"How jolly!"

"Let's go there?"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, just you and I. I'm fed up with everything. We could have a boatman to help sail and steer."

He spoke lightly and laughingly, and without much enthusiasm and as though he were talking to some one of his own sex, and Phyl, not knowing how to take him, said nothing.

He went on, his tone growing warmer.

"I'm not joking, I'm dead sick of Grangersons and Charleston, and I reckon you are too—aren't you?"

"No."

"You may think so, but you are, all the same, without knowing it."

"I think you are talking nonsense," said Phyl hurriedly, fighting against a deadly sort of paralysis of mind such as one may suppose comes upon the mind of a bird under the spell of a serpent.

"No one could be kinder than Miss Pinckney, and so no one could be happier than I am. I love Vernons."

"All the same," said Silas, "you are not really alive there. It's the life of a cabbage, must be, there's only you and Maria and—Pinckney. Maria is a decent old sort but she's only a woman, and as for Pinckney—he doesn't care for you."

This statement suddenly brought Phyl to herself. It went through her like a knife. She had ceased to think of Richard Pinckney in any way but as a friend. At one time, during the first couple of days at Vernons, her heart had moved mysteriously towards him; the way he had connected himself through Prue's message with the love story of Juliet had drawn her towards him, but that spell had snapped; she was conscious only of friendliness towards Richard Pinckney. Why, then, this sudden pain caused by Silas's words?

"How do you know?" she flashed out. "What right have you to dare—" She stopped.

The blaze of her anger seemed to Silas evidence that she cared for Pinckney.

"You're in love with him," said he, flying out. The bald and brutal statement took Phyl's breath from her. She turned on him, saw the anger in his face, and then—turned away.

His state of mind condoned his words. To a woman a blow received from the passion she has roused is a rude sort of compliment, unlike other compliments it is absolutely honest.

"I am in love with no one," said she; "you have no right to say such things—no right at all—they are insulting."

A gull, white as snow, came flitting by and wheeled out away over the harbour; as her eyes followed it he stood looking at her, his anger gone, but his mind only half convinced by her feeble words.

"I didn't mean to insult you," he said; "don't let us quarrel. When I'm in a temper I don't know what I say or do—that's the truth. I want to have you all for myself, have ever since the first moment I saw you over there at Grangersons."

"Don't," said Phyl. "I can't listen to you if you talk like that—Please don't."

"Very well," said Silas.

The quick change that was one of his characteristics showed itself in his altered voice. His was a mind that seemed always in ambush, darting out on predatory expeditions and then vanishing back into obscurity.

They turned away from the sea front and began to retrace their steps, silently at first, and then little by little falling into ordinary conversation again as though nothing had happened.

Silas knew every corner of Charleston, and the history of every corner, and when he chose he could make his knowledge interesting. In this mood he was a pleasant companion, and Phyl, her recent experience almost forgotten, let herself be led and instructed, not knowing that this armistice was the equivalent of a defeat.

She had already drawn much closer to him in mind, this companionship and quiet conversation was a more sure and deadly thing than any kisses or wild words. It would linger in her mind warm and quietly. Put in a woman's mind a pleasant recollection of yourself and you have established a force whose activity may seem small, but is in reality great, because of its permanency.

They did not take a direct line in the direction of Vernons, and so presently found themselves in front of St. Michael's. The gate of the cemetery was open and they wandered in.

The place was deserted, save by the birds, and the air perfumed by all manner of Southern growing things. Sun, shadow, silence, and that strange peace which hangs over the homes of the dead, all were here, ringed in by the old walls and the faint murmur of the living city beyond.

They walked along the paths, looking at the tombstones, and pausing to read the inscriptions, Phyl gradually entering into that state of mind wherein reality and material things fall out of perspective. The fragrant elusive poetry of death, which can speak in the songs of birds and the scent of flowers in the sunshine and the shade of trees more clearly than in the voice of man, was speaking to her now.

All these people here lying, all these names here inscribed, all these were the representatives of days once bright and now forgotten, love once sweet and now unknown.

Then, as though something had led or betrayed her to the place, she paused where the graves lay half shadowed by a magnolia, she read the nearest inscription with a little catch of her breath. Then the further one. They were the graves of Juliet Mascarene and Rupert Pinckney, the dead lovers who had passed from the world almost together, whose bodies lay side by side in the cold bed of earth.

In a moment the spell of the little arbour was around her again, in a moment the pregnant first impression of Vernons had re-seized her, fresh as though the commonplace touch of everyday life had never spoiled it.

It was as though the spirit of Juliet and the spirit of the old house were saying to her "Have you forgotten us?"

Tears welled to her eyes. Silas standing beside her was saying something, she did not know what. She scarcely heard him.

Misinterpreting her silence, unconscious as an animal of her state of mind and the direction of her thoughts, the man at her side moved towards her slightly, seemed to hesitate, and then, suddenly clasping her by the waist kissed her upon the side of the neck.

Phyl straightened like a bow when the string is released. Then she struck him, struck him open handed in the face, so that the sound of the blow might have been heard beyond the wall.

His face blanched so that the mark on it showed up, he took a step back. For a moment Phyl thought he was going to spring upon her. Then he mastered himself, but if murder ever showed itself upon the countenance of man it showed itself in that half second on the countenance of Silas Grangerson.

"You'll be sorry for that," said he.

"Don't speak to me," said Phyl. "You are horrible—bad—wicked—I will tell Richard Pinckney."

"Do," said Silas. "Tell him also I'll be even with him yet. You're in love with him, that's what's the matter with you—well, wait."

He turned on his heel and walked off. He did not look back once. As he vanished from sight Phyl clasped her hands together.

It was as though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that inhabited his mind.

She was not thinking of herself, she was thinking of Richard Pinckney. She felt that she had been the unconscious means of releasing against him an evil force. A force that might injure or destroy him.



CHAPTER VII

She came out of the cemetery. There was no sign of Silas in the street nor on the front of the church.

Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble, things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned.

She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a treasure house beyond a man's description, perhaps even beyond his true appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that corrupts.

A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of its brick and mortar; to keep it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive.

She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she had to tell.

Miss Pinckney carefully put the sheet she was examining on one side, opened the parcel and looked at the wool.

"I met Silas Grangerson," said Phyl as the other was examining the purchase with head turned on one side, holding it now in this light, now in that.

"Silas Grangerson! Why, where on earth has he sprung from?" asked Miss Pinckney in a voice of surprise.

"I don't know, but I met him in the street and we walked as far as the Battery and—and—"

She hesitated for a moment, then it all came out. To no one but Maria Pinckney could she have told that story.

"Well, of all the astounding creatures," said Miss Pinckney at last. "Did he ask you to marry him?"

"No."

"Just to run away with him—kissed you."

"He kissed me at Grangersons."

"At Grangersons. When?"

"That night. I went into the garden and he came out from amongst some bushes."

"Umph— It's the family disease— Well, if I get my fingers in his hair I promise to cure him. He wants curing. He'll just apologise, and that before he's an hour older. Where's he staying?"

"No, no," said Phyl, "you mustn't ever say I told you. I don't mind. I would have said nothing only for Mr. Pinckney."

"You mean Richard?"

"Yes."

"What has he to do with it?"

Phyl did not hesitate nor turn her head away, though her cheeks were burning.

"Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it—and I want you to warn him to be careful—without telling him, of course, what I have said."

Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the certainty that those two cared for one another.

Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's track. She smelt it.

"Phyl," said she, "do you care for Richard?"

The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the girl's mind.

