"We have been here," said Rachel—"let me see—about a week."

She looked anxious and disturbed.

"And where are you staying?" said Pateley.

"In the little pavilion behind the Hotel de Londres," and she pointed.

"Charming place," said Pateley. "And how is your husband?"

"He is very well, thank you," said Rachel. "He has been out for a long walk to-day; he went for an expedition to the woods with Mr. Wentworth."

And she looked as if something else that she did not say were on the tip of her tongue.

"It must have been delightful in the woods to-day," said Pateley, hardly knowing what he answered. He also was preoccupied by the story he had heard and wondering how much she knew of it. "Are you going home now?" he said, as Rachel turned away from the promenade in the direction she had pointed out.

"I think so. I am a little tired," said Rachel, holding out her hand.

"May I come and see you?" Pateley said.

"Please do," said Rachel.

"I certainly shall," Pateley said. "It will be delightful to get away for a little while from this seething mass of humanity."

And he again gave one of his loud laughs as he also went towards the tent, to plunge with the greatest zest into the seething mass whose company he had been contemning.



CHAPTER XXIV

Rachel turned in the other direction and walked slowly back to the pavilion. What had happened? What had she been hearing? The slightest mental exertion still made her head ache, but she was conscious that if she once let herself go and made the effort it would be possible for her to understand. But that moment had not come yet.

She had not been many minutes in her quiet shady garden when the little gate at the bottom of it was thrown open, and her husband came quickly in, looking round him with an anxious, hurried glance as though not knowing what he might find. What had he expected? He could hardly have told. But as he drew nearer and nearer he had been gradually nerving himself for the worst. He had been dreading to find he knew not what. Wentworth might be sitting with Rachel, the faces of both telling that Wentworth's would-be explanations had been of no avail; or Rachel herself might have been absent—she might have strolled out into the crowd and there unawares heard rumours of what he felt convinced must by this time be in every one's mind, on every one's lips. It was therefore for the moment an unmeasured relief to find that all seemed as usual, that Rachel was sitting there quiet and cool before her little tea-table.

"Ah!" he almost gasped, with a long sigh, as he sank into a chair and leant his head against the back of it with a weary, hunted look.

"Frank!" said Rachel anxiously, "what is the matter? What has happened?"

"What do you mean?" he said, sitting up, with again the startled, haggard expression on his face. "What should have happened?"

"I don't know," Rachel said, startled too at his look and manner. "You look so tired, so ill."

"Oh, I'm all right," he said, taking up and drinking eagerly the cup of tea that almost mechanically she had poured out and pushed towards him, and as he did so he realised that he had had no food since the morning. He ate and drank and then again lay back in his chair and was silent. As Rachel looked at him the absolute conviction swept over her—she knew not why—that he had been concerned in the terrible catastrophe of which she had heard the broken accounts. It began to dawn upon her that in some inconceivable way the thing had happened to him; that it was of him those women were speaking. She still heard Lady Adela saying: "Did you ever see any one look so awful?" And yet what could it be? What horrible misunderstanding was it? What horrible mistake could have been made?

She sat and waited. Not the least of her charms was that she knew, what many women do not know, how to sit absolutely quiet. She knew when to refrain from questioning, how to sit by her companion in so peaceful, so final a manner, as it were, that he did not feel that she was simply waiting for what he would do next.

The band blared out again with renewed vigour. Rendel leant his elbows on his knees, his face between his hands.

"Oh! that miserable noise!" he said. "Will it never leave off? The hideousness of it all!—those people, that band! Oh! to get away from it all!" he muttered half to himself.

"Frank," said Rachel entreatingly, touching his arm, "if you don't like it why shouldn't we go away from it? I think it is horrible, too. I went out of the garden to-day to where the people were walking."

Rendel looked up quickly.

"Did you? Did you see any one you knew?"

"Yes," said Rachel; "I saw Mr. Pateley."

"Pateley!" said her husband. "Did you have any talk with him? What did he say?"

"Hardly anything," said Rachel. "He was surprised to see me, and asked how long we had been here, and if he might come and see us. That was all."

"That was all," echoed Rendel, again with an inward shiver. "Coming to see us, is he?"

That encounter for the moment he must at any cost avoid.

"Frank, I wonder if we must go on staying here?" Rachel said.

"Of course we must," Rendel replied, trying to pull himself together again. "Dr. Morgan said that this was the very best place for you to come to, and that the waters would do you all the good in the world."

"I wonder if we need," said Rachel. "I am sure it is the kind of thing you hate."

"It is not for very long, after all," said Rendel, trying to smile.

He was gradually regaining possession of himself, but was still afraid to trust himself to utter any but the most commonplace and ordinary sentences.

"The moment I have done the cure," said Rachel, "we'll go back to London, won't we? And you can begin your work again, and do all the things you like. And then," she went on with an attempt at lightness of tone, "you can go back to your beloved politics, and think of nothing else all day." And she went on talking of their house, of their arrival, of what they would do, in a forlorn little attempt to show him that she meant to try to shoulder life valiantly, although it had been so altered. "You will stand for somewhere. You will go into the House."

