"What is the matter with me?" she thought. "William is an angel, and I love him. And I can't do what he wants—I can't!" She drew a long, troubled breath. The lips of the face reflected in the glass were dry and colorless, the eyes had a strange, shrinking expression. "People are possessed—I know they are. They can't help themselves. I began this to punish Mary—and now—when I don't see Geoffrey, everything is odious and dreary. I can't care for anything. Of course, I ought to care for William's politics. I expect I've done him harm—I know I have. What's wrong with me?"

But suddenly, in the very midst of her self-examination, the emotion and excitement that she had felt of late in her long conversations with Cliffe returned upon her, filling her at once with poignant memory and a keen expectation to which she yielded herself as a wild sea-bird to the rocking of the sea. They had started—those conversations—from her attempt to penetrate the secret history of the man whose poems had filled her with a thrilling sense of feelings and passions beyond her ken—untrodden regions, full, no doubt, of shadow and of poison, but infinitely alluring to one whose nature was best summed up in the two words, curiosity and daring. She had not found it quite easy. Cliffe, as we know, had resented the levity of her first attempt. But when she renewed it, more seriously and sweetly, combining with it a number of subtle flatteries, the flattery of her beauty and her position, of the private interest she could not help showing in the man who was her husband's public antagonist, and of an admiration for his poems which was not so much mere praise as an actual covetous sharing in them, a making their ideas and their music her own—Cliffe could not in the end resist her. After all, so far, she only asked him to talk of himself, and for a man of his type the process is the very breath of his being, the stimulus and liberation of all his powers.

So that before they knew they were in the midst of the most burning subjects of human discussion—at first in a manner comparatively veiled and general, then with the sharpest personal reference to Cliffe's own story, as the intimacy between them grew. Jealousy, suffering, the "hard cases" of passion—why men are selfish and exacting, why women mislead and torment—the ugly waste and crudity of death—it was among these great themes they found themselves. Death above all—it was to a thought of death that Cliffe's harsh face owed its chief spell perhaps in Kitty's eyes. A woman had died for love of him, crushed by his jealousy and her own self-scorn. So Kitty had been told; and Cliffe's tortured vanity would not deny it. How could she have cared so much? That was the puzzle.

But this vicarious relation had now passed into a relation of her own. Cliffe was to Kitty a problem—and a problem which, beyond a certain point, defied her. The element of sex, of course, entered in, but only as intensifying the contrasts and mysteries of imagination. And he made her feel these contrasts and mysteries as she had never yet felt them; and so he enlarged the world for her, he plunged her, if only by contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of sentiment and feeling. For in spite of the vulgar elements in him there were also elements of genius. The man was a poet and a thinker, though he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer. His mind was stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and poetry of his own. He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an unscrupulous way; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of tragic circumstance; he had been face to face with his own soul in the wilds of the earth; he had met every sort of physical danger with contempt; and his arrogant, imperious temper was of the kind which attracts many women, especially, perhaps, women physically small and intellectually fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their power and their charm.

His society, then, had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a passion—a passion of the imagination. For the man himself, she would probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else. But it was a repulsion that held her, because of the constant sense of reaction, of on-rushing life, which it excited in herself.

Add to these the elements of mischief and defiance in the situation, the snatching him from Mary, her enemy and slanderer, the defiance of Lady Grosville and all other hypocritical tyrants, the pride of dragging at her chariot wheels a man whom most people courted even when they loathed him, who enjoyed, moreover, an astonishing reputation abroad, especially in that France which Kitty adored, as a kind of modern Byron, the only Englishman who could still display in public the "pageant of a bleeding heart," without making himself ridiculous, and perhaps enough has been heaped together to explain the infatuation that now, like a wild spring gust on a shining lake, was threatening to bring Kitty's light bark into dangerous waters.

"I don't care for him," she said to herself, as she sat thinking alone, "but I must see him—I will! And I will talk to him as I please, and where I please!"

Her small frame stiffened under the obstinacy of her resolution. Kitty's will at a moment of this kind was a fatality—so strong was it, and so irrational.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, down-stairs, Ashe himself was wrestling with another phase of the same situation. Lady Tranmore's note had said: "I shall be with you almost immediately after you receive this, as I want to catch you before you go to the Foreign Office."

Accordingly, they were in the library, Ashe on the defensive, Lady Tranmore nervous, embarrassed, and starting at a sound. Both of them watched the door. Both looked for and dreaded the advent of Kitty.

"Dear William," said his mother at last, stretching her hand across a small table which stood between them and laying it on her son's, "you'll forgive me, won't you?—even if I do seem to you prudish and absurd. But I am afraid you ought to tell Kitty some of the unkind things people are saying! You know I've tried, and she wouldn't listen to me. And you ought to beg her—yes, William, indeed you ought!—not to give any further occasion for them."

She looked at him anxiously, full Of that timidity which haunts the deepest and tenderest affections. She had just given him to read a letter from Lady Grosville to herself. Ashe ran through it, then laid it down with a gesture of scorn.

"Kitty apparently enjoyed a moonlight walk with Cliffe. Why shouldn't she? Lady Grosville thinks the moon was made to sleep by—other people don't."

"But, William!—at night—when everybody had gone to bed—escaping from the house—they two alone!"

Lady Tranmore looked at him entreatingly, as though driven to protest, and yet hating the sound of her own words.

Ashe laughed. He was smoking with an air so nonchalant that his mother's heart sank. For she divined that criticism in the society around her which she was never allowed to hear. Was it true, indeed, that his natural indolence could not rouse itself even to the defence of a young wife's reputation?

"All the fault of the Grosvilles," said Ashe, after a moment, lighting another cigarette, "in shutting up their great heavy house, and drawing their great heavy curtains on a May night, when all reasonable people want to be out-of-doors. My dear mother, what's the good of paying any attention to what people like Lady Grosville say of people like Kitty? You might as well expect Deborah to hit it off with Ariel!"

"William, don't laugh!" said his mother, in distress. "Geoffrey Cliffe is not a man to be trusted. You and I know that of old. He is a boaster, and—"

"And a liar!" said Ashe, quietly. "Oh! I know that."

"And yet he has this power over women—one ought to look it in the face. William, dearest William!" she leaned over and clasped his hand close in both hers, "do persuade Kitty to go away from London now—at once!"

"Kitty won't go," said Ashe, quietly, "I am sorry, dear mother. I hate that you should be worried. But there's the fact. Kitty won't go!"

"Then use your authority," said Lady Tranmore.

"I have none."

"William!" Ashe rose from his seat, and began to walk up and down. His aspect of competence and dignity, as of a man already accustomed to command and destined to a high experience, had never been more marked than at the very moment of this helpless utterance. His mother looked at him with mingled admiration and amazement.

Presently he paused beside her.

"I should like you to understand me, mother. I cannot fight with Kitty. Before I asked her to marry me, I made up my mind to that. I knew then and I know now that nothing but disaster could come of it. She must be free, and I shall not attempt to coerce her."

"Or to protect her!" cried his mother.

"As to that, I shall do what I can. But I clearly foresaw when we married that we should scandalize a good many of the weaker brethren."

He smiled, but, as it seemed to his mother, with some effort.

"William! as a public man—"

He interrupted her.

"If I can be both Kitty's husband and a public man, well and good. If not, then I shall be—"

"Kitty's husband?" cried Lady Tranmore, with an accent of bitterness, almost of sarcasm, of which she instantly repented her. She changed her tone.

"It is, of course, Kitty, first and foremost, who is concerned in your public position," she said, more gently. "Dearest William—she is so young still—she probably doesn't quite understand, in spite of her great cleverness. But she does care—she must care—and she ought to know what slight things may sometimes affect a man's prospects and future in this country."

Ashe said nothing. He turned on his heel and resumed his pacing. Lady Tranmore looked at him in perplexity.

"William, I heard a rumor last night—"

He held his cigarette suspended.

"Lord Crashaw told me that the resignations would certainly be in the papers this week, and that the ministry would go on—after a rearrangement of posts. Is it true?"

Ashe resumed his cigarette.

"True—as to the facts—so far as I know. As to the date, Lord Crashaw knows, I think, no more than I do. It may be this week, it may be next month."

"Then I hear—thank goodness I never see her," Elizabeth went on, reluctantly—"that that dreadful woman, Lady Parham, is more infuriated than ever—"

"With Kitty? Let her be! It really doesn't matter an old shoe, either to Kitty or me."

"She can be a most bitter enemy, William. And she certainly influences Lord Parham."

Ashe smoked and smiled. Lady Tranmore saw that his pride, too, had been aroused, and that here he was likely to prove as obstinate as Kitty.

"I wish I could get her out of my mind!" she sighed.

Ashe glanced at her kindly.

"I daresay we shall hold our own. Xanthippe is not beloved, and I don't believe Parham will let her interfere with what he thinks best for the party. Will it pay to put me in the cabinet or not?—that's what he'll ask. I shall be strongly backed, too, by most of our papers."

