"I didn't admit that I was," said Kitty, "but if I am, why are you sorry?"

"Because," said the Dean, smiling, "I thought you were too clever to despise conventionalities."

Kitty sat up with revived energy, and joined battle. She flew into a tirade as to the dulness and routine of English life, the stupidity of good people, and the tyranny of English hypocrisy. The Dean listened with amusement, then with a shade of something else. At last he got up to go.

"Well, you know, we have heard all that before. My point of view is so much more interesting—subtle—romantic! Anybody can attack Mrs. Grundy, but only a person of originality can adore her. Try it, Lady Kitty. It would be really worth your while."

Kitty mocked and exclaimed.

"Do you know what that phrase—that name of abomination—always recalls to me?" pursued the old man.

"It bores me, even to guess," was Kitty's petulant reply.

"Does it? I think of some of the noblest people I have ever known—brave men—beautiful women—who fought Mrs. Grundy, and perished."

The Dean stood looking down upon her, with an eager, sensitive expression. Tales that he had heeded very little when he had first heard them ran through his mind; he had thought Lady Kitty's intimate tete-a-tete with her husband's assailant in the press disagreeable and unseemly; and as for Mrs. Alcot, he had disliked her particularly.

Kitty looked up unquelled.

"''Tis better to have fought and lost Than never to have fought at all—'"

she quoted, with one of her most radiant and provoking smiles.

"Incorrigible!" cried the Dean, catching up his hat. "I see! Once an Archangel—always an Archangel."

"Oh no!" said Kitty. "There may be 'war in heaven.'"

"Well, don't take Mrs. Alcot for a leader, that's all," said the Dean, as he held out a hand of farewell.

"And now I understand!" cried Kitty, triumphantly. "You detest my best friend."

The Dean laughed, protested, and went. Ashe, who had been writing letters while Kitty and the Dean were talking, escorted the old man to the door.

* * * * *

When he returned he found Kitty sitting with her hands in her lap, lost apparently in thought.

"Darling," he said, looking at his watch, "I must be off directly, but I should like to see the boy."

Kitty started. She rang, and the child was brought down. He sat on Kitty's knee, and Ashe coming to the sofa, threw an arm round them both.

"You are not a bad-looking pair," he said, kissing first Kitty and then the baby. "But he's rather pale, Kitty. I think he wants the country."

Kitty said nothing, but she lifted the little white embroidered frock and looked at the twisted foot. Then Ashe felt her shudder.

"Dear, don't be morbid!" he cried, resentfully. "He will have so much brains that nobody will remember that. Think of Byron."

Kitty did not seem to have heard.

"I remember so well when I first saw his foot—after your mother told me—and they brought him to me," she said, slowly. "It seemed to me it was the end—"

"The end of what?"

"Of my dream."

"What do you mean, Kitty!"

"Do you remember the mask in the 'Tempest'? First Iris, with saffron wings, and rich Ceres, and great Juno—"

She half closed her eyes.

"Then the nymphs and the reapers—dancing together on 'the short-grassed green,' the sweetest, gayest show—"

She breathed the words out softly. "Then, suddenly—"

She sat up stiffly and struck her small hands together:

"Prospero starts and speaks. And in a moment—without warning—with 'a strange, hollow, and confused noise'"—she dragged the words drearily—"they heavily vanish. That"—she pointed, shuddering, to the child's foot—"was for me the sign of Prospero."

Ashe looked at her with anxiety, finding it indeed impossible to laugh at her.

She was very pale, her breath came with difficulty, and she trembled from head to foot. He tried to draw her into his arms, but she held him away.

"That first year I had been so happy," she continued, in the same voice. "Everything was so perfect, so glorious. Life was like a great pageant, in a palace. All the old terrors went. I often had fears as a child—fears I couldn't put into words, but that overshadowed me. Then when I saw Alice—the shadow came nearer. But that was all gone. I thought God was reconciled to me, and would always be kind to me now. And then I saw that foot, and I knew that He hated me still. He had burned His mark into my baby's flesh. And I was never to be quite happy again, but always in fear, fear of pain—and death—and grief—"

She paused. Her large eyes gazed into vacancy, and her whole slight frame showed the working of some mysterious and pitiful distress.

A wave of poignant alarm swept through Ashe's mind, coupled also with a curious sense of something foreseen. He had never witnessed precisely this mood in her before; but now that it was thus revealed, he was suddenly aware "that something like it had been for long moving obscurely below the surface of her life. He took the child and laid him on the floor, where he rolled at ease, cooing to himself. Then he came back to Kitty, and soothed her with extraordinary tenderness and skill. Presently she looked at him, as though some obscure trouble of which she had been the victim had released her, and she were herself again.

"Don't go away just yet," she said, in a voice which was still low and shaken. He came close to her, again put his arms round her, and held her on his breast in silence.

"That is heavenly!" he heard her say to herself after a while, in a whisper.

"Kitty!" His eyes grew dim and he stooped to kiss her.

"Heavenly—" she went on, still as though following out her own thought rather than speaking to him, "because one yields—yields! Life is such tension—always."

She closed her eyes quickly, and he watched the beautiful lashes lying still upon her cheek. With an emotion he could not explain—for it was not an emotion of the senses, just as her yielding had not been a yielding of the senses but a yielding of the soul—he continued to hold her in his arms, her life, her will given to him wholly, sighed out upon his heart.

* * * * *

Then gradually she recovered her balance; the normal Kitty came back. She put out her hand and touched his face.

"You must go back to the House, William."

"Yes, if you are all right."

She sat up, and began to rearrange some of her hair that had slipped down.

"You have carried us both into such heights and depths, darling!" said Ashe, after he had watched her a little in silence, "that I have forgotten to tell you the gossip I brought back from mother this morning."

Kitty paused, interrogatively. She was still pale.

"Do you know that mother is convinced Mary Lyster has made up her mind to marry Cliffe?"

There was a pause, then Kitty said, with incredulous contempt: "He would never dream of marrying her!"

"Not so sure! She has a great deal of money, and Cliffe wants money badly."

Ashe began to put his papers together. Kitty questioned him a little more, intermittently, as to what his mother had said. When he had left her, she sat for long on the sofa, playing with some flowers she had taken from her dress, or sombrely watching the child, as it lay on the floor beside her.



X

"My lady! It's come!"

The maid put her head in just to convey the good news. Kitty was in her bedroom walking up and down in a fury which was now almost speechless.

The housemaid was waiting on the stairs. The butler was waiting in the hall. Till that hurried knock was heard at the front door, and the much-tried Wilson had rushed to open it, the house had been wrapped in a sort of storm silence. It was ten o'clock on the night of the ball. Half Kitty's costume lay spread out upon her bed. The other half—although since seven o'clock all Kitty's servants had been employed in rushing to Fanchette's establishment in New Bond Street, at half-hour intervals, in the fastest hansoms to be found—had not yet appeared.

However, here at last was the end of despair. A panting boy dragged the box into the hall, the butler and footman carried it up-stairs and into their mistress's room, where Kitty in a white peignoir stood waiting, with the brow of Medea.

"The boy that brought it looked just fit to drop, my lady!" said the maid, as she undid the box. She was a zealous servant, but she was glad sometimes to chasten these great ones of the land by insisting on the seamy side of their pleasures.

Kitty paused in the eager task of superintendence, and turned to the under-housemaid, who stood by, gazing open-mouthed at the splendors emerging from the box.

"Run down and tell Wilson to give him some wine and cake!" she said, peremptorily. "It's all Fanchette's fault—odious creature!—running it to the last like this—after all her promises!"

The housemaid went, and soon sped back. For no boy on earth would she have been long defrauded of the sight of her ladyship's completed gown.

"Did Wilson feed him?" Kitty flung her the question as she bent, alternately frowning and jubilant, over the creation before her.

"Yes, my lady. It was quite a little fellow. He said his legs were just run off his feet," said the girl, growing confused as the moon-robe unfolded.

"Poor wretch!" said Kitty, carelessly. "I'm glad I'm not an errand—Blanche! you know Fanchette may be an old demon, but she has got taste! Just look at these folds, and the way she's put on the pearls! Now then—make haste!"

Off flew the peignoir, and, with the help of the excited maids, Kitty slipped into her dress. Ten times, over did she declare that it was hopeless, that it didn't fit in the least, that it wasn't one bit what she had ordered, that she couldn't and wouldn't go out in it, that it was simply scandalous, and Fanchette should never be paid a penny. Her maids understood her, and simply went on pulling, patting, fastening, as quickly as their skilled fingers could work, till the last fold fell into its place, and the under-housemaid stepped back with clasped hands and an "Oh, my lady!" couched in a note of irrepressible ecstasy.

"Well?" said Kitty, still frowning—"eh, Blanche?"

The maid proper would have scorned to show emotion; but she nodded approval. "If you ask me, my lady, I think you have never looked so well in anything."

