And he had never called since that day—Miss Quincey remembered it well; it was Saturday the thirteenth of March. April and May went by; she had not seen him now for more than two months; and she began to think there must be a reason for it.

At last she saw him; she saw him twice running. Once in the park where they had sat together, and once in the forked road that leads past that part of St. Sidwell's where Miss Cursiter and Miss Vivian lived in state. Each time he was walking very fast as usual, and he looked at her, but he never raised his hat; she spoke, but he passed her without a word. And yet he had recognised her; there could be no possible doubt of it.

Depend upon it there was a reason for that. Miss Quincey was one of those innocent people who believe that every variety of human behaviour must have a reason (as if only two months ago she had not been favoured with the spectacle of an absolutely unreasonable young man). To be sure it was not easy to find one for conduct so strange and unprecedented, and in any case Miss Quincey's knowledge of masculine motives was but small. Taken by itself it might have passed without any reason, as an oversight, a momentary lapse; but coupled with his complete abandonment of Camden Street North it looked ominous indeed. Not that her faith in Bastian Cautley wavered for an instant. Because Bastian Cautley was what he was, he could never be guilty of spontaneous discourtesy; on the other hand, she had seen that he could be fierce enough on provocation; therefore, she argued, he had some obscure ground of offence against her.

Miss Quincey passed a sleepless night reasoning about the reason, a palpitating never-ending night, without a doze or a dream in it or so much as the winking of an eyelid. She reasoned about it for a week between the classes, and in her spare time (when she had any) in the evening (thus running into debt to Sordello again). At the end of the week Miss Quincey's mind seemed to have become remarkably lucid; every thought in it ground to excessive subtlety in the mill of her logic. She saw it all clearly. There had been some misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. She had forfeited his friendship through a blunder nameless but irrevocable. Once or twice she wondered if Mrs. Moon could be at the bottom of it—or Martha. Had her aunt carried out her dreadful threat of giving him a hint to send in his account? And had the hint implied that for the future all accounts with him were closed? Had he called on Mrs. Moon and been received with crushing hostility? Or had Martha permitted herself to say that she, Miss Quincey, was out when perhaps he knew for a positive fact that she was in? But she soon dismissed these conjectures as inadequate and fell back on her original hypothesis.

And all the time the Old Lady's eyes, and her voice too, were sharper than ever; from the corner where she dreamed she watched Miss Quincey incessantly between the dreams. At times the Old Lady was shaken with terrible and mysterious mirth. Bastian Cautley began to figure fantastically in her conversation. Her ideas travelled by slow trains of association that started from nowhere but always arrived at Bastian Cautley as a terminus. If Juliana had a headache Mrs. Moon supposed that she wanted that young man to be dancing attendance on her again; if Juliana sighed she declared that Dr. Cautley was a faithless swain who had forsaken Juliana; if Martha brought in the tea-tray she wondered when Dr. Cautley was coming back for another slice of Juliana's wedding-cake. Mrs. Moon referred to a certain abominable piece of confectionery now crumbling away on a shelf in the sideboard, where, with a breach in its side and its sugar turret in ruins, it seemed to nod at Miss Quincey with all sorts of satirical suggestions. And when Louisa sent her accounts of Teenie who lisped in German, Alexander who wrote Latin letters to his father, and Mildred who refused to read the New Testament in anything but Greek, and Miss Quincey remarked that if she had children she wouldn't bring them up so, the Old Lady laughed—"Tchee—Tchee! We all know about old maids' children." Miss Quincey said nothing to that; but she hardened her heart against Louisa's children, and against Louisa's husband and Louisa. She couldn't think how Louisa could have married such a dreadful little man as Andrew Mackinnon, with his unmistakable accent and problematical linen. The gentle creature who had never said a harsh word to anybody in her life became mysteriously cross and captious. She hardened her heart even to little Laura Lazarus.

And one morning when she came upon the Mad Hatter in her corner of the class-room, and found her adding two familiar columns of figures together and adding them all wrong, Miss Quincey was very cross and very captious indeed. The Mad Hatter explained at more length than ever that the figures twisted themselves about; they wouldn't stay still a minute so that she could hold them; they were always going on and on, turning over and over, and growing, growing, till there were millions, billions, trillions of them; oh, they were wonderful things those figures; you could go on watching them for ever if you were sharp enough; you could even—here Laura lowered her voice in awe of her own conception, for Laura was a mystic, a seer, a metaphysician, what you will—you could even think with them, if you knew how; in short you could do anything with them but turn them into sums. And as all this was very confusing to the intellect Miss Quincey became crosser than ever. And while Miss Quincey quivered all over with irritability, the Mad Hatter paid no heed whatever to her instructions, but thrust forward a small yellow face that was all nose and eyes, and gazed at Miss Quincey like one possessed by a spirit of divination.

"Have you got a headache, Miss Quincey?" she inquired on hearing herself addressed for the third time as "Stupid child!"

Miss Quincey relied tartly that no, she had not got a headache. The Mad Hatter appeared to be absorbed in tracing rude verses on her rough notebook with a paralytic pencil.

"I'm sorry; because then you must be unhappy. When people are cross," she continued, "it means one of two things. Either their heads ache or they are unhappy. You must be very unhappy. I know all about it." The paralytic pencil wavered and came to a full stop. "You like somebody, and so somebody has made you unhappy."

But for the shame of it, Miss Quincey could have put her head down on the desk and cried as she had seen the Mad Hatter cry over her sums, and for the same reason; because she could not put two and two together.

And what Mrs. Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see. It was Dr. Cautley's business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and it was Rhoda's to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly report the slightest threatening of a break-down. Miss Quincey's somewhat eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.

After Rhoda's lunch, soothed with her sympathy and hidden, not to say extinguished, in an enormous chair, Miss Quincey was easily worked into the right mood for confidences; indeed she was in that state of mind when they rush out of their own accord in the utter exhaustion of the will.

"Are you sure you are perfectly well?" so Rhoda began her inquiry.

"Perfectly, perfectly—in myself," said Miss Quincey, "I think, perhaps—that is, sometimes I'm a little afraid that taking so much arsenic may have disagreed with me. You know it is a deadly poison. But I've left it off lately, so I ought to be better—unless perhaps I'm feeling the want of it."