A number of thoughts ran through Lady Tranmore's brain. With her long experience of London, she knew well what the sudden lowering of a man's "consideration"—to use a French word—at a critical moment may mean. A cooling of the general regard—a breath of detraction coming no one knows whence—and how soon new claims emerge, and the indispensable of yesterday becomes the negligible of to-day!

But even if she could have brought herself to put any of these anxieties into words, she had no opportunity. Kitty's voice was in the hall; the handle turned, and she ran in.

"William! Ah!—I didn't know mother was here."

She went up to Elizabeth, and lightly kissed that lady's cheek.

"Good-morning. William, I just came to tell you that I may be late for dinner, so perhaps you had better dine at the House. I am going on the river."

"Are you?" said Ashe, gathering up his papers. "Wish I was."

"Are you going with the Crashaw's party?" asked Elizabeth. "I know they have one."

"Oh, dear, no!" said Kitty. "I hate a crowd on the river. I am going with Geoffrey Cliffe."

Ashe bent over his desk. Lady Tranmore's eyebrows went up, and she could not restrain the word:

"Alone?"

"Naturellement!" laughed Kitty. "He reads me French poetry, and we talk French. We let Madeleine Alcot come once, but her accent was so shocking that Geoffrey wouldn't have her again!"

Lady Tranmore flushed deeply. The "Geoffrey" seemed to her intolerable. Kitty, arrayed in the freshest of white gowns, walked away to the farther end of the library to consult a Bradshaw. Elizabeth, looking up, caught her son's eyes—and the mingled humor and vexation in them, wherewith he appealed to her, as it were, to see the whole silly business as he himself did. Lady Tranmore felt a moment's strong reaction. Had she indeed been making a foolish fuss about nothing?

Yet the impression left by the miserable meditations of her night was still deep enough to make her say—with just a signal from eye and lips, so that Kitty neither saw nor heard—"Don't let her go!"

Ashe shook his head. He moved towards the door, and stood there despatch-box in hand, throwing a last look at his wife.

"Don't be late, Kitty—or I shall be nervous. I don't trust Cliffe on the river. And please make it a rule that, in locks, he stops quoting French poetry."

Kitty turned round, startled and apparently annoyed by his tone.

"He is an excellent oar," she said, shortly.

"Is he? At Oxford we tried him for the Torpids—" Ashe's shrug completed his remark. Then, still disregarding another imploring look from Lady Tranmore, he left the room.

Kitty had flushed angrily. The belittling, malicious note in Ashe's manner had been clear enough. She braced herself against it, and Lady Tranmore's chance was lost. For when, summoning all her courage, and quite uncertain whether her son would approve or blame her, Elizabeth approached her daughter-in-law affectionately, trying in timid and apologetic words to unburden her own heart and reach Kitty's, Kitty met her with one of those outbursts of temper that women like Elizabeth Tranmore cannot cope with. Their moral recoil is too great. It is the recoil of the spiritual aristocrat; and between them and the children of passion the links are few, the antagonism eternal.

She left the house, pale, dignified, the tears in her eyes. Kitty ran up-stairs, humming an air from "Faust," as though she would tear it to pieces, put on a flame-colored hat that gave a still further note of extravagance to her costume, ordered a hansom, and drove away.

* * * * *

Whether Kitty got much joy out of the three weeks which followed must remain uncertain. She had certainly routed Mary Lyster, if there were any final satisfaction in that. Mary had left town early, and was now in Somersetshire helping her father to entertain, in order, said the malicious, to put the best face possible on a defeat which this time had been serious. And instead of devoting himself to the wooing of a northern constituency where he had been adopted as the candidate of a new Tory group, Cliffe lingered obstinately in town, endangering his chances and angering his supporters. Kitty's influence over his actions was, indeed, patent and undenied, whatever might be the general opinion as to her effect upon his heart. Some of Kitty's intimates at any rate were convinced that his absorption in the matter was by now, to say the least, no less eager and persistent than hers. At this point it was by no means still a relation of flattery on Kitty's side and a pleased self-love on his. It had become a duel of two personalities, or rather two imaginations. In fact, as Kitty, learning the ways of his character, became more proudly mistress of herself and him, his interest in her visibly increased. It might almost be said that she was beginning to hold back, and he for the first time pursued.

Once or twice he had the grace to ask himself where it was all to end. Was he in love with her? An absurd question! He had paid his heavy tribute to passion if any man ever had, and had already hung up his votive tablet and his garments wet from shipwreck in the temple of the god. But it seemed that, after all said and done, the society of a woman, young, beautiful, and capricious, was still the best thing which the day—the London day, at all events—had to bring. At Kitty's suggestion he was collecting and revising a new volume of his poems. He and she quarrelled over them perpetually. Sometimes there was not a line which pleased her; and then, again, she would delight him with the homage of sudden tears in her brown eyes, and a praise so ardent and so refined that it almost compared—as Kitty meant it should—with that of the dead. In the shaded drawing-room, where every detail pleased his taste, Cliffe's harsh voice thundered or murmured verse which was beyond dispute the verse of a poet, and thereby sensuous and passionate. Ostensibly the verse concerned another woman; in truth, the slight and lovely figure sitting on the farther side of the flowered hearth, the delicate head bent, the finger-tips lightly joined, entered day by day more directly into the consciousness of the poet. What harm? All he asked was intelligence and response. As to her heart, he made no claim upon it whatever. Ashe, by-the-way, was clearly not jealous—a sensible attitude, considering Lady Kitty's strength of will.

Into Cliffe's feeling towards Ashe there entered, indeed, a number of evil things, determined by quite other relations between the two men—the relation of the man who wants to the man who has, of the man beaten by the restlessness of ambition to the man who possesses all that the other desires, and affects to care nothing about it—of the combatant who fights with rage to the combatant who fights with a smile. Cliffe could often lash himself into fury by the mere thought of Ashe's opportunities and Ashe's future, combined with the belief that Ashe's mood towards himself was either contemptuous or condescending. And it was at such moments that he would fling himself with most resource into the establishing of his ascendency over Kitty.

The two men met when they did meet—which was but seldom—on perfectly civil terms. If Ashe arrived unexpectedly from the House in the late afternoon to find Cliffe in the drawing-room reading aloud to Kitty, the politics of the moment provided talk enough till Cliffe could decently take his departure. He never dined with them alone, Kitty having no mind whatever for the discomforts of such a party; and in the evenings when he and Kitty met at a small number of houses, where the flirtation was watched nightly with a growing excitement, Ashe's duties kept him at Westminster, and there was nothing to hinder that flow of small and yet significant incident by which situations of this kind are developed.

Ashe set his teeth. He had made up his mind finally that it was a plague and a tyranny which would pass, and could only be magnified by opposition. But his temper suffered. There were many small quarrels during these weeks between himself and Kitty, quarrels which betrayed the tension produced in him by what was—in essentials—an iron self-control. But they made daily life a sordid, unlovely thing, and they gave Kitty an excuse for saying that William was as violent as herself, and for seeking refuge in the exaltations of feeling or of fancy provided by Cliffe's companionship.

Perhaps of all the persons in the drama, Lady Tranmore was the most to be pitied. She sat at home, having no heart to go to Hill Street, and more tied indeed than usual by the helpless illness of her husband. Never, in all these days, did Ashe miss his daily visit to his father. He would come in, apparently his handsome, good-humored self, ready to read aloud for twenty minutes, or merely to sit in silence by the sick man, his eyes making affectionate answer every now and then to the dumb looks of Lord Tranmore. Only his mother sought and found that slight habitual contraction of the brow which bore witness to some equally persistent disquiet of the mind. But he kept her at arm's-length on the subject of Kitty. She dared not tell him any of the gossip which reached her.

Meanwhile these weeks meant for her not only the dread of disgrace, but the disappointment of a just ambition, the humiliation of her mother's pride. The political crisis approached rapidly, and Ashe's name was less and less to the front. Lady Parham was said to be taking an active part in the consultations and intrigues that surrounded her husband, and it was well known by now to the inner circle that her hostility to the Ashes, and her insistence on the fact that cabinet ministers must be beyond reproach, and their wives persons to whose houses the party can go without demeaning themselves, were likely to be of importance. Moreover, Ashe's success in the House of Commons was no longer what it had been earlier in the session. The party papers had cooled. Elizabeth Tranmore felt a blight in the air. Yet William, with his position in the country, his high ability, and the social weight belonging to the heir of the Tranmore peerage and estates, was surely not a person to be lightly ignored! Would Lord Parham venture it?

* * * * *

At last the resignations of the two ministers were in the Times; there were communications between the Queen and the Premier, and London plunged with such ardor as is possible in late July into the throes of cabinet-making. Kitty insisted petulantly that of course all would be well; William's services were far too great to be ignored; though Lord Parham would no doubt slight him if he dared. But the party and the public would see to that. The days were gone by when vulgar old women like Lady Parham could have any real influence on political appointments. Otherwise, who would condescend to politics?

Ashe brought her amusing reports from the House or the clubs of the various intrigues going on, and, as to his own chances, refused to discuss them seriously. Once or twice when Kitty, in his presence, insisted on speaking of them to some political intimate, only to provoke an evident embarrassment, Ashe suffered the tortures which proud men know. But he never lost his tone of light detachment, and the conclusion of his friends was that, as usual, "Ashe didn't care a button."