"No," said she. "At least— Oh, I don't know how to explain it—I care for everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story that I love—Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He's part of it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn't tell you, but when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him, when—that happened. It was just as though some one had struck her and him. I can't explain exactly."

"Strange," said Miss Pinckney.

She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had been examining. Then she said:

"I'll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that there is any danger—but it is just as well to warn him."

Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room. She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm had always one sure refuge in trouble—books.

Books! Have we ever properly recognised the mystery and magic that lies in that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never know the sorrows of "real people"—and their joys.

Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo.

History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from others.

It had to do with Vernons.



CHAPTER VIII

After luncheon that day Phyl, having nothing better to do, went up to her room and resumed her book.

Richard Pinckney had not come in to luncheon, he rarely returned home for the meal, yet all the same, his absence made her uneasy. Suppose Silas Grangerson had met him—suppose they had fought? She called to recollection Silas's face just after she had struck him, the insane malevolence in it, the ugliness that had suddenly destroyed his good looks. Silas was capable of anything, he would never forgive that blow and he would try to return it, of that she felt certain. He could not avenge himself on her but he could on Richard. He imagined that she cared for Richard Pinckney. Did she? The question came to her again in Miss Pinckney's voice—she did not even try to answer it. As though it irritated her, she tossed the book she was holding in her hand to the floor and lay with her eyes fixed on the lace window curtains that were moving slightly to the almost imperceptible stirring of the air from outside.

Beyond the curtains lay the golden afternoon. Sometimes a bird shadow, the loveliest thing in shadow-land, would cross the curtains, sometimes a note of song or the sound of a bird's flight from tree to tree would tell that there was a garden down below. The street beyond the garden and the city beyond the street could be heard, but were little more evident to the senses than those things in a picture which we guess but cannot see.

Phyl, allowing her mind to be led by these faint and fugitive sounds, fell into a reverie. Then she fell asleep and straight way began to dream.

She dreamed that Miss Pinckney was in the room moving about dusting things, a duster in one hand, an open letter in the other. There was troublous news of some sort in the letter, but what it was Miss Pinckney would not say. Then the room turned into the piazza, where Juliet Mascarene was standing with her hands on the rail, looking down on the garden.

She seemed to know Juliet quite well and was not a bit surprised to see her there; she touched her but she did not turn. Phyl slipped her arm round Juliet's waist and stood with her looking at the garden, and as they stood thus the most curious dream feeling came upon her, a feeling of duality, Juliet was herself, she was Juliet. Then as this feeling died away Juliet vanished and she was standing alone on the piazza.

Then she half woke, falling asleep again to be awakened fully by a sound.

A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of guns.

She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat up every nerve and muscle tense, and her mind filled with a vague dread, it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook.

She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the paths. A white butterfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to the garden beyond.

These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown under by a wind.

She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she found herself in the street.

Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there was a crowd.

The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved.

She ran, and as she drew close to the striving mass of people she saw men bearing stretchers.

They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on the right.

Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another.

"Young Pinckney's killed."

The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself lying on the cane couch in her room.

She sat up.

The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the street.

She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then.

For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square. She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the sun.

The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been reality. She had seen, touched, heard.

Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight of it was like a crystallising thread for thought.

She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war.

She went back into the room and took her seat on the couch and held her head between her hands. She recalled the terror that told her that everything she loved was in danger. When the man had cried out that young Pinckney was killed, it was the thought of the death of Richard Pinckney that struck her into unconsciousness. Yet she knew that what she had seen was the day of the death of Rupert Pinckney, that one of those figures carried on the stretchers was his figure, that her grief was for him.

Had she then experienced what Juliet once experienced, seen what she saw, suffered what she suffered?

Was she Juliet?

The thought had approached her vaguely before this, so vaguely and so stealthily that she had not really perceived it. It stood before her now frankly in the full light of her mind.

Was she Juliet, and was Richard Rupert Pinckney? She recalled that evening in Ireland when she had heard his voice for the first time, and the thrill of recognition that had passed through her, how, at the Druids' Altar that night she had heard her name called by his voice, the feeling in Dublin that something was drawing her towards America. Her feelings when she had first entered Meeting Street and the garden of Vernons, Miss Pinckney's surprise at her likeness to Juliet. Prue's recognition of her, the finding of those letters, the finding of the little arbour—any one of these things meant little in itself, taken all together they meant a great deal—and then this last experience.

Her mind like a bird caught in a trap made frantic efforts to escape from the bars placed around it by conclusion; the idea seemed hateful, monstrous, viewed as reality. Fateful too, for that feeling of terror in the vision had all the significance of a warning.

Then as she sat fighting against the unnatural, her imaginative and superstitious mind trembling at that which seemed beyond imagination, a miracle happened.

The thought of danger to Richard Pinckney brought it about. All at once fear vanished, the fantastic clouds surrounding her broke, faded, passing, showing the blue sky, and Truth stood before her in the form of Love.

It was as though the vision had brought it to her wrapped up in that terror she had felt for him. In a moment the fantasy of Juliet became as nothing beside the reality. If it were a thousand times true that she had once been Juliet what did it matter? She had loved Richard Pinckney always, so it seemed to her, and nothing at all mattered beside the recognition of that fact.

Perfect love casteth out fear, even fear of the supernatural, even fear of Fate.

* * * * *

"Richard," said Miss Pinckney that night, finding herself alone with him, "that Silas Grangerson is in town and I want you to beware of him."

"Silas," said he, "why I saw him at the club, he's gone back home by this, I expect, at least he said he was going back to-night. Why should I beware of him?"

"He's such an irresponsible creature," she replied. "I'm going to tell you something, and mind, what I'm going to tell you is a secret you mustn't breathe to any one: he's in love with Phyl."

"Silas?"

"Yes. I knew it wouldn't be long before some one was after her. She's the prettiest girl in Charleston, and she's different from the others somehow."

The cunning of the woman held her from praise of Phyl's goodness and mental qualities, or any over praise of the goods she was bringing to his attention.

"Has he spoken to her about it?" asked he.

"I'm sure to goodness I don't know what I'm about telling you a thing that was told to me in confidence," said the other. "Well, you promise never to say a word to Phyl or to any one else if I tell you."

"I promise."

"Well, he's—he's kissed her."

Richard Pinckney leaned forward in his chair. He seemed very much disturbed in his mind.

"Does she care for him?"

"I don't believe she does—yet. They always begin like that; girls don't know their minds till all of a sudden they find some man who does."

"Well, let's hope she never cares for Silas Grangerson," said he rising from his chair. "You know what he is."

He left the room and went out on the piazza where the girl was sitting. He sat down beside her and they fell into talk.

Richard Pinckney's mind was disturbed.

Only the day before he had proposed to Frances Rhett and had been accepted. No one knew anything of the engagement; they had decided to say nothing about it for a while, but just keep it to themselves. The trouble with Pinckney was that Frances had, so to say, put the words of the proposal into his mouth. Frances had flirted with every man in Charleston; out of them all she had chosen Pinckney as a permanent attache, not because she was in love with him but because he pleased her best. She matched him against the others, as a woman matches silk.

Pinckney had allowed himself to be led along; there is nothing easier than to be led along by a pretty woman. When the trap had closed on him he recognised the fact without resenting it. He was no longer a free man.

Phyl had told him this without speaking. For some time past he had been admiring her, and yesterday on returning in chains from Calhoun Street, Phyl picking roses in the garden seemed to him the prettiest picture he had seen for a long time, but it did not give him pleasure; it stirred the first vague uneasy recognition that his chains had wrought. He had no right to look at any girl but Frances—and he had been looking at her for a year without the picture stirring any wild enthusiasm in his mind.