"You are not worrying about St. Sidwell's—about your work?"

"It's not that—not that. But to tell you the truth, I am worried, Rhoda. For some reason or other, my own fault, no doubt, I have lost a friend. It's a hard thing," said Miss Quincey, "to lose a friend."

"Oh, I am sure—Do you mean Miss Cursiter?"

"No, I do not mean Miss Cursiter."

"Do you mean—me then? Not me?"

"You, dear child? Never. To be plain—this is in confidence, Rhoda—I am speaking of Dr. Cautley."

"Dr. Cautley?"

"Yes. I do not know what I have done, or how I have offended him, but he has not been near me for over two months."

"Perhaps he has been busy—in fact, I know he has."

"He has always been busy. It is not that. It is something—well, I hardly care to speak of it, it has been so very painful. My dear"—Miss Quincey's voice sank to an awful whisper—"he has cut me in the street."

"Oh, I know—he will do it; he has done it to all his patients. He is so dreadfully absent-minded."

If Miss Quincey had not been as guileless as the little old maid she was, she would have recognised these indications of intimacy; as it was, she said with superior conviction, "My dear, I know Dr. Cautley. He has never cut me before, and he would not do it now without a reason. There has been some awful mistake. If I only knew what I had done!"

"You've done nothing. I wouldn't worry if I were you."

"I can't help worrying. You don't know, Rhoda. The bitter and terrible part of this friendship is, and always has been, that I am under obligations to Dr. Cautley. I owe everything to him; I cannot tell you what he has done for me, and here I am, not allowed, and I never shall be allowed, to do anything for him." A sob struggled in Miss Quincey's throat.

Rhoda was silent. Did she know? Very dimly, with a mere intellectual perception, but still a great deal better than the little arithmetic teacher could have told her, she understood the desire of that innocent person, not for love, not for happiness, but just for leave to lay down her life for this friend, this deity of hers, to be consumed in sacrifice. And the bitter and terrible thing was that she was not allowed to do it. The friend had no use for the life, the deity no appetite for the sacrifice.

"Don't think about it," she said; it seemed the best thing to say in the singular circumstances. "It will all come right."

By this time Miss Quincey had got the better of the sob in her throat. "It may," she replied with dignity; "but I shall not be the first to make advances."

"Advances? Rather not. But if I thought he was thinking things—he isn't, you know, he's not that sort; still, if I thought it I should have it out with him."

"How could you have it—'out with him'?"

"Oh I should just ask him what he thought of me; or better still, tell him what I thought of him."

Miss Quincey shrank visibly from the bold suggestion.

"Would you? Oh, that would never do. You won't mind my saying so, but I think it would look a little indelicate. Of course it would be very different if it were a woman; if it were you for instance."

"I should do it any way. It's the straightest thing."

"I daresay, dear, in your friendships it is. But I think you can hardly judge of this. You do not know Dr. Cautley as I do."

"No," said Rhoda meekly, "perhaps I don't." Not for worlds would she have destroyed that beautiful illusion.

"It has been," continued Miss Quincey, "a very peculiar, a very interesting relationship. Strange too—considering. If you had asked me six months ago I should have told you that the thing was impossible, or rather, that in nine cases out of ten—I mean I should have said it was highly improbable that Dr. Cautley would take the faintest interest in me, let alone like me."

"He does like you, dear Miss Quincey, I know he does."

"How do you know?"

"He told me so." (Miss Quincey quivered and a faint flush worked up through the sallow of her cheek.) "And I'm sure he would be most distressed to think you were unhappy."

"It is not unhappiness; certainly not unhappiness. On the contrary I have been happy, quite happy lately. And I think it has been bad for me. I wasn't used to it. Perhaps, if it had happened five-and-twenty years ago—Do not misunderstand me, I am merely speaking of friendship, dear; but it might—I mean I might—"

Far back in the chair and favoured by Rhoda's silence, Miss Quincey dropped into a dream. Presently she woke up as it were with a start.

"What am I thinking of? Let us be reasonable; let us reduce it to figures. Forty-five—thirty—he is thirty. Take twenty-five from thirty and five remain. Why, Rhoda, he would have been—"

They looked at each other, but neither said: "He would have been five years old."

Miss Quincey seemed quite prostrated by the result of her calculations. To everything that Rhoda could urge to soothe her she answered steadily:

"You do not know him as I do."

The voice was not Miss Quincey's voice; it was the monotonous, melancholy voice of the Fixed Idea.

Her knowledge of him. After all, nothing could take from her the exquisite privacy of that possession.

* * * * *

"Eros anikate machan," said Rhoda.

Miss Quincey was gone and the Classical Mistress was in school again, coaching a backward student through the "Antigone."

"Oh Love, unconquered in fight. Love who—Love who fliest, who fliest about among things," said the student. And the teacher laughed.

Laughed, for the entertaining blunder called up a vivid image of the god in Miss Quincey's drawing-room, fluttering about among the furniture and doing terrific damage with his wings.

"What's wrong?" asked the student.

"Oh nothing; only a slight confusion between flying about and falling upon. 'Oh Love who fallest on the prey'; please go on."

"'Oh Love who fallest on the prey'—" The chorus mumbled and stumbled, and the student sighed heavily, for the Greek was hard. "He who has—he who has—Oh dear, I can't see any sense in these old choruses; I do hate them."

"Still," said Rhoda sweetly, "you mustn't murder them. 'He who has love has madness.'"

The chorus limped to its end and the student left the coach to some curious reflections.

"Eros anikate machan!"

"Oh Love, unconquered in fight!" It sang in her ears persistently, joyously, ironically—a wedding-song, a battle-song, a song of victory.

Bastian Cautley was right when he said that the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. How eager she had been for the fight, how mad for the crowded course! She had rushed on, heat after heat, outstripping all competitors and carrying off all the crowns and the judges' compliments at the end of the day. She loved the race for its own sake, this young athlete; and though she took the crowns and the compliments very much as a matter of course, she had come to look on life as nothing but an endless round of Olympic games. And just as she forgot each successive event in the excitement of the next, she also had forgotten the losers and those who were tumbled in the dust. Until she had seen Miss Quincey.

