Well, how was he to get through that fortnight? He decided that he would not get through it at all. He kept himself awake devising schemes for his liberation; he would find some business to take him up to town to-morrow; or, if he could not find it, he would invent it; he would send himself a telegram. And then, against his will, his mind began running on Miss Tancred. As he had been possessed by the ideal, so now he was haunted by the reality; it had a horrible fascination for him. He wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been young; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever made a joke; he wondered if Miss Tancred had ever been in love. This third idea was so incongruous, so impossible, that at last he found himself dallying with it for the mere extravagant humor of the thing.

If he had only been able to make himself agreeable to Miss Tancred—for Miss Tancred, if she had the will, had certainly the power to help him. The unhappy young man had made a careful inspection of the stables to see if there was a lingering chance for him there. The sleek bays that brought him from the station—impossible; the Colonel's cob, a creature too safe to be exciting; and—yes, there was Miss Tancred's mare. The sight of the fiery little beast dancing in her stall had affected him with an uncontrollable desire to ride her. The groom, not without sympathy, had interpreted his longing glances.

"There's a-many casts sheep's eyes at that there mare, sir; but it 'ud be as much as my place is worth, sir, to let you or any other gentleman get atop of her. Nobody lays a 'and on that annymal but Miss Tancred. Miss Tancred's orders, sir."

He might have known it. Miss Tancred was good for nothing, not even for the loan of a mount.

Miss Tancred seemed aware that nothing was expected from her, and kept conscientiously out of his way. He saw nothing of her from breakfast till dinnertime and the evening, when she appeared as his official partner in the game of whist. What became of her in the meanwhile he did not know; he could only vaguely conjecture. She seemed to vanish, to lose herself in the vast workings of Coton Manor, or in that vaster entity, the Colonel.

By the fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's attitude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented to be bored to death with a certain melancholy grace.

He had made a dash for freedom; he had actually started first thing in the morning with his sketching block and easel, and was congratulating himself on his benignant chance, when, as he sneaked round a corner of the house, the Colonel stepped out upon him from a side window. There was one hope for him. Rain had fallen over night, and the little gentleman was as yet in his slippers; he was feeling the damp gravel like a fastidious cat.

"Ah-ha!" said he, in the tone of joyful encounter. "And what do you propose to do with yourself this morning?"

Durant looked at his host with a sad reproachful gaze from which all bitterness had departed. He had felt inclined to reply that he proposed to commit suicide; as it was, he only said he thought of trying to sketch something.

The Colonel seemed a little offended at the proposal; it certainly implied that Durant had more confidence in his own resources than in those of the house.

"So that's your fad, is it? I think we can do better for you than that."

And as Durant had calculated he skipped back into the house, and before he could return with his boots on, Durant, by another miracle of chance or his own cunning, had contrived his escape.

He made his way up a slight slope, whence he could see far over the landscape. What he had as yet seen was not inspiring, the heavy full-blown charm of the Midlands in July, lonely, without any of the poetry of loneliness. As he looked about him he realized again that he was in the heart of the country, the great, slow, passionless heart whose pulses are interminable hours. If you love Nature as Durant loved her, for her sex with its divine caprices, its madness and its mystery, you will be disappointed with Wickshire. In Wickshire Mother Nature is no dubious Aphrodite; she is indissolubly married to man, and behaves like an ordinary British matron, comely and correct. Durant saw in the immediate foreground a paddock dotted with young firs, each in a ring fence, beyond the paddock a field of buttercups shining with a polished gleam, beyond the buttercups a horizon of trees. Before him to the southeast, soaring above the roofs of Whithorn-in-Arden, a church spire pointed the way to heaven; beyond that, traveling low above the railway cutting, a thin line of smoke indicated the way into the world. Behind him were more trees; the green crescent of the woods with the white front of Coton Manor shining in their arms like a heavy, foolish face. He had no patience with the landscape, with this Nature trimmed and tamed, these shaven meadows and clean-cut hedges and little rectangular plantations. It was a typical English landscape, a landscape most unnecessarily draped, where the bosom of the hills was always covered, and the very elms were muffled to their feet. A landscape destitute of passion and sensual charm, a landscape like Miss Tancred.

Miss Tancred. He no longer felt any wild resentment against that poor girl; he had learned to judge her leniently. If you live with bores you inevitably become a bore; at the same time, he admitted that she was doing her best not to bore him. Meanwhile he transferred his hatred to her surroundings.

This young man had no philosophy beyond the general impression that the universe was under infinite obligations to be good to him, a belief that had found itself rather rudely shaken. He chose his view and pitched his easel and relieved himself by one deep, metaphysical, soul-satisfying curse at the devilry of things. Then he set to work, and with the instinct of a born painter he tried to find possibilities in the despised landscape. Before long he had discovered mystery in the woods that lifted their heavy rounded contours to the sky, gathered and massed and piled on one another like clouds; deep mystery in their green, green drenched with liquid and aerial gray, pierced by thick black veins and hollowed into caverns of darkness and blue dusk. And, though he knew that he was tying himself to the place by taking it seriously, in an hour's time he was absorbed and happy.

He was startled by a voice behind him. "Do you think that it's so very beautiful?"

He turned round. Miss Tancred stood looking over his shoulders, not at him nor at his sketch, but at the distant prospect.

"It's—nice and open," he answered absently.

"Open? Wait till you've lived in it. To me it's like living with all the doors shut."

"Too many woods, perhaps. And yet there's always a charm about a wooded country; it's English."

"Yes, and, like everything English, it's much too serious, too conventional, too"—she paused for her epithet—"too disgustingly rich."

He was more startled than ever; she had put his own feeling about it into words.

"And then it's so painfully proper and respectable. Look at those ridiculous trees in their petticoats. English to a degree."

"Ah!—if you've been abroad——"

"I haven't been abroad."

"Proud insular boast!"

"I wasn't boasting. I was stating a fact."

"Well, you've some cause to boast. Not to have been abroad is distinction nowadays."

"If it comes to that I've never been out of this county, except to London now and then. You wouldn't think it."

He smiled, for it happened to be precisely what he had thought. It explained her somehow; he recognized in Miss Tancred the incurable provincial. To be sure, her sentiments were somewhat at variance with her character, an inconsistency not unusual in woman. All he said was, "It is a little extraordinary." He was wondering when she was going to go. She did not go.

"I'm glad you've discovered something to do here. It must be so deadly dull."

He found relief in ambiguity. "I am never dull"; adding irrelevantly, "it's a glorious view."

She brightened visibly. "If you like I can show you a better one than this. It's not so very far;"—she hesitated—"we might go to-morrow, perhaps; though it wouldn't be very amusing, I'm afraid."

Again he felt a touch of compunction. She had so clearly grasped the situation; she was so evidently sorry for him, so conscientious, even if mistaken, in her efforts to make amends, that he found her positively pathetic. He answered humbly that he would be delighted if she would be so good.

Then, conscientiously again, she left him. He watched her tall figure departing with energetic strides, and he decided that Miss Tancred was not so bad out of doors, but that she needed a large background.

The next morning he had the grace to remind her of her promise. They started at a rapid pace. Durant left the paraphernalia of his art behind him by way of intimating delicately that the hour was hers. Miss Tancred was evidently prepared for vigorous walking. She was dressed suitably and inoffensively in brown holland. She took him up a long, gradually rising hill to where a group of firs stood on an isolated mound.

Here Miss Tancred paused, with tilted profile, sniffing the ambient air. "This," she said, "is the highest point in the county; there is always a fresh breeze here; to-day you can smell the sea."

"Impossible; we must be right in the very center of England, about a hundred miles from the nearest coast."

"You can hear it, then. Shut your eyes and listen."

He obeyed. The wind moved and the firs gave out their voice. He opened his eyes and glanced at Miss Tancred. She was leaning up against a fir; her eyes looked straight past him into the distance; the wind had loosened the hair about her forehead; her lips were parted, her eyes shone; there was an eagerness in her face he had not yet seen there. It was as if a dead woman had been suddenly made alive before him. She was gazing and listening.

"If you've never been out of Wickshire, where have you heard the sea?"

She answered curtly, "I don't know where I've heard it"; then added, as if by way of apology for her manner, "Do you like it?"

"Immensely."

"Then you must come up whenever you want to. You can always be alone here."

She spoke as if she were giving him the freedom of her private sanctuary.

"Have you any sketches of those places you've been to abroad?"

"Sketches? Any amount."

"Have you brought them with you?"

He blushed. He had brought many sketches in the hope of showing them to a wealthy godfather and an admiring god-sister.

"Some—a few."

"I wish you'd show them to me."

"I shall be delighted." He blushed again, this time for pleasure. With the desire to bestow a little of it, he asked rashly, "Do you sketch, Miss Tancred? I saw some water-colors——"

"They were my mother's. I do nothing."

