She turned to him with a sudden bright smile.

"How perfectly delightful riding is! I owe all the pleasure of it to you."

"Do you?" he asked, smiling too, but slightly and gravely, narrowing on her his inscrutable eyes. "Well, then, will you do what I want?"

"I thought you were a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm learning the proper way for a woman to talk."

"I want you to remove the preposterous black pot with which you've covered up your hair. I'll carry it for you."

"Oh, Max! What would people think if they met me riding without my hat? Fancy Miss Cayley! What she'd say! And the Warden of Canterbury! What he'd feel!"

She laughed delightedly.

"They never ride this way. It's the 'primrose path,' you see, and they're afraid of the 'everlasting bonfire.' I'm not; you're not. You're not afraid of anything."

"I am. I'm afraid of old maids and—most butlers."

Maxwell laughed, but his laugh was a harsh one.

"Humbug! If you really wanted to do anything you'd do it. I know you better than you know yourself. If you won't take your hat off it's because you don't really want to do what I want; and when you say pretty things to me about your gratitude for the pleasure I'm giving you, you're only telling the same old lies women tell all the world over."

"There! Catch my reins!" cried Mildred, leaning over and holding them out to him. "How do you suppose I can take my hat off if you don't?"

He obeyed and drew up to her, stooping near, a hand on the mane of her horse. The horses nosed together and fidgeted, while she balanced herself in the saddle with lifted arms, busy with hat-pins. The task accomplished, she handed the hat to him and they cantered on. Presently she turned towards him, brightening.

"You were quite right about the hat, Max. It's ever so much nicer without it; one feels freer, and what I love about riding is the free feeling. It's as though one had got out of a cage; as though one could jump over all the barriers of life; as though there were nobody and nothing to hinder one from galloping right out into the sky if one chose. But I can't explain what I mean."

"Of course you don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it! None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be the life for you."

It was true that Mildred's was an essentially nomadic and adventurous soul. Whether the desert was precisely the most suitable sphere for her wanderings was open to doubt, but for the moment as typifying freedom, travel, and motion—all that really was as the breath of life to her—it fascinated her imagination. Maxwell, closely watching that sunshine-gilded head, saw her eyes widen, her whole expression at once excited and meditative, as though she beheld a vision. But in a moment she had turned to him with a challenging smile.

"I thought slavery was the only proper thing for women."

"So it is—for ordinary women. It makes them happier and less mischievous. But I don't fall into the mistake—which causes such a deal of unnecessary misery and waste in the world—the mistake of supposing that you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey. You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to wish them to distort themselves to fit it."

"And I'm not average? I needn't be a slave? Oh, thank you, Max! I am so glad."

"Confound it, Mildred, I'm not joking. You are a born queen and you oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice it is to ride with your hat off."

They had been slowly descending the steep, stony road which leads to Wytham Village, but as he spoke they were turning off into a large field to the right, across which a turfy track led gradually up to the woods from which they had come. The track lay smooth before them, and the horses began to sidle and dance directly their hoofs touched it. Mildred did not answer his remarks, except by a reference to the hat.

"Don't lose it, that's all!" she shouted, looking back and laughing, as she shot up the track ahead of him. He fancied she was trying to show him that she could run away from him if she chose; and with a quiet smile on his lips and a firm hand on his tugging horse, he kept behind her until she was a good way up the field. Then he gave his horse its head and it sprang forward. She heard the eager thud of the heavy hoofs drawing up behind, and in a few seconds he was level with her. For a minute they galloped neck and neck, though at a little distance from each other. Then she saw him ahead, riding with a seat looser than most Englishmen's, yet with an assurance, a grace of its own, the hind-quarters of his big horse lifting powerfully under him, as it sped with great bounds over the flying turf. Her own mare saw it, too, and vented her annoyance in a series of kicks, which, it must be confessed, seriously disturbed Mildred's equilibrium. Then settling to business, she sprang after her companion. Maxwell heard her following him up the long grass slope towards the gate which opens into the main ride by which they had started. He fancied he had the improvised race well in hand, but suddenly the hoofs behind him hurried their beat; Mildred flew past him at top speed and flung her mare back on its haunches at the gate.

"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her whip at him.

Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and anxiety.

"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her. "You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate, pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do you're a poor horse-woman."

He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now; they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher, his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of his lean face, which was as pale as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her, when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together, through flying scuds of rain.



CHAPTER XVI

There is a proverbial rule against playing with fire, but it is one which, as Davison would have said, was evidently made by average people, who would in fact rather play with something else. There are others to whom fire is the only really amusing plaything; and though the by-stander may hold his breath, nine times out of ten they will come out of the game as unscathed as the professional fire-eater. This was not precisely true of Mildred, who had still a wide taste in playthings; but in the absence of anything new and exciting in her environment, she found an immense fascination in playing with the fiery elements in Maxwell Davison's nature, in amusing her imagination with visions of a free wandering life, led under a burning Oriental sky, which he constantly suggested to her. Yet dangerously alluring as these visions might appear, appealing to all the hidden nomad heart of her, her good sense was never really silenced. It told her that freedom from the shackles of civilization might become wearisome in time, besides involving heavier, more intolerable forms of bondage; although she did not perceive that Maxwell Davison's dislike to her being a slave was only a dislike to her being somebody else's slave. He was a despot at heart and had accustomed himself to a frank despotism over women. Mildred's power over him, the uncertainty of his power over her, maddened him. But Mildred did not know what love meant. At one time she had fancied her affection for Ian might be love; now she wondered whether her strange interest in the society of a man for whom she had no affection, could be that. She did not feel towards Ian as an ordinary wife might have done, yet his feelings and interests weighed much with her. Milly, too, she must necessarily consider, but she did that in a different, an almost vengeful spirit.

One evening Ian, looking up from his work, asked her what she was smiling at so quietly to herself. And she could not tell him, because it was at a horrible practical joke suggested to her by an impish spirit within. What if she should prepare a little surprise for the returning Milly? Let her find herself planted in Araby the Blest with Maxwell Davison? Mildred chuckled, wondering to herself which would be in the biggest rage, Milly or Max; for however Tims might affirm the contrary, Mildred had a fixed impression that Milly could be in a rage.

The fire-game was hastening to its close; but before Mildred could prove herself a real mistress of the dangerous element, the sleep fell upon her.

Except a sensation of fatigue, for which it was easy to find a reason, there was no warning of the coming change. But Ian had dreams in the night and opened his eyes in the morning with a feeling of uneasiness and depression. Mildred could never sleep late without causing him anxiety, and on this morning his first glance at her filled him with a dread certainty. She was sleeping what was to her in a measure the sleep of death. He had a violent impulse to awaken her forcibly; but he feared it would be dangerous. With his arm around her and his head close to hers on the pillow, he whispered her name over and over again. The calmness of her face gradually gave way to an expression of struggle approaching convulsion, and he dared not continue. He could only await the inevitable in a misery which from its very nature could find no expression and no comforter.

Milly, unlike Mildred, did not return to the world in a rapture of satisfaction with it. The realization of the terrible robbery of life of which she had again been the victim, was in itself enough to account for a certain sadness even in her love for Ian and for her child. The hygiene of the nursery had been neglected according to her ideas, yet Baby was bonny enough to delight any mother's heart, however heavy it might be. Ian, she said, wanted feeding up and taking care of; and he submitted to the process with a gentle, melancholy smile. Just one request he made; that she would not spoil her pretty hair by screwing it up in her usual unbecoming manner. She understood, studying a certain photograph in a drawer—what drawer was safe from Milly's tidyings?—and dressed her hair as like it as she knew how, with a secret bitterness of heart.

Mildred had found a diary, methodically kept by Milly, of great use to her, and although incapable herself of keeping one regularly, she had continued it in a desultory manner, noting down whatever she thought might be useful for Milly's guidance. For whatever the feelings of the two personalities towards each other, there was a terrible closeness of union between them. Their indivisibility in the eyes of the world made their external interests inevitably one. New friends and acquaintances Mildred had noted down, with useful remarks upon them. She was not confidential on the subject of Maxwell Davison, but she gave the bare necessary information.

It was now late in the Summer Term and her bedroom chimney-piece was richly decorated with invitation cards. Among others there was an invitation to a garden-party at Lady Margaret Hall. Milly put on a fresh flowered muslin dress, apparently unworn, that she found hanging in one of the deep wall-cupboards of the old house, and a coarse burnt-straw hat, trimmed with roses and black ribbon, which became her marvellously well. All the scruples of an apostle of hygienic dress, all the uneasiness of an economist at the prospect of unpaid bills, disappeared before the pleasure of a young woman face to face with an extremely pretty reflection in a pier-glass. That glass, an oval in a light mahogany frame, of the Regency period, if not earlier, was one of Mildred's finds in the slums of St. Ebbes.