Miss Quincey—so they had let her come to this among them all? They had left her so bare of happiness that the first man (it happened to be her doctor) who spoke two kind words to her became necessary to her existence. No, that was hardly the way to put it; it was underrating Bastian Cautley. He was the sort of man that any woman—But who would have thought it of Miss Quincey? And the really sad thing was that she did not think it of herself; it showed how empty of humanity her life had been. It was odd how these things happened. Miss Quincey was neither brilliant nor efficient, but she had made the most of herself; at least she had lived a life of grinding intellectual toil; the whole woman had seemed absorbed in her miserable arithmetical function. And yet at fifty (she looked fifty) she had contrived to develop that particular form of foolishness which it was Miss Cursiter's business to exterminate. There were some of them who talked as if the thing was done; as if competitive examinations had superseded the primitive rivalry of sex.

Bastian Cautley was right. You may go on building as high as you please, but you will never alter the original ground-plan of human nature. And how she had scoffed at his "man's view"; how indignantly she had repulsed his suggestion that there was a side to the subject that her friends the idealists were much too ideal to see.

Were they really, as Bastian Cautley put it, so engrossed in producing a new type that they had lost sight of the individual? Was the system so far in accordance with Nature that it was careless of the single life? Which was the only life open to most of them, poor things.

And she had blundered more grossly than the system itself. What, after all, had she done for that innocent whom she had made her friend? She had taken everything from her. She had promised to keep her place for her at St. Sidwell's and was monopolising it herself. Worse than that, she had given her a friend with one hand and snatched him from her with the other. (If you came to think of it, it was hard that she who had so much already could have Bastian Cautley too, any day, to play with, or to keep—for her very own. There was not a bit of him that could by any possibility belong to Miss Quincey.) She had tried to stand between her and her Fate, and she had become her Fate. Worse than all, she had kept from her the knowledge of the truth—the truth that might have cured her. Of course she had done that out of consideration for Bastian Cautley.

There it seemed that Rhoda's regard for his feelings ended. Though she admitted ten times over that he was right, she was by no means more disposed to come to an understanding with him on that account. On the contrary, when she saw him the very next evening (poor Bastian had chosen his moment indiscreetly) she endeavoured to repair her blunders by visiting them on his irreproachable head, dealing to him a certain painful, but not wholly unexpected back-hander in the face.

She had done all she could for Miss Quincey. At any rate, she said to herself, she had spared her the final blow.



CHAPTER IX

Through the Stethoscope

One morning the Mad Hatter was madder than ever. It was impossible to hold her attention. The black eyes blazed as they wandered, the paralytic pencil was hot in her burning fingers. When she laid it down towards the end of the morning and rested her head on her hands, Miss Quincey had not the heart to urge her to the loathsome toil. She let her talk.

"Miss Quincey," said the Mad Hatter in a solemn whisper, "I'm going to tell you a secret. Do you see her?" She indicated Miss Rhoda Vivian with the point of her pencil.

It was evident that Laura Lazarus did not adore the Classical Mistress, and Rhoda, sick of her worshippers, had found this attitude refreshing. Even now she bestowed a smile and a nod on the Mad Hatter that would have kept any other St. Sidwellite in a fortnight's ecstasy.

"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your teachers."

The child raised the Semitic arch of her eye-brows. Her face belonged to the type formed from all eternity for the expression of contempt.

"She's not my teacher, thank goodness. Do you know what I'm going to be some day, when she's married and gone away? I'm going to be what she is—Classical Mistress. I shan't have to do any sums for that, you know. I shall only have to know Greek, and isn't it a shame, Miss Quincey, they won't let me learn it till I'm in the Fourth, and I never shall be. But—don't tell any one—they've stuck me here, behind her now, and when she's coaching that young idiot Susie Parker—"

"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your school-fellows."

"I know it isn't, but she is, you know. I've bought the books, and I get behind them and I listen hard, and I can read now. What's more, I've done a bit of a chorus. Look—" The pariah took a dirty bit of paper from the breast of her gown. "It goes, 'Oh Love unconquered in battle,' and it's simply splendiferous. Miss Quincey—when you like anything very much—or anybody—it doesn't matter which—do you turn red all over? Do you have creeps all down your back? And do you feel it just here?" The child clapped her yellow claw to Miss Quincey's heart. "You do, you do, Miss Quincey; I can see it go thump, I can feel it go thud!"

She gazed into the teacher's face, and again the power of divination was upon her.

"Laura!" Miss Quincey gasped; for the Head had been looming in their neighbourhood, a deadly peril, and now she was sweeping down on them, smiling a dangerous smile.

"Miss Quincey, I hope you've been making that child work," said she and passed on.

"I say! She didn't see my verses, did she? You won't let on that I wrote them?"

"You'll never write verses," said Miss Quincey, deftly improving a bad occasion, "if you don't understand arithmetic. Why, it's the science of numbers. Come now, if ninety hogsheads—"

"Oh-h! I'm so tired of hogsheads; mayn't it be firkins this time?"

And, for fancy's sake, firkins Miss Quincey permitted it to be.

Now Rhoda was responsible for much, but for what followed the Mad Hatter must, strictly speaking, be held accountable.

Miss Quincey had never been greatly interested in the movements of her heart; but now that her attention had been drawn to them she admitted that it was beating in a very extraordinary way; there was a decided palpitation, a flutter.

That night she lay awake and listened to it.

It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata (only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway knocks. Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die. Then its tactics changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her throat. Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the floor, down to the bottom of all things. Miss Quincey did not mind much; she had been so unhappy. And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.

And of what it all meant Miss Quincey had no more idea than the man in the moon, though even the Mad Hatter could have told her. Her heart went through the same performance a second and a third night, and Miss Quincey said to herself that if it happened again she would have to send for Dr. Cautley. Nothing would have induced her to see him for a mere trifle, but pride was one thing and prudence was another.

It did happen again, and she sent.

