He held up a little stoppered bottle full of strong ammonia, which Vane had got for cleaning up the bindings of some old books.

"Twenty drops of this," he went on, "in a wine-glassful of water, and he'll be as sober as ever he was in half an hour. Then I'll make him some strong coffee, and he'll be as right as a trivet. Only you mustn't let him take any more drink afterwards, or he'll just bring his boots up. I suppose I may try, sir? At any rate it won't do him any harm."

"Certainly," said Ernshaw, "I've heard of it before. Do the best you can for him, Jepson."

Jepson shut the door with a "Thank you, sir," and proceeded to treat his patient.

Before the doctor arrived Sir Arthur had almost entirely recovered, and Vane was sitting up in bed, supported by the faithful Jepson's arm, gasping and coughing, but perfectly sober, and wondering dimly what had happened during the last hour or two—or was it weeks, or months, or what? He felt horribly sick and ill, and he was trembling in every limb, but the clouds of intoxication had cleared away from his mind; memory was returning to him, and he was asking Jepson disjointed questions as to what had happened.

"Never you mind about that, sir," said Jepson. "Everything's all right now. Sir Arthur is coming round nicely, and now you've got that down, you just lay back and keep quiet, and I'll go and make your coffee, and before an hour's over you'll be ready and fit to go to the Sheldonian and face the Chancellor as though you hadn't tasted a drop."

Vane, still wondering at his apparently miraculous recovery, did as he was told and lay back upon the pillows, and Jepson went off to brew him an "extra special" pot of coffee.

"It's very unfortunate for Mr. Maxwell," he said, when he got into his own den, "very unfortunate, and on Degree Day too, but if I know anything about him and Sir Arthur, and I can get him to the Theatre dressed and compos mentis and all that sort of thing—well, it's a fiver at least in my pocket, so it's an ill wind that blows nobody good."

The doctor arrived while he was making the coffee. Ernshaw explained quickly what had happened. He went in and looked at Vane, felt his pulse, asked him in a kindly tone why he had made such a fool of himself on such a day, then he said that he couldn't improve on Jepson's treatment under the circumstances, and went in to look at Sir Arthur, who now, thanks to Ernshaw's care, was almost himself again.

"Curious business this," he said, after he had felt Sir Arthur's pulse and found that he was practically all right. "Your son's case, I mean. I've known him nearly all the time that he's been up, and I've always considered that he was a teetotaller from principle. Of course it would be simply absurd to attempt to conceal from you what has been the matter with him this morning. He's been drunk, dead drunk, by about half-past nine in the morning. At the same time we must remember that when a man has been in hard training for a boat race, or anything of that sort, or if he has been reading hard on tea, which is almost as vicious a habit as alcoholism, he can get drunk on very little alcohol when the strain is taken off. In fact, I have known a man get drunk on a pint of bitter and a beef-steak; but there doesn't seem any reason of that sort for what happened this morning. Still, fortunately, that man of his knew what to do, and he's done it—a rather heroic remedy certainly, but one can risk that with a good constitution.

"Still, I can't quite understand it, I must confess. If there was any taint of what we now call alcoholic insanity in his blood, it would, of course, be perfectly plain. However, we needn't go into that now. There can't be any idea of that, and I think when he's had his coffee, and you've had a mild brandy and soda, Sir Arthur, and kept quiet for half an hour or so, I think you will be able to go and see your son take the honours which he has won, and won very well, too. I suppose no idea of this has gone beyond these rooms?"

"I'm afraid they have," said Ernshaw. "Garthorne, a Cambridge man, the man, you know, Sir Arthur, who was here with Vane when you came in, the same man who went for you, Doctor, said that he would go on and tell Sir Godfrey that Vane had been taken ill and wouldn't be able to come out of his rooms to-day. In short, that he would have to receive his degree by proxy."

"The devil he did," said Sir Arthur, getting up from the sofa with the strength of a sudden access of anger and moving towards the bedroom door. "Look here, doctor, you have just said that Vane is getting round. Well, if he is, the old blood in him will tell, and he'll take his place and play his part with the rest of them. Mr. Ernshaw, I know your friendship for my son; I know what you have done for him, and how you have helped him. Now, will you do me another favour and take my compliments to Sir Godfrey Raleigh, and say that the matter is not anything like as serious as we thought it was, and that both Vane and myself will be ready to go through the day's programme as arranged. If you will be good enough to do that, the doctor and I will be able to arrange the rest, I think."

"I shall be only too glad," said Ernshaw, taking up his hat. "I shall just have about time to do it, and then get to my rooms and dress. Au revoir, then, until after the ceremony," and with that, he opened the door just as Jepson knocked at it, bringing in the coffee.

Ernshaw found Garthorne already at Sir Godfrey's rooms in close conversation with Enid. He had, of course, heard much about her from Vane, but this was the first time he had seen her. She had more than fulfilled the promise of two years before, and Ernshaw, ascetic as he was, had still too strong an artistic vein in his temperament to be insensible to her beauty. In fact, as she rose to greet the closest friend of the man who had been her lover, and who, as she fondly hoped, would be so once more after to-day, he started and coloured ever so slightly. He had never seen anything like her before as she stood there with outstretched hand, gently-smiling lips, and big, soft, deep eyes, in all the pride and glory of her dawning womanhood.

It was this, then, that Vane had to give up. This was the priceless treasure which, if he kept his vow, he would have to surrender to another man. As the thought crossed his mind, he looked at Garthorne, and he saw the possibility that, after all, he might be the victor in that struggle which had begun years ago on the deck of the steamer.

Certainly, as far as physical conditions went, there could hardly be a better match; but as he looked back to Enid, a darker thought stole into his mind. Garthorne had, superficially at least, rebutted the charges he had made against him in Vane's rooms; but though he had apologised for what he had said, the conviction that he had deliberately tempted Vane to drink came back to him, now that he saw how great a temptation Garthorne had to commit such an infamy.

No doubt he knew perfectly well that Enid herself would overlook Vane's second lapse as she had done his first, and would be quite content to marry him on the strength of his promise that he would never get drunk again; but he also knew that, after what had happened that morning, Vane's determination to give her up would be tenfold strengthened, and that, when once he had definitely done so, the psychological moment would have arrived for him to begin his own suit—at first, of course, from a deferential distance, from which he might hope to approach her heart through the avenue of her injured pride.

"Good morning, Mrs. Ernshaw!" she said, "I am glad to meet such an old and good friend of Vane's. I have heard a great deal about you, and, I need hardly say, nothing but good. I hope you have come to tell me that Vane is better and also that you will tell me what has really been the matter with him. Mr. Garthorne, here, has been very rude; he has absolutely refused to say anything about it, and I am quite offended with him. I really can't see why there should be any mystery about it. What is it?"

Ralph Ernshaw was one of those men who can no more tell a direct lie, or even prevaricate, than they can get outside their own skins. He held even the white lies of conventionality to be unworthy of anyone who held the truth as sacred, and yet for the life of him he could not look this lovely girl in the face and tell her that the man whom she had loved ever since she knew what love was, had been lying drunk on the floor of his room less than an hour before, and that the sight of him had shocked his father into a fainting fit.

"I think, Miss Raleigh," he said, after a little hesitation, "that Vane would rather tell you that himself. In fact, to be quite candid with you, it is not a subject upon which I should care to touch even at your request, simply because I think that it is a matter which could be very much better discussed and explained between Vane and yourself; and I think Mr. Garthorne will agree with me in that view."

"Certainly I do," said Garthorne, "I think that is the most sensible way of putting it. Enid, if you'll take my advice you'll take Ernshaw's, and let Vane do his own explaining after Commem."

"Really, I think it's very horrid of both of you," said Enid. "I certainly can't see why there should be all this mystery. If it's anything really serious, surely I have a right to know. However, I suppose I must control my feminine impatience, at any rate it can't be anything very bad if he'll be able to be at the Theatre and Sir Arthur can come with him. I suppose I shall hear all about it at dinner to-night."

"I have no doubt that you will, Miss Raleigh," said Ernshaw, "and now, if you will excuse me, I must be off to my rooms to get ready for my own share of the proceedings. Good morning."

"Good morning, Mr. Ernshaw," replied Enid, a trifle stiffly. "That reminds me how rude I have been, I've not congratulated you yet."

"Oh, I haven't done anything," said Ernshaw, "at least, not in comparison with what Vane has done. You'll see the difference in the Theatre. Good morning again. Good morning, Mr. Garthorne."

"Good morning—we shall see you later, I suppose?" replied Garthorne, as the door closed, and then he turned to Enid and went on: "He's a thundering good fellow that Ernshaw. Quite a character, I believe, enthusiast, and all that sort of thing, but everyone here seems to think he'll be a shining light some day."

"Yes, he seems very nice," said Enid, "but, as a matter of fact, I can't say that I'm particularly fond of shining lights or people who are too good, and from what papa tells me, this Mr. Ernshaw has been making or trying to make Vane a great deal too good for me. I even hear that he has been trying to make Vane become a parson. Fancy Vane, with all his talents and prospects, a curate! The idea is absurd, even more absurd than this two years' probation idea."

"I quite agree with you," said Garthorne, "but still, think of the test of constancy and the delight of knowing that you have both stood it so well."

At this moment the door opened, and Sir Godfrey came in, not altogether to Garthorne's satisfaction, and so put an end to further developments of the conversation.

