Her voice failed her. Mary collected her thoughts as best she could.

At last she said, with difficulty:

"Aren't you thinking only of the people who may be hurt—or scandalized? But after all, there they are in the Church, with all its privileges and opportunities—with everything they want. They are not asked to give anything up—nobody thinks of interfering with them—they have all the old dear things, the faiths and the practices they love—and that help them. They are only asked to tolerate other people who want different things. Mr. Meynell stands—I suppose—for the people—who are starved, whose souls wither, or die, for lack of the only food that could nourish them."

"'I am the bread of life,'" said Catharine with an energy that shook her slight frame. "The Church has no other food to give. Let those who refuse it go outside. There are other bodies, and other means."

"But, mother, this is the National Church!" pleaded Mary, after a moment. "The Modernists too say—don't they?—that Christ—or what Christ stands for—is the bread of life. Only they understand the words—differently from you. And if"—she came closer to her mother, and putting her hands on Catharine's knees, she looked up into the elder woman's face—"if there were only a few here and there, they could of course do nothing; they could only suffer, and be silent. But there are so many of them—so many! What is the 'Church' but the living souls that make it up? And now thousands of these living souls want to change things in the Church. Their consciences are hurt—they can't believe what they once believed. What is the justice of driving them out—or leaving them starved—forever? They were born in the Church; baptized in the Church! They love the old ways, the old buildings, the old traditions. 'Comfort our consciences!' they say; 'we will never tyrannize over yours. Give us the teaching and the expression we want; you will always have what you want! Make room for us—beside you. If your own faith is strong it will only be the stronger because you let ours speak and live—because you give us our bare rights, as free spirits, in this Church that belongs to the whole English people.' Dear mother, you are so just always—so loving—doesn't that touch you—doesn't it move you—at all?"

The girl's charming face had grown pale. So had Catharine's.

"This, I suppose, is what you have heard Mr. Meynell say," she answered slowly.

Mary turned away, shading her eyes with her hand.

"Yes," she said, with shrinking; "at least I know it is what he would say."

"Oh, Mary, I wish we had never come here!" It was a cry of bitterness, almost of despair. Mary turned and threw her arms round the speaker's neck.

"I will never hurt you, my beloved! you know I won't."

The two gazed into each other's eyes, questions and answers, unspoken yet understood, passing between them. Then Catharine disengaged herself, rose, and went away.

During the night that followed Mary slept little. She was engaged in trying to loosen and tear away those tendrils of the heart that had begun to climb and spread more than she knew. Toward the early dawn it seemed to her she heard slight sounds in her mother's room. But immediately afterward she fell asleep.

The next day, Mary could not tell what had happened; but it was as though, in some inexplicable way, doors had been opened and weights lifted; as though fresh winds had been set blowing through the House of Life. Her mother seemed shaken and frail; Mary hovered about her with ministering tenderness. There were words begun and left unfinished, movements and looks that strangely thrilled and bewildered the younger woman. She had no key to them; but they seemed to speak of change—of something in her mother that had been beaten down, and was still faintly, pitifully striving. But she dared say nothing. They read, and wrote letters, and strolled as usual; till in the evening, while Mary was sitting by the water, Catherine came out to her and stood beside her, holding the local paper in her hand.

"I see there is to be a meeting in the village next Friday—of the Reformers' League. Mr. Meynell is to speak."

Mary looked up in amazement.

"Yes?"

"You would perhaps like to go. I will go with you."

"Mother!" Mary caught her mother's hand and kissed it, while the tears sprang to her eyes. "I want to go nowhere—to do nothing—that gives you pain!"

"I know that," said Catharine quietly. "But I—I should like to understand him."

And with a light touch of her hand on Mary's red-gold hair, she went back into the house. Mary wandered away by herself into the depths of the woods, weeping, she scarcely knew why. But some sure instinct, lost in wonder as she was, bade her ask her mother no questions; to let time show.

The day of the League meeting came. It happened also to be the date on which the Commission of Inquiry into the alleged heresies and irregularities of the Rector of Upcote was holding its final meeting at Markborough.

The meetings of the commission were held in the Library of the Cathedral, once a collegiate church of the Cistercian order. All trace of the great monastery formerly connected with it had disappeared, except for the Library and a vaulted room below it which now made a passageway from the Deanery to the north transept.

The Library offered a worthy setting for high themes. The walls were, of course, wreathed in the pale golds and dignified browns of old books. A light gallery ran round three sides of the room, while a large perpendicular window at the farther end contained the armorial bearings of various benefactors of the see. Beneath the window was a bookcase containing several chained books—a Vulgate, a Saint Augustine, the Summa of St. Thomas; precious possessions, and famous in the annals of early printing. And wherever there was a space of wall left free, pictures or engravings of former bishops and dignitaries connected with the Cathedral enforced the message and meaning of the room.

A seemly, even beautiful place—pleasantly scented with old leather, and filled on this September afternoon with the sunshine which, on the Chase, was at the same moment kindling the heather into a blood-red magnificence. Here the light slipped in gently, subdued to the quiet note and standard of the old Library.

The Dean was in the Chair. He was a man of seventy who had only just become an old man, submitting with difficulty, even with resentment, to the weight of his years. He wore a green shade over his eyes, beneath which his long sharp nose and pointed chin—in the practical absence of the eyes—showed with peculiar emphasis. He was of heavy build, and suffered from chronic hoarseness. In his youth he had been a Broad churchman and a Liberal, and had then passed, through stages mysterious to his oldest friends, into an actively dogmatic and ecclesiastical phase. It was rumoured that he had had strange spiritual experiences; a "vision" was whispered; but all that was really known was that from an "advanced" man, in the Liberal sense, he had become the champion of high orthodoxy in the Chapter, and an advocate of disestablishment as the only means of restoring "Catholic liberty" to the Church.

The Dean's enemies, of whom he had not a few, brought various charges against him. It was said that he was a worldling with an undue leaning to notabilities. And indeed in every gathering, social or ecclesiastical, the track of the Dean's conversation sufficiently indicated the relative importance of the persons present. Others declared that during his long tenure of a country living he had left the duties of it mainly to a curate, and had found it more interesting to live in London, conferring with Cabinet Ministers on educational reform; while the women-folk of the Chapter pitied his wife, whose subdued or tremulous aspect certainly suggested that the Dean's critical and sarcastic temper sharpened itself at home for conflicts abroad.

On the Dean's right hand sat Canon Dornal, a man barely forty, who owed his canonry to the herculean work he had done for fourteen years in a South London parish, work that he would never have relinquished for the comparative ease of the Markborough precincts but for a sudden failure in health which had pulled him up in mid-career, and obliged him to think of his wife and children. He had insisted, however, on combining with his canonry a small living in the town, where he could still slave as he pleased; and his sermons in the Cathedral were generally held to be, next to the personality of the Bishop, all that was noblest in Markborough Christianity. His fine head, still instinct with the energy of youth, was covered with strong black hair; dark brows shadowed Cornish blue eyes, simple, tranquil, almost naif, until of a sudden there rushed into them the passionate or tender feeling that was in truth the heart of the man. The mouth and chin were rather prominent, and, when at rest, severe. He was a man in whom conscience was a gadfly, remorseless and tormenting. He was himself overstrained and his influence sometimes produced in others a tension on which they looked back with resentment. But he was a saint; open, pure, and loving as a child; yet often tempest-driven with new ideas, since he possessed at once the imagination that frees a man from tradition, and the piety which clings to it.

Beside him sat a University professor, the young holder of an important chair, who had the face, the smile, the curly hair of a boy of twenty, or appeared to have them, till you came to notice the subtleties of the mouth and the crow's-feet which had gathered round the eyes. And the paradox of his aspect only repeated the paradox within. His "History and the Gospels," recently published, would have earned him excommunication under any Pope; yet no one was a more rigid advocate of tests and creeds, or could be more eloquent in defence of damnatory clauses. The clergy who admired and applauded him did not read his books. It was rumoured indeed that there were many things in them which were unsound; but the rumour only gave additional zest to the speeches in which at Church Congresses and elsewhere he flattered clerical prejudice, and encouraged clerical ignorance. To him there was no more "amusing" study—using "amusing" in the French sense as meaning something that keeps a man intellectually happy and awake—than the study of the Gospels. They presented an endless series of riddles, and riddles were what he liked. But the scientific treatment of these riddles had, according to him, nothing to do with the discipline of the Church; and to the discipline of the Church this young man, with the old eyes and mouth, was rigorously attached. He was a bachelor and a man of means—facts which taken together with his literary reputation and his agreeable aspect made him welcome among women; of which he was well aware.

The Archdeacon, Doctor Froswick, and the Rural Dean, Mr. Brathay, who completed the Commission of Inquiry, were both men of middle age; the Archdeacon, fresh-coloured and fussy, a trivial, kindly person of no great account; the Rural Dean, broad-shouldered and square-faced, a silent, trustworthy man, much beloved in a small circle.