Kitty's brow relaxed at last, as she stood gazing at the reflection in the large glass before her. She saw herself as Artemis—a la Madame de Longueville—in a hunting-dress of white silk, descending to the ankles, embroidered from top to toe in crescents of seed pearls and silver, and held at the waist by a silver girdle. Her throat was covered with magnificent pearls, a Tranmore family possession, lent by Lady Tranmore for the occasion. The slim ankles and feet were cased in white silk, cross-gartered with silver and shod with silver sandals. Her belt held her quiver of white-winged arrows; her bow of ivory inlaid with silver was slung at her shoulder, while across her breast, the only note of color in the general harmony of white, fell a scarf of apple-green holding the horn, also of ivory and silver, which, like the belt and bow, had been designed for her in Madame de Longueville's Paris.

But neither she nor her model would have been finally content with an adornment so delicately fanciful and minute. Both Kitty and the goddess of the Fronde knew that they must hold their own in a crowd. For this there must be diamonds. The sleeves, therefore, on the white arms fell back from diamond clasps; the ivory spear in her right hand was topped by a small genius with glittering wings; and in the masses of her fair hair, bound with pearl fillets, shone the large diamond crescent that Lady Tranmore had foreseen, with one small attendant star at either side.



"Well, upon my word, Kitty!" said a voice from her husband's dressing-room.

Kitty turned impetuously.

"Do you like it?" she cried. Ashe approached. She lifted her horn to her mouth and stood tiptoe. The movement was enchanting; it had in it the youth and freshness of spring woods; it suggested mountain distances and the solitudes of high valleys. Intoxication spoke in Ashe's pulses; he wished the maids had been far away that he might have taken the goddess in his very human arms. Instead of which he stood lazily smiling.

"What Endymion are you calling?" he asked her. "Kitty, you are a dream!"

Kitty pirouetted, then suddenly stopped short and held out a foot.

"Look at those silk things, sir. Nobody but Fanchette could have made them look anything but a botch. But they spoil the dress. And all to please mother and Mrs. Grundy!"

"I like them. I suppose—the nearest you could get to buskins? You would have preferred ankles au naturel? I don't think you'd have been admitted, Kitty."

"Shouldn't I? And so few people have feet they can show!" sighed Kitty, regretfully.

Ashe's eyes met those of the maid, who was trying to hide her smiles, and he and she both laughed.

"What do you think about it, eh, Blanche?"

"I think her ladyship is much better as she is," said the maid, decidedly. "She'd have felt very strange when she got there."

Kitty turned upon her like a whirlwind. "Go to bed!" she said, putting both hands on the shoulders of the maid. "Go to bed at once! Esther can give me my cloak. Do you know, William, she was awake all last night thinking of her brother?"

"The brother who has had an operation? But I thought there was good news?" said Ashe, kindly.

"He's much better," put in Kitty. "She heard this afternoon. She won't be such a goose as to lie awake, I Should hope, to-night. Don't let me catch you here when I get back!" she said, releasing the girl, whose eyes had filled with tears. "Mr. Ashe will help me, and if he pulls the strings into knots, I Shall just cut them—so there! Go away, get your supper, and go to bed. Such a life as I've led them all to-day!" She threw up her hands in a perfunctory penitence.

The maid was forced to go, and the housemaid also returned to the hall with Kitty's Opera-cloak and fan, till it should please her mistress to descend. Both of them were dead tired, but they took a genuine disinterested pleasure in Kitty's beauty and her fine frocks. She was not by any means always considerate of them; but still, with that wonderful generosity that the poor show every day to the rich, they liked her; and to Ashe every servant in the house was devoted.

Kitty meanwhile had driven Ashe to his own toilette, and was walking about the room, now Studying herself in the glass, and now chattering to him through the open door.

"Have you heard anything more about Tuesday?" she asked him, presently.

"Oh yes!—compliments by the dozen. Old Parham overtook me as I was walking away from the House, and said all manner of civil things."

"And I met Lady Parham in Marshall's," said Kitty. "She does thank so badly! I should like to show her how to do it. Dear me!" Kitty sighed. "Am I henceforth to live and die on Lady Parham's ample breast?"

She sat with one foot beating the floor, deep in meditation.

"And shall I tell you what mother said?" shouted Ashe through the door.

"Yes."

He repeated—so fat as dressing would let him a number of the charming and considered phrases in which Lady Tranmore, full of relief, pleasure, and a secret self-reproach, had expressed to him the effect produced upon herself and a select public by Kitty's performance at the Parhams'. Kitty had indeed behaved like an angel—an angel en toilette de bal, reciting a scene from Alfred de Musset. Such politeness to Lady Parham, such smiles, sometimes a shade malicious, for the Prime Minister, who on his side did his best to efface all memory of his speech of the week before from the mind of his fascinating guest; smiles from the Princess, applause from the audience; an evening, in fact, all froth and sweetstuff, from which Lady Parham emerged grimly content, conscious at the same time that she was henceforward very decidedly, and rather disagreeably, in the Ashes' debt; while Elizabeth Tranmore went home in a tremor of delight, happily persuaded that Ashe's path was now clear.

Kitty listened, sometimes pleased, sometimes inclined to be critical or scornful of her mother-in-law's praise. But she did love Lady Tranmore, and on the whole she smiled. Smiles, indeed, had been Kitty's portion since that evening of strange emotion, when she had found herself sobbing in William's arms for reasons quite beyond her own defining. It was as if, like the prince in the fairy tale, some iron band round her heart had given way. She seemed to dance through the house; she devoured her child with kisses; and she was even willing sometimes to let William tell her what his mother suspected of the progress of Mary's affair with Geoffrey Cliffe, though she carefully avoided speaking directly to Lady Tranmore about it. As to Cliffe himself, she seemed to have dropped him out of her thoughts. She never mentioned him, and Ashe could only suppose she had found him disenchanting.

"Well, darling! I hope I have made a sufficient fool of myself to please you!"

Ashe had thrown the door wide, and stood on the threshold, arrayed in the brocade and fur of a Venetian noble. He was a somewhat magnificent apparition, and Kitty, who had coaxed or driven him into the dress, gave a scream of delight. She saw him before her own glass, and the crimson senator made eyes at the white goddess as they posed triumphantly together.

"You're a very rococo sort of goddess, you know, Kitty!" said Ashe. "Not much Greek about you!"

"Quite as much as I want, thank you," said Kitty, courtesying to her own reflection in the glass. "Fanchette could have taught them a thing or two! Now come along! Ah! Wait!"

And, gathering up her possessions, she left the room. Ashe, following her, saw that she was going to the nursery, a large room on the back staircase. At the threshold she turned back and put her finger to her lip. Then she slipped in, reappearing a moment afterwards to say, in a whisper, "Nurse is not in bed. You may come in." Nurse, indeed, knew much better than to be in bed. She had been sitting up to see her ladyship's splendors, and she rose smiling as Ashe entered the room.

"A parcel of idiots, nurse, aren't we?" he said, as he, too, displayed himself, and then he followed Kitty to the child's bedside. She bent over the baby, removed a corner of the cot-blanket that might tease his cheek, touched the mottled hand softly, removed a light that seemed to her too near—and still stood looking.

"We must go, Kitty."

"I wish he were a little older," she said, discontentedly, under her breath, "that he might wake up and see us both! I should like him to remember me like this."

"Queen and huntress, come away!" said Ashe, drawing her by the hand.

Outside the landing was dimly lighted. The servants were all waiting in the hall below.

"Kitty," said Ashe, passionately, "give me one kiss. You're so sweet to-night—so sweet!"

She turned.

"Take care of my dress!" she smiled, and then she held out her face under its sparkling crescent, held it with a dainty deliberation, and let her lips cling to his.

* * * * *

Ashe and Kitty were soon wedged into one of the interminable lines of carriages that blocked all the approaches to St. James's Square. The ball had been long expected, and there was a crowd in the streets, kept back by the police. The brougham went at a foot's pace, and there was ample time either for reverie or conversation. Kitty looked out incessantly, exclaiming when she caught sight of a costume or an acquaintance. Ashe had time to think over the latest phase of the negotiations with America, and to go over in his mind the sentences of a letter he had addressed to the Times in answer to one of great violence from Geoffrey Cliffe. His own letter had appeared that morning. Ashe was proud of it. He made bold to think that it exposed Cliffe's exaggerations and insincerities neatly, and perhaps decisively. At any rate, he hummed a cheerful tune as he thought of it.

Then suddenly and incongruously a recollection occurred to him.

"Kitty, do you know that I had a letter from your mother, this morning?"

"Had you?" said Kitty, turning to him with reluctance. "I suppose she wanted some money."

"She did. She says she is very hard up. If I cared to use it, I have an easy reply."

"What do you mean?"

"I might say,' D—-n it, we are, too!'"

Kitty laughed uneasily.

"Don't begin to talk money matters now, William, please."

"No, dear, I won't. But we shall really have to draw in."

"You will pay so many debts!" said Kitty, frowning.

Ashe went into a fit of laughter.

"That's my extravagance, isn't it? I assure you I go on the most approved principles. I divide our available money among the greatest number of hungry claimants it will stretch to. But, after all, it goes a beggarly short way."

"I know mother will think my diamond crescent a horrible extravagance," said Kitty, pouting. "But you are the only son, William, and we must behave like other people."

"Dear, don't trouble your little head," he said; "I'll manage it, somehow."