The hours passed, however, and no sign came from the Prime Minister. Everything was still uncertain; but Ashe had realized that at least he was not to be taken into the inner counsels of the party. The hopes and fears, the heartburnings and rivalries of such a state of things are proverbial. Ashe wondered impatiently when the beastly business would be over, and he could get off to Scotland for the air and sport of which he was badly in need.

* * * * *

It was a Friday, in the first week of August. Ashe was leaving the Athenaeum with another member of the House when a newspaper boy rushing along with a fresh bundle of papers passed them with the cry, "New cabinet complete! Official list!" They caught him up, snatched a paper, and read. Two men of middle age, conspicuous in Parliament, but not hitherto in office, one of them of great importance as a lawyer, the other as a military critic, were appointed, the one to the Home Office, the other to the Ministry of War; there had been some shuffling in the minor offices, and a new Privy Seal had dawned upon the world. For the rest, all was as before, and in the formal list the name of the Honorable William Travers Ashe still remained attached to the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs.

Ashe's friend shrugged his shoulders, and avoided looking at his companion. "A bomb-shell, to begin with," he said; "otherwise the flattest thing out."

"On the contrary," laughed Ashe. "Parham has shown a wonderful amount of originality. If you and I are taken by surprise, what will the public be? And they'll like him all the better—you'll see. He has shown courage and gone for new men—that's what they'll say. Vive Parham! Well, good-bye. Now, please the Lord, we shall get off—and I may be among the grouse this day week."

He stopped on his way out of the club to discuss the list with the men coming in. He was conscious that some would have avoided him. But he had no mind to be avoided, and his caustic, good-humored talk carried off the situation. Presently he was walking homeward, swinging his stick with the gayety of a school-boy expecting the holidays.

As he mounted St. James's Street a carriage descended. Ashe mechanically took off his hat to the half-recognized face within, and as he did so perceived the icy bow and triumphant eyes of Lady Parham.

He hurried along, fighting a curious sensation, as of a physical bruising and beating. The streets were full of the news, and he was stopped many times by mere acquaintances to talk of it. In Savile Row he turned into a small literary club of which he was a member, and wrote a letter to his mother. In very affectionate and amusing terms it begged her not to take the disappointment too seriously. "I think I won't come round to-night. But expect me first thing to-morrow."

He sent the note by messenger and walked home. When he reached Hill Street it was close on eight. Outside the house he suddenly asked himself what line he was going to take with Kitty.

Kitty, however, was not at home. As far as he could remember she had gone coaching with the Alcots into Surrey, Geoffrey Cliffe, of course, being of the party. Presently, indeed, he discovered a hasty line from her on his study table, to say that they were to dine at Richmond, and "Madeleine" supposed they would get home between ten and eleven. Not a word more. Like all strong men, Ashe despised the meditations of self-pity. But the involuntary reflection that on this evening of humiliation Kitty was not with him—did not apparently care enough about his affairs and his ambitions to be with him—brought with it a soreness which had to be endured.

The next moment, he was inclined to be glad of her absence. Such things, especially in the first shock of them, are best faced alone. If, indeed, there were any shock in the matter. He had for some time had his own shrewd previsions, and he was aware of a strong inner belief that his defeat was but temporary.

Probably, when she had time to remember such trifles, Kitty would feel the shock more than he did. Lady Parham had certainly won this round of the rubber!

He settled to his solitary dinner, but in the middle of it put down Kitty's Aberdeen terrier, which, for want of other company, he was stuffing atrociously, and ran up to the nursery. The nurse was at her supper, and Harry lay fast asleep, a pretty little fellow, flushed into a semblance of health, and with a strong look of Kitty.

Ashe bent down and put his whiskered cheek to the boy's. "Never mind, old man!" he murmured, "better luck next time!"

Then raising himself with a smile, he looked affectionately at the child, noticed with satisfaction his bright color and even breathing, and stole away.

He ran through the comments of the evening papers on the new cabinet list, finding in only two or three any reference to himself, then threw them aside, and seized upon a pile of books and reviews that were lying on his table. He carried them up to the drawing-room, hesitated between a theological review and a new edition of Horace, and finally plunged with avidity into the theological review.

For some two hours he sat enthralled by an able summary of the chief Tuebingen positions; then suddenly threw himself back with a stretch and a laugh.

"Wonder what the chap's doing that's got my post! Not reading theology, I'll be bound."

The reflection followed that were he at that moment Home Secretary and in the cabinet, he would not probably be reading it either—nor left to a solitary evening. Friends would be dropping in to congratulate—the modern equivalent of the old "turba clientium."

As his thoughts wandered, the drawing-room clock struck eleven. He rose, astonished and impatient. Where was Kitty?

By midnight she had not arrived. Ashe heard the butler moving in the hall and summoned him.

"There may have been some mishap to the coach, Wilson. Perhaps they have stayed at Richmond. Anyway, go to bed. I'll wait for her ladyship."

He returned to his arm-chair and his books, but soon drew Kitty's couvre-pied over him and went to sleep.

When he awoke, daylight was in the room. "What has happened to them?" he asked himself, in a sudden anxiety.

And amid the silence of the dawn he paced up and down, a prey for the first time to black depression. He was besieged by memories of the last two months, their anxieties and quarrels—the waste of time and opportunity—the stabs to feeling and self-respect. Once he found himself groaning aloud, "Kitty! Kitty!"

When this huge, distracting London was left behind, when he had her to himself amid the Scotch heather and birch, should he find her again—conquer her again—as in the exquisite days after their marriage? He thought of Cliffe with a kind of proud torment, disdaining to be jealous or afraid. Kitty had amused herself—had tested her freedom, his patience, to the utmost. Might she now be content, and reward him a little for a self-control, a philosophy, which had not been easy!

A French novel on Kitty's little table drew his attention. He thought not without a discomfortable humor of what a French husband would have made of a similar situation—recalling the remark of a French acquaintance on some case illustrating the freedom of English wives. "Il y a un element turc dans le mari francais, qui nous rendrait ces moeurs-la impossibles!"

A la bonne heure! Let the Frenchman keep up his seraglio standards as he pleased. An Englishman trusts both his wife and his daughter—scorns, indeed, to consider whether he trusts them or no! And who comes worst off? Not the Englishman—if, at least, we are to believe the French novel on the French menage!

He paced thus up and down for an hour, defying his unseen critics—his mother—his own heart.

* * * * *

Then he went to bed and slept a little. But with the post next morning there was no letter from Kitty. There might be a hundred explanations of that. Yet he felt a sudden need of caution.

"Her ladyship comes up this morning by train," he said to Wilson, as though reading from a note. "There seems to have been a mishap."

Then he took a hansom and drove to the Alcots.

"Is Mrs. Alcot at home?" he asked the butler. "Can I have an answer to this note?"

"Mrs. Alcot has been in her room since yesterday morning, sir. She was taken ill just before the coach was coming round, and the horses had to be sent back. But the doctor last night hoped it would be nothing serious."

Ashe turned and went home. Then Kitty was not with Madeleine Alcot—not on the coach! Where was she, and with whom?

He shut himself into his library and fell to wondering, in bewilderment, what he had better do. A tide of rage and agony was mounting within him. How to master it—and keep his brain clear!

He was sitting in front of his writing-table staring at the floor, his hands hanging before him, when the door opened and shut. He turned. There, with her back to the door, stood Kitty. Her aspect startled him to his feet. She looked at him, trembling—her little face haggard and white, with a touch of something in it which had blurred its youth.

"William!" She put both her hands to her breast, as though to support herself. Then she flew forward. "William! I have done nothing wrong—nothing—nothing! William—look at me!"

He sternly put out his hand, protecting himself.

"Where have you been?" he said, in a low voice—"and with whom?"

Kitty fell into a chair and burst into wild tears.



XIII

There was silence for a few moments except for Kitty's crying. Ashe still stood beside his writing-table, his hand resting upon it, his eyes on Kitty. Once or twice he began to speak, and stopped. At last he said, with obvious difficulty:

"It's cruel to keep me waiting, Kitty."

"I sent you a telegram first thing this morning." The voice was choked and passionate.

"I never got it."

"Horrid little fiend!" cried Kitty, sitting up and dashing back her hair from her tear-stained cheeks. "I gave a boy half a crown this morning to be at the station with it by eight o'clock. And I couldn't possibly either write or telegraph last night—it was too late."

"Where were you?" said Ashe, slowly. "I went to the Alcots' this morning, and—"

"—the butler told you Madeleine was in bed? So she is. She was ill yesterday morning. There was no coach and no party. I went with Geoffrey."

Kitty held herself erect; her eyes, from which the tears were involuntarily dropping, were fixed on her husband.

"Of course I guessed that," said Ashe.

