"Undoubtedly!"

"There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, "that the first march of the Division on its route to Frostenberg led past the Border farm called Haargrond Plaats. It looked deserted and half-ruined, with only a slipshod woman and a coloured man in charge; but something was known of what had gone on there, and might be going on still, and the Boers are clever stage-managers, and it don't do to trust to appearances! So the Chief detached a party with dynamite cartridges and express orders to make the ruin real. Our men searched the place thoroughly before they blew it up; and hidden in a disused chimney—solid bit of old Dutch masonry big enough to accommodate a baker's dozen of sweeps—were a few things calculated to facilitate that search for the needle in the haystack—you understand? Disguises of various kinds—a suit of clothes lined with chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin'—a good deal of the raw stuff itself, scattered all over the shop by the blow-up—and in a rusty cashbox a diary or private ledger, posted up in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher, impossible to make out, but with the name written on it of the identical man my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer of Miss Mildare's adopted mother! And that's what you may call the Clue Direct, Saxham, I rather fancy?"

Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some finality, and with some little difficulty extracted a biggish square envelope from the left inner pocket of the accurately-fitting frock-coat. He lightly placed the envelope upon the blotter before Saxham; reached out and took the shiny top-hat off the writing-table, fitted it with peculiar care on his pinkish, sandy, close-cropped head, and said, looking at Saxham with a pleasant smile.

"Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the contents of that envelope? There are three photographs of handwritin' inside, marked on the backs respectively." He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the big envelope, examining the polish of his own varnished patent-leather boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was extremely well assumed, if it was not strictly genuine. His large face was as bland and expressionless as the face of the grandfather-clock in the Sheraton case that ticked against the wainscot behind him, as he advised:

"Take 'em in numerical sequence. No. 1 is the photographed facsimile of the cover of the bogus letter to Mr. Casey. No. 2"—the speaker lightly touched it with a large round finger-tip—"that's the replica—also photographed—of a card the man we're after wrote on and gave to Lady Hannah, in case she found herself inclined to invest a hundred or so in the kind of wares he professed to supply. Photo No. 3 is a reproduction of an autograph and address that's written on the inside cover of the ledger —posted up in thieves' cipher—that was in the cashbox found at Haargrond Plaats." He waited, screwing painfully at the stiff, waxed ends of the scrubby moustache.

Saxham took the photographs in their order. The envelope of the bogus letter brought by the supposed runner from Diamond Town had been addressed in a big bold black round hand with curiously malformed capitals, to

"Mr. BARNEY CASEY, "Commercial Traveller, "Gueldersdorp.

"Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces"

"—Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo. "Compare the writin' with No. 2."

No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was written in ink, in the same bold hand:

"Mr. HENDRYK VAN BUSCH, "C/o Mr. W. Bough, "Transport Agent, "Haargrond Plaats, "Near Matambani, "Transvaal."



LXIV

There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people. Saxham glanced at Major Bingo with eyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and laid the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3, and read in the same large nourishing round hand:

"W. BOUGH, "Free State Hotel, "50 m. from Driepoort, "Orange Free State."

After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper:

"Van Busch and Bough are—one?"

Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's.

"One man!—and that's what I may call the pith of my verbal Despatch for you!"

Saxham said with hard composure:

"Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is common in South Africa. With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I have—associations. It was, in fact, one of the many aliases used by the witness for Regina in an Old Bailey case in which I was concerned nearly seven years ago."

The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:

"Same man!"

Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:

"—But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That—— Good Lord! what's the matter?"

For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:

"What wrong? What injury? What—what are you hinting at?——"

"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazy flame died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"

"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving trouble of late."

Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the Doctor looked like that—uncommonly like that! And the big Major, remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he thought, even as he said:

"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go!"

"I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling bitterly, as he remembered the little phial with the yellow label that lay beside the whisky-flask in the drawer beneath his hand. "I shall go very soon now!"

"But not immediately?"

"Not immediately." There was something strange, almost exalted, in the look that accompanied the words. Saxham added: "If you could give me an approximate date as regards the finding of that—needle in the haystack of South Africa, it would—facilitate my departure more than you can guess!"

"Would it, by George!" Bingo slipped the thumb and forefinger of the useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Something sparkled in the big pink palm he extended to Saxham—something sparkled, and spurted white and green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.

For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.

With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.

Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!

The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have indicated the height of the latest fashion—say, twenty-two or even three years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it. Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."

* * * * *

The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"

"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits of evidence were bits of a man—two men you might call him! And, by the Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"

"He had this upon him? He—wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.

"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd hand it over to—anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully! So long!"



LXV

In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of the Siege—a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written by an unsteady hand.

Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and drove there that afternoon.

The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West. Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and able to receive a visitor?

The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she would be happy to oblige the gentleman.

"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an ordinary caller on business connected with religion."

The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed, brown-distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense, to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.

Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library; chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying down.

"I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the prone figure, a single stride having taken him to the side of the sofa, "to prescribe for a man whose nerves are playing him tricks. I have torn up your letter—the epistle in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an avowal which will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any judge of a man's physical condition, a lower nature is what you want!" He threw down his hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor chairs, and crashed it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big body on it, and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who mustered breath to stammer:

"There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I am well—that is, bodily." He got up from the sofa, and crossed to the Zoological hearthrug, and poked the smoky little fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May day was wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you have heard what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned round, his thin face flaming. "Mind, I'm not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had impatiently waved his hand. "Hear you shall, and must!"

He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that couched on a field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his hands down deep into his pockets, and the painful scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar and dyed his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead to the roots of his dark, curling hair.

"Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigation one day in your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp?"

"Yes—no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, with his angry, brooding eyes upon the floor.

"It matters," said Julius doggedly, "in the present case. I need hardly tell you that I have kept that oath. If the man had not been dead, I might have ended by breaking it—who knows? What I have to tell you is that, some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen—deservedly fallen—to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her—something I had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling, worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."

Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:

"I knew that the man lied—on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he had given me of lowering your value in—in another's eyes was too tempting to resist. The man had told me——"

"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham; "and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"

"Saxham!... For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham, hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went on:

"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look down with infinite contempt—or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete. Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer, inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man who scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator, inspired by oxygen, astonishes the House of Commons or the Bar. And the actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage; and the clergyman, drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a Temperance sermon. And the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician, heal thyself!'"



The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick from the table.

"What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me. Moralists would say that you acted conscientiously—played the part of a true friend in telling—her—what you knew!"

"Of my benefactor—the man who had saved my life!" Julius moistened his dry lips. "Your approving moralist would be the devil's advocate. But I have not forgotten what your own opinion is of the man who tries to enhance his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a rival. And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. Her look of surprise ... the tone in which she said, 'Did he not save your life?' that was enough!... Then I—I lost my head, and told her that I loved her—entreated her to be my wife, only to learn that she never had—never could——" Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves painfully at the back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks between his gritted teeth: "It was revolting to her—a girl reared among nuns in a Catholic Convent—that a man calling himself a priest should speak to her of love. There was absolute horror in her look as she learned the truth." He groaned. "I have never met her eyes since that day without seeing—or imagining I saw—some reflection of that horror in them!"

"Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said Saxham, not unkindly.

He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when Julius stopped him.

"One moment. Has—has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you of—this that I have told you?"

"Never!" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.

"One moment more! Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you not by a desperate effort break this habit that may—that must—inevitably bring misery to your wife? In the name of her love for you—in the names of the children that may be born of it——"

—"Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"

"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know. When I endeavoured—unsuccessfully—to injure you, I robbed myself of my belief in myself. But you—you who gave me back my earthly life, you have robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do you know the effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance—I have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands, that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"

"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in the thin young face and in the beautiful haggard eyes, "that I never meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen an announcement in the Siege Gazette that ... I dare say you understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from. I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"

He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said, pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:

"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to forgive—why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much: She will be spared the 'inevitable misery' of which you spoke just now!"

"How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have heard," hesitated Julius, "that these things are not always successful—that they sometimes fail!"

"Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham.

A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that held the swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He shook hands with Julius, and went upon his lonely way.



LXVI

Even the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occasional displays of temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent from Eve by stamping her slender foot at her hulking Doctor; had, after a sudden outburst of passionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-table and run out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears.

Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst—merely an invitation from Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled for the London summer season in Eaton Square, for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of August and September at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs, among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and rose—nothing more.

But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the idea. Why never occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old treachery. If David's betrayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had borne him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered, if its divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at least, while he lived, it was his—to look at and long for. He owed that cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. And their meeting had been, upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recollection of what had once appeared to him a base betrayal—a gross, foul, unpardonable wrong.

Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully happy and successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would never have seen and known Lynette. She would never have come to him and laid in his the slight hand whose touch thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the little more that would have meant so much—so much....

Ah, yes! he was even grateful to Mildred. She had not worn well. She had grown thin and passee, and nervous and hysterical. But she was amiable, even demonstrative in her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for Owen's wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness of its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tempered by a regretful sigh—even by a reference to the time:

"When poor dear Owen thought me the only woman worth looking at in the whole world. Ah, well! that is all over, long ago!" Mildred would say, with an inflection that was meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she would tilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart.

These gentle, retrospective references were never made in the Doctor's hearing. With truly feminine tact they were reserved for Mrs. Owen's delectation. And possibly they might have rankled in those pretty shell-like ears, if their owner had loved Saxham.

But Saxham knew that she did not;—had even ceased to wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to! If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingratitude and deceit! And I hate her—and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than ever, and the glass he had been filling with port overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must be warned to complete his work without delay.

For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow.

Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year before.

He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.

When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower, now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion. When those blocks of cyclopaean masonry should be tufted with the golden wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask should come into use.

When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, and every hollow and hillock should be gay with the star convolvulus and the flaunting scarlet poppies—then Death should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained to the rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door!



Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and ask the reason of her strange display of emotion. Only a husband could do that who had the right to take her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of her tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks of London made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars rose and set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing-table, and the tide in the big whisky-flask in the table-drawer ebbed low.

Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been emptied; the alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers of his brain. Weariness of life weighed on him like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his hand to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the deep table-drawer aside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. His head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams.



Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the mantelshelf, and the grandfather clock in the corner, ran a race with the chronometer in the pocket of the sleeping man. The brilliant unwavering circle of electric light did not reach the face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands, that hung lax over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and tipped his lifted chin, leaving the strong brow and closed eyes in shadow. But as the pale glimmer of dawn began to outline the edges of the blinds and stretched at length a broad, pointing finger across the quiet room, the sleeping face showed greyish pale and luminous as a drawing by Whistler in silver-point.

The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a knock upon the panel of the consulting-room door. It was so faint and diffident a knock, no wonder it passed unheeded. Then the door opened timidly, and a slender figure in pale flowing draperies of creamy embroidered cashmere stole upon small, noiseless, slippered feet over the thick Turkey carpet.

It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked out from the landing into the hall below, and, seeing the light of the unextinguished lamp shining under the lintel of the consulting-room door, had stolen timidly down to ask Owen's pardon. Why had she behaved so badly? She could not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell him so. His name was upon her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.

Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And then—it was to her as though she looked upon her husband's face for the first time.

There was no stain of his secret excess upon it—no bloating of the features. You would have said this was a sane and strong and temperate man, upon whom the mighty brother of all-conquering Death had come, like one armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only the sorrow of a suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper in the diamond-hard Egyptian granite.

He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched as Lynette bent over and looked at him. A mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the weight of its own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half-bared bosom as she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over her as it fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had touched the rock in Horeb, one slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling point of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his face cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette, and a strange, new, overwhelming emotion seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid fire seemed to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.

She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart and bated breath, upon the living page before her eyes.