A couple of hours later Enid was sitting with her father, a unit of the vast audience which filled the Sheldonian Theatre. After Ernshaw's visit, neither she nor her father had received any message either from Vane or Sir Arthur. She had expected that Vane, at least, would have come to her before the beginning of the ceremonies, or that, at least, Sir Arthur would have come and told her something about him, but no, not a word; and there she sat between Garthorne and her father, angry and yet expectant, waiting for the moment of his appearance.

"Ah, here he is at last," whispered Garthorne, as his name and honours were called out in Latin.

Enid held her breath as the familiar figure, clad in the unfamiliar academic garb, walked towards the Chancellor's throne. She could see that he was deadly pale, and that his eyes were shining with an unnatural brightness. He never even once looked towards her. The wild outburst of cheering which greeted his appearance seemed as utterly lost upon him as if he had been stone deaf and blind. He listened to the Chancellor's address with as little emotion as though it concerned some one else. Then he knelt down, the hood, the outward and visible sign of his intellectual triumph, was put over his shoulders; the Chancellor spoke the magic words without his hearing them. He never felt the three taps given with the New Testament on his head, and he rose from his knees and moved away from the scene of the crowning triumph of his youth as mechanically as though the proceedings had no more interest for him than if they had been taking place a thousand miles away.

All through the afternoon Enid and her father waited for them to come, but there was no sign from either of them until just before tea-time Jepson presented himself with two letters, one addressed to Sir Godfrey and one to Enid. Both were very short. Sir Godfrey's was from Sir Arthur, and ran as follows:

"MY DEAR RALEIGH,

"I hope that you and your daughter will forgive the apparent discourtesy of our absence from you this afternoon and evening. I find it necessary to take Vane to London at once. His letter to Enid will explain the reason.

"Faithfully yours, "ARTHUR MAXWELL."

"There is evidently something very serious the matter," said Sir Godfrey, as he handed the note to Enid. "Maxwell wouldn't write like that without good reason. That's from Vane, I suppose. What does he say?"

"Say," exclaimed Enid, with a flash of anger through her fast gathering tears. "That's what he says. It's too bad, too cruel—and after leaving me alone for two years—it's miserable!" And with that, she made a swift escape out of the room and shut the door behind her with an emphatic bang.

Sir Godfrey picked the note up from the table where she had flung it. There was no form of address. It simply began:

"I was drunk this morning. Drunk without meaning to be so, after being two years without touching alcohol and without experiencing the slightest craving for it. Last night I had finally come to the conclusion that it would be a sin to ask you to keep your promise to me. Now I am convinced that it would be absolute infamy to do so. I dare not even face you to tell you this, so utterly unworthy and contemptible am I in my own sight. Whatever you hear to the contrary, remember that what has happened this morning is no fault of anyone but myself. If ever we meet again I hope I shall find you the wife of a man more worthy of you than I am now, or, with this accursed taint in my blood, ever could be. Perhaps in those days we may be friends again; but for the present we must be strangers.

"Vane."



CHAPTER X.

Yet another twelve months had passed since Vane had taken his degree; since Enid had seen him vanish like a spectre out of her life, and had waited vainly for his coming, only to receive instead that letter of farewell which, the instant she had read it, she knew to be final and irrevocable.

In such a nature as hers the tenderest spot was her pride. She had been his sweetheart since they were boy and girl together, and when the time came they had become formally engaged. For nearly four years now she had considered herself as half married to him. Other men attracted by her physical beauty and her mental charm had approached her, as they had a perfect right to do, in open and honest rivalry of Vane, but she had given them one and all very clearly to understand that she had definitely plighted her troth, and had no intention of breaking it. In other words she had been absolutely faithful even in thought.

She had never considered his feelings as to what he called his inherited alcoholism as anything else than the somewhat fine-drawn scruples of a highly-strung, and rather romantic nature. She had not troubled herself about the deadly scientific aspect of the matter. She knew perfectly well that men got drunk sometimes and still made excellent husbands, and, more than all, she firmly believed that, once Vane's wife, she would speedily acquire sufficient influence over him to make anything like a recurrence of what had happened quite impossible.

Even after his second and worst breakdown on the morning of Commemoration Day she would still have received him as her lover and, after a little friendly lecture which would, of course, have ended in the usual way, she would have been perfect friends with him again on the old footing.

But that letter had ended everything between them. Moreover, it had been followed by one from Sir Arthur to her father expressing great regret at the turn which matters had taken, but saying that, after repeated conversations with Vane, he had been forced to the conclusion that his resolve to enter the Church and devote himself to a life of celibacy and mission work at home was really fixed and unalterable.

After that there was, of course, nothing more to be said or done. Enid, being a natural, simple-hearted, healthy English girl, who enjoyed life a great deal too well to worry about looking under the surface of things, therefore came to the conclusion that she had been jilted for the sake of a fine-drawn Quixotic idea. If she had been jilted for the sake of another woman it would have been quite a different matter. Then there would have been something tangible to hate bitterly for a season, and then to get revenged on by making a much more brilliant marriage, as she could easily have done. But it was infinitely worse, and more humiliating to be thrown over like this by the man whom she had looked upon as her future husband nearly all her life, whom she had played at housekeeping with while they were children, and whom she had never looked upon as anything else but a sweetheart or a lover—and yet it was true, miserably true, and now, for the sake of a mere idea, she found herself cast off, loverless and alone.

Then, after a few weeks of secret, but exceeding bitterness, she did what nineteen out of every twenty girls would have done under the circumstances. The twentieth girl would probably have considered her life blighted for ever, and vowed the remainder of it to single-blessedness, charity and good works as a Sister of something or other. But Enid belonged to the practical majority, and so when the breaking off of the engagement became an actual social fact, and Reginald Garthorne came just at the psychological moment to tell her that never since he had earned that boyish licking on the steamer by kissing her, had he been able to look with love into the eyes of any other woman, she had told him with perfect frankness that, as it was quite impossible for her to marry Vane, and as she certainly liked him next best, and had not the slightest intention of remaining single, she was perfectly content to marry him. If he chose to take her on those terms he might go and talk the matter over with Sir Godfrey, and if he and her mother said "yes," she would say "yes," too.

It was a somewhat prosaic wooing, perhaps, but Reginald Garthorne had been hungering for her in his heart for years. Outwardly he had been friends with Vane, but in his soul he had hated him consistently as boy and man ever since that scene behind the wheelhouse of the Orient. He was, therefore, perfectly content. He had longed for her, and he didn't care how he got her. The rest would come afterwards.

He was rich, far richer than Vane ever would be. He had inherited a fortune of nearly two hundred thousand pounds from his mother's side of the family when he came of age. On his father's death he would succeed to the title and a fine old country house in the Midlands, with a rent-roll and mining royalties worth over thirty thousand a year. He would be able to make her life a continuous dream of pleasure, amidst which she would very soon forget the visionary who was throwing away his manhood and all the best years of his life just because he had learnt that he was the son of a drunken and abandoned woman, and had himself got drunk twice in his life.

The interview with Sir Godfrey and Lady Raleigh had been entirely satisfactory. They both considered in their hearts that their daughter had been very badly treated. From every social point of view this was a match which left nothing to be desired, and so they said "yes," and Garthorne went back to Enid, and said, triumphantly, as he kissed her for the first time since that memorable kiss on the steamer:

"And so, you see, darling, I've won, after all!"

It was thus that it came about that, on the same day, as the Fates would have it, two ceremonies were being performed at the same hour, one in St. George's, Hanover Square, and one before the altar at Worcester Cathedral.

The Bishop, in full canonicals, surrounded by his attendant clergy, sat inside the altar rails in front of the Communion Table, and on the topmost step before the rails knelt two young men wearing surplices and the hoods of Bachelors of Arts of Oxford.

It was the Feast of St. James the Apostle, and in his exhortation the Archdeacon, who was preacher for the day, had taken for his text the collect:

"Grant, O merciful God, that, as Thine holy Apostle St. James, leaving his father and all that he had without delay, was obedient unto the call of Thy Son Jesus Christ and followed Him, so we, forsaking all worldly and carnal affections, may be evermore ready to follow Thy holy commandments, through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

One of the men kneeling at the altar rails was Mark Ernshaw, and the other was Vane Maxwell.

Among the somewhat scanty congregation which had remained after the usual morning service, sat Sir Arthur Maxwell. A year ago he would have been inclined to laugh at the idea of his son sacrificing all his brilliant worldly prospects to enter the Church. He was, as has already been said, a deeply religious man himself, but still, he was a man of the world, a man who had made his own way through the world, and won by sheer hard work some of the prizes which it has to give, and, like many others of his class, he had come to look upon the clerical profession somewhat as the refuge of the intellectually destitute.

But as the time had gone on since that scene in his son's rooms at Oxford, he had come to believe that with Vane it was not a mere question, as it is with too many other men, of taking Orders to secure a profession and a position. He was entering the Church as the men of more earnest and more faithful ages had done; because he believed that he had a duty to do, a mission to perform, a sacrifice to make, and, above all, an enemy to fight which was God's enemy as well as his own.

Therefore the words "leaving his father and all that he had," awakened no bitter echoes in his soul. True it was a sacrifice for him as well as for Vane; but for Vane's sake he had made it willingly and cheerfully, and he was able now to look forward with perfect contentment to the triumphs which, in his father's pride, he could not help believing his son would win in that higher and holier sphere of life which he had chosen.

The presentation being made and the questions as to "crime or impediment" being duly asked and answered, the Litany and Suffrages began, and every note and word of the solemn intonation, ringing through the silence of the great Cathedral, found an echo which rang true in three souls at least among the congregation:

"O God the Father of Heaven: have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.

"O God the Son, Redeemer of the world: have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.

"O God the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son: have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.

