The premonition, then, had justified itself! Something had told him that the telegram was an evil thing. A vaguely superstitious consciousness of being in the presence of Fate laid hold upon him. His great day of triumph had its blood-stain. A victim had been needful—and to that end poor simple, silly old Tavender was a dead man. Thorpe could see him,—an embarrassing cadaver eyed by strangers who did not know what to do with it,—fatuous even in death.

A sudden rage at Kervick flamed up. He clearly had played the fool—clumsily over-plying the simpleton with drink till he had killed him. The shadow of murder indubitably hung over the thing. And then—the crass witlessness of telegraphing! Already, doubtless, the police of Edinborough were talking over the wires with Scotland Yard. A reference to a death in Edinborough, in a telegram from Newcastle—it was incredible that this should escape the eye of the authorities. Any minute might bring a detective through that door there—following into the Board Room with his implacable scent the clue of blood. Thorpe's fancy pictured this detective as a momentarily actual presence—tall, lean, cold-eyed, mysteriously calm and fatally wise, the omniscient terror of the magazine short-stories.

He turned faint and sick under a spasm of fright. The menace of enquiry became something more than a threat: he felt it, like the grip of a constable upon his arm. Everything would be mercilessly unravelled. The telegram of the idiot Kervick would bring the police down upon him like a pack of beagles. The beliefs and surmises of the idiot Gafferson would furnish them with the key to everything. He would have his letter from Tavender to show to the detectives—and the Government's smart lawyers would ferret out the rest. The death of Tavender—they could hardly make him responsible for that; but it was the dramatic feature of this death which would inspire them all to dig up everything about the fraud. It was this same sensational added element of the death, too, which would count with a jury. They were always gross, sentimental fools, these juries. They would mix up the death and the deal in Rubber Consols, and in their fat-headed confusion would say "Penal Servitude—fourteen years." Or no, it was the Judge who fixed that. But the Judges were fools, too; they were too conceited, too puffed up with vanity, to take the trouble to understand. He groaned aloud in a nightmare of helplessness.

The sound of his own voice, moaning in his ears, had a magical effect upon him. He lifted his head, gazed about him, and then flushed deeply. His nerveless cowardice had all at once become unbelievable to himself. With a shamed frown he straightened himself, and stood thus for a long minute, engrossed in the definite task of chasing these phantoms from his mind. Once a manly front was displayed to them, they slunk away with miraculous facility. He poured out some brandy, and sipped it neat, and laughed scornfully, defiantly, aloud.

He had over half a million—with power and force and courage enough to do with it what he liked. He had fought luck undauntedly, unwearyingly, during all those years when his hands were empty. Was he to tremble and turn tail now, when his hands were full, when he was armoured and weaponed at every point? He was amazed and hurt, and still more enraged, at that fit of girlish weakness which had possessed him. He could have beaten himself with stripes for it. But it could never happen again—never, never!

He told himself that with proud, resolute reiteration, as he got his hat and stick, and put in his pockets one or two papers from the desk, and then glanced about the Board Room for what was, most likely, the last time. Here he had won his great victory over Fate, here he had put his enemies under his feet, and if innocent simpletons had wandered into the company of these foes, it mattered not a whit to him that they also had been crushed. Figuratively, he turned his back upon them now; he left them, slain and trampled, in the Board Room behind him. They no longer concerned him.

Figuratively, too, as he walked with firmness to the door, he stepped over the body of old Tavender, upon the threshold, and bestowed upon it a downward mental glance, and passed on. By the time he reached the street, the memory of Tavender had become the merest shred of a myth. As he strode on, it seemed to him that his daughters came again, and took his hands, and moved lovingly beside him—lovingly and still more admiringly than before.



CHAPTER XXII

BY the autumn of the following year, a certain small proportion of the people inhabiting the district in Hertfordshire which set its clocks by the dial over the stable-tower of Pellesley Court had accustomed themselves to give the place its new name of High Thorpe. These were for the most part the folk of peculiarly facile wits and ready powers of adaptation, like pushing small tradesmen, and the upper servants in county houses. An indolent and hazy compromise upon Pellesley Thorpe had drifted into use by perhaps a larger number. To the puzzled conservatism of the abiding huge majority nearest to the soil—the round-backed, lumpish men who tie strings round their corduroys under the knee, and the strong, cow-faced women who look at passers-by on the road from the doors of dark little cottages, over radiant patches of blossoming garden—it seemed safest to drop family names altogether, and call it merely the Court.

It stood proudly upon what was rather a notable elevation for those flat parts—a massive mansion of simple form, built of a grey stone which seemed at a distance almost white against the deep background of yews and Italian pines behind it. For many miles seaward this pale front was a landmark. From the terrace-walk at its base, one beheld a great expanse of soft green country, sloping gently away for a long distance, then stretching out upon a level which on misty days was interminable. In bright weather, the remote, low-lying horizon had a defining line of brownish-blue—and this stood for what was left of a primitive forest, containing trees much older than the Norman name it bore. It was a forest which at some time, no doubt, had extended without a break till it merged into that of Epping—leagues away to the south. The modern clearance and tillage, however, which separated it now from Epping had served as a curiously effective barrier—more baffling than the Romans and Angles in their turn had found the original wildwood. No stranger seemed ever to find his way into that broad, minutely-cultivated fertile plain which High Thorpe looked down upon. No railway had pushed its cheapening course across it. Silent, embowered old country roads and lanes netted its expanse with hedgerows; red points of tiled roofs, distinguishable here and there in clusters among the darker greens of orchards, identified the scattered hamlets—all named in Domesday Book, all seemingly unchanged since. A grey square church-tower emerging from the rooks' nests; an ordered mass of foliage sheltering the distant gables and chimneys of some isolated house; the dim perception on occasion that a rustic waggon was in motion on some highway, crawling patiently like an insect—of this placid, inductive nature were all the added proofs of human occupation that the landscape offered.

Mr. Stormont Thorpe, on an afternoon of early October, yawned in the face of this landscape—and then idly wondered a little at the mood which had impelled him to do so. At the outset of his proprietorship he had bound himself, as by a point of honour, to regard this as the finest view from any gentleman's house in England. During the first few months his fidelity had been taxed a good deal, but these temptations and struggles lay now all happily behind him. He had satisfactorily assimilated the spirit of the vista, and blended it with his own. Its inertia, when one came to comprehend it, was undeniably magnificent, and long ago he had perceived within himself the growth of an answering repose, a responsive lethargy, which in its full development was also going to be very fine. Practically all the land this side of the impalpable line where trees and houses began to fade into the background belonged to him; there were whole villages nestling half-concealed under its shrubberies which were his property. As an investment, these possessions were extremely unremunerative. Indeed, if one added the cost of the improvements which ought to be made, to the expenditure already laid out in renovations, it was questionable if for the next twenty years they would not represent a deficit on the income-sheet. But, now that he had laid hold of the local character, it pleased him that it should be so. He would not for the world have his gentle, woolly-minded, unprofitable cottagers transformed into "hustlers"; it would wound his eye to see the smoke of any commercial chimney, the smudge of any dividend-paying factory, staining the pure tints of the sylvan landscape. He had truly learned to love it.

Yet now, as he strolled on the terrace with his first after-luncheon cigar, he unaccountably yawned at the thing he loved. Upon reflection, he had gone to bed rather earlier the previous evening than usual. He had not been drinking out of the ordinary; his liver seemed right enough. He was not conscious of being either tired or drowsy. He looked again at the view with some fixity, and said to himself convincingly that nothing else in England could compare with it. It was the finest thing there was anywhere. Then he surprised himself in the middle of another yawn—and halted abruptly. It occurred to him that he wanted to travel.