Miss Pinckney's revelation as to Silas had come to him as a blow. He could not tell what had hit him or exactly where he had been hit. What did it matter to him if a dozen men were in love with Phyl? What right had he to feel injured? None, yet he felt injured all the same.

As he sat by her now in the lamp-lit piazza, the thought that would not leave his mind was the thought that Silas had kissed her.

Behind the thought was the feeling of the boy who sees the other boy going off with the ripest and rosiest apple.

And Phyl was charming to-night. Something seemed to have happened to her, increasing the power of her personality, her voice seemed ever so slightly changed, her manner was different.

This was a woman, distinct from the girl of yesterday, as the full blown from the half blown flower.

They talked of trifles for a while, and then he remembered something that he ought to have mentioned before. The Rhetts were giving a dance and they had sent an invitation to Phyl as well as Miss Pinckney.

"It will be here by the morning post, I expect," said he. "You'd like to go, wouldn't you?"

Phyl hesitated for a moment. "Is that—I mean is that young lady Miss Frances Rhett—the one who called here?"

"Yes," cut in Pinckney, "those are the people. You'll come, won't you?"

"Is Miss Pinckney going?"

"She—of course she's going, she goes to everything, and old Mrs. Rhett is anxious to meet you."

"It is very kind of them," said Phyl. "Yes, I'll come." But she spoke without enthusiasm, and it seemed to him that a chill had come over her.

Did she know of his entanglement with Frances Rhett? And could it be—

He put the question aside. He had no right to indulge in any fancies at all about Phyl as regarded himself.

Then Miss Pinckney came out on the piazza and Phyl rose to go into the house.



CHAPTER IX

When Silas Grangerson left the cemetery of St. Michael's he walked for half a mile without knowing or caring in what direction he was going.

Phyl had done more than slap his face. She had slapped his pride, his assurance of himself, and his desire for her all at the same time.

Silas rarely bothered about girls, yet he knew that he had the power to fascinate any woman once he put his mind to the work. He had not tried his powers of fascination on Phyl. It was the other way about. Phyl absolutely unconsciously had used her fascination upon him.

Something in her, recognised by him on their first meeting in the stable yard, had put away the barrier of sex. He had talked to her as if she had been a boy. Sitting on the seat beside her whilst the Colonel had been prosing over politics and tobacco, the prompting came to Silas to pinch her finger just for fun; when he had put his hands over her eyes that night it was in obedience to the same prompting, but at the moment of parting from her, a desire quite new had overmastered him.

He had kissed a good many girls, but never in his life had he kissed a girl as he kissed Phyl.

Something cynical in his feelings for the other sex had always left him somewhat cold, but Phyl was different from the others, she had in some way struck straight at his real being.

When he left her that night at Grangersons he was almost as disturbed as she.

He scarcely slept. He was out at dawn and on his return after she had left he sat down and wrote the letter which Phyl received next morning.

Silas was in love for the first time in his life, but love with Silas was a thing apart from the love of ordinary men.

There was no worship of the object; the something that crystallises out in the form of love-letters, verses, bouquets, and candy was not there. He wanted Phyl.

He had no more idea of marriage than the great god Pan. If she had consented he would have taken her off on that yawl of his imagination round the world or down to Florida, without thought of the morrow or the convenances, or Society; but please do not imagine this rather primitive gentleman a chartered libertine. He would have married her as soon as not, but he had neither the genius nor the inclination for the courtship that leads by slow degrees up to the question, "Will you marry me?"

He wanted her at once.

As he walked along now with the devil awake in his heart, he felt no anger towards Phyl; all his rage was against Pinckney; he had never liked Pinckney, he more than suspected that Phyl cared for him and he wanted some one to hate badly.

He had walked himself into a reasonable state of mind when he found himself outside the Queen City Club. He went in and one of the first men he met was Pinckney.

So well did he hold himself in hand that Pinckney suspected nothing of his feelings. Silas was far too good a sportsman to shout at the edge of the wood, too much of a gentleman to desire a brawl in public. He was going to knife Pinckney, he was also going to capture Phyl, but the knifing of Pinckney was the main objective and that required time and thought. He did not desire the blood of the gentleman; he wanted his pride and amour propre. He wanted to hit him on the raw, but he did not know yet where, exactly, the raw was nor how to hit it. Time would tell him.

He was specially civil to his intended victim, and he went off home that evening plotting all the way, but arriving at nothing. He was trying to make bricks without straw. Pinckney did not drink, nor did he gamble, and he was far too good a business man to be had in that way. However, all things come to him who waits, and next morning's post brought him a ray of light in the midst of his darkness.

It brought him an invitation to the Rhetts' dance on the following Wednesday; nearly a week to wait, but, still, something to wait for.

"What are you thinking about, Silas?" asked old Seth Grangerson as they sat at breakfast.

"I'm thinking of a new rabbit trap, suh," responded the son.

The rabbit trap seemed to give him a good deal of food for thought during the week that followed; food that made him hilarious and gloomy by turns, restless also.

Had he known it, Phyl away at Charleston, was equally restless. She no longer thought of Silas. She had dismissed him from her mind, she no longer feared him as a possible source of danger to the man she loved. Love had her entirely in his possession to torture as he pleased. She knew only one danger, the danger that Richard Pinckney did not care in the least for her, and as day followed day that danger grew more defined and concrete. Richard had taken to avoiding her, she became aware of that.

She fancied that she displeased him.

If she had only known!



CHAPTER X

Silas Grangerson came to town on the Wednesday, driving in and reaching the Charleston Hotel about five o'clock in the afternoon.

The Grangersons scarcely ever used the railway. Silas, often as he had been in Charleston, had never put foot in a street car; even a hired conveyance was against the prejudices of these gentlemen.

This antagonism towards public means of locomotion was not in the least the outcome of snobbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a seat in a stuffy railway car at so much a mile, to grab a ticket and squeeze into a tram car, to drive in a cab drawn by an indifferent horse would have been hateful to these people; it was scarcely less so to their descendants.

So Silas came to Charleston driving a pair of absolutely matched chestnuts, a coloured manservant in the Grangerson livery in attendance.

After dinner he strolled into the bar of the hotel, met some friends, made some bets on the forthcoming races and at eight o'clock retired upstairs to dress.

He was one of the first of the guests to arrive.

The Rhetts' house in Legare Street was about the same size as Vernons and equally old, but it had not the same charm, the garden was much larger than that at Vernons, but it had not the same touch of the past. Houses, like people, have personalities and the house of the Rhetts had a telephone without resenting the intruder, electric everythings, even to an elevator, modern cookers, modern stoves, everything in a modern way to save labour and make life easy, and all so cunningly and craftily done that the air of antiquity was supposed not to be disturbed.

Illusion! Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked—everywhere was evident the use of yesterday as a veneer of to-day.

However that may be, the old house was gay enough to-night with flowers and lights, and Silas, looking better perhaps than he had ever looked in his life, found himself talking to Frances Rhett with an animation that surprised himself.

Frances had never had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination. This aloofness coupled with his good looks had set him apart from others.

But to-night he was quite a different being; to-night, in some mysterious way, he managed to convey the impression, pleasing enough, that he had come to see her and her alone.

As they stood together for a moment, he led the talk into Charleston channels, asking about this person and that till the folk at Vernons came on the tapis.

"Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the girl who is staying there?" asked Silas.

Frances smiled.

"I don't think so," she replied. "Who told you?"

"Upon my word I forget," said he, "but I judged mostly by my own eyes—they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last."

New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving them. Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a snatch of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he.

The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom, Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of his fiancee whirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson.

Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie, produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard. They had come with her, but it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come.

So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by the public.

A debutante fails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous success of Phyl was a record in successes.

And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance. The Inquisition had its torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and the torments of Frances Rhett were acute. Not that she was troubling much about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was passionately in love with herself. She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that prestige fades, that the position of principal girl in any society is like the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a cue—precarious. She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned.

In a moment. For no jeweller of Amsterdam ever had an eye for the quality of diamonds surer than the eye of Frances Rhett for the quality of other women's beauty. At the first glance to-night, she saw what others saw, though more clearly than they, that it was the touch of the past that gave Phyl her cachet, a something indefinable from yesterday, the lack of which made the other girls, by contrast, seem cheap.

Never could she have imagined that the "red-headed girl at Vernons" could gain so much from setting, a setting due to the instinct as well as the taste of "that old Maria Pinckney."

She had always laughed at Maria, as young people sometimes will at the old.

When Richard came up to her a little later on, he found himself coldly received; she had no dances for him except a few at the bottom of the programme.

"You shouldn't have been late," said she.

"Well," he said, "it was not my fault. You know what Aunt Maria is, she kept us ten minutes after the carriage was round, and then Phyl wasn't ready."

"She looks ready enough now," said the other, looking at Phyl and the cluster of young men around her. "What delayed her? Was she dyeing her head? It doesn't look quite so loud as when I saw her last."

"Her head's all right," replied Pinckney, irritated by the manner of the other, "inside and out, and one can't say the same for every one."

Frances looked at him.

"Do you know what Silas Grangerson asked me to-night?" she said.

"No."

"He asked me were you engaged to her."

"Phyl?"

"Miss Berknowles. I don't know her well enough to call her Phyl."

"He asked you that?"

"Yes, said every one was talking of it, and the last time he saw you together you looked like an engaged couple the way you were carrying on."

"But he has never seen us together," cried the outraged Pinckney; "that was a pure lie."

"I expect he saw you when you didn't see him; anyhow, that's the impression people have got, and it's not very pleasant for me."

Richard Pinckney choked back his anger. He fell to thinking where Silas could have seen them together.

"I don't know whether he saw us or not," said he, "but I am certain of one thing; he never saw us 'carrying on' as you call it; anyhow, I'll have a personal explanation from Silas to-morrow."

"Please don't imagine that I object to your flirting with any one you like," said Frances with exasperating calm. "If you have a taste for that sort of thing it is your own business."

Pinckney flushed.

"I don't know if you want to quarrel with me," said he, "if you do, say so at once."

"Not a bit," she replied, "you know I never quarrel with any one, it's bad form for one thing and it is waste of energy for another."

A man came up to claim her for the next dance and she went off with him, leaving Pinckney upset and astonished at her manner and conduct.

It was their first quarrel, the first result of their engagement. Frances had seemed all laziness and honey up to this; like many another woman she began to show her real nature now that Pinckney was secured.

But it was not an ordinary lovers' quarrel; her anger had less to do with Richard Pinckney than with Phyl. Her hatred of Phyl, big as a baobab tree, covered with its shadow Vernons, Miss Pinckney, and Richard.

He was part of the business of her dethronement.

Richard wandered off to where Maria Pinckney was seated watching the dancers.

"Why aren't you dancing?" asked she.

"Oh, I don't know," he replied. "I'm not keen on it and there are loads of men."

Miss Pinckney had watched him talking to Frances Rhett and she had drawn her own deductions, but she said nothing. He sat down beside her. He had been wanting to tell her of his engagement for a long time past, but had put it off and put it off, waiting for the psychological moment. Maria Pinckney was a very difficult person to fit into a psychological moment.

"I want to tell you something," said he. "I'm engaged to Frances Rhett."

"Engaged to be married to her?"

"Yes."

Miss Pinckney was dumb.

What she had always dreaded had come to pass, then.

"You don't congratulate me?"

"No," she replied. "I don't."

Then, all of a sudden, she turned on him.

"Congratulate you! If I saw you drowning in the harbour, would you expect me to stand at the Battery waving my hand to you and congratulating you? No, I don't congratulate you. You had the chance of being happy with the most beautiful girl in the world, and the best, and you've thrown it away to pick up with that woman. Phyl would have married you, I know it, she would have made you happy, I know it, for I know her and I know you. Now it's all spoiled."

He rose to his feet. It was the first time in his life that he had seen Maria Pinckney really put out.

"I'll talk to you again about it," said he. Then he moved away.

He had the pleasure of watching Frances dancing the next waltz with Silas Grangerson, and Silas had the pleasure of watching him as he stood talking to one of the elderly ladies and looking on.

Silas's rabbit trap was in reality a very simple affair, it was a plan to pick a quarrel with Richard through Frances, if possible; to make the imperturbable Pinckney angry, knowing well how easily an angry man can be induced to make a fool of himself. To keep cool and let Richard do the shouting.

Unfortunately for Silas, the sight of Phyl in all her beauty had raised his temperature far above the point of coolness. There were moments when he was dancing, when he could have flung Frances aside, torn Phyl from the arms of her partner and made off with her through the open window.

This dance was a deadly business for him. It was the one thing needed to cap and complete the strange fascination this girl exercised upon his mind, his imagination, his body. It was only now that he realised that nothing else at all mattered in the world, it was only now that he determined to have her or die.

Silas was of the type that kills under passion, the type that, unable to have, destroys.

Preparing a trap for another, he himself had walked into a trap constructed by the devil, stronger than steel.

Yet he never once approached or tried to speak to Phyl. He fed on her at a distance. Fleeting glimpses of the curves of her figure, the Titian red of her hair, the face that to-night might have turned a saint from his vows, were snatched by him and devoured. He would not have danced with her if he could. To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with kisses. Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she danced. All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows. He and Phyl were the only real persons in that room.

Later on in the evening, Richard Pinckney, tired with the lights and the noise, took a stroll in the garden.

The garden was lit here and there with fairy lamps and there were coigns of shadow where couples were sitting out chatting and enjoying the beauty of the night.

The moon was nearing the full and her light cut the tree shadows distinctly on the paths. Passing a seat occupied by one of the sitting out couples, Pinckney noticed the woman's fan which her partner was playing with; it was his own gift to Frances Rhett. The man was Silas Grangerson and the woman was Frances. They were talking, but as he passed them their voices ceased.

He felt their eyes upon him, then, when he had got twenty paces or so away, he heard Frances laugh.

He imagined that she was laughing at him. Already angry with Silas, he halted and half turned, intending to go back and have it out with him, then he thought better of it and went his way. He would deal with Silas later and in some place where he could get him alone or in the presence of men only. Pinckney had a horror of scenes, especially in the presence of women.

Twenty minutes later he had his opportunity. He was crossing the hall from the supper room, when he came face to face with Silas. They were alone.

"Excuse me," said Richard Pinckney, halting in front of the other, "I want a word with you."

"Certainly," answered Silas, guessing at once what was coming.

"You made some remarks about me to Miss Rhett this evening," went on the other. "You coupled my name with the name of a lady in a most unjustifiable manner and I want your explanation here and now."

"Who was the lady?" asked Silas, seemingly quite unmoved.

"Miss Berknowles."

"In what way did I couple your name with her, may I ask?"

"No, you mayn't." Richard had turned pale before the calm insolence of the other. "You know quite well what you said and if you are a gentleman you will apologise— If you aren't you won't and I will deal with you in Charleston accordingly."

Phyl was at that moment coming out of the supper room with young Reggie Calhoun—the same who, according to Richard that morning at breakfast long ago, was an admirer of Maria Pinckney.