A pile of books, MSS., and letters lay to the Chairman's right hand. On the blotting-pad before him was the voluminous written report of the commission which only awaited the signatures of the Commissioners, and—as to one paragraph in it—a final interview with Meynell himself, which had been fixed for noon. Business was now practically over till he arrived, and conversation had become general.

"You have seen the leader in the Oracle this morning?" asked the Archdeacon, nervously biting his quill. "Perfectly monstrous, I think! I shall withdraw my subscription."

"With the Oracle," said the Professor, "it will be a mere question of success or failure. At present they are inclined to back the rebellion."

"And not much wonder!" put in the Dean's hoarse voice. "The news this morning is uncommonly bad. Four more men joined the League here—a whole series of League meetings in Yorkshire!—half the important newspapers gone over or neutral—and a perfectly scandalous speech from the Bishop of Dunchester!"

"I thought we should hear of Dunchester before long," said the Professor, with a sarcastic lip. "Anything that annoys his brethren has his constant support. But if the Church allows a Socinian to be put over her, she must take the consequences!"

"What can the Church do?" said the Dean, shrugging his shoulders. "If we had accepted Disestablishment years ago, Dunchester would never have been a bishop. And now we may have missed our chance."

"Of what?"—Canon Dornal looked up—"of Disestablishment?"

The Dean nodded.

"The whole force of this Liberal movement," he said slowly, "will be thrown against Disestablishment. There comes the dividing line between it and the past. I say again, we have missed our chance. If the High Churchmen had known their own minds—if they had joined hands boldly with the Liberation society, and struck off the State fetters—we should at least have been left in quiet possession of what remained to us. We should not have been exposed to this treachery from within. Or, at least, we should have made short work of it."

"That means, that you take for granted we should have kept our endowments and our churches?" said Canon Dornal.

The Dean flushed.

"We have been called a nation of shopkeepers," he said vehemently, "but nobody has ever called us a nation of thieves."

The Canon was silent. Then his eye caught the bulky MS. report lying before the Dean, and he made a restless movement as though the sight of it displeased him.

"The demonstrations the papers report this morning are not all on one side," said the Rural Dean slowly but cheerfully, as though from a rather unsatisfactory reverie this fact had emerged.

"No—there seems to have been something like a riot at Darwen's church," observed the Archdeacon. "What can they expect? You don't outrage people's dearest feelings for nothing. The scandal and misery of it! Of course we shall put it down—but the Church won't recover for a generation. And all that this handful of agitators may advertise themselves and their opinions!"

Canon Dornal frowned and fidgeted.

"We must remember," he said, "that—unfortunately—they have the greater part of European theology behind them."

"European theology!" cried the Archdeacon. "I suppose you mean German theology?"

"The same thing—almost," said the Canon, smiling a little sadly.

"And what on earth does German theology matter to us?" retorted the Archdeacon. "Haven't we got theologians of our own? What have the Germans ever done but set up one mare's nest after another, for us to set right? They've no sooner launched some cocksure theory or other than they have to give it up. I don't read German," said the Archdeacon, hastily, "but that's what I understand from the Church papers."

Silence a moment. The Professor looked at the ceiling, a smile twitching the corners of his mouth. The green shade concealed the Dean's expression. He also knew no German, but it did not seem necessary to say so. Canon Dornal looked uncomfortable.

"Do you see who it was that protected Darwen from the roughs outside his church?" he said presently.

Brathay looked up.

"A party of Wesleyans?—class-leaders? Yes, I saw. Oh! Darwen has always been on excellent terms with the Dissenters!"

"Meynell too," said the Professor. "That of course is their game. Meynell has always gone for the inclusion of the Dissenters."

"Well, it was Arnold's game!" said the Canon, his look kindling. "Don't let's forget that. Meynell's dream is not unlike his—to include everybody that would be included."

"Except the Unitarians," said the Professor with emphasis—"the deniers of the Incarnation. Arnold drew the line there. So must we."

He spoke with a crisp and smiling decision—as of one in authority. All kinds of assumptions lay behind his manner. Dornal looked at him with a rather troubled and hostile eye. This whole matter of the coming trial was to him deeply painful. He would have given anything to avoid it; but he did not see how it could be avoided. The extraordinary spread of the Movement indeed had made it impossible.

At this moment one of the vergers of the Cathedral entered the room to say that Mr. Meynell was waiting below. The Dean directed that he should be shown up, and the whole commission dropped their conversational air and sat expectant.

Meynell came in, rather hastily, brushing his hair back from his forehead. He shook hands with the Dean and the Archdeacon, and bowed to the other members of the commission. As he sat down, the Archdeacon, who was very sensitive to such things, and was himself a model of spick-and-span-ness, noticed that the Rector's coat was frayed, and one of the buttons loose. Anne indeed was not a very competent valet of her master; and nothing but a certain esthetic element in Meynell preserved him from a degree of personal untidiness which might perhaps have been excused in a man alternating, hour by hour, between his study-table and the humblest practical tasks among his people.



The other members of the commission observed him attentively. Perhaps all in their different ways and degrees were conscious of change in him: the change wrought insensibly in a man by some high pressure of emotion and responsibility—the change that makes a man a leader of his fellows, consecrates and sets him apart. Canon Dornal watched him with a secret sympathy and pity. The Archdeacon said to himself with repugnance that Meynell now had the look of a fanatic.

The Dean took a volume from the pile beside him, and opened it at a marked page.

"Before concluding our report to the Bishop, Mr. Meynell, we wished to have your explanation of an important passage in one of your recent sermons; and you have been kind enough to meet us with a view to giving us that explanation. Will you be so good as to look at the passage?"

He handed the book to Meynell, who read it in silence. The few marked sentences concerned the Resurrection.

"These Resurrection stories have for our own days mainly a symbolic, perhaps one might call it a sacramental, importance. They are the 'outward and visible' sign of an inward mystery. As a simple matter of fact the continuous life of the spirit of Christ in mankind began with the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The Resurrection beliefs, so far as we can see, were the natural means by which that Life was secured."

"Are we right in supposing, Mr. Meynell," said the Dean, slowly, "that in those sentences you meant to convey that the Resurrection narratives of the New Testament were not to be taken as historical fact, but merely as mythical—or legendary?"

"The passage means, I think, what it says, Mr. Dean."

"It is not, strictly speaking, logically incompatible," said the Professor, bending forward with a suave suggestiveness, "with acceptance of the statement in the Creed?"

Meynell threw him a slightly perplexed look, and did not reply immediately. The Dean sharply interposed.

"Do you in fact accept the statements of the Creed? In that case we might report to the Bishop that you felt you had been misinterpreted—and would withdraw the sermon complained of, in order to allay the scandal it has produced?"

Meynell looked up.

"No," he said quietly, "no; I shall not withdraw the sermon. Besides"—the faintest gleam of a smile seemed to flit through the speaker's tired eyes—"that is only one of so many passages."

There was a moment's silence. Then Canon Dornal said:

"Many things—many different views—as we all know, are permitted, must be permitted, nowadays. But the Resurrection—is vital!"

"The physical fact?" said Meynell gently. His look met that of Dornal; some natural sympathy seemed to establish itself at once between them.

"The historical fact. If you could see your way to withdraw some of the statements in these volumes on this particular subject, much relief would be given to many—many wounded consciences."

The voice was almost pleading. The Dean moved abruptly in his chair. Dornal's tone was undignified and absurd. Every page of the books teemed with heresy!

But Meynell was for the moment only aware of his questioner. He leaned across the table as though addressing him alone.

"To us too—the Resurrection is vital—the transposition of it, I mean—from the natural, or physical to the spiritual order."

Dornal did not of course attempt to argue. But as Meynell met the sensitive melancholy of his look the Rector remembered that during the preceding year Dornal had lost a little son, a delicate, gifted child, to whom he had been peculiarly attached. And Meynell's quick imagination realized in a moment the haunted imagination of the other—the dear ghost that lived there—and the hopes that grouped themselves about it.

* * * * *

A long wrestle followed between Meynell and the Professor. But Meynell could not be induced to soften or recant anything. He would often say indeed with an eager frown, when confronted with some statement of his own, "That was badly put! It should be so-and-so." And then would follow some vivid correction or expansion, which sometimes left the matter worse than before. The hopes of the Archdeacon, for one set of reasons, and of Dornal, for another, that some bridge of retreat might be provided by the interview, died away. The Dean had never hoped anything, and Mr. Brathay sat open-mouthed and aghast, while Meynell's voice and personality drove home ideas and audacities which on the printed page were but dim to him. Why had the Anglican world been told for the last fifteen years that the whole critical onslaught—especially the German onslaught—was a beaten and discredited thing? It seemed to him terribly alive!

* * * * *

The library door opened again, and Meynell disappeared—ceremoniously escorted to the threshold by the Professor. When that gentleman was seated again, the Dean addressed the meeting.

"A most unsatisfactory interview! There is nothing for it, I fear, but to send in our report unaltered to the Bishop. I must therefore ask you to append your signatures."

All signed, and the meeting broke up.