In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that face of Saxham's pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of suffering and disappointment for Saxham, in its rugged confrontation of the inevitable; in its resolute long-suffering and grim patience; in its silent abnegation of any claim upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never stoop to beg for pity—would rather die hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and measured love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had—or so it seemed to her—asserted itself at the last, and said, "I have left off crying for the moon; I wish for your love no longer!"—it pleaded—pleaded.... Words struggled for answering utterance in her, but none came.... She leaned nearer, drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting eyebrow smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and thrill, she knew....

All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this man mattered who sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell him all! She dared not, though she longed to.

He was her master as well as her mate. When he had said to her that he had ceased to care, his eyes had given his words the lie. He had looked at her.... She shivered deliciously at the recollection of that look. If he were to open those stern, ardent eyes now, he would know her his. His—all his, to deal with as he chose!... His alone!

If Saxham had awakened then.... But he slept on. She did not dare to kiss that broad white buckler of his forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of his coat instead, and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her, and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out of the room.



LXVII

It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at Herion is wont to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of angry wind and lashing rain. Lynette, who had risen from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown about her, to kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she had found it, upon her arrival of the previous night, a reproduction, down to the smallest detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street, with this notable difference—that on the wall facing the bed-head hung a fine copy of a Millais portrait that was one of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady Bridget-Mary, in the glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas splendid as a star.

How kind, how kind of Owen!... Her eyes filled as she gazed, comparing the glowing, radiant face upon the canvas with the enlarged photograph of the Mother in her habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little table beside the bed. A worn "Garden of the Soul" lay near, and the "Imitation" of inspired A Kempis. Both had been the Mother's gifts. The Breviary and the Little Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead. Lynette had brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful eyes, and wistful lines about the mouth.

Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.

His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but she had never ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's consulting-room. The memory of that kiss she had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its sweetness. She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she might never be his.... To know it was to realise at once her riches and her poverty.

Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had come to her the knowledge of the true herb needed for her healing. The unsated hunger for sympathy and love and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she comprehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty, carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz draperies, recognising what his care had been to please her, and how every little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and gratified, a sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.

She had parted from Owen without one tender word, without even one glance of greater kindness than she would have bestowed upon a stranger. She ached with futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled through Major Bingo's blustering admonitions to perspiring porters to put the luggage in one compartment, to stow canvas bags of golf-clubs and fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles at their personal peril, since the company evaded liability.

It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche should be his wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid. Looking from her bedroom casements over the syringas and lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and hollies of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, whose green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and made a sea of verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed there—gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly with sea-holly and gay with flaunting poppies and purple scabious, the pink and white convolvulus, and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds nourishment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away. Lynette sighed a small sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks to be spent in the society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather fidgety people Owen had chosen to bear her company.

Of course, Owen could not leave his patients! He had explained that, and Lady Hannah and her big Major were old friends of hers and his. And the little woman with the jangling laugh and the snapping black eyes had known the Mother in her youth....

At that remembrance Lynette's eyes went lovingly to the copy of the Millais portrait, and as the sun burst through the streaming wind-chased clouds, and smote bright diamond-rays from the dripping window-panes, the firm lips seemed to curve in the rare, sudden smile, the great grey eyes to gleam with life and tenderness.

Ah, to spend a long, sweet summer here, alone with that dearest of all companions! Lynette's white throat swelled at the thought, and a mist blotted out the noble face, crowned with its diadem of rich black tresses. She wiped the tears away, and beheld a world miraculously changed. For land and sea were drenched in radiant sunshine.

She unlatched the casements and threw them wide, and clean, salt, sweet air came streaming in, bringing the fragrance of mignonette and wallflower and sweetbriar, and the aromatic smells of the larch and pine. She leaned her white arms upon the grey stone window-sill, and drank the freshness and fragrance. And it seemed to her that this ancient grange, perched on the cliff-ledge in the tremendous shadow of Herion Castle, looking across the restless grey-blue waters of Nantmadoc Bay to St. Tirlan's Roads, was an ideal place to spend a honeymoon in, supposing you loved the man you had married, and were loved by him?

Her bosom heaved and her wild heart fell to throbbing. A blush burned over her, and she drove the thought away. It came back, whispering like a guest who wishes not to be dismissed. It pleaded and urged and compelled. Something like a strong hand closed upon her heart and drew her, drew her.... A voice called to her in the silence that was only broken by the voices of birds, and the rustling of wind-stirred leaves, and the crying of the gulls above the white restless breakers. And the voice was Owen's.

How strangely he had looked and spoken in that last moment of their parting! It came back in every detail for the hundredth time, as she leaned her white arms upon the window-sill and looked out with wistful eyes upon the beauty of the blossoming world.

"Good-bye, good-bye! Be happy—and forget!"

The train had begun to move as he uttered the words He had gripped her hand painfully and released it. As he drew his arm sharply away, a button, hanging loosely by a thread or two, became detached from his coat-cuff, and fell upon the rubber matting of the corridor. She was conscious of the button as Saxham and the crowded, grimy platform receded from her view. And before she went back to her seat in the compartment that had been reserved for herself and her fellow-travellers, she picked up the tiny disc of black horn, and secretly kissed it, and slipped it into her purse. She was silent and preoccupied during the eleven hours' journey, turning over and over in her mind, mentally repeating with every shade of expression that could vary their meaning, Saxham's strange words of farewell.

She repeated them now aloud. They were tossed to and fro in her heart on waves of wonder and regret and apprehension. Did Owen really believe that to be happy she must forget him? Did he comprehend that she had long arrived at the conclusion that this loveless, joyless companionship, mocked by the name of marriage, was a miserable mistake?

He had never been under any illusion as concerned it. He had accepted the iron terms of the contract she offered him with open eyes and full knowledge. She heard his voice again, as it had spoken in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, saying:

"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage that should be practically no marriage at all—a formal contract that is not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and ripen into the close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"

That was just what she had asked. He had accepted her iron conditions, and stipulated for nothing. He had given his all. What had she given him? Nothing but suffering, being rendered pitiless by the ache and sting in her own bosom—absorbed, swallowed up by her agony of grief for the Mother, her passion of regret for dead Beauvayse.