She saw the two men, in profile, facing one another, and she saw Silas's right hand, which he was holding behind his back, opening and shutting convulsively.

She saw the blow given by Pinckney, she saw Silas step back and the knife which he always carried, as the wasp carries its sting, suddenly in his hand.

Then she was gripping his wrist.

Face to face with madness for a moment, holding it, fighting eye to eye.

Had she faltered, had her gaze left his for the hundredth part of a second, he would have cast her aside and fallen upon his prey.

It was her soul that held him, her spirit—call it what you will, the something that speaks alone through the eye.

Calhoun and Pinckney stood, during that tremendous moment, stricken, breathless, without making the slightest movement. They saw she was holding him by the power of her eye alone; so vividly did this fact strike them that for a dazed moment it seemed to them that the battle was not theirs, that the contest was beyond the earthly plane, that this was no struggle between human beings, but a battle between sanity and madness.

Its duration might have been spanned by three ticks of the great old clock that stood in the corner of the hall telling the time.

Then came the ring of the knife falling on the floor. It was like the breaking of a spell. Silas, white and bewildered-looking as a man suddenly awakened from sleep, stood looking now at his released hand as though it did not belong to him, then at Pinckney, and then at Phyl who had turned her back upon him and was tottering as though about to fall. Pinckney, stepping forward, was about to speak, when at that moment the door of the supper room opened and a band of young people came out chatting and laughing.

Calhoun, who was a man of resource, kicked the knife which slithered away under one of the seats. Phyl, recovering herself, walked away towards the stairs; Silas without a word, turned and vanished from sight past the curtain of the corridor that led to the cloakroom.

Calhoun and Pinckney were left alone.

"What are you going to do?" asked Calhoun.

"I am at his disposal," replied the other. "I struck him."

"Struck him, damnation! He drew a knife on you; he ought to be hoofed out of the club; he'd have had you only for that girl. I never saw anything so splendid in my life."

"Yes," said Pinckney, "she saved my life. He was clean mad, but thank God no one knows anything about it and we avoided a scene. Say nothing to any one unless he wants to push the matter further. I am quite at his disposal."

PART IV



CHAPTER I

When Silas reached the cloakroom he took a glance at himself in the mirror, then putting on his overcoat and taking his hat from the attendant he came back into the hall. Pinckney and Calhoun had just strolled away into the ballroom; there was no one in the hall, and without a thought of saying good-bye to his hostess, he left the house.

He felt no anger against Pinckney, nor did he think as he walked down Legare Street that but for the mercy of God and the intervention of Phyl he might at that moment have been walking between two constables, a murderer with the blood of innocence on his hands.

Not that he was insensible to reason or the fitness of things, he had always known and acknowledged that when in a passion he was not accountable for his acts; he admitted the fact with regret and also with a certain pride. To-night he might have felt the regret without any pride to leaven it but for the fact that his mind was lost to every consideration but one—Phyl.

All through his life Silas had followed with an iron will the line that pleased him, never for a moment had he counted the cost of his actions; just as he had swum the harbour with his clothes on so had he plunged into any adventure that came to hand; he knew Fear just as little as he knew Consequence. Well, now he found himself for the first time in his life face to face with Fate. All his adventures up to this had been little things involving at worst loss of life by accident. This was different; it involved his whole future and the future of the girl who had mastered his mind.

Leaving Legare Street he reached Meeting Street and passed up it till he reached Vernons. The moon, high in the sky now, showed the garden through the trellis-work of the iron gate, and Silas paused for a moment and looked in.

The garden, seen like this with the moonlight upon the roses and the glossy leaves of the southern trees, presented a picture charming, dream-like, almost unreal in its beauty. He tried the gate. It was locked. On ordinary nights it would be open till the house closed, or in the event of Pinckney being out, until he returned, but to-night, owing to the absence of the family, it was locked.

Then, turning from the gate he crossed the road and took up his position in a corner of shadow. Five minutes passed, then twenty, but still he kept watch. There were few passers-by at that hour and little traffic; he had a long view of the moonlit street and presently he saw the carriage he was waiting for approaching.

It drew up at the front door of Vernons and he watched whilst the occupants got out; he caught a glimpse of Phyl as she entered the house following Miss Pinckney and followed by Richard, then the door shut and the carriage drove away.

Silas left his concealment and crossed the road. He paced for a while up and down outside the door of Vernons, then he came to the garden gate again and looked in.

From here one could get a glimpse of the first and second floor piazzas and the windows opening upon them. He could not tell which was the window of Phyl's room, it was enough for him that the place held her.

In the way in which he had crossed the road, in his uneasy prowling up and down before the house, and now in his attitude as he stood motionless with head raised there was something ominous, animal-like, almost wolfish.

As he stood a call suddenly came from the garden. It was the call of an owl, a white owl that rose on the sound and flitted softly as a moth across the trees to the garden beyond.

Silas turned away from the gate and came back down the street towards his hotel, arrived there he went straight to his room and to bed.

But he did not go to sleep. His head was full of plans, the craziest and maddest plans. Pinckney he had quite dismissed from his mind, the consciousness of having committed a vile action in drawing a knife upon an unarmed man was with him, and the knowledge that the consequences might include his expulsion from Charleston society, but all that instead of sobering him made him more reckless. He would have Phyl despite the Devil himself. He would seize her and carry her off, trap her like a bird.

He determined on the morrow to return early to Grangersons and think things out.



CHAPTER II

Whilst he was lying in bed thinking things out, the folk at Vernons were retiring to rest.

Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed to say nothing.

Calhoun was for publishing the affair.

"The man's dangerous," said he; "some day or another he'll do the same thing again to some one and succeed and swing."

"I think he's had his lesson," said Pinckney; "he went clean mad for the moment. Then there's the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything into consideration, we'll let it be. I don't feel any animosity against him, not half as much as if he'd stabbed me behind the back with a libel— He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and I don't want to push the thing against him."

"I don't think he will do it again," said Phyl.

She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by the Devil.

They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time. She had a terrible instinct for the truth of things.

"Well," said Calhoun, "it's not my affair; if you choose to take pity on him, well and good; if it were my business I'd give him a cold bath, that might stop him from doing a thing like that again. I'll say nothing."

Though Miss Pinckney was in ignorance of the affair she was strangely silent during the drive home and when Phyl went to her room to bid her good night, she found her in tears, a very rare occurrence with Miss Pinckney.

She was seated in an armchair crying and Phyl knelt down beside her and took her hand.

Then it all came out.

"I had hoped and hoped and hoped for him, goodness knows he has been my one thought, and now he has thrown himself away. Richard is engaged to Frances Rhett. He told me so to-night—well, there, it's all ended, there's no hope anywhere, she'll never let him go, and she'll have Vernons when I'm gone. She picked him out from all the other men—why?— Why, because he's the best of the lot for money and position. Care about him! She cares no more for him than I do for old Darius. I'm sure I don't know why this trouble should have fallen on me. I suppose I have committed some sin or another though I can't tell what. I've tried to live blameless and there's others that haven't, yet they seem to prosper and get their wishes—and there's no use telling me to be resigned," finished she with a snap and as if addressing some viewless mentor. "I can't—and what's more I won't. Never will I resign myself to wickedness, and stupidity is wickedness, not even a decent, honest wickedness, but a crazy, sap-headed sort of wickedness, same as influenza isn't a disease but just an ailment that kills you all the same."

Phyl, kneeling beside Miss Pinckney, had turned deathly white. Only half an hour ago when the little conference with Calhoun had been concluded, Richard Pinckney had taken her hand. His words were still ringing in her ears:

"You saved my life. I can't say what I feel, at least not now."