Since his home-coming to this splendid new home in the previous January, at the conclusion of a honeymoon spent in Algiers and Egypt, he had not been out of England. There had been a considerable sojourn in London, it is true, at what was described to him as the height of the Season, but looking back upon it, he could not think of it as a diversion. It had been a restless, over-worked, mystifying experience, full of dinners to people whom he had never seen before, and laborious encounters with other people whom he did not particularly want to see again. There had been no physical comfort in it for him, and little more mental satisfaction, for Londoners, or rather people in London, seemed all to be making an invidious distinction in their minds between him and his wife. The fact that she continued to be called Lady Cressage was not of itself important to him. But in the incessant going about in London, their names were called out together so often that his ear grew sensitive and sore to the touch of the footmen's reverberations. The meaning differentiation which the voices of the servants insisted upon, seemed inevitably reflected in the glance and manner of their mistresses. More than anything else, that made him hate London, and barred the doors of his mind to all thoughts of buying a town-house.

His newly-made wife, it is true, had not cared much for London, either, and had agreed to his decision against a town-house almost with animation. The occasion of their return from the hot bustle of the metropolis to these cool home shades—in particular the minute in which, at a bend in the winding carriage-way down below, they had silently regarded together the spectacle uplifted before them, with the big, welcoming house, and the servants on the terrace—had a place of its own in his memory. Edith had pressed his arm, as they sat side by side in the landau, on the instant compulsion of a feeling they had in common. He had never, before or since, had quite the same assurance that she shared an emotion with him.

He was very far, however, from finding fault with his wife. It was in the nature of the life he chose to lead that he should see a great deal of her, and think a great deal about her, and she bore both tests admirably. If there was a fault to be found, it was with himself for his inability to altogether understand her. She played the part she had undertaken to play with abundant skill and discretion and grace, and even with an air of nice good-fellowship which had some of the aspects of affection. He was vaguely annoyed with himself for having insight enough to perceive that it was a part she was playing, and yet lacking the added shrewdness to divine what her own personal attitude to her role was like. He had noticed sometimes the way good women looked at their husbands when the latter were talking over their heads—with the eager, intent, non-comprehending admiration of an affectionate dog. This was a look which he could not imagine himself discovering in his wife's eves. It was not conceivable to him that he should talk over her head. Her glance not only revealed an ample understanding of all he said, but suggested unused reserves of comprehension which he might not fathom. It was as if, intellectually no less than socially, she possessed a title and he remained an undistinguished plebeian.

He made no grievance, however, even in his own thoughts, of either inequality. She had been charmingly frank and fair about the question of the names, when it first arose. The usage had latterly come to be, she explained, for a widow bearing even a courtesy title derived from her late husband, to retain it on marrying again. It was always the easiest course to fall in with usage, but if he had any feelings on the subject, and preferred to have her insist on being called Mrs. Thorpe, she would meet his wishes with entire willingness. It had seemed to him, as to her, that it was wisest to allow usage to settle the matter. Some months after their marriage there appeared in the papers what purported to be an authoritative announcement that the Queen objected to the practice among ladies who married a second time, of retaining titles acquired by the earlier marriages, and that the lists of precedency at Buckingham Palace would henceforth take this into account. Lady Cressage showed this to her husband, and talked again with candour on the subject. She said she had always rather regretted the decision they originally came to, and even now could wish that it might be altered, but that to effect a change in the face of this newspaper paragraph would seem servile—and in this as in most other things he agreed with her. As she said, they wanted nothing of Buckingham Palace.

She wanted equally little, it seemed, of the society which the neighbouring district might afford. There was a meagre routine of formal calls kept in languid operation, Thorpe knew, but it was so much in the background that he never came in contact with it. His own notions of the part he ought to take in County affairs had undergone a silent and unnoted, yet almost sweeping, change. What little he saw of the gentry and strong local men with whom he would have to work, quietly undermined and dismantled all his ambitions in that direction. They were not his sort; their standards for the measurement of things were unintelligible to him. He did not doubt that, if he set himself about it, he could impose his dominion upon them, any more than he doubted that, if he mastered the Chinese language, he could lift himself to be a Mandarin, but the one would be as unnatural and unattractive an enterprise as the other. He came to be upon nodding terms with most of the "carriage-people" round about; some few he exchanged meaningless words with upon occasion, and understood that his wife also talked with, when it was unavoidable, but there his relationship to the County ended, and he was well pleased that it should be so. It gave him a deep satisfaction to see that his wife seemed also well pleased.

He used the word "seemed" in his inmost musings, for it was never quite certain what really did please and displease her. It was always puzzling to him to reconcile her undoubted intellectual activity with the practical emptiness of the existence she professed to enjoy. In one direction, she had indeed a genuine outlet for her energies, which he could understand her regarding in the light of an occupation. She was crazier about flowers and plants than anybody he had ever heard of, and it had delighted him to make over to her, labelled jocosely as the bouquet-fund, a sum of money which, it seemed to him, might have paid for the hanging-gardens of Babylon. It yielded in time—emerging slowly but steadily from a prodigious litter of cement and bricks and mortar and putty, under the hands of innumerable masons, carpenters, glaziers, plumbers, and nondescript subordinates, all of whom talked unwearyingly about nothing at all, and suffered no man to perform any part of his allotted task without suspending their own labours to watch him—an imposing long line of new greenhouses, more than twenty in number. The mail-bag was filled meanwhile with nurserymen's catalogues, and the cart made incessant journeys to and from Punsey station, bringing back vast straw-enwrapped baskets and bundles and boxes beyond counting, the arrival and unpacking of which was with Edith the event of the day. About the reality of her engrossed interest in all the stages of progress by which these greenhouses became crowded museums of the unusual and abnormal in plant-life, it was impossible to have any suspicion. And even after they were filled to overflowing, Thorpe noted with joy that this interest seemed in no wise to flag. She spent hours every day under the glass, exchanging comments and theories with her gardeners, and even pulling things about with her own hands, and other hours she devoted almost as regularly to supervising the wholesale alterations that had been begun in the gardens outside. There were to be new paths, new walls with a southern exposure, new potting sheds, new forcing pits, new everything—and in the evenings she often worked late over the maps and plans she drew for all this. Thorpe's mind found it difficult to grasp the idea that a lady of such notable qualities could be entirely satisfied by a career among seeds and bulbs and composts, but at least time brought no evidences of a decline in her horticultural zeal. Who knew? Perhaps it might go on indefinitely.

As for himself, he had got on very well without any special inclination or hobby. He had not done any of the great things that a year ago it had seemed to him he would forthwith do—but his mind was serenely undisturbed by regrets. He did not even remember with any distinctness what these things were that he had been going to do. The routine of life—as arranged and borne along by the wise and tactful experts who wore the livery of High Thorpe—was abundantly sufficient in itself. He slept well now in the morning hours, and though he remained still, by comparison, an early riser, the bath and the shaving and slow dressing under the hands of a valet consumed comfortably a good deal of time. Throughout the day he was under the almost constant observation of people who were calling him "master" in their minds, and watching to see how, in the smallest details of deportment, a "master" carried himself, and the consciousness of this alone amounted to a kind of vocation. The house itself made demands upon him nearly as definite as those of the servants. It was a house of huge rooms, high ceilings, and grandiose fireplaces and stairways, which had seemed to him like a royal palace when he first beheld it, and still produced upon him an effect of undigestible largeness and strangeness. It was as a whole not so old as the agents had represented it, by some centuries, but it adapted itself as little to his preconceived notions of domesticity as if it had been built by Druids. The task of seeming to be at home in it had as many sides to it as there were minutes in the day—and oddly enough, Thorpe found in their study and observance a congenial occupation. Whether he was reading in the library—where there was an admirable collection of books of worth—or walking over the home-farms, or driving in his smart stanhope with the coachman behind, or sitting in formal costume and dignity opposite his beautiful wife at the dinner-table, the sense of what was expected of him was there, steadying and restraining, like an atmospheric pressure.