"Oh, I see." (They were going home now.) "I was wondering what on earth you found to do here."

"I? A great many things. Business chiefly. My father is secretary to the Primrose League. I write all his letters for him."

"That's one way of being secretary to the Primrose League."

"The usual way, I think. Secretaries generally have under-secretaries, haven't they? My father dictates."

Durant smiled. He could see him doing it. "What else does Colonel Tancred do?"

"He does no end of things. All the business of the estate; and he speaks, at meetings, everywhere. He has lectured——"

It was pathetic, her eagerness to vindicate his intellect, to record his achievements, to convince Durant that she was proud of him, not to let him see.

For the rest of the way she was silent, the light died out of her eyes with every turning, and by the time they had reached Coton Manor Miss Tancred was herself again.

At whist that evening nobody was pleased. The Colonel looked sulky and offended, possibly at Durant's disaffection; Durant was moodier than ever, and even Mrs. Fazakerly seemed depressed. Miss Tancred remained imperturbable and indifferent, she won every trick without turning a hair, but when it was all over she left the table abruptly. She was visibly distressed. Mrs. Fazakerly gazed after her with an affectionate stare. She turned to Durant.

"For goodness' sake," she whispered, "say something nice to her."

For the life of him Durant could think of nothing nice to say, beyond congratulating her on her success in the accursed game.

Mrs. Fazakerly chimed in, "With or without a partner Miss Tancred wins!"

"I always win. So, I imagine, does Mr. Durant."

"And why should I always win?"

"You? You win because you care nothing about the game."

V

If you had told Durant that the end of his first week would find him sitting under the firs in lonely conversation with Miss Tancred, he would have smiled at you incredulously. Yet so it was. Her fear of him, if fear it had been, and not indifference, was wearing away. She seemed anxious to make friends with him if possible in a less painfully conscientious manner, and he, on his side, was beginning to tolerate her. In fact, he went so far as to own that, if it had not been for that ridiculous idea of his, he would have tolerated her from the first. It was not her fault if he had been fool enough to fall in love with her before sight or at half-sight. She had disappointed him (hence his natural disgust); but the thing had happened many times before in his experience. After all, he had had no grounds for his passionate belief in Miss Tancred beyond the argument from defect, the vague feeling that Destiny owed him amends for her intolerable shortcomings. But Durant's mind was too sane and versatile to be long concerned with passion yet unborn. He was not one of those pitiable sentimentalists who imagine that every petticoat, or at any rate every well-cut skirt, conceals a probable ideal. Some women of his acquaintance had defined, not to say denounced, him as a consummate and dangerous flirt, but these were not the most discerning of their sex. Durant described himself more correctly as a sympathetic, though dispassionate, observer of womankind. In other words, he was not a vulgar flirt; he flirted with understanding.

An understanding without flirtation was springing up between him and Miss Tancred. In this God-forsaken place they were comrades in boredom and isolation. She had said nothing, but in some impalpable yet intimate way he knew that she, too, was bored, that the Colonel bored her. The knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their secret and the source of their mutual pity. Meanwhile she no longer avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for his society. She would come while he was sketching and sit beside him for five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, remaining silent, or merely exchanging a few frank words with him before she went her way. In these matters she was gifted with an unerring tact; without a hint on Durant's part she seemed to know to a nicety how far her presence was agreeable or otherwise.

This time he had gone up the hill after dinner, and had found her sitting in the accustomed place. They had been alone that evening, for the Colonel was dining intimately with Mrs. Fazakerly. That lady, with a refined friendliness that did her credit, had refrained from including Miss Tancred and Durant in the invitation, thereby insuring them one evening's immunity from whist. Durant could make no better use of his freedom than by spending it alone out of doors; it seemed that Miss Tancred had done the same with hers.

She was sitting there on the edge of the mound, clasping her knees and gazing into the distance. He apologized for his intrusion, and she waked from her abstraction with a dreamy air, making a visible effort to take him in and realize him. But, though she said simply that she was glad he had come, the effect of his coming was to plunge her into deeper abstraction. They sat for some time without speaking. Miss Tancred had a prodigious faculty for silence, and Durant let her have her way, being indeed indifferent to Miss Tancred's way.

At last she spoke.

"It's odd how some people take Nature," said she; "for instance, Mrs. Fazakerly says she loves it because it's so soothing. She might just as well say she liked listening to an orchestra because it sends her to sleep. She can't love it for its own sake."

"You'll think me horribly rude, but I doubt if any woman can. That is the one thing a woman is incapable of—a pure passion for Nature, a really disinterested love of life. It's an essentially masculine sentiment."

"I don't at all agree with you."

"Don't you? To begin with, it argues more vitality than most women have got. They take to it as a substitute for other things; and to be content with it would mean that they had exhausted, outlived the other things."

"What other things?"

She was studying every line of his young, repugnant face, and Durant was a little embarrassed by her steady gaze.

"Other interests, other feelings—whatever it is that women do care for most."

"I don't know anything about women."

Her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted Durant's attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the discussion. He talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he from her. She never reminded him that she was a woman. It would have been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was Miss Tancred was not absurd.

She went on calmly, "So I can't say what they care for most; can you?"

"You know my opinion. I wanted yours."

"Mine isn't worth much. But I should say that in these things no two women were alike. You talk as if they were all made of the same stuff."

"So they are inside—in their souls, I mean."

"There's more unlikeness in their souls, I imagine, than there ever is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the same as a pretty one, would you?"

"Yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. I admit that there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."

"And if the woman, why not her soul?"

"Because—because—because there is a certain psychical quality that is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the cosmic difference we call sex. In man or woman that is the one unalterable fact—the last reality."

He spoke coldly, brutally almost, as if he, like herself, was blind to the pathos of her ignored and rejected womanhood.

She seemed to be thinking that last point over.

"Yes," she said, "I'm glad you came. I believe you can help me."

"I shall be delighted if I can."

"What do you think of Mrs. Fazakerly?"

Durant was a little taken aback by the suddenness of the question.

"What should I think?"

"I—I hardly know."

She knitted her black brows till they almost touched, and propped her chin with her hand, as if she were oppressed with the weight of her own thoughts. It struck him that her provincial mind entertained an unreasonable suspicion of the consummate little widow, a woman's jealousy of the superior creature compact of sex; and a sense of justice made him inclined to defend Mrs. Fazakerly. Besides, he liked Mrs. Fazakerly; she, at any rate, was not a bore.

"She's a very amusing woman, and I should say she was an uncommonly good sort, too."

To his surprise her face brightened. "Should you? Should you say that she had a good heart?"

"Really, Miss Tancred, I can't see into Mrs. Fazakerly's heart, but I wouldn't mind betting——"

"That she's good? And affectionate? And straight?"

"Straight as a die."

"And honest?"

"Oh, Lord, yes." He wondered whatever primitive meaning she attached to the word.

"Well, if you think that——"

"Mind you, my opinion may be utterly worthless."

"No, no. It's just the very sort of opinion I want."

"Why should it be?"

"Because it's the opinion of a man of the world. Mrs. Fazakerly's a woman of the world, so I thought you'd understand her. I don't."

"I've known her exactly a week, and you?"

"Two years. But then I don't observe character, and you do. And yet I have an intuition."

"Then by all means trust your intuition."

"That's it—I daren't. The truth is, I'm afraid of myself—my motives."

"Your motives are not yourself."

"Aren't they? If it wasn't for them I should be certain. I see she's a dear little woman, and I know that I like her."

"Then, for Heaven's sake, go on liking her; it's the best thing you can do."

"Isn't it rather horrid to like a person just because they may be of use to you?"

"Not in the least. You were pleased to say I might be of use to you, and I'm sure I hope you like me."

"Yes, I like you; but I think I like you for yourself. I'm afraid of liking Mrs. Fazakerly from the wrong motive."

"You can't like her from the wrong motive. You can't have a motive at all, if it comes to that. You might have a motive for killing her, or for cultivating her acquaintance, but not for liking her. You either like a person or not, and there's an end of it."

"If your motives are not yourself, what are they?"

"Lord only knows. Forces, tendencies, that determine your actions, which are the very smallest part of you. What you call intuitions, your feelings—hate (I should say you were a good hater), and love——" (her eyes, which had been fixed on his, dropped suddenly), "don't wait for motives. They're the only spontaneous things about you, the only realities you know." (And of these he had said just now that the last reality was sex. It was his point of view, a point from which it appeared that for him Miss Tancred had no existence.) "Of course there may be some transcendental sense in which they're not realities at all; but as far as we are concerned they're not only real, but positively self-existent."

As he thus discoursed, Durant blinked critically at the sky, while his pencil described an airy curve on the infinite blue, symbolizing the grace, the fluency, and the vastness of his thought.