Indeed, he knew very well that he could never bring his own indolent and easy-going temper in such matters to face any real struggle with Kitty over money. He must go to his mother, who now—his father being a hopeless invalid—managed the estates with his own and the agent's help. It was, of course, right that she should preach to Kitty a little; but she would be sensible and help them out. After all, there was plenty of money. Why shouldn't Kitty spend it?

Any one who knew him well might have observed a curious contrast between his private laxity in these matters and the strictness of his public practice. He was scruple and delicacy itself in all financial matters that touched his public life—directorships, investments, and the like, no less than in all that concerned interest and patronage. He would have been a bold man who had dared to propose to William Ashe any expedient whatever by which his public place might serve his private gain. His proud and fastidious integrity, indeed, was one of the sources of his growing power. But as to private debts—and the tradesmen to whom they were owed—his standards were still essentially those of the Whigs from whom he descended, of Fox, the all-indebted, or of Melbourne, who has left an amusing disquisition on the art of dividing a few loaves and fishes in the shape of bank-notes among a multitude of creditors.

Not that affairs were as yet very bad. Far from it. But there was little to spare for Madame d'Estrees, who ought, indeed, to want nothing; and Ashe was vaguely meditating his reply to that lady when a face in a carriage near them, which was trying to enter the line, caught his attention.

"Mary!" he said, "a la Sir Joshua—and mother. They don't see us. Query, will Cliffe take the leap to-night? Mother reports a decided increase of ardor on his part. Sorry you don't approve of it, darling!"

"It's just like lighting a lamp to put it out—that's all!" said Kitty, with vivacity. "The man who marries Mary is done for."

"Not at all. Mary's money will give him the pedestal he wants, and trust Cliffe to take care of his own individuality afterwards! Now, if you'll transfer your alarms to Mary, I'm with you!"

"Oh! of course he'll be unkind to her. She may lay her account for that. But it's the marrying her!" And Kitty's upper-lip curled under a slow disdain.

William laughed out.

"Kitty, really!—you remind me, please, of Miss Jane Taylor:

"'I did not think there could be found—a little heart so hard!'

Mary is thirty; she would like to be married. And why not? She'll give quite as good as she gets."

"Well, she won't get—anything. Geoffrey Cliffe thinks of no one but himself."

Ashe's eyebrows went up.

"Oh, well, all men are selfish—and the women don't mind."

"It depends on how it's done," said Kitty.

Ashe declared that Cliffe was just an ordinary person, "l'homme sensuel moyen"—with a touch of genius. Except for that, no better and no worse than other people. What then?—the world was not made up of persons of enormous virtue like Lord Althorp and Mr. Gladstone. If Mary wanted him for a husband, and could capture him, both, in his opinion, would have pretty nearly got their deserts.

Kitty, however, fell into a reverie, after which she let him see a face of the same startling sweetness as she had several times shown him of late.

"Do you want me to be nice to her?" She nestled up to him.

"Bind her to your chariot wheels, madam! You can!" said Ashe, slipping a hand round hers.

Kitty pondered.

"Well, then, I won't tell her that I know he's still in love with the Frenchwoman. But it's on the tip of my tongue."

"Heavens!" cried Ashe. "The Vicomtesse D—-, the lady of the poems? But she's dead! I thought that was over long ago."

Kitty was silent for a moment, then said, with low-voiced emphasis:

"That any one could write those poems, and then think of Mary!"

"Yes, the poems were fine," said Ashe, "but make-believe!"

Kitty protested indignantly. Ashe bantered her a little on being one of the women who were the making of Cliffe.

"Say what you like!" she said, drawing a quick breath. "But, often and often, he says divine things—divinely! I feel them there!" And she lifted both hands to her breast with an impulsive gesture.

"Goddess!" said Ashe, kissing her hand because enthusiasm became her so well. "And to think that I should have dared to roast the divine one in a Times letter this morning!"

* * * * *

The hall and staircase of Yorkshire House were already filled with a motley and magnificent crowd when Ashe and Kitty arrived. Kitty, still shrouded in her cloak, pushed her way through, exchanging greetings with friends, shrieking a little now and then for the safety of her bow and quiver, her face flushed with pleasure and excitement. Then she disappeared into the cloak-room, and Ashe was left to wonder how he was going to endure his robes through the heat of the evening, and to exchange a laughing remark or two with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, into whose company he had fallen.

"What are we doing it for?" he asked the young man, whose thin person was well set off by a Tudor dress.

"Oh, don't be superior!" said the other. "I'm going to enjoy myself like a school-boy!"

And that, indeed, seemed to be the attitude of most of the people present. And not only of the younger members of the dazzling company. What struck Ashe particularly, as he mingled with the crowd, was the alacrity of the elder men. Here was a famous lawyer already nearing the seventies, in the Lord Chancellor's garb of a great ancestor; here an ex-Viceroy of Ireland with a son in the government, magnificent in an Elizabethan dress, his fair bushy hair and reddish beard shining above a doublet on which glittered a jewel given to the founder of his house by Elizabeth's own hand; next to him, a white-haired judge in the robes of Judge Gascoyne; a peer, no younger, at his side, in the red and blue of Mazarin: and showing each and all in their gay complacent looks a clear revival of that former masculine delight in splendid clothes which came so strangely to an end with that older world on the ruins of which Napoleon rose. So with the elder women. For this night they were young again. They had been free to choose from all the ages a dress that suited them; and the result of this renewal of a long-relinquished eagerness had been in many cases to call back a bygone self, and the tones and gestures of those years when beauty is its own chief care.

As for the young men, the young women, and the girls, the zest and pleasure of the show shone in their eyes and movements, and spread through the hall and up the crowded staircase, like a warm, contagious atmosphere. At all times, indeed, and in all countries, an aristocracy has been capable of this sheer delight in its own splendor, wealth, good looks, and accumulated treasure; whether in the Venice that Petrarch visited; or in the Rome of the Renaissance popes; in the Versailles of the Grand Monarque; or in the Florence of to-day, which still at moments of festa reproduces in its midst all the costumes of the Cinque-cento.

In this English case there was less dignity than there would have been in a Latin country, and more personal beauty; less grace, perhaps, and yet a something richer and more romantic.

At the top of the stairs stood a marquis in a dress of the Italian Renaissance, a Gonzaga who had sat for Titian; beside him a fair-haired wife in the white satin and pearls of Henrietta Maria; while up the marble stairs, watched by a laughing multitude above, streamed Gainsborough girls and Reynolds women, women from the courts of Elizabeth, or Henri Quatre, of Maria Theresa, or Marie Antoinette, the figures of Holbein and Vandyck, Florentines of the Renaissance, the youths of Carpaccio, the beauties of Titian and Veronese.

"Kitty, make haste!" cried a voice in front, as Kitty began to mount the stairs. "Your quadrille is just called."

Kitty smiled and nodded, but did not hurry her pace by a second. The staircase was not so full as it had been, and she knew well as she mounted it, her slender figure drawn to its full height, her eyes flashing greeting and challenge to those in the gallery, the diamond genius on her spear glittering above her, that she held the stage, and that the play would not begin without her.

And indeed her dress, her brilliance, and her beauty let loose a hum of conversation—not always friendly.

"What is she?" "Oh, something mythological! She's in the next quadrille." "My dear, she's Diana! Look at her bow and quiver, and the moon in her hair." "Very incorrect!—she ought to have the towered crown!" "Absurd, such a little thing to attempt Diana! I'd back Actaeon!"

The latter remark was spoken in the ear of Louis Harman, who stood in the gallery looking down. But Harman shook his head.

"You don't understand. She's not Greek, of course; but she's fairyland. A child of the Renaissance, dreaming in a wood, would have seen Artemis so—dressed up and glittering, and fantastic—as the Florentines saw Venus. Small, too, like the fairies!—slipping through the leaves; small hounds, with jewelled collars, following her!"

He smiled at his own fancy, still watching Kitty with his painter's eyes.

"She has seen a French print somewhere," said Cliffe, who stood close by. "More Versailles in it than fairyland, I think!"

"It is she that is fairyland," said Harman, still fascinated.

Cliffe's expression showed the sarcasm of his thought. Fairy, perhaps!—with the touch of malice and inhuman mischief that all tradition attributes to the little people. Why, after that first meeting, when the conversation of a few minutes had almost swept them into the deepest waters of intimacy, had she slighted him so, in other drawing-rooms and on other occasions? She had actually neglected and avoided him—after having dared to speak to him of his secret! And now Ashe's letter of the morning had kindled afresh his sense of rancor against a pair of people, too prosperous and too arrogant. The stroke in the Times had, he knew, gone home; his vanity writhed under it, and the wish to strike back tormented him, as he watched Ashe mounting behind his wife, so handsome, careless, and urbane, his jewelled cap dangling in his hand.