"Do you know at all when the case is likely to come on?" said Dornal to the Dean.

"Hardly before November. The Letters of Request are ready. Then after the Arches will come the appeal to the Privy Council. The whole thing may take some time."

"You see the wild talk in some of the papers this morning," said the Professor, interposing, "about a national appeal to Parliament to 'bring the Articles of the Church of England into accordance with modern knowledge.' If there is any truth in it, there may be an Armageddon before us."

Dornal looked at him with distaste. The speaker's light tone, the note of relish in it, as of one delighting in the drama of life, revolted him.

On coming out of the Cathedral Library, Dornal walked across to the Cathedral and entered. He found his way to a little chapel of St. Oswald on the north side, where he was often wont to sit or kneel for ten minutes' quiet in a busy day. As he passed the north transept he saw a figure sitting motionless in the shadow, and realized that it was Meynell.

The silence of the great Cathedral closed round him. He was conscious of nothing but his own personality, and, as it seemed, of Meynell's. They two seemed to be alone together in a world outside the living world. Dornal could not define it, save that it was a world of reconciled enmities and contradictions. The sense of it alternated with a disagreeable recollection of the table in the Library and the men sitting round it, especially the cherubic face of the Professor; the thought also of the long, signed document which reported the "heresy" of Meynell.

He had been quite right to sign it. His soul went out in a passionate adhesion to the beliefs on which his own life was built. Yet still the strange reconciling sense flowed in and round him, like the washing of a pure stream. He was certain that the Eternal Word had been made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, had died and risen, and been exalted; that the Church was now the mysterious channel of His risen life. He must, in mere obedience and loyalty, do battle for that certainty—guard it as the most precious thing in life for those that should come after. Nevertheless he was conscious that there was in him none of the righteous anger, none of the moral condemnation, that his father or grandfather might have felt in the same case. As far as feeling went, nothing divided him from Meynell. They two across the commission table—as accuser and accused—had recognized, each in the other, the man of faith. The same forces played on both, mysteriously linking them, as the same sea links the headland which throws back its waves with the harbour which receives them.

* * * * *

Meynell too was conscious of Dornal as somewhere near him in the still, beautiful place, but only vaguely. He was storm-beaten by the labour and excitement of the preceding weeks, and these moments of rest in the Cathedral were sometimes all that enabled him to go through his day. He endeavoured often at such times to keep his mind merely vacant and passive, avoiding especially the active religious thoughts which were more than brain and heart could continuously bear. "One cannot always think of it—one must not!" he would say to himself impatiently. And then he would offer himself eagerly to the mere sensuous impressions of the Cathedral—its beauty, its cool prismatic spaces, its silences.

He did so to-day, though always conscious beyond the beauty, and the healing quiet, of the mysterious presence on which he "propped his soul."...

Conscious, too, of a dear human presence, closely interwoven now with his sense of things ineffable.

Latterly, as we have seen, he had not been without some scanty opportunities of meeting Mary Elsmere. In Miss Puttenham's drawing-room, whither the common anxiety about Hester had drawn him on many occasions, he had chanced once or twice on Miss Puttenham's new friend. In the village, Mrs. Flaxman was beginning to give him generous help; the parish nurse was started. And sometimes when she came to consult, her niece was with her, and Meynell, while talking to the aunt either of his people or of the progress of the heresy campaign, was always keenly aware of the girlish figure beside her—of the quick, shy smile—the voice and its tones.

She was with him in spirit—that he knew—passionately knew. But the barriers between them were surely insurmountable. Her sympathy with him was like some warm, stifled thing—some chafing bird "beating up against the wind."

For a time, indeed, he had tried to put love from him, in the name of his high enterprise and its claims upon him. But as he sat tranced in the silence of the Cathedral that attempt finally gave way. His longing was hopeless, but it enriched his life. For it was fused with all that held him to his task; all that was divinest and sincerest in himself.

One of the great bells of the Cathedral struck the quarter. His moment of communion and of rest broke up. He rose abruptly and left the Cathedral for the crowded streets outside, thinking hard as he walked of quite other things.

The death of Mrs. Sabin in her son's cottage had been to Meynell like a stone flung into some deep shadowed pool—the ripples from it had been spreading through the secret places of life and thought ever since.

He had heard of the death on the morning after it occurred. John Broad, an inarticulate, secretive fellow, had come to the Rectory in quest of the Rector within a few hours of its occurrence. His mother had returned home, he said, unexpectedly, after many years of wanderings in the States; he had not had very much conversation with her, as she had seemed ill and tired and "terrible queer" when she arrived. He and his boys had given up their room to her for the night, and she had been very late in coming downstairs the following morning. He had had to go to his work, and when he came back in the evening he found her in great pain and unable to talk to him. She would not allow him to call any doctor, and had locked herself in her room. In the morning he had forced the door and had found her dead. He did not know that she had seen anybody but himself and his boys since her arrival.

But she had seen some one else. As the Rector walked along the street he had in his pocket a cutting from the Markborough Post, containing the report of the inquest, from which it appeared—the Rector of course was well aware of it—that Mr. Henry Barron of the White House, going to the cottage to complain of the conduct of the children in the plantation, had found her there, and had talked to her for some time. "I thought her excited—and overtired—no doubt by the journey," he had said to the Coroner. "I tried to persuade her to let me send in a woman to look after her, but she refused."

In Barron's evidence at the inquest, to which Meynell had given close attention, there had been no hint whatever as to the nature of his conversation with Mrs. Sabin. Nor had there been any need to inquire. The medical evidence was quite clear as to the cause of death—advanced brain disease, fatally aggravated by the journey.

Immediately after his interview with John Broad the Rector had communicated the news of Mrs. Sabin's unexpected arrival and sudden death to two other persons in the village. He still thought with infinite concern of the effect it had produced on one of them. Since his hurried note telling her of Barron's evidence before the Coroner, and of his own impressions of it, he had not seen her. But he must not leave her too much to herself. A patient and tender pity, as of one on whom the burden of a struggling and suffering soul has long been thrown, dictated all his thoughts of her. He had himself perceived nothing which need alarm her in Barron's appearance at the inquest. Barron's manner to himself had been singularly abrupt and cold when they happened to run across each other, outside the room in which the inquest was held; but all that was sufficiently explained by the position of the heresy suit.

Still anxiously pondering, Meynell passed the last houses in the Cathedral Close. The last of all belonged to Canon France, and Meynell had no sooner left it behind him than a full and portly figure emerged from its front door.

Barron—for it was he—stood a moment looking after the retreating Rector. A hunter's eagerness gave sharpening, a grim sharpening, to the heavy face; yet there was perplexity mixed with the eagerness. His conversation with France had not been very helpful. The Canon's worldly wisdom and shrewd contempt for enthusiasts had found their natural food in the story which Barron had brought him. His comments had been witty and pungent enough. But when it had come to the practical use of the story, France had been of little assistance. His advice inclined too much to the Melbourne formula—"Can't you let it alone?" He had pointed out the risks, difficulties, and uncertainties of the matter with quite unnecessary iteration. Of course there were risks and difficulties; but was a man of the type of Richard Meynell to be allowed to play the hypocrite, as the rapidly emerging leader of a religious movement—a movement directed against the unity and apostolicity of the English Church—when there were those looking on who were aware of the grave suspicions resting on his private life and past history?



CHAPTER IX

On the same afternoon which saw the last meeting of the Commission of Inquiry at Markborough, the windows of Miss Puttenham's cottage in Upcote Minor were open to the garden, and the sun stealing into the half darkened drawing-room touched all the many signs it contained of a woman's refinement and woman's tastes. The room was a little austere. Not many books, but those clearly the friends and not the passing acquaintance of its mistress; not many pictures, and those rather slight suggestions on the dim blue walls than finished performances; a few "notes" in colour, or black and white, chosen from one or other of those moderns who can in a sensitive line or two convey the beauty or the harshness of nature. Over the mantelpiece there was a pencil drawing by Domenichino, of the Madonna and Child; a certain ecstatic languor in the Madonna, and, in all the lines of form and drapery, an exquisite flow and roundness.

The little maidservant brought in the afternoon letters and with them a folded newspaper—the Markborough Post. A close observer might have detected that it had been already opened, and hurriedly refolded in the old folds. There was much interest felt in Upcote Minor in the inquest held on John Broad's mother; and the kitchen had taken toll before the paper reached the drawing-room.

As though the maid's movement downstairs had been immediately perceived by a listening ear overhead, there was a quick sound of footsteps. Miss Puttenham ran downstairs, took the letters and the newspaper from the hands of the girl, and closed the door behind her.

She opened the paper with eagerness, and read the account it gave of the Coroner's inquiry held at the Cowroast a week before. The newspaper dropped to the ground. She stood a moment, leaning against the mantelpiece, every feature in her face expressing the concentration of thought which held her; then she dropped into a chair, and raising her two hands to her eyes, she pressed the shut lids close, lifting her face as though to some unseen misery, while a little sound—infinitely piteous—escaped her.