Beauvayse.... Suppose he and Owen Saxham stood side by side down there on the green short grass beneath her windows, which of the two men would to-day be the dearer and the more desired? The tall, soldierly young figure, with the sunburnt, handsome face, the gay, amorous, challenging glance, the red mouth that laughed under the golden moustache, and the shallow brain under the close-clipped golden curls, or the black-haired, hulking Doctor, with the square-cut, powerful face and the stern blue eyes, the man of heart and intellect, whose indomitable, patient tenderness had led a stricken girl back from the borders of that strange land where the brain-sick dwell, to wholesome consciousness of common things, and renewed healthfulness of body and of mind?

She had hardly thanked him. She realised, with tears of shame, that this inestimable service she had accepted as matter of course. It was the way of Saxham's world to take of him and render nothing; he who was worthy to be a King among his fellow-men had been their servant as long as she had known him.

To call him hard and stern, and seek his aid and sympathy at every pinch; to deem him cold and grudging, and accept his sacrifices as matter of course—that was the way of the world with grim-jawed, tender-hearted Owen Saxham. And she, who had done like the rest, knew him now, and valued him for what he was, and—loved him!



For this was love that had come upon her like a strong man armed, not as he had shown himself to her before—laughing and merry, playful and sweet.... This was no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked by the beauty of gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, smiling mouth. This was a love that drew you with irresistible strength, and knitted you to the soul, and the heart, and the flesh of another, until his breath became your breath, and his life your life. It called you with a voice that plucked at the secret chords of your being, and was stern and compelling rather than sweet to implore. It drew you to the beloved, not with ribbons of silk, but with ropes of tempered steel. It was potent and resistless as death, and infinitely deeper than the grave. It reached out aspiring hands beyond the grave, into Eternity. And, newly born as it rose in the heart of this woman, it was yet as old as Eden, where Heavenly Love created the earthly love, that is more than half-divine.

Why, why had he sent her away, bidding her be happy and forget him?... The memory of his hollow eyes and haggard face pierced her to the quick. He was ill—he was in trouble; he had sent her away that he might bear the burden solely.... Or ... an iron hand closed upon her heart, and wrung it until points of moisture started upon her fair temples under the fine tendrils of her hair ... could the reason be—another woman?

Another woman?... She set her little teeth and drove the unworthy thought away. But it came again and again—a persistent mental gadfly. Was Owen not worthy of love? Suppose another sweeter, gentler creature had found a throne in the heart that his wife had prized so lightly, would it be so very strange, after all? Perhaps that was why he had asked her to forgive him for having married her a little while ago!

She dropped her head upon her folded arms, and sobbed at the thought. Then she dried her tears and rang for her maid, and presently came down to breakfast with Lady Hannah, smiling and composed, cheerful and attentive as a hostess ought to be. But her reddened eyelids told tales.

"Misses her Doctor, no doubt," thought Lady Hannah, as she commended the country eggs and butter, and was enthusiastic over the thyme-scented Welsh mountain-honey, and apologetic over the absence of her Bingo from the board.

She would carry her nuisance his breakfast with her own hands, she vowed, as he had left his man behind, on hearing from the Doctor that the house was a small one.

"But why?" asked Lynette. "There is Marie, my maid, and the red-cheeked parlourmaid, whose name I don't yet know, and Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper ..."

"Who was Dr. Saxham's nurse when he was a little boy, and adores him. And Mrs. Pugh's husband, who is gardener, and handy-man, and coachman when required." Lady Hannah's laugh jangled out over the capacious tray, containing the comprehensive assortment of viands representing what the invalid was wont to term his "brekker." "But I'm not to be deprived of my privilege, for all that. Do you suppose you young married creatures are the only wives who enjoy cosseting their husbands? There! it's out, and I ought to be ashamed of myself, I suppose, but I'm not. Is that collared brawn on the sideboard? Bingo has a devouring passion for collared brawn." She added a goodly slice to the contents of the tray. "I warn you, if you regard the billing and cooing of a middle-aged couple as indecent," she went on, "to look the other way a great deal while we're here. For I was for the first time seriously smitten with my husband when he rode out to meet me, returning from ignoble captivity in the tents of Brounckers, eighteen months ago. When I nursed him through enteric in the Hospital at Frostenberg—I won't disguise it—I fell in love! With a bag of bones, for he was nothing else: but genuine passion is indifferent to the personal appearance of the beloved object, though I hadn't suspected it before. The wound completed my conquest, and since then I'm madly jealous if another woman looks at him!... I see red—green would be a better colour—because he prefers to have his valet brush his hair. I don't know that I didn't reduce the holding capacity of this house by a storey—there's a pun for you!—so as to engineer my hated rival being left at home in Wilton Place. Is that lovely murrey-coloured stuff in the cut-glass jar quince marmalade? No! I won't pamper Bingo, if he is the idol of my soul. And please don't wait for me. He likes me to take off the tops of his eggs for him, and he usually eats three...."

Lady Hannah tripped off with her load, and deposited it before the idol, who was sitting up in a Japanese bed-jacket of wadded pink satin, left-handedly reading the Herion newspaper that comes out once a week, and is published at St. Tirlan's, twenty miles away.

"I've made a discovery," she announced. "No, don't look frightened. It's only that poor Biddy's belle trouvaille has got a heart. She's not the tinted Canova-nymph, the piece of correct inanity, I honestly believed her.... She idolised Biddy—small credit, for who could help it? She submitted to be adored by that poor foolish boy who's dead.... Now she's her black-avised Doctor's humble worshipper and slave."

"Can't understand a woman worshippin' a chap with a chin like the bows of an armoured Destroyer, and eyebrows like another man's moustaches," Bingo objected.