He had looked straight into her eyes, and now half an hour later—This.

Engaged to Frances Rhett!

She rose up and stood beside Miss Pinckney for a moment whilst that lady finished her complaints. Then she made her escape and returned to her room—

As she closed the door she caught a glimpse of herself in the old-fashioned cheval glass that had been brought up by Dinah and Seth to help her in dressing for the dance and which had not been removed. Every picture in every mirror is the work of an artist—the man who makes a mirror is an artist; according to the perfection of his work is the perfection of the picture. The old cheval glass was as truthful in its way as Gainsborough, but Gainsborough had never such a lovely subject as Phyl.

She started at her own reflection as though it had been that of a stranger. Then she looked mournfully at herself as a man might look at his splendid gifts which he has thrown away. All that was no use now.

She sat down on the side of her bed with her hands clasped together just as a child clasps its hands in grief.

Sitting like this with her eyes fixed before her she was looking directly at Fate.

It was not only Richard Pinckney that she was about to lose but Vernons and the Past— Just as Juliet Mascarene had lost everything so was it to happen to her. Or rather so had it happened, for she felt that the game was lost—some vague, mysterious, extraordinary game played by unknown powers had begun on that evening in Ireland when standing by the window of the library she had heard Pinckney's voice for the first time.

The sense of Fatality came to her from the case of Juliet. Consciously and unconsciously she had linked herself to Juliet. The extravagant idea that she herself was Juliet returned and that Richard Pinckney was Rupert had come to her more than once since that dream or vision in which the guns had sounded in her ears. The idea had frightened her at first, then pleased her vaguely. Then she had dismissed it, her ego refusing any one else a share in her love for Richard, any one—even herself masquerading under the guise of Juliet.

The idea came back to her now leaving her utterly cold, and yet stirring her mind anew with the sense of Fate.

* * * * *

When she fell asleep that night she passed into the dreamless condition which is the nearest thing we know to oblivion, yet her sub-conscious mind must have carried on its work, for when she awoke just as dawn was showing at the window it was with the sense of having passed through a long season of trouble, of having fought with—without conquering—all sorts of difficulties.

She rose and dressed herself, put on her hat and came down into the garden.

Vernons was just wakening for the day, and in the garden alive with birds, she could hear the early morning sounds of the city, and from the servants' quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten and now and then the angry screech of a parrot. General Grant slept in the kitchen and his cage was put out in the yard every morning at this hour. Later it would be brought round to the piazza. He resented the kitchen yard as beneath his dignity and he let people know it.

Phyl tried the garden gate, it was locked and Seth appearing at that moment on the lower piazza, she called to him to fetch the key. He let her out and she stood for a moment undecided as to whether she would walk towards the Battery or in the opposite direction. Meeting Street never looked more charming than now in the very early morning sunlight; under the haze-blue sky, almost deserted, it seemed for a moment to have recaptured its youth. A negro crab vendor was wheeling his barrow along, crying his wares. His voice came lazily on the warm scented air.

She turned in the direction of the station. The voice of the crab seller had completed in some uncanny way the charm of the deserted street and the early sunlight. She was going to lose all this. Vernons and the city she loved, Juliet, Miss Pinckney, the past and the present, she was going to lose them all, they were all in some miraculous way part of the man she loved, her love of them was part of her love for him. She could no longer stay in Charleston; she must go—where? She could think of nowhere to go but Ireland.

To stay here would be absolutely impossible.

As she walked without noticing whither she was going her mind cleared, she began to form plans.

She would go that very day. Nothing would stop her. The thing had to be done. Let it be done at once. She would explain everything to Miss Pinckney. She would escape without seeing Richard again. What she was proposing to herself was death, the ruin of everything she cared for, the destruction of all the ties that bound her to the world, the present and the past. It was the recognition that these ties had been broken for her and all these things taken away by the woman who had taken away Richard.

Presently she found herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time to pack her things, say good-bye to Miss Pinckney and take her departure before Richard returned to luncheon—if he did return.

It did not take her long to pass through the negro quarter, and now, out in the open country, out amidst those great flat lands in the broad day and under the lonely blue sky her mood changed.

Phyl was no patient Grizel, the very last person to be trapped in the bog of love's despondency. Abstract melancholy produced by colours, memories, or sounds was an easy enough matter with her, but she was not the person to mourn long over the loss of a man snatched from her by another woman.

As she walked, now, breathing the free fresh air, a feeling of anger and resentment began to fill her mind. Anger at first against Frances Rhett but spreading almost at once towards Richard Pinckney. Soon it included herself, Maria Pinckney, Charleston—the whole world. It was the anger which brings with it perfect recklessness, akin to that which had seized her the day in Ireland when in her rage over Rafferty's dismissal she had called Pinckney a Beast. Only this anger was less acute, more diffuse, more lasting.

The sounds of wheels and horses' hoofs on the road behind her made her turn her head. A carriage was approaching, an English mail phaeton drawn by two high-stepping chestnuts and driven by a young man.

It was Silas Grangerson. Returning to Grangerson's to make plans for the capture of Phyl, here she was on the road before him and going in the same direction.

For a moment he could scarcely believe his eyes. Then reining in and leaving the horses with the groom he jumped down and ran towards her.

After the affair of last night one might fancy that he would have shown something of it in his manner.

Not a bit.

"I didn't expect to come across you on the road," said he. "Won't you speak to me—are you angry with me?"

"It's not a question of being angry," said Phyl, stiffly.

She walked on and he walked beside her, silent for a moment.

"If you mean about that affair last night," said he, "I'm sorry I lost my temper—but he hit me—you don't understand what that means to me."

"You tried to—"

"Kill him, I did, and only for you I'd have done it. You can't understand it all. I can scarcely understand it myself. He hit me."

"I don't think you knew what you were doing," said Phyl.

"I most surely did not. I was rousted out of myself. I reckon he didn't know what he was doing either when he struck. He ought to have known I was not the person to hit. I'll show you, just stand before me for a moment."

Phyl faced him. He pretended to strike at her and she started back.

"There you are," said he; "you know I wasn't going to touch you but you had to dodge. Your mind had nothing to do with it, just your instinct. That was how I was. When he landed his blow I went for my knife by instinct. If you tread on a snake he lets out at you just the same way. He doesn't think. He's wound up by nature to hit back."

"But you are not a snake."

"How do you know what's in a man? I reckon we've all been animals once, maybe I was a snake. There are worse things than snakes. Snakes are all right, they don't meddle with you if you don't meddle with them. They've got a bad name they don't deserve. I like them. They're a lot better citizens, the way they look after their wives and families, than some others and they know how to hit back prompt—say, where are you going to?"

"I don't know," said Phyl. "I just came for a walk—I'm leaving Charleston."

She spoke with a little catch in her voice. All Silas's misdoings were forgotten for the moment, the fact that the man was dangerous as Death to himself and others had been neutralised in her mind by the fact, intuitively recognised, that there was nothing small or mean in his character. Despite his conduct in the cemetery, despite his lunatic outburst of the night before, in her heart of hearts she liked him; besides that, he was part of Charleston, part of the place she loved.

Ah, how she loved it! Had you dissected her love for Richard Pinckney you would have found a thousand living wrappings before you reached the core. Vernons, the garden, the birds, the flowers, the blue sky, the sunlight, Meeting Street, the story of Juliet, Miss Pinckney, even old Prue. Memories, sounds, scents, and colours all formed part of the living thing that Frances Rhett had killed.

"Leaving Charleston!" said Silas, speaking in a dazed sort of way.