She saw a bedroom in a foreign inn—a vague form in the bed—a woman moving about in nurse's dress, the same woman who had just died in John Broad's cottage—and her sister Edith sitting by the fire. The door leading to the passage is ajar, and she is watching.... Or is it the figure in the bed that is watching?—a figure marred by illness and pain? Through the door comes hastily a form—a man. With his entrance, movement and life, like a rush of mountain air, come into the ugly shaded room. He is tall, with a long face, refined and yet violent, instinct with the character and the pride of an old hectoring race. He comes to the bed, kneels down, and the figure there throws itself on his breast. There is a sound of bitter sobbing, of low words—

Alice Puttenham's hands dropped from her face—and lay outstretched upon her knee. She sat, staring before her, unconscious of the garden outside, or of the passage of time. In some ways she was possessed of more beauty at thirty-seven than she had been at twenty. And yet from childhood her face had been a winning one—with its childish upper lip and its thin oval, its delicate brunette colour, and the lovely clearness of its brown eyes. In youth its timid sweetness had been constantly touched with laughter. Now it shrank from you and appealed to you in one. But the departure of youth had but emphasized a certain distinction, a certain quality. Laughter was gone, but grace and character remained, imprinted also on the fragile body, the beautiful arms and hands. The only marring of the general impression came from an effect of restlessness and constraint. To live with Alice Puttenham was to conceive her as a creature subtly ill at ease, doing her best with a life which was, in some hidden way, injured at the core.

* * * * *

She thought herself quite alone this quiet afternoon, and likely to remain so. Hester, who had been lunching with her, had gone shopping into Markborough with the schoolroom maid, and was afterward to meet Sarah and Lulu at a garden party in the Cathedral Close. Lady Fox-Wilton had just left her sister's house after a long, querulous, excited visit, the latest of many during the past week. How could it be her—Alice's—fault, that Judith Sabin had come home in this sudden, mysterious way? Yet the event had reopened all the old wounds in Edith's mind, revived all the old grievances and terrors. Strange that a woman should be capable of one supreme act of help and devotion, and should then spend her whole after life in resenting it!

"It was you and your story—that shocking thing we had to do for you—that have spoilt my life—and my husband's. Tom never got over it— and I never shall. And it will all come out—some day—and then what'll be the good of all we've suffered!"

That was Edith's attitude—the attitude of a small, vindictive soul. It never varied year by year; it showed itself both in trifles and on great occasions; it hindered all sisterly affection; and it was the explanation of her conduct toward Hester—it had indeed made Hester what she was.

Again the same low sound of helpless pain broke from Alice Puttenham's lips. The sense of her unloved, solitary state, of all that she had borne and must still bear, roused in her anew a flame of memory. Torch-like it ran through the past, till she was shaken with anguish and revolt. She had been loved once! It had brought her to what the world calls shame. She only knew, at moments of strong reaction or self-assertion like the present, that she had once had a man at her feet who had been the desired and adored of his day; that she had breathed her heart out in the passion of youth on his breast; that although he had wronged her, he had suffered because of her, had broken his heart for her, and had probably died because circumstances denied him the power to save and restore her, and he was not of the kind that bears patiently either thwarting from without or reproach from within.

For his selfish passion, his weakness and his suffering, and her own woman's power to make him suffer; for his death, no less selfish indeed than his passion, for it had taken from her the community of the same air, and the same earth with him, the sense that somewhere in the world his warm life beat with hers, though they might be separated in bodily presence forever—for each and all of these things she had loved him. And there were still times when, in spite of the years that had passed away, and of other and perhaps profounder feelings that had supervened, she felt within her again the wild call of her early love, responding to it like an unhappy child, in vain appeal against her solitude, her sister's unkindness, and the pressure of irrevocable and unforgotten facts.

Suddenly, she turned toward a tall and narrow chest of drawers that stood at her left hand. She chose a key from her watch-chain, a small gold key that in their childhood had been generally mistaken by her nieces and nephews for one of the bunch of charms they were allowed to play with on "Aunt Alsie's" lap. With it she unlocked a drawer within her reach. Her hand slipped in; she threw a hasty look round her, at the window, the garden. Not a sound of anything but the evening wind, which had just risen, and was making a smart rustling among the shrubs just outside. Her hand, a white, furtive thing, withdrew itself, and in it lay a packet, wrapped in some faded, green velvet. Hurriedly—with yet more pauses to listen and to look—the wrapping was undone; the case within fell open.

It contained a miniature portrait of a man—French work, by an excellent pupil of Meissonier. The detail of it was marvellous; so, in Alice Puttenham's view, was the likeness. She remembered when and how it had been commissioned—the artist, and his bare studio in a street on the island, near Notre Dame; the chestnuts in the Luxembourg garden as they walked home; the dust of the falling blossoms, and the children playing in the alleys. And through it all, what passionate, guilty happiness—what dull sense of things irreparable!—what deliberate shutting out of the future!

It was as good a likeness as the Abbey picture, only more literal, less "arranged." The Abbey picture, also by a French artist of another school, was younger, and had a fine, romantic, Rene-like charm. "Rene" had been her laughing name for him—her handsome, melancholy, eloquent poseur! Like many of his family, he was proud of his French culture, his French accent, and his knowledge of French books. The tradition that came originally from a French marriage had been kept up from father to son. They were not a learned or an industrious race, but their tongue soon caught the accent of the boulevards—of the Paris they loved and frequented. Her hand lifted the miniature the better to catch the slanting light.

As she did so she was freshly struck with a resemblance she had long ceased to be conscious of. Familiarity with a living face, as so often happens, had destroyed for her its likeness—likeness in difference—to a face of the dead. But to-night she saw it—was indeed arrested by it.

"And yet Richard was never one tenth as good-looking!"

The portrait was set in pearls, and at the foot was an inscription in blue enamel—

"A ma mie!"

But before she could see it she must with her cold, quick fingers remove the fragment of stained paper that lay upon it like a veil. The half of a page of Moliere—turned down—like that famous page of Shelley's "Sophocles"—and stained with sea water, as that was stained.

She raised the picture to her lips and kissed it—not with passion—but clingingly, as though it represented her only wealth, amid so much poverty. Then her hand, holding it, dropped to her knee again; the other hand came to close over it; and her eyes shut. Tears came slowly through the lashes.

Amazing!—that that woman should have come back—and died—within a few hundred yards, and she, Alice, know nothing! In spite of all Richard's persuasions she tortured herself anew with the thought of the interview between Judith and Mr. Barron. What could they have talked about—so long? Judith was always an excitable, hot-tempered creature. Her silence had been heavily and efficiently bought for fifteen years. Then steps had been taken—insisted upon—by Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton. His wife and his sister-in-law had opposed him in vain. And Ralph had after all triumphed in Judith's apparent acquiescence.

Supposing she had now come home, perhaps on a sudden impulse, with a view to further blackmail, would not her wisest move be to risk some indiscretion, some partial disclosure, so that her renewed silence afterward might have the higher price? An hour's tete-a-tete with that shrewd, hard-souled man, Henry Barron! Alice Puttenham guessed that her own long-established dislike of him as acquaintance and neighbour was probably returned with interest; that he classed her now as one of "Meynell's lot," and would be only too glad to find himself possessed of any secret information that might, through her, annoy and harass Richard Meynell, her friend and counsellor.

Was it conceivable that nothing should have been said in that lengthy interview as to the causes for Judith's coming home?—or of the reasons for her original departure? What else could have accounted for so prolonged a conversation between two persons, so different in social grade, and absolute strangers to each other?

Richard had told her, indeed, and she saw from the Post, that at the inquest Barron had apparently accounted for the conversation. "She gave me a curious history of her life in the States. I was interested by her strange personality—and touched by her physical condition."

Richard was convinced that there was no reasonable cause for alarm. But Richard was always the consoler—the optimist—where she was concerned. Could she have lived at all—if it had not been so?

And then, for the second time, the rush of feeling rose, welling up, not from the springs of the past, but from the deepest sources of the present.

Richard!

That little villa on the Cap Martin—the steep pathway to it—and Richard mounting it, with that pale look, those tattered, sea-stained leaves in his hand—and the tragedy that had to be told, in his eyes, and on his lips. Could any other human being have upheld her as he did through that first year—through the years after? Was it not to him that she owed everything that had been recovered from the wreck; the independence and freedom of her daily life; protection from her hard brother-in-law, and from her sister's reproaches; occupation—hope—the gradual healing of intolerable wounds—the gradual awakening of a spiritual being?

Thus—after passion—she had known friendship; its tenderness, its disinterested affection and care.

Tenderness? Her hand dashed away some more impetuous tears, then locked itself in the other, the tension of the muscles answering to the inward effort for self-control. Thank God, she had never asked him for more; had often seemed indeed to ask him for much less; had made herself irresponsive, difficult, remote. At least she had never lost her dignity in his eyes—(ah! in whose eyes but his had she ever possessed it?)—she had never forfeited—never risked even—her sacred place in his life, as the soul he had helped through dark places, true servant as he was of the Master of Pity.