"Chin or no chin, eyebrows or not a hair, what does that count to a woman in love?" She placed the laden tray before him, and with a maternal air proceeded to tuck a napkin under his chin. He grumbled:

"There's no knowin' what will take the female fancy. But even if you haven't harked away on a wrong scent, slave's a dash too strong. Struck me they parted uncommon chilly and off-hand at Euston yesterday mornin', considerin' they've not been married much above a year! Do take this thing from round my neck! Makes me feel like Little Willie!"

Lady Hannah unpinned the napkin that framed the bulldog jowl, and said, patting the sandy-pink bullet-head:

"That's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in amatory affairs. No Eyes sees two people part, 'uncommon off-hand and chilly.'" She mimicked Bingo's tone. "Eyes sees that and something more! A man's coat-button dropped on the floor of a railway carriage, for instance, and a young woman who slyly picks it up—silly little gage d'amour—and kisses it when a considerate observer pretends not to be looking, and hides it away! Is that evidence, Major Mole?"

"By the Living Tinker!" he thundered, "I wouldn't have believed it of her!"

"Of course you wouldn't!" She rummaged in an open suit-case. "What necktie do you want to wear to-day?"

He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the coffee-cup:

"Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all alike when you've tied 'em!"

She beamed at what seemed to her a gallant speech.

"Sans compliment? You really mean it? And you won't miss Grindlay so frightfully, after all?"

He shook his head ambiguously.

"I shan't begin really to suffer for Grindlay—not till it comes to tubbin' with one fin."

"Mercy upon us!" She gasped in consternation. He said, controlling his features from wreathing into triumphant smiles:

"You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place, you know!"

Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and drooping eyelids. Blushes played hide-and-seek in the small cheeks that were usually pale.

"In—in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding his intolerable gaze.

"Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordinary, everyday affairs!" The man pursued his advantage pitilessly. "Didn't you regard it as essential that I should wash?"

She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.

"Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that decided me on marrying you was that you were invariably propre comme un sou neuf."

"I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying down under the lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, "that you would prefer a clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay at the Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in!"

The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing respectfully at sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious good-morning, dissembling the intense relief experienced at sight of his smug, clean-shaven countenance.

"Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made you comfortable. And now you have arrived to take responsibility off my hands," she announced, "I'll go and get some breakfast."

"Haven't you ... You're joking!" The tray shot from the bed into Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly assumed the perpendicular. "You don't mean to say that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging myself like—like a boa-constrictor?" he demanded furiously. "Why on earth are women such blessed——"

"—Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian shaft. "Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heartless, dull dolts of men!"

The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his reflections with a sigh.

"Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladyship to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!"

"O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, addressing his reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly assumed the office vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance on the scene:

"So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?"

"Blessed angel, you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"

"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."

"Concernin'——?"

"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."

"Well, what of her?"

She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.

"This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless, ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and other people into hot water." She made a little affected grimace that masked a genuine smart. "Not hot water only—boiling lava sometimes—fizzling vitriol——"

He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:

"Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts; his spots are in his skin! See?"

"Merci du compliment!" Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden bellow made her drop the comb.

"My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't swot at it any more; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once.... By the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!" he pleaded.

"Darling!—dearest!—you haven't—you've never!... The boot's on the other leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!" His strong left arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way, admitting:

"Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so—of nights in bed at Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?"

"There were people ready to tell you—years before we saw Gueldersdorp—that the one you'd got was as good as none...."

"Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their opinions!" She felt his great muscles swell as the big hand tightened on her waist. "Though, mind you, there have been times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other women——"

"Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win distinction as War Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and bloody bones"—she shook with a nervous giggle—"and all that sort of thing.... Would it please you to know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last quill—that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement of the coop?"

"You've said as much before!" he objected.

"But now I mean it! Put me to the test. Let the house in Wilton Place—we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if you think you won't be bored?"

He bellowed joyously!

"Me bored! With ten thousand acres arable and wood and moorland to farm and preserve and shoot over, two first-class packs meetin' within a fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo Association shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin' me with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieutenant! 'Bored'—I like that!"

"If you would like it, be it!" she flashed. "Trust me to back you up. I can and I will! I'll help you entertain the military authorities and their women, keep the Rolls, sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief Magistrate, and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to one man—and you shall be the man! Only"—she laughed hysterically, her face hidden against his big shoulder—"I don't quite know how far these things are compatible with my new role!"

"Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop." His big hand patted her almost paternally. "Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you suppose I'm such a pachydermatous ass that I can't understand that home is a make-believe to a real woman, when—when there isn't even one chicken to tuck under her wing! Worse luck for me and you!"

She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. Her black eyes were shining through the tears that rose and brimmed over and fell.

"If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make you happy?"

He cried out with a great oath:

"Yes, by G——!" and caught her to his leaping heart.



LXVIII

In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many interviews held with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch and dinner, learned much anent the difficulty of obtaining fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as regards the Satanic duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist butcher will substitute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still more about Saxham.

Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the Doctor's grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's worth of Master Owen, from the first time she set eyes on him in a white frock, with a sausage-roll curl and diamond-patterned socks. She had a venerable and spotty photograph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand, taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own pocket-money, to send to Janellan, who had nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And regularly had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said Janellan, until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain—mentioned by Janellan with the ringing sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement—had turned her and her old man out of the Plas "without as much as that!"—here Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth—in recognition of their forty years of faithful service.

But Master Owen, coming to his own again, "and 'deed an' 'deed, but the Plas ought to have been his from the beginning!" had sought out the old couple, living in decent poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in their old home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the points of a pig than any man in Herion—or in all Wales for the matter of that—well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never made a better man than Dr. Owen Saxham! What grand things they had said of him in the papers! No doubt the young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not got into print?

"I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said Lynette, smiling in the black-eyed, streaky-apple face "that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad to hear."