"O Holy blessed and glorious Trinity, three Persons and one God: have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.

"Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers: neither take thou vengeance on our sins: spare us, good Lord, spare thy people whom thou hast redeemed with Thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us for ever.

"From all evil and mischief: from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil: from Thy wrath and from everlasting damnation.

"From all blindness of heart: from pride, vain-glory and hypocrisy: from envy, hatred and malice, and all uncharitableness.

"From fornication, and all other deadly sin: and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil.

"Good Lord deliver us!"

"Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers: neither take thou vengeance on our sins."

These, of all the words which he heard spoken on that fateful day, the day which marked for him the passing of the line which divides the World of the Flesh from the World of the Spirit—the frontier of the kingdom of this world separating it from that other Kingdom which, though worldwide, yet owns but a single Lord—seemed to fall with greater weight into Vane's soul than any others of the service. As he heard them he raised his bent head, threw it back and, with wide open eyes, looked up over the Bishop's head and the reredos behind the altar to the central section of the great stained glass window containing the figure of the Godhead crucified in the flesh, with the two Marys, Mary the Mother and Mary Magdalene, kneeling at the foot of the Cross.

Like a quiver of summer lightning across the horizon of an August sky, there came to him the thought of that mother of his whom he had never known, and of that girl who was almost his sister, long ago lost in the great wilderness of London. They were not likenesses, only the faintest of suggestions, and yet the mere recollection seemed to lend an added solemnity to the vows which he was about to take.

"I will do so, the Lord being my helper!"

As he uttered the words there was not the faintest doubt in his soul that for the rest of his life he would be able to keep both the letter and the spirit of the oath unbroken to the end of his days. Many a man and woman has rashly wished that it were possible to look into the future. Such a thought had more than once crossed Vane Maxwell's mind, but could he, in that solemn moment, have looked into the future and seen what lay before him, he would have been well content with the high destiny to which his great renunciation was to lead him.

* * * * *

And now the scene changes from Gloucester Cathedral, to St. George's, Hanover Square.

It was the smartest wedding of the year, and, apart from all its social brilliance, even the most rigid critics admitted that London had not seen a lovelier bride or a handsomer bridegroom than Enid Raleigh and Reginald Garthorne. The church was thronged by an audience made up of the friendly, the sympathetic, the sentimental, and the merely curious, as is usual on such occasions.

Carol Vane and Dora Russel, who had come provided with tickets indirectly supplied by the bridegroom himself, occupied seats in the left-hand gallery at the front. In consequence of the crowd, they only got into their places just as the bridal procession was moving up the central aisle. There was the bride with her attendant bridesmaids, six little maidens dressed in pure white, the bridegroom with his pages, six counterparts dressed in the style of Charles I. Then Sir Godfrey and Lady Raleigh, and then a tall, grizzled, soldierly-looking man, and beside him a white-haired old lady, who might have stepped straight out of one of Gainsborough's pictures.

As Carol caught sight of the man beside her, she leant half her body over the front of the gallery, and stared with straining eyes down at the slowly moving procession. Dora caught her by the arm and pulled her back, saying, in a whisper:

"Don't do that; you might fall over."

Carol turned a white face and a pair of blankly staring eyes upon her, caught her by the arm with one hand and pointing downwards with the other, said in a whisper that seemed to rattle in her throat:

"See that man, there—that tall one with the old lady on his arm? That's the man who did all the ruin! That's my father—and my mother was Vane's mother, and that's his son, going to marry Vane's sweetheart. No, by God, he shan't! I'll tell the whole church full, first."

She tore herself free from Dora's hold and struggled to her feet, her lips were opened to utter words which would have instantly turned the wedding into a tragedy; but the rush of thoughts which came surging into her brain was too much for her. The swift revelation of an almost unbelievable life-tragedy struck her like a lightning-stroke; she uttered a few incoherent sounds, and then dropped back fainting into Dora's arms.

"Another of life's little tragedies, I suppose," whispered a well-dressed matron just behind her, to a companion at her side, "a petite maitresse, no doubt. It's a curious thing; they always come to see their lovers married."



CHAPTER XI.

The fainting of Carol in the gallery of the church and her being carried out just before the commencement of the ceremony, was looked upon by some of the more superstitious of the immediate spectators as a sign of evil omen to the happiness of those who, in the phrase which is so often only the echo of devils' laughter, were about "to be joined together in holy matrimony."

Still, only a few had heard the broken words which the horror-stricken girl had uttered before she fell down insensible, and those only thought what the good lady behind her had said. To the rest of the congregation it was merely an incident, due to the crowd and the heat. The little flutter of excitement which it caused soon passed away, and the ceremony began and went on without any of the bridal party even knowing what had happened.

She was carried to the gallery stairs, and there Dora sat her down, supporting her with her arm, while one sympathetic young lady held a bottle of salts to her nostrils, and an older lady emptied a scent-bottle on to her handkerchief and held it to her forehead.

In a very few minutes she came round. She looked about her, and, recognising Dora, said:

"Oh, dear, what's happened? Where am I? Yes, I remember—at a wedding—and he——"

Then she checked herself, and Dora said:

"Do you think you're well enough to come down and get into a cab, and then we'll get home? It was the heat and the crush that did it, I suppose."

"Yes, I think I can," said Carol. "I'm all right now. Thank you very much for being so kind," she went on to the other two with a faint smile of gratitude.

"Oh, don't mention it," they said almost together, and then the younger one put her hand under her arm and helped her up. "Let me help you down," she said. "I daresay you'll be all right when you get into the open air."

Carol looked round at her and saw that, without being exactly pretty, she had a very sweet and sympathetic expression, and big, soft brown eyes which looked out very kindly under dark level brows. It was a face which women perhaps admire more than men; but her voice was one which would have gone just as quickly to a man's heart as to a woman's. At any rate, it went straight to Carol's, and when they had got into the cab and she leant back against the cushions she said to Dora:

"I wonder who that girl was? Did you notice what a sweet face and what a lovely voice she had? I'm not very loving towards my own sex, but as soon as I got round I felt that I wanted to hug her—and I suppose if she knew the sort of person I am she wouldn't have touched me. What a difference clothes make, don't they? Now, if I'd been dressed as some of the girls are——"

"I think you're quite wrong there, Carol," said Dora, interrupting her. "I don't believe she's that sort at all, she was much too nice, I'm certain. She had the face of a really good woman, and you know good women don't think that of us. It's only the goody-goody ones who do that, and there's a lot of difference between good and goody-goody."

"Well, yes," said Miss Carol, "I daresay you're right, after all. She had a sweet face, hadn't she? But look here, Dora," she went on with a sudden change of tone, "did you ever know anything so awful? No—I can't talk about it yet. Tell him to pull up at the Monico, and we'll have a brandy and soda. I never wanted a drink so badly in my life."

The cab had meanwhile been rolling down Regent Street, and had almost reached the Circus. Dora put her hand up through the trap and told the cabman—whose opinion of his fares underwent an instantaneous change. He nodded and said, "Yes, miss," and the next minute pulled up in front of the square entrance to the cafe. Dora got out first and helped Carol out; then she gave the cabman a shilling and they went in.

"Goes to a wedding, does a faint, comes out, and stops 'ere when they ought to have been driven 'ome. Not much class there!" the cabman soliloquised as he flicked his whip over his horse's ears and turned across towards Piccadilly. He was, perhaps, naturally disgusted at the meagre results of a job for which he had expected three or four shillings at the very least.

The big cafe was almost deserted, as it usually is in the morning, and the two girls found a secluded seat at one of the corner tables.

"Dora, you must pay for these," said Carol when they had given their order, "and what's more you'll have to lend me some money to go on with, for if I was starving I wouldn't spend another shilling of that man's money."

"But, my dear child, I don't suppose he knew it," said Dora. "Of course you can have anything I've got if you want it, and I quite understand how you feel. It's very dreadful, horrible, in fact, but you couldn't help it. You're not to blame, and I don't see that he is, after all's said and done."

"No, I don't say that he is," said Carol, "and of course I couldn't know, for he isn't a bit like his father. He was dark once, so I suppose the—the other one takes after his mother. At least, he would do if she was a fair woman. But just fancy me having that feeling about Vane that night—feeling that I couldn't—and yet this one is just as near. God forgive me, Dora, isn't it awful?"

"Well, never mind, dear," said Dora, as the waiter brought the drinks. "I don't see that that matters one way or the other now. What's done is done, and there's an end of it. Well, here's fun, and better luck next time!"

"Hope so!" said Carol somewhat bitterly, as she took a rather long pull at her brandy and soda. "Ah, that's better," she went on, as she put her glass down. "At any rate, it couldn't be much worse luck, could it?"

"But are you perfectly certain," said Dora, "that he really was the man? You know, after all, you only saw him for quite a moment or so."

"I'm as certain as I am that I'm sitting here," said Carol, "that that was the man who lived with my mother in Paris and Vienna and Nice and a lot of other places ever since I can remember. It isn't likely that I'm going to forget when I have such good reason as I have for remembering. He's the man, right enough, and if I was face to face with him for five minutes I'd prove it. The question is whether I ought to prove it or not."

"That's a thing that wants thinking about," said Dora. "But how can you prove it?"

"Easy enough," replied Carol, "if he'd just take his coat off and turn his shirt-sleeve up. He's got two marks just above his right elbow, two white marks, and the one on the front is bigger than the one behind. I've seen them many a time when he's been sculling or playing tennis. He told me he got them from a spear thrust when he was fighting in the Zulu war. The spear went right in in front and the point came out behind, and if I had a thousand pounds I'd bet it that that man has got those marks on his arm.