"They, if you like, are you. It's very odd that you don't seem to trust them more."

She had turned from him till her face was a thin outline against the sky. She had a fine head, and carried it well, too; and at the moment the twilight dealt tenderly with her dress and face; it purified the tragic pallor of her forehead and all but defined that vague, haunting suggestion of a possible charm. Durant had it a moment ago—there—then. Ah! now he had lost it.

"I daren't trust my feelings. I can't. There are too many of them. They won't work the same way. They're all fighting against each other."

"Then let them fight it out, and let the strongest win."

"If I only knew which was the strongest."

"You'll know some day. In the long run, you see, the strongest is bound to win."

"Not necessarily. There might be a number of little ones that all together would be stronger still."

"Oh, kill off the little beggars one at a time—go for them, throttle them, wring their necks, jump on them; and if they wriggle, stamp!"

"You can't jump on your own shadow. You can't stamp on them if they're you."

He groaned. Miss Tancred was getting too subtle; it was like sitting in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the Sphinx. He had had about enough of it. He rose, stretching his long limbs, and the action suggested the hideous tension of his intellect.

"You must let yourself go, Miss Tancred—let yourself go!" And he laughed at his own vision of Miss Tancred; Miss Tancred insurgent, Miss Tancred flamboyant, Miss Tancred voluptuous, volatile, victorious!

And then a thought struck him.

He turned and saw Miss Tancred still sitting motionless, nursing her knees; her pure inflexible profile glimmered against the dusk.

VI

Durant had an idea, or rather two ideas, one purely comic, the other comic or tragic, according to the way you took it. He first of all discovered that the Colonel was laying siege to the heart of Mrs. Fazakerly, and at the same time conducting his campaign with an admirable discretion. There never was a little Colonel of militia so anxious to avoid committing himself. Not that the event could be considered doubtful for a moment. Measuring all risks, it was in the highest degree incredible that he would be called upon to suffer the indignity of repulse.

There was nothing extraordinary in that. To be sure, on the first face and blush of it, Durant had wondered how on earth Mrs. Fazakerly could tolerate the Colonel; but, when he came to think of it, there was no reason why she should not go a great deal farther than that. The Colonel's dullness would not depress her, she having such an eternal spring of gaiety in herself. She might even find it "soothing," like the neighboring landscape. And as she loved her laughter, it was not improbable that she loved its cause. Then she had the inestimable advantage of knowing the worst of him; her intelligent little eyes had seen him as he was; she could lay a soft finger on all his weak spots. There was this to be said for the Colonel, that he was all on the surface; there was nothing, positively nothing, behind him. Besides, Mrs. Fazakerly was not exacting. She had not lived forty years in the world without knowing the world, and no doubt she knew it too well to ask very much from it. Then the fact remained that the Colonel was an immaculate gentleman, immaculately dressed, and he was not the only item in the program. Coton Manor would be thrown in, and there were other agreeable accessories. Mrs. Fazakerly's tastes were all of the expensive sort, and her ambition aimed at something vaster than the mere adornment of her own person. In her household she displayed a talent, not to say a genius, for luxurious order. But a little dinner at the cottage opposite the lodge gates had convinced Durant that this elegance of hers was of a fragile and perishable sort. The peculiar genius of Mrs. Fazakerly clamored for material and for boundless scope. It could not do itself justice under two thousand a year at the very least. As things stood its exuberance was hampered both as to actual space (her drawing-room was only eighteen feet by twelve) and as to the more glorious possibilities that depend on income. At Coton Manor she would have a large field and a free hand. Heaven only knew what Mrs. Fazakerly's mind was made up of; but quite evidently it was made up.

So far so good; but there was less certainty as to the Colonel's attitude. As yet nothing was to be seen, so to speak, but his attitudes, which indeed were extremely entertaining. The little gentleman was balancing himself very deftly on the edge of matrimony, and Durant watched with a fearful interest the rash advance and circumspect retreat, the oscillating hair's-breadth pause, the perilous swerve, and desperate contortion of recovery.

Durant felt for him; he had so much to lose. Under Miss Tancred the working of his household was already brought to such exquisite perfection that any change must be for the worse. He had found out what became of Miss Tancred in her mysterious disappearances. As far as he could see the business of the estate was entirely superintended by the lady. He came across her in earnest conversation with the gardener; he met her striding across the fields with the farm-bailiff; he had seen her once on her black mare inspecting some buildings on the farthest limit of the property, the obsequious builder taking notes of her directions. She was obviously a capable woman, a woman of affairs. He presumed that these matters, with her household and secretarial work, filled up her days; he knew too well that whist accounted for her evenings. He did not know if there was any margin, any dim intellectual region, out of time, out of space, where Miss Tancred's soul was permitted to disport itself in freedom; she seemed to exist merely in order to supply certain deficiencies in the Colonel's nature. Mrs. Fazakerly had once remarked that Frida was "her father's right hand." It would have been truer to have said that she was right hand and left hand, and legs and brain to the student of meteorology. There had evidently been some tacit division of labor, by which she did all the thinking and all the work while he did the talking. Thus, to continue Durant's line of argument, the Colonel's comfort was secured to him without an effort on his part (otherwise it would not have been comfort); and when all was said and done Mrs. Fazakerly was a most indifferent player of whist.

Then there was the Colonel's age. Durant knew a man who had taught himself the 'cello at fifty-five. But the Colonel was not that sort of adventurous dilettante. Neither was Mrs. Fazakerly exactly like a violoncello, she was more like a piano; while Miss Tancred, from the Colonel's point of view, was like a hurdy-gurdy. Not a difficult instrument the hurdy-gurdy; you have only to keep on turning a handle to make it go. To be sure, you can get rather more out of a piano; but pianos are passionate things, ungovernable and slippery to the touch. The Colonel was fond of the humbler instrument that gave him the sense of accomplishment without the effort, the joys of the maestro without his labor and his pain.

He was in a double dilemma. If he had to choose between Miss Tancred and Mrs. Fazakerly his choice would never be made. On the other hand, if he decided for both, his comfort would be more insecure than ever. There would be jealousy to a dead certainty; in all mixed households that was where the shoe pinched. To pursue that vulgar figure, the Colonel's daughter was like a pair of old and easy shoes made by a good maker, a maker on whom he could rely; a wife would be like new boots ordered rashly from an unknown firm. They would be his best pair, no doubt, but your best pair is generally the tightest. He had some trying years before him; and well, a man does not put on new boots for a long uphill scramble.

So the Colonel's breast was torn with internecine warfare, desire battling with habit, and habit with desire. No wonder if in that awful struggle the fate of one insignificant individual counted for nothing. Frida Tancred never had counted.

Durant admitted that his imagination was apt to work in somewhat violent colors, and that there might be a point of view from which the Colonel would tone down into a very harmless and even pathetic figure; for Mrs. Fazakerly he had no terrors. But there was the girl. It was hard to say exactly what he had done to her. Apparently he had taken her soul while it was young and squeezable, and had crushed it till it fitted into all his little habits; he had silenced her heart with commonplaces, and dulled her intellect with his incomprehensible fatuity. And through it all he had been the most innocent little gentleman alive. Oh, yes, he was pathetic enough in his way. He himself was only an instrument in the hands of irrepressible Nature who couples wild soul with tame, hot blood with cold blood, genius with folly, and makes her sport of their unhappy offspring. And Nature was playing a glorious game with Frida Tancred now.

That was Durant's second idea; the thought that had struck him so unpleasantly after his last interview with her. To put it coarsely, he had a suspicion, a fear, that Miss Tancred was beginning to fall in love with him. He might have known that it would happen. It was just the sort of damnable irony most likely to pursue that unfortunate woman. There could be no mistake about it; he knew it; he knew it by many subtle and infallible signs. Somewhere he had heard or read that no nice man ever knows these things. That was all nonsense; or, if it had any meaning at all, it could only mean that no nice man ever shows that he knows. The fact remained that if he had loved her he would not have known.

For the disagreeable circumstance itself he called Heaven to witness that he had not been to blame. He had been ready to do his part, to fall down and worship the unknown Miss Tancred, the Miss Tancred of his vision. The hour had been ripe, the situation also, and the mood; the woman alone had failed him. Heaven knew he had done nothing to make her care for him. True, he had given her a certain amount of his society; since she found a pleasure in it he would have been a brute to deny her that poor diversion, that miserable consolation for the tedium of her existence. Perhaps he had tried too much to be sympathetic; but who again would not have tried? He had given her nothing to go upon. What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself—given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic some women are! You do them some kindness on an afternoon when you have nothing better to do and they reward you with the devotion of eternity; for they have no sense of proportion. The awkward thing is that it lays you under an eternal obligation to do something or other for them, you don't know exactly what; an intolerable position for a nice man.