* * * * *

The quadrille of gods and goddesses was over. Kitty had been dancing with a fine clumsy Mars, in ordinary life an honest soldier and deer-stalker, the heir to a Scotch dukedom; having as her vis-a-vis Madeleine Alcot—as the Flora of Botticelli's "Spring"—and slim as Mercury in fantastic Renaissance armor. All the divinities of the Pantheon, indeed, were there, but in Gallicized or Italianate form; scarcely a touch of the true antique, save in the case of one beautiful girl who wore a Juno dress of white whereof the clinging folds had been arranged for her by a young Netherlands painter, Mr. Alma Tadema, then newly settled in this country. Kitty at first envied her; then decided that she herself could have made no effect in such a gown, and threw her the praises of indifference.

When, to Kitty's sharp regret, the music stopped and the glittering crew of immortals melted into the crowd, she found behind her a row of dancers waiting for the quadrille which was to follow. This was to consist entirely of English pictures revived—Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney—and to be danced by those for whose families they had been originally painted. As she drew back, looking eagerly to right and left, she came across Mary Lyster. Mary wore her hair high and powdered—a black silk scarf over white satin, and a blue sash.

"Awfully becoming!" said Kitty, nodding to her. "Who are you?"

"My great-great aunt!" said Mary, courtesying. "You, I see, go even farther back."

"Isn't it fun?" said Kitty, pausing beside her. "Have you seen William? Poor dear! he's so hot. How do you do?" This last careless greeting was addressed to Cliffe, whom she now perceived standing behind Mary.

Cliffe bowed stiffly.

"Excuse me. I did not see you. I was absorbed in your dress. You are Artemis, I see—with additions."

"Oh! I am an 'article de Paris,'" said Kitty. "But it seems odd that some people should take me for Joan of Arc." Then she turned to Mary. "I think your dress is quite lovely!" she said, in that warm, shy voice she rarely used except for a few intimates, and had never yet been known to waste on Mary. "Don't you admire it enormously, Mr. Cliffe?"

"Enormously," said Cliffe, pulling at his mustache. "But by now my compliments are stale."

"Is he cross about William's letter?" thought Kitty. "Well, let's leave them to themselves."

Then, as she passed him, something in the silent personality of the man arrested her. She could not forbear a look at him over her shoulder. "Are you—Oh! of course, I remember—" for she had recognized the dress and cap of the Spanish grandee.

Cliffe did not reply for a moment, but the harsh significance of his face revived in her the excitable interest she had felt in him on the day of his luncheon in Hill Street; an interest since effaced and dispersed, under the influence of that serenity and home peace which had shone upon her since that very day.

"I should apologize, no doubt, for not taking your advice," he said, looking her in the eyes. Their expression, half bitter, half insolent, reminded her.

"Did I give you any advice?" Kitty wrinkled up her white brows. "I don't recollect."

Mary looked at her sharply, suspiciously. Kitty, quite conscious of the look, was straightway pricked by an elfish curiosity. Could she carry him off—trouble Mary's possession there and then? She believed she could. She was well aware of a certain relation between herself and Cliffe, if, at least, she chose to develop it. Should she? Her vanity insisted that Mary could not prevent it.

However, she restrained herself and moved on. Presently looking back, she saw them still together, Cliffe leaning against the pedestal of a bust, Mary beside him. There was an animation in her eyes, a rose of pleasure on her cheek which stirred in Kitty a queer, sudden sympathy. "I am a little beast!" she said to herself. "Why shouldn't she be happy?"

Then, perceiving Lady Tranmore at the end of the ballroom, she made her way thither surrounded by a motley crowd of friends. She walked as though on air, "raining influence." And as Lady Tranmore caught the glitter of the diamond crescent, and beheld the small divinity beneath it, she, too, smiled with pleasure, like the other spectators on Kitty's march. The dress was monstrously costly. She knew that. But she forgot the inroad on William's pocket, and remembered only to be proud of William's wife. Since the Parhams' party, indeed, the unlooked-for submission of Kitty, and the clearing of William's prospects, Lady Tranmore had been sweetness itself to her daughter-in-law.

But her fine face and brow were none the less inclined to frown. She herself as Katharine of Aragon would have shed a dignity on any scene, but she was in no sympathy with what she beheld.

"We shall soon all of us be ashamed of this kind of thing," she declared to Kitty. "Just as people now are beginning to be ashamed of enormous houses and troops of servants."

"No, please! Only bored with them!" said Kitty. "There are so many other ways now of amusing yourself—that's all."

"Well, this way will die out," said Lady Tranmore. "The cost of it is too scandalous—people's consciences prick them."

Kitty vowed she did not believe there was a conscience in the room; and then, as the music struck up, she carried off her companion to some steps overlooking the great marble gallery, where they had a better view of the two lines of dancers.

It is said that as a nation the English have no gift for pageants. Yet every now and then—as no doubt in the Elizabethan mask—they show a strange felicity in the art. Certainly the dance that followed would have been difficult to surpass even in the ripe days and motherlands of pageantry. To the left, a long line, consisting mainly of young girls in their first bloom, dressed as Gainsborough and his great contemporaries delighted to paint these flowers of England—the folds of plain white muslin crossed over the young breast, a black velvet at the throat, a rose in the hair, the simple skirt showing the small pointed feet, and sometimes a broad sash defining the slender waist. Here were Stanleys, Howards, Percys, Villierses, Butlers, Osbornes—soft slips of girls bearing the names of England's rough and turbulent youth, bearing themselves to-night with a shy or laughing dignity, as though the touch of history and romance were on them. And facing them, the youths of the same families, no less handsome than their sisters and brides—in Romney's blue coats, or the splendid red of Reynolds and Gainsborough.

To and fro swayed the dancers, under the innumerable candles that filled the arched roof and upper walls of the ballroom; and each time the lines parted they disclosed at the farther end another pageant, to which that of the dance was in truth subordinate—a dais hung with blue and silver, and upon it a royal lady whose beauty, then in its first bloom, has been a national possession, since as, the "sea-king's daughter" she brought it in dowry to her adopted country. To-night she blazed in jewels as a Valois queen, with her court around her, and as the dancers receded, each youth and maiden seemed instinctively to turn towards her as roses to the sun.

"Oh, beautiful, beautiful world!" said Kitty to herself, in an ecstasy, pressing her small hands together; "how I love you!—love you!"

* * * * *

Meanwhile Darrell and Harman stood side by side near the doorway of the ballroom, looking in when the crowd allowed.

"A strange sight," said Harman. "Perhaps they take it too seriously."

"Ah! that is our English upper class," said Darrell, with a sneer. "Is there anything they take lightly?—par exemple! It seems to me they carry off this amusement better than most. They may be stupid, but they are good-looking. I say, Ashe"—he turned towards the new-comer who had just sauntered up to them—"on this exceptional occasion, is it allowed to congratulate you on Lady Kitty's gown?"

For Kitty, raised upon her step, was at the moment in full view.

Ashe made some slight reply, the slightest of which indeed annoyed the thin-skinned and morbid Darrell, always on the lookout for affronts. But Louis Harman, who happened to observe the Under-Secretary's glance at his wife, said to himself, "By George! that queer marriage is turning out well, after all."

* * * * *

The Tudor and Marie Antoinette quadrilles had been danced. There was a rumor of supper in the air.

"William!" said Kitty, in his ear, as she came across him in one of the drawing-rooms, "Lord Hubert takes me in to supper. Poor me!" She made an extravagant face of self-pity and swept on. Lord Hubert was one of the sons of the house, a stupid and inarticulate guardsman, Kitty's butt and detestation. Ashe smiled to himself over her fate, and went back to the ballroom in search of his own lady.

Meanwhile Kitty paused in the next drawing-room, and dismissed her following.

"I promised to wait here for Lord Hubert," she said. "You go on, or you'll get no tables."

And she waved them peremptorily away. The drawing-room, one of a suite which looked on the garden, thinned temporarily. In a happy fatigue, Kitty leaned dreamily over the ledge of one of the open windows, looking at the illuminated space below her. Amid the colored lights, figures of dream and fantasy walked up and down. In the midst flashed a flame-colored fountain. The sounds of a Strauss waltz floated in the air. And beyond the garden and its trees rose the dull roar of London.

A silk curtain floated out into the room under the westerly breeze, then, returning, sheathed Kitty in its folds. She stood there hidden, amusing herself like a child with the thought of startling that great heavy goose, Lord Hubert.

Suddenly a pair of voices that she knew caught her ear. Two persons, passing through, lingered, without perceiving her. Kitty, after a first movement of self-disclosure, caught her own name and stood motionless.

"Well, of course you've heard that we got through," said Lady Parham. "For once Lady Kitty behaved herself!"

"You were lucky!" said Mary Lyster. "Lady Tranmore was dreadfully anxious—"

"Lest she should cut us at the last?" cried Lady Parham. "Well, of course, Lady Kitty is 'capable de tout.'" She laughed. "But perhaps as you are a cousin I oughtn't to say these things."

"Oh, say what you like," said Mary. "I am no friend of Kitty's, and never pretended to be."

Lady Parham came closer, apparently, and said, confidentially: "What on earth made that man marry her? He might have married anybody. She had no money, and worse than no position."

"She worked upon his pity, of course, a good deal. I saw them in the early days at Grosville Park. She played her cards very cleverly. And then, it was just the right moment. Lady Tranmore had been urging him to marry."

"Well, of course," said Lady Parham, "there's no denying the beauty."