"Besides, I know lots of other things about him. You know I'm not a bad mimic, for one thing, and I could imitate his voice and his way of talking before I heard him speak, and I know a photographer in Paris where I could get his photograph—one taken while he was with us. We went with him to have it taken; and, besides, I don't care whether that unfortunate mother of mine's mad or not, she'd recognise him. I'd bet any money he daren't go to the place where she is and face her. Well, now I'm better. Let's go home to lunch and think it over. It certainly isn't a thing to do anything hastily about."

"That's just what I think, dear," said Dora, finishing her brandy and soda.

"All right; we won't take another cab just yet. Let's walk along the 'Dilly for a bit; it'll do me good, I think; and besides, I may as well get familiar with the old place again," said Carol, rising from her seat.

"What nonsense!" said Dora. "The very idea of you having to go in for that sort of thing, when there are half a dozen fellows a good deal more than ready to take this man Garthorne's place."

"Well, well," said Carol, with a light laugh and a toss of her pretty head, "I don't suppose the change would be for the worse. But there's one thing certain, I shall have to snare the oof bird very shortly, for the first thing I'm going to do when we get to the flat is to send back every penny of the money that Reginald gave me when we said good-bye. Of course I didn't know anything about it, but it seems worse a good deal than if I had stolen it. Then to-night we'll go to the Empire, and you, being rather more married than I am, can chaperone me."

"All right," said Dora. "I'll send a wire to Bernard, and perhaps he'll come too and escort us."

Reginald Garthorne had behaved, as both the world and the half-world would have said, very honourably to Carol when they had said the usual good-bye before his marriage. He had paid his share of the rent of the flat for her for six months ahead, and had given her a couple of hundred pounds to go on with. Of this considerably over a hundred pounds remained. She changed the gold into notes, and even the silver into postal orders, and put the whole sum into a packet, which she registered and posted to his town address.

She gave no explanation or reason for what she was doing. In the first place she could not bring herself to tell him the dreadful truth that she had discovered; and then, again, it would only after all be a piece of needless cruelty. During her connection with him he had always treated her with kindness and courtesy, and often with generosity. She had nothing whatever against him, so why should she wreck the happiness of his honeymoon, and perhaps of his whole married life, by disclosing the secret that had been so strangely revealed to her? So she simply wrote:

"DEAR MR. GARTHORNE,

"You have been very kind to me, and I thoroughly appreciate your kindness. But something has happened to-day—I daresay you can guess what it is—which makes it unnecessary to me, and, as you know I have rather curious ideas about money matters, I hope you will understand my reasons, and not be offended by my returning it to you with many thanks.

"Yours very sincerely, "CAROL VANE."

Under the circumstances the white lie was one which the Recording Angel might well have blotted out. Probably he did. But, as the Fates would have it, the words proved prophetic.

They went to the Empire that night under the escort of Mr. Bernard Falcon, and while they were having a stroll round the promenade during the interval he nodded and smiled a little awkwardly to a tall, good-looking young fellow in evening dress, whose bronzed skin, square shoulders and easy stride gave one the idea that he was a good deal more accustomed to the free and easy costume of the Bush or the Veld or the Mining Camp than to the swallow-tails and starched linen of after-dinner Civilisation.

"What a splendid-looking fellow!" said Dora, turning her head slightly as he passed; "the sort of man, I should say, who really is a man. Who is he, Bernard? You seem to know him!"

"That man?" said Mr. Falcon. "Well, come down into the lower bar, and we'll have a drink, and I'll tell you."

"That looks a little bit as if you didn't want to meet him again!" said Dora, a trifle maliciously. "Does he happen to be one of your clients, or someone who only knows you as a perfectly respectable person?"

Mr. Falcon did not reply immediately, but he frowned a little, as if he didn't find the remark very palatable. But when they reached the seclusion of the bar and sat down at one of the tables he said:

"Well, yes, it is something like that. The fact is we have done a little business for him, and we hope to do more. Lucky beggar, he's one of Fortune's darlings."

"That sounds interesting," said Carol. "May I ask what the good lady has done for him?"

"Well," said Mr. Falcon, folding his hands on the table and dropping his voice to a discreet monotone, "in the first place she made him the younger son of a very good family. Nothing much to begin with, of course, but then she also gave him a maiden aunt who left him five thousand pounds just after he left Cambridge in disgust after failing three times to get a pass degree. He had no special turn for anything in particular except riding and shooting and athletics of all sorts. So, like a sensible fellow, instead of stopping in England and fooling his money away, as too many younger sons do, he put four thousand pounds into my partner's hands—Lambe, I should tell you, was his aunt's solicitor—to be invested in good securities, put the other thousand into his pocket, and started out to seek his fortune.

"That's a little over five years ago, which makes him about thirty now. Of course, I suppose he went everywhere and did everything, as such fellows do, but we heard very little of him, and he never drew a penny of the four thousand pounds, and he turned up in London a week or two ago something more than a millionaire. It seems that he was one of the first to hear of the West Australian goldfields—he was out there prospecting in the desert, and a few months later he was one of the pioneers of Kalgoorlie, and pegged out a lot of the most valuable claims. He put in nearly three years there, and now he's come back to enjoy himself. He's a very fine fellow, but I must say I'd rather not have met him here to-night."

"Oh, nonsense," laughed Dora, "he'll understand. Being a man he knows perfectly well that scarcely any of you respectable married men are half as respectable as you'd like to be thought. However, why not compromise him too? Go and fetch him and introduce him."

Mr. Falcon knew Dora well enough to take this request as something like an order. So he rose, saying:

"Well, that's not a bad idea, after all, and I daresay he won't have the slightest objection to make the acquaintance of two such entirely charming young ladies."

Mr. Falcon rather prided himself upon his way of turning a compliment, albeit his action, as they say in stable parlance, was a trifle heavy. When he had gone Dora nodded to Carol and said:

"There, dear. If I'm not very much mistaken this is the reward of virtue."

"Which is its own reward, and generally doesn't get it," laughed Carol, colouring slightly. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," said Dora, "that only to-day you made yourself penniless from the most laudable of motives, and here, this very night, comes Prince Charming from the Fortunate Isles, with all his pockets and both hands full of money, and a splendid-looking fellow as well. I think that's a bit mixed, but still it's somewhere about the fact. Ah, here they come."

"Mr. Cecil Rayburn, Miss Dora Murray; Mr. Rayburn, Miss Carol Vane. Now we know each other," said Mr. Falcon. "Rayburn, what will you have?"

Rayburn had a brandy and soda, and before it was finished the conversation was running easily and even merrily. With the quick perception of the travelled man he speedily discovered that Dora was Falconer's particular friend; she always addressed him as "Bernie," while Carol always said "Mr. Falcon" or "Mr. F."

When they got up, all thoroughly well pleased with each other, Falcon said:

"Are you alone, Rayburn?"

"Yes," he replied. "I hadn't anything particular to do to-night, and as I was sick of playing billiards and swopping lies with the other fellows at the Carlton, I just put on a hard-boiled shirt and the other things and came over here to seek my fortune."

As he said this he looked straight at Carol, their eyes met for a moment, and then she coloured up swiftly and looked away.

The four wound up the evening with a sumptuous supper at Prince's, at which Rayburn played host to perfection, and within a week Carol and he had left Charing Cross by the eleven o'clock boat-train on a trip which had no particular objective, but which, as a matter of fact, extended round the world before Carol again saw her beloved London. In addition to her other rings she wore a new thick wedding ring, a compromise with conventionality which the etiquette of hotels and steamer saloons had rendered imperative, and thus it came to pass that Miss Carol, travelling as Mrs. Charles Redfern, vanished utterly for more than a year, and this, too, was why all the efforts of Vane and Ernshaw and Sir Arthur to find her had proved for the present unavailing.



CHAPTER XII.

Enid Garthorne came back from a somewhat extended honeymoon trip to the Riviera and thence on through Northern Italy to Venice, whence she returned via Vienna and Paris, a very different woman from the Enid Raleigh who had cried so bitterly over that farewell letter of Vane's in her bedroom at Oxford.

She had already schooled herself to look upon her long love for Vane as, after all, only the sustained infatuation of a romantic school-girl, and upon him as a high-hearted, clean-souled but utterly impossible visionary who had sacrificed the substance for the shadow, and who, having chosen irrevocably, could only be left to work out his own destiny as he had shaped it.

Garthorne, in the first flush of his gratified love and triumph, had proved an almost ideal combination of lover and husband, and of all the brides who were honeymooning in the most luxurious resorts of the Continent that Autumn and Winter, she, with her youth and beauty, her handsome, devoted husband, and splendid fortunes, was accounted the most to be envied. As week after week went by, and the intoxication of her new life grew upon her, she gradually came to believe this herself. At the same time, something very like true affection for this man, whose love was very real and who seemed to find his only happiness in making the world the most delightful of dreamlands for her, began to grow up in her heart.

Of course, she often thought of Vane; that was inevitable. It was inevitable, too, that she should look back now and then to some of the many tender scenes that had passed between them; but as time went on, these memory-pictures grew more faint. The fast-succeeding events and the new experiences of her married life crowded swiftly and thickly upon her, until she began to look upon the past more as a dream than as a reality. Vane's figure receded rapidly into the background of her life, and, as it did so, it seemed in some way to become spiritualised, lifted above and beyond the world-sphere in which it was now her destiny to move.