She may have hoped that he would discover something wrong, being dimly conscious that her chance lay there, that suffering constituted the incontestable claim on his sympathy; most distinctly she felt the desire (monstrous of course in a woman of no account) to wear the aureole of pain for its own sake; to walk for a little while in the glory and glamour of death. She did not want or mean to give any trouble, to be a source of expense; she had saved a little money for the supreme luxury. But she had hardly entertained the idea for a moment when she dismissed it as selfish. It was her duty to live, for the sake of St. Sidwell's and of Mrs. Moon; and she was only calling Dr. Cautley in to help her to do it. But through it all the feeling uppermost was joy in the certainty that she would see him on an honourable pretext, and would be able to set right that terrible misunderstanding.

She hardly expected him till late in the day; so she was a little startled, when she came in after morning school, to find Mrs. Moon waiting for her at the stairs, quivering with indignation that could have but one cause.

He had lost no time in answering her summons.

The drawing-room door was ajar; the Old Lady closed it mysteriously, and pushed her niece into the bedroom behind.

"Will you tell me the meaning of this? That man has been cooling his heels in there for the last ten minutes, and he says you sent for him. Is that the case?"

Miss Quincey meekly admitted that it was, and entered upon a vague description of her trouble.

"It's all capers and nonsense," said the Old Lady, "there's nothing the matter with your heart. You're just hysterical, and you just want—?"

"I want to know, and Dr. Cautley will tell me."

"Oh ho! I daresay he'll find some mare's nest fast enough, if you tell him where to look."

Miss Quincey took off her hat and cape and laid them down with a sigh. She gave a terrified glance at the looking-glass and smoothed her thin hair with her hand.

"Auntie—I must go. I can't keep him waiting any longer."

"Go then—I won't stop you."

She went trembling, followed so closely by Mrs. Moon that she looked like a prisoner conducted to the dock.

"How will he receive me?" she wondered.

He received her coldly and curtly. There was a hurry and abstraction in his manner utterly unlike his former leisurely sympathy. Many causes contributed to this effect; he was still all bruised and bleeding from the blow dealt to him by Rhoda's strong young arm; an epidemic had kept him on his legs all day and a great part of the night; his time had never been so valuable, and he had been obliged to waste ten minutes of it contemplating the furniture in that detestable drawing-room. He was worried and overworked, and Miss Quincey thought he was still offended; his very appearance made her argue the worst. No hope to-day of clearing up that terrible misunderstanding.

She tremulously obeyed his first brief order, one by one undoing the buttons of her dress, laying bare her poor chest, all flat and formless as a child's. A momentary gentleness came over him as he adjusted the tubes of his stethoscope and began the sounding, backwards and forwards from heart to lungs, and from lungs to heart again; while the Old Lady looked on as merry as Destiny, and nodded her head and smiled, as much to say, "Tchee-tchee, what a farce it is!"

He put up the stethoscope with a click.

"There is nothing the matter with you."

Mrs. Moon gave out a subdued ironical chuckle.

Miss Quincey looked anxiously into his face. "Do you not think the heart—the heart is a little—?"

He smiled and at the same time he sighed. "Heart's all right. But you've left off your tonic."

She had, she was afraid that so much poison—

"Poison?" (He was not in the least offended.) "Do you mean the arsenic? There are some poisons you can't live without; but you must take them in moderation."

"Will you—will you want to see me again?"

"It will not be necessary."

At that Mrs. Moon's chuckle broke all bounds and burst into a triumphant "Tchee-tchee-chee!" He went away under cover of it. It was her way of putting a pleasant face on the matter.

She hardly waited till his back was turned before she delivered herself of that which was working within her.

"I tell you what it is, Juliana; you're a silly woman."

Miss Quincey looked up with a faint premonitory fear. Her fingers began nervously buttoning and unbuttoning her dress bodice; while half-dressed and shivering she waited the attack.

"And a pretty exhibition you've made of yourself this day. Anybody might have thought you wanted to let that young man see what was the matter with you."

"So I did. He says there is nothing the matter with me."

"Nothing the matter with you, indeed! He knows well enough what's the matter with you."

The victim was staring now, with terror in her tired eyes. Her mouth dropped open with the question her tongue refused to utter.

"If you," continued Mrs. Moon, "had wanted to tell him plainly that you were in love with him, you couldn't have set about it better. I should have thought you'd have been ashamed to look him in the face—at your age. You're a disgrace to my family!"

The poor fingers ceased their labour of buttoning and unbuttoning; Miss Quincey sat with her shoulders naked as it were to the lash.

"There!" said Mrs. Moon with an air of drawing back the whip and putting it by for the present. "If I were you I'd cover myself up, and not sit there catching cold with my dress-body off."



CHAPTER X

Miss Quincey Stands Back

As it happened on a Saturday morning she had plenty of time to think about it. All the afternoon and the evening and the night lay before her; she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that.

The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock that her mind refused to realize it all at once. It was an outrage to all the meek reticences and chastities of her spirit. But she owned its truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could not see.

She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.

Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of St. Sidwell's, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that its experiences were of no earthly use to her.

And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship, literary sympathy, intellectual esteem—there were a thousand delicate subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought. As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it. Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she—who knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had always understood that love was a holy thing.

Unfortunately, when a holy thing has been pulled about and dragged in the mud, it may be as holy as ever but it will never look the same. In Miss Quincey's case mortal passion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality. In the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it tolerable to thought. With her own hands she had delivered it up to the stethoscope.

He knew, he knew. In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached itself from the torrent. "He knows well enough what's the matter with you."

The nature of the crime was such that there was no possibility or explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed heaviest on her soul. He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestive of a Hindoo idol; but Miss Quincey had not noticed that); his bumpy forehead was terrible with intelligence; his eyes were cold and comprehensive; the smile of a foregone conclusion flickered on his lips.

He must have known it all the time. There never had been any misunderstanding. That was the clue to his conduct; that was the reason why he had left off coming to the house; for he was the soul of delicacy and honour. And yet she had never said a word that might be interpreted—He must have seen it in her face, then,—that day—when she allowed herself to sit with him in the park. She remembered—things that he had said to her—did they mean that he had seen? She saw it all as he had seen it. "Delicacy" and "honour" indeed! Disgust and contempt would be more likely feelings.