She walked across the Parks, where the Cricket Match of the season was drawing a crowd, meaning to come out by a gate below Lady Margaret Hall, the gardens and buildings of which did not then extend to the Cherwell. In their place were a few tennis-grounds and a path leading to a boat-house, shared by a score or more of persons. While she was still coming across the grass of the Parks, a man in flannels, very white in the sun, came towards her from the gate for which she was making. He must have recognized her from a long way off. He was a striking-looking man of middle age, walking with a free yet indolent stride that carried him along much faster than it appeared to do.

Milly had no idea who the stranger was, but he greeted her with: "Here you are at last, Mildred! Do you know how much behind time you are?"—he took out his watch—"Exactly thirty-five minutes. I should have given you up if I hadn't known that breaking your promise is not among your numerous vices, and unpunctuality is."

Who on earth was he? And why did he call her by her Christian name? Milly went a beautiful pink with embarrassment.

"I'm so sorry. I thought the party would have just begun," she replied.

"You don't mean to say you want to keep me kicking my heels while you go to a confounded party? I thought you knew I was off to Paris to-night, after that Firdusi manuscript, and I think of taking the Continental Express to Constantinople next week. I don't know when I shall be back. Surely, Mildred, it's not a great deal to ask you to spare half an hour from a wretched party to come on the river with me before I go?" It struck Maxwell as he ended that he was falling into the whining of the Occidental lover. He was determined that he would clear the situation this afternoon; the more determined because he was conscious of a feeling odiously resembling fear which had before now held him back from plain dealing with Mildred. Afraid of a woman? It was too ridiculous.

Milly, meanwhile, felt herself on firmer ground. This must be Ian's cousin, Maxwell Davison, the Orientalist. But there was nothing nomadic in her heart to thrill to the idea of being on the Cherwell this afternoon, in London this evening, in Paris next morning, in Constantinople next week.

"Of course I'll come on the river with you," she said. "I'm sorry I'm late. I'm afraid I—I'd forgotten."

Forgotten! How simply she said it! Yet it was surely the veriest impudence of coquetry. He looked at her slowly from the hat downward, as he lounged leisurely at her side.

"War-paint, I see!" he remarked. "Armed from head to heel with all the true and tried female weapons. They're just the same all the world over—'plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose,'—though no doubt you fancy they're different. Who's the frock put on for, Mildred? For the party, or—for me?"

Milly was conscious of such an extreme absence of intention so far as Maxwell was concerned, that it would have been rude to express it. She went very pink again, and lifting forget-me-not blue eyes to his inscrutable ones, articulated slowly:

"I'm sure I don't know."

Her eyes were like a child's and a shy smile curved her pink lips adorably as she spoke. Such mere simplicity would not in itself have cast a spell over Maxwell, but it came to him as a new, surprising phase of the eternal feminine in her; and it had the additional charm that it caused that subjugated feeling resembling fear, with which Mildred could inspire him, to disappear entirely. He was once more in the proper dominant attitude of Man. He felt the courage now to make her do what he believed she wished to do in her heart; the courage, too, to punish her for the humiliation she had inflicted upon him. Six months ago he would have had nothing but a hearty contempt for the man who could beat thirty yards of gravel-path for half an hour, watch in hand, in a misery of impatience, waiting on the good pleasure of a capricious woman.

Meantime he laughed good-humoredly at Milly's answer and began to talk of neutral matters. If her tongue did not move as nimbly as usual, he flattered himself it was because she knew that the hour of her surrender was at hand.

Milly knew the boat-house well, the pleasant dimness of it on hot summer days; how the varnished boats lay side by side all down its length, and how the light canoes rested against the walls as it were on shelves. How, when the big doors were opened on to the raft and the slowly moving river without, bright circles of sunlight, reflected from the running water, would fly in and dance on wall and roof. She stood there in the dimness, while Maxwell lifted down a large canoe and, opening one of the barred doors, took it out to the water. Mildred would have felt a half-conscious aesthetic pleasure in watching his movements, superficially indolent but instinct with strength. Milly had not the same aesthetic sensibilities, and she was still disagreeably embarrassed at finding herself on such a familiar footing with a man whom she had never seen before. Then, although she followed Aunt Beatrice's golden rule of never allowing a question of feminine dress to interfere with masculine plans, she could not but feel anxious as to the fate of her fresh muslin and ribbons packed into a canoe. Maxwell, however, had learned canoeing years ago on the Canadian lakes, and did not splash. His lean, muscular brown arms and supple wrists took the canoe rapidly through the water, with little apparent effort.

It was the prime of June and the winding willow-shaded Cherwell was in its beauty. White water-lilies were only just beginning to open silver buds, floating serenely on their broad green and red pads; but prodigal masses of wild roses, delicately rich in scent and various in color, overhung the river in brave arching bowers or starred bushes and hedgerows so closely that the green briers were hardly visible. Beds of the large blue water forget-me-not floated beside the banks, and above them creamy meadow-sweet lifted its tall plumes among the reeds and grasses. Small water-rats swam busily from bank to bank or played on the roots of the willows, and bright wings of birds and insects fluttered and skimmed over the shining stream.

The Cherwell, though not then the crowded waterway it has since become, was usually popular with boaters on such an afternoon. But there must have been strong counter-attractions elsewhere, for Milly and Davison passed only one, a party of children working very independent oars, on their way to the little gray house above the ferry, where an old Frenchman dispensed tea in arbors.

There was a kind of hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a person who had rights over her—a tone which before he had been more willing than able to adopt; but now the bit was between his teeth. Perhaps absorbed in his own intent, he hardly noticed how little she answered; but he did notice every point of her beauty as she leaned back on the cushions in the light shade of her parasol, from the soft brightness of her hair to the glimpse of delicate white skin which showed through the open-work stocking on her slender foot.

When they were in the straight watery avenue between green willow walls, which leads up to the ferry, he slackened the pace.

"And what are you going to do next week?" he asked, as one of a series of ironical questions.

"A great deal; much more than I care to do. I'm going up to town to see the new Savoy opera, and I'm going to a dance, and to several garden-parties, and to dine with the Master of Durham."

"Quite enough for some people; but not for you, Mildred. Think of it—year after year, always the same old run. October Term, Lent Term, Summer Term! A little change in Vacations, say a month abroad, when you can afford it. You aren't meant for it, you know you're not, any more than a swallow's meant for the little hopping, pecketing life of a London sparrow."

"Indeed, I don't see the likeness either way. I'm quite happy as I am."

He smiled mockingly.

"Quite happy! As it's very proper you should be, of course. Come, Mildred, no humbug! Think how you'd feel if you knew that instead of going to all those idiotic parties next week you were going to Constantinople."

"Isn't it dreadfully hot at this time of year?"

"I like it hot. But at any rate one can always find some cool place in the hottest weather. How would you like to go in a caravan from Cairo to Damascus next autumn?"

"I dare say it would be delightful, if the country one passed through were not too wild and dangerous. But Ian would never be able to leave his work for an expedition like that."

Maxwell smiled grimly.

"I'd no idea you'd want him. I shouldn't. Do be serious. If you fancy I'm the sort of man you can go on playing with forever, you're most confoundedly mistaken."

Milly was both offended and alarmed. Was this strange man mad? And she alone with him on the river!

"I don't know what you mean," she said, coldly.

"Don't you?" he returned, and he still wore his ironic smile—"Well, I know what you mean all the time. You say I only know Oriental women, but, by Allah, there's not a pin to choose between the lot of you, except that there's less humbug about them, and over here you're a set of trained, accomplished hypocrites!"

Indignation overcame fear in Milly's bosom.

"We are nothing of the kind," she said. "How can you talk such nonsense?"

"Nonsense? I suppose being a woman you can't really be logical, although you generally pretend to be so. Why have you pranked yourself out, spent an hour I dare say in making yourself pretty to-day? For what possible reason except to attract the eyes of a crowd of men, young fools or doddering old ones—"

Milly uttered an expression of vehement denial, but he continued:

"Or else to whet my appetite for forbidden fruit. But there's no 'or' about it, is there? Most likely you had both of those desirable objects in view."

Milly was not a coward when her indignation was aroused. She took hold of the sides of the canoe and began raising herself.

"I don't know whether you mean to be insulting," she said; "but I don't wish to hear any more of this sort of thing. I'd rather you put me out, please."

"Sit down," he said, with authority—the canoe was rocking violently—"unless you're anxious to be drowned. I warn you I'm a very poor swimmer, and if we upset there's not a ghost of a chance of my being able to save you."

Milly was a poor swimmer, too, and felt by no means competent to save herself; neither was she anxious to be drowned. So she sat down again.

"Put me out at the ferry, please," she repeated, haughtily.