So Durant's first feelings were surprise, annoyance, and a certain shame. Then he began to feel a little flattered, being perfectly sure that Frida Tancred was not the woman to give herself away to any ordinary man. He was the first, the only one, the one in a thousand, who had broken down her implacable reserve. He ended by feeling positively proud of his power to draw out the soul of a creature so reticent and passionless and strange.

His time was not yet up, and the question was: Ought he to go or stay? He would have found or invented some pretext, and left long ago, but that in him the love of pleasure brought with it an equal fear of giving pain. It would give pain to the Colonel (who, after all, had received him kindly) if he went before his time. By the art of graceful evasion Durant had escaped many such an old gentleman as the Colonel; but when it came to doing the really disagreeable and ungraceful thing it seemed that his courage failed him.

There was no doubt in Miss Tancred's mind on the delicate point. She was even capable of making a sacrifice to keep him.

He met her one morning riding on her black mare. Miss Tancred looked well on horseback; the habit, the stiff collar, the hard hat, were positively becoming, perhaps because they left no room for decorative caprice. She drew up, and Durant ran his hand lovingly over the warm shining neck and shoulders of the mare. Miss Tancred's eyes followed the movements of his hand, then they traveled up his tall figure and down again.

"Your legs are rather long," said she, "and you're heavier than I am; but you can ride her if you like."

"I shouldn't think of it," said Durant, magnificently mendacious. He had been very early enlightened as to his chances with the mare; but the temptation to ride her had never died in him.

"Unless you ride," she continued, "there is nothing for you to do here. Then you'll be bored to death; and then, I suppose, you'll go?"

"And bury myself? And then?"

"You won't be buried long. You'll rise again fast enough, somewhere else."

"And what if I do go and do all these things?"

"Well, I don't want you to go—and do them."

She moved on, and he walked beside her, his hand on the mare's mane.

"I can't think why you've stopped so long. Every morning since you came I've been expecting you to go. I thought you'd say your father was dying, or that your partner was ill, and you had urgent business in town. It's what they all do. Do you know, we've asked no end of people down, and they never stay more than three days. They always get letters or telegrams, or something. No, I'm wrong; one man stopped a week. He sprained his ankle the first day, and left before he was fit to travel."

(Durant laughed. She really amused him, this ingenue of thirty, with the face of a Sphinx and the conversation of a child.)

"And they never come again. There's something about the place they can not stand."

They were walking leisurely together in full sight of Coton Manor. She gazed at it anxiously.

"Does it—does it look so very awful?"

"Well—architecturally speaking—no, of course it doesn't."

"Ah, you're getting used to it. Do you know you'll have been here a fortnight next Monday?"

About the corners of her mouth and eyes there played a dawning humor.

"Come, that sounds as if you did want me to go."

"No it doesn't. How could it? If you don't believe me, here's the proof—you can ride Polly every day if you'll stop another week."

Another week! Most decidedly she had a sense of the monstrous humor of the thing. If she could see it that way she was saved. He had not the heart to kill that happy mood by a coarse refusal; it would have been like grinding his heel on some delicate, struggling thing just lifting its head into life.

Besides, she had really touched him. His legs, as Miss Tancred had observed, were a little long, otherwise Durant had the soul and the physique of a tamer of horses. The sight of Polly filled him with desire that was agony and rapture; he saw himself controlling the splendid animal; he could feel her under him, bounding, quivering, pulsating, he himself made one with every movement of her nervous, passionate body. It was too much. Beside that large, full-blooded pleasure, his scruples showed colorless and light as air.

That happened on a Friday. He had only two clear days more. He found himself seriously considering the desirability of staying over Monday.

VII

As ill-luck would have it Saturday was a wet day, and Durant, instead of riding the mare, was wandering aimlessly about the house. He had finished all the books in his bedroom and was badly in want of more. He knocked up against Frida Tancred in a dark passage, apologized, and confided in her. As usual she was sorry for him.

"I'm afraid we haven't many books; but you'll find some of mine in here." She opened a door as she spoke, and passed on.

Durant found himself in a room which he had not yet investigated. It was somewhat bare as to furniture; it struck strange to his senses as if he had stumbled into another world; in some occult way it preserved a tradition of travel and adventure. The bookcase he came to inspect was flanked by a small cabinet of coins and curios—Italian, Grecian, Egyptian, and Japanese; the walls were hung with bad landscapes interspersed with maps.

One of these, an uncolored map of Europe, attracted his attention. It was drawn by hand in Indian ink, a red line and accompanying arrow heads followed the coast and strung together such inland places as were marked upon the blank. The line started from Southampton and reached the Mediterranean by the Bay of Biscay; it shot inland to the great cities of Italy, returning always to the sea. It skirted Greece, wound in and out of the Ionian islands, touched at Constantinople, ringed the Bosporus and the Black Sea, wheeled to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then swept wildly up the north of Russia to Archangel and the Arctic Ocean; thence it followed the Scandinavian coast-line, darted to Iceland, and dipped southward again to Britain by way of the Hebrides. Off Queenstown the arrowheads pointed west, winged for the Atlantic. He found the same red line again on a blank map of Asia heading for India by China and Japan. An adventurous, erratic line, whose stages were now the capitals of the world, and now some unknown halting-place in the immeasurable waste. And what on earth did it mean? Was it the record of an actual journey, or some yet untraveled visionary route?

But it was not these things alone that gave the room its fantastic and alien air. What dominated the place was the portrait of a woman, a woman who had Frida's queer accented eyebrows and Frida's eyes, with some more fiery and penetrating quality of her own, something more inimitably fine and foreign. The portrait (which struck Durant as decidedly clever) was signed by some unknown Russian artist, and he recognized it as that of Frida's mother, the lady of the landscapes. He wondered if it was the demon of ennui that had driven poor Mrs. Tancred to the practice of her terrible art, if she had had a spite against Coton Manor, which she vented by covering its walls with bad pictures.

He turned to the bookcase. Frida's library offered him an amazing choice of polyglot fiction. It contained nearly all Balzac and the elder Dumas, Tolstoi and Turgenieff, Bjoernsen and Ibsen, besides a great deal of miscellaneous literature, chiefly Russian and Norwegian. Here and there he came across some odd volumes of modern Greek. A whole shelf was devoted to books of travel; grammars and dictionaries made up the rest. Miss Tancred's taste in books was a little outlandish, but it was singularly virile and robust. He had been prepared to suspect her of a morbid pedantry, having known more than one lady in her desperate case who found consolation in the dead languages. But Miss Tancred betrayed no ghoulish appetites; if she had a weakness for tongues, she had also the good taste to prefer them living.

Durant was so much absorbed in these observations that he did not hear her come into the room.

"Have you found anything you can read?" she asked.

"I've found a great deal that I can't read. You do go in strong for languages."

"That's nothing; my mother was a Russian, and Russians know every language better than their own. I don't know more than seven besides mine. And I can only read and write them. They will never be any use to me."

"How can you tell what may be of use to you? Even Mrs. Fazakerly, or I?" Durant was anxious to give a playful turn to that remarkable discussion they once had; he thus hoped to set the tone for all future conversations with Miss Tancred. "I admit that you can't live on languages, they are not exactly safety-valves for the emotions; nobody can swear in more than three of them at a time. I think music's better. Instead of playing whist you ought to play Chopin."

"It's better to play whist well than Chopin badly."

"Better to rule in Hades than fool in the other place, you think? Miss Tancred, you are as proud as Lucifer."

"I don't see that any good is got by murdering the masters."

"It saves some women from worse crimes, I believe. Why didn't you take to sketching, then? That only kills time."

Miss Tancred was splendid in her scorn. "Kill time with painting bad pictures? I'd rather time killed me."

Ah, that was what he liked about her. She had not revenged herself on Nature by making hideous caricatures of Nature's face; she did not draw in milk-and-water colors, and she did not strum. She had none of the exasperating talents, the ludicrous ambitions of the amateur; she was altogether innocent of intellectual vanity.

"That reminds me," said she, "that I've seen nothing of those wonderful sketches you said you'd show me."

He had clean forgotten the things. Well, he could hardly do better than exhibit them; it would keep her quiet, and save him from perilous personalities.

At first he thought the exhibition was going to give her more pain than pleasure. He sat beside her, and she took the sketches from him gingerly, one by one, and looked at them without a word. A visible nervousness possessed her; her pulses clamored, she seemed to struggle with her own unsteady breathing. Once, when in the transfer of a drawing her hand brushed against his, she drew it back again as if it had dashed against a flame. Durant had noticed once or twice before that she avoided his touch.

Suddenly she awoke out of the agony of her consciousness. One picture had held her longer than the rest.

"It's beautiful—beautiful," she murmured.