She lay awake all Saturday night and all Sunday night, until four o'clock on Monday morning; always reviewing the situation, always going over the same patch of ground in the desperate hope of finding some place where her self-respect could rest, and discovering nothing but the traces of her guilty feet. A subtler woman would have flourished lightly over the territory, till she had whisked away every vestige of her trail; another would have seen the humour of the situation and blown the whole thing into the inane with a burst of healthy laughter; but subtlety and humour were not Miss Quincey's strong points. She could do nothing but creep shivering to bed and lie there, face to face with her own enormity.

On Monday morning and on many mornings after she crept out into the street stealthily, like a criminal seeking some shelter where she could hide her head. She acquired a habit—odd enough to the casual onlooker—of slinking cautiously round every turning and rushing every crossing in her abject terror of meeting Bastian Cautley.

There was nobody to tell her that it would not matter if she did meet him; no cheerful woman of the world to smile in her frightened face and say: "My dear Miss Quincey, there is nothing remarkable in this. We all do it, sooner or later. Too late? Not a bit of it; better too late than never, and if it's that Cautley man I'm sure I don't wonder. I'm in love with him myself. Lost your self-respect, have you? Self-respect, indeed, why bless your soul, you are all the nicer for it. As for hiding your head I never heard such rubbish in my life. Nobody is looking at you—certainly not the Cautley man. In fact, to tell you the truth, at this moment he is particularly engaged in looking the other way."

But Miss Quincey did not know that lady. She knew no one but Rhoda and Mrs. Moon; and if Mrs. Moon was too old, Rhoda was too young to take that view; besides, Mrs. Moon was not a woman of the world and no ridiculous delicacy prompted her to look the other way. In any case Juliana's state of mind, advertised as it was by her complexion and many eccentricities of behaviour, could not have escaped her notice.

The Old Lady had reverted to her former humorous attitude, and was trying whether Juliana's state of mind would not yield to skilfully directed banter. In these tactics she was not left unsupported. Louisa had written a long letter about her husband and her children, with a postscript.

"P.S.—I don't half like what you tell me about Juliana and Dr. C—. For goodness' sake don't encourage her in any of that nonsense. Sit on it. Laugh her out of it. I agree with you that it would be better if she cultivated her mind a little more.

"P.P.S.—Andrew has just come in. He says we oughtn't to call her Juliana, but Fooliana."

So laughed Louisa, the married woman.

And Fooliana she was called. The joke was quite unworthy of the Greek Professor's reputation, but for Mrs. Moon's purposes he could hardly have made a better one.

Louisa had put a terrible weapon into the Old Lady's hands. It was many weapons in one. It could be turned on in all its broad robust humour—"Fooliana!" Or refined away into a playful or delicate suggestion, pointed with an uplifted finger—"Fooli!" Or cut down and compressed into its essential meaning—"Fool!"

But whichever missile came handy, the effect was much the same. Juliana's complexion grew redder or grayer, but her state of mind remained unchanged. Sometimes the Old Lady tried a graver method.

"If you would cultivate your mind a little in the evenings you would have no time for all this nonsense."

But Juliana had abandoned the cultivation of her mind. She made no attempt to pay off that small outstanding debt to Sordello. There was an end of the intellectual life; for the living wells of literature were tainted; Browning had become a bitter memory and Tennyson a shame.

But if Miss Quincey had no heart for General Culture, she was busier than ever in the discharge of her regular duties. At the end of the midsummer term the pressure on the staff was heavy. Her work had grown with the growth of St. Sidwell's, and the pile of marble and granite copy-books rose higher than ever; it was monumental, and Miss Quincey was glad enough to bury her grief under it for a time. Indeed it looked as if in St. Sidwell's she had found the shelter where she could hide her head; and a very desirable shelter too, as long as Mrs. Moon continued in that lively temper. Gradually she began to realize that of all those five hundred pairs of eyes there was none that had discovered her secret; that not one of those busy brains was occupied with her affairs. It was a relief to lose herself among them all and be of no account again. In the corner behind Rhoda Vivian she and the Mad Hatter seemed to be clinging together more than ever in an ecstasy of isolation.

After all, above the turmoil of emotion a little tremulous, attenuated ideal was trying to raise its head. Her duty. She dimly discerned a possibility of deliverance, of purification from her sin. Therefore she clung more desperately than ever to her post. Seeing that she had served the system for five-and-twenty years, it was hard if she could not get from it a little protection against her own weakness, if she could not claim the intellectual support it professed to give. It was the first time she had ever put it to the test. If she could only stay on another year or two—

And now at the very end of the midsummer term it really looked as if St. Sidwell's was anxious to keep her. Everybody was curiously kind; the staff cast friendly glances on her as she sat in her corner; Rhoda was almost passionate in her tenderness. Even Miss Cursiter seemed softened. She had left off saying "Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please"; and Miss Quincey began to wonder what it all meant.

She was soon to know.

One night, the last of the term, the Classical Mistress was closeted with the Head. Rhoda, elbow-deep in examination papers, had been critically considering seventy variously ingenious renderings of a certain chorus, when the sudden rapping of a pen on the table roused her from her labours.

"You must see for yourself, Rhoda, how we are placed. We must keep up to a certain standard of efficiency in the staff. Miss Quincey is getting past her work."

(Rhoda became instantly absorbed in sharpening a pencil.)

"For the last two terms she has been constantly breaking down; and now I'm very much afraid she is breaking-up."

The Head remained solemnly unconscious of her own epigram.

"No wonder," said Rhoda to herself, "first love at fifty is new wine in old bottles; everybody knows what happens to the bottles."

The flush and the frown on the Classical Mistress's face might have been accounted for by the sudden snapping of the pencil.

"You see," continued Miss Cursiter, as if defending herself from some accusation conveyed by the frown, "as it is we have kept her on a long while for her sister's sake."

(A murmur from the Classical Mistress.)

"Of course we must put it to her prettily, wrap it up—in tissue paper."

(The Classical Mistress is still inarticulate.)

"You are not giving me your opinion."

"It seems to me I've said a great deal more than I've any right to say."

"Oh you. We know all about that. I asked for your opinion."

"And when I gave it you told me I was under an influence."

"What if I did? And what if it were so?"

"What indeed? You would get the benefit of two opinions instead of one."

Now if Miss Cursiter were thinking of Dr. Cautley there was some point in what Rhoda said; for in the back of her mind the Head had a curious respect for masculine judgment.