They were reaching the end of the willow avenue, just where the wire rope crosses the river. On the right was a small wooden landing-stage, and high above it the green, steep river-bank, with the gray house and the arbors on the top. The old Frenchman stood before the house in his shirt-sleeves, watching sadly for his accustomed prey, which for some inexplicable reason did not come. He took off his cap expectantly to Maxwell Davison, whom he knew; but the canoe glided swiftly under the rope and on.

"No, I sha'n't put you out, Mildred," Maxwell answered with decision, after a pause. "I'm sorry if I've offended you. I've forgotten my manners, no doubt, and must seem a bit of a brute to you. I didn't bring you here just to quarrel, or to play a practical joke upon you, and send you on a field-walk in that smart frock and shoes—" he smiled at her, and this time she was obliged to feel a certain fascination in his smile—"nor yet to go on with the game you've been playing with me all these months. You forget; I've been used to Nature for so many years that I find it hard to realize how natural the most artificial conditions of life appear to you. I'll try to remember; but you must remember, too, that the most civilized beings on earth have got to come right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core. And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined, but simply stupid and obstinate and no good."

Milly, if she would have no compromise with principles, was always quick to accept an apology. She did not follow the line of Maxwell's argument, but she remembered it was noted in a certain deplorably irregular Diary, that he had lived for many years in the East and was quite Orientalized in many of his ways and ideas. With gentle dignity she signified that in her opinion civilized European manners and views were to be commended in opposition to barbarous and Oriental ones. Maxwell, his face bent towards the turning paddle, hardly heard what she was saying. He was paddling fast and considering many things.

They came to where the river ran under a narrow grass field, rising in a steep bank and shut off from the world by a tall hedge and a row of elms, that threw long shadows down the grass and were reflected in the water. A path led through it, but it was little frequented. On the other side was a wide, green meadow, where the long grass was ripening under rose-blossoming hedges, and far beyond was the blueness of distant hills and woods. Maxwell ran the bow of the canoe into a thick bed of forget-me-nots, growing not far from the bank. He laid the dripping paddle aside, and, resting his elbows on his knees, held his head in his hands for a minute or more. When he turned his face towards her it was charged with passion, but most of all with a grave masterfulness. He had been sitting on a low seat, but now he kneeled so as to come nearer to her, and, stretching out his long arms, laid a hand, brown, long-fingered, smooth, on her two slight, gray-gloved ones.

"Mildred," he said, and his voice seemed to have lost its harshness, "I've brought you here to make you decide what you are going to do with me and with yourself. I want you—you know I want you, but I don't come begging for you as an alms. I say, just compare the life, the free, glorious life I can give you, and the wretched, petty round of existence here. Come with me, won't you? Don't be afraid I shall treat you like a slave; I follow Nature, and Nature made you a queen. Come with me to-night, come to Paris, to Constantinople, to all the East! Never mind about love yet, we won't talk about that, for I don't really flatter myself you love me; I'm only sure you don't love Ian—"

Milly had listened to him so far, drawing herself back to the farthest end of the canoe, half petrified with amazement, half dominated by his powerful personality. At these words her pallor gave way to a scarlet flush.

"How dare you!" she cried, in a voice tremulous with indignation. "How dare you talk to me like this? How dare you name my husband? You brought me out here on purpose to say such things to me? Oh, it's abominable, it's disgraceful!"

There was no room for doubt as to the sincerity of her indignation. Maxwell drew back and his face changed. There were patches of dull red on his cheeks, almost as though he had been struck, and his narrow eyes glittered. Looking at him, Milly felt physical fear; she thought once more of insanity. There was a silence; then she spoke again.

"Put me on to the bank here, please. I'll walk back."

"I shall let you go when I choose," returned he, in a grating voice. "I have something to say to you first."

He paused and his frown darkened upon her. "You asked me how I 'dared.' Dare! Do you take me for a dog, to be chained up and tantalized with nice bits, and hardly allowed to whine for them? I say, how dare you entice me with your beauty—it's decked out now for me—entice me with all your beguiling ways, your pretence of longing to go away and to live the free life in the East as I live it? Now, when you've made me want you—what else have you been aiming at? You pretend to be surprised, you pretend even to yourself, to be dreadfully shocked. What damned humbug! With us only the dancing-girls venture to play such tricks as you do, and they daren't go too far, because the men are men and wear knives. But here you proper women, with your weakness unnaturally protected, you go about pretending you don't know there's such a thing in the world as desire—oh, of course not!—and all the while you're deliberately exciting it and playing upon it."

Mildred had been right in saying that the gentle Milly could be in a rage; though it was a thing that had happened to her only once or twice before since her childhood. It happened now. Anger, burning anger, extinguished the fear that had held her silent while he was speaking.

"It's false!" she cried, with burning face and blazing eyes. "It's disgraceful of you to say such things—it's degrading for me to have to hear them. I will get away from you, if I have to jump into the river."

She started forward, but Maxwell, with his tall, lithe body and long arms, had a great reach. He leaned forward and his iron hands were upon her shoulders, forcing her back.

"Don't be a fool," he said, still fierce in eye and voice.

Her lips trembled with fury so that she could hardly speak.

"Do you consider yourself a gentleman?"

He laughed scornfully.

"I don't consider the question at all. I am a man; you are a woman, and you have presumed to make a plaything of me. You thought you could do it with impunity because we are civilized, because you are a lady; for bar-maids and servant-girls do get their throats cut sometimes still. Don't be frightened, I'm not going to kill you, but I mean to make you understand for once that these privileges of weakness are humbug, that they're not in nature. I mean to teach you that a man is a better animal—"

He suddenly withdrew his hands from her with a sharp exclamation. Milly's teeth were pearly white and rather small, but they were pointed, and they had met in the flesh of the right hand which rested so firmly on her shoulder. He fell back and put his hand to his mouth. A boat-hook lay within her reach, and her end of the canoe had drifted near enough to the river-bank for her to be able to catch hold with the hook and to pull it farther in. Braced to the uttermost by rage and fear, she bounded to her feet without upsetting the canoe. It lurched violently, but righted itself, swinging out once more into the stream. Maxwell looked up and saw her standing on the river-bank above him. She did not stay to parley, but with lifted skirt hurried up the steep meadow, through the sun-flecked shadows of the elm-trees, towards the path. When she was half-way up a harsh, sardonic laugh sounded behind her, and instinctively she looked back. Maxwell held up his wounded hand:

"Primitive woman at last, Mildred!" he shouted. "Don't apologize, I sha'n't."



CHAPTER XVII

Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our lives are made up of mere to-morrows—if Shakespeare had not happened to put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real delight, and that it was well she should have nothing to spend in ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share. Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her bric-a-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow, a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind. Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid existence.

In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen in her nursery days.

Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian, and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the evening that Ian expected her to go to bed at once; but she followed him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in London.

Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:

"I've got something awful to tell you."

Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot chair.

"What about? Tony?"—for it was to this diminutive that Mildred had reduced the flowing syllables of Antonio.

"No, your cousin, Maxwell Davison."

Now, Ian liked his cousin well enough, but by no means as well as he liked Tony.

"About Max!" he exclaimed, relieved. "What's happened to him?"

"Nothing—but oh, Ian! I—hate even to speak of such a thing—"

"Never mind. Just tell me what it is."

"I was on the river with him this afternoon, and he—he made love to me."

The lines of Ian's face suddenly hardened.

"Did he?" he returned, significantly, playing with a paper-knife. Then, after a pause: "I'm awfully sorry, Milly. I'd no idea he was such a cad."

"He—he wanted me to run away with him."

Ian's face became of an almost inhuman severity.

"I shall let Maxwell Davison know my opinion of him," he said.

"But it's worse—it's even more horrible than that. He was expecting me. I—I of course knew nothing about it; I only knew about the garden-party at Lady Margaret. But he said I'd promised to come; he said all kinds of shocking, horrid things about my having dressed myself up for him—"

"Please don't tell me what he said, Milly," Ian interrupted, still coldly, but with a slight expression of disgust. "I'd rather you didn't. I suppose I ought to have taken better care of you, my poor little girl, but really here in Oxford one never thinks of anything so outrageous happening."

"I must tell you one thing," she resumed, almost obstinately. "He said he knew I didn't love you—that I didn't love you, my own darling husband. Some one, some one—must be responsible for his thinking that. How do I know what happens when—when I'm away. My poor Ian! Left with a creature who doesn't love you!"

Ian rose. His face was cold and hard still, but there was a faint flush on his cheek, the mark of a frown between his black brows. He walked to a window and looked out into the moonlit garden, where the gnarled apple-trees threw weird black shadows on grass and wall, like shapes of grotesque animals, or half-hidden spectres, lurking, listening, waiting.

"We're getting on to a dangerous subject," he answered, at length. "Don't give me pain by imagining evil about—about yourself. You could never, under any aspect, be anything but innocent and loyal and all that a man could wish his wife to be."

He smoothed his brow with an effort, went up to her, and taking her soft face between his hands kissed her forehead.