Rendel thought of what the life might have been that she was sketching, and what it was going to be now. What he had gone through that day was an earnest probably of what awaited him many a time if he should try to lead his life as he used to lead it, among the people who were congenial to him.

"No," he said, "I'm not going to stand. I'm not going into the House. I shan't have anything to do with politics."

"What?" said Rachel, looking at him startled.

"All that, is at an end," he said firmly. Then with the relief of speaking, came the irresistible desire to go on, to tell her something at least of what his fate was, although he might not tell the thing that mattered most.

"Do you remember," he said, "something that I told you had happened——" he broke off, then began again. "Tell me," he said, impelled to ask, "how much you remember, if you remember anything, of those days when your father was so ill, at the end, just before he died, or is it still a blank to you?"

Rachel shuddered.

"No, I can't remember," she said. "The last thing I remember clearly is one afternoon when he was beginning to be worse and had to go upstairs again; and I remember nothing more after that till," and her voice trembled, "till—a day that I woke up in bed and wanted to go to him, and you told me that—that he was dead. The rest of that time is a blank."

"How extraordinary it is!" muttered Rendel to himself.

"I did not even know," said Rachel, "that I had fallen on the stairs, until the doctor told me days afterwards that I had caught my foot as I was running downstairs. He told me then it was no use trying to remember the time just before," she went on in a low, anxious voice, something stirring uneasily within her: "that it might not come back at all. It seems it doesn't sometimes to people who have that sort of accident."

Rendel, his eyes fixed on the ground, had been listening; he took in the meaning of her words and tried to realise their bearing on himself, but he was too far gone on the slope to stop. It was clear that she would not know what had happened, unless she were told by himself... and yet, who could tell how the awakening would come? it might even be in a worse form when she was able once more to mix with her kind.

"Rachel," he said. "I want to tell you something that happened the day before your father became worse, the day before you had that accident, the last day, in fact, that you remember." She looked at him with anxious eagerness. "Something tremendously important happened. Lord Stamfordham brought me some private notes of his own to decipher and copy."

"Of course," said Rachel, "that I remember. In your study downstairs."

"You remember?" said Rendel eagerly. Then instantly conscious, alas, that the evidence could do him no kind of good, "that I gave some papers to Thacker to take to Stamfordham?"

"Stop a minute," said Rachel. "Yes, I remember that too. My father wanted to play chess afterwards, but he was too tired."

"In those papers," said Rendel, "there was a very important secret, though it didn't remain a secret," he added, with a bitter little laugh, "for twenty-four hours. Those papers contained the notes of a conversation at the German Embassy at which that agreement was decided upon by which Germany and England divided Africa between them. It was I copied those papers from Stamfordham's notes. I copied the map of Africa with a line down the middle of it. The next morning, no one knew how or why, that map appeared in the Arbiter."

Rachel looked at him, still not understanding all that was implied.

"Do you see what that means for me?" Rendel said. "It was not Stamfordham published it, he did not mean to do so until the moment should come, and since I was the person who had had the original notes, he thought that I had published it; that I had let it out, somehow."

"You!" said Rachel, with wide-open eyes.

"Yes," said Rendel shortly. "That I had betrayed the great secret entrusted to me."

"Frank!" she cried. "But of course you didn't!"

"Of course I didn't," Rendel said quietly.

"And—then——?" said Rachel breathlessly.

"Then," Rendel said, shrinking at the very recollection, "Stamfordham told me he believed I had done it. Then of course,"—and the words came with an effort—"there was an end of everything, and I knew that there was nothing left for me to do but to go under, to throw everything up. I knew that people would turn their backs upon me, and I didn't see Stamfordham again until—until to-day. And to-day Wentworth and I went up to that place in the woods to lunch, and by chance, by the most horrible, evil fortune, we came upon a luncheon party at which Stamfordham was, and—and," he said trying to speak calmly, "when he saw me he refused to sit down at the same table with me." And as he spoke Rachel felt that things were becoming clear to her and that she was beginning to understand. The comments of the people who had stood by her and discussed the scene they had witnessed still rang in her ears, and she realised what the horror of that scene must have been.

"Frank!" she cried, with her tears falling. And she went to him and took his hand, then drew his head against her bosom as though to give him sanctuary. "Imagine believing that you, you of all people..." and the broken words of comfort and faith in him, of love and belief again gave him a moment of feeling that rehabilitation might be possible.

"Frank!" Rachel went on, "tell me this. Did my father know?"

"Know what?" Rendel said, starting up, the iron reality again facing him.

"That you were accused? That they could believe that you had done such a shameful thing?"

"Yes," said Rendel slowly. "At least he knew what had happened—and—and—he guessed that the suspicion would fall upon me."

"Oh!" cried Rachel, hiding her face in her hands and trying to steady her voice. "I am sorry he knew just at the end. I wonder if he realised?"

Rendel said nothing. Even now was Sir William Gore to stand between them?