"I'm glad you like it," said Durant, pleased at her first sign of admiration.

"Oh, I don't mean your picture—I mean the place."

"It's not a very good picture perhaps——"

"I don't know whether it's good or bad; it seems to me rather bad, though I can't say what's wrong with it. It looks unfinished."

"It is unfinished, but that's not what's wrong with it. These are better—better painting."

His hand brushed hers in vain this time. She remained absorbed. "I don't care two straws about the painting; they may be masterpieces for all I know; it's that—that stretch of sand licked by the sea, and the grass trodden down by the wind—the agony and beauty and desolation of it——" She laid it down unwillingly, and took the others from his hand.

"Oh, what's this?"

"A wall in Suza."

"I've never seen anything like that. The light seems to be moving—soaking into it and streaming out again. It looks as if it would burn if you touched it."

The artist in him laughed for pure pleasure. "It's all very well, you know, but they must be infernally good if they make you feel like that."

"They may be. Have you seen all these things, or have you done any of them out of your head?"

"Seen them, of course. I never paint 'out of my head'; I haven't enough imagination."

"Show me more places where you've been. Tell me about them. You might have done that before."

He obeyed, giving her his experience, his richest and his best; he drew for her scenes and things, not in their crude and temporary form, but as they lived for him and for his art, idealized, eternalized by the imagination that sees them as parts of the immortal whole; and yet vivid, individual, drenched with the peculiar color that made them equally and forever one with the soul of Maurice Durant. She hardly seemed to heed, hardly seemed to listen or to follow. She looked as if hearing were already absorbed in sight.

Durant put a small oil painting into her hand. He had kept his finest to the last. "If you're fond of the sea that may please you."

Mid-ocean, the slope and trough of a luminous sea; in the foreground one smooth, high-bosomed, unbroken wave, the light flung off from its crest like foam, to slide down its shoulder like oil on rounded glass. On the sky-line the white peak of a sail; the whole a heaving waste of wind and water, light and air. It was a consummate bit of painting, as nobody knew better than Maurice Durant.

She looked at it as though she would never be tired of looking. A sudden impulse seized him, a blind instinct to give pleasure at any cost, to make amends for pain.

"If you honestly like it, I wish you'd keep it."

"Keep it? Keep it? Do you really mean it?"

"It would give me pleasure if you would."

"But isn't—might it not be valuable?"

It was valuable, as Durant reflected somewhat regretfully, but he answered well. "Valuable chiefly to me, I fancy. Which is all the more reason, if you like it——"

"Like it? I should lo——" She drew back her breath. "No; I think I'd better not. Thank you very much, all the same." She laid the canvas down with a gesture of renunciation.

"Now that's foolish. Why ever won't you?"

"I daren't. I daren't live with it. It would remind me of all the things I want to forget."

"What things?" He felt that the question was cruel, it was probing the very heart of pain. But his curiosity was too strong. The fountains of the deep were breaking up; he knew that he had only to give the word to witness an astounding transformation of the woman. He had given the word. Her face was changing; it had taken on the likeness of her foreign mother, intensified in its subtlety and fire.

"What things? The things I want to do and can't; the things I want to see—the things——" She stopped. "Do you know, I don't even like to have those sketches of my mother's hanging about; they haunt me so intolerably, they tempt me to that degree that sometimes I can hardly bear to look at them."

He glanced at the drawings. He could hardly bear to look at them either. Poor wraiths and skeletons of landscapes, he would have thought them too fleshless and bloodless to touch even the ghost of longing.

She took up the picture she had just laid down. "But this—it's not painting, it's real; it's a piece torn out of the living world. It would bring it so horribly near me—don't you see?"

He thought he saw. He looked, and she lowered her eyelids. On to the slope of his wave there splashed a tear, salt to the salt.

She got up, turned away from him, and leaned against the window frame, staring out at the gravel walk, the lawn, the paddock, all the sedate, intolerable scene. Her breast heaved; she was shaken by a tumult of vision and desire.

"If only I could get away—get away from this!"

It was not she that cried out, but some other self, unacknowledged and unappeased, smothered and crushed and hidden out of sight.

Durant was moved by the revelation, and a little frightened, too.

"And why not get away?" he asked gently.

"Because I can't do anything like other people, by bits and halves. If I once go, I shall never come back—never. There's no use thinking about it. I've thought about it till I could have gone mad." She faced him bravely. "Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing as badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will be simpler and easier to give it up altogether, for always, than to keep on looking at it and touching it and letting it go."

"Do you apply that principle to everything?"

"Nearly everything."

"H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you are wise."

"Wise? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger than to go back to starvation after luxury?"

"Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring your soul down to a straw a day. But in the end, you know, it dies."

"If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago, and buried quite decently, too. I think we won't dig it up again; by this time it might not look pretty."

At any other time she would have alienated his sympathy by that nasty speech; it was the sort of thing he hated women to say. But he forgave her because of her evident sincerity.

She dried her eyes and left him to his own reflections.

So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of habit. Habit indeed! She had never known even that comparative calm. It was not habit that had bound her to that dreadful old man, who was the father of her body, but with whom her soul recognized no kinship. Her life must have been an agony of self-renunciation, an eternal effort not to be.

He doubted her wisdom; but he was not sure that he did not admire her courage. That uncompromising attitude was more dignified than the hesitations of weaker natures. When women set out with the bold intention of living resolutely in the Whole, the Good, and the Beautiful, they sometimes find themselves brought up sharply midway at the threshold of the Good; and there they stand vacillating all the time, or at the most content themselves now and then with a terrified rush for the Beautiful and the Whole. They are fascinated by all three and faithful to none. Frida Tancred scorned their fatuous procedure. Balked of the best, she would never console herself with half-measures and the second best; as for all lesser values, there was something in her which would always mark her from Mrs. Fazakerly and her kind. With Frida it was either the whole or nothing; either four bare walls or the open road where there is no returning.

She would go no way where the Colonel could not follow.

Durant, on his way to bed that night, saw something that told him so much. Father and daughter stood with their backs to him at the end of the long corridor. The Colonel was putting out the lights. Frida had just nodded good night to him at her bedroom door, when she turned impetuously and flung her arms round the little gentleman. She pressed his head against her neck and held it there an instant, a passion of remorse and tenderness in the belated caress. The Colonel was, as it were, taken off his feet; he was visibly embarrassed. Durant saw his eyes staring over her shoulder, in their profound stupidity helpless and uncomprehending.

VIII

It was Sunday afternoon, and they had been taking tea with Mrs. Fazakerly. This was the second time that Durant had had the opportunity of studying Mrs. Fazakerly at home, of filling in the little figure on its own appropriate background. The first thing that struck him was that the background was not appropriate, or rather that it was inadequate. Mrs. Fazakerly's drawing-room had an air of uneasy elegance, of appearances painfully supported on the thin edge of two hundred a year. It was furnished with a too conspicuous care; the most insignificant details were arranged so as to lead up to and set off her good things, which were few and far between. There was no rest in it for the eye that was perpetually seized and riveted on some bit of old silver, or Oriental drapery, some Chippendale cabinet or chair. Such things were the commonplaces of Coton Manor, and there they fell unobtrusively into their place. Here they were touched up and handled, posed out of all simplicity; they bore themselves accordingly with a shining consciousness of their own rarity; they made an unblushing bid for praise. In Mrs. Fazakerly's drawing-room the note of taste was forced.

The invitation had come as a sort of farewell attention to Durant. Its valedictory character was further emphasized by Mrs. Fazakerly's proposing to walk home with them, and finally falling into the rear with Durant.

As a turn in the drive brought them within sight of Coton Manor, Mrs. Fazakerly balanced her pince-nez on the bridge of her nose. It remained there, and he judged that Mrs. Fazakerly was in no mood for mirth.

"That house," said Mrs. Fazakerly, "annoys me."

"Why?"

"Because it hasn't had justice done to it."

"I should have thought that was a ground for pity rather than resentment."

Mrs. Fazakerly shrugged her shoulders ever so little. "That drawing-room—did you ever see anything like it? And such possibilities in it, too. I can't bear to think of all those beautiful things wasted, just for want of a little taste, a little arrangement—the right touch."

The widow's white fingers twitched. It was not vulgar cupidity; it was the passion of the born genius, of the lover of art for art's sake, who sees his opportunity given into the hands of an inferior. If only she had the ordering, the decoration of Coton Manor! Durant thought of the cottage at the gates, her cramped and humble sphere; it was not her fault so much as the defect of her instrument, that forcing of the note of taste; no wonder that she longed for the rich harmonies of Coton Manor under "the right touch," the touch of the master.

She continued, "But poor dear Miss Tancred, you know, she will have it left just as it was in Mrs. Tancred's time; she won't change a picture or a chair in it. That's Frida all over. She's made that house a monument to her mother's memory. And think what she might have made it."