"There!" he exclaimed, with a forced smile. "Don't let's talk about it any more, darling. Go to bed and forget all about it. It won't seem so bad to-morrow morning."

But Milly did not respond. When he released her head she threw it back against her own clasped hands, closing her eyes. She was ghastly pale.

"No," she moaned, "I can't bear it by myself. It's too, too awful. It's not Me; it's something that takes my place. I saw it once. It's an evil spirit. O God, what have I done that such a thing should happen to me! I've always tried to be good."

There was a clash of pity and anger in Ian's breast. Pity for Milly's case, anger on account of her whom his inmost being recognized as another, whatever his rational self might say to the matter. He sat down beside his wife and uttered soothing nothings. But she turned upon him eyes of wild despair, the more tragic because it broke through a nature fitted only for the quietest commonplaces of life. She flung herself upon him, clutching him tight, hiding her face upon him.

"What have I done?" she moaned again. "You know I always believed in God, in God's love. I wouldn't have disbelieved even if He'd taken you away from me. But now I can't believe in anything. There must be wicked spirits, but there can't be a good God if He allows them to take possession of a poor girl like me, who's never done any one any harm. O Ian, I've tried to pray, and I can't. I don't believe in anything now."

Ian was deeply perplexed. He himself believed neither in a God nor in evil spirits, and he knew not how to approach Milly's mind. At length he said, quietly:

"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition, like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand? Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors."

"At first I thought it was like that—an eclipse of memory. But now I feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I. To-night Cousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was reminded of—that fearful night when I came back and saw—something. I am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."

Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.

"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."

"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I could bear it better if—But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who deceives you, and—"

"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."

There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.

"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me tell you what she is?"

He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered with cold deliberation:

"I cannot cease to love my own wife because—because she's not always exactly the same."

They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa. The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.



CHAPTER XVIII

Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two, or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and since the season of festivity has begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathes from blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year.

Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress. He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class, and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no severance.

He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself. Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life, it would be regarded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an overwrought brain.

There is something in college life which fosters a reticence that is almost secretiveness; and this becomes a code, a religion; yet Stewart found himself seized with an intense longing to confide in someone. And at that moment, from under the wide archway leading into the quadrangle, appeared the Master of Durham. The Master was in cap and gown, and carried some large papers under his arm; he walked slowly, as he had taken to walking of late, his odd, trotting gait transformed almost to a hobble. Meditative, he looked straight before him with unseeing eyes. No artist was ever able to seize the inner and the outer verity of that round, pink baby face, filled with the power of a weighty personality and a penetrating mind. Stewart marked him in that minute, sagacity and benevolence, as it were, silently radiating from him; and the younger man in his need turned to the wise Master, the paternal friend whose counsels had done so much to set his young feet in the way of success.

When Stewart found himself in the Master's study, the study so familiar to his youth, with its windows looking out on the garden quadrangle, and saw the great little man himself seated before him at the writing-table, he marvelled at the temerity that had brought him there to speak on such a theme. But the cup was poured and had to be drunk. The Master left him to begin. He sat with a plump hand on each plump knee, and regarded his old pupil with silent benevolence.

"I've come to see you, Master," said Stewart, "because I feel very bewildered, very helpless, in a matter which touches my wife even more than myself. You were so kind about my marriage, and you have always been good to her as well as to me."

"Miss Flaxman was a nice young lady," squeaked the Master. "I knew you married wisely."

"Something happened shortly before we were engaged which she—we didn't quite grasp—its importance, I mean," Stewart began. He then spoke of those periodical lapses of memory in his wife which he had come to see involved real and extraordinary variations in her character—a change, in fact, of personality. He mentioned their futile visits to Norton-Smith, the brain and nerve specialist. The Master heard him without either moving or interrupting. When he had done there was a silence. At length the Master said:

"I suspect we don't understand women."

"Perhaps not. But, Master, haven't you yourself noticed a great difference in my wife at various times?"

"Not more than I feel in myself—not of another character, that is. We live among men; we live among men who, generally speaking, know nothing about women. That's why women appear to us strange and unnatural. Your wife's quite normal, really."

"But the memory alone, surely—"

"That's made you nervous; but I've known cases not far different. You remember meeting Sir Henry Milwood here? When I knew him he was a young clergyman. He had an illness; forgot all about his clerical life, and went sheep-farming in Australia, where he made his fortune."

"But his personality?" asked Stewart, with anxiety. "Was that changed?"

"Certainly. A colonial sheep-farmer is a different person from a young Don just in orders."

"I don't mean that, Master. I mean did he rise from his bed with ideas, with feelings quite opposite to those which had possessed him when he lay down upon it? Did he ever have a return of the clerical phase, during which he forgot how he became a sheep-farmer and wished to take up his old work again?"

"No—no."

There was a pause. The Master played with his gold spectacles and sucked his under lip. Then:

"Take a good holiday, Stewart," he said.

Stewart's clear-cut face hardened and flushed momentarily. "These are not fancies of my own, Master. Cases occur in which two, sometimes more than two, entirely different personalities alternate in the same individual. The spontaneous cases are rare, of course, but hypnotism seems to develop them pretty freely. The facts are there, but English scientists prefer to say nothing about them."

The Master rose and trotted restlessly about.

"They're quite right," he returned, at length. "Such ideas can lead to nothing but mischief."

"Surely that is the orthodox theologian's usual objection to scientific fact."

The Master lifted his head and looked at his rebel disciple. For although he was an officiating clergyman, he and the orthodox theologians were at daggers drawn.

"Views, statements of this kind are not knowledge," he said, after a while, and continued moving uneasily about without looking at Stewart.

Stewart did not reply; it seemed useless to go on talking. He recognized that the Master's attitude was what his own had been before the iron of fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him. To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the hard sofa would have seemed an oddly assorted pair. Stewart's length of frame, the raven black of his hair and beard, the marble pallor of his delicate features, made the little Master look smaller, pinker, plumper than usual; but his face, radiating wisdom and affection, was more than beautiful in the eyes of his old disciple.

"I took a great interest in your marriage, Stewart," he said. "I always think of you and your wife as two very dear young friends. You must let me speak to you now as a father might—and probably wouldn't."

Stewart assented with affectionate reverence.

"You are young, but your wife is much younger. A man marries a girl many years younger than himself and has not the same feeling of responsibility towards her as he would have towards a young man of the same age. He seldom considers her youth. Yet his responsibility is much greater towards her than towards a pupil of the same age; she needs more help, she will accept more in forming her mind and character. Now you have married a young lady who is very intelligent, very pleasing; but she has a delicate nervous system, and it has been overstrained. She lets this peculiar weakness of her memory get on her nerves. You have nerves yourself, you have imagination, and you let your mind give way to hers. That's not wise; it's not right. Let her feel that these moods do not affect you; be sure that they do not. What matters mainly is that your mutual love should remain unchanged. When your wife finds that her happiness, her real happiness, is quite untouched by these changes of mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them. So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason and Religion are the only true guides."

The Master did not utter these sayings continuously. There were pauses which Stewart might have filled, but he did not offer to do so. The spell of his old teacher's mind and aspect was upon him. His spirit was, as it were, bowed before his Master in a kind of humility.

He walked home with a lightened heart, feeling somewhat as a devout sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile, because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost which vainly endeavors to make its presence and its needs recognized.



CHAPTER XIX

Tims had ceased to be an inhabitant of Oxford. She was studying physiology in London and luxuriating in the extraordinary cheapness of life in Cranham Chambers. Not that she had any special need of cheapness; but the spinster aunt who brought her up had, together with a comfortable competence, left her the habit of parsimony. If, however, she did not know how to enjoy her own income, she allowed many women poorer than herself to benefit by it.

She was no correspondent; and an examination, followed by the serious illness of her next-door neighbor—Mr. Fitzalan, a solitary man with a small post in the British Museum—had prevented her from visiting Oxford during Mildred's last invasion. She had imagined Milly Stewart to have been leading for two undisturbed years the busily tranquil life proper to her; adoring Ian and the baby, managing her house, and going sometimes to church and sometimes to committees, without wholly neglecting the cultivation of the mind. A letter from Milly, in which she scented trouble, made her call herself sternly to account for her long neglect of her friend.

It was now the Long Vacation, but Miss Burt was still at Ascham and Lady Thomson was spending a week with her. She had stayed with the Stewarts in the spring, and resolutely keeping a blind eye turned towards whatever she ought to have disapproved in Mildred, had lauded her return to bodily vigor, and also to good sense, in ceasing to fuss about the health of Ian and the baby. Aunt Beatrice would have blushed to own a husband and child whose health required care. This time when she dined with the Stewarts she had found Milly reprehensibly pale and dispirited. One day shortly afterwards she came in to tea. The nurse happened to be out, and Tony, now a beautiful child of fifteen months, was sitting on the drawing-room floor.