Thus far they had had few visitors, and had accepted no invitations to join house-parties elsewhere. They agreed without speaking about it that it was more their form to entertain than to be entertained, and certain people were coming to them later in the month. These were quite wholly of Edith's set and selection, for Thorpe had no friends or acquaintances outside her circle for whose presence he had any desire—and among these prospective guests were a Duke and a Duchess. Once, such a fact would have excited Thorpe's imagination. He regarded it now as something appropriate under the circumstances, and gave it little further thought. His placid, satisfied life was not dependent upon the stir of guests coming and going, even though they were the great of the earth. He walked on his spacious terrace after luncheon—a tall, portly, well-groomed figure of a man, of relaxed, easy aspect, with his big cigar, and his panama hat, and his loose clothes of choice fabrics and exquisite tailoring—and said to himself that it was the finest view in England—and then, to his own surprise, caught himself in the act of yawning.

From under the silk curtains and awning of a window-doorway at the end of the terrace, his wife issued and came toward him. Her head was bare, and she had the grace and fresh beauty of a young girl in her simple light gown of some summery figured stuff.

"What do you say to going off somewhere—tomorrow if you like—travelling abroad?" he called out, as she approached him. The idea, only a moment old in his mind, had grown to great proportions. "How can we?" she asked, upon the briefest thought. "THEY are coming at the end of the week. This is Monday, and they arrive on the 12th—that's this Saturday."

"So soon as that!" he exclaimed. "I thought it was later. H-m! I don't know—I think perhaps I'll go up to London this evening. I'm by way of feeling restless all at once. Will you come up with me?"

She shook her head. "I can't think of anything in London that would be tolerable."

He gave a vague little laugh. "I shall probably hate it myself when I get there," he speculated. "There isn't anybody I want to see—there isn't anything I want to do. I don' t know—perhaps it might liven me up."

Her face took on a look of enquiring gravity. "Are you getting tired of it, then?" She put the question gently, almost cautiously.

He reflected a little. "Why—no," he answered, as if reasoning to himself. "Of course I'm not. This is what I've always wanted. It's my idea of life to a 't.' Only—I suppose everything needs a break in it now and then—if only for the comfort of getting back into the old rut again."

"The rut—yes," she commented, musingly. "Apparently there's always a rut."

Thorpe gave her the mystified yet uncomplaining glance she knew so well in his eyes. For once, the impulse to throw hidden things up into his range of view prevailed with her.

"Do you know," she said, with a confused half-smile at the novelty of her mood for elucidation, "I fancied a rut was the one thing there could be no question about with you. I had the notion that you were incapable of ruts—and conventional grooves. I thought you—as Carlyle puts it—I thought you were a man who had swallowed all the formulas."

Thorpe looked down at his stomach doubtfully. "I see what you mean," he said at last, but in a tone without any note of conviction.

"I doubt it," she told him, with light readiness—"for I don't see myself what I mean. I forget indeed what it was I said. And so you think you'll go up to town tonight?"

A sudden comprehension of what was slipping away from his grasp aroused him. "No—no," he urged her, "don't forget what it was you said! I wish you'd talk more with me about that. It was what I wanted to hear. You never tell me what you're really thinking about." She received the reproach with a mildly incredulous smile in her eyes. "Yes—I know—who was it used to scold me about that? Oh"—she seemed suddenly reminded of something—"I was forgetting to mention it. I have a letter from Celia Madden. She is back in England; she is coming to us Saturday, too."

He put out his lips a trifle. "That's all right," he objected, "but what has it got to do with what we were talking about?"

"Talking about?" she queried, with a momentarily blank countenance. "Oh, she used to bully me about my deceit, and treachery, and similar crimes. But I shall be immensely glad to see her. I always fight with her, but I think I like her better than any other woman alive."

"I like her too," Thorpe was impelled to say, with a kind of solemnity. "She reminds me of some of the happiest hours in my life."

His wife, after a brief glance into his face, laughed pleasantly, if with a trace of flippancy. "You say nice things," she observed, slightly inclining her head. "But now that Celia is coming, it would be as well to have another man. It's such dreadfully short notice, though."

"I daresay your father could come, all right," Thorpe suggested. "I'd rather have him than almost anyone else. Would you mind asking him—or shall I?"

An abrupt silence marked this introduction of a subject upon which the couple had differed openly. Thorpe, through processes unaccountable to himself, had passed from a vivid dislike of General Kervick to a habit of mind in which he thoroughly enjoyed having him about. The General had been twice to High Thorpe, and on each occasion had so prolonged his stay that, in retrospect, the period of his absence seemed inconsiderable. The master now, thinking upon it in this minute of silence, was conscious of having missed him greatly. He would not have been bored to the extremity of threatening to go to London, if Kervick had been here. The General was a gentleman, and yet had the flexible adaptability of a retainer; he had been trained in discipline, and hence knew how to defer without becoming fulsome or familiar; he was a man of the world and knew an unlimited number of racy stories, and even if he repeated some of them unduly, they were better than no stories at all. And then, there was his matchless, unfailing patience in playing chess or backgammon or draughts or bezique, whatever he perceived that the master desired.

"If you really wish it," Edith said at last, coldly.

"But that's what I don't understand," Thorpe urged upon her with some vigour. "If I like him, I don't see why his own daughter——"

"Oh, need we discuss it?" she broke in, impatiently. "If I'm an unnatural child, why then I am one, and may it not be allowed to pass at that?" A stormy kind of smile played upon her beautifully-cut lips as she added: "Surely one's filial emotions are things to be taken for granted—relieved from the necessity of explanation."

Thorpe grinned faintly at the hint of pleasantry, but he did not relinquish his point. "Well—unless you really veto the thing—I think I'd like to tell him to come," he said, with composed obstinacy. Upon an afterthought he added: "There's no reason why he shouldn't meet the Duke, is there?"

"No specific reason," she returned, with calm coolness of tone and manner. "And certainly I do not see myself in the part of Madame Veto."

"All right then—I'll send him a wire," said Thorpe. His victory made him uneasy, yet he saw no way of abandoning it with decorum.

As the two, standing in a silence full of tacit constraint, looked aimlessly away from the terrace, they saw at the same instant a vehicle with a single horse coming rather briskly up the driveway, some hundreds of yards below. It was recognizable at once as the local trap from Punsey station, and as usual it was driven by a boy from the village. Seated beside this lad was a burly, red-bearded man in respectable clothes, who, to judge from the tin-box and travelling-bags fastened on behind, seemed coming to High Thorpe to stay.

"Who on earth is that?" asked Thorpe, wonderingly. The man was obviously of the lower class, yet there seemed something about him which invited recognition.

"Presumably it's the new head-gardener," she replied with brevity.

Her accent recalled to Thorpe the fact that there had been something disagreeable in their conversation, and the thought of it was unpleasant to him. "Why, I didn't know you had a new man coming," he said, turning to her with an overture of smiling interest.

"Yes," she answered, and then, as if weighing the proffered propitiation and rejecting it, turned slowly and went into the house.

The trap apparently ended its course at some back entrance: he did not see it again. He strolled indoors, after a little, and told his man to pack a bag for London, and order the stanhope to take him to the train.



CHAPTER XXIII

IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people had made themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up.

It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but he had slept very badly in it, none the less. The room was luxuriously furnished, as was the entire suite, but it was all strange and uncomfortable to his senses. The operation of shaving and dressing in solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. He regretted not having brought his man with him for this reason, and then, upon meditation, for other reasons. A person of his position ought always to have a servant with him. The hotel people must have been surprised at his travelling unattended—and the people at High Thorpe must also have thought it strange. It flashed across his mind that no doubt his wife had most of all thought it strange. How would she explain to herself his sudden, precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite naturally put an unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to remember that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much worse to be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over his mysterious absence in her mind.