"It was Geoffrey brought me the news—here, just as I was starting to go to the Alcots'. Then he said he had something to read me—and it would be delicious to go to Pangbourne—spend the day on the river—and come back from Windsor—at night—by train. And I had a horrid headache—and it was so hot—and you were at the office"—her lip quivered—"and I wanted to hear Geoffrey's poems—and so—"

She interrupted herself, and once more broke down—hiding her face against the chair. But the next moment she felt herself roughly drawn forward, as Ashe knelt beside her.

"Kitty!—look at me! That man behaved to you like a villain?"

She looked up—she saw the handsome, good-humored face transformed—and wrenched herself away.

"He did," she said, bitterly—"like a villain." She began to twist and torment her handkerchief as Ashe had seen her do once before, the small white teeth pressed upon the lower lip—then suddenly she turned upon him—

"I suppose you want me to tell you the story?"

All Kitty in the words! Her frankness, her daring, and the impatient, realistic tone she was apt to impose upon emotion—they were all there.

Ashe rose and began to walk up and down.

"Tell me your part in it," he said, at last—"and as little of that fellow as may be."

Kitty was silent. Ashe, looking at her, saw a curious shade of reverie, a kind of dreamy excitement steal over her face.

"Go on, Kitty!" he said, sharply. Then, restraining himself, he added, with all his natural courtesy—"I beg your pardon, Kitty, but the sooner we get through with this the better."

The mist in which her expression had been for a moment wrapped fell away. She flushed deeply.

"I told you I had done nothing vile!" she said, passionately. "Did you believe me?"

Their eyes met in a shock of challenge and reply.

"Those things are not to be asked between you and me," he said, with vehemence, and he held out his hand. She just touched it—proudly. Then she drew a long breath.

"The day was—just like other days. He read me his poems—in a cool place we found under the bank. I thought he was rather absurd now and then—and different from what he had been. He talked of our going away—and his not seeing me—and how lonely he was. And of course I was awfully sorry for him. But it was all right till—"

She paused and looked at Ashe.

"You remember the inn near Hamel Weir—a few miles from Windsor—that lonely little place."

Ashe nodded.

"We dined there. Afterwards we were to row to Windsor and come home by a train about ten. We finished dinner early. By-the-way, there were two other people there—Lady Edith Manley and her boy. They had rowed down from somewhere—"

"Did Lady Edith—"

"Yes—she spoke to me. She was going back to town—to the Holland House party—"

"Where she probably met mother?"

"She did meet her!" cried Kitty. She pointed to a letter which she had thrown down as she entered. "Your mother sent round this note to me this morning—to ask when I should be at home. And Wilson sent word—There! Of course I know she thinks I'm capable of anything."

She looked at him, defiant, but very miserable and pale.

"Go on, please," said Ashe.

"We finished dinner early. There was a field behind the inn, and then a wood. We strolled into the wood, and then Geoffrey—well, he went mad! He—"

She bit her lip fiercely, struggling for composure—and words.

"He proposed to you to throw me over?" said Ashe, as white as she.

With a sudden gesture she held out her arms—like a piteous child.

"Oh! don't stand there—and look at me like that—I can't bear it."

Ashe came—unwillingly. She perceived the reluctance, and with a flaming face she motioned him back, while she controlled herself enough to pour out her story. Presently Ashe was able to reconstruct with tolerable clearness what had occurred. Cliffe, intoxicated by the long day of intimacy and of solitude, by Kitty's beauty and Kitty's folly, aware that parting was near at hand, and trusting to the wildness of Kitty's temperament, had suddenly assumed the language of the lover—and a lover by no means uncertain of his ultimate answer. So long as they understood each other—that, indeed, for the present, was all he asked. But she must know that she had broken off his marriage with Mary Lyster, and reopened in his nature all the old founts of passion and of storm. It had been her sovereign will that he should love her; it had been achieved. For her sake—knowing himself for the seared and criminal being that he was—for Ashe's sake—he had tried to resist her spell. In vain. A fatal fusion of their two natures—imaginations—sympathies—had come about. Each was interpenetrated by the other; and retreat was impossible.

A kind of sombre power, indeed—the power of the poet and the dreamer—seemed to have spoken from Cliffe's strange wooing. He had taken no particular pains to flatter her, or to conceal his original hesitation. He put her own action in a hard, almost a brutal light. It was plain that he thought she had treated her husband badly; that he warned her of a future of treachery and remorse. At the same time he let her see that he could not doubt but that she would face it. They still had the last justifying cards in their hands—passion, and the courage to go where passion leads. When those were played, they might look each other and the world in the face. Till then they were but triflers—mean souls—fit neither for heaven nor for hell.

Ashe's whole being was soon in a tumult of rage under the sting of this report, as he was able to piece it out from Kitty. But he kept his self-command, and by dint of it he presently arrived at some notion of her own share in the scene. Horror, recoil, disavowal—a wild resentment of the charges heaped upon her, of the pitiless interpretation of her behavior which broke from those harsh lips, of the incredulity passing into something like contempt with which Cliffe had endured her wrath and received her protestations—then a blind flight through the fields to the little wayside station, where she hoped to catch the last train; the arrival and departure of the train while she was still half a mile from the line, and her shelter at a cottage for the night; these things stood out plainly, whatever else remained in obscurity. How far she had provoked her own fate, and how far even now she was delivered from the morbid spell of Cliffe's personality, Ashe would not allow himself to ask. As she neared the end of her story, it was as though the great tempest wave in which she had been struggling died down, and with a merciful rush bore him to a shore of deliverance. She was there beside him; and she was still his own.

He had been leaning over the side of a chair, his chin on his hand, his eyes fixed upon her, while she told her tale. It ended in a burst of self-pity, as she remembered her collapse in the cottage, the impossibility of finding any carriage in the small hamlet of which it made part, the faint weariness of the night—

"I never slept," she said, piteously. "I got up at eight for the first train, and now I feel"—she fell back in her chair, and whispered desolately with shut eyes—"as if I should like to die!"

Ashe knelt down beside her.

"It's my fault, too, Kitty. I ought to have held you with a stronger hand. I hated quarrelling with you. But—oh, my dear, my dear—"

She met the cry in silence, the tears running over her cheeks. Roughly, impetuously, he gathered her in his arms and kissed her, as though he would once more re-knit and reconsecrate the bond between them. She lay passively against him, the tangle of her fair hair spread over his shoulder—too frail and too exhausted for response.

"This won't do," he said, presently, disengaging himself; "you must have some food and rest. Then we'll think what shall be done."

She roused herself suddenly as he went to the door.

"Why aren't you at the Foreign Office?"

"I sent a message early. Lawson came"—Lawson was his private secretary—"but I must go down in an hour."

"William!"

Kitty had raised herself, and her eyes shone large and startled in the small, tear-stained face.

"Yes." He paused a moment.

"William, is the list out?"

"Yes."

Kitty tottered to her feet.

"Is it all right?"

"I suppose so," he said, slowly. "It doesn't affect me."

And then, without waiting, he went into the hall and closed the door behind him. He wrote a note to the Foreign Office to say that he should not be at the office till the afternoon, and that important papers were to be sent up to him. Then he told Wilson to bring wine and sandwiches into the library for Lady Kitty, who had been detained by an accident on the river the night before, and was much exhausted. No visitors were to be admitted, except, of course, Lady Tranmore or Miss French.

When he returned to the library he found Kitty with crimson cheeks, her hands locked behind her, walking up and down. As soon as she saw him she motioned to him imperiously.



"Shut the door, William. I have something very important to say to you."

He obeyed her, and she walked up to him deliberately. He saw the fluttering of her heart beneath her white dress—the crushed, bedraggled dress, which still in its soft elegance, its small originalities, spoke Kitty from head to foot. But her manner was quite calm and collected.

"William, we must separate! You must send me away."

He started.

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. It is—it is intolerable—that I should ruin your life like this."

"Don't, please, exaggerate, Kitty! There is no question of ruin. I shall make my way when the time comes, and Lady Parham will have nothing to say to it!"

"No! Nothing will ever go well—while I'm there—like a millstone round your neck. William"—she came closer to him—"take my advice—do it! I Warned you when you married me. And now you see—it was true."

"You foolish child," he answered, slowly, "do you think I could forget you for an hour, wherever you were?"

"Oh yes," she said, steadily, "I know you would forget me—- if I wasn't here. I'm sure of it. You're very ambitious, William—more than you know. You'll soon care—"

"More for politics than for you? Another of your delusions, Kitty. Nothing of the sort. Moreover, if you will only let me advise you—trust your husband a little—think both for him and yourself. I see nothing either in politics or in our life together that cannot be retrieved."

He spoke with manly kindness and reasonableness. Not a trace of his habitual indolence or indifference. Kitty, listening, was conscious of the most tempestuous medley of feelings—love, remorse, shame, and a strange gnawing desolation. What else, what better could she have asked of him? And yet, as she looked at him, she thought suddenly of the moonlit garden at Grosville Park, and of that young, headlong chivalry with which he had thrown himself at her feet. This man before her, so much older and maturer, counting the cost of his marriage with her in the light of experience, and magnanimously, resolutely paying it—Kitty, in a flash, realized his personality as she had never yet done, his moral independence of her, his separateness as a human being. Her passionate self-love instinctively, unconsciously, had made of his life the appendage of hers. And now—? His devotion had never been so plain, so attested; and all the while bitter, terrifying voices rang upon the inner ear, voices of fate, vague and irrevocable.