"Perhaps he didn't," Rachel said, almost entreatingly, "as he was so ill. Because think what it would have been to him! Of course he would have known it was not true, but he was so fastidious, so terribly sensitive, the mere thought that you could have been suspected of such a thing even would have preyed upon him so terribly."

"Well," said Rendel, in a low voice—the last possibility of clearing himself was put behind him, and the darkness fell again—"he is beyond reach of it. It is I who must suffer now."

Rachel had walked to the other side of the garden, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes and trying to control herself. Now she came swiftly back, a sudden determination in her heart.

"Frank," she cried, "why must you suffer? We must find out who really did it."

"I can't," said Rendel.

"But have you tried?"

"Yes," he said. "As much as was possible."

"But it must be possible," she cried. And she came to him, her eyes and face glowing with resolve. "If the whole world came to me and said that you had done this I should not believe it. I remember so well my mother saying, the day that I came back from Maidenhead," and their eyes met in the recollection of that happy, cloudless time, "'what a man needs is some one to believe in him,' and I thought to myself that when—if—I married I would believe in my husband as she believed in my father."

At this moment one of the Swiss waiters came quickly through the pavilion into the garden.

"Monsieur Pateley," he said, "wishes to know if Madame is at home." Rachel and her husband looked at each other in consternation.

"I can't see him at this moment," Rendel said, going to the gate.

"Can't we send him away?" said Rachel, anxiously.

"Where is he?" addressing the waiter. But it was too late. The question answered itself, as Pateley's large form appeared behind that of the waiter, distinctly seen on every side of it. Rachel, trying to control her face into a smile of welcome, went forward to meet him as Rendel disappeared amongst the trees, from whence he could get round into the house another way.



CHAPTER XXV

We do not move unfortunately all in one piece. It would be much simpler if we did, and if our actions could be accounted for by saying, "He did this, being a generous man, or a forgiving man, or a curious man, or a remorseful man." Unhappily, and it makes our actions more difficult to account for, we are more complicated than this, and Pateley, when he finally felt impelled to make his way into Rachel's presence so soon after parting from her in the promenade, could not probably have said exactly what motive prompted him to seek her. To Rachel he arrived as the complement, the consolidation, of the resolve that she had made. She hardly tried to conceal her agitation as she shook hands with him and looked in his face. Her own wore an expression that had not been there an hour ago. Something new had come to life in it. So conscious were they both of something abnormal, overmastering, between them that there did not seem anything strange in the fact that for a moment, after the first greeting, they stood without thinking of any of the commonplaces of intercourse. Then Pateley, more accustomed to overlay the realities of life by the conventional outside, recovered himself and said in an ordinary tone, looking round him—

"What a delightful oasis! What charming quarters you are in here!"

"Yes, we like them very much," said Rachel, recovering herself; and they went towards the little table and sat down.

"No tea for me, thank you," said Pateley. "I have just been made to drink a liquid distantly resembling it at the bazaar."

"At the bazaar?" said Rachel. "It was German tea, I suppose?"

"I imagine so. It has been well said," said Pateley, "that no nation has yet been known great enough to produce two equally good forms of national beverage. We have good tea, but our coffee is abominable: the Germans have good coffee, but their tea is poison. The Spaniards, I believe, have good chocolate, but that I have to take on hearsay. I have never been to Spain. I mean to go some day, though."

"Do you?" Rachel said, dimly hearing his flow of words while she made up her mind what her own were to be. She had had so little time to form her plan of action, to piece together all that she had been hearing during the afternoon, that it was not yet clear to her that from the circumstances of the case Pateley must necessarily be concerned in it; and at the moment she began to speak she simply looked upon him as some one who knew Rendel in London, who had known her father and mother, who had a general air of bluff and hearty serviceability, and had presented himself at a moment when she had no one else to turn to.

"Mr. Pateley," she said, and at the sudden ring of resolution in her tone Pateley's face changed and his smiling flow of chatter about nothing came to a pause. "There is something I want very much to ask you about," she went on, "something I want your help in."

"I am at your orders," said Pateley, with a smile and bow that concealed his surprise.

"It is something that matters very, very much," Rachel went on. "Something you could find out for me."

Pateley said nothing.

"I don't know if you know," she went on hurriedly—"if you heard, of what happened to me in London just before my father died? I had an accident. It seemed a slight one at the time. I fell down on the stairs one evening that he was worse when I ran down quickly to fetch my husband, and I had concussion of the brain afterwards and was unconscious for forty-eight hours. And since, I have not been able to remember anything of what happened during those days."

Pateley made a sort of sympathetic sound and gesture.

"But," Rachel said, "I have heard to-day—not until to-day—of something that happened during that time, something terrible. I am going to tell it to you, in the greatest confidence. You will see when I tell you that it matters very, very much. First of all,—this I remember—on the day my father began to be worse, Lord Stamfordham brought my husband some papers to copy for him in which was the Agreement with Germany, and told him no one was to know about them, and my husband told no one, and sent them back, when they were done, to Stamfordham, in a sealed packet."