"You think so?" said Mary, as though in wonder. "Well, I never could see it. And now she has so much gone off."

"I don't agree with you. Many people think her the star to-night. Mr. Cliffe, I am told, admires her."

Kitty could not see how the eyes of the speaker, under a Sir Joshua turban, studied the countenance of Miss Lyster, as she threw out the words.

Mary laughed.

"Poor Kitty! She tried to flirt with him long ago—just after she arrived in London, fresh out of the convent. It was so funny! He told me afterwards he never was so embarrassed in his life—this baby making eyes at him! And now—oh no!"

"Why not now? Lady Kitty's very much the rage, and Mr. Cliffe likes notoriety."

"But a notoriety with—well, with some style, some distinction! Kitty's sort is so cheap and silly."

"Ah, well, she's not to be despised," said Lady Parham. "She's as clever as she can be. But her husband will have to keep her in order."

"Can he?" said Mary. "Won't she always be in his way?"

"Always, I should think. But he must have known what he was about. Why didn't his mother interfere? Such a family!—such a history!"

"She did interfere," said Mary. "We all did our best"—she dropped her voice—"I know I did. But it was no use. If men like spoiled children they must have them, I suppose. Let's hope he'll learn how to manage her. Shall we go on? I promised to meet my supper-partner in the library."

They moved away.

* * * * *

For some minutes Kitty stood looking out, motionless, but the beating of her heart choked her. Strange ancestral things—things of evil—things of passion—had suddenly awoke, as it were, from sleep in the depths of her being, and rushed upon the citadel of her life. A change had passed over her from head to foot. Her veins ran fire.

At that moment, turning round, she saw Geoffrey Cliffe enter the room in which she stood. With an impetuous movement she approached him.

"Take me down to supper, Mr. Cliffe. I can't wait for Lord Hubert any more, I'm so hungry!"

"Enchanted!" said Cliffe, the color leaping into his tanned face as he looked down upon the goddess. "But I came to find—"

"Miss Lyster? Oh, she is gone in with Mr. Darrell. Come with me. I have a ticket for the reserved tent. We shall have a delicious corner to ourselves."

And she took from her glove the little coveted paste-board, which—handed about in secret to a few intimates of the house—gave access to the sanctum sanctorum of the evening.

Cliffe wavered. Then his vanity succumbed. A few minutes later the supper guests in the tent of the elite saw the entrance of a darkly splendid Duke of Alva, with a little sandalled goddess. All compact, it seemed, of ivory and fire, on his arm.



XI

The spring freshness of London, had long since departed. A crowded season; much animation in Parliament, where the government, to its own amazement, had rather gained than lost ground; industrial trouble at home, and foreign complications abroad; and in London the steady growth of a new plutocracy, the result, so far, of American wealth and American brides. In the first week of July, the outward things of the moment might have been thus summed up by any careful observer.

On a certain Tuesday night, the debate on a private member's bill unexpectedly collapsed, and the House rose early. Ashe left the House with his secretary, but parted from him at the corner of Birdcage Walk, and crossed the park alone. He meant to join Kitty at a party in Piccadilly; there was just time to go home and dress; and he walked at a quick pace.

Two members sitting on the same side of the House with himself were also going home. One of them noticed the Under-Secretary.

"A very ineffective statement Ashe made to-night—don't you think so?" he said to his companion.

"Very! Really, if the government can't take up a stronger line, the general public will begin to think there's something in it."

"Oh, if you only shriek long enough and sharp enough in England something's sure to come of it. Cliffe and his group have been playing a very shrewd game. The government will get their agreement approved all right, but Cliffe has certainly made some people on our side uneasy. However—"

"However, what?" said the other, after a moment.

"I wish I thought that were the only reason for Ashe's change of tone," said the first speaker, slowly.

"What do you mean?"

The two were intimate personal friends, belonging, moreover, to a group of evangelical families well known in English life; but even so, the answer came with reluctance:

"Well, you see, it's not very easy to grapple in public with the man whose name all smart London happens to be coupling with that of your wife!"

"I say"—the other stood still, in genuine consternation and distress—"you don't mean to say that there's that in it!"

"You notice that the difference is not in what Ashe says, but in how he says it. He avoids all personal collision with Cliffe. The government stick to their case, but Ashe mentions everybody but Cliffe, and confutes all arguments but his. And meanwhile, of course, the truth is that Cliffe is the head and front of the campaign, and if he threw up to-morrow, everything would quiet down."

"And Lady Kitty is flirting with him at this particular moment? Damned bad taste and bad feeling, to say the least of it!"

"You won't find one of the Bristol lot consider that kind of thing when their blood is up!" said the other. "You remember the tales of old Lord Blackwater?"

"But is there really any truth in it? Or is it mere gossip?"

"Well, I hear that the behavior of both of them at Grosville Park last week was such that Lady Grosville vows she will never ask either of them again. And at Ascot, at Lord's, the opera, Lady Kitty sits with him, talks with him, walks with him, the whole time, and won't look at any one else. They must be asked together or neither will come—and 'society,' as far as I can make out, thinks it a good joke and is always making plans to throw them together."

"Can't Lady Tranmore do anything?"

"I don't know. They say she is very unhappy about it. Certainly she looks ill and depressed."

"And Ashe?"

His companion hesitated. "I don't like to say it, but, of course, you know there are many people who will tell you that Ashe doesn't care twopence what his wife does so long as she is nice to him, and he can read his books and carry on his politics as he pleases!"

"Ashe always strikes me as the soul of honor," said the other, indignantly.

"Of course—for himself. But a more fatalist believer in liberty than Ashe doesn't exist—liberty especially to damn yourself—if you must and will."

"It would be hard to extend that doctrine to a wife," said the other, with a grave, uncomfortable laugh.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the man whose affairs they had been discussing walked home, wrapped in solitary and disagreeable thought. As he neared the Marlborough House corner a carriage passed him. It was delayed a moment by other carriages, and as it halted beside him Ashe recognized Lady M——, the hostess of the fancy ball, and a very old friend of his parents. He took off his hat. The lady within recognized him and inclined slightly—very slightly and stiffly. Ashe started a little and walked on.

The meeting vividly recalled the ball, the terminus a quo indeed from which the meditation in which he had been plunged since entering the park had started. Between six and seven weeks ago, was it? It might have been a century. He thought of Kitty as she was that night—Kitty pirouetting in her glittering dress, or bending over the boy, or holding her face to his as he kissed her on the stairs. Never since had she shown him the smallest glimpse of such a mood. What was wrong with her and with himself? Something, since May, had turned their life topsy-turvy, and it seemed to Ashe that in the general unprofitable rush of futile engagements he had never yet had time to stop and ask himself what it might be.

Why, at any rate, was he in this chafing irritation and discomfort? Why could he not deal with that fellow Cliffe as he deserved? And what in Heaven's name was the reason why old friends like Lady M—— were beginning to look at him coldly, and avoid his conversation?

His mother, too! He gathered that quite lately there had been some disagreeable scene between her and Kitty. Kitty had resented some remonstrance of hers, and for some days now they had not met. Nor had Ashe seen his mother alone. Did she also avoid him, shrink from speaking out her real mind to him?

Well, it was all monstrously absurd!—a great coil about nothing, as far as the main facts were concerned, although the annoyance and worry of the thing were indeed becoming serious. Kitty had no doubt taken a wild liking to Geoffrey Cliffe—

"And, by George!" said Ashe, pausing in his walk, "she warned me."

And there rose in his memory the formal garden at Grosville Park, the little figure at his side, and Kitty's franknesses—"I shall take mad fancies for people. I sha'n't be able to help it. I have one now, for Geoffrey Cliffe."

He smiled. There was the difficulty! If only the people whose envious tongues were now wagging could see Kitty as she was, could understand what a gulf lay between her and the ordinary "fast" woman, there would be an end of this silly, ill-natured talk. Other women might be of the earth earthy. Kitty was a sprite, with all the irresponsibility of such incalculable creatures. The men and women—women especially—who gossiped and lied about her, who sent abominable paragraphs to scurrilous papers—he had one now in his pocket which had reached him at the House from an anonymous correspondent—spoke out of their own vile experience, judged her by their own standards. His mother, at any rate—he proudly thought—ought to know better than to be misled by them for a moment.

At the same time, something must be done. It could not be denied that Kitty had been behaving like a romantic, excitable child with this unscrupulous man, whose record with regard to women was probably wholly unknown to her, however foolishly she might idealize the liaison commemorated in his poems. What had Kitty, indeed, been doing with herself this six weeks? Ashe tried to recall them in detail. Ascot, Lord's, innumerable parties in London and in the country, to some of which he had not been able to accompany her, owing to the stress of Parliamentary and official work. Grosville Park, for instance—he had been stopped at the last moment from going down there by the arrival of some important foreign news, and Kitty had gone alone. She had reappeared on the Monday, pale and furious, saying that she and her aunt had quarrelled, and that she would never go near the Grosvilles either in town or country again. She had not volunteered any further explanation, and Ashe had refrained from inquiry. There were in him certain disgusts and disdains, belonging to his general epicurean conception of existence, which not even his love for Kitty could overcome. One was a disdain for the quarrels of women. He supposed they were inevitable; he saw, by-the-way, that Kitty and Lady Parham were once more at daggers drawn; and Kitty seemed to enjoy it. Well, it was her own affair; but while there was a Greek play, or a Shakespeare sonnet, or even a Blue Book to read, who could expect him to listen?