She dropped into a chair beside his table, trembling and white.

"No, no," she said, drawing her handkerchief across her eyes, with a gesture of childish misery, "it's all been a—a horrid mistake. Your mother was quite right. Of course she hated your marrying me—and now—now she'll see what I've done. I guess perfectly what she's thinking about me to-day! And I can't help it—I shall go on—if you let me stay with you. There's a twist—a black drop in me. I'm not like other people."

Her voice, which was very quiet, gave Ashe intolerable pain.

"You poor, tired, starved child," he said, kneeling down beside her. "Put your arms round my neck. Let me carry you up-stairs."

With a sob she did as she was told. Ashe's library a comparatively late addition to the rambling, old-fashioned house, communicated by a small staircase at the back with his dressing-room above. He lifted the small figure with ease, and half-way up-stairs he impetuously kissed the delicate cheek.

"I'm glad you're not Polly Lyster, darling!"

Kitty laughed through her tears. Presently he deposited her on the large sofa in her own room, and stood beside her, panting a little.

"It's all very well," said Kitty, as she nestled down among the pillows, "but we're none of us feathers!"

Her eyes were beginning to recover a little of their sparkle. She looked at him with attention.

"You look horribly tired. What—what did you do—last night?" She turned away from him.

"I sat up reading—then went to sleep down-stairs. I thought the coach had come to grief, and you were somewhere with the Alcots."

"If I had known that," she murmured, "I might have gone to sleep. Oh, it was so horrible—the little stuffy room, and the dirty blankets." She gave a shiver of disgust. "There was a poor baby, too, with whooping-cough. Lucky I had some money. I gave the woman a sovereign. But she wasn't at all nice—she never smiled once. I know she thought I was a bad lot."

Then she sprang up.

"Sit there!" She pointed to the foot of the sofa. Ashe obeyed her.

"When did you know?"

"About the ministry? Between six and seven. I saw Lady Parham afterwards driving in St. James's Street. She never enjoyed anything so much in her life as the bow she gave me.'"

Kitty groaned, and subsided again, a little crumpled form among her cushions.

"Tell me the names."

Ashe gave her the list of the ministry. She made one or two shrewd or bitter comments upon it. He fully understood that in her inmost mind she was registering a vow of vengeance against the Parhams; but she made no spoken threat. Meanwhile, in the background of each mind there lay that darker and more humiliating fact, to which both shrank from returning, while yet both knew that it must be faced.

There was a knock at the door, and Blanche appeared with the tray which had been ordered down-stairs. She glanced in astonishment at her mistress.

"We had an accident on the river last night, Blanche," said Kitty. "Come back in half an hour. I'm too tired to change just yet."

She kept her face hidden from the maid, but when Blanche had departed, Ashe saw that her cheeks were flaming.

"I hate lying!" she said, with a kind of physical disgust—"and now I suppose it will be my chief occupation for weeks."

It was true that she hated lying, and Ashe was well aware of it. Of such a battle-stroke, indeed, as she had played at the ball, when her prompt falsehood snatched Cliffe from Mary Lyster, she was always capable. But in general her pride, her very egotism and quick temper kept her true.

Perhaps the fact represented one of those deep sources whence the well of Ashe's tenderness was fed. At any rate, consciously or not, it was at this moment one of his chief motives for not finding the past intolerable or the future without hope. He took some wine and a sandwich from the tray, and began to feed her. In the middle, she pushed his hands away, and her eyes brimmed again with tears.

"Put it down," she commanded. And when he had done so, she raised his hands deliberately, one after the other, and kissed them, crying:

"William!—I have been a horrible wife to you!"

"Don't be a goose, Kitty. You know very well that—till this last business—And don't imagine that I feel myself a model, either!"

"No," she said, with a long sigh. "Of course, you ought to have beaten me."

He smiled, with an unsteady lip.

"Perhaps I might still try it."

She shook her head.

"Too late. I am not a child any more."

Then throwing her soft arms round his neck, she clung to him, saying the most adorable and poignant things, dissolved, indeed, in a murmuring anguish of remorse; until, with the same unexpectedness as before, she again disengaged herself—urging, insisting that he should send her away.

"Let me go and live at Haggart, baby and I." (Haggart was one of the Tranmore "places," recently handed over to the young people.) "You can come and see me sometimes. I'll garden—and write books. Half the smart women I know write stories—or plays. Why shouldn't I?"

"Why, indeed? Meanwhile, madam, I take you to Scotland—next week."

"Scotland?" She pressed her hands over her eyes. "'Anywhere—anywhere—out of the world!'"

"Kitty!" Startled by the abandonment of her words, Ashe caught her hands and held them. "Kitty!—- you regret—"

"That man? Do I?" She opened her eyes, frowning. "I loathe him! When I think of yesterday, I could drown myself. If I could pile the whole world between him and me—I would. But"—she shivered—"but yet—if he were sitting there—"

"You would be once more under the spell?" said Ashe, bitterly.

"Spell!" she repeated, with scorn. Then snatching her hands from his, she threw back the hair from her temples with a wild gesture. "I warned you," she said—"I warned you."

"A man doesn't pay much attention to those warnings, Kitty."

"Then it is not my fault. I don't know what's wrong with me," she said, sombrely; "but I remember saying to you that sometimes my brain was on fire. I seem to be always in a hurry—in a desperate, desperate hurry!—to know or to feel something—while there is still time—before one dies. There is always a passion—always an effort. More life—more life!—even if it lead to pain—and agony—and tears."

She raised her strange, beautiful eyes, which had at the moment almost a look of delirium, and fixed them on his face. But Ashe's impression was that she did not see him.

He was conscious of the same pang, the same sudden terror that he had felt on that never-to-be-forgotten evening when she had talked to him of the mask in the "Tempest." He thought of the Blackwater stories he had heard from Lord Grosville. "Mad, my dear fellow, mad!"—the old man's frequent comment ran through his memory. Was there, indeed, some unsound spot in Kitty?

He sat dumb and paralyzed for a moment; then, recovering himself, he said, as he recaptured the cold little hands:

"'More light,' Kitty, was what Goethe said, in dying. A better prayer, don't you think?"

There was a strong, even a stern insistence in his manner which quieted Kitty. Her face as it came back to full consciousness was exquisitely sweet and mournful.

"That's the prayer of the calm," she said, in a whisper, "and my nature is hunger and storm. And Geoffrey Cliffe is the same. That's why I couldn't help being—"

She sprang up.

"William, don't let's talk nonsense. I can't ever see that man again. How's it to be done?"

She moved up and down—all practical energy and impatience—her mood wholly altered. His own adapted itself to hers.

"For the present, fear nothing," he said, dryly. "For his own sake Cliffe will hold his tongue and leave London. And as to the future—I can get some message conveyed to him—by a man he won't disregard. Leave it to me."

"You can't write to him, William!" cried Kitty, passionately.

"Leave it to me," he repeated. "Then suppose you take the boy—and Margaret French—to Haggart till I can join you?"

"And your mother?" she said, timidly, coming to stand beside him and laying a hand on each shoulder.

"Leave that also to me."

"How she'll hate the sight of me," she said, under her breath. Then, with another tone of voice—"How long, William, do you give the government?"

"Six months, perhaps—perhaps less. I don't see how they can last beyond February."

"And then—we'll fight!" said Kitty, with a long breath, smoothing back the hair from his brow.

"Allow me, please, to command the forces! Well, now then, I must be off!" He tried to rise, but she still held him.

"Did you have any breakfast, William?"

"I don't remember."

"Sit still and eat one of my sandwiches." She divided one into strips, and standing over him began to feed him. A knock at the door arrested her.

"Don't move!" she said, peremptorily, before she ran to open the door.

"Please, my lady," said Blanche, "Lady Tranmore would like to see you."

Kitty started and flushed. She looked round uncertainly at Ashe.

"Ask her ladyship to come up," said Ashe, quietly.

The maid departed.

"Feed me if you want to, Kitty," said Ashe, still seated.

Kitty returned, her breath hurried, her step wavering. She looked doubtfully at Ashe—then her eyes sparkled—as she understood. She dropped on her knees beside him, kissing the sleeve of his coat, against which her cheek was pressed—in a passion of repentance.

He bent towards her, touching her hair, murmuring over her. His mind meanwhile was torn with feelings which, so to speak, observed each other. This thing which had happened was horribly serious—important. It might easily have wrecked two lives. Had he dealt with it as he ought—made Kitty feel the gravity of it?