"I'm thinking what she might have made of her life. She seems to be making that a monument to her father's memory."

"Ah! and the things she could have done with it."

Impossible to say whether Mrs. Fazakerly referred to Miss Tancred's house or her life. Durant smiled at her probable conception of Coton Manor, with its tragedy of splendid possibilities gone to waste; but Mrs. Fazakerly's idea cut both ways.

She sighed wearily.

"These drives were not made to be walked up. There's another mile and a half of it, and I'm half-dead already. I shall sit down."

She led the way to an elm tree fallen in the grass, examined it critically, sat down, and made a place for him at her side.

"So you're going to-morrow? Is that so?"

"It is—probably."

"It's a pity—just as you and Miss Tancred have made friends."

"The best of friends must part," said he lightly.

"Yes. Well, I'm glad you've managed to be nice to her, after all. She's come out in the most astonishing manner since you came. What have you been doing to her?"

"I've done nothing to her, I assure you."

"Ah, you mean you've not been making love to her."

"I don't mean anything of the sort."

Durant was angry. It was borne in upon him that Mrs. Fazakerly was vulgar, after all. She looked at him, and her pince-nez balanced itself on the bridge of her nose, then leapt its suicidal leap. She was amused with the ambiguity of his reply.

"That's all right. Heaven help the man who does make love to her, if he means it. That girl's a riddle to me. I used to think she cared a little for her father; but it's my belief that Frida Tancred cares for nobody, not even herself. She simply doesn't know what love is, and she doesn't want to know. Why am I saying these alarming things to you? I'm saying them because I'm old enough to be your mother, and because I like you. You're clever, and you've got a sense of humor, too, though I can't say it's been much use to you since you came here. But, with all your cleverness, you'll never understand Frida Tancred. She's not like other women, the sort you've flirted with so much. Don't tell me you haven't; for you have. She can't help it. Her mother was a queer fantastic creature, and Frida's just like her, only stronger, much stronger, and deeper, which makes it worse. I'm sorry for her, because you see I'm very fond of her, and I think there's nothing—positively nothing—I wouldn't do to help her."

"It's an intolerable existence for her."

"Intolerable? Ah, my dear Mr. Durant, you're delightfully young; so is Frida, though you mightn't think it; and you young people are all so tragic. Frida's absurd about her father; she's always been going about with that face of hers, playing at being Antigone, and as the poor, dear Colonel is as blind as What's-his-name? he naturally doesn't see it. She's brought it all on herself. She looks on her father as her fate, and treats him accordingly—in the grand style—and it doesn't suit him. What a subject like the Colonel wants is a light touch. With me, for instance, he's a dear."

"Is he? I thought he rather bored you," said Durant maliciously.

"When did you think that? Oh, that first night when we all laughed so much, except poor Frida. I wasn't bored—not a bit; on the contrary, I was amused at the expression of your face, and at your atrocious manners and still more atrocious puns. Nothing ever bores me. It's only you young people who let yourselves be bored. Tragedy again. Too much tragedy for my taste."

Mrs. Fazakerly paused to let her communications sink in and take root. There was a deep hush on the landscape, as if in deference to her awful confidences. A deer stood knee-deep in the grass and gazed at them inquiringly. And as Mrs. Fazakerly stared unabashed into the face of Nature, Durant thought of Frida's remark, and wondered if she found it "soothing."

"Mind you, I don't mean to say that she's cold. On the contrary, I believe she's capable of a tremendous passion for something—I don't quite know what. It might be a person,"—she rose—"but let me tell you it's much more likely to be a thing."

They were talking quite innocently about art and literature when they appeared at the house.

Durant vainly tried to unravel the possible motives for her confidence. They were so many and so mixed. It was possible that she honestly suspected him of a dawning passion for Frida and that she meant to warn him of the hopelessness of such an attachment; apparently she understood her friend. Or the conversation may have been designed as an apology for her own future conduct. Durant knew that she would not refuse to marry Colonel Tancred if he made the offer; he knew, or thought he knew, her inmost opinion of that ridiculous person. She must be aware that her own dignity was considerably compromised by the situation; perhaps she hoped by rehabilitating the Colonel's behavior to justify her own. But why that insistence on the enigma of Frida Tancred's? Why this superfluous and elaborate cover for her own very simple meaning?

Unless, indeed, she was not quite so simple as she seemed. In courtship the Colonel had shown himself vacillating, to say the least of it. If Mrs. Fazakerly wanted to bring him to the point it was obviously her interest to get Miss Tancred out of her way. In other words, to throw her in Durant's way. His delicacy shrank from the baseness of this conjecture, but his reason, as well as his experience, suggested that the thing was not impossible. Mrs. Fazakerly had been studying him, and she was shrewd enough to see that the surest way to interest him in Miss Tancred was to set his intellect to work on her. She had doubtless observed his fin de siecle contempt for the obvious, his passion for the thing beyond his grasp, his worship of the far-fetched, the intangible, the obscure. Thus she thought to inflame his curiosity by hinting that Frida Tancred was incomprehensible, while she touched the very soul of desire by representing her as unattainable. All this was no doubt very clever of Mrs. Fazakerly; but it was not quite what he had expected of her.

His suspicions were confirmed by Frida's behavior. Ever since their last interview she had relapsed into something like her former reticence. To-night, as if she had an inkling of the atrocious plot, she avoided him with a sort of terror.

IX

Durant's time was up, but the Colonel had pressed him to stay another week. He was affectionate; he was firm; he would take no refusal. He dwelt on the advantages of a prolonged visit. "A little change," said he, "does us all good. You young fellows are apt to get into a groove. But you seem brighter since you came. I think we've shaken you up a bit."

Indeed, at no time had there been room for any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome. Though he was so determined to shake Durant up, to get him out of his groove, and give him fresh ideas, he betrayed a pitiable dependence on the young fellow. He endeavored to meet youth on its own ground; he made piteous experiments in the frivolous. More than once Durant had suspected that the poor gentleman had asked him down as a protection from the terrors of his own society. His intellectual resources were evidently giving out. The barometer was stationary; a fortnight's almost persistent sunshine had dried up the source of ideas. Having gutted the Nineteenth Century, his mind seemed to be impotently raging for fresh matter to destroy. He repeated himself eternally; the same phrases were always in his mouth. "A fad, a theory, a name for ignorance." "Don't tell me; it's an insult to my intelligence!" Durant could have been sorry for him if he had not been so infinitely sorry for himself.

On Monday morning Frida Tancred was herself again; not her old self, but the new one that Durant had learned to know and tolerate. She sought him out after breakfast and seconded the Colonel's invitation.

"If you could possibly stop, Mr. Durant, I wish you would. I'm asking a favor. My cousin, Georgie Chatterton, is coming down on Wednesday to stay. I don't know how long. I've never seen her before, and she's a young girl."

Frida's voice expressed a certain horror.

"Well, what of that?"

"If there's one thing on earth that I'm afraid of, it's a young girl. If you could only stay on just to amuse her a little, to help her through her first week! You see, it'll be so desperately dull for her if you don't."

He laughed; there was no other way of responding to the naivete of the request.

"It doesn't really seem fair to ask her when she hasn't an idea—I can't think why father did it. Perhaps he didn't. It's odd, but I've noticed that, when anything like this happens, Mrs. Fazakerly is always at the bottom of it."

Another lurid light on Mrs. Fazakerly!

"Was Mrs. Fazakerly at the bottom of his asking me?"

She smiled. "To tell you the honest truth, she was. Not but what he is delighted to have you here. I don't know when I've seen him so happy, so interested in anyone. But, you see, he's fearfully conservative; he can't bear to take the first step in anything."

He saw. The Colonel might be as conservative as he pleased; but the old order was changing; Coton Manor was on the eve of a revolution. He saw it all clearly, that deep-laid plot of Mrs. Fazakerly's. He had been asked down at her suggestion to keep Frida Tancred out of the way for the moment, or, better still, forever. He had not risen to the occasion; his time was up, so Miss Chatterton was to be invited to take his place. Yet, when he came to think of it, so simple a scheme, the mere substitution of one cat's paw for another, hardly did justice to Mrs. Fazakerly's imagination. Was she still convinced of his dawning passion for Miss Tancred? Had she doubts as to Miss Tancred's willingness or power to return it? and had she suggested that he should be pressed to prolong his stay in the hope that the rival presence of the young girl would act as the spark that fires the mine, kindling Miss Tancred's emotions and revealing her to herself?