He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and made his way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his in the old days—but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east, and ever and again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway, and flung it in his face.

He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose, and with no very definite reflections. It occurred to him that if his wife did impute to him some unworthy motive in stealing off to London, and made herself unhappy in doing so—that would at least provide the compensation of showing that she cared. The thought, however, upon examination, contained very meagre elements of solace. He could not in the least be sure about any of the workings of her mind. There might be more or less annoyance mixed up this morning with the secret thoughts she had concerning him—or she might not be bothering her head about him at all. This latter contingency had never presented itself so frankly to him before. He looked hard at it, and saw more semblances of probability about it than he liked. It might very well be that she was not thinking about him one way or the other.

A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need think about him pervaded his soul. Who cared what he said or did or felt? The City had forgotten his very existence. In the West End, only here and there some person might chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder who had married Lady Cressage. Nowhere else in England, save one dull strip of agricultural blankness in a backward home county, was there a human being who knew anything whatever about him. And this was his career! It was for this that he had planned that memorable campaign, and waged that amazing series of fortnightly battles, never missing victory, never failing at any point of the complicated strategy, and crowning it all with a culminating triumph which had been the wonder and admiration of the whole financial world! A few score of menials or interested inferiors bowed to him; he drove some good horses, and was attentively waited upon, and had a never-failing abundance of good things to eat and drink aud smoke. Hardly anything more than that, when you came to think of it—and the passing usufruct of all these things could be enjoyed by any fool who had a ten-pound note in his pocket!

What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had achieved power—and where was that power? What had he done with it? What COULD he do with it? He had an excess of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it command an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox, as he dimly perceived. There existed only a narrow margin of advantage in favour of the rich man. He could eat and drink a little more and a little better than the poor man; he could have better clothes, and lie abed later in the morning, and take life easier all round—but only within hard and fast bounds. There was an ascertained limit beyond which the millionaire could no more stuff himself with food and wine than could the beggar. It might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in bed in the morning, but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So it ran indefinitely—this thin selvedge of advantage which money could buy—with deprivation on the one side, and surfeit on the other. Candidly, was it not true that more happiness lay in winning the way out of deprivation, than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The poor man succeeding in making himself rich—at numerous stages of the operation there might be made a moral snap-shot of the truly happy man. But not after he had reached the top. Then disintegration began at once. The contrast between what he supposed he could do, and what he finds it possible to do, is too vast to be accepted with equanimity.

It must be said that after breakfast—a meal which he found in an Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension, and ate with an almost novel relish—Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his meditations. He established in his mind the proposition that since an excess of enjoyment was impossible—since one could not derive a great block of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, but at the most could only gather a little from each—the desirable thing was to multiply as much as might be those tastes and whims and fancies which passed for appetites, and thus expand the area of possible gratification.

This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply itself to his individual needs with much facility. What did he want to do that he had not done? It was difficult for him to say. Perhaps it was chandlers' signs and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring preoccupation suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets, which raised the question of a yacht in his mind. Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once dwelt with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it would still be full of attractions for him. He liked the water, and the water liked him—and he was better able now than formerly to understand how luxurious existence can be made in modern private ships. He decided that he would have a yacht—and then perceived that the decision brought no exhilaration. He was no happier than before. He could decide that he would have anything he chose to name—and it would in no whit lighten his mood. The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively as spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired of the one as he had of the other?

He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something he had never admitted to himself. Was he indeed tired of High Thorpe? He had assured his wife to the contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his own mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself. He carried a weariness about with him, which looked at everything with apathetic eyes, and cared for nothing. Some nameless paralysis had settled upon his capacity for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it. He had had the power to expand his life to the farthest boundaries of rich experience and sensation, and he had deliberately shrunk into a sort of herbaceous nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had London at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.

Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him. He walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied smugness—of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could be more commonplace to the eye.

Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels of power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within those doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct the movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and their cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between them wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth. They could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole people, or decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of their little family council. He remembered now how he had stood on this same spot, and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild—and that was only a little over a year ago!

There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the little knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the doorway. It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding within. One of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for aught he knew; at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were on the premises. He had heard it said that the very head of the house listened to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon, and interrupted his conversations with the most important of non-commercial callers, to make or refuse bargains in shares offered by brokers who came in. What impulse lay behind this extraordinary devotion to labour? Toward what conceivable goal could it be striving?

To work hard and risk great things for the possession of a fortune, in order to enjoy it afterward—he could understand how that attracted men. But to possess already the biggest of human fortunes, and still work—that baffled him. He wished he knew some of those men in there, especially if they belonged to the place. It would be wonderfully interesting to get at the inner point of view of New Court.

A little later, in Colin Semple's office, he sat down to await the coming of that gentleman. "Then he doesn't get here so early nowadays?" he suggested to the head-clerk who, with instant recognition and exaggerated deference, had ushered him into this furthermost private room. It pleased him to assume that prosperity had relaxed the Scotchman's vigilance.

"Oh yes, sir," the clerk replied. "A bit earlier if anything, as a rule. But I think he is stopping at his solicitors on his way to the City. I hope you are very well, sir."

"Yes—I'm very fit—thanks," Thorpe said, listlessly, and the other left him.

Mr. Semple, when at last he arrived, bustled into the room with unaffected gratification at the news he had heard without. "Well, well, Thorpe man!" he cried, and shook hands cordially. "This is fine! If I'd only known you were in town! Why wouldn't you have told me you were coming? I'd never have kept you waiting."

Thorpe laughed wearily. "I hardly knew I was in town myself. I only ran up last night. I thought it would amuse me to have a look round—but things seem as dull as ditchwater."

"Oh no," said Semple, "the autumn is opening verra well indeed. There are more new companies, and a better public subscription all round, than for any first week of October I remember. Westralians appear bad on the face of things, it's true—but don't believe all you hear of them. There's more than the suspicion of a 'rig' there. Besides, you haven't a penny in them."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Thorpe told him, with comprehensive vagueness. "Well, I suppose you're still coining money," he observed, after a pause.

"Keeping along—keeping along," the broker replied, cheerfully. "I canna complain." Thorpe looked at him with a meditative frown. "Well, what are you going to do with it, after you've got it?" he demanded, almost with sharpness.

The Scotchman, after a surprised instant, smiled. "Oh, I'll just keep my hands on it," he assured him, lightly.

"That isn't what I mean," Thorpe said, groping after what he did mean, with sullen tenacity, among his thoughts. His large, heavy face exhibited a depressed gravity which attracted the other's attention.

"What's the matter?" Semple asked quickly. "Has anything gone wrong with you?"

Thorpe slowly shook his head. "What better off do you think you'll be with six figures than you are with five?" he pursued, with dogmatic insistence.

Semple shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have grown much brighter and gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. Apparently he was somewhat stouter, and certainly there was a mellowed softening of his sharp glance and shrewd smile. It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat nonplussed him, but his good-humour was unflagging.

"It's the way we're taught at school," he hazarded, genially. "In all the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six."

"They're wrong," Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement. "What I mean is—what's the good of piling up money, while you can't pile up the enjoyments it will buy? What will a million give you, that the fifth of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?"

"Aye," said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. "So you've come to that frame of mind, have you? Why does a man go on and shoot five hundred pheasants, when he can eat only one?"

"Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing more to say," Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. "I've always thought of you as a man like myself, who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy himself."

The Scotchman laughed joyously. "Enjoy myself! Like you!" he cried. "Man, you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's funeral! What's come over you? I know what it is. You go and take a course of German waters——"

"Oh, that be damned!" Thorpe objected, gloomily. "I tell you I'm all right. Only—only—God! I've a great notion to go and get drunk."

Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic expression. "I'm sorry you're so hipped," he said, in gentle tones. "It can't be more than some passing whimsy. You're in no real trouble, are you?—no family trouble?"