The alarms of the week died away, as this emotion gained upon her. She bethought her of certain central and critical years, when, after long dependence on him as comrade and friend, suddenly, she knew not how, her own pulse had quickened, and the sharpest struggle of her life had come upon her. It was the crisis of the mature woman, as compared with that of the innocent and ignorant girl; and in the silent mastering of it she seemed to have parted with her youth.

But she had never parted with self-control and self-respect. She had never persuaded herself that the false was true. She had kept her counsel, and her sanity, and the wage of it had not been denied her. She had emerged more worthy of his friendship, more capable of rewarding it.

Yes, but with a clear and sad perception of the necessities laid upon her—of the sacrifices involved.

He believed her—she knew it—indifferent to the great cause of religious change and reform which he had at heart. In these matters, indeed, she had quietly, unwaveringly held aloof. There are efforts and endurances that can only be maintained—up to a point. Beyond that point resistance breaks. The life that is fighting emotion must not run too many risks of emotion. At the root of half the religious movements of the world lies the appeal of the preacher and the prophet—to women. Because women are the creatures and channels of feeling; and feeling is to religion as air to life.

But she—must starve feeling—not feed and cherish it. Richard's voice was too powerful with her already. To hear it dealing with the most intimate and touching things of the soul would have tested the resistance of her will too sorely. Courage and honour alike told her that she would be defeated and undone did she attempt to meet and follow him—openly—in the paths of religion. Entbehren sollst du—sollst entbehren!

So, long before this date, she had chosen her line of action. She took no part in the movement, and she rarely set foot in the village church, which was close to her gates. Meynell sadly believed her unshakeable—one of the natural agnostics or pessimists of the world who cannot be comforted through religion.

And meanwhile secretly, ardently, she tracked all the footsteps of his thoughts, reading what he read, thinking as far as possible what he thought, and revealing nothing.

Except that, lately, she had been indiscreet sometimes in talk with Mary Elsmere. Mary had divined her—had expressed her astonishment that her friend should declare herself and her sympathies so little; and Alice had set up some sort of halting explanation.

But in this nascent friendship it was not Mary alone who had made discoveries....

* * * * *

Alice Puttenham sat very still, in the quiet shadowy room, her eyes closed, her hands crossed over the miniature, the Markborough paper lying on the floor beside her. As the first activity of memory, stirred and goaded by an untoward event, lost its poignancy; as she tried in obedience to Meynell to put away her terrors, with regard to the past, her thoughts converged ever more intensely on the present—on herself— and Mary....

There was in the world, indeed, another personality rarely or never absent from Alice Puttenham's consciousness. One face, one problem, more or less acutely realized, haunted her life continuously. But this afternoon they had, for the moment, receded into the background. Hester had been, surely, more reasonable, more affectionate lately. Philip Meryon had now left Sandford; a statement to that effect had appeared in the Post; and Hester had even shown some kindness to poor Stephen. She had at last declared her willingness to go to Paris, and the arrangements were all made. The crisis in her of angry revolt, provoked apparently by the refusal of her guardian to allow her engagement to Stephen, seemed to be over.

So that for once Alice Puttenham was free to think and feel for her own life and what concerned it. From the events connected with Judith Sabin's death—through the long history of Meynell's goodness to her—the mind of this lonely woman travelled on, to be filled and arrested by the great new fact of the present. She had made a new friend. And at the same moment she had found in her—at last—the rival with whom her own knowledge of life had threatened her these many years. A rival so sweet—so unwitting! Alice had read her. She had scarcely yet read herself.

Alice opened her eyes—to the quiet room, and the windy sky outside. She was very pale, but there were no tears. "It is not renouncing"—she whispered to herself—"for I never possessed. It is accepting—loving—giving—all one has to give."

And vaguely there ran through her mind immortal words—"good measure—pressed down, and running over."

A smile trembled on her lip. She closed her eyes again, lost in one of those spiritual passions accessible only to those who know the play and heat of the spiritual war. The wind was blowing briskly outside, and from the wood-shed in the back garden came a sound of sawing. Miss Puttenham did not hear a footstep approaching on the grass outside.

* * * * *

Hester paused at the window—smiling. There was wildness—triumph—in her look, as though for her this quiet afternoon had seen some undisclosed adventure. Her cheek was hotly flushed, her loosened hair made a glory in the evening sun. Youth, selfishly pitiless—youth, the supplanter and destroyer—stood embodied in the beautiful creature looking down upon Alice Puttenham, on the still intensity of the plaintive face, the closed eyes, the hands holding the miniature.

Mischievously the girl came closer. She took the stillness before her for sleep.

"Auntie! Aunt Alsie!"

With a start, Alice Puttenham sprang up. The miniature dropped from her hands to the floor, opening as it fell. Hester looked at it astonished—and her hand stooped for it before Miss Puttenham had perceived her loss.

"Were you asleep, Aunt Alsie?" she asked, wondering. "I got tired of that stupid party—and I—well, I just slipped away"—the clear high voice had grown conscious—"and I looked in here, because I left a book behind me—Auntie, who is it?" She bent eagerly over the miniature, trying to see it in the dim light.

Miss Puttenham's face had faded to a gray-white.

"Give it to me, Hester!" She held out her hand imperiously.

"Mayn't I know even who it is?" asked Hester, as she unwillingly returned it. In the act she caught the inscription and her face kindled.

Impetuously throwing herself down beside Miss Puttenham, the girl looked up at her with an expression half mockery, half sweetness, while Alice, with unsteady fingers, replaced the case and locked the drawer.

"What an awfully handsome fellow!" said Hester in a low voice, "though you wouldn't let me see it properly. I say, Auntie, won't you tell me—?"

"Tell you what?"

"Who he was—and why I never saw it before? I thought I knew all your things by heart—and now you've been keeping something from me!" The girl's tone had changed to one of curious resentment. "You know how you scold me when you think I've got a secret."

"That is quite different, Hester."

Miss Puttenham tried to rise, but Hester, who was leaning against her knee, prevented it.

"Why is it different?" she said, audaciously. "You always say you—you—want to be everything to me—and then you hide things from me—and I—"

She raised herself, sitting upright on the floor, her hands round her knees, and spoke with extraordinary animation and sparkling eyes.

"Why, I should have loved you twice as much, Aunt Alice—and you know I do love you!—if you'd told me more about yourself. The people I care about are the people who live—and feel—and do things! There's verse in one of your books"—she pointed to a little bookshelf of poets on a table near—"I always think of it when mamma reads the 'Christian Year' to us on Sunday evenings—

Out of dangers, dreams, disasters We arise, to be your masters!"

"We—the people who want to know, and feel, and fight! We who loathe all the humdrum bourgeois talk—'don't do this—don't do that!' Aunt Alsie, there's a German line, too, you know it—' Was uns alle baendigt, das Gemeine'—don't you hate it too—das Gemeine?" the word came with vehemence through the white teeth. "And how can we escape it—we women—except through freedom—through asserting ourselves—through love, of course? It all comes to love!—love that mamma says one ought not to talk about. I wouldn't talk about it, if it only meant what it means to Sarah and Lulu—I'd scorn to!"

She stopped—and looked with her blazing and wonderful eyes at her companion—her lips parted. Then she suddenly stooped and kissed the cold hand trying to withdraw itself from hers.

"Who was he, dear?"—she laid the hand caressingly against her cheek—"I'm good at secrets!"

Alice Puttenham wrenched herself free, and rose tottering to her feet.

"He is dead, Hester—and you mustn't speak of it to me—or any one—again."

She leant against the mantelpiece trying to recover herself—but in vain.

"I'm rather faint," she said at last, putting out a groping hand. "No, don't come!—I'm all right—I'll go upstairs and rest. I got overtired this morning."

And she went feebly toward the door.

Hester looked after her, panting and wounded. Aunt Alsie repel—refuse her!—Aunt Alsie!—who had always been her special possession and chattel. It had been taken for granted in the family, year after year, that if no one else was devoted to Hester, Aunt Alsie's devotion, at least, never failed. Hester's clothes were Miss Puttenham's special care; it was for Hester that she stitched and embroidered. Hester was to inherit her jewels and her money. In all Hester's scrapes it was Aunt Alice who stood by her, who had often carried her off bodily out of reach of the family anger, to the Lakes, to the sea—once even, to Italy.

And from her childhood Hester had coolly taken it all for granted, had never been specially grateful, or much more amenable to counsels from Aunt Alice than from anybody else. The slender, graceful woman, so gentle, plaintive and reserved, so easily tyrannized over, had never seemed to mean much to her. Yet now, as she stood looking at the door through which Miss Puttenham had disappeared, the girl was conscious of a profound and passionate sense of grievance, and of something deeper, beneath it. The sensation that held her was new and unbearable.

Then in a moment her temperament turned pain into anger. She ran to the window and down the steps into the garden.

"If she had told me"—she said to herself, with the childish fury that mingled in her with older and maturer things—"I might have told her. Now—I fend for myself!"