Pateley, as he listened, sat absolutely impenetrable, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

"But somebody got hold of them," she went on—"somebody must have stolen them, because they were published the next morning in the paper, in the Arbiter." And as the words left her lips she suddenly realised that the man in front of her was the one of all others in the world who must know what had happened. The Arbiter was embodied in Pateley, it was Pateley: that, everybody knew, everybody repeated. Pateley would, he must, be able to tell her.

"Oh," she cried, "the Arbiter is your paper!"

"Yes," said Pateley, looking at her.

"Then," she said, "you know—you must know."

"Know what?" he said calmly.

"You must know," she said, "who it was told the Arbiter what was in those papers."

Pateley sat silent a moment. Then he said—

"It can and does happen occasionally that things are brought to the Arbiter of which I don't know the origin, in fact of which the origin is purposely kept a secret."

She waited for him to add something to this sentence, to add a but to it, but he remained silent. Being unversed in diplomatic evasions, she accepted his words as a disclaimer.

"But still," she said, "even if you don't know this you could find it out. It matters terribly. I don't want to say to any one else, it is not a thing to be told, how horribly it matters, but I must tell you, that you may see. Lord Stamfordham thought that my husband had betrayed the secret—he told him so then. And to-day—it was too terrible!—he was at a luncheon to which Frank and Mr. Wentworth went, not knowing——" A sudden involuntary change in Pateley's face made her stop and say, "But perhaps you were there? Were you at the luncheon?"

"No," said Pateley. "I was not there."

"But you heard about it?" she said.

"Yes," he said after a pause. "I heard about it."

"It's too horrible!" said Rachel, covering her face with her hands. "Of course you heard about it—everybody will hear about it: how Lord Stamfordham insulted him and refused to sit down with him, because of the unjust accusation that was brought against him. Now do you see," she said excitedly, and Pateley, as he looked at her, was amazed at the fire that shone from her eyes, at the glow of excitement in her whole being—"now do you see how much it matters? how if we don't find out the truth, if we don't get to know who did it, this is the kind of thing that will happen to him? You see now, don't you? You will help me?"

Pateley had got up and restlessly paced to the end of the garden and back, his eyes fixed on the ground, Rachel breathlessly watching him. He was moved at her distress, he felt the stirrings of something like remorse at the fate that had overtaken Rendel. But in Pateley's Juggernaut-like progress through the world he did not, as a rule, stop to see who were the victims that were left gasping by the roadside. As long as the author of the mischief drives on rapidly enough, the evil he has left behind him is not brought home to him so acutely as if he is compelled to stop and bend over the sufferer. But a brief moment of reflection made him pretty clear that neither himself nor the Arbiter had anything to fear from the disclosure. He had nothing particularly heroic in his composition; he would not have felt called upon for the sake of Francis Rendel, or even for the sake of Rendel's wife, to sacrifice his own destiny and possibilities if it had been a question of choosing between his own and theirs; but fortunately this choice would not be thrust upon him. He looked up and met Rachel's eyes fixed upon him.

"Yes," he said. "I will help you."

"Oh, thank you!" she cried, her heart swelling with relief. "Will you, can you find out about it?"

"Yes," said Pateley again. He paused a moment, then came back and stood in front of her. "I have no need to find out," he said slowly. "I know who did it."

Rachel sprang up.

"What?" she cried, quivering with anxiety. "Do you mean that you know now, that you can tell Frank, that you can tell Lord Stamfordham? Oh, why didn't you say so?"

Pateley paused.

"I didn't know," he said, "that Stamfordham had accused your husband of it, and so I kept—I was rather bound to keep—the other man's secret."

"The other man?" Rachel repeated, looking at him.

"Yes," said Pateley. "The man who did it."

Rachel started. Of course, yes—if her husband had not done it some one else had, they were shifting the horrible burden on to another. But that other deserved it, since he was the guilty man.

"Yes," she said lower, "of course I know there is some one else!—it is very terrible—but—but—it's right, isn't it, that the man who has done it should be accused and not one who is innocent?"

"Yes," said Pateley, "it is right."

"You must tell me," she said, "you must!—you must tell me everything now, as I have told you. Is it some one to whom it will matter very much?"

Pateley waited.

"No," he said at length, "it won't matter to him."

Rachel looked at him, not understanding.

He went on, "Nothing will ever matter to him again. He is dead."

"Dead, is he?" said Rachel, but even in the horror-struck tone there rang an accent of glad relief. "Then it can't matter to him. And it is right, after all, that people should know what he did. It is right, it is justice, isn't it?" she repeated, as though trying to reassure herself, "not only because of Frank?"

"Yes," said Pateley, "I believe that it is right, that it is justice." Then as he looked at her he suddenly became conscious of an unwonted difficulty of speech, of an almost unknown wave of emotion rising within him, of shrinking from the words he was now clear had to be said.

"Mrs. Rendel," he said at last, "I am afraid it will be very painful to you to hear what I am going to say."

She looked at him bewildered. He waited one moment, almost hoping that the truth might dawn upon her before he spoke, but she was a thousand miles from being anywhere near it. "Those papers which I published in the Arbiter the next morning were shown to me on the afternoon your husband had them to copy, by—" again the strange unfamiliar perturbation stopped him, and he felt he had to make a distinct effort to bring the name out—"your father, Sir William Gore."