They got back to England a few weeks before the season began, and, after a day or two in London for some necessary shopping, they went down to Garthorne Abbey, one of the finest old seats in the Midland counties, standing on a wooded slope in the green border which fringes the Black Country, and facing the meadows and woodlands which stretch away down to the banks of the Severn, beyond which rise the broken, picturesque outlines of the Herefordshire Hills.

Here Enid Garthorne spent an entirely delightful week exploring the stately home and the splendid domain of which she would one day be mistress. Day after day in the early clear Spring morning, she would go up alone on to a sort of terrace-walk which had been made round the roof behind the stone balustrade which ran all round the house, and look out over the green, well-wooded, softly undulating country, her heart filled with a delighted pride and the consciousness, or, at any rate, the belief, that after all the cloud which had come between her and Vane had had a silver, nay, a golden lining, and that, so far, at least, everything had been for the best.

As she looked to the eastward, she could see stretched along the horizon a low, dun-coloured line which was not cloud. It was the smoke of the Black Country, and underneath it hundreds and hundreds of men, aye, and if she had known it, women, too, were toiling in forge and mine and factory, earning the thousands which made life so easy and so pleasant for her. To the westward were the low-lying meadows, the rolling corn-lands, and the dark strips and patches of wood and coppice which lay for miles on three sides of the Home Park, and beyond these she caught bright gleams of the silver Severn rippling away to the distant Bristol Channel; then, beyond this again, the rising uplands which culminated in the irregular terraces of the Abberley Hills.

She knew nothing of it at the time, but far away, perched up in a leafy nook among them was a little cluster of old grey buildings; just a chapel, a guest-house, a refectory, and half a dozen cells forming a tiny quadrangle which was still called St. Mary's Chapel of Ease, but which in the old days when all the lands that Enid could see from her roof-walk had belonged to the ancient Abbey of Ganthony—of which her husband's name was perhaps a corruption—had been known as the House of Our Lady of Rest.

Before the dissolution of the Monasteries it had been a place of rest and retreat for servants of the Church who had exhausted themselves in her service or had found reason to withdraw themselves a while from the world and its temptations; and such, though creeds have changed, it has practically remained until now.

The little church was nominally St. Augustine's, the Parish Church of a little scattered hamlet which was sprinkled over the hillside beneath it. The living had been in the gift of the Garthorne family, but Sir Reginald's father had sold the advowson to one of the earliest pioneers of the High Church movement in England, and through this purchase it had passed into the keeping of a small Anglican Order calling itself the Fraternity of St. Augustine.

This little Brotherhood had not only maintained the traditions of the ancient Order of St. Augustine, Preacher, Saint and Martyr, but had done all that was possible to revive them in their ancient purity. The little monastery among the hills, though it had passed under another ecclesiastical rule, was still a place where priests and deacons might come either to rest from the labours which they had endured in the service of their Master, or to separate themselves from the din and turmoil of the world, and, amidst the peace and silence of nature, wrestle with the doubts or temptations that had beset them. The Vicar of the parish and Father Superior of the Retreat was an aged priest who had welcomed three generations of his younger brothers in Christ as temporary sojourners in this little sanctuary, and had sent them away comforted and strengthened to take their place again in the ranks of the army which wages that battle which began when the first prophecy was uttered in Eden, and which will only end when the sound of the Last Trump marshalls the hosts of men before the bar of the Last Tribunal.

Vane had been the occupant of one of the tiny little rooms, which had once been the monks' cells, for a little over three months when Enid came to her future home. The rooms were on the side of the quadrangle facing the valley, and from his little window he could distinctly see the great white house, with its broad terraces standing out against the dark background formed by the trees which crowned the ridge behind it. He, of course, knew perfectly well to whom it belonged and who would one day be mistress of it, and one day he saw from the Times, the only secular newspaper admitted into St. Augustine's, that Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Garthorne had returned from their wedding trip on the Continent, and, after a day or two in London, would proceed for a few weeks to Garthorne Abbey to recuperate before the fatigues of the season, of which it was generally expected Mrs. Garthorne would be one of the most brilliant ornaments.

The sight of it, the knowledge of all the splendours that it contained, of all the worldly wealth of which it was the material sign, had not affected him in the least. He had already lifted himself beyond the possibility of envying anyone the possession of such things as these. He could see over and beyond them as a man on a mountain top might look over a little spot on the plain beneath, which to those who dwelt in it was a great and splendid city.

Even the knowledge that Enid was coming to the Abbey as the wife of its future master only drew just a single quiet sigh from his lips, only caused him to give one swift look back into the world that he had left, for after all this was only what he had expected, what he knew to be almost inevitable when he had first made up his mind to sacrifice his love to what he believed to be his duty.

She had passed out of his existence and he had passed out of hers. Henceforth their life-circles might touch, but they could never intersect each other. Of course, they would meet again in the world, but only as friends, with perhaps a warmer hand-clasp for the sake of the days that were past and gone for ever, but that was all. He had but one mistress now, the Church. He was hers body and soul to the end, for he had sworn an allegiance which could not be broken save at the risk of his own soul.

One morning, about a week after he had read the paragraph in the Times, he was out on the hillside, going from cottage to cottage of the hundred or so sprinkled round the high road across the hills, for it was his day to carry out the parochial duties of the fraternity. Every day one of the Fathers, as the villagers called them, made his rounds, starting soon after sunrise and sometimes not getting back till after dark, for Father Philip had no belief in the efficacy of fasting and meditation and prayer unless they were supplemented by a literal obedience to the commands of Him who went about doing good. When priest or deacon entered the Retreat, no matter what he was, rich or poor, wedded or single, he had to take the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. When he left to go back into the world he was absolved from them, and was free to do what seemed best to his own soul.

Vane had just left a little farmhouse upon which a great shame and sorrow had fallen. As too often happens in this district, the only daughter of the house, discontented with the quiet monotony of the farm life, had gone away to Kidderminster to work in a carpet factory. That was nearly eighteen months ago, and the night before she had come back ragged, hungry, and penniless, with a nameless baby in her arms.

As he was walking along the road which led from this farmhouse to the next hamlet thinking of that vanished sister of his and of the poor imbecile in the French asylum, he turned a bend and saw a figure such as was very seldom seen among the villages approaching him about two hundred yards away. He stopped, almost as though he had received a blow on the chest. It was impossible for his eyes to mistake it, and with a swift sense, half of anger and half of disgust, he felt his heart begin to beat harder and quicker. It was Enid, Enid in the flesh.

He had read of her marriage, and of her return with her husband with hardly an emotion. Day after day he had looked upon her future home, the home in which she would live as the wife of another man and the mother of his children, without a single pang of envy or regret—and now, at the first sight of her, his heart was beating, his pulses throbbing, and his nerves thrilling.

True, every heart-beat, every pulse-throb, was a sin now, for she was a wedded wife—and meanwhile she was still coming towards him. In a few minutes more, since it was impossible for him to pass her as a stranger, her hand would be clasped in his, and he would be once more looking into those eyes which had so often looked up into his, hearing words of greeting from those lips which he had so often kissed, and whose kisses were now vowed to another man.

There was a little lane, turning off to the left a few yards away. She had never seen him in his clerical dress, so she could not have recognised him yet. She would only take him for one of the clergy at the Retreat, he had only to turn down the lane—

But no, his old manhood rose in revolt at the idea. That would be a flight, a mean, unworthy flight, unworthy alike of himself and the high resolves that he had taken. It was hard, almost impossible even to think of her as a temptation, as an enemy to his soul, and yet, even if she were, as the leaping blood in his veins told him she might be, was it for him, the young soldier of the Cross, just buckling on his armour, to turn his back upon the first foe he met, even though that foe had once been his best beloved? He set his teeth and clenched his hands, and walked on past the entrance to the lane.

A minute or two later their eyes met. A look of astonished recognition instantly leapt into hers. She shifted the silver handled walking stick into her left hand, and held out the other, daintily gauntleted in tan.

"Why Vane!" she exclaimed, in a voice which was still as sweet and soft as ever, but which seemed to him to have a strange and somewhat discordant note in it, "you don't mean to say that it's you. I suppose, as a matter of fact, I ought to say Mr. Maxwell now—I mean now that you're a clergyman—but after all, those little things don't matter between such very old friends as we are, and I'm sure Reggie won't mind, in fact, I shan't let him if he does. Just fancy meeting you here! I suppose you're one of the Fathers—is that it?—at the little monastery up there. I've only been home a week, and last night I heard about this place, so I drove over to see it. But you haven't told me how you are yet, and how you like your—your new life."

As a matter of fact, she had rattled all this off so quickly that Vane had not had time to reply to her greeting. He had taken her hand and, somewhat tremblingly, returned the frank, firm pressure. While she was speaking, he looked into her face and saw that she had already assumed the invisible but impenetrable mask in which the society woman plays her part in the tragic comedy of Vanity Fair. It was the same face and yet not the same, the same voice and yet a different one, and the sight and sound acted upon him like a powerful tonic. This was not the Enid he had loved, after all, at least, so it seemed to him. He had forgotten, or had never known that every woman is a born actress, and that even the brief training which Enid had already had was quite enough to enable her to say one thing, while thinking and feeling something entirely different.

He smiled for the first time as their hands parted, and said, in a voice whose calm frankness surprised himself:

"Good morning, Mrs. Garthorne!"—he absolutely couldn't trust himself to pronounce the word "Enid"—"Thanks, I'm very well, and, as you have guessed, I am located for the present up in the Retreat yonder. I confess I was a little startled to see you coming up the road, although I saw from the Times the other day that you had come back from the Continent and were coming down here to the Abbey. Of course, you would hear of the Retreat sooner or later, and as it's a bit of a show place in its humble way, I had an idea that you would come over some time to see it."

