all, when we needn't have been here at all this October—"

She stopped, shrinking from the rest of the sentence, but not before he had time to think, "She say that!—monstrous!"

Aloud he coldly replied:

"It is difficult to see where I could have been but here, this October."

Then the door opened, and the light showed her to him pale, with lips tight pressed from the pain of her injury. Instantly he forgot everything but his natural pity and chivalry towards women. He led her in, and half carried her upstairs. A little later she was resting on her bed, and he had done everything he could for her till the doctor should come. She seemed to have passed into an eclipse of temper or moodiness, and he got little gratitude.

The evening post brought her a letter which he took up to her himself. He knew the clear, rapid hand, and he knew, too, that Letty had received many such during the preceding month. He stood beside her a moment, almost on the point of asking her to let him see it. But the words died on his lips. And, perceiving that she would not read it while he was there, he went away again.

When he returned, carrying a new book and asking if he should read to her, he found her lying with her cheek on her hand, staring into the fire, and so white and miserable that his heart sank. Had he married her, a girl of twenty-four, only to destroy her chance of happiness altogether? A kind of terror seized him. He had been "good to her," so far as she and his business had allowed him, since their return; there had been very little outward jarring; but no one knew better than he that there had not been one truly frank or reconciling moment.

His own inner life during these weeks had passed in one obscure continuous struggle—a sort of dull fever of the soul. And she had simply held herself aloof from him.

He knelt down beside her, and laid his face against hers.

"Don't look so unhappy!" he said in a whisper, caressing her free hand. She did not answer or make any response till, as he got up again in a kind of despair as to what to do or say next, she hastily asked:

"Has the constable been up here to see you?"

He looked at her in surprise.

"Yes. It is all arranged. The lad will be brought up before the magistrates on Thursday."

She fidgeted, then said abruptly:

"I should like him to be let off."

He hesitated.

"That's very nice of you, but it wouldn't be very good for the district."

She did not press the matter, but as he moved away she said fretfully:

"I wish you'd read to me. The pain's horrid."

Thankful, in his remorse, to do anything for her, he tried to amuse and distract her as he best could. But in the middle of a magazine story she interrupted him:

"Isn't it the day after to-morrow your mother's coming?"

"According to her letter this morning." He put down the book. "But I don't think you'll be at all fit to look after her. Shall I write to-night and suggest that she stays in London a little?"

"No. I shall be all right, the doctor says. I want to tell Esther"—Esther was the housemaid—"not to get the Blue Room ready for her. I looked in to-day, and it seemed damp. The back room over the dining-room is smaller, but it's much warmer."

She turned to look at him with a rather flushed face.

"You know best," he said, smiling. "I am sure it will be all right. But I sha'n't let her come unless you are better."

He went on reading till it grew late, and it seemed to him she was dropping off to sleep. He was stealing off by way of the large dressing-room near by, where he had been installed since their return, when, she said faintly, "Good-night!"

He returned, and felt the drawing of her hot hand. He stooped and kissed her. Then she turned away from him, and seemed to go instantly to sleep.

He went downstairs to his library, and gathered about him some documents he had brought back from the last meeting of the masters' committee, which had to be read. But in reality he spent an hour of random thought. When would she herself tell him anything of her relations to Lady Maxwell, of the nature and causes of that strange subjection which, as he saw quite plainly, had been brought about? She must know that he pined to know; yet she held her secret only the more jealously, no doubt to punish him.

He thought of her visits to the village, half humorously, half sadly; then of her speech about the Blue Room and his mother. They seemed to him signs of some influence at work.

But at last he turned back to his papers with a long impatient sigh. The clear pessimism with which he was wont to see facts that concerned himself maintained that all the surrounding circumstance of the case was as untoward as it could be—this dull house, a troubled district, his money affairs, the perpetual burden of his mother, Letty's own thirst for pleasure, and the dying down in himself of the feelings that might once—possibly—have made up to her for a good deal. The feelings might be simulated. Was the woman likely to be deceived? That she was capable of the fiercest jealousy had been made abundantly plain; and such a temper once roused would find a hundred new provocations, day by day, in the acts and doings of a husband who had ceased to be a lover.