Then the optimist in him asked impatiently what was "the good of exaggerating the damned business"? That fellow has got his lesson—could be driven headlong out of his life and Kitty's henceforward. And how could he doubt the love shown in this clinging penitence, these soft kisses? How would the Turk theory of marriage, please, have done any better? Kitty had had her own wild way. No fiat from without had bound her; but love had brought her to his feet. There was something in him which triumphed alike in her revolt and her submission.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in the cool drawing-room to which the green persiennes gave a pleasant foreign look, Lady Tranmore had been waiting for the maid's return. She shrank from every sound in the house; from her own reflection in Kitty's French mirrors; from her own thoughts most of all.

Lady Edith Manley—at Holland House—had been the most innocent of gossips. A little lady who did no wrong herself—and thought no wrong of others; as white-minded and unsuspicious as a convent child. "Poor Lady Kitty! Something seemed to have gone wrong with the Alcots' coach, and they were somehow divided from all their party. I can't remember exactly what it was they said, but Mr. Cliffe was confident they would catch their train. Though my boy—you remember my boy? they've just put him in the eight!—thought they were running it rather fine."

Then, five minutes later, in the supper-room, Lady Tranmore had run across Madeleine Alcot's husband, who had given her in passing the whole story of the frustrated expedition—Mrs. Alcot's chill, and the despatch of Cliffe to Hill Street. "Horrid bore to have to put it off! Hope he got there in time to stop Lady Kitty getting ready. Oh, thanks, Madeleine's all right."

And then no more, as the rush of the crowd swept them apart.

After that, sleep had wholly deserted Lady Tranmore—if, indeed, after the publication of the cabinet list in the afternoon, and William's letter following upon it, any had been still possible. And in the early morning she had sent her note to Kitty—a ballon d'essai, despatched in a horror of great fear.

"Her ladyship has not yet returned." The message from Hill Street, delivered by the footman's indifferent mouth, struck Lady Tranmore with trembling.

"Where is William?" she said to herself, in anguish. "I must find him—but—what shall I say to him?" Then she went up-stairs, and, without calling for her maid, put on her walking things with shaking hands.

She slipped out unobserved by her household, and took a hansom from the corner of Grosvenor Street. In the hansom she carefully drew down her veil, with the shrinking of one on whom disgrace—the long pursuing, long expected—has seized at last. All the various facts, statements, indications as to Kitty's behavior, which through the most diverse channels had been flowing steadily towards her for weeks past, were now surging through her mind and memory—a grievous, damning host. And every now and then, as she caught the placards in the streets, her heart contracted anew. Her son, her William, in what should have been the heyday of his gifts and powers, baffled, tripped up, defeated!—by his own wife, the selfish, ungrateful, reckless child on whom he had lavished the undeserved treasures of the most generous and untiring love. And had she not only checked or ruined his career—was he to be also dishonored, struck to the heart?

She could scarcely stand as she rang the bell at Hill Street, and it was only with a great effort that she could ask her question:

"Is Mr. Ashe at home?"

"Mr. Ashe, my lady, is, I believe, just going out," said Wilson. "Her ladyship arrived just about an hour ago, and that detained him."

Elizabeth betrayed nothing. The training of her class held good.

"Are they in the library?" she asked—"or up-stairs?"

Wilson replied that he believed her ladyship was in her room, and Mr. Ashe with her.

"Please ask Mr. Ashe if I can see him for a few minutes."

Wilson disappeared, and Lady Tranmore stood motionless, looking round at William's books and tables. She loved everything that his hand had touched, every sign of his character—the prize books of his college days, the pictures on the wall, many of which had descended from his Eton study, the photographs of his favorite hunter, the drawing she herself had made for him of his first pony.

On his writing-table lay a despatch-box from the Foreign Office. Lady Tranmore turned away from it. It reminded her intolerably of the shock and defeat of the day before. During the past six months she had become more rejoicingly conscious than ever before of his secret, deepening ambition, and her own heart burned with the smart of his disappointment. No one else, however, should guess at it through her. No sooner had she received his letter from the club than, after many weeks of withdrawal from society, she had forced herself to go to the Holland House party, that no one might say she hid herself, that no one might for an instant suppose that any hostile act of such a man as Lord Parham, or any malice of that low-minded woman, could humiliate her son or herself.

Suddenly she saw Kitty's gloves—Kitty's torn and soiled gloves—lying on the floor. She clasped her trembling hands, trying to steady herself. Husband and wife were together. What tragedy was passing between them?

Of course there might have been an accident; her thoughts might be all mistake and illusion. But Lady Tranmore hardly allowed herself to encourage the alternative of hope. It was like Kitty's audacity to have come back. Incredible!—unfathomable!—like all she did.

"Her ladyship says, my lady, would you please go up to her room?"

The message was given in Blanche's timid voice. Lady Tranmore started, looked at the girl, longed to question her, and had not the courage. She followed mechanically, and in silence. Could she, must she face it? Yes—for her son's sake. She prayed inwardly that she might meet the ordeal before her with Christian strength and courage.

* * * * *

The door opened. She saw two figures in the pretty, bright-colored room, William sat astride upon a chair in front of Kitty, who, like some small mother-bird, hovered above him, holding what seemed to be a tiny strip of bread-and-butter, which she was dropping with dainty deliberation into his mouth. Her face, in spite of the red and swollen eyes, was alive with fun, and Ashe's laugh reflected hers. The domesticity, the intimate affection of the scene—before these things Elizabeth Tranmore stood gasping.

"Dearest mother!" cried Ashe, starting up.

Kitty turned. At sight of Lady Tranmore she hung back; her smiles departed; her lip quivered.

"William!"—she pursued him and touched him on the shoulder. "I—I can't—I'm afraid. If mother ever means to speak to me again—come and tell me."

And, hiding her face, Kitty escaped like a whirlwind. The dressing-room door closed behind her, and mother and son were left alone.

"Mother!" said Ashe, coming up to her gayly, both hands out-stretched. "Ask me nothing, dear. Kitty has been a silly child—but things will go better now. And as for the Parhams—what does it matter?—come and help me send them to the deuce!"

Lady Tranmore recoiled. For once the good-humor of that handsome face—pale as the face was—seemed to her an offence—nay, a disgrace. That what had happened had been no mere contretemps, no mere accident of trains and coaches, was plain enough from Kitty's eyes—from all that William did not say, no less than from what he said. And still this levity!—this inconceivable levity! Was it true, as she knew was said, that William had no high sense of honor, that he failed in delicacy and dignity?

In reality, it was the same cry as the Dean's—upon another and smaller occasion. But in this case it was unspoken. Lady Tranmore dropped into a chair, one hand abandoned to her son, the other hiding her face. He talked fast and tenderly, asking her help—neither of them quite knew for what—her advice as to the move to Haggart—and so forth. Lady Tranmore said little. But it was a bitter silence; and if Ashe himself failed in indignation, his mother's protesting heart supplied it amply.



PART III

DEVELOPMENT

"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom, der Welt."



XIV

"What does Lady Kitty do with herself here?" said Darrell, looking round him. He had just arrived from town on a visit to the Ashes, to find the Haggart house and garden completely deserted, save for Mrs. Alcot, who was lounging in solitude, with a cigarette and a novel, on the wide lawn which surrounded the house on three sides.

As he spoke he lifted a chair and placed it beside her, under one of the cedars which made deep shade upon the grass.

"She plays at Lady Bountiful," said Mrs. Alcot. "She doesn't do it well, but—"

"—The wonder is, in Johnsonian phrase, that she should do it at all. Anything else?"

"I understand—she is writing a book—a novel."

Darrell threw back his head and laughed long and silently.

"Il ne manquait que cela," he said—"that Lady Kitty should take to literature!"

Mrs. Alcot looked at him rather sharply.

"Why not? We frivolous people are a good deal cleverer than you think."

The languid arrogance of the lady's manner was not at all unbecoming. Darrell made an inclination.

"No need to remind me, madam!" A recent exhibition at an artistic club of Mrs. Alcot's sketches had made a considerable mark. "Very soon you will leave us poor professionals no room to live."

The slight disrespect of his smile annoyed his companion, but the day was hot and she had no repartee ready. She only murmured as she threw away her cigarette:

"Kitty is much disappointed in the village."

"They are greater brutes than she thought?"

"Quite the contrary. There are no poachers—and no murders. The girls prefer to be married, and the Tranmores give so much away that no one has the smallest excuse for starvation. Kitty gets nothing out of them whatever."

"In the way of literary material?"

Mrs. Alcot nodded.

"Last week she was so discouraged that she was inclined to give up fiction and take to journalism."

"Heavens! Political?"

"Oh, la haute politique, of course."

"H'm. The wives of cabinet ministers have often inspired articles. I don't remember an instance of their writing them."

"Well, Kitty is inclined to try."

"With Ashe's sanction?"

"Goodness, no! But Kitty, as you are aware"—Mrs. Alcot threw a prudent glance to right and left—"goes her own way. She believes she can be of great service to her husband's policy."

Darrell's lip twitched.

"If you were in Ashe's position, would you rather your wife neglected or supported your political interests?"

Mrs. Alcot shrugged her shoulders.

"Kitty made a considerable mess of them last year."

"No doubt. She forgot they existed. But I think if I were Ashe, I should be more afraid of her remembering. By-the-way—the glass here seems to be at 'Set Fair'?"