"There can be no two opinions about Miss Quincey."

"I don't know. Miss Quincey," said Rhoda thoughtfully to her pencil, "is a large subject."

"Yes, if you mean that Miss Quincey is a terrible legacy from the past. The question for me is—how long am I to let her hamper our future?"

"The future? It strikes me that we're not within shouting distance of the future. We talk as if we could see the end, and we're nowhere near it, we're in all the muddle of the middle—that's why we're hampered with Miss Quincey and other interesting relics of the past."

"We are slowly getting rid of them."

At that Rhoda blazed up. She was young, and she was reckless, and she had too many careers open to her to care much about consequences. Miss Cursiter had asked for her opinion and she should have it with a vengeance.

"It's not enough to get rid of them. We ought to provide for them. Who or what do we provide for, if it comes to that? We're always talking about specialisation, and the fact is we haven't specialised enough. Don't we give the same test papers to everybody?"

"I shall be happy to set separate papers for each girl if you'll undertake to correct them."

The more Rhoda fired the more Miss Cursiter remained cold.

"That's just it—we couldn't if we tried. We know nothing about each girl. That's where we shall have to specialise in the future if we're to do any good. We've specialised enough with our teachers and our subjects; chipped and chopped till we can't divide them any more; and we've taken our girls in the lump. We know less about them than they do themselves. As for the teachers—"

"Which by the way brings us back to Miss Quincey."

"Everything brings us back to Miss Quincey. Miss Quincey will be always with us."

"We must put younger women in her place."

Rhoda winced as though Miss Cursiter had struck her.

"They will soon grow old. Our profession is a cruel one. It uses up the finest and most perishable parts of a woman's nature. It takes the best years of her life—and throws the rest away."

"Yet thousands of women are willing to take it up, and leave comfortable homes to do it too."

"Yes," sighed Rhoda, "it's the rush for the open door."

"My dear Rhoda, the women's labour market is the same as every other. The best policy is the policy of the open door. Don't you see that the remedy is to open it wider—wider!"

"And when we've opened all the doors as wide as ever they'll go, what then? Where are we going to?"

"I can't tell you." Miss Cursiter looked keenly at her. "Do you mean that you'll go no further unless you know?"

Rhoda was silent.

"There are faults in the system. I can see that as well as you, perhaps better. I am growing old too, Rhoda. But you are youth itself. It is women like you we want—to save us. Are you going to turn your back on us?"

Miss Cursiter bore down on her with her steady gaze, a gaze that was a menace and an appeal, and Rhoda gave a little gasp as if for breath.

"I can't go any farther."

"Do you realize what this means? You are not a deserter from the ranks. It is the second in command going over to the enemy."

The words were cold, but there was a fiery court-martial in Miss Cursiter's eyes that accused and condemned her. If Rhoda had been dashing her head against the barrack walls her deliverance was at hand. It seemed that she could never strike a blow for Miss Quincey without winning the battle for herself.

"I can't help it," said she. "I hate it—I hate the system."

"The system? Suppose you do away with it—do away with every woman's college in the kingdom—have you anything to put in its place?"

"No. I have nothing to put in its place."

"Ah," said Miss Cursiter, "you are older than I thought."

Rhoda smiled. By this time, wrong or right, she was perfectly reckless. If everybody was right in rejecting Miss Quincey, there was rapture in being wildly and wilfully in the wrong. She had flung up the game.

Miss Cursiter saw it. "I was right," said she. "You are under an influence, and a dangerous one."

"Perhaps—but, influence for influence" (here Rhoda returned Miss Cursiter's gaze intrepidly), "I'm not far wrong. I honestly think that if we persist in turning out these intellectual monstrosities we shall hand over worse incompetents than Miss Quincey to the next generation."

Rhoda was intrepid; all the same she reddened as she realized what a mouthpiece she had become for Bastian Cautley's theories and temper.

"My dear Rhoda, you're an intellectual monstrosity yourself."

"I know. And in another twenty years' time they'll want to get rid of me."

"Of me too," thought the Head. Miss Cursiter felt curiously old and worn. She had invoked Rhoda's youth and it had risen up against her. Influence for influence, her power was dead.

Rhoda had talked at length in the hope of postponing judgment in Miss Quincey's case; now she was anxious to get back to Miss Quincey, to escape judgment in her own.

"And how about Miss Quincey?" she asked.

Miss Cursiter had nothing to say about Miss Quincey. She had done with that section of her subject. She understood that Rhoda had said in effect, "If Miss Quincey goes, I go too." Nevertheless her mind was made up; in tissue paper, all ready for Miss Quincey.

Unfortunately tissue paper is more or less transparent, and Miss Quincey had no difficulty in perceiving the grounds of her dismissal when presented to her in this neat way. Not even when Miss Cursiter said to her, at the close of the interview they had early the next morning, "For your own sake, dear Miss Quincey, I feel we must forego your valuable—most valuable services."

Miss Cursiter hesitated, warned by something in the aspect of the tiny woman who had been a thorn in her side so long. Somehow, for this occasion, the most incompetent, most insignificant member of her staff had contrived to clothe herself with a certain nobility. She was undeniably the more dignified of the two.

The Head, usually so eloquent at great moments, found actual difficulty in getting to the end of her next sentence.

"What I was thinking of—really again entirely for your own sake—was whether it would not be better for you to take a little longer holiday. I do feel in your case the imperative necessity for rest. Indeed if you found that you wished to retire at the end of the holidays—of course receiving your salary for the term—"

Try as she would to speak as though she were conferring a benefit, the Head had the unmistakable air of asking a favour from her subordinate, of imploring her help in a delicate situation, of putting it to her honour.

Miss Quincey's honour was more than equal to the demand made on it. She had sunk so low in her own eyes lately that she was glad to gain some little foothold for her poor pride. She faced Miss Cursiter bravely with her innocent dim eyes as she answered: "I am ready to go, Miss Cursiter, whenever it is most convenient to you; but I cannot think of taking payment for work I have not done."