Rachel said absolutely nothing. She looked at him with dilated eyes, incredulous amazement and then horror in her face, as she saw in his that he was telling her the truth.

"My father?" she said at last, with trembling lips.

"Yes," Pateley said. The worst was over now, he felt, and he had recovered possession of himself.

"No, no, it can't be!" she said miserably. "It's not possible...."

"I fear it is," said Pateley. "They were shown to myself, you see, so it is an absolute certainty."

"But when was it?" said Rachel, bewildered. "When did he have them?"

"They were left," Pateley said, "in the study where he was, when your husband went down to speak to Lord Stamfordham. During that time I happened to go in."

And as Rachel listened to his brief account of what had taken place she knew that there was no longer any doubt as to the culprit. For the moment, as the idol of her life fell before her in ruins the discovery she had made swallowed up everything else. Pateley made a move.

"Wait, wait!" she said. "Don't go away. Only wait till I see what I must do. It is all so horrible! I see nothing clearly yet."

He walked away to the other end of the little garden.

She leant back in her chair, her eyes fixed, seeing nothing, trying to make up her mind. Gradually what she must do became more and more distinct to her, more and more inevitable. The sheer force of her agitation and emotion were carrying her own. If she acted at once, within the next half-hour, anything, everything might be possible. She would not wait to think, she would do it now, while it was still possible to pronounce the name, the dear name that she had hardly been able to bring to her lips during these last weeks in which every day, every hour, she had been conscious of her loss. She would go to the person who must be told, and who alone could remedy the great evil that had been done. She got up, a despairing determination in her face.

Pateley looked at her, his face asking the question which he did not put in words.

"I am going to Lord Stamfordham," she said. "I am going to tell him."

"You?" said Pateley. "Are you going to tell him yourself?"

"Yes," she said, "it is I who must tell him. I have quite made up my mind." She turned to him appealingly as though taking for granted he would help her. "I want to go now, while I feel I can, and before Frank knows anything about it. Can you help me—would you help me to find Lord Stamfordham?"

"Certainly," said Pateley, with a new admiration for Rachel rising within him, but with some misgivings, however, as to the possibility or the desirability of running Stamfordham to earth among his present surroundings.

"Do you know where he is?" Rachel said.

"I should think probably at the bazaar," said Pateley, and as he reflected on the scene he had just left, Stamfordham surrounded by a bevy of attractive ladies beseeching him to give them an autograph, to buy a buttonhole, to drink their tea, to put into their raffles, and to have his fortune told, he felt still more dubious as to the mission he was engaged upon. Fortunately Rachel realised none of these things.

"Come, then, let us go," she said, with a vibrating anxiety and excitement, at strange variance with the usual atmosphere that surrounded her, and he followed her out of the garden in the direction of the Casino.



CHAPTER XXVI

Pateley, who had been caught up in some measure into the excitement of Rachel's emotion, was brought back to earth again with a run, as he passed with her through the brightly coloured hangings which drooped over the portals of the bazaar and found themselves in the gay crowd within. His misgivings grew as he felt more and more the incongruity of the errand they were bent upon to the preoccupations of the people who surrounded them. There was no doubt that, whatever the ultimate result as far as Mrs. Birkett and the needs she represented were concerned, the bazaar, that subsidiary consideration apart, was being very successful indeed. The sound of voices and laughter filled the air, and the gloomy previsions Lady Chaloner had felt as to the lack of buyers were apparently not realised, since the whole of the available space surrounded by the stalls was filled with people engaged in some sort of very active and voluble commercial transactions with one another which, financial result or not, were of a most enjoyable kind, to judge by the bursts of laughter they necessitated. Rachel, pale, strung up, with the look of determination in her face called up in the usually timid by an unwonted resolve, was making her way, or rather trying to do so, in Pateley's wake, bewildered by the sights and sounds around her. Pateley at each step was beset by some laughing vendor from whom he had much ado to escape, and indeed in most cases did not succeed in doing so without having paid toll. By the time he had gone half along the room he was the possessor of three tickets for raffles, for each of which he had paid a sum he would have grudged for the unneeded article that was being raffled. He had bought several single flowers, each one on terms which should have commanded an armful of roses, and he had had three dips into a bag from which fortunately he had emerged with nothing more permanent than sawdust. Rachel also had been accosted by a vendor as soon as she came in, a moment of poignant embarrassment for all parties concerned—herself, her escort, and the fascinating seller who had offered her wares, for Rachel, looking at her with startled eyes, felt in her pocket as though at last seeing what was wanted of her, and then stammered, "I'm so sorry, I have no money with me." Pateley knew the vendor; it was no other than Mrs. Samuels, who had emerged from behind her stall, and was making the round of the bazaar with a basket of most attractive-looking cakes. His eye met hers in hurried and involuntary misgiving, mutely telling her that Rachel was not a suitable customer, and that she had better carry her wares elsewhere. She at once responded to the unconscious confidence and returned to himself.