Two days later Lady Tressady arrived, with Justine, and her dogs, and all her paraphernalia. She declared herself better, but she was a mere shadow of the woman who had tormented George with her debts and affectations at Malford House a twelvemonth before. She took Ferth discontentedly, as usual, and was particularly cross with Letty's assignment to her of the back room, instead of the larger spare room to the front of the house.

"Damp?—nonsense!" she said to Justine, who was trying to soothe her on the night she arrived. "I suppose Lady Tressady has some friend of her own coming to stay—that's, of course, what it is. C'est parfaitement clair, je te dis—parfaitement!"

The French maid reminded her that her daughter-in-law had said, on showing her the room, she had only to express a wish to change, and the arrangements should be altered at once.

"I daresay," cried Lady Tressady. "But I shall ask no favours of her—and that, of course, she knew."

"But, miladi, I need only speak to the housemaid."

"Thank you! Then afterwards, whenever I had a pain or a finger-ache, it would be, 'I told you so!' No! she has managed it very cleverly—very cleverly indeed!—and I shall let it alone."

Thenceforward, however, there were constant complaints of everything provided for her—room, food, the dulness of the place, the manners of her daughter-in-law. Whether it was that her illness had now reached a stage when the will could no longer fight against it, and its only effect was demoralising; or whether the strange flash of courage and natural affection struck from the volatile nature by the first threat of death could not in any case have maintained itself, it is hard to say. At any rate, George also found it hard to keep up his new and better ways with her. The fact was, he suffered through Letty. In a few days his sympathies were all with her, and to his amazement he perceived before long that, in spite of occasional sharp speeches and sulky moments that only an angel could have forborne, she was really more patient under his mother's idiosyncrasies than he was. Yet Lady Tressady, even now, was rarely unmanageable in his presence, and could still restrain herself if it was a question of his comfort and repose; whereas, it was clear that she felt a cat-like impulse to torment Letty whenever she saw her.

One recent habit, however, bore with special heaviness on himself. Oddly enough, it was a habit of religious discussion. Lady Tressady in health had never troubled herself in the least as to what the doctors of the soul might have to say, and had generally gaily professed herself a sceptic in religious matters, mostly, as George had often thought, for the sake of escaping all inconvenient restrictions—such as family prayers, or keeping Sunday, or observing Lent—which might have got in the way of her amusements.

But, now, poor lady, she was all curiosity and anxiety about this strange other side of things, and inclined, too, to be rather proud of the originality of her inquiries on the subject. So that night after night she would keep George up, after an exhausting day, till the small hours, while she declared her own views "on God, on Nature, and on Human Life," and endeavoured to extract his. This latter part of the exercise was indeed particularly attractive to her; no doubt because of its difficulty. George had been a singularly reserved person in these respect's all his life, and had no mind now to play the part of a coal-seam for his mother to "pike" at. But "pike" she would incessantly.

"Now, George, look here! what do you really think about a future life? Now don't try and get out of it! And don't just talk nonsense to me because you think I'm ill. I'm not a baby—I really am not. Tell me—seriously—what you think. Do you honestly expect there is a future life?"

"I've told you before, mother, that I have no particular thoughts on that subject. It isn't in my line," George would say, smiling profanely, but uneasily, and wondering how long this bout of it might be going to last.

"Don't be shocking, George! You must have some ideas about it. Now, don't hum and haw—just tell me what you think." And she would lean forward, all urgency and expectation.

A pause, during which George could think only of the ghastly figure on the sofa. She sat upright, generally, against a prop of cushions, dressed in a white French tea-gown, slim enough to begin, with, but far too large now for the shrunk form—a bright spot of rouge on either pinched cheek, and the dyed "fringe" and "coils" covering all the once shapely head. Meanwhile her hand would play impatiently on her knee. The hand was skin and bone; and the rings with which it was laden would often slip off from it to the floor—a diversion of which George was always prompt to avail himself.

"Why don't you talk to Mr. Fearon, mother?" he would say gently at last. "It's his business to discuss these things."

"Talk to a clergyman! thank you! I hope I have more respect for my own intelligence. What can a priest do for you? What does he know more than anybody else? But I do want to know what my own son thinks. Now, George, just answer me. If there is a future life"—she spread out her hand slowly on her lap—"what do you suppose your father's doing at this moment? That's a thing I often think of, George. I don't think I want a future life if it's to be just like the past. You know—you remember how he used to be—poking about the house, and going down to the pits, and—and—swearing at the servants, and having rows with me about the accounts—and all his dear dreadful little ways? Yet, what else in the world can you imagine him doing? As to singing hymns!"