"Oh, but I suppose you don't allow anything so unholy as a woman to enter the sacred precincts, do you?"

The artificial flippancy of her tone annoyed him perhaps even more than it shocked him. There was a sort of scoff in it which rightly or wrongly he took to himself. It seemed to say "You, of course, have done with women now and for ever; henceforth, you must only look upon us as temptations to sin, and so I can say what I like to you."

"On the contrary," he replied, forcing a smile, "the Retreat is as open for visiting purposes to women as it is to men. It is nothing at all like a monastery, you know, although report says it is. It is simply a place where clergymen who have need of it can go and rest and think and pray in peace, and act as curates to the Superior who is also vicar of the parish. In fact, it has been known for mothers and sisters of the men to take rooms in the villages, and they are even invited to lunch."

"Dear me," she said, "how very charming! Of course, you will come over to the Abbey and have dinner some evening, and sleep, and the next morning I shall expect you to let me drive you over here and invite me to lunch."

"Of course, I shall be delighted," he said, purposely using the most conventional terms, "but I ought to tell you that there is a condition attached to our hospitality."

"Oh, indeed, and what is that?" she said, glancing up at him with one of her old saucy looks. "I hope it isn't very stringent. Won't you turn and walk a little way with me and tell me all about it? There is my pony carriage coming up the hill after me. It will overtake us soon, and then I won't take up your time any longer, for I daresay you are going on some good work."

Again the half-veiled flippancy of her tone jarred upon him and made him clench his teeth for an instant.

"With the greatest pleasure," he replied, turning and walking with long, slow strides beside her. His blood was quite cool now, and a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

"It is this way," he went on, speaking as calmly as though he were addressing an utter stranger. "You know, or perhaps you do not know yet, that, beautiful and almost arcadian as this place is, there is, I regret to say, a great deal of poverty and sorrow, and, I am afraid, sin too, and it is part of our duty at the Retreat to seek this out and do what we can to relieve it; but there is much of that kind of work which women can do infinitely better than men, and therefore, when a woman enters our gates as our guest, we ask her to do what she can to help us."

"I see," she said, more softly and more naturally than she had spoken before. "It is a very just and a very good condition, and I shall do my best to fulfil it; indeed, as I suppose I shall some day be Lady of the Manor here, it will be my duty to do it."

"I am very glad to hear you say so," he said, with a touch of warmth in his tone, "very glad. And if you like you can begin at once. You see that little farmhouse up the road yonder. Well, there is not only sorrow, but sin and shame as well in that house. The old people are most respectable, and they were once fairly comfortably off before the agricultural depression ruined them. They are wretchedly poor now, but they struggle on somehow. About eighteen months ago their daughter went off to Kidderminster to work in the mills. She said she would get good wages and send some of them home every week. For some months she did send them a few shillings, and then what is unfortunately only too common about here happened. For a long time they lost sight of her, and last night she came back, starving, with a baby and no husband."

He said this in a perfectly passionless and impersonal tone, just as a doctor might describe the symptoms of a disease. "If you care to, you can do a great deal of good there," he went on. "I have just been there. If you like I will take you in and introduce you."

She stopped and hesitated for a moment. It struck her as such an utter reversal of their former relationships, that it seemed almost to obliterate the line which lies between the sublime and the ridiculous. Then she moved forward again, saying, in her own old natural voice:

"Thank you, Vane. I have often wondered since what sort of circumstances we should meet under again, but I never thought of anything like this. Yes, I will come, and if there is anything I can do I will do it."

"I thought you would," he said quietly, as he strode along beside her towards the farmhouse.



CHAPTER XIII.

After introducing Enid to the sorrow-stricken family, Vane took his leave of her to go about his work. He met the pony-cart coming up the hill, and told the footman to wait for his mistress outside the farmhouse. Then he went on to the other hamlet, doing his work just as well and conscientiously as ever, and yet all the while thinking many thoughts which had very little connection with it.

He got back to the Retreat just in time for supper, and when the meal was over he asked Father Philip for the favour of half an hour's conversation. The request was, of course, immediately granted, and as soon as he was alone with the old man, who was wise alike in the things of the world and in those of the spirit, he told him, not as penitent to confessor, but rather as pupil to teacher, the whole story of his meeting and conversation with Enid, not omitting the slightest detail that his memory held, from the first thrill of emotion that he had experienced on seeing her to the last word he had spoken to her on leaving the farmhouse.

Father Philip was silent for some time after he had finished his story, then, leaning back in his deep armchair, he looked at Vane, who was still walking slowly up and down the little room, and said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice:

"I'm very glad, Maxwell, that you've told me this. As I have told you before, I have listened to a good many life-histories in this room, but I must admit that yours is one of the strangest and most difficult of them. The fact of Miss Raleigh having married the son of the lord of the manor here, and having come down while you are here, naturally makes it more difficult still. But then, you know, my dear fellow, the greater the difficulty and the danger of the strife the greater the honour and the reward of victory.

"For my own part I think that your meeting with her in the road down yonder, if not ordered by Providence, may, with all reverence, be called providential. Those emotions which you experienced on first seeing her, and for which you were inclined to reproach yourself, were after all perfectly human, and therefore natural and pardonable. I needn't tell you now that I entirely disagree with those who consider that a man should cease to be a man when he becomes a clergyman. You are young, and you are made of flesh and blood. You were once very much in love with this young lady"—there was a slight, almost imperceptible emphasis upon the "once" which somehow made Vane wince—"you might have married her, but you forewent that happiness in obedience to a conviction which would have done honour to the best of us. You would have been either more or less than human if your heart had not beaten a little harder and your blood had not flowed a little faster when you met her unexpectedly like that in a country road.

"But," he went on, sitting up in his chair and speaking with a little more emphasis, "the very fact that you so quickly discovered such a decided change in her, and that that change, moreover, struck you as being one for the worse, is to my mind a distinct proof that your paths in life have already diverged very widely."

"And yet, Father Philip," said Vane, as the old man paused and looked up at him, "you can hardly say, surely, that it was a good thing for me to discover that change. I can tell you honestly that it was a very sad one for me."

"Possibly," said Father Philip, "and, without intending the slightest disrespect to Mrs. Garthorne, I still say that it was a good thing for you to discover it."

"But why, Father Philip? How can it be a good thing for a man to discover a change for the worse in a woman whom he has grown up with from boy and girl, whom he has loved, and who has been to him the ideal of all that was good and lovable on earth?"

"My dear Maxwell, what you have just said convinces me that you have learnt or are in course of learning one of the most valuable lessons that experience can teach you. Remember that a man can only see with his own eyes, that he can only judge from his own perceptions. I do not agree with you in thinking that the Mrs. Garthorne of the present differs so greatly from the Miss Raleigh of the past. Different in a certain degree, of course, she must be. She was a girl then, living under the protection of her father's roof. She is a wife now, with a home of her own, with new cares, new responsibilities, new prospects. In fact, the whole world has changed for her, and therefore it would be very strange if she had not changed too. But that was not the change you saw. I would rather believe that that was in yourself, that you are a different man, not that she is a different woman."

"I think I see what you mean," said Vane, seating himself on the edge of an old oak table in the middle of the room. "You mean that while she has remained the same or nearly so my point of view has altered. I see her in a different perspective, and through a different atmosphere."

"Exactly," replied Father Philip. "It is both more reasonable and more charitable to believe that you have changed for the better, and not she for the worse."

"God grant that it may be so," said Vane, slipping off the table and beginning his walk again. "If it is so, then at least my work has not been without some result, and some of my prayers have been granted. But now, Father Philip, I want your advice. What shall I do? Shall I stay here and meet her just as an old friend? Shall I accept her invitation over to the Abbey? Shall I bring her here and introduce her to you, so that you may tell her what she can do for our people? Shall I trust myself to this sort of intercourse with her, or, as my time here is nearly up, shall I go away?"

"As for trusting yourself, Maxwell," said Father Philip slowly, "that is a question I cannot answer. You must ask that of your own soul, and I will pray and you must pray that it shall answer you with an honest 'Yes.' I don't believe that the answer will be anything else. But if it is, then by all means go, go to the first work that your hand finds to do. Go and join your friend Ernshaw in his mission under Southey. But if it is 'Yes,' as I hope and believe it will be, then stop until it is time for you to take your priest's orders. Visit the Abbey, bring Mrs. Garthorne here, interest her in the good work that you have already, I hope, made her begin by taking her to the Clellens. Prove to her and her husband, and, most important of all, to yourself, that you did not take that resolve of yours lightly or in vain, that, in short, you are one of those who can, as Tennyson says, 'rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things.'

"That, Maxwell, is the best advice I can give you. When you go to your room you will, of course, ask for guidance from the Source which cannot err, and I will add my prayers to yours that it may be given you."

The next day a mounted footman brought a note from Garthorne to Vane saying that his wife had told him of her meeting with him, and also expressing his pleasure at finding that he was in the neighbourhood, and asking him to come over to dine and sleep at the Abbey the next evening. If that evening would suit him he had only to tell the messenger, and a dog-cart would be sent for him, as the distance by road over the Bewdley Bridge was considerably over seven miles.

He had been awake nearly all night. In fact, he had spent the greater part of it on his knees questioning his own soul and seeking that advice which Father Philip had advised him to seek, and when the early morning service in the little chapel was over he honestly believed that he had found it. He went back into his room, after telling the man to put his horse in the stable, and go to what was stilled called the buttery and get a glass of beer, and wrote a note thanking Garthorne for his invitation, and accepting it for the following night.