What had old Lady Grosville been about? He understood that Cliffe had been of the party. And Kitty must have done something to bring down upon her the wrath of the Puritanical mistress of the house.

Well, what was he to do? It was now July. The session would last certainly till the middle of August, and though the American business would be disposed of directly, there was fresh trouble in the Balkan Peninsula, and an anxious situation in Egypt. Impossible that he should think of leaving his post. And as for the chance of a dissolution, the government was now a good deal stronger than it had been before Easter—worse luck!

Of course he ought to take Kitty away. But short of resignation how was it to be done? And what, even, would resignation do—supposing, per impossibile, it could be thought of—but give to gnawing gossip a bigger bone, and probably irritate Kitty to the point of rebellion? Yet how induce her to go with any one else? Lady Tranmore was out of the question. Margaret French, perhaps?

Then, suddenly, Ashe was assailed by an inner laughter, hollow and discomfortable. Things were come to a pretty pass when he must even dream of resigning because a man whom he despised would haunt his house, and absorb the company of his wife; when, moreover, he could not even think of a remedy for such a state of things without falling back dismayed from the certainty of Kitty's temper—Kitty's wild and furious temper.

For during the last fortnight, as it seemed to Ashe, all the winds of tempest had been blowing through his house. Himself, the servants, even Margaret, even the child, had all suffered. He also had lost his temper several times—such a thing had scarcely happened to him since his childhood. He thought of it as of a kind of physical stain or weakness. To keep an even and stoical mind, to laugh where one could not conquer—this had always seemed to him the first condition of decent existence. And now to be wrangling over an expenditure, an engagement, a letter, the merest nothing—whether it was a fine day or it wasn't—could anything be more petty, degrading, intolerable?

He vowed that this should stop. Whatever happened, he and Kitty should not degenerate into a pair of scolds—besmirch their life with quarrels as ugly as they were silly. He would wrestle with her, his beloved, unreasonable, foolish Kitty; he ought, of course, to have done so before. But it was only within the last week or so that the horizon had suddenly darkened—the thing grown serious. And now this beastly paragraph! But, after all, what did such garbage matter? It would of course be a comfort to thrash the editor. But our modern life breeds such creatures, and they have to be borne.

* * * * *

He let himself into a silent house. His letters lay on the hall-table. Among them was a handwriting which arrested him. He remembered, yet could not put a name to it. Then he turned the envelope. "H'm. Lady Grosville!" He read it, standing there, then thrust it into his pocket, thinking angrily that there seemed to be a good many fools in this world who occupied themselves with other people's business. Exaggeration, of course, damnable parti pris! When did she ever see Kitty except with a jaundiced eye? "I wonder Kitty condescends to go to the woman's house! She must know that everything she does is seen there en noir. Pharisaical, narrow-minded Philistines!"

The letter acted as a tonic. Ashe was positively grateful to the "old gorgon" who wrote it. He ran up-stairs, his pulses tingling in defence of Kitty. He would show Lady Grosville that she could not write to him, at any rate, in that strain, with impunity.

He took a candle from the landing, and opened his wife's door in order to pass through her room to his own. As he did so, he ran against Kitty's maid, Blanche, who was coming out. She shrank back as she saw him, but not before the light of his candle had shone full upon her. Her face was disfigured with tears, which were, indeed, still running down her cheeks.

"Why, Blanche!" he said, standing still—then in the kind voice which endeared him to the servants—"I am afraid your brother is worse?"

For the poor brother in hospital had passed through many vicissitudes since his operation, and the little maid's spirits had fluctuated accordingly.

"Oh no, sir—no, sir!" said Blanche, drying her eyes and retreating into the shadows of the room, where only a faint flame of gas was burning. "It's not that, sir, thank you. I was just putting away her ladyship's things," she said, inconsequently, looking round the room.

"That was hardly what caused the tears, was it?" said Ashe, smiling. "Is there anything in which Lady Kitty or I could help you?"

The girl, who had always seemed to him on excellent terms with Kitty, gave a sudden sob.

"Thank you, sir; I've just given her ladyship warning."

"Indeed!" said Ashe, gravely. "I'm sorry for that. I thought you got on here very well."

"I used to, sir, but this last few weeks there's nothing pleases her ladyship; you can't do anything right. I'm sure I've worked my hands off. But I can't do any more. Perhaps her ladyship will find some one else to suit her better."

"Didn't her ladyship try to persuade you to stay?"

"Yes—but—I gave warning once before, and then I stayed. And it's no good. It seems as if you must do wrong. And I don't sleep, sir. It gets on your nerves so. But I didn't mean to complain. Good-night, sir."

"Good-night. Don't sit up for your mistress. You look tired out. I'll help her."

"Thank you, sir," said the maid, in a depressed voice, and went.

* * * * *

Half an hour later, Ashe mounted the staircase of a well-known house in Piccadilly. The evening party was beginning to thin, but in a side drawing-room a fine Austrian band was playing Strauss, and some of the intimates of the house were dancing.

Ashe at once perceived his wife. She was dancing with a clever Cambridge lad, a cousin of Madeleine Alcot's, who had long been one of her adorers. And so charming was the spectacle, so exhilarating were the youth and beauty of the pair, that Ashe presently suspected what was indeed the truth, that most of the persons gathering in the room were there to watch Kitty dance, rather than to dance themselves. He himself watched her, though he professed to be talking to his hostess, a woman of middle age, with honest eyes and a brow of command.

"It is a delight to see Lady Kitty dance," she said to him, smiling. "But she is tired. I am sure she wants the country."

"Like my boy," said Ashe. "I wish to goodness they'd both go."

"Oh, I know it's hard to leave the husband toiling in town!" said his companion, who, as the daughter, wife, and mother of politicians, had had a long experience of official life.

Ashe glanced at her—at her face moulded by kind and scrupulous living—with a sudden relief from tension. Clearly no gossip had reached her. He lingered beside her, for the sheer pleasure of talking to her. But their tete-a-tete was soon interrupted by the approach of Lady Parham, with a daughter—a slim and silent girl, to whom, it was whispered, her mother was giving "a last chance" this season, before sending her into the country as a failure, and bringing out her younger sister.

Lady Parham greeted the hostess with effusion. It was a rich house, and these small, informal dances were said to be more helpful to matrimonial development than larger affairs. Then she perceived Ashe, and her whole manner changed. There was a very evident bristling, and she gave him a greeting deliberately careless.

"Confound the woman!" thought Ashe, and his own pride rose.

"Working as hard as usual, Lady Parham?" he asked her, with a smile.

"If you like to put it so," was the stiff reply. "There is, of course, a good deal of going out."

"I hope, if I may say so, you don't allow Lord Parham to do too much of it."

"Lord Parham never was better in his life," said Lord Parham's spouse, with the air of putting down an impertinence.

"That's good news. I must say when I saw him this afternoon I thought he seemed to be feeling his work a good deal."

"Oh, he's worried," said Lady Parham, sharply. "Worried about a good many things." She turned suddenly, and looked at her companion—an insolent and deliberate look.

"Ah, that's where the wives come in!" replied Ashe, unperturbed. "Look at Mrs. Loraine. She has the art to perfection—hasn't she? The way she cushions Loraine is something wonderful to see."

Lady Parham flushed angrily. The suggested comparison between herself, and that incessant rattle and blare of social event through which she dragged her husband—conducting thereby a vulgar campaign of her own, as arduous as his and far more ambitious—and the ways and character of gentle Mrs. Loraine, absorbed in the man she adored, scatter-brained and absent-minded towards the rest of the world, but for him all eyes and ears, an angel of shelter and protection—this did not now reach the Prime Minister's wife for the first time. But she had no opportunity to launch a retort, even supposing she had one ready, for the music ceased, and the tide of dancers surged towards the doors. It brought Kitty abruptly face to face with Lady Parham.

"Oh! how d'you do?" said Kitty, in a tone that was already an offence, and she held out a small hand with an indescribably regal air.

Lady Parham just touched it, glanced at the owner from top to toe, and walked away. Kitty slipped in beside Ashe for a moment, with her back to the wall, laughing and breathless.

"I say, Kitty," said Ashe, bending over her and speaking in her small ear, "I thought Lady Parham was eternally obliged to us. What's wrong with her?"

"Only that I can't stand her," said Kitty. "What's the good of trying?" She looked up, a flame of mutiny in her cheeks.

"What, indeed?" said Ashe, feeling as reckless as she. "Her manners are beyond the bounds. But look here, Kitty, don't you think you'll come home? You know you do look uncommonly tired."

Kitty frowned.

"Home? Why, I'm only just beginning to enjoy myself! Take me into the cool, please," she said to the boy who had been dancing with her, and who still hovered near, in case his divinity might allow him yet a few more minutes. But as she put out her hand to take his arm, Ashe saw her waver and look suddenly across the room.