She raised her hands expressively.

George laughed, and puffed away at his cigarette. But as he still said nothing Lady Tressady began to frown.

"That's the way you always get out of my questions," she said fretfully; "it's so provoking of you."

"I've recommended you to the professional," he said, patting her hand. "What else could I do?"

Her thin cheek flamed.

"As if we couldn't be certain, anyway," she cried, "that the Christians don't know anything about it. As M. d'Estrelles used to say to me at Monte Carlo, if there's one thing clear, it is that we needn't bother ourselves with their doctrines!"

"Needn't we?" said George. Then he looked at her, smiling. "And you think M. d'Estrelles was an authority?"

Odd recollections began to run through his mind of this elderly French admirer of his mother's, whom he had seen occasionally flitting about their London lodgings when, as a boy, he came up from Eton for his exeat.

"Oh! don't you scoff, George," said his mother, angrily. "M. d'Estrelles was a very clever man, though he did gamble like a fool. Everybody said his memory was marvellous. He used to quote me pages out of Voltaire and the rest of them on the nights when we walked up and down the gardens at Monte Carlo, after he'd cleared himself out. He always said he didn't see why these things should be kept from women—why men shouldn't tell women exactly what they think. And I know he'd been a Catholic in his youth, so he'd had experience of both. However, I don't care about M. d'Estrelles. I want your opinions. Now, George!"—her voice would begin to break—"how can you be so unkind. You might really compose my mind a little, as the doctors say!"

And through her incorrigible levity he would see for a moment the terror which always possessed her raise its head. Then it would be time for him to go and put his arm round her, and try and coax her to bed.

One night, after he had taken her upstairs, he came down so wearied and irritable that he put all his letters aside, and tried to forget himself in some miscellaneous reading.

His knowledge of literature was no more complete than his character. Certain modern English poets—Rossetti, Morris, Keats, and Shelley—he knew almost by heart. And in travels and biography—mostly of men of action—he had, at one time or another, read voraciously. But "the classics he had not read," as with most of us, would have made a list of lamentable length.

Since his return to Ferth, however, he had browsed a good deal among the books collected by his grandfather, mostly by way of distracting himself at night from the troubles and worries of the day.

On this particular night there were two books lying on his table. One was a volume of Madame de Sevigne, the other St. Augustine's "Confessions." He turned over first one, then the other.

"Au reste, ma fille, une de mes grandes envies, ce serait d'etre devote; je ne suis ni an Dieu, ni an Diable; cet etat m'ennuie, quoiqu' entre nous je le trouve le plus naturel du monde. On n'est point an Diable parce qu'on craint Dieu, et qu' an fond on a un principe de religion; on n'est point a Dieu aussi, parce que sa loi paroit dure, et qu' on n'aime point a se detruire soi-meme."

"Admirable!" he thought to himself, "admirable! We are all there—my mother and I—three parts of mankind."

But on a page of the other book he had marked these lines—for the beauty of them:

"Beatus qui amat te, et amicum in te, et inimicum propter te. Solus enim nullum eorum amittit, cui omnes in illo cari sunt qui non amittitur."

He hung over the fire, pondering the two utterances.

"A marvellous music," he thought of the last. "But I know no more what it means than I know what a symphony of Brahms' means. Yet some say they know. Perhaps of her it might be true."

The weeks ran on. Outside, the strike was at its worst, though George still believed the men would give in before Christmas. There was hideous distress, and some bad rioting in different parts of the country. Various attempts had been made by the employers to use and protect non-union labour, but the crop of outrage they had produced had been too threatening: in spite of the exasperation of the masters they had been perforce let drop. The Press and the public were now intervening in good earnest—"every fool thinks he can do our business for us," as George would put it bitterly to Letty. Burrows was speaking up and down the district with a superhuman energy, varied only by the drinking-bouts to which he occasionally succumbed; and George carried a revolver with him when he went abroad.

The struggle wore him to death; the melancholy of his temperament had never been so marked. At the same time Letty saw a doggedness in him, a toughness like Fontenoy's own, which astonished her. Two men seemed to be fighting in him. He would talk with perfect philosophy of the miners' point of view, and the physical-force sanction by which the lawless among them were determined to support it; but at the same time he belonged to the stiffest set among the masters.