"Yes. I cannot stay here any longer."

"Going—say—it's not because of what I did last night."

"You—oh, no. It has nothing to do with you." She spoke almost disdainfully.

"But where are you going?"

"Back to Ireland."

"When?"

"To-day."

Then, suddenly, in some curious manner, he knew. But he was clever enough, for once in his life, to restrain himself and say nothing.

"I will go this afternoon," said she, as though she were talking of a journey of a few miles.

"Have you any friends to go to?"

Phyl thought of Mr. Hennessy sitting in his gloomy office in gloomy Dublin.

"Yes, one."

"In Ireland?"

"Yes."

"Can't you think of any other friends?"

"No."

"Not even me?"

"I don't know," said poor Phyl, "I never could understand you quite, but now that I am in trouble you seem a friend—I'm miserable—but there's no use having friends here. It only makes it the worse having to go."

"Do you remember the day I asked you to run off to Florida with me," said Silas, "and leave this damned place? It's no good for any one here and you've found it out—the place is all right, it's the people that are wrong."

Phyl made no reply.

"You're not going back," he finished.

She glanced at him.

"You're going to stay here—here with me."

"I am going back to Ireland to-day," said Phyl.

"You are not, you are going to stay here."

"No. I am going back."

She spoke as a person speaks who is half drowsy, and Silas spoke like a person whose mind is half absent. It was the strangest conversation to listen to, knowing their relationship and the point at issue.

"You are going to stay here," he went on. "If I lost you now I'd never find you again. I've been wanting you ever since I saw you that day first in the yard— D'you remember how we sat on the log together?—you can't tramp all the way back to Charleston— Come with me and you'll be happy always, all the time and all your life—"

"No," said Phyl, "I mustn't—I can't." Her mind, half dazed by all she had gone through, by the mesmerism of his voice, by the brilliant light of the day, was capable of no real decision on any point. The dark streets of Dublin lay before her, a vague and nightmare vision. To return to Vernons would be only her first step on the return to Ireland, and yet if she did not return to Vernons, where could she go?

Silas's invitation to go with him neither raised her anger nor moved her to consent. Phyl was an absolute Innocent in the ways of the world. No careful mother had sullied her mind with warnings and suggestions, and her mind was by nature unspeculative as to the material side of life.

Instinctively she knew a great deal. How much knowledge lies in the sub-conscious mind is an open question.

They walked on for a bit without speaking and then Silas began again.

"You can't go back all that way. It's absurd. You talk of going off to-day, why, good heavens, it takes time even to start on a journey like that. You have to book your passage in a ship—and how are you to go alone?"

"I don't know," said Phyl.

His voice became soft. It was the first time in his life, perhaps, that he had spoken with tenderness, and the effect was perfectly magical.

"You are not going," he said, "you are not; indeed, I want you far too much to let you go; there's nothing else I want at all in the world. I don't count anything worth loving beside you."

No reply.

He turned.

The coloured groom was walking the horses, they were only a few yards away. He went to the man and gave him some money with the order to return to Charleston and go back to Grangersons by train, or at least to the station that was ten miles from Grangerville.

Then as the man went off along the road he stood holding the near horse by the bridle and talking to Phyl.

"You can't walk back all that way; put your foot on the step and get in, leave all your trouble right here. I'll see that you never have any trouble again. Put your foot on the step."

Phyl looked away down the road.

She hesitated just as she had hesitated that morning long ago when she had run away from school. She had run away, not so much to get home as to get away from homesickness.

Still she hesitated, urged by the recklessness that prompted her to break everything at one blow, urged by the dismal and hopeless prospect towards which the road to Charleston led her mind, held back by all sorts of hands that seemed reaching to her from the past.

Confused, bewildered, tempted yet resisting, all might have been well had not a vision suddenly risen before her clear, definite, and destructive to her reason.

The vision of Frances Rhett.

Everything bad and wild in Phyl surged up before that vision. For a second it seemed to her that she loathed the man she loved.

She put her foot on the step and got into the phaeton. Silas, without a word, jumped up beside her, and the horses started.



CHAPTER III

She had committed the irrevocable.

When the contract is signed, when the china vase is broken, all the regret in the world will not alter the fact.

It was not till they had gone ten miles on their way that the regret came, sudden and painful as the stab of a dagger.

Miss Pinckney's kindly old face suddenly rose up before Phyl. She would have been waiting breakfast for her. She saw the breakfast room, sunny and pleasant, the tea urn on the table, the garden through the open window—

Then came the thought—what matter.

All that was lost to her anyhow. It did not matter in the least what she did.

She was running away with Silas Grangerson.

She had a vague sort of idea that they were running away to be married, that she would have to explain things to Colonel Grangerson when they got to the house and that things would arrange themselves somehow.

But now, she sat voiceless beside her companion, answering only in monosyllables when he spoke; a voice began to trouble her, a voice that repeated the half statement, half question, over and over again.

"You are running away to be married to Silas Grangerson?"

She was running away from her troubles, from the prospect of returning to Ireland, from the idea of banishment from Vernons. She was running away out of anger against the woman who had taken Richard. She was running away because of pique, anger and the reckless craving to smash everything and dash everything to pieces—but to marry Silas Grangerson!

"Stop!" cried Phyl.

Silas glanced sideways at her.

"What's the matter now?"

"I want to go back."

"Back to Charleston!"

"Yes, stop, stop at once—I must go back, I should never have come."

Silas was on the point of flashing out but he shut his lips tight, then he reined in.

"Wait a moment," said he with his hand on her arm, "you can't walk back, we are nearly half way to Grangersons. I can't drive you because I don't want to return to Charleston. If you have altered your mind you can go back when we reach Grangersons, you can wire from there. The old man will make it all right with Maria Pinckney."

Phyl hesitated, then she began to cry.

It was the rarest thing in the world for her to cry like this. Tears with her meant a storm, but now she was crying quietly, hopelessly, like a lost child.

"Don't cry," said he, "everything will be all right when we get to Grangersons—we'll just go on."

The horses started again and Phyl dried her eyes. They covered another five miles without speaking, and then Silas said:

"You don't mean to stick to me, then?"

"I can't," said Phyl.

"You care for some one else better?"

"Yes."

"Is it Pinckney?"

"Yes."

"God!" said he. He cut the off horse with the whip. The horses nearly bolted, he reined them in and they settled down again to their pace.

The country was very desolate just here, cotton fields and swampy grounds with here and there a stretch of water reflecting the blue of the sky.

After a moment's silence he began again.

There was something in Silas's mentality that seemed to have come up from the world of automata, something tireless and persistent akin to the energy that drives a beetle over all obstacles in its course, on or round them.

"That's all very well," said he, "but you can't always go on caring for Pinckney."

"Can't I?" said Phyl.

"No, you can't. He's going to get married and then where will you be?"

Phyl, staring over the horses' heads as though she were staring at some black prospect, set her teeth. Then she spoke and her voice was like the voice of a person who speaks under mesmerism.

"I cared for him before he was born and I'll care for him after I'm dead and there's no use in bothering a bit about it now. You couldn't understand. No one can understand, not even he."

The road here bordered a stretch of waste land; Silas gazed over it, his face was drawn and hard.

Then he suddenly blazed out.

Laying the whip over the horses and turning them so sharply that the phaeton was all but upset he put them over the waste land; another touch of the whip and they bolted.

Beyond the waste land lay a rice field and between field and waste land stood a fence; there was doubtless a ditch on the other side of the fence.

"You'll kill us!" cried Phyl.

"Good—so," replied Silas, "horses and all."