"My dear Miss Quincey, the rule is always a term's notice—or if—if any other arrangement is agreed upon, a term's salary. There can be no question—you must really allow me—"

There Miss Cursiter's address failed her and her voice faltered. She had extracted the thorn; but it had worked its way deeper than she knew, and the operation was a painful one. A few compliments on the part of the Head, and the hope that St. Sidwell's would not lose sight of Miss Quincey altogether, and the interview was closed.

It was understood by the end of the morning that Miss Quincey had sent in her resignation. The news spread from class to class—"Miss Quincey is going"—and was received by pupils and teachers with cries of incredulity. After all, Miss Quincey belonged to St. Sidwell's; she was part and parcel of the place; her blood and bones had been built into its very walls, and her removal was not to be contemplated without dismay. Why, what would a procession be like without Miss Quincey to enliven it?

And so, as she went her last round, a score of hands that had never clasped hers in friendship were stretched out over the desks in a wild leave-taking; three girls had tears in their eyes; one, more emotional than the rest, sobbed audibly without shame. The staff were unanimous in their sympathy and regret. Rhoda withdrew hastily from the painful scene. Only the Mad Hatter in her corner made no sign. She seemed to take the news of Miss Quincey's departure with a resigned philosophy.

"Well, little Classical Mistress," said Miss Quincey, "we must say good-bye. You know I'm going."

The child nodded her small head. "Of course you're going. I might have known it. I did know it all along. You were booked to go."

"Why, Laura?" Miss Quincey was mystified and a little hurt.

"Because"—a sinister convulsion passed over the ugly little pariah face—"because"—the Mad Hatter had learnt the force of under-statement—"because I like you."

At that Miss Quincey broke down. "My dear little girl—I am going because I am too old to stay."

"Write to me, dear," she said at the last moment; "let me know how you are getting on."

But she never knew. The Mad Hatter did not write. In fact she never wrote anything again, not even verses. She was handed over next term to Miss Quincey's brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became Classical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished. But this is by the way.

As the College clock struck one, Miss Quincey walked home as usual and went up into her bedroom without a word. She opened a drawer and took from it her Post Office Savings Bank book and looked over her account. There stood to her credit the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds four shillings and eight pence. No, not quite that, for the blouse, the abominable blouse, had been paid for out of her savings and it had cost a guinea. Twenty-six pounds three shillings and eight pence was all that she had saved in five-and-twenty years. This, with the term's salary which Miss Cursiter had insisted on, was enough to keep her going for a year. And a year is a long time. She came slowly downstairs to the drawing-room where her aunt was dozing and dreaming in her chair. There still hung about her figure the indefinable dignity that had awed Miss Cursiter. If she was afraid of Mrs. Moon she was too proud to show her fear.

"This morning," she said simply, "I received my dismissal."

The old lady looked up dazed, not with the news but with her dream. Miss Quincey repeated her statement.

"Do you mean you are not going back to that place there?" she asked mildly.

"I am never going back."

Still with dignity she waited for the burst of feeling she felt to be justifiable in the circumstances. None came; neither anger, nor indignation, nor contempt, not even surprise. In fact the Old Lady was smiling placidly, as she was wont to smile under the spell of the dream.

Slowly, very slowly, it was dawning upon her that the reproach had been taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon. Henceforth his niece Miss Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large. At the same time it struck her that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.

"Very well then," said she, "if I were you I should put on that nice silk blouse in the evenings."



CHAPTER XI

Dr. Cautley Sends in his Bill

"I wonder," Mrs. Moon observed suddenly one morning, "if that man is going to let his bill run on to the day of judgment?"

The Old Lady had not even distantly alluded to Dr. Cautley for as many as ten months. After the great day of what she called Juliana's "resignation" she seemed to have tacitly agreed that since Juliana had spared her dream she would spare Juliana's. Did she not know, she too, that the dream is the reality? As Miss Quincey, gentlewoman at large, Juliana had a perfect right to set up a dream of her own; as to whether she was able to afford the luxury, Juliana was the best judge. Her present wonder, then, had no malignant reference; it was simply wrung from her by inexorable economy. Juliana's supplies were calculated to last a year; as it was the winter season that they had lately weathered, she was rather more than three-quarters of the way through her slender resources, and it behoved them to look out for bills ahead. And Mrs. Moon had always suspected that young man, not only of a passion for mare's-nesting, but of deliberately and systematically keeping back his accounts that he might revel in a larger haul.

The remark, falling with a shock all the greater for a silence of ten months, had the effect of driving Juliana out of the room. Out of the room and out of the house, down High Street, where Hunter's shop was already blossoming in another spring; up Park Street and past the long wall of St. Sidwell's, till she found herself alone in Primrose Hill Park.

The young day was so glorious that Miss Quincey had some thoughts of climbing Primrose Hill and sitting on the top; but after twenty yards or so of it she abandoned the attempt. For the last few months her heart had been the seat of certain curious sensations, so remarkably like those she had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it. That, she understood, was the right treatment for hysteria.

But this morning Miss Quincey's heart protested so violently against her notion of ascending Primrose Hill, threatening indeed to strangle her if she persisted in it, that Miss Quincey unwillingly gave in and contented herself with a seat in one of the lower walks of the park. There she leaned back and looked about her, but with no permanent interest in one thing more than another.

Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to be moving there to a foregone conclusion. And all the time her eyes were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the many-pointed leaves of a sycamore pricked against the blue; now with the straight rectangular paths that made the park an immense mathematical diagram. From where she sat her eyes swept the length of the wide walk that cuts the green from east to west. Far down at the west end was a seat, and she could see two people, a man and a woman, sitting on it; they must have been there a quarter of an hour or more; she had noticed them ever since she came into the park.

They had risen, and her gaze left everything else to follow them; or rather, it went to meet them, for they had turned and were coming slowly eastward now. They had stopped; they were facing each other, and her gaze rested with them, fascinated yet uncertain. And now she could see nothing else; the park, with the regions beyond it and the sky above it, had become merely a setting for one man and one woman; the avenue, fresh strewn with red golden gravel, led up to them and ended there at their feet; a young poplar trembled in the wind and shook its silver green fans above them in delicate confusion. The next minute a light went up in that obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind faces shining.

She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home.

It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well. Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth. Now she had seen the whole, with all that Rhoda had disguised and kept hidden from her; the truth that kills or cures.