Meanwhile Miss Tancred's one idea was to make use of him, to hand over the young girl to him and be rid of her. Her former offer of the black mare on the condition that he stayed another week appeared now as a grim jest, a cynical wager. This time she was in earnest. Whereas, if she had been in love with him——

Weighing these matters in his sensitive brain, Durant conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Fazakerly and her plot, together with a corresponding determination to stay on, if only to prove to that ingenious lady that she was hopelessly mistaken. Any hasty movement on his part would but confirm her in her absurd suspicions, while his actual flight would be the most flattering testimony to the profundity of her insight. He was not going to behave like the victim to a desperate infatuation for Miss Tancred. He would stay on, and Mrs. Fazakerly would see that nothing came of her psychological intrigue.

How far the Colonel was her accomplice he had no idea. The old fellow was a gentleman when all was said and done, and it was more than likely that he contented himself with a gentlemanly acquiescence. His dignity might possibly not refuse to draw a profit either way from the transaction. Durant could reckon on Miss Tancred, having returned to his original opinion of her. There was not enough womanhood in her for ordinary elemental jealousy; as for passion, he had decided that she was as innocent of understanding as she was incapable of inspiring it. A sentimental coxcomb might beat a precipitate retreat because he thought or fancied that his hostess was in love with him, and he would probably call his ridiculous conduct chivalry; it was more becoming in a gentleman to ignore the painful circumstance. For all these reasons he determined to stay.

His acceptance of their renewed invitation gave evident pleasure to the Colonel and Miss Tancred and very little annoyance to himself. He had grown used to Coton Manor as a prisoner grows used to his cell. He had, as he had feared, tied himself to the place by beginning serious work in it. He was too well pleased with his landscape studies of the neighborhood to leave them unfinished; and, as it happened, he had plenty of time to give to them, for the Colonel was pretty constantly engaged with Mrs. Fazakerly. (Here again he traced the delicate hand of that lady. She had seen that, if any guest was to remain at Coton Manor, a limit must be put to the Colonel's opportunities for tormenting him.) Durant had ceased to long for distraction; he was sufficiently entertained by the situation itself.

X

If he had been on the lookout for distraction, he would have found it in Georgie Chatterton. At Miss Tancred's request he went with her to the station to meet the expected guest. It was evidently thought that his presence would break the shock of her arrival.

It proved an unnecessary precaution. The young girl presented a smiling face at the carriage window—the Tancred face, somewhat obscured by a mass of irrelevant detail, sandy hair, freckles, a sanguine complexion, and so on. She jumped out on to the platform with a joyous cry of "Fridah!" She embraced "Fridah" impetuously, and then kept her a moment at arm's length, examining her dubiously. "You don't seem a bit glad to see me," was her verdict. She smiled gaily at Durant, and held out a friendly hand. All the way up from the station she conversed with them in a light-hearted manner. Thus:—

"What do you people do down here?"

"Ask Mr. Durant; he'll tell you that we vegetate all day and play whist all night."

"Oh, do you? Well, you know, I shan't. My goodness, Frida! is that your house? Whatever is it like? A Unitarian chapel, or the Carlton Club, or, stop a bit—you don't bury people in it, do you?" Then, as it occurred to her that she might have hurt her cousin's feelings by her last suggestion, she added, "It's rather a jolly old mausoleum, though. I wonder what it's like inside."

If Miss Chatterton had any premonition of her own approaching death by boredom, and had seen in Coton Manor more than a mere passing resemblance to a tomb, she was neither awestruck nor downcast at the prospect of dissolution. She flung herself into the vault as she had flung herself onto the platform, all glowing with pleasurable anticipation. To Durant there was something infinitely sad in the spectacle of this young creature precipitating herself into the unknown with such reckless and passionate curiosity. The whole long evening through he could discover no diminution of her mood, her gleeful determination to enjoy herself among the shades. She behaved to Colonel Tancred as if he had been a celebrity whose acquaintance she had long desired to make, a character replete with interest and romantic charm. She greeted Mrs. Fazakerly with a joyous lifting of the eyebrows, as much as to say, "What! another delightful person?"

And she was observant in her way, too. When Miss Tancred put a hand on her shoulder and said, "It will be horribly dull for you, Georgie; you'll have nothing to do but talk to Mr. Durant," she replied, "H'm! Mr. Durant looks as if he had been talked to all his life. I shall talk to you, Frida."

All through dinner she managed to preserve her spirits, her air of being among the most curious and interesting people. Durant wondered how on earth she kept it up. She seemed one of those fortunate beings whose vivacity is so overpowering that it can subdue even dulness to itself. She made the Colonel look strangely old; beside her Mrs. Fazakerly seemed suddenly to become dull and second-rate, to sink into the position of an attendant, a fatuous chorus, a giddy satellite. Her laughter swallowed up Mrs. Fazakerly's as a river in flood devours its tributaries; her spirits quenched Mrs. Fazakerly's as a blaze licks up a spasmodic flicker. It pleased Durant to look at her, the abandonment of her manners was in such flagrant contradiction with the Roman regularity of her Tancred face. Owing, perhaps, to some dash of the Tancred blood in her, she was neither pretty nor witty; yet she contrived to get her own way with everybody. Durant accounted for it by her sheer youth, the obstinacy of her will to live.

In twenty-four hours she had put a stop to Frida's disappearances, to Durant's sketching, and to the Colonel's intellectual conversation; and this she did by behaving so as to make these things impossible. In short, she had taken possession of her cousin and her black mare, of the Colonel and his cigarettes, of Mrs. Fazakerly and her books, of everybody and everything except Durant. She was friendly with him, but somehow her friendliness was infinitely more unflattering than Miss Tancred's former apathy. It implied that he was all very well in his way, but that she had seen too many of his sort to be greatly excited about him; while in Frida Tancred, now, she had found something absolutely and uniquely new. She was not going to be put off with Durant; she fastened herself upon Frida, and refused to let her go; she did the thing she had said she would do—without absolutely ignoring her fellow-guest, she talked to Frida or at Frida or for Frida alone. And yet, strangely enough, by dint of much observation she had detected a subtle resemblance between them, and she proclaimed her discovery with her natural frankness.

It was the second evening of her stay, and the three were sitting out on the lawn together. She had been looking long and earnestly at her mysterious kinswoman.

"Frida, you really are a sort of cousin, aren't you?"

"So I've always been told."

"And Mr. Durant, is he a sort of cousin, too?"

"I never heard that."

"I'm afraid I have not the honor."

"That's odd. I thought he must be."

"Why?" asked Miss Tancred.

"Oh, because there's a likeness somewhere. Not in the face exactly, but—yes, there! Keep that expression on your face one minute, Mr. Durant; now don't you see it?"

"See what?"

"It—the likeness. He looks terribly reserved somehow—a sort of wild-horses-shan't-draw-it-out-of-me expression, and yet so fearfully restless; and that's just like you."

There was an embarrassed silence; and then Miss Chatterton again raised her cheerful voice.

"I say, Frida! you might tell me exactly what I'm in for. Are you two going to be horribly intellectual and clever and that sort of thing?"

"I'm not," said Miss Tancred.

"I'm not," echoed Durant.

"Thank Heaven! Because you both look as if you'd a tremendous lot in you. I wonder if you'll ever let it out."

"Not if we can help it," said Durant.

"There you are again! If you're not Frida's first cousin, you ought to be."

Durant smiled; he wondered whether the idea was more than the random frolicking of Miss Chatterton's brain. She was evidently a young woman of perception; but her perceptions had wings, and she threw them off from her in a manner altogether spontaneous, impersonal and free. It was nothing to her if they brushed against the truth sometimes in their irresponsible flight.

"You don't mind all these personal remarks, do you?"

"Not in the least," said Miss Tancred.

"For my part I rather like them," said Durant; but they both carefully avoided each other's eyes.

XI

Durant had a grievance against Miss Chatterton. He had been induced to lengthen his visit in order to entertain her, and Miss Chatterton refused to be entertained. His position at Coton Manor had thus become a humiliating sinecure. There was no earthly reason why he should stay any longer, and yet he stayed.

The fact was, that by this time he was really interested in other things beside the landscape. He had wondered how long Miss Chatterton would keep it up. He watched her, as one haunted guest watches another, to know if she too has seen the specter of the house, observing her manner and her appetite at breakfast, the expression of her face at bedtime, her voice in saying good-morning and good-night. On the third day he thought he could detect a slight flagging; Miss Chatterton was a shade less buoyant, less talkative than before. By the evening she was positively serious, and he judged that the iron had entered into her soul. Her manner to her cousin had changed; it was more tentative, more tender, more maternal. She had begun to pity Frida, as he had pitied her.

The two were inseparable; they were always putting their heads together, always exchanging confidences. And it was not only confidences but characters that they exchanged. It was a positive fact that as Miss Chatterton flagged Miss Tancred revived, she seemed to be actually growing young while the young girl grew older. Not that Miss Tancred grew young without difficulty; the life she had led was against that. She looked like a woman recovering from a severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse, she went about in a flush and fever of convalescence; it was a struggle for health under desperate conditions, the agony of a strong constitution still battling with the atmosphere that poisoned it, recovery simulating disease, disease counterfeiting recovery.