She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule but this morning she stooped and kissed the red-veined, wrinkled cheek within Janellan's white-quilled cap-border. Then, her household duties done, she pinned a rough, shady straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose chamois-leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were, perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the hall-rack, ran down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the spidery, red-rusted iron foot-bridge that spanned the railway-line, descended upon the farther side of the wood of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base of the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulating gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless line of white breakers that rose and fell a mile away.

She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-company; a new hope gave her strength. She drank in long draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant air, and as it filled her lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight in the beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy of life made music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her heart.

She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter of this sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that line of white frothing breakers washed the shores of the Mother's beloved green island, Emerald Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel spanned—then straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County, King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild mallard's flight; and there would be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers, the grey-green mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy valleys and wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castleclare rising from its mossed lawns studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne among the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron Harbour, with its Titanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun-brown islands bidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken by the voices of hidden waters roaring in their secret caves.

A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden eyes dreamed as she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed in a plain skirt of rough grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight waist belted with a silver-mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle of silver chatelaine appendages accompanying her steps.

And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned. It was as though the Mother were living, so enfolding and close was the sense of her presence to-day. God was in His Heaven, and the world, His footstool, bore the visible impress of His Feet. And it seemed to Lynette, who had learned to see the faces of Christ and of His Mother Mary through the lineaments of the earthly face that had first looked love upon herself in her terrible abandonment, that those Divine and glorious countenances looked down on her and smiled. And her chilled faith spread quivering wings, basking in their ineffable mild radiance as the little blue and tortoiseshell butterflies basked in the glorious sunshine that had followed the morning's storm.

The tangible presence seemed to move beside her, through the white powdery sand. Over the knotted grasses, between the tufts of poppies and the prickly little yellow roses that fringed the hollows, the garments of another seemed to sweep beside her own. The folds of a thin veil upborne on the elastic breeze fluttered beside her cheek, blew against her lips, bringing the rare delicate fragrance—the familiar perfume that clung to everything the Mother habitually wore and used and touched. She did not look round, or stretch out her hand. She walked along, drinking in blissfulness and companionship at every pore of her thirsty soul, joyfully realising that this would last; that by-and-by the great void of loneliness would not close in on her again.

Only the night before, upon the brink of the supreme discovery that the dead in Christ are not only living in Him, but for us also who are His, she had hesitated and doubted. Before the sunrise of this glorious day she had learned to doubt no more.

* * * * *

She had been restless and unhappy. Saxham had not written for a week. She bitterly missed the short, cold, kind letters in the clear, small, firm handwriting, that had reached her at intervals of three days, to be answered by her constrained and timid notes, hoping that he was well and not overworking, describing the place and her pleasure in it, without mention of her loneliness; giving details of Major Wrynche's progress towards recovery, and left-handed attempts at golf, winding up with messages from Lady Hannah and dutiful remembrances from Tafydd and Janellan, and signed, his affectionate wife, Lynette Saxham.

Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles seemed to their writer. To Saxham they were drops of rain upon the parching soil of his heart, the one good that life had for him in this final lap of the race. And yet he had ceased to write that they might come no more.

If he had known how his own letters to her were welcomed, how tenderly they were read and re-read, how sweetly kept and cherished.... But he did not know! He could only look ahead, and strain on to the nearing goal with the great, dim, mysterious curtain hanging beyond it, hearing the thudding of his wearied heart, and the whistling of those sharp breaths in his strained lungs, and the measured sound of his own footfalls bearing him on to the end, while night closed in on her, fevered and wakeful in her bed, thinking of him, praying for him, longing for the sight and sound of him. Sleep, when it came now, brought her dreams less crystal than of old. Hued with the fiery rose of opals some, because in these he loved her; and that shadowy woman, in whose existence she only half-believed, had no part in him at all. But on the night preceding the revelation she had not dreamed.

She awakened in the grey of dawn, when the thrushes were calling, and lay straight and still, listening to the glad bird-voices from the garden, her soft, fringed eyelids closed, her white breasts gently heaving, her small feet crossed, her slender, bare arms pillowing the little Greek head; a heavy plait of the silken wealth that crowned it drawn down on either side of the sweet, pale face and the pure throat, intensifying their virginal beauty. The dull smart of loneliness, the famished ache of loss, were gone altogether. She felt strangely peaceful and calm and glad. Then she knew she was not at Herion; she was not even in London.... She was back at the Convent, in the little whitewashed room with the stained deal furniture—the room with the pleasant outlook on the gardens that had been hers from the first. Surely it was past the rising hour? Ah, yes! but she had had a touch of fever. That was why she was lying here so quietly, with the Mother sitting by the bed.

There could be no doubt.... The light firm, pressure that she knew of old was upon her bosom, just above the beating of her heart.... That was always the Mother's way of waking you. She sat beside you, and looked at you, and touched you, and presently your eyes opened, that was all!... Thinking this, a streak of gold glimmered between Lynette's thick dusky lashes; her lips wore a smile of infinite content. She stole a glance, and there it was, the large, beautiful, lightly clenched hand. The loose sleeve of thin black serge flowed away from the strong, finely moulded wrist; the white starched guimpe showed snowy between the drooping folds of the nun's veil.... These familiar things Lynette drank in with a sense of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then—her eyes opened widely, and she knew.

She was looking into eyes that had seen the Beatific Vision—great grey eyes that were unfathomable lakes of heavenly tenderness and love divine. And the face that framed them was a radiant pale splendour, indescribable in its glorious beauty, unfathomable in its fulfilled peace. Her own eyes drank peace from them, deeply, insatiably, while the Herion thrushes sang their dewy matins, and the scent of mignonette and sweet-peas and early roses mingled with the smell of the sea, stole in at the open casement where the white blind swelled out like a breeze-filled sail.

How long Lynette lay there storing up content and rapture she did not know, or want to know. But at last the wonder of those eyes came nearer—nearer! She felt the dear pressure of the familiar lips upon her own. A fragrance enveloped her, an exquisite joy overbrimmed her, as a voice—the beloved, unforgotten voice of matchless music—spoke. It said:

"Love your husband as I loved Richard! Be to a child of his what I have been to you!"