A group parted that had been clustering round a farther door, and Ashe perceived Cliffe, leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed. He was surrounded by pretty women, with whom he seemed to be carrying on a bantering warfare. Involuntarily Ashe watched for the recognition between him and Kitty. Did Kitty's lips move? Was there a signal? If so, it passed like a flash; Kitty hurried away, and Ashe was left, haughtily furious with himself that, for the first time in his life, he had played the spy.

He turned in his discomfort to leave the dancing-room. He himself enjoyed society frankly enough. Especially since his marriage had he found the companionship of agreeable women delightful. He went instinctively to seek it, and drive out this nonsense from his mind. Just inside the larger drawing-room, however, he came across Mary Lyster, sitting in a corner apparently alone. Mary greeted him, but with an evident coldness. Her manner brought back all the preoccupations of his walk from the House. In spite of her small cordiality, he sat down beside her, wondering with a vicarious compunction at what point her fortunes might be, and how Kitty's proceedings might have already affected them. But he had not yet succeeded in thawing her when a voice behind him said:

"This is my dance, I think, Miss Lyster. Where shall we sit it out?"

Ashe moved at once. Mary looked up, hesitated visibly, then rose and took Geoffrey Cliffe's arm.

"Just read your remarks this evening," said Cliffe to Ashe. "Well, now, I suppose to-morrow will see your ship in port?"

For it was reasonably expected that the morrow would see the American agreement ratified by a substantial ministerial majority.

"Certainly. But you may at least reflect that you have lost us a deal of time."

"And now you slay us," said Cliffe. "Ah, well—'dulce et decorum est,' etcetera."

"Don't imagine that you'll get many of the honors of martyrdom," laughed Ashe—in Cliffe's eyes an offensive and triumphant figure, as he leaned carelessly upon a marble pedestal that carried a bust of Horace Walpole.

"Why?" Cliffe's hand had gone instinctively to his mustache. Mary had dropped his arm, and now stood quietly beside him, pale and somewhat jaded, her fine eyes travelling between the speakers.

"Why? Because the heresies have no martyrs. The halo is for the true Church!"

"H'm!" said Cliffe, with a reflective sneer. "I suppose you mean for the successful?"

"Do I?" said Ashe, with nonchalance. "Aren't the true Church the people who are justified by the event?"

"The orthodox like to think so," said Cliffe. "But the heretics have a way of coming out top."

"Does that mean you chaps are going to win at the next election? I devoutly hope you may—we're all as stale as ditch-water—and as for places, anybody's welcome to mine!" And so saying, Ashe lounged away, attracted by the bow and smile of a pretty Frenchwoman, with whom it was always agreeable to chat.

"Ashe trifles it as usual," said Cliffe, as he and Mary forced a passage into one of the smaller rooms. "Is there anything in the world that he really cares about?"

Mary looked at him with a start. It was almost on her lips to say, "Yes! his wife." She only just succeeded in driving the words back.

"His not caring is a pretence," she said. "At least, Lady Tranmore thinks so. She believes that he is becoming absorbed in politics—much more ambitious than she ever thought he would be."

"That's the way of mothers," said Cliffe, with a sarcastic lip. "They have got to make the best of their sons. Tell me what you are going to do this summer."

He had thrown one arm round the back of a chair, and sat looking down upon her, his colorless fair hair falling thick upon his brow, and giving by contrast a strange inhuman force to the dark and singular eyes beneath. He had a way of commanding a woman's attention by flashes of brusquerie, melting when he chose into a homage that had in it the note of an older world, a world that had still leisure for, passion and its refinements, a world still within sight of that other which had produced the Carte du tendre. Perhaps it was this, combined with the virilities, not to be questioned, of his aspect, the signs of hard physical endurance in the face burned by desert suns, and the suggestions of a frame too lean and gaunt for drawing-rooms, that gave him his spell and preserved it.

Mary's conversation with him consisted at first of much cool fencing on her part, which gradually slipped back, as he intended it should, into some of the tones of intimacy. Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret range of thoughts—hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the bitter disappointments and disillusions of the past six weeks; and his with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home, of marrying Mary Lyster, or more correctly, Mary Lyster's money, and so resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence. For her the mental horizon was full of Kitty—Kitty insolent, Kitty triumphant. For him, too, Kitty made the background of thought—environed, however, with clouds of indecision and resistance that would have raised happiness in Mary could she have divined them.

For he was now not easy to capture. There had been enough and more than enough of women in his life. The game of politics must somehow replace them henceforth, if, indeed, anything were still worth while, except the long day in the saddle and the dawn of new mornings in untrodden lands.

Mingled, all these, with hot dislike of Ashe, with the fascination of Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his pursuit of her; inter penetrated, moreover, through and through with the memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated from and despising him. He and Mary passed a profitless half-hour. He would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should do with the propitiation, if it were reached. He wanted her money, but he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the cost. The poet in him was still strong, crossed though it were by the adventurer.

He took her back to the dancing-room. Mary walked beside him with a dull, fierce sense of wrong. It was Kitty, of course, who had done it—Kitty who had taken him away from her.

"That's finished," said Cliffe to himself, with a long breath of relief, as he delivered her into the hands of her partner. "Now for the other!"

* * * * *

Thenceforward, no one saw Kitty and no one danced with her. She spent her time in beflowered corners, or remote drawing-rooms, with Geoffrey Cliffe. Ashe heard her voice in the distance once or twice, answering a voice he detested; he looked into the supper-room with a lady on his arm, and across it he saw Kitty, with her white elbow on the table and her hand propping a face that was turned—half mocking and yet wholly absorbed—to Cliffe. He saw her flitting across vistas or disappearing through far doorways, but always with that sinister figure in attendance.

His mind was divided between a secret fury—roused in him by the pride of a man of high birth and position, who has always had the world at command, and now sees an impertinence offered him which he does not know how to punish—and a mood of irony. Cliffe's persecution of Kitty was a piece of confounded bad manners. But to look at it with the round, hypocritical eyes some of these people were bringing to bear on it was really too much! Let them look to their own affairs—they needed it.

At last the party broke up. Kitty touched him on the shoulder as he was standing on the stairs, apparently absorbed in a teasing skirmish with a charming child in her first season, who thought him the most delightful of men.

"I'm ready, William."

He turned sharply, and saw that she was alone.

"Come along, then! In five minutes more I should have been asleep on the stairs."

They descended. Kitty went for her cloak. Ashe sent for the carriage. As he was standing on the steps Cliffe pushed past him and called for a hansom. It came in the rear of two or three carriages already under the portico. He ran along the pavement and jumped in. The doors were just being shut by the linkman when a little figure in a white cloak flew down the steps of the house and held up a hand to the driver of the hansom.

"Do you see that?" said Lady Parham, in a voice of suppressed but contemptuous amazement, as she turned to Mary Lyster, who was driving home with her. "Call my carriage, please!" she said, imperiously, to one of the footmen at the door. Her carriage, as it happened, was immediately behind the hansom; but the hansom could not move because of the small lady who had jumped upon the step and was leaning eagerly forward.

There was a clamor of shouting voices: "Move on, cabby! Move on!" "Stand clear, ma'am, please," said the driver, while Cliffe opened the door of the cab, and seemed about to jump down again.

"Who is it?" said an impatient judge behind Lady Parham. "What's the matter?"

Lady Parham shrugged her shoulders.

"It's Lady Kitty Ashe," whispered the debutante, who was the judge's daughter, "talking to Mr. Cliffe. Isn't she pretty?"

A sudden silence fell upon the group in the porch. Kitty's high, clear laugh seemed to ring back into the house. Then Ashe ran down the steps.

"Kitty, don't stop the way." He peremptorily drew her back.

Cliffe raised his hat, fell back into the hansom, and the man whipped up his horse.

Kitty came back to the outer hall with Ashe. Her cheeks had a rose flush, her wild eyes laughed at the crowd on the steps, without really seeing them.

"Are you going with Lady Parham?" she said, absently, to Mary Lyster.

"Yes."

Kitty looked up and Ashe saw the two faces as she and Mary confronted each other—the contempt in Mary's, the startled wrath in Kitty's.

"Come, Miss Lyster!" said Lady Parham, and pushing past the Ashes without a good-night, she hurried to her carriage, drawing up the glass with a hasty hand, though the night was balmy.

For a few moments none of those left on the steps spoke, except to fret in undertones for an absent carriage. Then Ashe saw his own groom, and stormed at him for delay. In another minute he and Kitty were in the carriage, and the figures under the porch dropped out of sight.

* * * * *

"Better not do that again, Kitty, I think," said Ashe.

Kitty glanced at him. But both voice and manner were as usual. "Why shouldn't I?" she said, haughtily; he saw that she had grown very white. "I was telling Geoffrey where to find me at Lord's."

Ashe winced at the "Archangelism" of the Christian name.

"You kept Lady Parham waiting."

"What does that matter?" said Kitty, with an angry laugh.

"And you did Cliffe too much honor," said Ashe. "It's the men who should stand on the steps—not the women!"

Kitty sat erect. "What do you mean?" she said, in a low, menacing voice.

"Just what I say," was the laughing reply.

Kitty threw herself back in her corner, and could not be induced to open her lips or look at her companion till they reached home.

On the landing, however, outside her bedroom, she turned and said: "Don't, please, say impertinent things to me again!" And drawn up to her full height, the most childish and obstinate of tragedy queens, she swept into her room.

Ashe went into his dressing-room. And almost immediately afterwards he heard the key turn in the lock which separated his room from Kitty's.

For the first time since their marriage! He threw himself on his bed, and passed some sleepless hours. Then fatigue had its way. When he awoke, there was a gray dawn in the room, and he was conscious of something pressing against his bed. Half asleep, he raised himself and saw Kitty, in a long white dressing-gown, sitting curled up on the floor, or rather on a pillow, her head resting on the edge of the bed. In a glass opposite he saw the languid grace of her slight form and the cloud of her hair.

"Kitty"—he tried to shake himself into full consciousness—"do go to bed!"

"Lie down," said Kitty, lifting her arm and pressing him down, "and don't say anything. I shall go to sleep."

He lay down obediently. Presently he felt that her cheek was resting on one of his hands, and in his semi-consciousness he laid the other on her hair. Then they both fell asleep.

His dreams were a medley of the fancy ball and of some pageant scene in which Iris and Ceres appeared, and there was a rustic dance of maidens and shepherds. Then a murmur as of thunder ran through the scene, followed by darkness. He half woke, in a hot distress, but the soft cheek was still there, his hand still felt the silky curls, and sleep recaptured him.



XII

When Ashe woke up in earnest he was alone. He sprang up in bed and looked round the darkened room, ashamed of his long sleep; but there was no sign of Kitty.

After dressing, he knocked, as usual, at Kitty's door.

"Oh, come in," cried Kitty's lightest voice. "Margaret's here; but if you don't mind her, she won't mind you."

Ashe entered. Kitty, as was her wont four days out of the seven, was breakfasting in bed. Margaret French was beside her with a batch of notes, mostly bills and unanswered invitations, with which she was trying to make Kitty cope.

"Excuse me, Mr. Ashe," Margaret lifted a smiling face. "I had to be out on business for my brother all day, so I thought I'd come early and remind Kitty of some of these tiresome things while there was still a chance of finding her."

"I don't know why guardian angels excuse themselves," said Ashe, as they shook hands.

"Oh, dear, what a lot of them there are!" said Kitty, tossing over the notes with a bored air. "Refuse them all, Margaret; I'm tired to death of dining out."

"Not all, I think," pleaded Margaret. "Here's that nice woman—you remember—who wanted to thank Mr. Ashe for what he'd done for her son. You promised to dine with her."

"Did I?" Kitty wriggled with annoyance. "Well, then, I suppose we must. What did William do for her? When I ask him to do something for the nicest boys in the world, he won't lift a finger."

"I gave him some introductions in Berlin," laughed Ashe. "What you generally want me to do, Kitty, is to stuff the public service with good-looking idiots. And there I really can't oblige you."

"Every one knows that corruption gets the best men," said Kitty. "Hullo, what's that?" and she lifted a dinner-card, and looked at it strangely.

"My dear Kitty! when did it come?" exclaimed Margaret French, in dismay.

It was a dinner-card, whereby Lord and Lady Parham requested the honor of Mr. and Lady Kitty Ashe's company at dinner, on a date somewhere within the first week of July.

Ashe bent over to look at it.

"I think that came ten days ago," he said, quietly. "I imagined Kitty accepted it."

"I never thought of it from that day to this," said Kitty, who had clasped her hands behind her head and was staring at the ceiling. "Say, please, that"—she spaced out the words deliberately—"Mr. and Lady Kitty Ashe—are unable to accept—Lord and Lady Parham's invitation—etc.—"

"Kitty!" said Margaret, firmly, "there must be a 'regret' and a 'kind.' Think! Ten days! The party is next week!"

"No 'regret,' and no 'kind'!" said Kitty, still staring overhead. "It's my affair, please, Margaret, altogether. And I'll see the note before it goes, or you'll be putting in civilities."

Margaret, in despair, looked entreatingly at Ashe. He and she had often conspired before this to soften down Kitty's enormities. But he said nothing—made not the smallest sign.

With difficulty Margaret got a few more directions out of Kitty, over whom a shade of sombre taciturnity had now fallen. Then, saying she would write the notes down-stairs and come back, she gathered up her basketful of letters and departed.

As soon as she was alone with Ashe, Kitty took up a novel beside her, and pretended to be absorbed in it.

He hesitated a moment, then he stooped over her and took her hand.

"Why did you come in to visit me, Kitty?" he said, in a low voice.

"I don't know," was her indifferent reply, and her hand pulled itself away, though not with violence.

"I wish I could understand you, Kitty." His tone was not quite steady.

"Well, I don't understand myself!" said Kitty, shortly, reaching out for a bunch of roses that Margaret had just brought her, and burying her face among them.

"Perhaps, if you submitted the problem to me," said Ashe, laughing, "we might be able to thresh it out together!"

He folded his arms and leaned against the foot of the bed, delighting his eyes with the vision of her amid the folds of muslin and lace, and all the costly refinements of pillow and coverlet with which she liked to surround herself at that hour of the morning. She might have been a French princess of the old regime, receiving her court.

Kitty shook her head. The roses fell idly from her hands, and made bright patches of blush pink about her. Ashe went on:

"Anyway, dear, don't give silly tongues too good a handle!"

He threw her a gay comrade's look, as though to say that they both knew the folly of the world, but he perhaps the better, as he was the elder.

"You mean," said Kitty, calmly, "that I am not to talk so much to Geoffrey Cliffe?"

"Is he worth it?" said Ashe. "That's what I want to know—worth the fuss that some people make?"

"It's the fuss and the people that drive one on," said Kitty, under her breath.

"You flatter them too much, darling! Do you think you were quite kind to me last night?—let's put it that way. I looked a precious fool, you know, standing on those steps, while you were keeping old Mother Parham and the whole show waiting!"

She looked at him a moment in silence, at his heightened color and insistent eyes.

"I can't think what made you marry me," she said, slowly.

Ashe laughed, and came nearer.

"And I can't think," he said, in a lower voice, "what made you come—if you weren't a little bit sorry—and lean your dear head against me like that, last night."

"I wasn't sorry—I couldn't sleep," was her quick reply, while her eyes strove to keep up their war with his.

A knock was heard at the door. Ashe moved hastily away. Kitty's maid entered.

"I was to tell you, sir, that your breakfast was ready. And Lady Tranmore's servant has brought this note."

Ashe took it and thrust it into his pocket.

"Get my things ready, please," said Kitty to her maid. Ashe felt himself dismissed and went.

As soon as he was gone, Kitty sprang out of bed, threw on a dressing-gown, and ran across to Blanche, who was bending over a chest of drawers. "Why did you say those foolish things to me yesterday?" she demanded, taking the girl impetuously by the arm, and so startling her that she nearly dropped the clothes she held.

"They weren't foolish, my lady," said Blanche, sullenly, with averted eyes.

"They were!" cried Kitty. "Of course, I'm a vixen—I always was. But you know, Blanche, I'm not always as bad as I have been lately. Very soon I shall be quite charming again—you'll see!"

"I dare say, my lady." Blanche went on sorting and arranging the lingerie she had taken out of the drawer.

Kitty sat down beside her, nursing a bare foot which was crossed over the other.

"You know how I abused you about my hair, Blanche? Well, Mrs. Alcot said, that very night, she never saw it so well done. She thought it must be Pierrefitte's best man. Wasn't it hellish of me? I knew quite well you'd done it beautifully."

The maid said nothing, but a tear fell on one of Kitty's night-dresses.

"And you remember the green garibaldi—last week? I just loathed it—because you'd forgotten that little black rosette."

"No!" said Blanche, looking up; "your ladyship had never ordered it."

"I did—I did! But never mind. Two of my friends have wanted to copy it, Blanche. They wouldn't believe it was done by a maid. They said it had such style. One of them would engage you to-morrow if you really want to go—"

A silence.

"But you won't go, Blanchie, will you?" said Kitty's silver voice. "I'm a horrid fiend, but I did get Mr. Ashe to help your young man—and I did care about your poor brother—and—and—" she stroked the girl's arm—"I do look rather nice when I'm dressed, don't I? You wouldn't like a great gawk to dress, would you?"

"I'm sure I don't want to leave your ladyship," said the girl, choking. "But I can't have no more—"

"No more ructions?" said Kitty, meditating. "H'm, of course that's serious, because I'm made so. Well, now, look here, Blanchie, you won't give me warning again for a fortnight, whatever I do, mind. And if by then I'm past praying for, you may. And I'll import a Russian—or a Choctaw—who won't understand when I call her names. Is that a bargain, Blanchie?"

The maid hesitated.

"Just a fortnight!" said Kitty, in her most seductive tones.

"Very well, my lady."

Kitty jumped up, waltzed round the room, the white silk skirts of her dressing-gown floating far and wide, then thrust her feet into her slippers, and began to dress as though nothing had happened.

* * * * *

But when her toilette was accomplished, Kitty having dismissed her maid, sat for some time in front of her mirror in a brown study.