"Now, Mr. Pateley," she said ingratiatingly, "you, I know, never refuse a cake. Look, these are what you had when you came to tea with me the other day. Now, I'll choose you the very best."

"Of course, if you will choose one for me," said Pateley gallantly.

"Oh, but one is not enough," she said, "you must have two—you really must. Five marks. Thank you so much!" and she tripped off.

Pateley, who had already, as we have seen, spent a good deal of time and of the money which is supposed to be its equivalent in the bazaar before going to see Rachel, began to be conscious that before he got round it again he would have spent a sum large enough to have kept him another week in Schleppenheim. "However," he said to himself with a sigh, "it is all part of the story, I suppose." In his inmost soul he felt the conviction that he was altogether, in his strange progress through the joyous crowd with that pale, anxious companion, going through a sufficient penance to make amends for the misfortune of which he was the primary cause.

"Where is Lord Stamfordham?" whispered Rachel anxiously. "Do you see him?"

"Not at this moment," said Pateley, looking vainly in every direction. The difficulties of his quest, and the still worse difficulties that would certainly face him when the object of that quest should be attained, loomed with increased terror before him.

The names of the stallholders, of the performers, waved above their respective quarters. In the corner of the great tent was a mysterious-looking enclosure, of which the entrance was closed by a curtain, and above which hung the legend, "Oriental Fortune-telling. Lady Adela Prestige." Lady Adela Prestige! That was probably the most likely place to try for. "I think he may be over there," he said, and without a word, hardly conscious of the people who were passing through, Rachel followed him.

"Hallo, Pateley, is that you?" said a cheery voice. He turned round and saw Wentworth, a packet of tickets in his hand. "Would you like to have a ticket for the performing dog?" said Wentworth, not seeing who Pateley's companion was.

"No," said Pateley, almost savagely, thankful to be accosted by some one whom he need not answer by a smile and a compliment. "I don't want any fooling of that sort now."

"My dear fellow," said Wentworth, amazed, "what have you come here for, then?" and as he spoke he saw Rachel behind Pateley, and realised that something was happening that had no connection with the business of the bazaar.

"Look here," Pateley said aside to him, "do you know where Stamfordham is?"

"Over there," said Wentworth, with some inward wonder, pointing towards Lady Adela's corner. "I saw him there just now."

"Ah!" said Pateley, "all right," hardly knowing if he was relieved or not, but desperately threading his way in the direction indicated, still followed by Rachel.

Wentworth looked after them in surprise.

"What is that you are saying, Mr. Wentworth?" said a voice in his ear, and he turned quickly and found himself face to face with Mrs. Samuels. "A performing dog? Where? I am quite sure it must be performing better than Princess Hohenschreien."

Wentworth replied by eagerly offering a ticket.

"Let me offer you a ticket, Mrs. Samuels, and then you shall see for yourself."

"Well, I will take a ticket," she said, "on condition that you will tell me honestly what the performance is."

"Certainly," said Wentworth, with a bow, offering the ticket and receiving a gold piece in exchange. "It is Lady Chaloner's Aberdeen terrier. He sits up and begs with a piece of biscuit on his nose while somebody says 'Trust!' and 'Paid for!'"

"That is a most extraordinary and novel trick," said Mrs. Samuels gravely.

"It is unique," said Wentworth; "and sometimes he tosses the biscuit in the air when they say 'Trust,' sometimes when they say 'Paid for,' but generally he drops on all fours and eats it before they have begun."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Samuels. "I am afraid Princess Hohenschreien's performance will be best after all." Then Wentworth suddenly saw from her face that some other attraction was approaching from behind him, and turned quickly round as Mrs. Samuels, with her most beguiling air, advanced and offered her basket of cakes to Lord Stamfordham.

"Now, milord," she said. "I am sure you must be hungry."

"And what makes you think that?" said Stamfordham, whose air of willing response and admiration made it quite evident that Mrs. Samuels's blandishments were not usually exercised in vain. "Do I look pale, or haggard, or weary?"

"None of these," said Mrs. Samuels; "but I am sure it is a long time since I had the privilege of offering you a cup of tea at my stall. Quite half an hour, I should think."

"Quite possible," said Stamfordham. "All I can say is that it seems to me an eternity since I last had the pleasure of receiving anything at your hands. Pray give me a bag of those cakes. You baked them yourself, of course?"

"Of course," Mrs. Samuels said, with a little rippling laugh. And then in answer to Stamfordham's smile of incredulity, "All is fair in ... bazaars and war, you know."

In the meantime, Wentworth, enlisted, he himself did not understand how or why, in the anxious quest in which he saw Pateley and Rachel engaged, had hurried after Pateley, whose broad back he saw disappearing, to tell him of Lord Stamfordham's whereabouts. Pateley turned quickly round. Lord Stamfordham was coming towards them, with Mrs. Samuels, wreathed in smiles, at his side.

"I think," she was saying, "when you have eaten those cakes you can drink some more tea, don't you think so?"

"It is not improbable," Stamfordham replied. "But was our bargain that I was to eat them all myself?"