CHAPTER X

Meanwhile, in the room upstairs, Alice Puttenham lying with her face pressed against the back of the chair into which she had feebly dropped, heard Hester run down the steps, tried to call, or rise, and could not. Since the death of Judith Sabin she had had little or no sleep, and much less food than usual, with—all the while—the pressure of a vague corrosive terror on nerve and brain. The shock of that miniature in Hester's hands had just turned the scale; endurance had given way.

The quick footsteps receded. Yet she could do nothing to arrest them. Her mind floated in darkness.

Presently out of the darkness emerged a sound, a touch—a warm hand on hers.

"Dear—dear Miss Puttenham!"

"Yes."

Her voice seemed to herself a sigh—the faintest—from a great distance.

"The servants said you were here. Ellen came up to knock, and you did not hear. I was afraid you were ill—so I came in—you'll forgive me."

"Thank you."

Silence for a while. Mary brought cold water, chafed her friend's hands, and rendered all the services that women in such straits know how to lavish on a sufferer. Gradually Alice mastered herself, but more than a broken word or two still seemed beyond her, and Mary waited in patience. She was well aware that some trouble of a nature unknown to her had been weighing on Miss Puttenham for a week or more; and she realized too, instinctively, that she would get no light upon it.

Presently there was a knock at the door, and Mary went to open it. The servant whispered, and she returned at once.

"Mr. Meynell is here," she said, hesitating. "You will let me send him away?"

Alice Puttenham opened her eyes.

"I can't see him. But please—give him some tea. He'll have walked—from Markborough."

Mary prepared to obey.

"I'll come back afterward."

Alice roused herself further.

"No—there is the meeting afterward. You said you were going."

"I'd rather come back to you."

"No, dear—no. I'm—I'm better alone. Good night, kind angel. It's nothing"—she raised herself in the chair—"only bad nights! I'll go to bed—that'll be best. Go down—give him tea. And Mrs. Flaxman's going with you?"

"No. Mother said she wished to go," said Mary, slowly. "She and I were to meet in the village."

Alice nodded feebly, too weak to show the astonishment she felt.

"Just time. The meeting is at seven."

Then with a sudden movement—"Hester!—is she gone?"

"I met her and the maid—in the village—as I came in."

A silence—till Alice roused herself again—"Go dear, don't miss the meeting. I—I want you to be there. Good night."

And she gently pushed the girl from her, putting up her pale lips to be kissed, and asking that the little parlour-maid should be sent to help her undress.

Mary went unwillingly. She gave Miss Puttenham's message to the maid, and when the girl had gone up to her mistress she lingered a moment at the foot of the stairs, her hands lightly clasped on her breast, as though to quiet the stir within.

* * * * *

Meynell, expecting to see the lady of the house, could not restrain the start of surprise and joy with which he turned toward the incomer. He took her hand in his—pressing it involuntarily. But it slipped away, and Mary explained with her soft composure why she was there alone—that Miss Puttenham was suffering from a succession of bad nights and was keeping her room—that she sent word the Rector must please rest a little before going home, and allow Mary to give him tea.

Meynell sank obediently into a chair by the open window, and Mary ministered to him. The lines of his strong worn face relaxed. His look returned to her again and again, wistfully, involuntarily; yet not so as to cause her embarrassment.

She was dressed in some thin gray stuff that singularly became her; and with the gray dress she wore a collar or ruffle of soft white that gave it a slight ascetic touch. But the tumbling red-gold of the hair, the frank dignity of expression, belonged to no mere cloistered maid.

Meynell heard the news of Miss Puttenham's collapse with a sigh—checked at birth. He asked few questions about it; so Mary reflected afterward. He would come in again on the morrow, he said, to inquire for her. Then, with some abruptness, he asked whether Hester had been much seen at the cottage during the preceding week.

Mary reported that she had been in and out as usual, and seemed reconciled to the prospect of Paris.

"Are you—is Miss Puttenham sure that she hasn't still been meeting that man?"

Mary turned a startled look upon him.

"I thought he had gone away?"

"There may be a stratagem in that. I have been keeping what watch I could—but at this time—what use am I?"

The Rector threw himself back wearily in his chair, his hands behind his head. Mary was conscious of some deep throb of feeling that must not come to words. Even since she had known it the face had grown older—the lines deeper—the eyes finer. She stooped forward a little.

"It is hard that you should have this anxiety too. Oh! but I hope there is no need!"

He raised himself again with energy.

"There is always need with Hester. Oh! don't suppose I have forgotten her! I have written to that fellow, my cousin. I went, indeed, to see him the day before yesterday, but the servants at Sandford declared he had gone to town, and they were packing up to follow. Lady Fox-Wilton and Miss Alice here have been keeping a close eye on Hester herself, I know; but if she chose, she could elude us all!"

"She couldn't give such pain—such trouble!" cried Mary indignantly.

The Rector shook his head sadly. Then he looked at his companion.

"Has she made a friend of you? I wish she would."

"Oh! she doesn't take any account of me," said Mary, laughing. "She is quite kind to me—she tells me when she thinks my frock is hideous—or my hat's impossible—or she corrects my French accent. She is quite kind, but she would no more think of taking advice from me than from the sofa-cushion."

Meynell shrugged his shoulders.

"She has no bump of respect—never had!" and he began to give a half humorous account of the troubles and storms of Hester's bringing up. "I often ask myself whether we haven't all—whether I, in particular, haven't been a first-class bungler and blundered all through with regard to Hester. Did we choose the wrong governesses? They seemed most estimable people. Did we thwart her unnecessarily? I can't remember a time when she didn't have everything she wanted!"

"She didn't get on very well with her father?" suggested Mary timidly.

Meynell made a sudden movement, and did not answer for a moment.

"Sir Ralph and she were always at cross-purposes," he said at last. "But he was kind to her—according to his lights; and—he said some very sound and touching things to me about her—on his death-bed."

There was a short silence. Meynell had covered his eyes with his hand. Mary was at a loss how to continue the conversation, when he resumed:

"I wonder if you will understand how strangely this anxiety weighs upon me—just now."

"Just now?"

"Here am I preaching to others," he said slowly, "leading what people call a religious movement, and this homely elementary task seems to be all going wrong. I don't seem to be able to protect this child confided to me."

"Oh, but you will protect her!" cried Mary, "you will! She mayn't seem to give way—when you talk to her; but she has said things to me—to my mother too—"

"That shows her heart isn't all adamant? Well, well!—you're a comforter, but—"

"I mean that she knows—I'm sure she does—what you've done for her—how you've cared for her," said Mary, stammering a little.

"I have done nothing but my plainest, simplest duty. I have made innumerable mistakes; and if I fail with her, it's quite clear that I'm not fit to teach or lead anybody."

The words were spoken with an impatient emphasis to which Mary did not venture a reply. But she could not restrain an expression in her gray eyes which was a balm to the harassed combatant beside her.

They said no more of Hester. And presently Mary's hunger for news of the Reform Movement could not be hid. It was clear she had been reading everything she could on the subject, and feeding upon it in a loneliness, and under a constraint, which touched Meynell profoundly. The conflict in her between a spiritual heredity—the heredity of her father's message—and her tender love for her mother had never been so plain to him. Yet he could not feel that he was abetting any disloyalty in allowing the conversation. She was mature. Her mind had its own rights!

Mary indeed, unknown to him, was thrilling under a strange and secret sense of deliverance. Her mother's spiritual grip upon her had relaxed; she moved and spoke with a new though still timid sense of freedom.

So once again, as on their first meeting, only more intimately, her sympathy, her quick response, led him on. Soon lying back at his ease, his hands behind his head, he was painting for her the progress of the campaign; its astonishing developments; the kindling on all sides of the dry bones of English religion.

The new—or re-written—Liturgy of the Reform was, it seemed, almost completed. From all parts: from the Universities, from cathedral cloisters, from quiet country parishes, from the clash of life in the great towns, men had emerged as though by magic to bring to the making of it their learning and their piety, the stored passion of their hearts. And the mere common impulse, the mere release of thoughts and aspirations so long repressed, had brought about an extraordinary harmony, a victorious selflessness, among the members of the commission charged with the task. The work had gone with rapidity, yet with sureness, as in those early years of Christianity, which saw so rich and marvellous an upgrowth from the old soil of humanity. With surprising ease and spontaneity the old had passed over into the new; just as in the first hundred years after Christ's death the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs of the later Judaism had become, with but slight change, the psalms and hymns of Christianity; and a new sacred literature had flowered on the stock of the old.

"To-night—here!—we submit the new marriage service and the new burial service to the Church Council. And the same thing will be happening, at the same moment, in all the churches of the Reform—scattered through England."

"How many churches now?" she asked, with a quickened breath.

"Eighteen in July—this week, over a hundred. But before our cases come on for trial there will be many more. Every day new congregations come in from new dioceses. The beacon fire goes leaping on, from point to point!"