Thorpe shook his head. "The whole thing is rot!" he affirmed, enigmatically.

"What whole thing?" The broker perched on the edge of his desk, and with patient philosophy took him up. "Do you mean eighty thousand a year is rot? That depends upon the man who has it."

"I know that well enough," broke in the other, heavily. "That's what I'm kicking about. I'm no good!"

Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips in reflection. "That's not the case," he observed with argumentative calmness. "You're a great deal of good. I'm not so sure that what you've been trying to do is any good, though. Come!—I read you like large print. You've set out to live the life of a rich country squire—and it hasn't come off. It couldn't come off! I never believed it would. You haven't the taste for it inbred in your bones. You haven't the thousand little habits and interests that they take in with their mother's milk, and that make such a life possible. When you look at a hedge, you don't think of it as something to worry live animals out of. When you see one of your labourers, you don't care who his father was, or which dairymaid his uncle ought to have married, if he had wanted to get a certain cottage. You don't want to know the name of everybody whose roof you can see; much less could you remember them, and talk about them, and listen to gossip about them, year after year. It isn't a passion in your blood to ride to hounds, and to shoot, and all that. It doesn't come to you by tradition—and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might be a substitute for tradition. What are you doing in the country, then? Just eating too much, and sitting about, and getting fat and stupid. If you want the truth, there it is for you."

Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon reflection to the view that this was the truth. "That's all right, as far as it goes," he assented, with hesitation. "But what the hell else is there?"

The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis to drop it in an incomplete state. "A year ago," he went on, "you had won your victories like a veritable Napoleon. You had everything in your own hands; Napoleon himself was not more the master of what he saw about him than you were. And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired yourself to your Elba. It wasn't that you were beaten and driven there by others; you went of your own accord. Have you ever thought, Thorpe, of this? Napoleon was the greatest man of his age—one of the greatest men of all ages—not only in war but in a hundred other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St. Helena—in excellent health and with companions that he talked freely to—and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence worth repeating. If you read it, you'll see he talked like a dull, ordinary body. The greatness had entirely evaporated from him, the moment he was put on an island where he had nothing to do."

"Yes-s," said Thorpe, thoughtfully. He accepted the application without any qualms about the splendour of the comparison it rested upon. He had done the great things, just as Semple said, and there was no room for false modesty about them in his mind. "The trouble is," he began, "that I did what I had always thought I wanted to do most. I was quite certain in my mind that that was what I wanted. And if we say now that I was wrong—if we admit that that wasn't what I really wanted—why then, God knows what it is I DO want. I'll be hanged if I do!"

"Come back to the City," Semple told him. "That's where you belong."

"No—no!" Thorpe spoke with emphasis. "That's where you're all off. I don't belong in the City at all. I hate the whole outfit. What the devil amusement would it be to me to take other men's money away from them? I'd be wanting all the while to give it back to them. And certainly I wouldn't get any fun out of their taking my money away from me. Besides, it doesn't entertain me. I've no taste at all for it. I never look at a financial paper now. I could no more interest myself in all that stuff again than I could fly. That's the hell of it—to be interested in anything."

"Go in for politics," the other suggested, with less warmth.

"Yes, I know," Thorpe commented, with a lingering tone. "Perhaps I ought to think more about that. By the way, what's Plowden doing? I've lost all track of him."

"Abroad somewhere, I fancy," Semple replied. His manner exhibited a profound indifference. "When his mother died he came into something—I don't know how much. I don't think I've seen him since—and that must have been six months and more ago."

"Yes. I heard about it at the time," the other said. "It must be about that. His sister and brother—the young Plowdens—they're coming to us at the end of the week, I believe. You didn't hit it off particularly with Plowden, eh?"

Semple emitted a contemptuous little laugh. "I did not quarrel with him—if you mean that," he said, "but even to please you, Thorpe, I couldn't bring myself to put my back into the job of making money for him. He was treated fairly—even generously, d'ye mind. I should think, all told, he had some thirty thousand pounds for his shares, and that's a hundred times as much as I had a pleasure in seeing him get. Each man can wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand another man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the chance came."

"THAT'S all right," Thorpe assured him, easily. "I never told you that he was any good. I merely felt like giving him a leg up—because really at the start he was of use to me. I did owe him something....It was at his house that I met my wife."

"Aye," said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.



CHAPTER XXIV

WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could think of no one else in the City whom he desired to see. A call upon his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant courtesy by those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely worth the trouble.

He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when the whim seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were like. After luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from St. Giles, through avenues which had not existed in the London of his boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials. Here also the landmarks seemed all changed, but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and disorder to identify the district. He observed it and its inhabitants with a certain new curiosity. A notable alteration for the better had come over his spirits. It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it might be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple, that had dissipated his gloom. At all events it was gone—and he strolled along in quite placid contentment, taking in the panorama of London's more intimate life with the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh country eye.

He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had not supposed it possible to do. He surrendered himself to the experience with a novel sense of having found something worth while—and found it, moreover, under his very nose. In some dull, meaningless fashion he had always known this part of London, and been familiar with its external aspects. Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of seeing it all in a different way. The objects he beheld, inanimate and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. His mind was stirred pleasurably by the things they said to him.

He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts, sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse; at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to him—faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed alive to him before.

Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship. It pleased Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. He had almost the temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and see what the lad would do. It was remarkable, he reflected with satisfaction—this new capacity within him to find drama in trifles.

There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he had had with his sister about the sign overhead. He stepped back a few paces and looked up at it. There were the old words—"Thorpe, Bookseller"—right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a novel prominence. Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been repainted. At this he laughed aloud. The details of the episode came back to him now. For some reason, or no reason at all—he could not now imagine what on earth could have prompted him—he had last spring caused his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney, should be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. It was to Julia that he had confided this mission, and it was Julia who, in a round-about way, had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do nothing of the sort. He laughed again at the added defiance that this refurbishing of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly as he entered the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.

She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he could remember her—tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling as it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. Her long, mannish countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence, when she recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was pleased or otherwise. In their infrequent latter-day encounters he had dropped the habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in her manner of expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now—but upon a sudden impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.

Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his embrace, was plain enough. "Well!" she exclaimed vaguely, and then looked at him. "You're getting fatter."

"No I'm not," he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an important topic. "People think I am—but it's merely the looseness of these clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last."

The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. "Let's see—that was just before Christmas, wasn't it?" he said.

"Something like that," she responded. "You were going to get married in a week or two, I remember, and THAT was in January, wasn't it? I was taking stock, I know."

He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday, and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic life, annoyed him afresh. "You're an awful goat, not to come near us," he felt impelled, in brotherly frankness, to tell her.

She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. "I thought that was all settled and done with long ago," she said, moodily.

"Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou," he observed, with reassuring kindness of tone. "I never felt so much like being nice to you in my life."

She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.

"Julia and Alfred all right?" he queried, cheerfully.

"I daresay," she made brief answer.

"But they write to you, don't they?"

"SHE does—sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well, from what she says."

"She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters," he told her, in tones of confidential reproach.

"Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say," she answered, as if the explanation were ample.

The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf, where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and occupation of a home of her own. They had taken a house for the summer and autumn, and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for the winter.

"What I would really have liked," Thorpe confided to his sister now, "was to have had them both live with me. They would have been as welcome as the day is long. I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if he's set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad. Even the best English artists, he says, do that at the beginning. So it was all right for him to go. But Julia—it was different with her—I was rather keen about her staying. My wife was just as keen as I was. She took the greatest fancy to Julia from the very start—and so far as I could see, Julia liked her all right. In fact, I thought Julia would want to stay—but somehow she didn't."

"She always spoke very highly of your wife," Mrs. Dabney affirmed with judicial fairness. "I think she does like her very much."

"Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those Dutchmen for, when one of the best houses in England was open to her?" Thorpe demanded.

"You mustn't ask me," her mother responded. Her tone seemed to carry the suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's interests.

"I don't believe you know any more about it than I do," was his impulsive comment.

"I daresay not," she replied, with indifference. "Probably she didn't fancy living in so big a house—although heaven knows her ideas are big enough about most things."

"Did she say so?" Thorpe asked abruptly.

The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. "She didn't say anything to me about it, one way or the other. I formed my own impressions—that's all. It's a free country. Everybody can form their impressions."

"I wish you'd tell me what you really think," Thorpe urged her, mildly persuasive. "You know how fond I am of Julia, and how little I want to do her an injustice."

"Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way," Louisa observed, vaguely. "If you ask me plain, I think it was dull for her."

"Well," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "I shouldn't be surprised if it was. I hadn't thought of that. But still—why she and my wife could be company for each other."

"You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey," she told him, in an unexpected flight of metaphor. "Two women cooped up in a lonesome country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself would be—but not much. It's none of my business—but how your wife must hate it!"

He laughed easily. "Ah, that's where you're wrong," he said. "She doesn't care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the amaryllises—and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. Well, that's her passion. That's what she really loves."

"That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness," Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother she went on. "Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four customers—ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title, too—and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to occupy themselves with—and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd even do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank God I don't!"

"That's because you don't know anything about the country," he told her, but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in his own ears. "All you know outside of London is Margate."

"I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer," she informed him, crushingly.

Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. "I know what you mean, Lou," he said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. "I suppose there's a good deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you have too much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never occurred to me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is there to do? We tried a house in London, during the Season——"

"Yes, I saw in the papers you were here," she said impassively, in comment upon his embarrassed pause.

"I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see me"—he explained with a certain awkwardness—"but bye-gones are all bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one endless procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties; we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well there you are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfordshire, and it's stupid here. Of course one can travel abroad, but that's no good for more than a few months. Of course it would be different if I had something to do. I tell you God's truth, Lou—sometimes I feel as if I was really happier when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot—I really wasn't—but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was."

She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. "Didn't it ever occur to you to do some good with your money?" she said, with slow bluntness. Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: "I don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes; we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while we were doing it—but I mean outside, in the world at large."

"What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't make it; I'm not responsible for it." He muttered the phrases lightly enough, but a certain fatuity in them seemed to attract his attention when he heard their sound. "I've given between five and six thousand pounds to London hospitals within the present year," he added, straightening himself. "I wonder you didn't see it. It was in all the papers."

"Hospitals!"

It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her voice imported into the word. He looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and then took in the impression that she was upon a subject which exceptionally interested her. Certainly the display of something approaching animation in her glance and manner was abnormal.

"I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'" she reminded him, still with a vibration of feeling in her tone. "You must live in the country, if you think London hospitals are deserving objects. They couldn't fool Londoners on that point, not if they had got the Prince to go on his hands and knees. And you give a few big cheques to them," she went on, meditatively, "and you never ask how they're managed, or what rings are running them for their own benefit, or how your money is spent—and you think you've done a noble, philanthropic thing! Oh no—I wasn't talking about humbug charity. I was talking about doing some genuine good in the world."

He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat back with a smile. "All right," he said, genially. "What do you propose?"

"I don't propose anything," she told him, after a moment's hesitation. "You must work that out for yourself. What might seem important to me might not interest you at all—and if you weren't interested you wouldn't do anything. But this I do say to you, Joel—and I've said it to myself every day for this last year or more, and had you in mind all the time, too—if I had made a great fortune, and I sat about in purple and fine linen doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and selfishness, letting my riches accumulate and multiply themselves without being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look my fellow-creatures in the face! You were born here. You know what London slums are like. You know what Clare Market was like—it's bad enough still—and what the Seven Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places round here are like to this day. That's only within a stone's throw. Have you seen Charles Booth's figures about the London poor? Of course you haven't—and it doesn't matter. You KNOW what they are like. But you don't care. The misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your money-bags and smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for a brother!"

"Well, I'm damned!" was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. "Since when have you been taken this way?" he asked at last, mechanically jocular.

"That's all right," she declared with defensive inconsequence. "It's the way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning."

He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked about in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he had been conscious.

"How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too—from the beginning?" he demanded of her, almost with truculence. "You say I sit on my money-bags and smile—you abuse me with doing no good with my money—how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did believe in me!"

She sniffed at him. "I don't believe in you now, at all events," she said, bluntly.

He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. "Why, this very day"—he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his brain—"this whole day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the things they buy and the way they live—and thinking out my plans for doing something. I don't claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more than what a man in my position ought to do. But I own that to come in, actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the rest of it—I must say, that's a bit rum."

Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown with which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to avoid offense. "It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. You're too used to it for that."

He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his assurances than this—but after all, one did not look to Louisa for enthusiasms. The depth of feeling she had disclosed on this subject of London's poor still astonished him, but principally now because of its unlikely source. If she had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed disposition, he could have understood it. But she had been always the hard, dry, unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself to be a volatile and even sentimental person. If she had such views as these, it became clear to him that his own views were even much advanced.

"It's a tremendous subject," he said, with loose largeness of manner. "Only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. The only way is to start with the understanding that something is going to be done. No matter how many difficulties there are in the way, SOMETHING'S GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out with that, why then he can fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or bend them to suit his purpose, and accomplish something."

Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with—yet somehow remained, if not skeptical, then passively unconvinced. "What are your plans?" she asked him.

"Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything," he told her, with prepared readiness. "It isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked theories and limited information. Great results, permanent results, are never obtained that way."

"I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing."

"Oh, nothing like it in the least," he assured her, and made a mental note to find out what it was she had referred to.

"The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say," she went on, "but it seems to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this immense number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their pocket. That's where the real mischief lies."

He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then something occurred to him. "Look here!" he said. "If you're as keen about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and devote your time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into shape?"

She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to her. "It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?" she observed.

"No—you've got to promise me now," he told her.

"Well that I won't!" she answered, roundly.

"You'd see the whole—the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?"—he scolded at her—"rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness."

"Aha!" she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining through the stolidity of her mien. "I knew you were humbugging! If you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm always a goose when I believe what you tell me."

A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. "No you're not, Lou," he replied, coaxingly. "I really mean it all—every word of it—and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?"

She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. "I don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it," she declared, when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their perusal—and almost to their endorsement. He had thought during the day of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.



CHAPTER XXV

"I DIDN'T ask your father, after all," was one of the things that Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark with a scant, silent nod.

Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day, with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to induce.

"About your father," he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: "I'm afraid I annoyed you the other day by what I said."

"I have no recollection of it," she told him, with tranquil politeness, over her shoulder.

He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this topic. "But I want you to recollect," he said, as he rose to his feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant against the parapet.

"I've thought of it a good deal," he went on, in halting explanation. His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which to define it. "I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't want me to do—something that was a good deal more your affair than mine—and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to do."

Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly embarrassed as well. "I'm sure you always wish to be nice," she said at last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere a perfunctory note.

"Oh—nice!" he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word. "Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'"

"I withdraw the word immediately—unreservedly," she put in, with a smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.

"You laugh at me—whenever I try to talk seriously," he objected.

"I laugh?" she queried, with an upward glance of demurely simulated amazement. "Impossible! I assure you I've forgotten how."

"Ah, now we get to it!" he broke out, with energy. "You're really feeling about it just as I am. You're not satisfied with what we're doing—with the life we're leading—any more than I am. I see that, plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I got the idea that you were enjoying it immensely—the greenhouses and gardens and all that sort of thing. And do you know who it was that put me right—that told me you hated it?"

"Oh, don't let us talk of him!" Edith exclaimed, swiftly.