She had half risen from her seat, she sat down again holding tight to the side rail and staring ahead. Death and destruction lay waiting behind that fence, leaping every moment nearer. She did not care in the least.

She could see that Silas, despite his words, was making every effort to rein in, the impetus to drive to hell and smash everything up had passed; she watched his hands grow white all along the tendon ridges with the strain. The whole thing was extraordinary and curious but unfearful, a storm of wind seemed blowing in her face. Then like a switched out light all things vanished.



CHAPTER IV

Twenty yards from the fence the off side wheel had gone.

The phaeton, flinging its occupants out, tilted, struck the earth at the trace coupling just as a man might strike it with his shoulder, dragged for five yards or so, breaking dash board and mud guard and brought the off side horse down as though it had been poleaxed.

Silas, with the luck that always fell to him in accidents, was not even stunned. Phyl was lying like a dead creature just where she had been flung amongst some bent grass.

He rushed to her. She was not dead, her pulse told that, nor did she seem injured in any way. He left her, ran to the horses, undid the traces and got the fallen horse on its feet, then he stripped them of their harness and turned them loose.

Having done this he returned to the girl. Phyl was just regaining consciousness; as he reached her she half sat up leaning on her right arm.

"Where are the horses?" said she. They were her first thought.

"I've let them loose—there they are."

She turned her head in the direction towards which he pointed. The horses, free of their harness, had already found a grass patch and were beginning to graze. The broken phaeton lay in the sunshine and the cushions flung to right and left showed as blue squares amidst the green of the grass; a light wind from the west was stirring the grass tops and a bird was singing somewhere its thin piping note, the only sound from all that expanse of radiant blue sky and green forsaken country.

"How do you feel now?" asked Silas.

"All right," said Phyl.

"We'd better get somewhere," he went on; "there are some cabins beyond that rice field, I can see their tops. There's sure to be some one there and we can send for help."

Phyl struggled to her feet, refusing assistance.

"Let us go there," said she. She turned to look at the horses.

"They'll be all right," said Silas; "there's lots of grass and there's a pond over there—they'd live here a month without harm."

He led the way to the fence, helped her over, and then, without a word they began to plod across the rice field.

When they reached the cabins they found them deserted, almost in ruins. They faced a great tract of tree-grown ground. In the old plantation days this place would have been populous, for to the right there were ruins of other cabins stretching along and bordering an old grass road that bent westward to lose itself amongst the trees, but now there was nothing but desolation and the wind that stirred the mossy beards of the live oaks and the rank green foliage of weeds and sunflowers. An old disused well faced the cabins.

Phyl gave a little shudder as she looked around her. Her mind, still slightly confused by the accident and beaten upon by troubles, could find nothing with which to reply to the facts of the situation—alone here with Silas Grangerson, lost, both of them, what explanation could she make, even to herself, of the position?

In the nearest cabin to the right some rough dry grass had been stored as if for the bedding of an animal. It was too coarse for fodder. Silas made her sit down on it to rest. Then he stood before her in the doorway.

For the first time in his life he seemed disturbed in mind.

"I'll have to go and get help," said he, "and find out where we are. It's my fault. I'm sorry, but there's no use in going over that. You aren't fit to walk. I'll go and leave you here. You won't be afraid to stay by yourself?"

"No," said Phyl.

"You needn't be a bit, there's no danger here."

"I am thirsty," said she.

"Wait."

He went to the well head. The windlass and chain were there rusty but practicable and a bucket lay amongst the grass. It was in good repair and had evidently been used recently. He lowered it and brought up some water. The water was clear diamond bright, and cold as ice. Having satisfied himself that it was drinkable he brought the bucket to Phyl and tilted it slightly whilst she drank. Then he put it by the door.

"Now I'll go," said he, "and I shan't be long. Sure you won't be afraid?"

"No," she replied.

"You're not angry with me?"

"No, I'm not angry."

He bent down, took her hand and kissed it. She did not draw it away or show any sign of resentment; it was cold like the hand of a dead person.

He glanced back as he turned to go. She saw him stand at the doorway for a moment looking down along the grass road, his figure cut against the blaze of light outside, then the doorway was empty.

She was never to see him again.

* * * * *

Outside in the sunlight Silas hesitated for a moment as though he was about to turn back, then he went on, striking along the grass road and between the trees.

Although he had never been over the ground before, he guessed it to be a part of the old Beauregard plantation and the distance from Grangerville to be not more than eight miles as the crow flies. By the road, reckoning from where the accident had occurred, it would be fifteen. But the lie of the place or the distance from Grangersons mattered little to Silas. His mind was going through a process difficult to describe.

Silas had never cared for anything, not even for himself. Danger or safety did not enter into his calculations. Religion was for him the name of a thing he did not understand. He had no finer feelings except in relationship to things strong, swift and brilliant, he had no tenderness for the weakness of others, even the weakness of women.

He had seized on Phyl as a Burgomaster gull might seize on a puffin chick, he had picked her up on the road to carry her off regardless of everything but his own desire for her—a desire so strong that he would have dashed her and himself to pieces rather than that another should possess her.

Well, as he watched her seated on the straw in that ruined cabin, subdued, without energy, and entirely at his mercy, a will that was not his will rose in opposition to him. Some part of himself that had remained in utter darkness till now woke to life. It was perhaps the something that despite all his strange qualities made him likeable, the something that instinct guessed to be there.

It stood between him and Phyl. He was conscious of no struggle with it because it took the form of helplessness.

Nothing but force could make her give him what he wanted. The thing was impossible, beyond him. He felt that he could do everything, fight everything, subdue everything—but the subdued.

There was something else. Weakness had always repelled him, whether it was the weakness of the knees of a horse or the weakness of the will of a man. Phyl's weakness did not repel him but it took the edge from his passion. It was almost a form of ugliness.

He had determined on finding help to send some one back for Phyl; any of the coloured folk hereabouts would be able to pilot her to Grangersons. He was not troubling about the broken phaeton or the horses; the horses had plenty of food and water; so far from suffering they would have the time of their lives. They might be stolen—he did not care, and nothing was more indicative of his mental upset than this indifference toward the things he treasured most.

All to the left of the grass road, the trees were thin, showing tracts of marsh land and pools, and the melancholy green of swamp weeds and vegetation.

The vegetable world has its reptiles and amphibians no less than the animal; its savages, its half civilised populations, and its civilised. The two worlds are conterminous, and just as cultivated flowers and civilised people are mutually in touch, here you would find poisonous plants giving shelter to poisonous life, and the amphibious giving home to the amphibious.

The woods on the right were healthier, more dense, more cheerful, on higher ground; one might have likened the grass road to the life of a man pursuing its way between his two mysteriously different characters.

Silas had determined to make straight for home after having sent assistance for Phyl, what he was going to do after arriving home was not evident to his mind; he had a vague idea of clearing out somewhere so that he might forget the business. He had done with Phyl, so he told himself.

But Phyl had not done with him. He had been scarcely ten minutes on his road when her image came into his mind. He saw her, not as he had seen her last seated on the straw in the miserable cabin, but as he had seen her at the ball.

The curves of her limbs, the colour of her hair, her face, all were drawn for him by imagination, a picture more beautiful even than the reality.

Well, he had done with her, and there was no use in thinking of her—she cared for that cursed Pinckney and she was as good as dead to him, Silas.

An ordinary man would have seen hope at the end of waiting, but Silas was not an ordinary man, a long and dubious courtship was beyond his imagination and his powers. Courtship, anyhow, as courtship is recognised by the world was not for him. He wanted Phyl, he did not want to write letters to her.