But the emotion which the phrase betrayed was instantly replaced by the business tone of the organizer as he went on to describe some of the practical developments of the preceding weeks: the founding of a newspaper; the collection of propagandist funds; the enrolment of teachers and missionaries, in connection with each Modernist church. Yet, at the end of it all, feeling broke through again.

"They have been wonderful weeks!—wonderful! Which of us could have hoped to see the spread of such a force in the dusty modern world! You remember the fairy story of the prince whose heart was bound with iron bands—and how one by one, the bands give way? I have seen it like that—in life after life."

"And the fighting?"

She had propped her face on her hands, and her eyes, with their eager sympathy, their changing lights, rained influence on the man beside her; an influence insensibly mingling with and colouring the passion for ideas which held them both in its grip.

"—Has been hot—will be of course infinitely hotter still! But yet, again and again, with one's very foes, one grasps hands. They seem to feel with us 'the common wave'—to be touched by it—touched by our hope. It is as though we had made them realize at last how starved, how shut out, we have been—we, half the thinking nation!—for so long!"

"Don't—don't be too confident!" she entreated. "Aren't you—isn't it natural you should miscalculate the forces against you? Oh! they are so strong! and—and so noble."

She drew in her breath, and he understood her.

"Strong indeed," he said gravely. "But—"

Then a smile broke in.

"Have I been boasting? You see some signs of swelled head? Perhaps you are right. Now let me tell you what the other side are doing. That chastens one! There is a conference of Bishops next week; there was one a week ago. These are of course thundering resolutions in Convocation. The English Church Union has an Albert Hall meeting; it will be magnificent. A 'League of the Trinity' has started against us, and will soon be campaigning all over England. The orthodox newspapers are all in full cry. Meanwhile the Bishops are only waiting for the decision of my case—the test case—in the lower court to take us all by detachments. Every case, of course, will go ultimately to the Supreme Court—the Privy Council. A hundred cases—that will take time! Meanwhile—from us—a monster petition—first to the Bishops for the assembling of a full Council of the English Church, then to Parliament for radical changes in the conditions of membership of the Church, clerical and lay."

Mary drew in her breath.

"You can't win! you can't win!"

And he saw in her clear eyes her sorrow for him and her horror of the conflict before him.

"That," he said quietly, "is nothing to us. We are but soldiers under command."

He rose; and, suddenly, she realized with a fluttering heart how empty that room would be when he was gone. He held out his hand to her.

"I must go and prepare what I have to say to-night. The Church Council consists of about thirty people—two thirds of them will be miners."

"How is it possible that they can understand you?" she asked him, wondering.

"You forget that half of them I have taught from their childhood. They are my spiritual brothers, or sons—picked men—the leaders of their fellows—far better Christians than I. I wish you could see them—and hear them." He looked at her a little wistfully.

"I am coming," she said, looking down.

His start of pleasure was very evident.

"I am glad," he said simply; "I want you to know these men."

"And my mother is coming with me."

Her voice was constrained. Meynell felt a natural surprise. He paused an instant, and then said with gentle emphasis:

"I don' think there will be anything to wound her. At any rate, there will be nothing new, or strange—to her—in what is said to-night."

"Oh, no!" Then, after a moment's awkwardness, she said, "We shall soon be going away."

His face changed.

"Going away? I thought you would be here for the winter!"

"No. Mother is so much better, we are going to our little house in the Lakes, in Long Whindale. We came here because mother was ill—and Aunt Rose begged us. But—"

"Do you know"—he interrupted her impetuously—"that for six months I've had a hunger for just one fortnight up there among the fells?"

"You love them?" Her face bloomed with pleasure. "You know the dear mountains?"

He smiled.

"It doesn't do to think of them, does it? You should see the letters on my table! But I may have to take a few days' rest, some time. Should I find you in Long Whindale—if I dropped down on you—over Goat Scar?"

"Yes—from December till March!" Then she suddenly checked the happiness of her look and tone. "I needn't warn you that it rains."

"Doesn't it rain! And everybody pretends it doesn't. The lies one tells!"

She laughed.

They stood looking at each other. An atmosphere seemed to have sprung up round them in which every tone and movement had suddenly become magnified—significant.

Meynell recovered himself. He held out his hand in farewell, but he had scarcely turned away from her, when she made a startled movement toward the open window.

"What is that?"

There was a sound of shouting and running in the street outside. A crowd seemed to be approaching. Meynell ran out into the garden to listen. By this time the noise had grown considerably, and he thought he distinguished his own name among the cries.

"Something has happened at the colliery!" he said to Mary, who had followed him.

And he hurried toward the gate, bareheaded, just as a gray-haired lady in black entered the garden.

"Mother," cried Mary, in amazement.

Catharine Elsmere paused—one moment; she looked from her daughter to Meynell. Then she hurried to the Rector.

"You are wanted!" she said, struggling to get her breath. "A terrible thing has happened. They think four lives have been lost—some accident to the cage—and people blame the man in charge. They've got him shut up in the colliery office—and declare they'll kill him. The crowd looks dangerous—and there are very few police. I heard you were here—some one, the postman, saw you come in—you must stop it. The people will listen to you."

Her fine, pale face, framed in her widow's veil, did not so much ask as command. He replied by a gesture—then by two or three rapid inquiries. Mary—bewildered—saw them for an instant as allies and equals, each recognizing the other. Then Meynell ran to the gate, and was at once swallowed up in the moving groups which had gathered there, and seemed to carry him back with them toward the colliery.

Catharine Elsmere turned to follow—Mary at her side. Mary looked at her in anxiety, dreading the physical strain for one, of late, so frail.

"Mother darling!—ought you?"

Catharine took no heed whatever of the question.

"It is the women who are so terrible," she said in a low voice, as they hurried on; "their faces were like wild beasts. They have telephoned to Cradock for police. If Mr. Meynell can keep them in check for half an hour, there may be hope."

They ran on, swept along by the fringe of the crowd till they reached the top of a gentle descent at the farther end of the village. At the bottom of this hill lay the colliery, with its two huge chimneys, its shed and engine houses, its winding machinery, and its heaps of refuse. Within the enclosure, from the height where they stood, could be seen a thin line of police surrounding a small shed—the pay-office. On the steps of it stood the manager, and the Rector, to be recognized by his long coat and his bare head, had just joined him. Opposite to the police, and separated from the shed by about ten yards and a wooden paling, was a threatening and vociferating mob, which stretched densely across the road and up the hill on either side; a mob largely composed of women—dishevelled, furious women—their white faces gleaming amid the coal-blackened forms of the miners.

"They'll have 'im out," said a woman in front of Mary Elsmere. "Oh, my God!—they'll have 'im out! It was he caused the death of the boy—yo mind 'im—young Jimmy Ragg—a month sen; though the crowner's jury did let 'im off, more shame to them! An' now they say as how he signalled for 'em to bring up the men from the Albert pit afore he'd made sure as the cage in the Victory pit was clear!"

"Explain to me, please," said Mary, touching the woman's arm.

Half a dozen turned eagerly upon her.

"Why, you see, miss, as the two cages is like buckets in a well—the yan goes down, as the other cooms up. An' there's catches as yo mun knock away to let 'un go down—an' this banksman—ee's a devil!—he niver so much as walked across to the other shaft to see—an' theer was the catches fast—an' instead o' goin' down, theer was the cage stuck, an' the rope uncoilin' itsel', and fallin' off the drum—an' foulin' the other rope—An' then all of a suddent, just as them poor fellows wor nearin' top—the drum began to work t'other way—run backards, you unnerstan?—an' the engineman lost 'is head an' niver thowt to put on t'breaks—an'—oh! Lord save us!—whether they was drownt at t'bottom i' the sump, or killt afore they got theer—theer's no one knows yet—They're getten of 'em up now."

And as she spoke, a great shout which became a groan ran through the crowd. Men climbed up the railings at the side of the road that they might see better. Women stood on tiptoe. A confused clamour came from below, and in the colliery yard there could be seen a gruesome sight; four stretchers, borne by colliers, their burdens covered from view. Beside them were groups of women and children and in front of them the crowd made way. Up the hill they came, a great wail preceding and surrounding them; behind them the murmurs of an ungovernable indignation.

As the procession neared them Mary saw a gray-haired woman throw up her arm, and heard her cry out in a voice harsh and hideous with excitement:

"Let 'im as murdered them pay for't! What's t' good o' crowner's juries?—Let's settle it oursel's!"

Deep murmurs answered her.

"And it's this same Jenkins," said another fierce voice, "as had a sight to do wi' bringin' them blacklegs down here, in the strike, last autumn. He's been a great man sense, has Jenkins, wi' the masters; but he sha'n't murder our husbinds and sons for us, while he's loafin' round an' playin' the lord—not he! Have they got 'un safe?"

"Aye, he's in the pay-house safe enough," shouted another—a man. "An' if them as is defendin' of 'un won't give 'un up, there's ways o' makin' them."

The procession of the dead approached—all the men baring their heads, and the women wailing. In front came a piteous group—a young half-fainting wife, supported by an older woman, with children clinging to her skirts. Catharine went forward, and lifted a baby or two that was being dragged along the ground. Mary took up another child, and they both joined the procession.