"Certainly," Mrs. Samuels replied.

"My dear lady," Stamfordham said, "I will engage to eat every one of them that you have baked, I can't say more. And in the meantime I am bound on a very foolish errand. I have sworn to go and have my fortune told," and as Mrs. Samuels's eye, with a careless and ingenuous air, rested upon Lady Adela's name above the tent, she smiled inwardly at the thought that what that astute lady might possibly prophesy would also perhaps come true if, as well as prophesying, she eventually brought her intelligence to bear upon its accomplishment.

"Wait one moment," Pateley said, almost nervously, to Rachel. "There is Stamfordham, he is coming this way," and as Stamfordham drew near the door of the tent Pateley accosted him.

Lady Adela, it may be presumed, had some occult means of discovering from inside who was drawing near her fateful quarters, or else she had the simpler methods more usually employed by mortals, of looking to see. At all events, as Stamfordham came towards her enclosure, she appeared on the threshold and winningly lifted the mysterious curtain, burlesquing a low curtsey in reply to Stamfordham's bow.

"Lord Stamfordham!" Pateley said hurriedly. Stamfordham, in some surprise, looked round. He had been seeing Pateley on and off during the day. Why did he accost him in this way? But the urgent note in his voice arrested his attention. Then, as he looked up, he saw an anxious pale-faced, girlish figure standing by Pateley, looking at him with large brown eyes filled with indescribable anxiety. It was a face that he knew, that he had seen somewhere. Who was it? For one puzzled moment he tried to remember. Pateley took the bull by the horns.

"Lord Stamfordham," he said, "Mrs. Rendel wants to speak to you."

Mrs. Rendel! Of course it was Mrs. Rendel. He had last seen her that day at Cosmo Place. Again a wave of indignation rushed over him. Rachel advanced desperately, looking as though she were going to speak. Stamfordham, involuntarily looking round him at the crowd of observers and listeners, said quickly in a low voice, "I am very sorry, it is no good. It is impossible." And then to Pateley, "It is no good, I can't do anything. You must tell her so," and he passed through the curtain which Lady Adela let drop behind him. Rachel looked at Pateley, then to his amazement and also to his involuntary admiration she lifted the curtain and passed in too.

The two people inside stood aghast at her appearance. She had followed so quickly upon Stamfordham's steps that he was still standing looking round him at his strange surroundings, Lady Adela facing him with a smile of welcome. The apparatus of the fortune-teller apparently consisted in certain cabalistic properties—wands, dials with signs upon them, and the like—arranged round a table. Stamfordham spoke first. He was absolutely convinced that Rachel had come to appeal to him for mercy, and was as absolutely clear that it was an appeal to which he could not listen.

"Mrs. Rendel," he said, "I am afraid I am obliged to tell you that I cannot listen to anything you may have to say. I can guess, of course, why you have come here, and I am sorry for you," he said, leaning on the pronoun. "But I can do nothing," and he spoke slowly and inexorably, "I can do nothing for either you or your husband." But Rachel had now lost all fear, all misgiving.

"I don't think," she said, unconsciously drawing herself up and looking straight at him, "you know what I have come to say, and I must ask you to listen for a moment."

"I think I do know," Stamfordham said sternly, and she saw he meant to go out.

"I have come to tell you," she said, quickly standing between him and the door, "that my husband was wrongfully accused of the thing that you believed he did." Stamfordham shook his head: this was what he expected to hear. "I know who did it, I have found out to-day," and she grew more and more assured as she went on. Stamfordham started, then looked incredulous again. "I have come to tell you who did it, that you may know my husband is innocent." Then she became aware of Lady Adela, who, having at first been much annoyed at her brusque intrusion, was now suddenly roused to interest, even to sympathy. Rachel turned to her. "I must say this," she said. "Don't you see, don't you understand, what it is to me?"

"Yes, yes, you must," the other woman said, with a sudden impulse of help and sympathy. "Go on," and she went outside. Stamfordham felt a slight accession of annoyance as Lady Adela passed out; he felt it was going to be very difficult for him to deal as cruelly as he was bound to do with the anxious, quivering wife before him. He stood silent and absolutely impenetrable. Rachel went on quickly in broken sentences.

"I didn't know about this at the time. I have been ill since. I could not remember. You brought some papers for my husband to copy, and he locked them up so that no one should see them, and while he went down to speak to you they were pulled out of his writing-table from outside, by somebody else who was there, and who showed them to Mr. Pateley. Mr. Pateley came in and went out again. Frank didn't know he had been there." Stamfordham stopped her.

"They were taken out by 'somebody,' you say; do you mean—in fact I must gather from your words—that it was—do you mean by yourself?"

"Oh no, no," Rachel cried, as it dawned upon her what interpretation might be put upon her words. "Oh no, not myself! I wish it had been, I wish it had!"

"You wish it had?" Stamfordham said, surprised. "Who was it, then? Who was it?" he said again, in the tone of one who must have an answer. "Who got the paper out and showed it to Pateley?"

Rachel forced herself to speak.

"It was—my father," she said, "Sir William Gore." And with an immense effort she prevented herself from bursting into tears.

"Sir William Gore!" said Stamfordham, "did he do it?"

"Yes," said Rachel; "I only knew it to-day, and I am telling you to prove to you that it wasn't my husband."

Stamfordham stood for a moment trying to recall Rendel's attitude at the time, and then, as he did so, he made up his mind that Rendel must have known.

"But," he said, after a moment, still somewhat perplexed, "you say you didn't know about this?"

"No," said Rachel, "I didn't. My father," and again her lips quivered and told Stamfordham what that father and his good name probably were to her, "was taken very ill, and I had an accident at the time and did not know anything that had happened. Frank told me nothing. Then my father died, and I was ill, and we came here and I did not know it at all till my husband came in and told me"—and her eyes blazed at the thought—"told me what had happened to-day..." She stopped. Stamfordham felt a stab as he thought of it.

"But," he said, "did he know? Did he tell you then? Did he know that it was Sir William Gore?"

"Oh no, no," Rachel said; "it was Mr. Pateley, and he brought me here to tell you that you might know." Then Stamfordham began to understand.

"Mrs. Rendel," he said, with a change of voice and manner that made her heart leap within her. "Where is your husband?"

"He is at our house, the little pavilion behind the Casino garden."

"Will you take me to him?" Stamfordham said.

Rachel looked at him, unable to speak, her face illuminated with hope—then she covered her face in her hands, saying through the tears she could no longer restrain, "Oh, thank you, thank you!"

"Come," said Stamfordham gently, but with decision. "You must dry your tears," he added with a smile, "or people will think I have been ill-treating you." And to the speechless amazement of Lady Adela, who was standing outside the curtain waiting until, as she expressed it to herself, she too should have her "innings," Stamfordham passed out before her eyes with Rachel, saying to Lady Adela as he passed, "Will you forgive me? I am going to take Mrs. Rendel back." Then looking round him at the jostling crowd he said to Rachel, offering her his arm, "Will you think me very old-fashioned if I ask you to take my arm to get through the crowd?" And, leaning on his arm, hardly daring to believe what had happened or might be going to happen, Rachel passed back along the room through which she had just come with Pateley, the crowd this time opening before them with some indescribable tacit understanding that something had happened concerned with the incident which, as Rendel had foreseen, nearly everybody at the bazaar had heard of. They did not speak again until they reached the pavilion.

Latchkeys were unknown at Schleppenheim, and the inhabitants of the little summer abodes walked in by the simple process of turning the handle of the front door. Rachel and Stamfordham went straight in out of the sunlight into the cool little room into which, in long low rays, the setting sun was sending its beams. Rendel had been trying to read: the book that lay beside him on the floor showed that the attempt had been in vain. He looked up, still with that strange, hunted expression that had come into his face since the morning—the expression of the man to whom every door opening, every figure that comes in may mean some fresh cause of apprehension. Rachel came into the room without speaking, something that he could not read in the least in her face, then his heart stood still within him as he saw Stamfordham behind her. What, again? What new ordeal awaited him? He made no sign of recognition, but stood up and looked Stamfordham straight in the face. Stamfordham came forward and spoke.

"I have come," he said, "to apologise to you for what took place to-day, to beg you to forgive me." Rendel was so utterly astounded that he simply looked from one to the other of the people standing before him without uttering a sound.

"I have just learnt," Stamfordham went on, "the name of the person who did the thing of which I wrongfully accused you." Rendel made a hurried movement forward as if to stop him.

"Wait, wait one moment!" he cried, "don't say it before my wife—she doesn't know." In that moment Rachel realised what he had done for her.

"Do you know?" asked Stamfordham.

"Yes," Rendel answered.

With the old friendliness, and something deeper, in his face and voice, Stamfordham said—

"Mrs. Rendel knows also. It was she told me."

"Rachel!" cried Rendel, turning to her. "Do you know?"

"Yes," said Rachel, trying to command her voice. "I know—now—that it was—my father," and the eyes of the two met.

Stamfordham advanced to Rendel.

"Will you forgive me," he said again, "and shake hands?" Rendel held out his hand and pressed Stamfordham's in a close and tremulous grasp, which the other returned. "I must see you," he said. "Will you come to my rooms some time? I shall be here for a week longer." He held out his hand to Rachel. "Thank you," he said, "for what you have done." And he went out.

Rendel turned towards Rachel, his arms outstretched, his face transformed by the knowledge of the great love she had shown him. His heart was too full for speech: in the closer union of silence that new precious compact was made. The veil that had hung between them so long was lifted for ever.

THE END.

* * * * *

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

The author's name on the original title page was "Mrs. Hugh Bell". Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. Typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced quotes and the like) have been fixed. Text that has been changed to correct an obvious error by the publisher is noted below:

page 125: "Rendal" corrected to "Rendel"

"Of course," he said, after listening to what Rendal[Rendel] had to say

page 303: "toward's" corrected to "towards"

Wentworth, with some inward wonder, pointing toward's[towards] Lady Adela's corner.

THE END