The two women were discussing plans for raising money to build a gymnasium at Ascham, but Tony was not interested in the subject. He kept working his way along the floor to his mother, partly on an elbow and a knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until it jumped up with a bang—a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles, and scarlet snout—to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune. Then Tony, be sure, would laugh until he rolled from side to side. Mummy never responded to his wishes now, but Daddy had pleaded for the Jack-in-the-box to be spared, and sometimes when quite alone with Tony, would play the monkey-game in his inferior paternal style, pleased with such modified appreciation as the young critic might bestow upon him.

"I'm sorry Baby's so troublesome," apologized the distressed Milly, for the third time lifting Tony up and replacing him in a sitting posture, with his picture-book. "I'm trying to teach him to sit quiet, but I'm afraid he's been played with a great deal more than he should have been."

"To tell the truth, I thought so the last time I was here," replied Aunt Beatrice. "But he's still young enough to be properly trained. It's such waste of a reasonable person's time to spend it making idiotic noises at a small baby. And it's a thousand times better for the child's brain and nerves for it to be left entirely to itself."

Tony said nothing, but his face began to work in a threatening manner.

"I perfectly agree with you, Aunt Beatrice," responded Milly, eagerly.

Lady Thomson continued:

"Children should be spoken to as little as possible until they are from two to two and a half years old; then they should be taught to speak correctly."

Milly chimed in: "Yes, that's always been my own view. I do feel it so important that their very first impressions should be the right ones, that the first pictures they see should be good, that they should never be sung to out of tune and in general—"

Apparently this programme for babies did not commend itself to Tony; certainly the first item, enjoining silent development, did not. His face had by this time worked the right number of minutes to produce a roar, and it came. Milly picked him up, but the wounds of his spirit were not to be immediately healed, and the roar continued. Finally he had to be handed over to the parlor-maid, and so came to great happiness in the kitchen, where there were no rules against infantile conversation. Milly was flushed and disturbed.

"Baby has not been properly brought up," she said. "He's been allowed his own way too much."

"Since you say so, Milly, I must confess I noticed in the spring that you seemed to be bringing the child up in an easy-going, old-fashioned way I should hardly have expected of you. I hope you will begin now to study the theory of education. A mother should take her vocation seriously. I own I don't altogether understand the taste for frivolities which you have developed since you married. It's harmless, no doubt, but it doesn't seem quite natural in a young woman who has taken a First in Greats."

Milly's hands grasped the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked at her aunt with desolation in her dark-ringed eyes. The last thing she had ever intended was to mention the mysterious and disastrous fate that had befallen her; yet she did it.

"The person you saw here last spring wasn't I. Oh, Aunt Beatrice! Can't you see the difference?"

Lady Thomson looked at her in surprise:

"What do you mean? I was speaking of my visit to you in March."

"And don't you see the difference? Oh, how hateful you must have found me!"

"Really, Mildred, I saw nothing hateful about you. On the contrary, if you want the plain truth, I greatly prefer you in a cheerful, common-sense mood, as you were then, even if your high spirits do lead you into a little too much frivolity. I think it a more wholesome, and therefore ultimately a more useful, frame of mind than this causeless depression, which leads you to take such a morbid, exaggerated view of things."

Every word pierced Milly's heart with a double pang.

"You liked her better than me?" she asked, piteously. "Yet I've always tried to be just what you wanted me to be, Aunt Beatrice, to do everything you thought right, and she—Oh, it's too awful!"

"What do you mean, Mildred?"

"I mean that the person you prefer to me as I am now, the person who was here in March, wasn't I at all."

The fine healthy carnation of Lady Thomson's cheek paled. In her calm, rapid way she at once found the explanation of Milly's unhealthy, depressed appearance and manner. Poor Mildred Stewart was insane. Beyond the paling of her cheek, however, Lady Thomson allowed no sign of shock to be visible in her.

"That's an exaggerated way of talking," she replied. "I suppose you mean your mood was different."

Milly was looking straight in front of her with haggard eyes.

"No; it simply wasn't I at all. You believe in the Bible, don't you?"

"Not in verbal inspiration, of course, but in a general way, yes," returned Lady Thomson, puzzled but guarded.

"Do you believe in the demoniacs? In possession by evil spirits?"

Milly was not looking at vacancy now. Her desperate hands clutched the arms of her chair, as she leaned forward and fixed her aunt with hollow eyes, awaiting her reply.

"Certainly not! Most certainly not! They were obviously cases of epilepsy and insanity, misinterpreted by an ignorant age."

"No—it's all true, quite literally true. Three times, and for six months or more each time, I have been possessed by a spirit that cannot be good. I know it's not. It takes my body, it takes the love of people I care for, away from me—" Milly's voice broke and she pressed her handkerchief over her face. "You all think her—But she's bad, and some day she'll do something wicked—something that will break my heart, and you'll all insist it was I who did it, and you'll believe I'm a wicked woman."

Lady Thomson looked very grave.

"Mildred, dear," she said, "try and collect yourself. It is really wicked of you to give way to such terrible fancies. Would God permit such a thing to happen to one of His children? We feel sure He would not."

Milly shook her head, but the struggle with her hysterical sobs kept her silent. Lady Thomson walked to the window, feeling more "upset" than she had ever felt in her life. The window was open, but an awning shut out the view of the street. From the window-boxes, filled with pink geraniums and white stocks, a sweet, warm scent floated into the room, and the rattle of the milkman's cart, the chink of his cans, fell upon Lady Thomson's unheeding ears. So did voices in colloquy, but she did not particularly note a female one of a thin, chirpy quality, addressing the parlor-maid with a familiarity probably little appreciated by that elegantly decorous damsel.

Milly had scarcely mastered her tears and Lady Thomson had just begun to address her in quiet, firm tones, when Tims burst unannounced into the room. Her hat was incredibly on one side, and her sallow face almost crimson with heat, but bright with pleasure at finding herself once more in Oxford.

"Hullo, old girl!" she cried, blind to the serious scene into which she was precipitated. "How are you? Now don't kiss me"—throwing herself into an attitude of violent defence against an embrace not yet offered—"I'm too hot. Carried my bag myself all the way from the station and saved the omnibus."

Lady Thomson fixed Tims with a look of more than usually cold disapproval. Milly proffered a constrained greeting.

"Anything gone wrong?" asked Tims, after a minute, peering at Milly's tear-stained eyes with her own short-sighted ones.

Milly answered with a forced self-restraint which appeared like cold deliberation.

"Aunt Beatrice thinks I'm mad because I say I'm not the same person she found in my place last March. I want you to tell her that it's not just my fancy, but that you know that sometimes a quite different person takes my place, and I'm not responsible for anything she says or does."

"Yes, that's a solemn Gospel fact, right enough," affirmed Tims.

Lady Thomson could hardly control her indignation, but she did, although she spoke sternly to Tims.

"Do I understand you to say, Miss Timson, that it's a 'solemn Gospel fact'—Gospel! Good Heavens—that Milly is possessed by a devil?"

Tims plumped down on the sofa and stared at Lady Thomson.

"Possessed by a devil? Good Lord, no! What do you mean?"

"Mildred believes herself to be possessed by an evil spirit."

Tims turned to Milly in consternation.

"Milly, old girl! Come! Poor old Milly! I never thought you were so superstitious as all that. Besides, I know more about it than you do, and I tell you straight, you mayn't be quite such a good sort when you're in your other phase, but as to there being a devil in it—well, devil's all nonsense, but if that were so, I should like to have a devil myself, and the more the merrier."

Milly turned on her a face pale with horror and indignation. Her eyes flashed and she raised a remonstrating hand.

"Hush!" she cried. "Hush! You don't know what dreadful things you're saying. I don't know exactly what this spirit is that robs me of my life; I'm only sure it's not Me and it's not good."

"Whatever may be the matter with you, Mildred," said Lady Thomson, "it can't possibly be that. I suppose you have suffered from loss of memory again and it's upset your nerves. Why will people have nerves? I should advise you to go to Norton-Smith at once."

Milly's tears were flowing again but she managed to reply:

"I've been to Dr. Norton-Smith, Aunt Beatrice. He doesn't seem to understand."

"He doesn't want to," interjected Tims, scornfully. "You don't suppose a respectable English nerve-doctor wants to know anything about psychology? They'd be interested in the case in France, or in the United States, but they wouldn't be able to keep down Milly Number Two."

"Then what use would they be to me?" asked Milly, despairingly. "I can only trust in God; and He seems to have forsaken me."

"No, no, my dear child!" cried Lady Thomson. "Don't talk in this painful way. I can't imagine what you mean, Miss Timson. It all sounds dreadfully mad."

"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager confidence.

"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like, only—only it isn't true."

Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old houses—the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.



CHAPTER XX

When Ian came back from the Bodleian Library, where he was working, he heard voices talking in raised tones before he entered the drawing-room. He found no Milly there, but Lady Thomson and Miss Timson seated at the extreme ends of the same sofa and engaged in a heated discussion.