Miss Quincey did not go out again that day, but sat all afternoon silent in her chair. Towards evening she became talkative and stayed up later than had been her wont since she recovered her freedom. She seemed to be trying to make up to her aunt for a want of sociability in the past.

At eleven she got up and stood before the Old Lady in the attitude of a penitent. Apparently she had been seized with a mysterious impulse of confession.

"Aunt," she said, "there's something I want to say to you."

She paused, casting about in her mind for the sins she had committed. They were three in all.

"I am afraid I have been very extravagant"—she was thinking of the blouse—"and—and very foolish"—she was thinking of Bastian Cautley—"and very selfish"—she was thinking of her momentary desire to die.

"Juliana, if you're worrying about that money"—the Old Lady was thinking of nothing else—"don't. I've plenty for us both. As long as we can keep together I don't care what I eat, nor what I drink, nor what I put on my poor back. And if the worst comes to the worst I'll sell the furniture."

It seemed to Miss Quincey that she had never known her aunt in all those five-and-twenty years; never known her until this minute. For perhaps, after all, being angry with Juliana was only Mrs. Moon's way of being sorry for her. But how was Juliana to know that?

"Only," continued the Old Lady, "I won't part with your uncle's picture. Don't ask me to part with your uncle's picture."

"You won't have to part with anything. I'll—I'll get something to do. I'm not worrying. There's nothing to worry about."

She stooped down and tenderly kissed the wrinkled forehead.

A vague fear clutched at the Old Lady's heart.

"Then, Juliana, you are not well. Hadn't you better see"—she hesitated—pausing with unwonted delicacy for her words—"a doctor?"

"I don't want to see a doctor. There is nothing the matter with me." And still insisting that there was nothing the matter with her, she went to bed.

And old Martha had come with her early morning croak to call Miss Juliana; she had dumped down the hot-water can in the basin with a clash, pulled up the blind with a jerk, and drawn back the curtains with a clatter, before she noticed that Miss Juliana was up all the time. Up and dressed, and sitting in her chair by the hearth, warming her feet at an imaginary fire.

She had been sitting up all night, for her bed was as Martha had left it the night before. Martha approached cautiously, still feeling her way, though there was no need for it, the room being full of light.

She groped like a blind woman for Miss Juliana's forehead, laying her hand there before she looked into her face.

After some fumbling futile experiments with brandy, a looking-glass and a feather, old Martha hid these things carefully out of sight; she disarranged the bed, turning back the clothes as they might have been left by one newly wakened and risen out of it; drew a shawl over the head and shoulders of the figure in the chair; pulled down the blind and closed the curtains till the room was dark again. Then she groped her way out and down the stairs to her mistress's door. There she stayed a moment, gathering her feeble wits together for the part she meant to play. She had made up her mind what she would do.

So she called the Old Lady as usual; said she was afraid there was something the matter with Miss Juliana; thought she might have got up a bit too early and turned faint like.

The Old Lady answered that she would come and see; and the two crept up the stairs, and went groping their way in the dark of the curtained room. Old Martha fumbled a long time with the blind; she drew back the curtains little by little, with infinite precaution letting in the light upon the fearful thing.

But the Old Lady approached it boldly.

"Don't you know me, Jooley dear?" she said, peering into the strange eyes. There was no recognition in them for all their staring.

"Don't know me, m'm," said Martha soothingly; "seems all of a white swoon, don't she?"

Martha was warming to her part. She made herself busy; she brought hot water bottles and eau de cologne; she spent twenty minutes chafing the hands and forehead and laying warmth to the feet, that the Old Lady might have the comfort of knowing that everything had been done that could be done. She shuffled off to find brandy, as if she had only thought of it that instant; and she played out the play with the looking-glass and the feather.

The feather fluttered to the floor, and Martha ceased bending and peering, and looked at her mistress.

"She's gone, m'm, I do believe."

The Old Lady sank by the chair, her arms clinging to those rigid knees.

"Jooley—Jooley—don't you know me?" she cried, as if in a passion of affront.



CHAPTER XII

Epilogue.—The Man and the Woman

By daylight there is neither glamour nor beauty in the great burying-ground of North London; you must go to it at evening, in the first fall of the summer dusk, to feel the fascination of that labyrinth of low graves, crosses and headstones, urns and sarcophagi, crowded in the black-green of the grass; of marble columns, granite pyramids and obelisks, massed and reared and piled in the grey of the air. It is nothing if not fantastic. Even by day that same mad grouping and jostling of monumental devices, gathered together from the ends of the world, gives to the place a cheerful half-pagan character; now, in its confusion and immensity, it might be some city of dreams, tossed up in cloud and foam and frozen into marble; some aerial half-way limbo where life slips a little from the living and death from the dead.

For these have their own way here. No priest interferes with them, and whatever secular power ordains these matters is indulgent to its children. If one of them would have his horse or his dog carved on his tomb instead of an angel, or a pair of compasses instead of a cross, there is no one to thwart his fancy. He may even be humorous if he will. It is as if he implored us to laugh with him a little while though the jest be feeble, and not to chill him with so many tears.

At twilight a man and a woman were threading their way through this cemetery, and as they went they smiled faintly at the memorial caprices of the living and the still quainter originalities of the dead. But on the whole they seemed to be trying not to look too happy. They said nothing to each other till they came to a mound raised somewhere in the borderland that divides the graves of the rich from the paupers' ground. There was just room for them to stand together on the boards that roofed in the narrow pit dug ready for the next comer.

"If I believed in a Creator" (it was the man who spoke), "I should want to know what pleasure he found in creating that poor little woman."

The woman did not answer as she looked at him.

"Yet," he went on, "I'm selfish enough to be glad that she lived. If I had not known Miss Quincey, I should not have known you."

"And I," said the woman, and her face was rosy under the touch of grief, "if I had not loved Miss Quincey, I could not have loved you."

They seemed to think Miss Quincey had justified her existence. Perhaps she had.

And the woman took the roses that she wore in her belt and laid them on the breast of the grave. She stood for a minute studying the effect with a shamefaced look, as if she had mocked the dead woman with flowers flung from her wedding-wreath of youth and joy.

Then she turned to the man; the closing bell tolled, and they passed through the iron gates into the ways of the living.

THE END