His interrogative smile was not wholly good-natured. But mere benevolence was not what the world asked of Philip Darrell—even in the case of his old friends.

"Astonishing!" said Mrs. Alcot, with lifted brows. "Kitty is immensely proud of him—and immensely ambitious. That, of course, accounts for Lord Parham's visit."

"Lord Parham!" cried Darrell, bounding on his seat. "Lord Parham!—coming here?"

"He arrives to-morrow. On his way from Scotland—to Windsor."

Mrs. Alcot enjoyed the effect of her communication on her companion. He sat open-mouthed, evidently startled out of all self-command.

"Why, I thought that Lady Kitty—"

"Had vowed vengeance? So, in a sense, she has. It is understood that she and Lady Parham don't meet, except—"

"On formal occasions, and to take in the groundlings," said Darrell, too impatient to let her finish her sentence. "Yes, that I gathered. But you mean that Lord Parham is to be allowed to make his peace?"

Madeleine Alcot lay back and laughed.

"Kitty wishes to try her hand at managing him."

Darrell joined her in mirth. The notion of the white-haired, bullet-headed, shrewd, and masterful man who at that moment held the Premiership of England managed by Kitty, or any other daughter of Eve—always excepting his wife—must needs strike those who had the slightest acquaintance with Lord Parham as a delicious absurdity.

Suddenly Darrell checked himself, and bent forward.

"Where—if I may ask—is the poet?"

"Geoffrey? Somewhere in the Balkans, isn't he?—making a revolution."

Darrell nodded.

"I remember. They say he is with the revolutionary committee at Marinitza. Meanwhile there is a new volume of poems out—to-day," said Darrell, glancing at a newspaper thrown down beside him.

"I have seen it. The 'portrait' at the end—"

"Is Lady Kitty." They spoke under their breaths.

"Unmistakable, I think," said Kitty's best friend. "As poetry, it seems to me the best thing in the book, but the audacity of it!" She raised her eyebrows in a half-unwilling, half-contemptuous admiration.

"Has she seen it?"

Mrs. Alcot replied that she had not noticed any copy in the house, and that Kitty had not spoken of it, which, given the Kitty-nature, she probably would have done, had it reached her.

Then they both fell into reverie, from which Darrell emerged with the remark:

"I gather that last year some very important person interfered?"

This opened another line of gossip, in which, however, Mrs. Alcot showed herself equally well informed. It was commonly reported, at any rate, that the old Duke of Morecambe, the head of Lady Eleanor Cliffe's family, the great Tory evangelical of the north, who was a sort of patriarch in English political and aristocratic life, had been induced by some undefined pressure to speak very plainly to his kinsman on the subject of Lady Kitty Ashe. Cliffe had expectations from the duke which were not to be trifled with. He had, accordingly, swallowed the lecture, and, after the loss of his election, had again left England with an important newspaper commission to watch events in the Balkans.

"May he stay there!" said Darrell. "Of course, the whole thing was absurdly exaggerated."

"Was it?" said Mrs. Alcot, coolly. "Kitty richly deserved most of what was said." Then—on his start—"Don't misunderstand me, of course. If twenty actions for divorce were given against Kitty, I should believe nothing—nothing!" The words were as emphatic as voice and gesture could make them. "But as for the tales that people who hate her tell of her, and will go on telling of her—"

"They are merely the harvest of what she has sown?"

"Naturally. Poor Kitty!"

Madeleine Alcot rested her thin cheek on a still frailer hand and looked pensively out into the darkness of the cedars. Her tone was neither patronizing nor unkind; rather, the shade of ironic tenderness which it expressed suited the subject, and that curious intimacy which had of late sprung up between herself and Darrell. She had begun, as we have seen, by treating him de haut en bas. He had repaid her with manner of the same type; in this respect he was a match for any Archangel. Then some accident—perhaps the publication by the man of a volume of essays which expressed to perfection his acid and embittered talent—perhaps a casual meeting at a northern country-house, where the lady had found the man of letters her only resource amid a crowd of uncongenial nonentities—had shown them their natural compatibility. Both were in a secret revolt against circumstance and their own lives; but whereas the reasons for the man's attitude—his jealousies, defeats, and ambitions—were fairly well understood by the woman, he was almost as much in the dark about her as when their friendship began.

He knew her husband slightly—an eager, gifted fellow, of late years a strong High Churchman, and well known in a certain group as the friend of Mrs. Armagh, that muse—fragile, austere, and beautiful—of several great men, and great Christians, among the older generation. Mrs. Alcot had her own intimates, generally men; but she tired of them and changed them often. Mr. Alcot spent part of every year within reach of the Cornish home of Mrs. Armagh; and during that time his wife made her round of visits.

Meanwhile her thin lips were sealed as to her own affairs. Certainly she made the impression of an unhappy woman, and Darrell was convinced of some tragic complication. But neither he nor any one of whom he had yet inquired had any idea what it might be.

"By-the-way—where is Lady Kitty?—and are there many people here?"

Darrell turned, as he spoke, to scrutinize the house and its approaches. Haggart Hall was a large and commonplace mansion, standing in the midst of spreading "grounds" and dull plantations, beyond which could be sometimes seen the tall chimneys of neighboring coal-mines. It wore an air of middle-class Tory comfort which brought a smile to Darrell's countenance as he surveyed it.

"Kitty is at the Agricultural Show—with a party."

"Playing the great lady? What a house!"

"Yes. Kitty abhors it. But it will do very well for the party to-morrow."

"Half the county—that kind of thing?"

"All the county—some royalties—and Lord Parham."

"Lord Parham being the end and aim? I thought I heard wheels."

Mrs. Alcot rose, and they strolled back towards the house.

"And the party?" resumed Darrell.

"Not particularly thrilling. Lord Grosville—"

"Also, I presume, en garcon."

Mrs. Alcot smiled.

"—the Manleys, Lady Tranmore, Miss French, the Dean of Milford and his wife, Eddie Helston—"

"That, I understand, is Lady Kitty's undergraduate adorer?"

"It's no use talking to you—you know all the gossip. And some county big-wigs, whose names I can't remember—come to dinner to-night." Mrs. Alcot stifled a yawn.

"I am very curious to see how Ashe takes his triumph," said Darrell, as they paused half-way.

"He is just the same. No!" said Madeleine Alcot, correcting herself—"no—not quite. He meant to triumph, and he knows that he has done so."

"My dear lady!" cried Darrell—"a quite enormous difference! Ashe never took stock of himself or his prospects in his life before."

"Well, now—you will find he takes stock of a good many things."

"Including Lady Kitty?"

His companion smiled.

"He won't let her interfere again."

"L'homme propose," said Darrell. "You mean he has grown ambitious?"

Mrs. Alcot seemed to find it difficult to cope with these high things. Fanning herself, she languidly supposed that the English political passion, so strong and unspent still in the aristocratic families, had laid serious hold at last on William Ashe. He had great schemes of reform, and, do what he might to conceal it, his heart was in them. His wife, therefore, was no longer his occupation, but—

Mrs. Alcot hesitated for a word.

"Scarcely his repose?" laughed Darrell.

"I really won't discuss Kitty any more," said Mrs. Alcot, impatiently. "Here they are! Hullo! What has Kitty got hold of now?"

Three carriages were driving up the long approach, one behind the other. In the first sat Kitty, a figure beside her in the dress of a nurse, and opposite to them both an indistinguishable bundle, which presently revealed a head. The carriage drew up at the steps. Kitty jumped down, and she and the nurse lifted the bundle out. Footmen appeared; some guests from the next carriage went to help; there was a general movement and agitation, in the midst of which Kitty and her companions disappeared into the house.

Lady Edith Manley and Lord Grosville began to cross the lawn.

"What is the matter?" asked Mrs. Alcot, as they converged.

"Kitty ran over a boy," said Lord Grosville, in evident annoyance. "The rascal hadn't a scratch, but Kitty must needs pick him up and drive him home with a nurse. 'I ain't hurt, mum,' says the boy. 'Oh! but you must be,' said Kitty. I offered to take him to his mother and give him half a crown. 'It's my duty to look after him,' says Kitty. And she lifted him up herself—dirty little vagabond!—and put him in the carriage. There were some laborers and grooms standing near, and one of them sang out, 'Three cheers for Lady Kitty Ashe!' Such a ridiculous scene as you never saw!"

The old man shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.

"Lady Kitty is always so kind," said the amicable Lady Edith. "But her pretty dress—I was sorry!"

"Oh no—only an excuse for a new one," said Mrs. Alcot.

The Dean and Lady Tranmore approached—behind them again Ashe and Mrs. Winston.

"Well, old fellow!" said Ashe, clapping a hand on Darrell's shoulder. "Uncommonly glad to see you. You look as though that damned London had been squeezing the life out of you. Come for a stroll before dinner?"

The two men accordingly left the talkers on the lawn, and struck into the park. Ashe, in a straw hat and light suit, made his usual impression of strength and good-humor. He was gay, friendly, amusing as ever. But Darrell was not long in discovering or imagining signs of change. Any one else would have thought Ashe's talk frankness—nay, indiscretion—itself. Darrell at once divined or imagined in it shades of official reserve, tracts of reticence, such as an old friend had a right to resent.