If Vane had been told a couple of years before that he would visit Enid and her husband as an ordinary guest, that he would sit opposite to her at table and hear her address another man as "dear" in the commonplace of marital conversation, that he would see her exchange with another man those little half-endearments which are not the least of the charms of the first few married years, and that he would be able to look upon all this at least with grave eyes and unmoved features, he would simply have laughed at the idea as something too ridiculous ever to come within the bounds of possibility.

Yet, to the outward view, that was exactly what happened during his stay at Garthorne Abbey. He seemed to see Enid through some impalpable and yet impenetrable medium. He could see her as he always had seen her; but to touch her, to put his hand upon her, even to dream of one of those caresses which such a short time ago had been as common as hand-shakes between them, was every whit as impossible as the present condition of things would have seemed to him then.

There were a few other people to dinner. None of them knew anything of his previous relationship to Enid, and their presence naturally, and perhaps fortunately, kept the conversation away from the things of the past; but the Fates had put him in full view of Enid at the table, and, do what he would, he could not keep his eyes from straying back again and again to that perfect and once well-beloved face, any more than he could keep his ears from listening to that voice which had once been the sweetest of music for him, rather than to the general conversation in which it was his social duty to take a part.

It was a sore trial to the fortitude and self-control of a man who had loved as long and as dearly as he had done, but the strength which his long vigils away among the hills had given him did not desert him, and he came through it outwardly calm and triumphant, however deeply the iron was entering into his soul the while. It was one of those occasions on which such a man as he would take refuge from spiritual torment in intellectual activity, and neither Enid nor her husband had ever heard him talk so brilliantly and withal so lightly and good-humouredly as he did that night.

One of the guests was the vicar of Bedminster; and a Canon of Worcester, an old friend of Sir Reginald's, happened to be staying in the house. They were both High Churchmen, the Canon perhaps a trifle "higher" than the Vicar, and they were both delighted with him. The Canon remembered his ordination at Worcester, and during the conversation, which had now turned upon the relationship between the Church and the People, he said:

"Well, Maxwell, I will say frankly if you can preach as well as you can talk, and if your doctrine is as sound as your opinion on things in general seems to be, the Church will be none the poorer when you are priested. I think I shall ask the Bishop to let you preach the Sunday after you take full orders. I suppose your Father Superior up there would let you come, wouldn't he?

"A grand man, that Father Philip, by the way," he went on, looking round the table. "In his quiet, unostentatious way, in his little room up there in the old house of Our Lady of Rest, as they used to call it, he has done more real work for the Church than, I am afraid, a good many of us have done with all our preaching in churches and cathedrals."

"That," said Enid, "would be altogether delightful. Of course, we should all come and hear your Reverence," she went on, with a half ironical nod towards Vane. "You know, Canon, Mr. Maxwell and I are quite old friends. In fact, we came home from India as children in the same ship, didn't we, Reggie?" she added, with another laughing nod, this time at her husband, "and I am sure your Reverence would have no more interested listener than I should be."

"It is quite possible, Mrs. Garthorne," Vane replied in something like the same tone, "that you might be more interested than pleased."

"Indeed," said Enid, "and may I ask why?"

There was an immediate silence round the table, everybody wondering what his answer would be.

"Because," he replied, with a change of tone so swift as to be almost startling, "as soon as I take full Orders, it is my purpose, with God's help and under Father Philip's advice, to become a missionary, not a missionary to the heathen, as we are pleased to call them, or to the infinitely more degraded heathen of our own country, but to such people as you, you who are really living in sin without knowing it. Has it ever struck you, Canon, how great a work the Church has left undone in what are called the upper ranks of Society? You know the vast majority of them really and honestly believe themselves to be good Christians, and yet, as far as practical obedience to the teaching of Christ goes, they are no more Christians than an unconverted Hottentot is."

"Oh—er—ah—yes," replied the Canon rather awkwardly, and in the midst of a long silence. "Of course, I quite understand you and—er—by the way, do you intend to apply for any preferment?"

"I shall get a curacy with Ernshaw if I can in the East End to begin with, or, perhaps, with Father Baldwin in Kensington," said Vane, unable, like Enid and her husband and one or two others, to repress a faint smile at the Canon's not very skilful change of subject. "But I shall not attempt to get a living or anything of that sort. You see, I have some private means, and so I shall be in the happy position of being able to do my work without pay. Besides, while there is such an amount of poverty in the lower ranks of the Church, I think it is little less than sinful for a man who can live without it to take a stipend which, at least, might be bread and butter to a man who has nothing."

There was a rather awkward pause after this speech, as everyone at the table save Vane knew perfectly well that both the Vicar and the Canon had considerable private means in addition to the substantial stipends they drew from their clerical offices. At length Enid looked across at her husband with a wicked twinkle in her eye, and put an end to the situation by rising. As soon as the ladies were gone, Garthorne sent the wine round and adroitly turned the conversation back again to general subjects. When they went into the drawing-room, a discussion on the prospects of the season was in full swing, and from motives of prudence, this, varied with a little music and singing, was kept up till the ladies retired for the night.

When Enid shook hands with Vane they happened to be out of earshot of the others, and as she returned his clasp with the same old frank pressure, she said in a low tone:

"You were splendid to-night, Vane, and you will be more splendid still in the pulpit, only they'll never let you preach in the Cathedral after that. Well, good-night. After all, I was wrong and you were right. You have chosen the better part. God bless you and be with you, Vane. Good-night!"

As their eyes met he fancied that he saw a faint mist in hers. Then her long lashes fell; she turned her head away and the next moment she was gone.

When the good-nights had been said, Garthorne took his male guests into the smoking-room for whisky and soda and cigars. Vane laughingly declined, and asked permission to light a pipe.

"No, thanks," he said, with perfect good temper, although the offer was not in the best of taste. "I've not forgotten the last brandy and soda I had with you at Oxford."

When bed-time came, Garthorne took Vane up to his room. As his host said "good-night," Vane followed him to the door and watched him as he went along the panelled corridor and down the great staircase to next floor, on which the Bride-chamber of the Abbey was situated. Then he went in and locked his door.

He sat down in an easy chair in the corner of the room and covered his face with his hands. After all, had he done the right thing in accepting Garthorne's invitation? Had he not over-estimated his strength? As he sat there, he felt that he had thrown himself unnecessarily into a life and death conflict. He encountered temptations every day of his life, although to the ordinary individual it might seem that the life which he and his companions led must be singularly devoid of temptation, yet here he was confronted with a trial which he could have avoided. Ought he to have avoided it?

Then there came to his mind the remembrance of a passage in one of the sermons which Father Philip had once preached to the little community in the Retreat. The words seemed particularly appropriate to Vane at the time, and he made a note of them in a little memorandum book which he always carried with him for the purpose of writing down any sentences which he heard or read which might strengthen him in the life which he had chosen for himself. He took the book from his pocket and read:

"The ideal life is never one of rigid asceticism any more than it is one of voluptuous self-indulgence; it is an equilibrium of forces, a vital harmony, a constant symphony, in the performance of which all capabilities in all phases of expression are called into vital but never into hysterical activity. The true peace is so heroic that it only follows crucifixion of all that was once regarded as essential to human happiness."

He sat for a moment after he had read and re-read this passage. Then he went to the mirror over the mantel-piece, and drew back shocked and terrified at the sudden change which had come over his features. They reminded him strongly of the features he had seen in the glass that other night in Warwick Gardens. Then he turned away and threw himself on his knees by the bed and groaned aloud in the bitterness of his soul:

"Oh, God! it is too heavy for me! Not by my strength but by Thine alone can I bear it."

It was the only prayer he uttered. In fact, they were the only words he could speak; but when he rose from the bedside he felt relieved, so far relieved that he took from his pocket a well-worn copy of Thomas a Kempis's "Imitation," and sat and read until almost daybreak.



CHAPTER XIV.

It was the morning of Trinity Sunday, and Worcester Cathedral was crowded by a congregation which, if it had been an audience in an unconsecrated building, could have been justly described as brilliant.

Trinity Sunday is usually what may, without irreverence, be called more or less of a show Sunday in all churches. To-day all the clerical light and learning of the diocese was gathered together in the grand old Cathedral. The various portions of the service were to be conducted by clergy of high rank and notable social position. No one under the rank of a Canon, at least, would take any part in the proceedings.

The first lesson would be read by the Vicar of Bedminster, who was also a Canon of the Cathedral, and the second by Canon Thornton-Moore, whose acquaintance the reader has already made at Garthorne Abbey. Both of them were men of dignified presence, and both possessed good voices and a careful elocutionary training.

The Epistle and Gospel would be read by the Archdeacon and the Dean. Organ and choir were tuned to a perfection of harmony. And finally the Bishop would preach. After that would come the administration of the Sacrament to those who had not received it at the early service, for Trinity Sunday is accredited one of those three days on which, at least, the faithful member of the Anglican Church shall communicate. Then, the communion over, the Bishop would hold an Ordination, in consideration of which he had thoughtfully and thankfully curtailed his eloquence in the pulpit.

At this ordination Mark Ernshaw, who had already won fame both as an earnest and utterly self-sacrificing missionary, in the moral and spiritual wilds of East and South London, and also as a preacher who could fill any West End Church to suffocation, was to be admitted to full orders in company with his friend, Vane Maxwell, who was so far unknown to fame save for the fact that he was locally known as one of the dwellers in the Retreat among the hills, and, therefore, as one who had sat at the feet of the far-famed Father Philip, who himself had to-day made one of his rare appearances in the world, and was occupying one of the Canons' stalls in the chancel.