"It can't be true," Lady Thomson was stating firmly. "If it were, what becomes of Personal Immortality?"

Miss Timson had just time to convey the fact that Personal Immortality was not the affair of a woman of science, before she rose to greet Ian, which she did effusively.

"Hullo!" he remarked, cheerfully, when her effusion was over. "No Milly and no tea!"

"We don't want either just yet," returned Lady Thomson. "I'm terribly anxious about Mildred, Ian, and Miss Timson has not said anything to make me less so. I want a sound, sensible opinion on the state of her—her nerves."

Ian's brow clouded.

"Tell me frankly, do you notice so great a difference in her from time to time, as to account for the positively insane delusion she has got into her head?"

"What do you mean, Aunt Beatrice?" asked Ian, shortly, sternly eying Tims, whom he imagined to have let out the secret.

"Mildred has made an extraordinary statement to me about not being the same person now as she was in March. Of course I see she—well, she is not so full of life as she was then. Yes, I do admit she is in a very different mood. But do you know the poor unfortunate child has got it into her head that she is possessed by an evil spirit? I can't think how you could have allowed her to come to that state of—of mental aberration, without doing anything."

Ian was silent. He looked gaunt and sombrely dark in the low, awning-shaded room, with its heavy beams and floor of wavelike unevenness.

"You'll have to put her under care next, if you don't take some steps. Send her for a sea-voyage."

"I'd take her myself if I thought it would do her any good," said Tims. "But I'll lay my bottom dollar it wouldn't."

"I'm afraid I think Miss Timson's view of the matter as insane as Milly's," returned Lady Thomson, tartly.

Ian lifted his bowed head and addressed Tims:

"I should like to know exactly what your view of the matter is, Miss Timson. We need not discuss poor Milly's; it's too absurd and also too painful."

"It's no doubt a case of disintegration of personality," replied Tims, after a pause. "Somewhere inside our brains must be a nerve-centre which co-ordinates most of our mental, our sensory and motor processes, in such a manner as to produce consciousness, volition, what we call personality. But after all there are always plenty of activities within us going on independent of it. Your heart beats, your stomach digests—even your memory works apart from your consciousness sometimes. Now suppose some shock or strain enfeebles your centre of consciousness, so that it ceases to be able to co-ordinate all the mental processes it has been accustomed to superintend. What you call your personality is the outcome of your memory and all your other faculties and tendencies working together, checking and balancing each other. Suppose your centre of consciousness so enfeebled; suppose at the same time an enfeeblement of memory, causing you to completely forget external facts: certain of your faculties and tendencies are left working and they are co-ordinated without an important part of the memory, without many other faculties and tendencies which checked and balanced them. Naturally you appear to yourself and to every one else a totally different person; but it's not a new personality really, it's only a bit of the old one which goes on its own hook, while the rest is quiescent."

"This is the most abominably materialistic theory of the human mind I ever heard," exclaimed Lady Thomson, indignantly. "The most degrading to our spiritual natures."

Ian leaned against the high, carved mantel-piece and pushed back the black hair from his forehead.

"I'm not concerned with that," he replied, deliberately, discussing this case so vitally near to him with an almost terrible calmness. "But I can't feel that this disintegration theory altogether covers the ground. There is no development of characteristics previously to be found in Milly; on the contrary, the qualities of mind and character which she exhibits when—when the change comes over her, are precisely the opposite of those she exhibits in what I presume we ought to call her normal state."

"There must be some reason for it, old chap, you know," returned Tims; "and it seems to me that's the line you've got to move along, unless you're an idiot and go in for devils or spiritualistic nonsense."

"I believe I've followed what you've been saying, Miss Timson," said Lady Thomson, in her fullest tones; "and I can assure you I feel under no necessity to become either a materialist or an idiot in consequence."

Ian spoke again.

"I don't profess to be scientific, but I do seem to see another possible line, running parallel with yours, but not quite the same. It's evident we can inherit faculties, characteristics, from our ancestors which never become active in us; but we know they must have been present in us in a quiescent state, because we can transmit them to children in whom they become active. Mildred's father and mother, for example, are not scholars, although her grandfather and great-grandfather were; yet in one of her parents at least there must be a germ of the scholar's faculty which has never been developed, because Mildred has inherited it. Now why can't we develop all the faculties, the germs of which lie within our borders? Perhaps because we have each only a certain amount of what I'll call vital current. If the Nile could overflow the whole desert it would all be fertilized, and perhaps if we had sufficient vital force we could develop all the faculties whose germs we inherit. Suppose by some accident, owing to a shock or strain, as you say, the flow of this vital current of ours is stopped in the direction in which it usually flows most strongly; its course is diverted and it fertilizes tracts of our brain and nervous system which before have been lying quiescent, sterile. If we lose the memory of our former lives, and if at the same time hereditary faculties and tendencies, of the existence of which we were unaware, suddenly become active in us, we are practically new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. No doubt this is all very unscientific, but so far Science seems to have nothing to say on the question."

"It certainly has not," commented Lady Thomson, decisively. "I ought to know what Science is, considering how often I've met Mr. Darwin and Professor Huxley. Hypnotism and this kind of unpleasant talk is not Science. It's only a new variety of the hocus-pocus that's been imposing on human weakness ever since the world began. I'd sooner believe with poor Milly that she's possessed by a devil. It's less silly to accept inherited superstitions than to invent brand-new ones."

"But we've got to account somehow for the extraordinary changes which take place in Milly," sighed Ian, wearily.

The light lines across his forehead were showing as furrows, and Tims's whole face was corrugated.

"No hocus-pocus about them, anyway," she said.

"There's a great deal of fancy about them," retorted Lady Thomson. "A nervous, imaginative man like you, Ian, ought to be on your guard against allowing such notions to get hold of you. It's so easy to fancy things are as you're afraid they may be, and then you influence Milly and she goes from bad to worse. I think I may claim to understand her if any one does, and all I see is that she gives way to moods. At first I thought it was a steady development of character; but I admit that when she is unwell and out of spirits, she becomes just her old timid, over-conscientious self again. She's always been very easily influenced, very dependent, and now—I hardly like to say such a thing of my own niece—but I fear there's a touch of hysteria about her. I've always heard that hysterical people, even when they've been perfectly frank and truthful before, become deceitful and act parts till it's impossible to tell fact from falsehood with regard to them. I would suggest your letting Mildred come to me for a month or two, Ian. I feel sure I should send her back to you quite cured of all this nonsense."

At this point Milly came in. Ian stretched out his hand towards her with protective tenderness; but even at the moment when his whole soul was moved by an impulse of compassion so strong that it seemed almost love, a spirit within him arose and mocked at all hypotheses, telling him that this poor stricken wife of his, seemingly one with the lady of his heart, was not she, but another.

"Aunt Beatrice was just saying you ought to get away from domestic cares for a month or two, Milly," he said, as cheerfully as he could.

Lady Thomson explained.

"What you want is a complete change; though I don't know what people mean when they talk about 'domestic cares.' I should like to have you up at Clewes for the rest of the Long. Ian can look after the baby."

Milly smiled at her sweetly, but rather as though she were talking nonsense.

"It's very kind of you, Aunt Beatrice, but Ian and I have never been parted for a day since we were married; I mean not when—and I don't feel as though I could spare a minute of his company. And poor Baby, too! Oh no! But of course it's very good of you to think of it."

"Then you must all come to Clewes," decided Aunt Beatrice, after some remonstrance. "That'll settle it."

"But my work!" ejaculated Ian in dismay. "How am I to get on at Clewes, away from the libraries?"

"There are some things in life more important than books, Ian," returned Lady Thomson.

"But it won't do a penn'orth of good," broke in Tims, argumentatively. "I don't pretend to have more than a working hypothesis, but whoever else may prove to be right, Lady Thomson's on the wrong line."

Lady Thomson surveyed her in silence; Ian took no notice of her remark. He was looking before him with a sadness incomprehensible to the uncreative man—to the man who has never dreamed dreams and seen visions; with the sadness of one who just as the cloudy emanations of his mind are beginning to take form and substance sees them scattered, perhaps never again to reunite, by some cold breath from the relentless outside world of circumstance. He made his renunciation in silence; then, with a quiet smile, he turned to Lady Thomson and answered her.

"You're very kind, Aunt Beatrice, and quite right. There are things in life much more important than books."