* * * * *

Eyes and face and voice, white hand and flowing veil, were all gone then. Lynette sat up, sobbing for joy, and blindly holding out her arms, and the rising sun looked over the mountains eastward, and drew one hushing, golden finger over the lips of the cold, grey, whispering sea.



LXIX

A thin, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whiff of cinder-flavoured steam, heralded the Down Express as it plunged out of the cliff-tunnel, flashed across an intervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in the box on the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the points. And hearing the clanking bustle of the train's arrival in the station, Lynette reminded herself with a sigh of relief that her maid was packing, that she would presently make her excuses to Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, and that the midnight up-mail should take her home to Owen.

Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved, lost hand. But for this Heaven-sent light that had been cast upon her way, Lynette knew that she might have wandered on in doubt and darkness to the very end.

She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent, essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and led, and to love the guide.

Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet with the beating of celestial wings.

She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her, she said to herself that she would win him back again.

She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden, had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen companion at her side.

The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.

It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping mother—a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes. Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then, as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.

Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth—where had Lynette seen them before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it up and kissed it soundly.

"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are mother and nurse?"

"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows, and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of having no other engagement so absorbing.

Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen.... She ran up the steep side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon Saxham's heart so heavily.

No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry waves of the sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the hilly main street of Herion may be gained, went a white perambulator, canopied with white, and propelled by a nurse in starched white skirts and flying white bonnet-strings—a nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently reading a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella bobbed against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who carried the flaming object was young; that much was plain, for the fluttering heliotrope chiffons of her gown were held at a high, perhaps at an unnecessarily lofty, altitude above the powdery sand, and her plumply-filled and gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred with black, and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in evidence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared over the farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, in charging up the steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation underneath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of the suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell was void of the pearl.

Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, glimpsed the red umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, comprehended the horrible consternation of mistress and maid. She must signal to them—cry out.... Involuntarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it, standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow—a squat, blue dwarf with arms out of all proportion—flourished and gesticulated at her feet.



LXX

It is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the becoming shadow of a red umbrella, on the starched and rustling skirts of the agitated nurse, whose mouth is seen to be shaping sentences long before she can be heard panting:

"Did you call, 'm? Her ladyship thought you did, and might have found ... Oh, ma'am! have you seen a baby? We've lost ours!"

Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down into the hollow. The nurse, with a squawk of relief, leaves her perambulator bogged in the sand, flutters up the powdery rise like some large species of seagull, squawks again, and swoops to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby, perfectly contented until the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of her attendant appear over the edge of her Paradise, throws herself backwards, strikes out with kicking, dimpled legs, and sets up an indignant roar.

"There now—there! 'A was a pessus!" vociferates the owner of the streaming ribbons and the scarlet countenance. "And did she tumble out of her pram, the duck, and wicked Polly never see her? And thank Good Gracious, not a bruise on her blessed little body-woddy, nor nothing but the very tiddiest scratch!"

"Which is not your fault, Watkins, I am compelled to say it," pronounces the Red Umbrella, arriving breathless and decidedly indignant, on the scene. "The idea of a person of your class being so wrapped up in a rotten penny novel that you can't even keep your eye upon the darling entrusted to your charge is too perfectly shameful for words. Baby, don't cry," she continues, as the repentant Polly appears, bearing the retrieved treasure. "Come to mummy and kiss her, and tell her all about it, do!"

"I sa-t!" bellows Baby, now keenly alive to the pathos of the situation, and digging a sandy pink fist into either eye ...

"Don't, then, you obstinate little pig!" returns Red Umbrella, with maternal asperity. She looks up to the fair vision that stands on high amongst the poppies, and nods and smiles. "However I am to thank you!... Such a turn when we missed her!..." She utters these incoherences with a great deal of eye-play, pressing a small, plump, jewelled hand, with short, broad fingers, and squat, though elaborately rouged and polished, nails, upon the bountiful curve of a Parisian corsage. "My heart did a double flip-flap ... hasn't done thumping yet. Am I pale still, Watkins?" She appeals to the recreant Watkins, who is busily repacking Baby in her luxurious perambulator. "I felt to go as white as chalk!"

"Perfect gassly, my lady!" agrees Watkins, and it occurs to Lynette that the process of blanching must, taking into consideration the artificial blushes that bloom so thickly upon the pretty, piquante face under the red umbrella, have been attended with some difficulty.

Everything is round in the coquettish face, shaded by a hat that is an expensive triumph of Parisian millinery, trimmed with a whole branch of wistaria in bloom. The big brown eyes are round, so is the cherry-stained mouth, so is the pert, button nose. The thick, dark eyebrows are like inky half-moons, in the middle of the little round chin a circular dimple is cunningly set. Round, pinky-olive shoulders and rounded arms gleam temptingly through the bodice of heliotrope chiffon. Other roundnesses, artfully exaggerated by the Parisian modiste, are liberally suggested, as Red Umbrella gathers her frothy draperies about her hips, lifting her multitudinous frills to reveal black and scarlet openwork silk stockings, bedecking her plump legs and tiny feet, whose high-heeled silver-buckled shoes are sinking in the hot, white, powdery sand.

"Please don't go on! I haven't half thanked you," she pleads, still pressing the podgy little bejewelled paw upon the heaving corsage. Then she sinks, with an air of graceful languor, down upon a long, prostrate monolith of granite, that is thickly crusted with velvety orange lichen and grey-green moss, starred with infinitesimal yellow flowers. And Lynette, habitually courteous and rather amused, and not at all unwilling to know a little more of the affected, slangy, overdressed little woman, sits down upon the other end of the sprawling stone column, and says, smiling at Baby, who is clutching at a hovering butterfly with her eager, dimpled hands:

"Of course, it was a terrible shock to you when you missed her. She is such a darling! Aren't you, Baby?"