Thorpe laughed. "You're wrong. It wasn't your father. I didn't see him. No—it was my sister. She's never seen you, but all the same she knew enough to give me points. She told me I was a fool to suppose you were happy here."

"How clever of her!" A certain bantering smile accompanied the words, but on the instant it faded away. She went on with a musing gravity. "I'm sorry I don't get to know your sister. She seems an extremely real sort of person. I can understand that she might be difficult to live with—I daresay all genuine characters are—but she's very real. Although, apparently, conversation isn't her strong point, still I enjoy talking with her."

"How do you mean?" Thorpe asked, knitting his brows in puzzlement.

"Oh, I often go to her shop—or did when I was in town. I went almost immediately after our—our return to England. I was half afraid she would recognize me—the portraits in the papers, you know—but apparently she didn't. And it's splendid—the way she says absolutely nothing more than it's necessary to say. And her candour! If she thinks books are bad she says so. Fancy that!"

He still frowned uneasily as he looked down at her. "You never mentioned to me that you had gone there," he told her, as if in reproach.

"Ah, it was complicated," Edith explained. "She objects to knowing me—I think secretly I respect her a great deal for that—and therefore there is something clandestine about my getting to know her—and I could not be sure how it would impress you, and really it seemed simplest not to mention it."

"It isn't that alone," he declared, grave-faced still, but with a softer voice. "Do you remember what I said the other day? It would make all the difference in the world to me, if—if you were really—actually my other half!"

The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.

"I mean"—all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as he progressed—"I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the start—you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy."

"Oh no," she interposed, gently. "It is not the fact that it has made me unhappy."

"Well—discontented, then," he resumed, without pause. "Here we are. We do the thing we want to do—we make the kind of home for ourselves that we've agreed we would like—and then it turns out that somehow it doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of us. It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and examine frankly in all its bearings—in order to see if we can't better it—but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy——"

"You use the word again," she reminded him, a wan smile softening her protest.

Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding her.

"Do you tell me that you are happy?" he asked, with sober directness.

She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. "You consider only the extremes," she told him. "Between black and white there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum, in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications. People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that can be said of me is that I may be in the blues—in the light-blues—but it is fair to remember that they photograph white."

Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling, he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. "That is to say"—he began hesitatingly.

"To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy."

"Why won't you tell me, Edith, just where you are?"

The sound of her name was somewhat unfamiliar to their discourse. The intonation which his voice gave to it now caused her to look up quickly.

"If I could tell myself," she answered him, after an instant's thought, "pray believe that I would tell you."

The way seemed for the moment blocked before him, and he sighed heavily. "I want to get nearer to you," he said, with gloom, "and I don't!"

It occurred to her to remark: "You take exception to my phraseology when I say you always try to be 'nice,' but I'm sure you know what I mean." She offered him this assurance with a tentative smile, into which he gazed moodily.

"You didn't think I was 'nice' when you consented to marry me," he was suddenly inspired to say. "I can't imagine your applying that word to me then in your mind. God knows what it was you did say to yourself about me, but you never said I was 'nice.' That was the last word that would have fitted me then—and now it's the only one you can think of." The hint that somehow he had stumbled upon a clue to the mysteries enveloping him rose to prominence in his mind as he spoke. The year had wrought a baffling difference in him. He lacked something now that then he had possessed, but he was powerless to define it.

He seated himself again in the chair, and put his hand through her arm to keep her where she lightly rested beside him. "Will you tell me," he said, with a kind of sombre gentleness, "what the word is that you would have used then? I know you wouldn't—couldn't—have called me 'nice.' What would you have called me?"

She paused in silence for a little, then slipped from the chair and stood erect, still leaving her wrist within the restraining curve of his fingers. "I suppose," she said, musingly—"I suppose I should have said 'powerful' or 'strong.'" Then she released her arm, and in turn moved to the parapet.

"And I am weak now—I am 'nice,'" he reflected, mechanically.

In the profile he saw, as she looked away at the vast distant horizon, there was something pensive, even sad. She did not speak at once, and as he gazed at her more narrowly it seemed as if her lips were quivering. A new sense of her great beauty came to him—and with it a hint that for the instant at least her guard was down. He sprang to his feet, and stood beside her.

"You ARE going to be open with me—Edith!" he pleaded, softly.

She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation. "Oh, what is there to say?" she demanded, in a tone which was almost a wail. "It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you."

"WHAT is not my fault?" he persisted with patient gentleness.

Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. "It is a mistake—a blunder," she began, hurriedly. "I take it all upon my own shoulders. I was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment—more good sense!"

"You are not telling me, are you," he asked with gravity, "that you are sorry you married me?"

"Is either of us glad?" she retorted, breathlessly. "What is there to be glad about? You are bored to death—you confess it. And I—well, it is not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach you."

"No, you keep saying that," he observed, with gloomy slowness of utterance. "But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as well have it out."

"Yes," she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. "I married one man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am. There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am his daughter; that explains everything."

The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all—a woman to whom he could talk on terms of intimacy.

"Rubbish!" he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal smile. "You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence."

To his sharp scrutiny there seemed to flicker in her eyes a kind of answering gleam. Then she hastily averted her glance, and in this action too there was a warrant for his mounting confidence.

"The trouble has been," he declared, "that I've been too much afraid of you. I've thought that you were made of so much finer stuff than I am, that you mustn't be touched. That was all a mistake. I see it right enough now. You ARE finer than I am—God knows there's no dispute about that—but that's no reason why I should have hung up signs of 'Hands off!' all around you, and been frightened by them myself. I had the cheek to capture you and carry you off—and I ought to have had the pluck to make you love me afterward, and keep it up. And that's what I'm going to do!"

To this declaration she offered no immediate reply, but continued to gaze with a vaguely meditative air upon the expanse of landscape spread below them. He threw a hasty glance over the windows behind him, and then with assurance passed his arm round her waist. He could not say that there was any responsive yielding to his embrace, but he did affirm to himself with new conviction, as he looked down upon the fair small head at his shoulder, with its lovely pale-brown hair drawn softly over the temples, and its glimpse of the matchless profile inclined beneath—that it was all right.

He waited for a long time, with a joyous patience, for her to speak. The mere fact that she stood beneath his engirdling arm, and gave no thought to the potential servants'-eyes behind them, was enough for present happiness. He regarded the illimitable picture commanded from his terrace with refreshed eyes; it was once again the finest view in England—and something much more than that beside.

At last, abruptly, she laughed aloud—a silvery, amused little laugh under her breath. "How comedy and tragedy tread forever on each other's heels!" she remarked. Her tone was philosophically gay, but upon reflection he did not wholly like her words.

"There wasn't any tragedy," he said, "and there isn't any comedy."

She laughed again. "Oh, don't say that this doesn't appeal to your sense of humour!" she urged, with mock fervour.

Thorpe sighed in such unaffected depression at this, that she seemed touched by his mood. Without stirring from his hold, she lifted her face. "Don't think I'm hateful," she bade him, and her eyes were very kind. "There's more truth in what you've been saying than even you imagine. It really wasn't the money—or I mean it might easily have been the same if there had been no money. But how shall I explain it? I am attracted by a big, bold, strong pirate, let us say, but as soon as he has carried me off—that is the phrase for it—then he straightway renounces crime and becomes a law-abiding, peaceful citizen. My buccaneer transforms himself, under my very eyes, into an alderman! Do you say there is no comedy in that—and tragedy too?"

"Oh, put it that way and it's all right," he declared, after a moment's consideration. "I've got as much fun in me as anybody else," he went on, "only your jokes have a way of raising blisters on me, somehow. But that's all done with now. That's because I didn't know you—was frightened of you. But I aint scared any more. Everything is different!"

With a certain graciousness of lingering movement, she withdrew herself from his clasp, and faced him with a doubtful smile. "Ah, don't be too sure," she murmured.