CHAPTER XXI

So the summer went by; a hot summer, passed brightly enough to all appearance in the spacious rooms and gardens of Clewes and in expeditions among the neighboring fells. But to Ian it seemed rather an anxious pause in life. His work was at a stand-still, yet whatever the optimistic Aunt Beatrice might affirm, he could not feel that the shadow was lifting from his wife's mind. To others she appeared cheerful in the quiet, serious way that had always been hers, but he saw that her whole attitude towards life, especially in her wistful, yearning tenderness towards himself and Tony, was that of a woman who feels the stamp of death to be set upon her. At night, lying upon his breast, she would sometimes cling to him in an agony of desperate love, adjuring him to tell her the truth as to that Other: whether he did not see that she was different from his own Milly, whether it were possible that he could love that mysterious being as he loved her, his true, loving wife. Ian, who had been wont to hold stern doctrines as to the paramount obligation of truthfulness, perjured himself again and again, and hoped the Recording Angel dropped the customary tear. But, however deep the perjury, before long he was sure to find himself obliged to renew it.

To a man of his sensitive and punctilious nature the situation was almost intolerable. The pity of this tender, innocent life, his care, which seemed like some little inland bird, torn by the tempest from its native fields and tossed out to be the plaything of an immense and terrible ocean whose deeps no man has sounded! The pity of that other life, so winged for shining flight, so armed for triumphant battle, yet held down helpless in those cold ocean depths, and for pity's sake not to be helped by so much as a thought! Yet from the thorns of his hidden life he plucked one flower of comfort which to him, the philosopher, the man of Abstract Thought, was as refreshing as a pious reflection would be to a man of Religion. He had once been somewhat shaken by the dicta of the modern philosophers who relegate human love to the plane of an illness or an appetite. But where was the physical difference between the woman he so passionately loved and the one for whom he had never felt more than affection and pity? If from the strange adventure of his marriage he had lost some certainties concerning the human soul, he had gained the certainty that Love at least appertains to it.

One hot afternoon Milly was writing her Australian letter under a spreading ilex-tree on the lawn. Lady Thomson and Ian were sitting there also; he reading the latest French novel, she making notes for a speech she had to deliver shortly at the opening of a Girls' High School.

It is sometimes difficult to find the right news for people who have been for some years out of England, and Milly, in the languor of her melancholy, had relaxed the excellent habit formed under Aunt Beatrice of always keeping her mind to the subject in hand. She sat at the table with one hand propping her chin, gazing dreamily at the bright flower-beds on the lawn and the big, square, homely house, brightened by its striped awnings. At length Aunt Beatrice looked up from her notes.

"Mooning, Milly!" she exclaimed, in her full, agreeable voice. "Now I suppose you'll be telling your father you havn't time to write him a long letter."

"Milly's not mooning; she's making notes, like you," Ian replied, for his wife.

Milly looked around at him in surprise, and then at her right hand. It held a stylograph and had been resting on some scattered sheets of foolscap that Ian had left there in the morning. She had certainly been scrawling on it a little, but she was not aware of having written anything. Yet the scrawl, partly on one sheet and partly on another, was writing, very bad and broken, but still with a resemblance to her own handwriting. She pored over it; then looked Ian in the eyes, her own eyes large with a bewilderment touched with fear.

"I—I don't know what it means," she said, in a low, anxious tone.

"What's that?" queried Aunt Beatrice. "Can't read what you've written? You remind me of our old writing-master at school, who used to say tragically that he couldn't understand how it was that when that happened to a man he didn't just take a gun and shoot himself. I recommend you the pond, Mildred. It's more feminine."

"Please don't talk to Milly like that," retorted Ian, not quite lightly. "She always follows your advice, you know. It—it's only scrabbles."

He had left his chair and was leaning over the table, completely puzzled, first by Milly's terrified expression, then by what she had written, illegibly enough, across the two sheets of foolscap. He made out: "You are only miserab ..."—the words were interspersed with really illegible scrawls—"... Go ... go ... Let me ... I want to live, I want to ... Mild ..."

Milly now wrote in her usual clear hand: "Who wrote that?"

He scribbled with his pencil: "You."

She replied in writing: "No. I know nothing about it."

Lady Thomson had taken up the newspaper, a thing she never did except at odd minutes, although she contrived to read everything in it that was really worth reading. Folding it up and looking at her watch, she exclaimed:

"A quarter of an hour before the carriage is round! Now don't go dawdling there, young people, and keep it standing in the sun."

Milly stood up and gathered her writing-materials together. Aunt Beatrice's tall figure, its stalwart handsomeness disguised in uncouth garments, passed with its usual vigorous gait across the burning sunlight on the lawn and broad gravel walk, to disappear under the awning of a French window. Milly, very pale, had closed her eyes and her hands were clasped. She trembled, but her voice and expression were calm and even resolute.

"The evil spirit is trying to get possession of me in another way now," she said. "But with God's help I shall be able to resist it."

Ian too was pale and disturbed. It was to him as though he had suddenly heard a beloved voice calling faintly for help.

"It's only automatic writing, dear," he replied. "You may not have been aware you were writing, but it probably reflects something in your thoughts."

"It does not," returned she, firmly. "However miserable I may sometimes be, I could never wish to give up a moment of my life with you, my own husband, or to leave you and our child to the influence of this—this being."

She stretched out her arms to him.

"Please hold me, Ian, and will as I do, that I may resist this horrible invasion. I have a feeling that you can help me."

He hesitated. "I, darling? But I don't believe—"

She approached him, and took hold of him urgently, looking him in the eyes.

"Won't you do it, husband dear? Please, for my sake, even if you don't believe, promise you'll will to keep me here. Will it, with all your might!"

What madness it was, this fantastic scene upon the well-kept lawn, under the square windows of the sober, opulent North Country house! And the maddest part of it all was the horrible reluctance he felt to comply with his wife's wish. He seemed to himself to pause noticeably before answering her with a meaningless half-laugh:

"Of course I'll promise anything you like, dear."

He put his arms around her and rested his face upon her golden head.

"Will!" she whispered, and the voice was one of command rather than of appeal. "Will! You have promised."

He willed as she commanded him.

The triple madness of it! He did not believe—and yet it seemed to him that the being he loved best in all the world was struggling up from below, calling to him for help from her tomb; and he was helping her enemy to hold down the sepulchral stone above her. He put his hand to his brow, and the sweat stood upon it.

Aunt Beatrice's masculine foot crunched the gravel. She stood there dressed and ready for the drive, beckoning them with her parasol. They came across the lawn holding each other by the hand, and Milly's face was calm, even happy. Aunt Beatrice smiled at them broadly with her large, handsome mouth and bright brown eyes.

"What, not had enough of spooning yet, you foolish young people! The carriage will be round in one minute, and Milly won't be ready."



CHAPTER XXII

There is a joy in the return of every season, though the return of spring is felt and celebrated beyond the rest. The gay flame dancing on the hearth where lately all was blackness, the sense of immunity from the "wrongs and arrows" of the skies and their confederate earth, the concentration of the sense upon the intimate charms which four walls can contain, bring to civilized man consolation for the loss of summer's lavish warmth and beauty. Children are always sensible of these opening festivals of the seasons, but many mature people enjoy without realizing them.

To Mildred the world was again new, and she looked upon its most familiar objects with the delighted eyes of a traveller returning to a favorite foreign country. So she did not complain because when she had left the earth it had been hurrying towards the height of June, and she had returned to find the golden boughs of October already stripped by devastating winds. The flames leaped merrily under the great carved mantel-piece in her white-panelled drawing-room, showing the date 1661, and the initials of the man who had put it there, and on its narrow shelf a row of Chelsea figures which she had picked up in various corners of Oxford. The chintz curtains were drawn around the bay-window and a bright brass scaldino stood in it, filled with the yellows and red-browns, the silvery pinks and mauves of chrysanthemums. The ancient charm, the delicate harmony of the room, in which every piece of furniture, every picture, every ornament, had been chosen with an exactness of taste seldom found in the young, made it more pleasurable to a cultivated eye than the gilded show drawing-rooms into which wealth too commonly crowds a medley of incongruous treasures and costly nullities.

It was a free evening for Ian, and as it was but the second since the Desire of his Eyes had returned to him, his gaze followed her movements in a contented silence, as she wandered about the room in her slight grace, the whiteness of her skin showing through the transparency of a black dress, which, although it was old, Milly would have thought unsuitable for a domestic evening. When everything was just where it should be, she returned to the fire and sank into a chair thoughtfully.

"How I should like some rides," she said; "but I suppose I can't have them, not unless Maxwell Davison's still in Oxford."

Ian's face clouded.

"He's not," he returned, shortly; and knocked the ashes out of his pipe, hesitating as to how he should put what he had to say about Maxwell Davison.

Mildred put her hand over her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Suddenly the silence was broken by a burst of rippling laughter. Ian started; his own thoughts had not been so diverting.

"What's the joke, Mildred?"

"Oh, Ian, don't you know? Max made love to Milly and she—she bit him! Wasn't it frightfully funny?" She laughed again, with a more inward enjoyment.

"I didn't know you bit him, although he richly deserved it; but of course I knew he made love to you. How do you know?"

"It came to me just now in a sort of flash. I seemed to see him—to see her, floundering out of the canoe; and both of them in such a towering rage. It really was too funny."