All the Clergy at the Retreat were popularly supposed to have "a past" of some sort, and as Vane had come from there and was also credited with being young and exceedingly good-looking—some of the lady visitors to the Retreat had described him as possessing "an almost saintlike beauty, my dear"—he also was a focus of interest. Moreover, he was known to have taken a brilliant degree at Oxford, and to have had equally brilliant worldly prospects which he had suddenly and unaccountably relinquished to go into the Church.

Thus it came to pass that a very different and much more numerous congregation witnessed this ceremonial than the one which had taken place at the same altar rails a little more than a twelvemonth before.

Of course, all the party from the Abbey were present, including Sir Reginald, who had come down for a few days from town. Enid and her husband had communicated. It was their first communion since their marriage. Then they had gone back to their places to await the ordination.

In one of the front rows of the transept seats there was a tall, well-dressed girl, very pretty, with dark, deep, serious eyes which, in the intervals of the service she had several times raised and turned on Enid and her husband, who were sitting on the same side towards the front, in the body of the Cathedral. She was the very last person in the world, saving only, perhaps, Carol herself, whom Garthorne would have wished to see just then and there, and as soon as he had made sure that Dora Murray really was sitting within a few yards of him he began to be haunted by ugly fears of blackmail and exposure—which showed how very little he had learnt of Dora's character during the time that Carol had shared the flat with her.

But Dora's thoughts were very different, for they were all of fear, mingled with something like horror. She looked at the sweet-faced girl sitting beside Reginald Garthorne, and thought of the ruin and desolation that would fall upon her young life, with all its brilliant outward promise, if she only knew what she could have told her. She looked at her husband and wondered what all these good people—most of whom would have given almost anything for an invitation to his home—what these grave-faced, decorous clergy, too, would think if they could see him as she had seen him only a few months before. There was Sir Arthur Maxwell, too, sitting a little farther on, and beside him Sir Godfrey and Lady Raleigh, though, of course, she did not know them, but she guessed who they were, and close to Sir Arthur sat Sir Reginald, his host for the time being.

The whole of the Abbey party had communicated together. What would happen if she were to go to Sir Arthur after the service, and tell him what Carol had told her, if he were to learn that he had been kneeling at the altar rails beside the betrayer of his wife and the dishonourer of his name?

When she had seen Sir Reginald rise from his seat and go with the rest of the party across the centre transept to the chancel, she needed all her self-control to shut her teeth and clench her hands and prevent herself from leaving her seat and accusing him of his infamy before clergy and congregation. She thought thankfully how good a thing it was that Carol, with her fierce impetuosity and sense of bitter wrong, was not there too. There was no telling what disaster might have happened, how many lives might have been wrecked by the words which she might have flung out at him, red-hot from her angry heart.

In her way Dora was a really religious girl, as many of her class are. So religious, indeed, that she would not have dared to have approached the altar herself; because she knew that for her, wedded as she was to the pleasant careless life she led, repentance and reform were quite out of the question.

She saw no incongruity at all in this. She went to church regularly in London, offered up as simple and as earnest prayers as anyone; lifted up her beautiful voice in the hymns and psalms and responses in honest forgetfulness of the things of yesterday and to-morrow, and, for the time being at least, took the lessons of the sermon to heart with a simple faith which many of her respectable sisters in the congregation were far from feeling.

In short, though the circumstances were different, she was very much in the position of the average respectable, well-to-do church-going Christian who will strive all the week, often by quite questionable methods, to lay up for himself and his wife and family treasures upon earth, and then on Sunday go to church and listen with the most perfect honesty and the most undisturbed equanimity to the reading of the Sermon on the Mount.

But when she saw Sir Reginald go with his son and his daughter-in-law, with her parents and Vane's father up through the chancel where Vane was sitting, her heart turned sick in her breast. The sacrilege, the blasphemy of it all seemed horrible beyond belief. Again and again the words rose to her lips. Again and again an almost irresistible impulse impelled her to get up, and she was only saved from doing what all that was best in her nature urged her to do, by the knowledge that, after all, she might only be expelled from the Cathedral by the Vergers, and perhaps prosecuted afterwards for brawling. Then her real story would come out.

She was visiting her parents who lived in Worcester, and who believed that she was conducting a little millinery business in London. She had great natural skill in designing head-gear—her own hat, for instance, had been gazed on by many an envious eye since the service began—and she would have bitten her tongue through, rather than say a word which would have undeceived them. And so for this reason as well she held her peace.

Then she had heard the sonorous voice of the officiating priest rolling down the chancel:

"Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking from henceforth in His holy way, draw near with faith and take this Holy Sacrament to your comfort."

Then came the general confession, and as she followed it in her prayer-book she thought of that unconfessed, though, perhaps, not unrepented sin of which she alone, save Sir Reginald, in all that great congregation knew. How could this man kneel there and say these solemn words, before he had confessed his sin to the man he had wronged, to the husband from whom he had stolen a wife, to the son he had deprived of a mother? What horrible mockery and blasphemy it all was! Surely some day some terrible retribution must fall on him for this.

After the Eucharist followed, as usual on such occasions, the Ordination Service. She had never seen Vane before, but when some of the congregation had left after the Communion Service, she left her seat and took a vacant one in front of the chancel, and then, even at some distance, she recognised him immediately by his likeness to Carol. It seemed to her that she had never seen anything so beautiful in human shape when he rose in his surplice and stole and hood to take his place before the Bishop at the altar-rail. And yet how different must her thoughts have been from Enid's, as they both looked upon the kneeling figure and listened to the words which were the actual fulfilment of the vow that he had taken to take up his cross and follow Him who said: "Whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple."

Then, in due course, came the fateful words, more full of fate, so far as they concerned Vane, than any who knew him in the congregation had any idea of.

"Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the Imposition of our hands from God. Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain they are retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the word of God and of his Holy Sacraments; in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen!"

"Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained!"

Saving only Vane himself, these words had a deeper meaning for Dora, the Magdalen, the sinner, and the outcast, than they had for anyone else in the congregation, and in one sense they meant even more to her than they could do to him. When he rose from his knees before the altar rails, he would rise invested, as she believed, by the authority of God through the Church, with a power infinitely greater than that of any earthly judge. It was his to forgive or retain, his to pardon or to damn. That, to her simple reasoning, was the absolute meaning of the words as the Bishop had spoken them.

Some day it might happen that Carol would be confronted with the man whom she believed to be her father. What if she were to bring Vane face to face with him and he knew him for what he was, what would he do, not as man, but as priest—forgive or retain, absolve or damn?

When the ordination service was over and the congregation was moving out of the Cathedral, Sir Arthur caught sight of Dora for the first time. They were only a few feet apart, and recognition was inevitable. She looked at him as though she had never seen him before, although she had been present at more than one interview between him and Carol at Melville Gardens, but Sir Arthur at once edged his way towards her, shook hands in that decorous fashion which is usual among departing congregations, and said, in an equally decorous whisper:

"Good morning, Miss Murray! I hope you have not come here by accident, and that you will be able to give me some news of Carol. We have looked for you everywhere."

"Except perhaps in the right place," she murmured, putting her hand into his, "and if you had found us I don't think it would have been of any use. Carol's mind was quite made up. My address is 15, Stonebridge Street, if you wish to write to me. Good morning."

And then they parted, he to go his way and she to go hers, and each with an infinite pity for the other, and yet with what different reasons? It was only a chance meeting, the accidental crossing of two widely diverging life-paths; only one of those instances in which romance delights to mock the commonplace, and yet how much it meant—and how much might it mean when the future had become the present.

Fortunately, Garthorne and Enid had been pressing on in front, and so he had not noticed the meeting between Sir Arthur and Dora, whereby the second possible catastrophe of the day was averted.

Sir Arthur was one of the house-party at the Abbey, for he and Sir Reginald had been to a certain extent colleagues in India, and had kept up their acquaintance, and now that Sir Reginald's son had married the girl whom Sir Arthur had always looked upon as a prospective daughter-in-law, the intimacy had become somewhat closer. Sir Arthur had said frankly at the first that he thought Vane had done an exceedingly foolish thing; but since he had done it and meant to stick to it, there was an end of the matter, and if Vane couldn't or wouldn't marry Enid, he would, after all, rather see her the wife of his old friend's son than anybody else's. He had, therefore, willingly accepted Sir Reginald's invitation to spend a few days at the Abbey and witness his son's admission to the full orders of the priesthood.

Vane and Ernshaw, after exchanging greetings and receiving congratulations, declined Sir Reginald's invitation to dine and sleep at the Abbey, and went straight back to the Retreat with Father Philip.

It happened that, somewhat late that night after their guests had gone to bed, Reginald Garthorne had a couple of rather important letters to write, and sat up to get them finished. When he had sealed and stamped them, he took them to the post-box in the hall. The postman's lock-up bag was standing on the hall table, and, as he knew there wouldn't be any more letters that night, he thought he might as well put what there were there into the bag and lock it with his own key. He took them out in a handful, but before he could put them into the bag they slipped and scattered on to the table. He bent down to gather them up, and there, right under his eyes, was an envelope addressed in Sir Arthur Maxwell's handwriting to Miss Dora Murray, 15 Stonebridge Street, Worcester. He would have given a thousand pounds to know what that thin paper cover concealed. The thought half entered his mind to take it away and steam it, read the letter, and then put it back again; but he was not without his own notions of honour, and he dismissed the thought before it was fully formed. He contented himself with taking out his pencil and copying the address, and as he put the letters into the bag and locked it he said to himself: