She began her career of defiance at once by informing Aunt Anne that she was now going out every morning to do her shopping. Considering the confinement to the house that her life had always been, this was such a declaration of independence as those walls had never encountered before. But Aunt Anne never turned one of her shining neatly ordered hairs. "Shopping, my dear?" she asked. "Yes," said Maggie, looking her full in the face. "What sort of shopping, dear?" "Oh, I don't know," said Maggie. "There's always something every day."

Maggie had an uncomfortable feeling that her aunt had in some way mysteriously defeated her by this sudden abandonment of all protest, and for a moment the mysterious house closed around her, with its shadows and dim corners and the little tinkling Chapel hell in the heart of it. But the thought of Martin dissolved the shadows, and off she went.

They agreed to meet every morning at eleven o'clock outside Hatchards, the bookseller's, in Piccadilly. They chose that place because you could look into a bookseller's window for quite a long time without seeming odd, and there were so many people passing that no one noticed you. Their habit then was to walk to the corner of the Green Park and there climb on to the top of a motor omnibus and go as far as they could within the allotted time. Maggie never in after life found those streets again. They had gone, she supposed, to Chelsea, to St. John's Wood, to the heart of the city, to the Angel, Islington, to Westminster and beyond, but places during those three weeks had no names, streets had no stones, houses no walls, and human figures no substantiality. They tried on one or two occasions to go by Tube, but they missed the swing of the open air, the rush of the wind, and their independence of men and women. Often he tried to persuade her to stay with him for luncheon and the afternoon, but she was wiser than he.

"No," she said, "everything depends on keeping them quiet. A little later on it will be lovely. You must leave that part of it to me."

She promised him definitely that soon they should go to a matinee together, but she would not give her word about a whole evening. In some strange way she was frightened of the evening, although she had already pledged her word to him on something much more final: "No," she thought to herself, "when the moment comes for me to leave everything, I will go, but he shall know that I am not doing it cheaply, simply for an evening's fun." He felt something of that too, and did not try to persuade her. He hugged his unselfishness; for the first time in his life it seemed to him that he wanted to follow somebody else's will; with the other women it had been so different, if they had not wanted to obey him he had left them. But indeed all through these three weeks they were discovering themselves and one another, and, as though it were part of the general conspiracy, only the best part of themselves. On the top of the 'bus, as they sat close together, their hands locked under his overcoat, the world bumping and jolting, and jogging about their feet, as though indeed public houses and lamp-posts and cinemas and town halls and sweet-shops were always jumping up tiptoe to see whether they couldn't catch a glimpse of the lovers, Martin and Maggie felt that they were really divine creatures, quite modestly divine, but nevertheless safe from all human ravages and earthly failings, wicked and cowardly thoughts, and ambitions and desires.

Indeed, during those three weeks Maggie saw nothing of Martin's weaknesses, his suspicions and dreads, his temper and self-abasement. The nobility that Martin had in him was true nobility, his very weaknesses came from his sharp consciousness of what purity and self-sacrifice and asceticism really were, and that they were indeed the only things for man to live by. During those weeks he saw so truly the sweetness and fidelity and simplicity of Maggie that his conscience was killed, his scruples were numbed. He did not want during those weeks any sensual excitement, any depravity, any license. A quiet and noble asceticism seemed to him perfectly possible. He burst out once to Maggie with: "I can't conceive, Maggie, why I ever thought life complicated. You've straightened everything out for me, made all the troubles at home seem nothing, shown me what nonsense it was wanting the rotten things I was always after."

But Maggie had no eloquence in reply—she could not make up fine sentences; it embarrassed her dreadfully to tell him even that she loved him, and when he was sentimental it was her habit to turn it off with a joke if she could. She wanted terribly to ask him sometimes what he had meant when he said that he didn't love her as he had loved other women. She had never the courage to ask him this. She wondered sometimes why it had hurt her when he had said he loved her as though she were a man friend, without any question of sex. "Surely that's enough for me," she would ask herself, "it means that it's much more lasting and safe." And yet it was not enough.

Nevertheless, during these weeks she found his brotherly care of her adorable, he found her shyness divine.

"Every other woman I have ever been in love with," he told her once, "I have always kept asking them would they ever change, and would they love me always, and all that kind of nonsense. A man always begins like that, and then the time comes when he wishes to God they would change, and they won't. But you're not like that, Maggie, I know you'll never change, and I know that I shall never want you to." "No, I shall never change," said Maggie.

At the very beginning of the three weeks a little incident occurred that was trivial enough at the time, but appeared afterwards as something significant and full of meaning. This incident was a little talk with poor Mr. Magnus. Maggie always thought of him as "poor Mr. Magnus." He seemed so feckless and unsettled, and then he wrote novels that nobody wanted to buy. He always talked like a book, and that was perhaps one reason why Maggie had avoided him during these last months. Another reason had been that she really could not be sure how far he was in the general conspiracy to drive her into the Chapel. He would not do that of his own will she was sure, but being in love with Aunt Anne he might think it his sacred duty, and Maggie was terrified of "sacred duties." Therefore when, three days after that great evening in the park, he caught her alone in the drawing-room, her first impulse was to run away; then she looked at him and found that her love for the world in general embraced him too "if only he won't talk like a book," she thought to herself.

He looked more wandering than ever with his high white collar, his large spectacles, and his thin, dusty hair; the fire of some hidden, vital spirit burnt beneath those glasses, and his face was so kindly that she felt ashamed of herself for having avoided him so often.

"Both the aunts are at Miss Avies'." she said.

"Oh," he said, looking at her rather blankly.

"Perhaps I'll come another time," and he turned towards the door.

"No," she cried. "You won't—I haven't seen you for months."

"That's not my fault," he answered. "I thought we were to have been friends, and you've run away every time you saw the corner of my dusty coat poking round the door."

"Yes," she said, "I have—I've been frightened of every one lately."

"And you're not now?" he asked, looking at her with that sudden bright sharpness that was so peculiarly his.

"No, I'm not," she answered. "I'm frightened of nobody."

He said nothing to that, but stared fixedly in front of him.

"I'm in a bad mood," he said. "I've been trying for weeks to get on with a novel. Just a fortnight ago a young man and a young woman took shelter from the rain in the doorway of a deserted house—they're still there now, and they haven't said a word to one another all that time."

"Why not?" asked Maggie.

"They simply won't speak," he answered her.

"Well then, I should start another story," said Maggie brightly.

"Ah," he said, shaking his head. "What's the use of starting one if you know you're never going to finish it, what's the use of finishing it if you know no one is ever going to read it?" Maggie shook her head.

"You've changed. When I saw you last you told me that you didn't mind whether any one ever read them or not, and that you just wrote them because you loved doing them."

"Every author," said Mr. Magnus gloomily, "says that to himself when he can't sell his books, but it's all vainglory, I'm afraid."

"I can't help being glad," Maggie answered. "There are such interesting things you might do. I can't imagine why any one writes books now when there are so many already in existence that nobody's read."

He wasn't listening to her. He looked up suddenly and said quite wildly:

"It's terrible all this that's going on. You know about it, of course—Warlock's visions I mean and the trouble it's making. I'm outside it and you're outside it, but we're being brought into it all the same—how can we help it when we love the people who are in it? It's so easy to say that it's nonsense, that people ought to be wiser nowadays; that it's hysteria, even insanity—I know all that and, of course, I don't believe for a moment that God's coming in a chariot of fire on New Year's Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn't end it—it ought to end it, but it doesn't. There's more in some people's madness than in other people's sanity, and anyway, even if it's all nonsense it means life or death to your aunt and some of the others, and it means a certain breaking up of all this place. And it probably means the triumph of a charlatan like Thurston and the increase of humbug in the world and the discouragement of all the honest adventurers. I call myself an adventurer, you know, Miss Maggie, although I'm a poor specimen—but I'm damned if it isn't better to be a poor adventurer than to be a fat, swollen, contented stay-at-home who can see just as far as his nose and his cheque-book and might be just as well dead as alive—I beg your pardon," he added suddenly, "for swearing—I'm not myself, I'm not really."

She could see indeed that he was in great agitation of mind, and some of this agitation communicated itself to her. Had she not been selfish in forgetting all this through her own happiness? He was right, she was part of it all, whether she wished or no.

"What do you think," she asked, dropping her voice a little, "is the real truth about it?"

"The real truth"—he looked at her suddenly with a tender, most charming smile that took away his ugliness. "Ah, that's a tremendous question. Part of the truth is that Warlock's been praying so much and eating so little that it would be odd indeed if he didn't see visions of some sort. And part of the truth is that there are a lot of women in the world who'll believe simply anything that you tell them. It's part of the truth, too, that there are scoundrels in the world who will take advantage of anybody's simple trust to fill their pockets. But that's not all," he went on, shaking his head, "no, that's not all. It's part of the truth that there is a mystery, and that human beings will go on searching whatever all the materialists and merchants in the world can try to do to stop them. I remember years ago an old man, a little off his dot, telling my father that he, the old man, was a treasure hunter. He told my father that the world was divided into two halves, the treasure hunters and the Town Councillors, and that the two halves would never join and never even meet. My father, who was a practical man, said that the old idiot should be shut up in an asylum, and eventually I believe he was. 'We'll have him going off one day,' my father said, 'in a cargo boat with a map in his pocket, looking for gold pieces.' But it wasn't gold pieces he was after."

To Maggie it was always irritating the way that Mr. Magnus would wander away from the subject. She brought him back now with a jerk.

"No, but what do you think is going to happen?" she asked him.

"I don't know," he answered. "I can't tell, but I know all my happiness here is coming to an end, and I don't know what I shall do. If I were a strong man I would go out and find all the other treasure hunters, all the vicious ones, and the diseased, and the drunkards and the perverted, and I would try to found some kind of a society so that they should recognise one another all the world over and shouldn't feel so lonely and deserted and hopelessly done for. I don't mean a society for improving them, mind you, or warning them or telling them they'll go to prison if they don't do better, that's none of my business. But it seems to be a solemn fact that you aren't a treasure hunter until there's something wrong with you, until you've got a sin that's stronger than you are, or until you've done something that's disgraceful in the eyes of the world—not that I believe in weakness or in giving way to things. No one admires the strong and the brave more than I do. I think a man's a fool if he doesn't fight as hard as he can. But there's a brotherhood of the dissatisfied and the uneasy and the anxious-hearted, and I believe it's they who will discover the Grail in the end if it's ever going to be discovered at all."

He broke off, then said restlessly: "I think things out, you know, and at last I come to a conclusion, and it ends by being a platitude that all the goody, goody books have said times without number. But all the same that doesn't prevent it from being my discovery. It's nothing to do with goodness and nothing to do with evil, it's nothing to do with strength, and nothing to do with weakness; it simply is that there are some people who want what they can see and no more, and there are others, the baffled, fighting and disordered others, for whom nothing that they can see with their mortal eyes is enough, and who'll be restless all their days with their queer little maps and their mysterious, thumbed directions to some island or other that they'll never reach and never even get a ship for."

He stopped and there was a long silence between them, Maggie was silent because she never knew what to say when he burst into parables and divided mankind, under strange names, into different camps. And yet this time she did know a little what he was after. There was that house of Katharine Mark's the other day, with its comfort and quiet and kind smiling clergyman—and there was this strange place with all of them in an odd quiver of excitement waiting for something to happen. But she couldn't speak to him about that, she couldn't say anything to him at all. He cleared his throat as though he were embarrassed and were conscious that he had been making a fool of himself. Maggie felt that he was disappointed in her. She was sorry for that, but she was as she was.

"Well, I'm glad you're happy," he said, looking at her wistfully. He got up and stood awkwardly looking at her.

"I want you to promise me something," he said, "that's really what I came for. I want you to promise that you won't in any case leave your aunts before the New Year."

She got up, looked at him and gave him her hand.

"Yes," she said. "I promise that."

The year had only a week or two more to run and she was not afraid of that little space of time. He seemed to want to say something more, but after hesitating he suddenly made a bolt for the door and she could hear him stumbling downstairs.

She forgot him almost as soon as he had left the house, but his words nevertheless brought her to consider her aunts. Next morning at breakfast time she had a further reason to consider them. Aunt Elizabeth met her, when she came downstairs, with a very grave face.

"Your aunt's had a terrible night," she said. "She's insisted on coming downstairs—I told her not. She never listens to anything I say."

Maggie could see that something more than ordinary had occurred. Aunt Elizabeth was on the edge of tears, and in so confused a state of mind that she put sugar into her egg, and then ate it with a puzzled air as though she could not be sure why it tasted so strange. When Aunt Anne came in it was plain enough that she had wrestled with demons during the night. Maggie had often seen her before battling with pain and refusing to be defeated. Now she looked as though she had but risen from the dead. It was a ghost in very truth that stood there; a ghost in black silk dress with white wristbands and a stiff white collar, black hair, so tightly drawn back and ordered that it was like a shining skull-cap. Her face was white, with the effect of a chalk drawing into which live, black, burning eyes had been stuck. But it was none of these things that frightened Maggie. It was the expression somewhere in the mouth, in the eyes, in the pale bony hands, that spoke of some meeting with a torturer whose powers were almost omniscient—almost, but not quite. Pain, sheer physical, brutal pain, came into the room hulking, steering behind Aunt Anne's shoulder. It grinned at Maggie and said, "You haven't begun to feel what I can do yet, but every one has his turn. You needn't flatter yourself that you're going to escape."

When Aunt Anne moved now it was with infinite caution, as though she were stalking her enemy and was afraid lest any incautious gesture should betray her into his ambush. No less marked than her torture was her courage and the expectation that sustained that courage. She had her eyes set upon something very sure and very certain. Maggie was afraid to think what that expectation might be. But Maggie had grown during these last weeks. She did not now kiss her aunt and try to show an affection which was not so genuine as she would have liked it to be by nervous little demonstrations. She said gravely:

"I am so sorry, Aunt Anne, that you have had so bad a night. Shall I stay this morning and read to you?"

Even as she spoke she realised with sharp pain what giving up her meeting with Martin meant.

"What were you going to do, dear?" asked Aunt Anne, her eyes seeing as ever far beyond Maggie and the room and the house. As she spoke Thomas, the cat, came forward and began rubbing himself very gently, as though he were whispering something to his mistress, against her dress. Maggie had an impulse, so strong that it almost defeated her, to burst out with the whole truth. She almost said: "I'm going out to meet Martin Warlock, whom I love and with whom I'm going to live." She hated deceit, she hated lies. But this was some one else's secret as well as her own, and telling the truth now would only lead to much pain and distress, and then more lies and more deceit.

So she said:

"I'm going to Piccadilly to get some things for Aunt Elizabeth."

"Yes," said Aunt Elizabeth, "she saves me a great deal of trouble. She's a good girl."

"I know she's a good girl," said Aunt Anne softly.

It was strange to remember the time not so long ago when to run out of the house and post a letter had seemed a bold defiant thing to do threatened with grave penalties. The aunts had changed their plans about her and had given her no reasons for doing so. No reasons were ever given in that house for anything that was done. The more Maggie went out, the more she was drawn in.

On her way to Martin that morning the figure of Aunt Anne haunted her. She felt for a brief moment that she would do anything, yes, even surrender Martin, to ease her aunt's pain. And then she knew that she would not, and she called herself cruel and selfish and felt for an instant a dark shadow threatening her because she was so. But when she saw Martin outside Hatchard's she forgot it all. It was a strange thing that during those weeks they neither of them asked any questions about their home affairs. It was as though they both inwardly realised that there was trouble for them of every kind waiting outside and that they could only definitely realise their happiness by building a wall around themselves. They knew perhaps in their secret hearts, or at any rate Martin knew, that they could not hold their castle for long. But is not the gift of three perfect weeks a great thing for any human being to be given—and who has the temerity, the challenging audacity, to ask with confidence for even so much?

On this particular morning Martin said to her:

"Before we get into the 'bus, Maggie, you've got to come into a shop with me." He was especially boyish and happy and natural that morning. It was strange how his face altered when he was happy. His brow was clear, his eyes were bright, and he had a kind of crooked confident smile that must have won anybody's heart. His whole carriage was that of a boy who was entering life for the first time with undaunted expectation that it could give him nothing but the best and jolliest things. Maggie as she looked at him this morning caught her breath with the astonishing force of her love for him. "Oh, how I'll look after him," was her thought. "He shall never be unhappy again."

They crossed the street together, and stood for a moment close together on the kerb in the middle way as though they were quite alone in the world. She caught his arm and they ran before a charging motor-'bus, laughing. People turned back and looked at them, so happy they seemed. They walked up Bond Street and Martin drew her into a jeweller's. She had never possessed any ornament except her coral necklace in all her life and she knew now for the first time how terribly she liked beautiful things. It was useless of her to pretend that she did not know that he was going to give her something. She did not pretend. A very thin old man, who looked like one of the prophets, drawn out of the wilderness and clothed by the most fashionable of London tailors, looking over their shoulders as he talked to them because he saw at once that they were not customers who were likely to add very much to his shop's exchequer, produced a large tray, full of rings that glittered and sparkled and danced as though they'd been told to show themselves off to the best possible advantage. But for Maggie at once there was only one possible ring. It was a thin hoop of gold with three small pearls set in the middle of it; nothing very especial about it, it was in fact less striking than almost any other ring in the tray. Maggie looked at the ring and the ring looked at Maggie. It was as though the ring said, "I shall belong to you whether you take me or no."

"Now," said Martin with a little catch in his throat, "you make your choice, Maggie." He was not a millionaire, but he did honestly intend that whatever ring she chose she should have.

"Oh," said Maggie, whispering because the shop was so large and the prophet so indifferent, "don't you think you'd better choose?"

At the same time she felt the anxious gaze of the three little pearls upon her.

"No," said Martin, "I want to give you what you'd like."

"I'd like what you'd like," said Maggie, still whispering.

At this banality the prophet made a little impatient movement as though he really could not be expected to stand waiting there for ever. Also a magnificent lady, in furs so rich that you could see nothing of her but her powdered nose, was waving ropes of pearls about in a blase manner very close to them, and Maggie had a strange, entirely unreasonable fear that this splendour would suddenly turn round and snatch the little pearl ring and go off with it.

"I'd like that one," said Maggie, pointing. She heard the prophet sniff his contempt, but she did not care.

Martin, although he would willingly have given her the most gorgeous ring in the shop, was delighted to find that her taste was so good, and like herself. He had great ideas about taste, some of his secret fears had been lest her strange uncouth upbringing should have caused her to like gaudy things. He could have hugged her before them all when she chose that particular ring, which he had himself noticed as the prettiest and neatest there.

"Just see whether it fits, darling," he said. At the word "darling" the prophet cast another despairing look about the shop, as though he knew well the length of time that lovers could take over these things if they once put their hearts into it. Maggie was ashamed of her stubby finger as she put her hand forward—but the ring fitted exactly.

"That's right," said Martin, "Now we'll have this put into a case."

"How wonderful he is," thought Maggie. Not as other women might have thought, "I wonder how many times he's done this before." Maggie thought then that it would be more proper to retire a little so that she should not know the price—and she stood in the doorway of the shop, looking upon the wind and weather in Bond Street and the magnificent motor car that belonged to the lady with the pearls and a magnificent chauffeur, who was so superior that it was probable that the lady with the pearls belonged to him—and she saw none of these things, but was conscious of herself and Martin wrapt together in a mist of happiness that no outside force could penetrate.

As they walked away from the shop she said: "Of course I won't be able to wear it."

He put the little square box, wrapped in tissue paper, into her hand, and answered: "You can wear it on a ribbon under your dress."

"Oh yes," she whispered, pressing his hand for a moment.

They did not climb on to a 'bus that morning, but walked ahead blindly, blissfully, they did not know whither. They were now in wild days at the end of November and the weather was tempestuous, the wind blowing with a screaming fury and black clouds scudding across the sky like portents. Little heavy drops of rain fell with a sudden urgency as though they were emphasising some secret; figures were swept through the streets and the roar of the wind was so vehement that the traffic seemed to make no sound. And yet nothing happened—no great storm of rain, no devastating flood. It was a day of warning.

They noticed nothing of the weather. It might have been a world of burning sunshine for all they saw of it.

"You know," said Martin, "I've never liked giving any one anything so much as I liked giving you that ring."

"I wish I could give you something too," she said.

"Well, you can," he said. "Some little thing that I'll carry about with me always ... Oh, Maggie!" he went on. "Isn't it strange how easy it is to be good when no one worries you. These last ten days with you I couldn't have done anything wrong if I tried. It isn't fair to say we can help ourselves. We can't. Something just comes along and seizes you and makes you do wrong."

"Oh, I don't know," said Maggie. "Don't let's talk about those things. It's like Mr. Magnus, who says we're treasure hunters or pools of water, or old men in asylums. I don't understand all that. I'm just Maggie Cardinal.—All the same I believe one can do what one wants to. I don't believe people can make one do things."

"Do you think any one could make me not love you if they tried? I shall love you always, whatever happens. I know I shall never change. I'm not one to change. I'm obstinate. Father used to say 'obstinate as a pig.'"

That made her think of the old days at St. Dreot's, just then, as they seemed, so remote. She began to tell him of those old days, of the Vicarage, of the holes in the floor and the ceiling, of her loneliness and the way the villagers used to talk, of her solitary walks and looking down on to Polchester from the hill-top, of her father's sudden death, of Uncle Mathew ...

"He's a funny old codger," said Martin. "What does he do?"

"I don't know," said Maggie. "I really don't know how he lives I'm afraid it's something rather bad."

"I've known men like that," said Martin, "plenty, but it's funny that one of them should be connected with you. It doesn't seem as though you could have anything to do with a man like that."

"Oh, but I like him!" said Maggie. "He's been very kind to me often. When I was all alone after father died he was very good—" She stopped abruptly remembering how he'd come into her bedroom. "Drink's been his trouble, and never having any money. He told me once if he had money he'd never do a thing he shouldn't." "Yes," said Martin. "That's what they always say when they haven't any money, and then when they have any it's worse than ever."

He was thinking, perhaps, of himself. At any rate to stop remorseful thoughts he began to tell her about his own childhood.

"Mine was very different from yours, Maggie," he said. "I wasn't lonely. You don't know what a fuss people made of me. I was conceited, too. I thought I was chosen, by God, out of all the world, that I was different from every one else, and better too. When I was only about nine, at home one Sunday they asked me if I'd say a prayer, and I did, before them all, made it up and went on for quarter of an hour. Lord! I must have been an awful child. And outside the religious time I was as wicked as I could be. I used to go down into the kitchen and steal the food and I'd dress up as a ghost to frighten Amy and I'd break mother's china. I remember once, after we'd had a service in the drawing-room and two girls had gone into hysterics, I stole down into the kitchen in my nightdress to get some jam and I found one of the Elders making love to the cook. They were both so fat and he had his coat and waistcoat off and he was kissing her neck. My word, they were frightened when they saw me standing there! After that I could do what I liked with the cook ... We used to have prayer meetings in the drawing-room, and sometimes father would pray so hard that the glass chandelier would shake and rattle till I used to think it would come down."

"And the funny thing was that one minute I'd be pinching Amy who was kneeling next to me and the next I'd be shaking with religion and seeing God standing right in front of me by the coal-scuttle. Such a mix-up! ... it was then and so it is now. Amy always hated me. She was really religious and she thought I was a hypocrite. But I wasn't altogether. There was something real in it and there still is."

"Didn't you go to school?" asked Maggie.

"No, that was the mistake. They never sent me. Father loved me too much and he wanted to keep me always with him. He tried to teach me himself but I never learnt anything. I always knew I could turn them round my little finger. I always knew he'd rather do anything than make me unhappy. Sometimes we had lovely times together, sitting in the dusk in the front of the fire. Do you know, Maggie, I've never changed in my love for father? I've changed in everything else, but in that never. Yet I've hurt him over and over and over again. I've done things ..." Here he broke off. To-day was to be happy; they must build up their walls faster, faster, faster to keep the world out. He would think of nothing, nothing but the present. The wind blew and the heavy drops of rain fell, one and one and one, slowly between the gusts. Ho drew her close to him.

"Are you cold?"

"No, Martin dear."

"I suppose we should turn back."

"Yes, it's getting late."

"It will seem hours until to-morrow."

"And to me too."

They were at the end of the Green Park. There was no one there. They kissed and clung together and Maggie's hand was warm inside his coat. Then they turned back and entered the real world once more ...

"Now we must have our matinee," Martin said. Maggie could not refuse and besides she herself wanted it so badly. Also the three weeks were drawing to a close, and although she did not know what was in store for them, she felt, in some mysterious way, that trouble was coming.

"Yes, we'll have our matinee," she said.

It was a terrific excitement for her, apart altogether from her love for Martin. She had, of course, never been to a theatre. She could not imagine in the least what it was like. It so happened, by a wonderful chance, that a note came from Katherine Mark asking her to tea. She showed this to the aunts and said that she would accept it. She wrote to Katherine Mark and refused and told Martin that for that Wednesday afternoon she was quite free until at least seven o'clock. She wove these deceits with strong disgust. She hated the lies, and there were many, many times when she was on the edge of confessing everything to the aunts. But the thought of what would follow that confession held her back. She could not make things harder for Martin.

Nevertheless she wondered why when she felt, in herself, no shame al all at the things that she was doing, she should have to lie to cover those things up. But everything in connection with the Chapel seemed to lie.—The place was wrapped in intrigue and double-dealing. How long would it be before she and Martin were out of it all?

She was to meet him by one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. She bought a golden chrysanthemum which she stuck into the belt of her black dress and she wore her coral necklace. She was tired of black. She sometimes thought she would spend all her Three Hundred Pounds on clothes ... To-day, as soon as she was out of the house and had turned the corner into King William Street, she slipped on her ring. She kissed it before she put her glove on. He was waiting there looking like a happy schoolboy, that way that she loved him to look. That slow crooked smile of his, something that broke up his whole face into geniality and friendliness, how she adored him when he looked like that! He was wearing clothes of some rough red-brown stuff and a black knitted tie—

She was carrying something, a little parcel in tissue paper. She pressed it into his hand when they met. He opened it, just like a boy, chuckling, his eyes shining, his fingers tearing the paper in his eagerness. Her present was a round locket of thin plain gold and inside was the funniest little black faded photograph of Maggie, her head only, a wild untidy head of hair, a fat round schoolgirl face—a village snapshot of Maggie taken in St. Dreot's when she was about fifteen.

"It's all I had," she said. "I remembered it the other day and I found it. A travelling photographer took it one day. He came to the village and every one was taken, father and all. It's very bad but it was the only one."

"It's wonderful," said Martin, and truly it was wonderful. It had caught by a marvellous chance, in spite of its shabby faded darkness, the very soul of Maggie. Was it her hair, her untidy hair, or the honesty of her eyes, or the strength and trustiness of her mouth? But then it was to any one who did not know her the bad dim photograph of an untidy child, to any one who did know her the very stamp and witness of Maggie and all that she was. Maggie had spent twenty-five shillings on the locket (she had had three pounds put away from her allowance in her drawer).

It was a very simple locket, thin plain gold round and smooth, but good, and it would last.

"You darling," whispered Martin. "There couldn't have been anything more like you if you'd been taken by the grandest photographer in London."

They started off towards Shaftesbury Avenue where the theatre was, and as they went a funny little incident occurred. They were both too happy to talk and Maggie was too happy even to think. Suddenly she was aware that some one was coming towards her whom she knew. She looked and tugged herself from that world of Martin and only Martin in which she was immersed. It was the large, smiling, rosy-cheeked, white-haired clergyman, Mr. Trenchard. Yes, certainly it was he. He had recognised her and was stopping to speak to her. Martin moved on a little and stood waiting for her. She was confused and embarrassed but pleased too because he seemed glad to see her. He looked the very picture of a well-dressed, kindly, genial friend who had known her all his life. He was wearing a beautifully shining top-hat and his stiff white collar gleamed. Yes, he was glad to see her and he said so. He remembered her name. "Miss Cardinal," he called her. How had she been? What had she been doing? Had she seen Mrs. Mark? He was staying with his sister at Brown's Hotel in Somewhere—she didn't catch the name of the street. His sister would be so glad if she would come and see them one day. Would she come? He wouldn't tie her down, but she had only to write and say she was coming ...

He took her hand and held it for a moment and looked in her eyes with the kindliest friendliest regard. He was glad to have seen her. He should tell his sister ...

He was gone and Maggie really could not be sure what she had said. Something very silly she could be certain. Stupid the pleasure that his few words had given her, but she felt once again, as she had felt in Katherine Mark's drawing-room, the contact with that other world, that safe, happy, comfortable, assured world in which everything was exactly what it seemed. She was glad that he liked her and that his sister liked her. Then she could not be so wild and odd and uncivilised as she often was afraid that she was. She rejoined Martin with a little added glow in her cheeks.

"Who was that?" Martin asked her rather sharply.

She told him.

"One of those humbugging parsons," he said. "He stood over you as though he'd like to eat you."

"Oh, I'm sure he's not a humbug," she answered.

"You'd be taken in by anybody," he told her.

"Oh, no, I shouldn't," she said. "Now forget him."

And they did. By the time they had reached Piccadilly Circus they were once more deep, deep in one another. They were back in their dark and gleaming wood.

The Lyric Theatre was their destination. Maggie drew a breath as they stepped into the hall where there stood two large stout commissionaires in blue uniforms, gold buttons, and white gloves. People pushed past them and hurried down the stairs on either side as though a theatre were a Nothing. Maggie stood there fingering her gloves and feeling lonely. The oil painting of a beautiful lady with a row of shining teeth faced her. There were also some palms and a hole in the wall with a man behind it.

Soon they too passed down the stairs, curtains were drawn back, and Maggie was sitting, quite suddenly, in a large desert of gold and red plush, with emptiness on every side of it and a hungry-looking crowd of people behind a wooden partition staring at her in such a way that she felt as though she had no clothes on. She gave a hurried glance at these people and turned round blushing.

"Why don't they sit with us?" she whispered to Martin.

"They're the Pit and we're the Stalls," he whispered to her, but that comforted her very little.

"Won't people come and sit where we are?" she asked.

"Oh yes; we're early," he told her.

Soon she was more composed and happier. She sat very close to Martin, her knee against his and his hand near to hers, just touching the outside of her palm. Her ring sparkled and the three little pearls smiled at her. As he breathed she breathed too, and it seemed to her that their bodies rose and fell as one body. Without looking directly at him, which would, she knew, embarrass him before all those hungry people behind her, she could out of the corner of her eye see the ruddy brown of his cheek and the hard thick curve of his shoulder. She was his, she belonged to no one else in the world, she was his utterly. Utterly. Ever so swiftly and gently her hand brushed for an instant over his; he responded, crooking his little finger for a moment inside hers. She smiled; she turned round and looked at the people triumphantly, she felt a deep contented rest in her heart, rich and full, proud and arrogant, the mother, the lover, the sister, the child, everything to him she was ...

People came in, the theatre filled, and a hum of talk arose, then the orchestra began to tune, and soon music was playing, and Maggie would have loved to listen but the people must chatter.

When suddenly the lights went down the only thing of which she was conscious was that Martin's hand had suddenly seized hers roughly, sharply, and was crushing it, pressing the ring into the flesh so that it hurt. Her first excited wondering thought then was:

"He doesn't care for me any more only as a friend.—There's the other now ..." and a strange shyness, timidity, and triumph overwhelmed her so that her eyes were full of tears and her body trembling.

But as the play continued she must listen. It was her very first play and soon it was thrilling to her so that she forgot, for a time, even Martin. Or rather Martin was mingled with it, absorbed in it, part of it, and she was there too sharing with him the very action of the story. It was a very old-fashioned play about a little Charity girl who was brought up by a kindly middle-aged gentleman who cared for nothing but books. He brought her up on his own plan with a view to marrying her afterwards. But meanwhile, of course, she saw a handsome young soldier who was young like herself, and she was naturally bored with the studious gentleman. Maggie shared all the feelings of the Charity girl. Had she been brought up, say by a man like Mr. Trenchard and then had met Martin, why, of course, she could have gone only one way.

The soldier was not like Martin, being slim and curled and beautiful, nor was the studious gentleman like Mr. Trenchard, being thin and tall with a face like a monk and a beautiful voice. But the girl was like Maggie, prettier of course, and with artful ways, but untidy a little and not very well educated. At the first interval, when the lights were up and the band was playing and the people walking, Martin whispered:

"Do you like it, Maggie?"

"I love it," she answered.

And then they just sat there, without another word between them, pressed close together.

A little song ran through the play—one of Burns's most famous songs, although Maggie, who had never read anything, did not know that. The verses were:

O my luve's like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June: O my luve's like the melodie That's sweetly played in tune!

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I: And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a' the seas gang dry:

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun; I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve, And fare thee weel a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho' it were ten thousand mile.

First the handsome soldier sang this to the Charity girl, and then, because it was a sentimental tune, it was always turning up through the play, and if one of the characters were not singing it the orchestra was quietly playing it. Maggie loved it; she was not sentimental but she was simple, and the tune seemed at once to belong to herself and to Martin by natural right.

As the story developed it became more unreal and Maggie's unerring knowledge of the difference between sense and nonsense refused to credit the tall handsome villainness who confronted the Charity girl at the ball. The Charity girl had no right to be at the ball and people stood about in unnatural groups and pretended not to listen to the loud development of the plot and no one seemed to use any of their faculties. Then at the end, when the middle-aged gentleman nobly surrendered his Charity girl to the handsome soldier, the little tune came back again and all was well.

They came out of the theatre into lights and shadows and mists cabs and omnibuses and crowds of people ... Maggie clung to Martin's arm. It seemed to her, dazzled for an instant, that a great are of white piercing light cut the black street and that in the centre of this arc a tree, painted green, stood, and round the tree figures, dark shapes, and odd shadows danced. She shaded her eyes with her hand. The long shining line of Shaftesbury Avenue ran out, from her feet, into thick clusters of silver lights. The tree had vanished and now there were policemen and ladies in hats and strange mysterious houses. She caught above it all, between the roofs, the pale flat river of the evening sky and in this river stars like golden buttons floated. The moon was there too, a round amber coin with the laughing face stamped upon it.

"What time is it?" she asked Martin.

"Half-past five," he said. "How early the moon rises. It's only climbing now. See the chimney's tossing it about."

"I must get home."

"No, no." He held her arm fiercely. "You must come to tea. That's part of the programme. We have plenty of time before seven o'clock." She knew that she ought to return. Something seemed to tell her, as she stood there, that now was the moment to break this off. But when his hand was on her arm, when he was so close to her, she could not leave him. She would have one hour more ... He took her across the street, down into darkness, up into light. Then they went into a shop, up some stairs, and were suddenly in a little room with a table with a cloth, a window looking out into the lamp-lit square, cherry-coloured curtains and gay hunting pictures on the walls. Martin pushed a bell in the wall and a stout waiter, perspiring, smiling, a napkin in his hand, came to the door. "Tea," said Martin, and he vanished. "It's all right," he said, drawing her to a creaking wicker armchair near the empty fireplace. "No one will interrupt us. They know me here. I ordered the room yesterday." Tea came, but she could not eat anything. In some strange way that moment in the theatre when he had pressed her hand had altered everything. She recognised in herself a new Maggie; she was excited with a thick burning excitement, she was almost sleepy with the strain of it and her cheeks were hot, but her throat icy cold. When she told him that she wasn't hungry, he said, "I'm not either." Then he added, not looking at her, "That fellow won't be back for an hour." He came and stood by her looking down on her. He bent forward over the chair and put his hands under her chin and pressed her face up towards his. But he did not kiss her. Then he took her hands and pulled her gently out of the chair, sat down on it himself, then, still very tenderly, put his arms round her and drew her down to him. She lay back against him, her cheek against his, his arms tight around her. He whispered to her again and again, "Darling ... Darling ... Darling." She felt now so terribly part of him that she seemed to have lost all her own identity. His hands, softly, tenderly passed up and down her body, stroking her hair, her cheeks, her arms. Her mouth was against his cheek and she was utterly motionless, shivering a little sometimes and once her hand moved up and caught his and then moved away again. At last, as it seemed from an infinite distance, his voice came to her, speaking to her. "Maggie, darling," he said, "don't go back till late to-night. You can say that those people asked you to stay to dinner. Your aunts can't do anything. Nothing can happen. Stay with me here and then later we'll go and have dinner at a little place I know ... and then come back here ... come back here ... like this. Maggie, darling, say you will. You must. We mayn't have another chance for so long. You're coming to me afterwards. What does it matter, a week or two earlier? What does it matter, Maggie? Stay here. Let us love one another and have something to think about ... to remember ... to remember ... to remember ..." His voice seemed to slip away into infinity as voices in a dream do. She could not say anything because she was in a dream too. She could only feel his hand stroking her face. He seemed to take her silence for consent. He suddenly kissed her furiously, pressing her head back until it hurt. That woke her. She pushed his arms back and sprang up. Her hands were trembling. She shook her head. "No, Martin. No, not now." "Why not?" He looked at her angrily from the chair. His face was altered, he was frowning, his eyes were dark. "I'm not going to stay now." Her voice shook in spite of herself. With shaking hands she patted her dress. "Why not?" he asked again. "I'm not. I promised the aunts. Not now. It would spoil everything." "Oh, very well." He was furious with her. He wouldn't meet her eyes. "Not now." She felt that she would cry; tears flooded her eyes. "It's been so lovely ... Martin ... Don't look like that. Oh, I love you too much!" She broke off. With a sudden movement she fell at his feet; kneeling there, she drew his hands to her face, she kissed them, the palms of his hands over and over again. His anger suddenly left him. He put his arms round her and kissed her, first her eyes, then her cheeks, then, gently, her mouth. "All right," he said. "Only I feel somehow ... I feel as though our time had come to an end." "But it shan't?" He turned upon her fiercely, held her hands, looked in her face. "Maggie, do you swear that you'll love me always, whatever I am, whatever I do?" "I swear," she answered, gazing into his eyes, "that I'll love you always, whatever you are, whatever you do." Then she went away, leaving him by the table, staring after her. In the street she saw that her chrysanthemum was in pieces, torn and scattered and destroyed. She slipped off the ring and put it into her pocket, then, with forebodings in her heart, as though she did indeed know that her good time was over, she turned towards home. She was right. Her good time was over. That night she was left alone. Martha let her in and, regarding her darkly, said nothing. The aunts also said nothing, sitting all the evening under the green shade of the lamp in the drawing-room, Aunt Anne reading a pamphlet, Aunt Elizabeth sewing. Maggie pretended to read but she saw no words. She saw only the green lamp like a dreadful bird suspended there and Aunt Anne's chiselled sanctity. Over and over again she reasoned with herself. There was no cause for panic. Nothing had happened to change things—and yet—and yet everything was changed. Everything had been changed from that moment when Martin pressed her hand in the theatre. Everything! ... Danger now of every sort. She could be brave, she could meet anything if she were only sure of Martin. But he too seemed strange to her. She remembered his dark look, his frown when she had refused him. Oh, this loneliness, this helplessness. If she could be with him, beside him, she would fear nothing. That night, the first faint suspicion of jealousy, of doubt, an agonising dart of pain at the knowledge of what it would mean to her now if he left her, stirred in her breast. This room was stifling. She got up from her chair, went to the window, looked out between the thick curtains at the dark deserted street. "What is it, Maggie?" "Nothing, Aunt Anne." "You're very restless, dear." "It's close. May I open the door?" "A little, dear." She opened the door and then sat there hearing the Armed Men sway ever so slightly, tap, tap, against the wall in the passage. That night she scarcely slept at all, only tumbling into sudden nightmare dreams when something had her by the throat and Martin was not there. In the morning as soon as she could escape she hurried to Piccadilly. Martin was waiting for her. When she saw him she realised at once that her good time was indeed over. His face was white and strained. He scarcely looked at her but stared anxiously up and down the street.

"What is it?" she asked breathlessly. "Look here, Maggie," he began, still scarcely looking at her. "I must get back at once. I only came to tell you that we must drop our meetings for the next day or two—until it's blown over."

"Until what's blown over," she asked him.

"It's my father. I don't know what exactly has happened. They'll none of them tell me, damn them. It's Caroline Smith. She's been talking to Amy about you and me. I know that because of what Amy said about you at breakfast this morning."

"What did she say?"

"She wouldn't speak out. She hinted. But she admitted that Caroline Smith had told her something. But she doesn't matter. Nothing matters except father. He mustn't be excited just now. His heart's so bad. Any little thing ... We must wait."

She saw that he was scarcely realising her at all. She choked down all questions that concerned themselves. She simply agreed, nodding her head.

He did look at her then, smiling as he used to do.

"It's awfully hard on us. It won't be for more than a day or two. But I must put things right at home or it will be all up. I don't care for the others, of course, but if anything happened to father through me ..." He told her to write to the Charing Cross post-office. He would do the same. In a day or two it would be all right. He pressed her hand and was gone.

When she looked about her the street seemed quite empty although it was full of people. She threw up her head. She wouldn't be beaten by anybody ... only, it was lonely going back to the house and all of them ... alone ... without Martin.

She cried a little on her way home. But they were the last tears she shed.



CHAPTER IX

THE INSIDE SAINTS

Maggie, when she was nearly home, halted suddenly. She stopped as when on the threshold of a room that should be empty one sees waiting a stranger. If at the end of all this she should lose Martin! ...

There was the stranger who had come to her now and would not again depart. She recognised the sharp pain, the almost unconscious pulling back on the sudden edge of a dim pit, as something that would always be with her now—always. One knows that in the second stage of a great intimacy one's essential loneliness is only redoubled by close companionship. One asks for so much more, and then more and more, but that final embrace is elusive and no physical contact can surrender it. But she was young and did not know that yet. All she knew was that she would have to face these immediate troubles alone, that she would not see him for perhaps a week, that she would not know what his people at home were doing, and that she must not let any of these thoughts come up into her brain. She must keep them all back: if she did not, she would tumble into some foolish precipitate action.

When she reached home she was obstinate and determined. At once she found that something was the matter. During luncheon the two aunts sat like statues (Aunt Elizabeth a dumpy and squat one). Aunt Anne's aloofness was coloured now with a very human anger. Maggie realised with surprise that she had never seen her angry before. She had been indignant, disapproving, superior, forbidding, but never angry. The eyes were hard now, not with religious reserve but simply with bad temper. The mist of anger dimmed the room, it was in the potatoes and the cold dry mutton, especially was it in the hard pallid knobs of cheese. And Aunt Elizabeth, although she was frightened by her sister's anger on this occasion, shared in it. She pursed her lips at Maggie and moved her fat, podgy hand as though she would like to smack Maggie's cheeks.

Maggie was frightened—really frightened. The line of bold independence was all very well, but now risks were attached to it. If she swiftly tossed her head and told her aunts that she would walk out of the house they might say "Walk!" and that would precipitate Martin's crisis. She knew from the way he had looked at her that morning that his thoughts were with his father, and it showed that she had travelled through the first stage of her intimacy with him, that she could not trust him to put her before his own family troubles. At all costs she must keep him safe through these next difficult weeks, and the best way to keep him safe was herself to remain quietly at home.

Of all this she thought as she swallowed the hostile knobs of cheese and drank the tepid, gritty coffee.

She followed her aunts upstairs, and was not at all surprised when Aunt Elizabeth, with an agitated murmur, vanished into higher regions. She followed Aunt Anne into the drawing-room.

Aunt Anne sat in the stiff-backed tapestry chair by the fire. Maggie stood in front of her. She was disarmed at that all-important moment by her desperate sensation of defenceless loneliness. It was as though half of herself—the man-half of herself—had left her. She tried to summon her pluck but there was no pluck there. She could only want Martin, over and over again inside herself. Had any one been, ever so hopelessly ALONE before?

"Maggie, I am angry," said Aunt Anne. She said it as though she meant it. Amazing how human this strange aloof creature had become. As though some coloured saint bright with painted wood and tinsel before whom one stood in reverence slipped down suddenly and with fingers of flesh and blood struck one's face. Her cheeks were flushed, her beautiful hands were no longer thin but were hard and active.

"What have I done, aunt?" asked Maggie.

"You have not treated us fairly. My sister and I have done everything for you. You have not made it especially easy for us in any way, but we have tried to give you what you wanted. You have repaid is with ingratitude."

She paused, but Maggie said nothing. She went on:

"Lately—these last three weeks—we have given you complete liberty. I advised that strongly against my sister's opinion because I thought you weren't happy. You didn't make friends amongst our friends, and I thought you should have the chance of finding some who were younger and gayer than we were. Then I thought we could trust you. You have many faults, but I believed that you were honest."

"I am honest!" Maggie broke in. Her aunt went on:

"You have used the liberty we gave you during these weeks to make yourself the talk of our friends. You have been meeting Mr. Martin Warlock secretly every day. You have been alone with him in the Park and at the theatre. I know that you are young and very ignorant. You could not have known that Martin Warlock is a man with whom no girl who respects herself would be seen alone—"

"That is untrue!" Maggie flamed out.

"—and," went on Aunt Anne, "we would have forgiven that. It is your deceit to ourselves that we cannot forget. Day after day you were meeting him and pretending that you went to your other friends. I am disappointed in you, bitterly disappointed. I saw from the first that you did not mean to care for us, now, as well, you have disgraced us—"

Maggie began: "Yes, I have been seeing Martin. I didn't think it wrong—I don't now. I didn't tell you because I was afraid that you would stop me—"

"Then that shows that you knew it was wrong."

"No, Aunt Anne—only that you would think it was wrong. I can only go by myself, by what I feel is wrong I mean. I've always had to, all my life. It would have been no good doing anything else at home, because father—"

She pulled herself up. She was not going to defend herself or ask for pity. She said, speaking finally:

"Yes, I have been out with Martin every day. I went to the theatre with him, too, and also had tea with him."

Maggie could see Aunt Anne's anger rising higher and higher like water in a tube. Her voice was hard when she spoke again—she pronounced judgment:

"We see now that you were right when you said that you had better leave us. You are free to go as soon as you wish. You have, of course, your money, but if you care to stay with us until you have found some work you must now obey our rules. While you remain with us you must not go out unless my sister or I accompany you." Then her voice changed, softening a little. She suddenly raised her hands in a gesture of appeal: "Oh, Maggie, Maggie, turn to God. You have rebelled against Him. You have refused to listen to His voice. The end of that can be only misery. He loves, but He also judges. Even now, within a day, a week, He may come with judgment. Turn to Him, Maggie, not because I tell you but because of the Truth. Pray with me now that He may help you and give you strength."

Because she felt that she had indeed treated them badly and must do just now what they wished, she knelt down on the drawing-room carpet. Aunt Anne also knelt down, her figure stiff like iron, her raised hands once again delicate and ghost-like.

"O Lord God," she prayed, "this Thy servant comes to Thee and prays that Thou wilt give her strength in her struggle with the Evil One. She has been tempted and is weak, but Thou art strong to save and wilt not despise the least of these Thy children."

"Come, O Lord the Father, and take Thy daughter into Thy loving care, and when Thou comest, in all Thy splendour, to redeem the world, I pray that Thou wilt find her waiting for Thee in holiness and meekness of heart."

They rose. Maggie's knees were sore with the stiff carpet. The family group watched her from the wall ironically.

She saw that in spite of the prayer Aunt Anne had not forgiven her. She stood away from her, and although her voice now was not so hard, it had lost altogether the tender note that it used to have.

"Now, Maggie, you must promise us that you will not see Martin Warlock again."

Maggie flushed. "No, aunt, I can't promise that."

"Then we must treat you as a prisoner whilst you are with us."

"If he wants to see me I must see him."

They looked at one another. Aunt Anne was like a man just then.

"Very well. Until you give us your promise we must see ourselves that you do not disgrace us."

There was no more to be said. It was as though a heavy iron door had rolled to.

Aunt Anne passed Maggie and left the room.

Well, then, there was the situation. As she remained in the empty room she felt relief because now she knew where she was.

If only she could keep in touch with Martin then nothing else at all mattered. But that must be, otherwise she felt that she would rush at them all and tread them down and break doors and windows to get at him.

Meanwhile, how they must all have been talking! She felt no especial anger against Caroline Smith. It had been her own fault for trusting that note to her honour. Caroline had no honour, of course. Maggie might have guessed that from the way that she talked about other people. And then probably she herself was in love with Martin ... She sat down, staring in front of her, thinking. They all knew, Amy Warlock, Mr. Thurston, Miss Avies—knew about that wonderful, marvellous thing, her love for Martin, his for her. They were turning it over in their hands, soiling it, laughing at it, sneering at it. And what were they doing to Martin? At that thought she sprang up and began hurriedly to walk about. Oh, they must leave him alone! What were they saying to him? They were telling him how ridiculous it was to have anything to do with a plain, ugly girl! And he? Was he defending her? At the sudden suggestion of his disloyalty indignation fought in her with some strange, horrible suspicion. Yes, it would come back, that thought. He was weak. He had told her that he was. He was weak. She KNEW that he was. She would not lie to herself. And then at the thought of his weakness the maternal love in her that was the strongest instinct in her character flooded her body and soul, so that she did not mind if he were weak, but only wanted to defend him, to protect him ...

Strangely, she felt more sure of him at that moment when she was conscious of his weakness than she had been when she asserted his strength. Beneath that weakness he would be true to her because he needed her. No one else could give him what she did; he had said so again and again. And it would always be so. He would have to come back to her however often he denied her.

She felt happier then. She could face them all. She had been bad to her aunts, too. She had done them harm, and they had been nothing but goodness to her. Apart from leaving Martin she would do all, these next weeks, to please them.

She went up to her bedroom, and when she reached it she realised, with a little pang of fright, that she was a prisoner. No more meetings outside Hatchards, no more teas, no more walks ... She looked out of the window down into the street. It was a long way down and the figures walking were puppets, not human at all. But the thing to be thought of now was the question of letters. How was she to get them to the Strand Office and receive from them Martin's letters in return? After long, anxious thought there seemed to be only one way. There was a kitchen-maid, Jane, who came every morning to the house, did odd jobs in the kitchen, and went home again in the evening. Maggie had seen the girl about the house a number of times, had noticed her for her rebellious, independent look, and had felt some sympathy with her because she was under the harsh dominion of Martha.

Maggie had spoken to her once or twice and the girl had seemed grateful, smiling in a kind of dark, tearful way under her untidy hair. Maggie believed that she would help her; of course the girl would get into trouble were she discovered, and dismissal would certainly follow, but it was clear enough that she would not in any case be under Martha's government very long. Martha never kept kitchen-maids for more than a month at a time.

She sat down at once and wrote her first letter, sitting on her bed.

DARLING MARTIN—There has been an explosion here. The aunts have told me to give you up. I could not promise them that I would not see you and so I am a prisoner here until I leave them altogether. I won't leave them until after the New Year, partly because I gave a promise and partly because it would make more trouble for you if I were turned out just now. I can't leave the house at all unless I am with one of them, so I am going to try and send the letters by the kitchen-maid here who goes home every day, and she will fetch yours when she posts mine. I'll give her a note to tell the post people that she is to have them. Martin, dear, try and write every day, even if it's only the shortest line, because it is dreadful to be shut up all day, and I think of you all the time and wonder how you are. Don't be unhappy, Martin—that's the one thing I couldn't bear. If you're not, I'm not. There's no reason to be unhappy about me. I'm very cheerful indeed if I know that you are all right. You are all right, aren't you? I do want to know what happened when you got home. I quite understand that the one thing you must do now is to keep your father well and not let anything trouble him. If the thought of me troubles him, then tell him that you are thinking of nothing but him now and how to make him happy. But don't let them change your feeling for me. You know me better than any of them do and I am just as you know me, every bit. The aunts are very angry because they say I deceived them, but they haven't any right to tell me who I shall love, have they? No one has. I am myself and nobody's ever cared for me except you—and Uncle Mathew, so I don't see why I should think of anybody. The aunts never cared for me really—only to make me religious.

But, Martin, never forget I love you so much I can never change. I'm not one who changes, and although I'm young now I shall be just the same when I'm old. I have the ring and I look at it all the time. I like to think you have the locket. Please write, dear Martin, or I'll find it very difficult to stay quiet here, and I know I ought to stay quiet for your sake.

Your loving,

MAGGIE.

She put it in an envelope, wrote the address as he had told her, and then set out to find Jane. It was four o'clock in the afternoon now and the house, on this winter's day, was dark and dim.

The gas was always badly lit in the passages, spitting and muttering like an imprisoned animal. The house was so quiet when Maggie came out on to the stairs that there seemed to be no one in it. She found her way down into the hall and saw Thomas the cat there, moving like a black ghost along the floor. He came up to her and rubbed himself in his sinister, mysterious way against her dress. When she turned towards the green baize door that led towards the kitchen regions he stood back from her, stole on to the lower steps of the staircase and watched her with steady, unblinking eyes. She pushed the door and went through into the cold passage that smelt of cheese and bacon and damp earth. There seemed to be no one about, and then suddenly the pantry door opened and Jane came out. She stopped when she saw Maggie.

"Where's Martha?" asked Maggie in a low voice.

The whisper seemed to tell Jane at once that this was to be a confidential matter. She jerked with a dirty thumb in the direction of the kitchen.

"In there. Cooking the dinner," she whispered back. She was untidy, there were streaks of black on her face, but her eyes looked up at Maggie with a friendly, roguish glance, as though they had already something in common. Maggie saw that she had no time to lose. She came close to her.

"Jane," she said, "I'm in trouble. It's only you who can help me. Here's a letter that I want posted—just in the ordinary way. Can you do that for me?"

Jane, suddenly smiling, nodded her head.

"And there's something else," Maggie went on. "To-morrow morning, before you come here, I want you to go to the Strand post-office—you know the one opposite the station—and ask for a letter addressed to me. I've written on a piece of paper here that you're to be given any letters of mine. Give it to me somehow when no one's looking. Do you understand?"

Jane nodded her head. Maggie gave her the note and also half-a-crown, but Jane pushed back the money.

"I don't want no money," she said in a hoarse whisper. "You're the only one here decent to me."

At that moment the kitchen door opened and Martha appeared. When she saw Jane she came up to her and said: "Now then, idling again! What about the potatoes?"

She looked at Maggie with her usual surly suspicion.

"I came down for a candle," Maggie said, "for my room. Will you give me one, please?"

Jane had vanished.

Martin, meanwhile, after Maggie left him, had returned home in no happy state. There had leapt upon him again that mood of sullen impatient rebellion that he knew so well—a mood that really was like a possession, so that, struggle as he—might, he seemed always in the grip of some iron-fingered menacing figure.

It was possession in a sense that to many normal, happy people in this world is so utterly unknown that they can only scornfully name it weakness and so pass on their way. But those human beings who have suffered from it do in very truth feel as though they had been caught up into another world, a world of slavery, moral galley-driving with a master high above them, driving them with a lash that their chained limbs may not resist. Such men, if they try to explain that torment, can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery; at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses are all checked, perverted, driven and counter-driven by a mysterious force. Let no man who has not known such hours and the terror of such a dominion utter judgment upon his neighbour.

To Martin the threat of this conflict with his father over Maggie was the one crisis that he had wished to avoid. But his character, which was naturally easy and friendly and unsuspicious, had confused him. Those three weeks with Maggie had been so happy, so free from all morbidity and complication, that he had forgotten the world outside. For a moment when Maggie had told him that she had given her note to Caroline he had been afraid, but he had been lulled as the days passed and nothing interfered with their security. Now he was suddenly plunged into the middle of a confusion that was all the more complicated because he could not tell what his mother and his, sister were thinking. He knew that Amy had disliked him ever since his return, and that that dislike had been changed into something fiercer since his declared opposition to Thurston. His mother he simply did not understand at all. She spoke to him still with the same affection and tenderness, but behind the words he felt a hard purpose and a mysterious aloofness.

She was not like his mother at all; it was as though some spy had been introduced into the house in his mother's clothing.

But for them he did not care; it was his father of whom he must think. Here, too, there was a mystery from which he was deliberately kept. He knew, of course, that they were all expecting some crisis; as the days advanced he could feel that the excitement increased. He knew that his father had declared that he had visions and that there was to be a revelation very shortly; but of these visions and this revelation he heard only indirectly from others. His father said nothing to him of these things, and at the ordinary Chapel services on Sunday there was no allusion to them. He knew that the Inside Saints had a society and rules of their own inside the larger body, and from that inner society he was quite definitely excluded. Of that exclusion he would have been only too glad had it not been for his father, but now when he saw him growing from day to day more haggard and worn, more aloof from all human society, when lie saw him wrapped further and further into some strange and as it seemed to him insane absorption, he was determined to fight his way into the heart of it. His growing intimacy with Maggie had relieved him, for a moment, of the intensity of this other anxiety. Now suddenly he was flung back into the very thick of it. His earlier plan of forcing his father out of all this network of chicanery and charlatanism now returned. He felt that if he could only seize his father and forcibly abduct him and take him away from Amy and Thurston and the rest, and all the associations of the Chapel, he might cure him and lead him back to health and happiness again.

And yet he did not know. He had not himself escaped from it all by leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was not only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him. He was like a man who hears sounds and faint cries behind a thick wall, and there are no doors and windows, and the bricks are too stout to be torn apart.

He had been behind that wall all his life ...

Amy's allusion to Maggie in the morning had been very slight, but had shown quite clearly that she had heard all, and probably more, than the truth. When he returned that morning he found his mother alone, knitting a pink woollen comforter, her gold spectacles on the end of her nose, her fresh lace cap crisp and dainty on her white hair—the very picture of the dearest old lady in the world.

"Mother," he began at once, "what did Amy mean this morning about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

"Maggie who, dear?" his mother asked.

"Maggie Cardinal—the Cardinal niece, you know," he said impatiently.

"Did she say anything? I don't remember."

"Yes, mother. You remember perfectly well. She said that they were all talking about me and Maggie."

"Did she?" The old lady slowly counted her stitches. "Well, dear, I shouldn't worry about what they all say—whoever 'they' may be."

"Oh, I don't care for that," he answered contemptuously, "although all the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down. She's been against her from the first. What I want to know is has Amy been to father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it. I'm not going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's picked up by listening behind other peoples' key-holes."

Amy, meanwhile, had come in and heard this last sentence.

"Thank you, Martin," she said quietly.

He turned to her with fury. "What did you mean at breakfast," he asked, "by what you said about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

She looked at him with contempt but no very active hostility.

"I was simply telling you something that I thought you ought to know," she said. "It is what everybody is saying—that you and she have been meeting every day for weeks, sitting in the Park after dark together, going to the theatre. People draw their own conclusions, I suppose."

"How much have you told father of this?" he demanded.

"I don't know at all what father has heard," she answered.

"You've been that girl's enemy since the first moment that she came here," he continued, growing angrier and angrier at her quiet indifference. "Now you're trying to damage her character."

"On the contrary," she answered, "I told you because I thought you ought to know what people were saying. The girl doesn't matter to me one way or another—but I'm sorry for her if she thinks she cares for you. That won't bring her much happiness."

Then suddenly her impassivity had a strange effect upon him. He could not answer her. He left them both, and went up to his room.

As soon as he had closed the door of his bedroom he knew that his bad time was come upon him. It was a physical as well as a spiritual dominion. The room visibly darkened before his eyes, his brain worked as it would in dreams suggesting its own thoughts and wishes and intentions. A dark shadow hung over him, hands were placed upon his eyes, only one thought came before him again and again and again. "You know, you have long known, that you are doomed to make miserable everything that you touch, to ruin every one with whom you come in contact. That is your fate, and you can no more escape from it than you can escape from your body!"

How many hours of this kind he had known in Spain, in France, in South America. Often at the very moment when he had thought that he was at last settling down to some decent steady plan of life he would be jerked from his purpose, some delay or failure would frustrate him, and there would follow the voice in his ear and the hands on his eyes.

It was indeed as though he had been pledged to something in his early life, and because he had broken from that pledge had been pursued ever since ...

He stripped to the waist and bathed in cold water; even then it seemed to him that his flesh was heavy and dull and yellow, that he was growing obese and out of all condition. He put on a clean shirt and collar, sat down on his bed and tried to think the thing out. To whomsoever he had done harm in the past he would now spare Maggie and his father. He was surprised at the rush of tenderness that came over him at the thought of Maggie; he sat there for some time thinking over every incident of the last three weeks; that, at least, had been a good decent time, and no one could ever take it away from them again. He looked at her picture in the locket and realised, as he looked at it, a link with her that he had never felt with any woman before. "All the same," he thought, "I should go away. She'd mind it at first, but not half as much as she'd mind me later on when she saw what kind of a chap I really was. She'd be unhappy for a bit, but she'd soon meet some one else. She's never seen a man yet except me. She'd soon forget me. She's such a kid."

Nevertheless when he thought of beginning that old wandering life again he shrank back. He had hated it—Oh! how he'd hated it! And he didn't want to leave Maggie. He was in reality beginning to believe that with her he might pull himself right out of this morass of weakness and indecision in which he had been wallowing for years. And yet what sort of a life could he offer her? He did not believe that he would ever now be able to find this other woman whom he had married, and until he had found her and divorced her Maggie's position would be impossible. She, knowing nothing of the world, could disregard it, but HE knew, knew that daily, hourly recurrence of alights and insults and disappointments, knew what that life could make after a time of women in such a position; even though she did not mind he would mind for her and would reproach himself continually.

No, it was impossible. He must go away secretly, without telling her ... Then, at that, he was pulled up again by the thought of his father. He could not leave him until this crisis, whatever it might be, was over. A very little thing now might kill him, and at the thought of that possibility he jumped up from his bed and swore that THAT catastrophe at least must be prevented. His father must live and be happy and strong again, and he, Martin, must see to it.

That was his charge and his sacred duty above all else.

Strong in this thought he went down to his father's room. He knocked on the door. There was no answer, and he went in. The room was in a mess of untidiness. His father was walking up and down, staring in front of him, talking to himself.

At the sound of the door he turned, saw Martin and smiled, the old trusting smile of a child, that had been, during his time abroad, Martin's clearest memory of him.

"Oh, is that you? Come in."

Martin came forward and his father put his arm round his neck as though for support.

"I'm tired—horribly tired." Martin took him to the shabby broken arm-chair and made him sit down. Himself sat in his old place on the arm of the chair, his hand against his father's neck.

"Father, come away—just for a week—with me. We'll go right off into the country to Glebeshire or somewhere, quite alone. We won't see a soul. We'll just walk and eat and sleep. And then you'll come back to your work here another man."

"No, Martin. I can't yet. Not just now."

"Why not, father?"

"I have work, work that can't be left."

"But if you go on like this you'll be so that you can't go on any longer. You'll break down. You know what the doctor said about your heart. You aren't taking any care at all."

"Perhaps ... perhaps ... but for a week or two I must just go on, preparing ... many things ... Martin."

He suddenly looked up at his son, putting his hand on his knee.

"Yes, father."

"You're being good now, aren't you?"

"Good, father?"

"Yes ... Not doing anything you or I'd be ashamed of. I know in the past ... but that's been forgotten, that's over. Only now, just now, it's terribly important for us both that you should be good ... like you used to be ... when you were a boy."

"Father, what have people been saying to you about me?"

"Nothing—nothing. Only I think about you so much. I pray about you all the time. Soon, as you say, we'll go away together ... only now, just now, I want you with me here, strong by my side. I want your help."

Martin took his father's hand, felt how dry and hot and feverish it was.

"I'll be with you," he said. "I promise that. Don't you listen to what any one says. I won't leave you." He would like to have gone on and asked other questions, but the old man seemed so worn out and exhausted that he was afraid of distressing him, so he just sat there, his hands on his shoulders, and suddenly the white head nodded, the beard sank over the breast and huddled up in the chair as though life itself had left him; the old man slept.

During the next four days Martin and Maggie corresponded through the fair hands of Jane. He wrote only short letters, and over them he struggled. He seemed to see Maggie through a tangled mist of persons and motives and intentions. He could not get at the real Maggie at all, he could not even get at his real feelings about her. He knew that these letters were not enough for her, he could feel behind her own a longing for something from him more definite, something that would bring her closer to him. He was haunted by his picture of her sitting in that dismal house, a prisoner, waiting for him, and at last, at the end of the four days, he felt that he must, in some way or other see her. Then she herself proposed a way.

"To-morrow night (Friday)," she wrote, "the aunts are going to a meeting. They won't return until after eight o'clock. During most of that time Martha will be in the kitchen cooking, and Jane (who is staying late that night) has promised to give me a signal. I could run out for quarter of an hour and meet you somewhere close by and risk getting back. Jane will be ready to let me in. Of course, it may fail, but things can't be worse than they are ... I absolutely forbid you to come if you think that this can make anything worse for you at home. But I MUST see you, Martin ... I feel to-night as though I couldn't stand it any longer (although I've only had five days of it!), but I think that if I met you, really you, for only five minutes, I could bear it then for weeks. Let me know if you agree to this, and if so where we could meet about 7.30."

The mere thought of seeing her was wonderful. He would not have believed a month ago that it could have come to mean so much to him.

He wrote back:

"Yes. At the corner of Dundas Street, by the Pillar Box, 7.30."

He knew that she had been to that dark little street with her aunts to see Miss Pyncheon.

The night, when it came, was misty, and when he reached the place she was at once in his arms. She had been there more than five minutes, she had thought that he was not coming. Martha had nearly caught her ...

He kissed her hair and her eyes and her mouth, holding her to him, forgetting everything but her. She stayed, quiet, clinging to him as though she would never let him go, then she drew away.

"Now we must walk about or some one will see us," she said.

"We've only got five minutes. Martin, what I want to know is, are you happy?"

"Yes," he said.

They walked like ghosts, in the misty street.

"Well, then I am," she said. "Only your letters didn't sound very happy."

"Can you hold on till after the New Year?" They were walking hand in hand, her fingers curled in his palm.

"Yes," she said. "If you're happy."

"There are troubles of course," he said. "But I don't care for Amy and the rest. It's only father that matters. I can't discover how much he knows. If I knew that I'd be much happier. We'll be all right, Maggie, if nothing happens to him."

With a little frightened catch in her throat she asked him:

"How do you mean, if anything happens to him?"

"If anything happened to him—" she could feel his hand stiffen round hers; "through me—then—why then—I'd leave you—everything—I'd have to."

"Leave me! ... Oh Martin! No!"

"I'd go. I'd go—I don't know where to. I don't know what I'd do. I'd know then that I must leave every one alone, always, for ever—especially you."

"No. You'd need me more than ever."

"You don't understand, Maggie. I'd be impossible after that. If father suffered through me that would be the end of it—the end of everything."

"Martin, listen." She caught his arm, looking up, trying to see his face. "If anything like that did happen that would be where you'd want me. Don't you see that you COULDN'T harm me EXCEPT by leaving me?"

"You can reason it as you like, Maggie, but I know myself. I know the impulse would be too strong—to go away and hide myself from everybody. I've felt it before—when I've done something especially bad. It's something in me that I've known all my life." Then he turned to her: "But it's all right. Nothing shall happen to the old man. I'll see that it doesn't. We've only got to wait a fortnight, then I'll get him away for a holiday. And once he's better I can leave him. It WILL be all right. It SHALL."