"Everything is different!" he repeated, with confident emphasis. "Don't you see yourself it is?"

"You say it is," she replied, hesitatingly, "but that alone doesn't make it so. The assertion that life isn't empty doesn't fill it."

"Ah, but NOW you will talk with me about all that," he broke in triumphantly. "We've been standing off with one another. We've been of no help to each other. But we'll change that, now. We'll talk over everything together. We'll make up our minds exactly what we want to do, and then I'll tuck you under my arm and we'll set out and do it."

She smiled with kindly tolerance for his new-born enthusiasm. "Don't count on me for too much wisdom or invention," she warned him. "If things are to be done, you are still the one who will have to do them. But undoubtedly you are at your best when you are doing things. This really has been no sort of life for you, here."

He gathered her arm into his. "Come and show me your greenhouses," he said, and began walking toward the end of the terrace. "It'll turn out to have been all right for me, this year that I've spent here," he continued, as they strolled along. There was a delightful consciousness of new intimacy conveyed by the very touch of her arm, which filled his tone with buoyancy. "I've been learning all sorts of tricks here, and getting myself into your ways of life. It's all been good training. In every way I'm a better man than I was."

They had descended from the terrace to a garden path, and approached now a long glass structure, through the panes of which masses of soft colour—whites, yellows, pinks, mauves, and strange dull reds—were dimly perceptible.

"The chrysanthemums are not up to much this year," Edith observed, as they drew near to the door of this house. "Collins did them very badly—as he did most other things. But next year it will be very different. Gafferson is the best chrysanthemum man in England. That is he in there now, I think."

Thorpe stopped short, and stared at her, the while the suggestions stirred by the sound of this name slowly shaped themselves.

"Gafferson?" he asked her, with a blank countenance.

"My new head-gardener," she explained. "He was at Hadlow, and after poor old Lady Plowden died—why, surely you remember him there. You spoke about him—you'd known him somewhere—in the West Indies, wasn't it?"

He looked into vacancy with the aspect of one stupefied. "Did I?" he mumbled automatically.

Then, with sudden decision, he swung round on the gravel. "I've got a kind of headache coming on," he said. "If you don't mind, we won't go inside among the flowers."



CHAPTER XXVI

THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts of the great gardens, as the first shadows of evening began to dull the daylight. For a long time he moved aimlessly about, sick at heart and benumbed of mind, in the stupid oppression of a bad dream.

There ran through all his confused thoughts the exasperating consciousness that it was nonsense to be frightened, or even disturbed; that, in truth, nothing whatever had happened. But he could not lay hold of it to any comforting purpose. Some perverse force within him insisted on raising new phantoms in his path, and directing his reluctant gaze to their unpleasant shapes. Forgotten terrors pushed themselves upon his recollection. It was as if he stood again in the Board Room, with the telegram telling of old Tavender's death in his hands, waiting to hear the knock of Scotland Yard upon the door.

The coming of Gafferson took on a kind of supernatural aspect, when Thorpe recalled its circumstances. His own curious mental ferment, which had made this present week a period apart in his life, had begun in the very hour of this man's approach to the house. His memory reconstructed a vivid picture of that approach—of the old ramshackle village trap, and the boy and the bags and the yellow tin trunk, and that decent, red-bearded, plebeian figure, so commonplace and yet so elusively suggestive of something out of the ordinary. It seemed to him now that he had at the time discerned a certain fateful quality in the apparition. And he and his wife had actually been talking of old Kervick at the moment! It was their disagreement over him which had prevented her explaining about the new head-gardener. There was an effect of the uncanny in all this.

And what did Gafferson want? How much did he know? The idea that perhaps old Kervick had found him out, and patched up with him a scheme of blackmail, occurred to him, and in the unreal atmosphere of his mood, became a thing of substance. With blackmail, however, one could always deal; it was almost a relief to see the complication assume that guise. But if Gafferson was intent upon revenge and exposure instead? With such a slug-like, patient, tenacious fool, was that not more likely?

Reasonable arguments presented themselves to his mind ever and again: his wife had known of Gafferson's work, and thought highly of it, and had been in a position to learn of his leaving Hadlow. What more natural than that she should hasten to employ him? And what was it, after all, that Gafferson could possibly know or prove? His brother-in-law had gone off, and got too drunk to live, and had died. What in the name of all that was sensible had this to do with Thorpe? Why should it even be supposed that Gafferson associated Thorpe with any phase of the business? And if he had any notion of a hostile movement, why should he have delayed action so long? Why indeed!

Reassurance did not come to him, but at last an impulse to definite action turned his footsteps toward the cluster of greenhouses in the deepening shadow of the mansion. He would find Gafferson, and probe this business to the uttermost. If there was discoverable in the man's manner or glance the least evidence of a malevolent intention—he would know what to do. Ah, what was it that he would do? He could not say, beyond that it would be bad for Gafferson. He instinctively clenched the fists in the pockets of his jacket as he quickened his pace. Inside the congeries of glazed houses he was somewhat at sea. It was still light enough to make one's way about in the passages between the stagings, but he had no idea of the general plan of the buildings, and it seemed to him that he frequently got back to places he had traversed before. There were two or three subordinate gardeners in or about the houses, but upon reflection he forbore to question them. He tried to assume an idly indifferent air as he sauntered past, nodding almost imperceptible acknowledgment of the forefingers they jerked upward in salutation.

He came at last upon a locked door, the key of which had been removed. The fact vaguely surprised him, and he looked with awakened interest through the panes of this door. The air inside seemed slightly thickened—and then his eye caught the flicker of a flame, straight ahead. It was nothing but the fumigation of a house; the burning spirits in the lamp underneath the brazier were filling the structure with vapours fatal to all insect life. In two or three hours the men would come and open the doors and windows and ventilate the place. The operation was quite familiar to him; it had indeed interested him more when he first saw it done than had anything else connected with the greenhouses.

His abstracted gaze happened to take note of the fact that the door-key was hanging on a nail overhead, and then suddenly this seemed to be related to something else in his thoughts—some obscure impression or memory which evaded him. Continuing to look at the key, a certain recollection all at once assumed great definiteness in his mind: it came to him that the labels on this patent fumigator they were using warned people against exposing themselves to its fumes more than was absolutely necessary. That meant, of course, that their full force would kill a human being. It was very interesting. He looked through the glass again, but could not see that the air was any thicker. The lamp still burned brightly.

He turned away, and beheld a man, in an old cap and apron, at the further end of the palm-house he was in, doing something to a plant. Thorpe noted the fact that he felt no surprise in seeing that it was Gafferson. Somehow the sight of the key, and of the poison-spreading flame inside the locked door, seemed to have prepared him for the spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. He moved forward slowly toward the head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house, and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. The men when they came back would find him there. But ah! they would know that they had not left him there; they would have seen him outside, no doubt, after the fire had been lighted. Well, the key could be left in the unlocked door. Then it could be supposed that he had rashly entered, and been overcome by the vapours. He approached the man silently, his brain arranging the details of the deed with calm celerity.

Then some objections to the plan rose up before him: they dealt almost exclusively with the social nuisance the thing would entail. There was to be a house-party, with that Duke and Duchess in it, of whom his wife talked so much, and it would be a miserable kind of bore to have a suffocated gardener forced upon them as a principal topic of conversation. Of course, too, it would more or less throw the whole household into confusion. And its effect upon his wife!—the progress of his thoughts was checked abruptly by this suggestion. A vision of the shock such a catastrophe might involve to her—or at the best, of the gross unpleasantness she would find in it—flashed over his mind, and then yielded to a softening, radiant consciousness of how much this meant to him. It seemed to efface everything else upon the instant. A profoundly tender desire for her happiness was in complete possession. Already the notion of doing anything to wound or grieve her appeared incredible to him.