Baby, her long, grey-green eyes melting and gleaming dangerously, her golden head tilted coquettishly, and a gay, provoking laugh on the bold red mouth, makes another snatch, captures the hovering blue butterfly, opens the rosy hand, and with a wry face of disgust, drops the crushed morsel over the edge of the perambulator. The superb, unconscious cruelty of the act gives Lynette a little pang even as she goes on:

"She was not in the least shy. I think we should soon be very great friends. May her nurse bring her to see me sometimes? Most babies love flowers, and there is a garden full of them where I am staying. Do you live here?"

"Live here? Gracious, no!" Red Umbrella opens the round, brown eyes that Baby's are so unlike in shape and expression, and shrugs her pretty shoulders as high as the big ruby buttons that blaze in her pretty ears. "Me and Baby are only visiting—stopping with her nurse and my two maids for a change at the Herion Arms—me having been recommended sea-air by the doctors for tonsils in the throat. The house is advertised as an up-to-date hotel in the ABC Railway Guide, but diggings more wretched I never struck, and you do fetch up in some queer places on tour in the Provinces, let alone the States," says Red Umbrella, tossing the wistaria-wreathed hat. "Which may be a surprise to people who think it must be nothing but jam for those ladies and gentlemen that have made their mark in the Profession."

"Yes?"

Lynette's golden eyes smile back into the laughing brown ones with pleasant friendliness, combined with an irritating lack of comprehension. And Red Umbrella, who derives a considerable income from percentages upon the sale of her photographs, and is conscious that her celebrated features are figuring upon several of the postcards that hang up for sale in the window of the only stationer in Herion, is a little nettled.

"I refer to the stage, of course." She fingers a long neck-chain of sapphires, and tinkles her innumerable bangles with their load of jingling charms. "But perhaps you're not a Londoner? Or you don't patronise the theatre?"

"Oh yes. We have a house in Harley Street. And I am very fond of the Opera," says Lynette, smiling still, "and of seeing plays too; and I often go to the theatre with Lord and Lady Castleclare, or Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, when my husband is too much engaged to take me. One of the last pieces we saw before we left town was 'The Chiffon Girl' at The Variety," she adds.

"Indeed! And how did you like 'The Chiffon Girl'?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with a gracious and encouraging smile. Unconscious tribute rendered to one's beauty and one's genius is ever well worth the having. And the editor of the Keyhole, a certain weekly journal of caterings for the curious, will gladly publish any little anecdote which will serve the dual purpose of amusing his readers and keeping the name of Miss Lessie Lavigne before the public eye. "How did you enjoy the performance of the lady who played the part?"

Lynette ponders, and her fine brows knit. Vexed and indignant, Red Umbrella, scanning the thoughtful face, admits its youth, its high-breeding, its delicate, chiselled beauty, and the slender grace of the supple figure in the grey-blue serge skirt and white silk blouse; nor is she slow to appreciate the value of the diamond keeper on the slight, fine, ungloved hand that rests upon the sun-hot moss between them.

"I think I felt rather sorry for her," says the soft cultured voice with the exquisite, precise inflections. The golden eyes look dreamily out over the undulating sand-dunes beyond the crisp line of foam to the silken shimmer of the smoothing water. The little wind has fallen. It is very still. The nurse, sitting on a hillock of bents in dutiful nearness to the perambulator, has taken out her paper-covered volume, and is deep in a story of blood and woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, dozes among her white embroidered pillows, undisturbed by Red Umbrella's shrill exclamation:

"Sorry for her! Why on earth should you be?"

The shriek startles Lynette. She brings back her grave eyes from the distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-brown waves at her fair temples.

"She—she had on so few clothes!" she says. And there is a profound silence, broken by Lessie's saying with icy dignity:

"If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on, I expect that ought to do for you!"

"I—don't quite understand."

Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the marvellous change that has been wrought in the little lady who sits beside her.

"I am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an angry toss of the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria-trimmed hat. "At least, that is the name I am known by in the profession."

"I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. "I did not recognise you. I am afraid you must think me rather rude!"

"Oh, pray don't mention it!" cries the owner of the red umbrella. "Rude?—not in the least!"

Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the outrage the little lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne, the original exponent of the role of "The Chiffon Girl," the idol of the pit and gallery, Queen regnant over the hearts beating behind the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls, has lived to hear herself pitied—not envied, but commiserated—for the scantiness of the costume in which it is alike her privilege and her joy to trill and caper seven times in the week before her patrons and adorers. Small wonder that she feels her carefully-manicured nails elongating with the desire to scratch and rend.

Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for nothing is she the widow of an English nobleman. With all the hereditary dignities of the Foltlebarres she will arm herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to the level of the dust. At the thought of the humiliation it is in her power to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a complete double row of beautifully stopped teeth. And she says, as she fumbles in a chatelaine bag of golden links, studded with turquoises, and with elaborately ostentatious dignity produces therefrom a card-case, as precious as regards material, and emblazoned with a monogram and coronet, enriched with diamonds and pearls:

"I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbourhood? May I know who I have the a—pleasure of being indebted to for finding my daughter to-day?"

"I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house up there on the cliff. 'Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains Lynette, a little nervously, as her reluctant eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who owns the legal right to bear Beauvayse's name. The encounter is distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute sensation of antagonism and dislike. "The house belongs to my husband, and this is my first visit to Herion," she adds hurriedly, "because we—my husband and I—have not been very long married. But I like the place. And the house is charming, and there is a hall that was once the chapel, when it was a Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is"—the wild-rose colour deepens on the lovely face—"if my husband agrees? To have it so restored would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I was brought up in a Convent, though not in England."

Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc Bay and the dotted line of white spots that indicate the town of St. Tudwalls at the base of the green promontory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this little overdressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past with the Mother.

"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border—in a little village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld."

"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to know what it means."

Lynette's soft voice answers:

"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that is all!"