"One can see what a personage he feels himself!"

Yet Darrell would have been the first to own that Ashe had some right to feel himself a personage. The sudden revelation of his full intellectual power, and of his influence in the country, for which the general election of the preceding winter had provided the opportunity, was still an exciting memory among journalists and politicians. He had gone into the election a man slightly discredited, on whose future nobody took much trouble to speculate. He had emerged from it—after a series of speeches laying down the principles and vindicating the action of his party—one of the most important men in England, with whom Lord Parham himself must henceforth treat on quasi-equal terms. Ashe was now Home Secretary, and, if Lord Parham's gout should take an evil turn, there was no saying to what height fortune might not soon conduct him.

The will—the iron purpose—with which it had all been done—that was the amazing part of it. The complete independence, moreover. Darrell imagined that Lord Parham must often have regretted the small intrigue by which Ashe's promotion had been barred in the crisis of the summer. It had roused an indolent man to action, and freed him from any particular obligation towards the leader who had ill-treated him. Ashe's campaign had not been in all respects convenient; but Lord Parham had had to put up with it.

The summer evening broadened as the two men sauntered on through the park, beside a small stream fringed with yellow flags. Even the dingy Midland landscape, with its smoke-blackened woods and lifeless grass, assumed a glory of great light; the soft, interlacing clouds parted before the dying sun; the water received the golden flood, and each coot and water-hen shone jet and glossy in the blaze. A few cries of birds, the distant shouts of harvesters, the rustling of the water-flags along the stream, these were the only sounds—traditional sounds of English peace.

"Jolly, isn't it?" said Ashe, looking round him—"even this spoiled country! Why did we go and stifle in that beastly show!"

The sensuous pleasure and relaxation of his mood communicated itself to Darrell. They talked more intimately, more freely than they had done for months. Darrell's gnawing consciousness of his own meaner fortunes, as contrasted with the brilliant and expanding career of his school-friend, softened and relaxed. He almost forgave Ashe the successes of the winter, and that subtly heightened tone of authority and self-confidence which here and there bore witness to them in the manner or talk of the minister. They scarcely touched on politics, however. Both were tired, and their talk drifted into the characteristic male gossip—"What's —— doing now?" "Do you ever see So-and-so?" "You remember that fellow at Univ.?"—and the like, to the agreeable accompaniment of Ashe's best cigars.

So pleasant was the half-hour, so strongly had the old college intimacy reasserted itself, that suddenly a thought struck upward in Darrell's mind. He had not come to Haggart bent merely on idle holiday—far from it. At the moment he was weary of literature as a profession, and sharply conscious that the time for vague ambitions had gone by. A post had presented itself, a post of importance, in the gift of the Home Office. It meant, no doubt, the abandonment of more brilliant things; Darrell was content to abandon them. His determination to apply for it seemed, indeed, to himself an act of modesty—almost of sacrifice. As to the technical qualifications required, he was well aware there might be other men better equipped than himself. But, after all, to what may not general ability aspire—general ability properly stiffened with interest?

And as to interest, when was it ever to serve him if not now—through his old friendship with Ashe? Chivalry towards a much-solicited mortal, also your friend—even the subtler self-love—might have counselled silence—or at least approaches more gradual. It had been far from his purpose, indeed, to speak so promptly. But here were the hour and the man! And there, in a distant country town, a woman—whereof the mere existence was unsuspected by Darrell's country-house acquaintance—sat waiting, in whose eyes the post in question loomed as a condition—perhaps indispensable. Darrell's secret eagerness could not withstand the temptation.

So, with a nervous beginning—"By-the-way, I wished to consult you about a personal matter. Of course, answer or not, as you like. Naturally, I understand the difficulties!"—the plunge was taken, and the petitioner soon in full career.

After a first start—a lifted brow of astonishment—Ashe was uncomfortably silent—till suddenly, in a pause of Darrell's eloquence, his face changed, and with a burst of his old, careless freedom and affection, he flung an arm along Darrell's shoulder, with an impetuous—

"I say, old fellow—don't—don't be a damned fool!"

An ashen white overspread the countenance of the man thus addressed. His lips twitched. He walked on in silence. Ashe looked at him—stammered:

"Why, my dear Philip, it would be the extinguishing of you!"

Darrell said nothing. Ashe, still holding his friend captive, descanted hurriedly on the disadvantages of the post "for a man of your gifts," then—more cautiously—on its special requirements, not one of which did Darrell possess—hinted at the men applying for it, at the scientific and professional influences then playing upon himself, at his strong sense of responsibility—"Too bad, isn't it, that a duffer like me should have to decide these things"—and so on.

In vain. Darrell laughed, recovered himself, changed the subject; but as they walked quickly back to the house, Ashe knew, perchance, that he had lost a friend; and Darrell's smarting soul had scored another reckoning against a day to come.

* * * * *

As they neared the house they found a large group still lingering on the lawn, and Kitty just emerging from a garden door. She came out accompanied by the handsome Cambridge lad who had been her partner at Lady Crashaw's dance. He was evidently absorbed in her society, and they approached in high spirits, laughing and teasing each other.

"Well, Kitty, how's the bruised one?" said Ashe, as he sank into a chair beside Mrs. Alcot.

"Doing finely," said Kitty. "I shall send him home to-night."

"Meanwhile, have you put him up in my dressing-room? I only ask for information."

"There wasn't another corner," said Kitty.

"There!" Ashe appealed to gods and men. "How do you expect me to dress for dinner?"

"Oh, now, William, don't be tiresome!" said Kitty, impatiently. "He was bruised black and blue"—("Serve him right for getting in the way," grumbled Lord Grosville)—"and nurse and I have done him up in arnica."

She came to stand by Ashe, talking in an undertone and as fast as possible. The little Dean, who never could help watching her, thought her more beautiful—and wilder—than ever. Her eyes—it was hardly enough to say they shone—they glittered—in her delicate face; her gestures were more extravagant than he remembered them; her movements restlessness itself.

Ashe listened with patience—then said:

"I can't help it, Kitty—you really must have him removed."

"Impossible!" she said, her cheek flaming.

"I'll go and talk to Wilson; he'll manage it," said Ashe, getting up.

Kitty pursued him, arguing incessantly.

He lounged along, turning every now and then to look at her, smiling and demurring, his hat on the back of his head.

"You see the difference," said Mrs. Alcot, in Darrell's ear. "Last year Kitty would have got her way. This year she won't."

Darrell shrugged his shoulders.

"These domesticities should be kept out of sight, don't you think?"

Madeleine Alcot looked at him curiously.

"Did you have a pleasant walk?" she said.

Darrell made a little face.

"The great man was condescending."

Madeleine Alcot's face was still interrogative.

"A touch of the folie des grandeurs?"

"Well, who escapes it?" said Darrell, bitterly.

* * * * *

Most of the party had dispersed. Only Lady Tranmore and Margaret French were on the lawn. Margaret was writing some household notes for Kitty; Lady Tranmore sat in meditation, with a book before her which she was not reading. Miss French glanced at her from time to time. Ashe's mother was beginning to show the weight of years far more plainly than she had yet done. In these last three years the face had perceptibly altered; so had the hair. The long strain of nursing, and that pathetic change which makes of the husband who has been a woman's pride and shelter her half-conscious dependent, had, no doubt, left deep marks upon a beauty which had so long resisted time. And yet Margaret French believed it was rather with her son than with her husband that the constant and wearing anxiety of Lady Tranmore's life should be connected. All the ambition, the pride of race and history which had been disappointed in her husband had poured themselves into her devotion to her son. She lived now for his happiness and success. And both were constantly threatened by the personality and the presence of Kitty.

Such, at least, as Margaret French well knew, was the inmost persuasion—fast becoming a fanaticism—of Ashe's mother. William might, indeed, for the moment have triumphed over the consequences of Kitty's bygone behavior. But the reckless, untamed character was there still at his side, preparing Heaven knew what pitfalls and catastrophes. Lady Tranmore lived in fear. And under the outward sweetness and dignity of her manner was there not developing something worse than fear—that hatred which is one of the strange births of love?

If so, was it just? There were many moments when Margaret would have indignantly denied it.

It was true, indeed, that Kitty's eccentricity seemed to develop with every month that passed. The preceding winter had been marked, first by a mad folly of table-turning—involving the pursuit of a particular medium whose proceedings had ultimately landed him in the dock; then by a headlong passion for hunting, accompanied by a series of new flirtations, each more unseemly than its predecessor, as it seemed to Lady Tranmore. Afterwards—during the general election—a political phase! Kitty had most unfortunately discovered that she could speak in public, and had fallen in love with the sound of her own voice. In Ashe's own contest, her sallies and indiscretions had already begun to do mischief when Lady Tranmore had succeeded in enticing her to London by the bait of a French clairvoyante, with whom Kitty nightly tempted the gods who keep watch over the secrets of fate—till William's poll had been declared.