As they did so, there was a shout from below.

Mary, white as her dress, asked an elderly miner beside her, who had shown no excitement whatever, to tell her what had happened. He clambered up on the bank to look and came back to her.

"They've beaten 'un back, miss," he said in her ear. "They've got the surface men to help, and Muster Meynell he's doing his best; if there's anybody can hold 'em, he can; but there's terrible few on 'em. It is time as the Cradock men came up. They'll be trying fire before long, an' the women is like devils."

On went the procession into the village, leaving the fight behind them. In Mary's heart, as she was pushed and pressed onward, burnt the memory of Meynell on the steps—speaking, gesticulating—and the surging crowd in front of him.

There was that to do, however, which deadened fear. In the main street the procession was met by hurrying doctors and nurses. For those broken bodies indeed—young men in their prime—nothing could be done, save to straighten the poor limbs, to wash the coal dust from the strong faces, and cover all with the white linen of death. But the living—the crushed, stricken living—taxed every energy of heart and mind. Catharine, recognized at once by the doctors as a pillar of help, shrank from no office and no sight, however terrible. But she would not permit them to Mary, and they were presently separated.

Mary had a trio of sobbing children on her knee, in the living-room of one of the cottages, when there was a sudden tramp outside. Everybody in Miners' Row, including those who were laying out the dead, ran to the windows.

"The police from Cradock!"—fifty of them.

The news passed from mouth to mouth, and even those who had been maddest half an hour before felt the relief of it.

Meanwhile detachments of shouting men and women ran clattering at intervals through the village streets. Sometimes stragglers from them would drop into the cottages alongside—and from their panting talk, what had happened below became roughly clear. The police had arrived only just in time. The small band defending the office was worn out, the Rector had been struck, palings torn down; in another half-hour the rioters would have set the place on fire and dragged out the man of whom they were in search.

The narrator's story was broken by a howl—

"Here he comes!" And once again, as though by a rush of muddy water, the street filled up, and a strong body of police came through it, escorting the banksman who had been the cause of the accident. A hatless, hunted creature, with white face and loosened limbs, he was hurried along by the police, amid a grim silence that had suddenly succeeded to the noise.

Behind came a group of men, officials of the colliery, and to the right of them walked the Rector, bareheaded as before, a bandage on the left temple. His eyes ran along the cottages, and he presently perceived Mary Elsmere standing at an open door, with a child that had cried itself to sleep in her arms.

Stepping out of the ranks, he approached her. The people made way for him, a few here and there with sullen faces, but in the main with a friendly and remorseful eagerness.

"It's all over," he said in Mary's ear. "But it was touch and go. An unpopular man—suspected of telling union secrets to the masters last year. He was concerned in another accident to a boy—a month ago; they all think he was in fault, though the jury exonerated him. And now—a piece of abominable carelessness!—manslaughter at least. Oh! he'll catch it hot! But we weren't going to have him murdered on our hands. If he hadn't got safe into the office, the women alone would have thrown him down the shaft. By the way, are you learned in 'first aid'?"

He pointed, smiling, to his temple, and she saw that the wound beneath the rough bandage was bleeding afresh.

"It makes me feel a bit faint," he said with annoyance; "and there is so much to do!"

"May I see to it?" said her mother's voice behind her. And Catharine, who had just descended from an upper room, went quickly to a nurse's wallet which had been left on a table in the kitchen, and took thence an antiseptic dressing and some bandaging.

Meynell sat down by the table, shivering a little from shock and strain, while she ministered to him. One of the women near brought him brandy; and Catharine deftly cleaned and dressed the wound. Mary looked on, handing what was necessary to her mother, and in spite of herself, a ray of strange sweetness stole through the tragedy of the day.

In a very few minutes Meynell rose. They were in the cottage of one of the victims. The dead lay overhead, and the cries of wife and mother could be heard through the thin flooring.

"Don't go up again!" he said peremptorily to Catharine. "It is too much for you."

She looked at him gently.

"They asked me to come back again. It is not too much for me. Please let me."

He gave way. Then, as he was following her upstairs, he turned to say to Mary:

"Gather some of the people, if you can, outside. I want to give a notice when I come down."

He mounted the ladder-stairs leading to the upper room. Violent sounds of wailing broke out overhead, and the murmur of his voice could be heard between.

Mary quietly sent a few messengers into the street. Then she gathered up the sleeping child again in her arms, and sat waiting. In spirit she was in the room overhead. The thought of those two—her mother and Meynell—beside a bed of death together, pierced her heart.

After what seemed to her an age, she heard her mother's step, and the Rector following. Catharine stood again beside her daughter, brushing away at last a few quiet tears.

"You oughtn't to face this any more, indeed you oughtn't," said Meynell, with urgency, as he joined them. "Tell her so, Miss Mary. But she has been doing wonders. My people bless her!"

He held out his hand, involuntarily, and Catharine placed hers in it. Then, seeing a small crowd already collected in the street, he hurried out to speak to them.

Meanwhile evening had fallen, a late September evening, shot with gold and purple. Behind the village the yellow stubbles stretched up to the edge of the Chase and drifts of bluish smoke from the colliery chimneys hung in the still air.

Meynell, standing on the raised footpath above the crowd, gave notice that a special service of mourning would be held in the church that evening. The meeting of the Church Council would of course be postponed.

During his few words Mary made her way to the farther edge of the gathering, looking over it toward the speaker. Behind him ran the row of cottages, and in the doorway opposite she saw her mother, with her arm tenderly folded round a sobbing girl, the sister of one of the dead. The sudden tranquillity, the sudden pause from tumult and anguish seemed to draw a "wind-warm space" round Mary, and she had time, for a moment, to think of herself and the strangeness of this tragic day.

How amazing that her mother should be here at all. This meeting of the Reformers' League to which she had insisted on coming—as a spectator of course, and with the general public—what did it mean? Mary did not yet know, long as she had pondered it.

How beautiful was the lined face!—so pale in the golden dusk, in its heavy frame of black. Mary could not take her eyes from it. It betrayed an animation, a passion of life, which had been foreign to it for months. In these few crowded hours, when every word and action had been simple, instructive, inevitable; love to God and man working at their swiftest and purest; through all the tragedy and the horror some burden seemed to have dropped from Catharine's soul. She met her daughter's eyes, and smiled.

When Meynell had finished, the crowd silently drifted away, and he came back to the Elsmeres. They noticed the village fly coming toward them—saw it stop in the roadway.

"I sent for it," Meynell explained rapidly. "You mustn't let your mother do any more. Look at her! Please, will you both go to the Rectory? My cook will give you tea; I have let her know. Then the fly will take you home."

They protested in vain—must indeed submit. Catharine flushed a little at being so commanded; but there was no help for it.

"I would like to come and show you my den!" said Meynell, as he put them into the carriage. "But there's too much to do here."

He pointed sadly to the cottages, shut the door, and they were off.

During the short drive Catharine sat rather stiffly upright. Saint as she was, she was accustomed to have her way.

They drove into the dark shrubbery that lay between the Rectory and the road. At the door of the little house stood Anne in a white cap and clean apron. But the white cap sat rather wildly on its owner's head; nor would she take any interest in her visitors till she had got from them a fuller account of the tumult at the pit than had yet reached her, and assurances that Meynell's wound was but slight. But when these were given she pounced upon Catharine.

"Eh, but you're droppin'!"

And with many curious looks at them she hurried them into the study, where a hasty clearance had been made among the books, and a tea-table spread.

She bustled away to bring the tea.

Then exhaustion seized on Catharine. She submitted to be put on the sofa after it had been cleared of its pile of books; and Mary sat by her a while, holding her hands. Death and the agony of broken hearts overshadowed them.

But then the dogs came in, discreet at first, and presently—at scent of currant cake—effusively friendly. Mary fed them all, and Catharine watched the colour coming back to her face, and the dumb sweetness in the gray eyes.

Presently, while her mother still rested, Mary took courage to wander round the room, looking at the books, the photographs on the walls, the rack of pipes, the carpenter's bench, and the panels of half-finished carving. Timidly, yet eagerly, she breathed in the message it seemed to bring her from its owner—of strenuous and frugal life. Was that half-faded miniature of a soldier his father—and that sweet gray-haired woman his mother? Her heart thrilled to each discovery.

Then Anne invaded them, for conversation, and while Catharine, unable to hide her fatigue, lay speechless, Anne chattered about her master. Her indignation was boundless that any hand could be lifted against him in his own parish. "Why he strips himself bare for them, he does!"

And—with Mary unconsciously leading her—out came story after story, in the racy Mercian vernacular, illustrating a good man's life, and all

His little nameless unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

As they drove slowly home through the sad village street they perceived Henry Barron calling at some of the stricken houses. The squire was always punctilious, and his condolences might be counted on. Beside him walked a young man with a jaunty step, a bored sallow face, and a long moustache which he constantly caressed. Mary supposed him to be the squire's second son, "Mr. Maurice," whom nobody liked.