Ian's face hardened.

"I am afraid I can't see the joke of a man making love to my wife."

"You old stupid! He'd never have dared to behave like that to me; but Milly's such an ass."

"Milly was frightened, shocked, as any decent woman would be to whom such a thing happened. She certainly didn't encourage Maxwell; but she found an appointment already made for her to go on the river with him. No doubt she took an exaggerated view of her—of your—good God, Mildred, what am I to say?—well, of your relations with him."

Mildred had closed her eyes. A strange knowledge of things that had passed during her suppression was coming to her in glimpses.

"I know," she returned, in a kind of wonder at her own knowledge. "Absurd! But Max did behave abominably. I couldn't have believed it of him, even with that silly little baa-lamb. Of course she couldn't manage him. She won't be able to manage Tony long."

"Please don't speak of—of your other self in that way, Mildred. You're very innocent of the world in both your selves, and you must have been indiscreet or it would never have occurred to Maxwell to make love to you."

Ian was actually frowning, his lips were tight and hard, the clear pallor of his cheek faintly streaked with red. Mildred, leaning forward, looked at him, interested, her round chin on her hands.

"Are you angry, Ian? I really believe you are. Is it with me?"

"No, not with you. But of course I'm angry when I think of a fellow like that, my own cousin, a man who has been a guest in my house over and over again, being cad enough to make love to my wife."

Mildred was smiling quietly to herself.

"How primitive you are, Ian!" she said. "I suppose men are primitive when they're angry. I don't mind, but it does seem funny you should be."

He looked at her, surprised.

"Primitive? What do you mean?"

"What difference does it make, Max being your cousin, you silly old boy? You'd hardly ever seen him till last winter. Clans aren't any use to us now, are they? And when a man's got a house of his own, as Max had, or even a hotel, why should he be so grateful as all that for a few decent meals? He's not in the desert, depending on you for food and protection. Anyhow, it seems curious to expect him to weigh little things like that in the balance against what is always said to be such a very strong feeling as a man's love for a woman."

Men often deplore that they have failed in their attempts fundamentally to civilize Woman. They would use stronger language if Woman often made attempts fundamentally to civilize them.

"Please don't look at me like that," Mildred said, tremulously, after a pause. And the tears rushed to her eyes.

Ian's face softened, as leaning against the tall white mantel-piece he looked down and met the tear-bright gaze of his beloved.

"Poor sweetheart!" he exclaimed. "You're just a child for all your cleverness, and you don't half understand what you're talking about. But listen to me—" He kneeled before her, bringing their heads almost on a level. "I won't have any more affairs like this of Maxwell's. I dare say it was as much my fault as yours, but it mustn't happen again."

She dabbed away two tears that hung on her eyelashes, and looked at him with such a bright alluring yet elusive smile as might have flitted across the face of Ariel.

"How can I help it if Milly flirts? I don't believe I can help it if I do myself. But I can tell you this, Ian—yes, really—" Her soft white arms went about his neck. "I've never seen a man yet who was a patch upon you for cleverness and handsomeness and goodness and altogetherness. No! You really are the very nicest man I ever saw!"



CHAPTER XXIII

In spite of the deepening dislike between the two egos which struggled for the possession of Mildred Stewart's bodily personality, they had a common interest in disguising the fact of their dual existence. Yet the transformation never occurred without producing its little harvest of inconveniences, and the difficulty of disguising the difference between the two was the greater because of the number of old acquaintances and friends of Milly Flaxman living in Oxford.

This was one reason why, when Ian was offered the headship of the Merchants' Guild College in London, Mildred encouraged him to take it. The income, too, seemed large in comparison to their Oxford one; and the great capital, with its ever-roaring surge of life, drew her with a natural magnetism. The old Foundation was being reconstructed, and was ambitious of adorning itself with a name so distinguished as Ian Stewart's, while at the same time obtaining the services of a man with so many of his best years still before him. Stewart, although he could do fairly well in practical administration, if he gave his mind to it, had won distinction as a student and man of letters, and feared that, difficult as it was to combine the real work of his life with bread-and-butter-making in Oxford, it would be still more difficult to combine it with steering the ship of the Merchants' Guild College. But he had the sensitive man's defect of too often deferring to the judgment of others, less informed or less judicious than himself. He found it impossible to believe that the opinion of the Master of Durham was not better than his own; and his old friend and tutor was strongly in favor of his accepting the headship. His most really happy and successful years had been those later ones in which he had shone as the Head of the most brilliant College in Oxford, a man of affairs and, in his individual way, a social centre. Accordingly he found it impossible to believe that it might be otherwise with Ian Stewart. The majority of Ian's most trusted advisers were of the same opinion as the Master, since the number of persons who can understand the conditions necessary to the productiveness of exceptional and creative minds is always few. Besides, most people at bottom are in Martha's attitude of scepticism towards the immaterial service of the world.

Lady Thomson voiced the general opinion in declaring that a man could always find time to do good work if he really wanted to do it. She rejoiced when Ian put aside the serious doubts which beset him and accepted the London offer. Mildred also rejoiced, although she regretted much that she must leave behind her, and in particular the old panelled house.

This was, however, the one part of Oxford that Milly did not grieve to have lost, when she awoke once more from long months of sleep, to find herself in a new home. For she had grown to be silently afraid of the old house, with the great chimney-stacks like hollowed towers within it, made, it seemed, for the wind to moan in; its deep embrasures and panelling, that harbored inexplicable sounds; its ancient boards that creaked all night as if with the tread of mysterious feet. Awake in the dark hours, she fancied there were really footsteps, really knockings, movements, faint sighs passing outside her door, and that some old wicked life which should long since have passed away through the portals of the grave, clung to those ancient walls with a horrible tenacity, still refusing the great renunciation of death.

It was true that in the larger, more hurried world of London it was easier to dissimulate her transformations than it had been in Oxford. The comparative retirement in which Milly lived was easily explained by her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns—which more and more encroached upon those of the original personality—the strong, intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her young heart of its happiness; and for that very reason it grew deeper and more envenomed.

That Ian should love her evil and mysterious rival as though they two were really one was horrible to her. Even her child was not unreservedly her own, to bring up according to her own ideas, to love without fear of that rival. Tony was like his father in the sweetness of his disposition, as well as in his dark beauty, and he accented with surprising resignation the innumerable rules and regulations which Milly set about his path and about his bed. But although he was healthy, his nerves were highly strung, and it seemed as though her feverish anxiety for his physical, moral, and intellectual welfare reacted upon him and made him, after a few weeks of her influence, less vigorous in appearance, less gay and boylike than he was during her absence. Ian dared not hint a preference for the animal spirits that Mildred encouraged, with their attendant noise and nonsense, considered by Milly so undesirable. But one day Tims observed, cryptically, that "A watched boy never boils"; and Emma, the nurse, told Mrs. Stewart bluntly that she thought Master Tony wasn't near so well and bright when he was always being looked after, as he was when he was let go his own way a bit, like other children. Then a miserable fear beset Milly lest the boy, too, should notice the change in his mother; lest he should look forward to the disappearance of the woman who loved him so passionately, watched over him with such complete devotion, and in his silent heart regret, invoke, that other. It was at once soothing and bitter to her to be assured by Ian and by Tims that they had never been able to discover the least sign that Tony was aware when the change occurred between the two personalities of his mother.

Two years passed in London, two years out of which the original owner enjoyed a total share of only nine months; and this, indeed, she could not truly have been said to have enjoyed, since happiness was far from her. Death would have been a sad but simple catastrophe, to be met with resignation to the will of God. What resignation could be felt before this gradual strangulation of her being at the hands of a nameless yet surely Evil Thing? Her love for Ian was so great that his sufferings were more to her than her own, and in the space of those two years she saw that on him, too, sorrow had set its mark. The glow of his good looks and the brilliancy of his mind were alike dulled. It was not only that his shoulders were bent, his hair thinned and touched with gray, but his whole appearance, once so individual, was growing merely typical; that of the middle-aged Academic, absorbed in the cares of his profession. His real work was not merely at a stand-still, but a few more such years and his capacity for it would be destroyed. She felt this vaguely, with the intuition of love. If the partnership had been only between him and her, he surely would have yielded to her prayer to give up the headship of the Merchants' Guild College after a set term; but he put the question by. Evidently that Other, who cared for nothing but her own selfish interests and amusements, who spent upon them the money that he ought to be saving, would never allow him to give up his appointment unless something better offered. It was not only her own life, it was the higher and happier part of his that she was struggling to save in those desperate hours when she sought around her for some weapon wherewith to fight that mortal foe. She turned to priests, Anglican, Roman Catholic; but they failed her. Both believed her to be suffering under an insane delusion, but the Roman Catholic priest would have attempted to exorcise the evil spirit if she would have joined his Communion. She was too honest to pretend to a belief that was not hers.