Meanwhile, at home, friction and discomfort were constantly recurring. In the course of three or four weeks Lady Tressady had several attacks of illness, and it was evident that her weakness increased rapidly. And with the weakness, alas! the ugly incessant irritability, that dried up the tenderness of nurses, and made a battleground of the sick-room. Though, indeed, she could never be kept in her room; she resented being left a moment alone. She claimed, in spite of the anxieties of the moment, to be constantly amused; and though George could sometimes distract and quiet her, nothing that Letty did, or said, or wore was ever tolerable to a woman who merely saw in this youth beside her a bitter reminder of her own.

At last, one day early in November, came a worse turn than usual. The doctor was in the house most of the day, but George had gone off before the alarm to a place on the further side of the county, and could not be got at till the evening.

He came in to find Letty waiting for him in the hall. There had been a rally; the doctor had gone his way marvelling, and it was thought there was no immediate danger.

"But oh, the pain!" said Letty, under her breath, pressing her hands together, and shivering. Her eyes were red, her cheeks pale; he saw that she was on the point of exhaustion; and he guessed that she had never seen such a sight before.

He ran up to visit his mother, whom he found almost speechless from weakness, yet waiting, with evident signs of impatience and temper, for her evening food. And while he and Letty were at their melancholy dinner together, Justine came flying downstairs in tears. Miladi would not eat what had been taken to her. She was exciting herself; there would be another attack.

Husband and wife hurried from the room. In the hall they found the butler just receiving a parcel left by the railway delivery-cart.

George passed the box with an exclamation and a shudder. It bore a large label, "From Worth et Cie," and was addressed to Lady Tressady. But Letty stopped short, with a sudden look of pleasure.

"You go to her. I will have this unpacked."

He went up and coaxed his mother like a child to take her soup and champagne. And presently, just as she was revived enough to talk to him, Letty appeared. Her mother-in-law frowned, but Letty came gaily up to the bed.

"There is a parcel from Paris for you," she said, smiling. "I have had it opened. Would you like it brought in?"

Lady Tressady first whimpered, and said it should go back—what did a dying woman want with such things?—then demanded greedily to see it.

Letty brought it in herself. It was a new evening gown of the softest greens and shell-pinks, fit for a bride in her first season. To see the invalid, ashen-grey, stretching out her hand to finger it was almost more than George could stand. But Letty shook out the rustling thing, put on the skirt herself that Lady Tressady might see, and paraded up and down in it, praising every cut and turning with the most ingenious ardour.

"I sha'n't wear it, of course, till after Christmas," said Lady Tressady at last, still looking at it with half-shut covetous eyes. "Isn't it darling the way the lace is put on! Put it away. George!—it's the first I've had from him this year."

She looked up at him appealingly. He stooped and kissed her.

"I am so glad you like it, mother dear. Can't you sleep now?"

"Yes, I think so. Good-night. And good-night, Letty."

Letty came, and Lady Tressady held her hand, while the blue eyes, still bearing the awful impress of suffering, stared at her oddly.

"It was nice of you to put it on, Letty. I didn't think you'd have done it. And I'm glad you think it's pretty. I wish you would have one made like it. Kiss me."

Letty kissed her. Then George slipped his wife's arm in his, and they left the room together. Outside Letty turned suddenly white, and nearly fell. George put his arms round her, and carried her down to his study. He put her on the sofa, and watched her tenderly, rubbing the cold hands.

"How you could," he said at last, in a low voice, when he saw that she was able to talk; "how you could! I shall never forget that little scene."

"You'd have done anything, if you'd seen her this morning," she said, with her eyes still closed.

He sat beside her, silent, thinking over the miseries of the last few weeks. The net result of them—he recognised it with a leap of surprise—seemed to have been the formation of a new and secret bond between himself and Letty. During all the time he had been preparing himself for the worst this strange thing had been going on. How had it been possible for her to be, comparatively, so forbearing? He could see nothing in his past knowledge of her to explain it.

He recalled the effort and gloom with which she had made her first preparations for Lady Tressady. Yet she had made them. Is there really some mystic power, as the Christians say, in every act of self-sacrifice, however imperfect,—a power that represents at once the impelling and the rewarding God,—that generates, moreover, from its own exercise, the force to repeat itself? Personally such a point of view meant little to him, nor did his mind dwell upon it long. All that he knew was that some angel had stirred the pool—that old wounds smarted less—that hope seemed more possible.

Letty knew quite well that he was watching her in a new way, that there was a new clinging in his touch. She, little more than he, understood what was happening to her. From time to time during these weeks of painful tension there had been hours of wild rebellion, when she had hated her surroundings, her mother-in-law, and her general ill-luck as fiercely as ever. Then there had followed strange appeasements, and inflowing calms—moments when she had been able somehow to express herself to one who cared to listen who poured upon her in return a sympathy which braced while it healed.

Suddenly she opened her eyes.

"Do you want to hear about that first time when she came to see me?" she whispered, her look wavering under his.

He flushed and hesitated. Then he kissed her hand.

"No, not now. You are worn out. Another time. But I love you for thinking of telling me."

A feeling of rest and well-being stole over her. Mercifully he made no protestations, and she asked for none, but there was a gentle moving of heart towards heart. And the memory of that hour, that night, made one of the chief barriers between her and despair in the time that followed.

Two days later a painless death, death in her sleep, overtook Lady Tressady. Her delicate face, restored to its true years, and framed in its natural grey hair, seemed for the first time beautiful to George when he saw her in her coffin. He could not remember admiring her, even when he was a boy, and she was reckoned among the handsomest women of her day. Parting with her was like the snapping of a strain that had pulled life out of its true bearings and proportions. An immense, inevitable relief followed. But after her death Letty never said a harsh word of her, and George had a queer, humble feeling that after all he might be found to owe her much.

For as November and December passed away the relation between the husband and wife steadily settled and improved. "We shall rub along," George said to himself in his frank, secret thoughts—"in the end it will be much better perhaps than either of us could have hoped." That no doubt was the utmost that could ever be said; but it was much.

The night after his mother's death, Letty abruptly, violently even, as though worked up to it by an inner excitement, told him the story of her wrestle with Marcella. Then, throwing some letters into his hand she broke into sobbing and ran away from him. When he went to look for her his own eyes were wet. "Who else could have done such a thing?" he said; and Letty made no protest.

The letters gave him food for thought for many a day afterwards. They were little less of a revelation to him than the motives and personality lying behind them had been to Letty. In spite of all that he had felt for the woman who had written them, they still roused in him a secret and abiding astonishment. We use the words "spiritual," "poetic" in relation to human conduct; we talk as though all that the words meant were familiarly understood by us; and yet when the spiritual or the poetic comes actually to walk among us, slips into the forms and functions of our common life, we find it amazing, almost inhuman. It gives us some trouble to take it simply, to believe in it simply.

Yet nothing in truth could be a more inevitable outcome of character and circumstance than these letters of Marcella Maxwell to George Tressady's wife. Marcella had suffered under a strong natural remorse, and to free her heart from the load of it she had thrown herself into an effort of reconciliation and atonement with all the passion, the subtlety, and the resource of her temperament. She had now been wooing Letty Tressady for weeks, nor had the eager contriving ability she had been giving to the process missed its reward. Letty fresh from the new impressions made upon her by Marcella at home, and Marcella as a wife, by a beauty she could no longer hate, and a charm to which she had been forced to yield, had found herself amid the loneliness and dulness of Perth gradually enveloped and possessed anew by the same influence, acting in ways that grew week by week more personal, and more subduing.

What to begin with could be more flattering either to heart or vanity than the persistence with which one of the most famous women of her time—watched, praised, copied, attacked, surrounded, as Letty knew her to be, from morning till night—had devoted herself first to the understanding, then to the capturing, of the smaller, narrower life. The reaction towards a natural reserve, a certain proud, instinctive self-defence, which had governed Marcella's manner during a great part of Letty's visit to the Court, had been in these letters deliberately broken down—at first with effort, then more and more frankly, more and more sweetly. Day after day, as Letty knew, Marcella had taken time from politics, from society, from her most cherished occupations, to write to this far-off girl, from whom she had nothing either to gain or to fear, who had no claims whatever on her friendship, had things gone normally, while thick about the opening of their relation to each other hung the memory of Letty's insults and Letty's violence.