A wholesome process, no doubt, but decidedly unpleasant to watch. Durant, however, had very little opportunity for watching it, as he was now left completely to himself. Miss Tancred's manner intimated that she had done with him,—put him away in some dark cupboard of the soul, like a once desired and now dreaded stimulant,—that she was trusting to other and safer means for building up her strength. If Durant had ever longed for solitude, he had more than enough of it now, and he devoted the rest of his time to finishing the studies and sketches he had begun. He had made none of Miss Tancred.

One morning he had pitched his umbrella and his easel below a ridge on the far slope of the fir plantation. A thorn bush sheltered him from the wind and made him invisible from the terrace of grass above him.

He had emerged from a fit of more than usual absorption when he felt the stir of footsteps in the grass, and a voice rang out clear from the terrace.

"If it would only make papa happy. I want him to be happy."

Durant could not help but overhear, his senses being sharpened by the dread of hearing.

"My poor child" (it was the young girl who spoke), "you don't know what you want; but you want something more than that."

Durant rattled his color-box in desperation, but the women were too much absorbed to heed his warning, and Frida even raised her voice in answering:

"Yes, I'm afraid I do want something more. I know what you're thinking, Georgie. When women of my age go on like this it generally means that they're in love, or that they want to be married, or both."

Durant was considering the propriety of bursting out on them noisily from the cover of his umbrella, but before he could decide the point Miss Tancred had continued:

"I am not in love."

She spoke in the tone of one stating an extremely uninteresting fact.

"You are in love, Frida. You're in love with life, and life won't have anything to do with you; it's thrown you over, and a beastly shame, too! You're simply dying for love of it, my sweetheart."

Frida did not deny the accusation. They passed on, and in the silence Durant could hear their skirts as they brushed the thorn bush. He could only pray now that he might remain invisible.

He felt rather than saw that they turned their heads in passing.

"Do you think he heard?"

This time it was Miss Chatterton who raised her voice.

"It doesn't matter if he did. He's not a fool, whatever else he is."

Durant overlooked that flattering tribute to himself in his admiration of Miss Chatterton's masterly analysis and comprehension. She had, so to speak, taken Frida Tancred to pieces and put her together again in a phrase—"Dying for love of life." Beside her luminous intuition his own more logical method seemed clumsy and roundabout, a constructive process riddled by dangerous fallacies and undermined by monstrous assumptions. At the same time he persisted in returning to one of these, the most monstrous, perhaps, of all. In spite, perhaps because, of her flat denial, he pictured Frida not only as mysteriously in love with existence, but with a certain humble spectator of existence. According to the view he had once expounded to her the two passions were inseparable.

Before very long he received a new light on the subject. It was his last day, the two cousins were together somewhere, the Colonel was in bed with a bilious attack, and Durant was alone in the drawing-room.

He had not been alone long before Miss Chatterton appeared. She came into the room with an air of determination and sat down beside him. She went straight to her point, a very prickly one; there was no beating about the thorn bush with Miss Chatterton.

"Mr. Durant," said she, "I want to talk to you—for once. When you first came here what did you think of Miss Tancred?"

"I'm afraid I didn't think anything of Miss Tancred."

"Did you dislike her?"

"N-no. I only found her a little difficult to talk to."

"Oh. Well, that's not what I came to consult you about. I want you to help me. I am going to elope——"

"You don't mean to say so——"

"To elope with Miss Tancred—run away with her—take her out of this. It's the only way."

"The only way to what?"

"To save her. But I shall do nothing rash, nothing that would cause a scandal in the county. I shall simply take her up to town with me when I go back on Monday. My week isn't up; but—well—my temper is. So far it's all open and aboveboard——"

"Yes—yes. And where do I come in?"

"Oh, you—if you wouldn't mind staying where you are and keeping the Colonel in play till we've got safe across the Channel——"

"The Channel?"

"The Channel, my friend. Where else should we be safe?"

"That means that I've got to stick here till——"

"Till Wednesday."

"Good heavens! Another week! Not if I know it."

"Yes; it's awful, I know; but not as bad as it might have been. You won't have to talk to Miss Tancred. By the way, she says you are the only man who ever tried to talk to her—to understand her. What a dreadful light on her past! Think what her life must have been."

"Not very amusing, I imagine."

"Amusing! Think of it. Thirty years in this hole, where you can't breathe, and without a soul to speak to except the Colonel. Not that the Colonel is a soul—he's much too dense."

"To be anything but a body?"

"And all the time she has loathed it—loathed it. You see, she's got cosmopolitan blood in her veins. Her mother—you know about her mother?"

"I know nothing about her except that she did a great many bad things—I mean pictures—for which I hope Heaven may forgive her."

"Don't be brutal. She's dead now and can't do any more. When she was alive she was a Russian or a Pole or something funny, and mad on traveling, always going from one place to another—a regular rolling stone; till one day she rolled up to the Colonel's feet, and then——"

"Well?"

"He picked her up and put her in his pocket, and she never rolled any further. He packed her off to England and made her sit in this dreadful old family seat of his till she died of it. That's the sort of woman Miss Tancred's mother was, and Miss Tancred takes after her mother. She's a cosmopolitan, too."

"Rubbish! No woman can be a cosmopolitan." He said it in the same tone in which he had told Frida that no woman could have a pure passion for Nature. "And Miss Tancred, though nice, strikes me as peculiarly provincial. I shouldn't have thought——"

"There are things in her you'd never have thought of. It's wonderful how she comes out when you know her."

"She certainly has come out wonderfully since you came on the scene." (The words he used had a familiar ring. It was exactly what Mrs. Fazakerly had said to him.)

"I? I've not had anything to do with it. It was you; she told me. It wasn't just that you understood her; you made her understand herself; you made her feel; you stirred up all the passion in her."

"I don't understand you," he said coldly.

"Well, I think if you can understand Miss Tancred you might understand me. Compared with Frida I'm simplicity itself."

"When did I do these things?"

"Why, when you told her to let herself go. When you showed her your sketches and talked to her about the places, and the sea, all the things you had seen; the things she had dreamed of and never seen."

The young girl spoke as if she was indignant with him for reveling in opportunities that were Frida's by right.

"But she shall see them. She shall go away from this, and be herself and nobody else in the world."

"It's too late—it's not as if she were young."

"Young? She's a good deal younger than I am, though she's thirty and I'm twenty-four—twenty-five next September. Frida's young because she's got the body of a woman, the mind of a man, and the soul of a baby. She'll begin where other women end, will Frida. Wait till she's been abroad with me, and you'll see how her soul will come on, in a more congenial climate."

"Where are you going?"

"We're going everywhere. Venice—Rome—Florence—the Mediterranean—the regular thing. And to all sorts of queer outlandish places besides—Scandinavia, the Hebrides, and Iceland; everywhere that you can go to by sea. The sea——That's you again."

"The deuce it is! I doubt if I've done the kind thing, then. I seem to have roused passions which will never be satisfied. When she comes back——"

Miss Chatterton's voice sank. "She never will come back."

"Never? How about the Colonel?"

Miss Chatterton smiled. "That's the beauty of it. It's the neatest, sweetest, completest little plot that ever was invented, and it's simplicity itself, like its inventor—that's me. I suppose you know all about Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"Well, not all. Who could know all about Mrs. Fazakerly?"

"You know enough, I daresay. By taking her away—I mean Frida—we force the Colonel's hand."

"You might explain."

"I never saw a man who wanted so many things explained. Don't you see that, as long as Frida stays at home, petting and pampering him and doing all his work for him, he'll never take the trouble to marry; but as soon as she goes away, and stays away——"

"I see, I see; he marries. You force his hand—and heart."

"Exactly. And, if he marries, Frida stays away altogether. She's free."

"Yes; she's free. If she goes; but she'll never go."

"Won't she? She's going next Monday. It's all arranged. I've told her that she's in her father's way, that he wants to marry, and keeps single for her sake. And she believes it."

He walked up and down with his hands in his pockets, a prey to bewildering emotions.

"It's ingenious and delightful, your plot," said he. "But I can't say that I grasp all the minutiae, the practical details. For instance (it's a brutal question, but), who's going to provide the—the funds for this expedition to Scandinavia—or was it Abyssinia?"

"Funds? Oh, that's all right. She's got any amount of her own, though you wouldn't know it."

"I didn't know it." He champed his upper lip. He could not in the least account for the feeling, but he was bitterly, basely disappointed at this last revelation. Miss Tancred was independent. Up till now he could not bring himself to believe in her flight; he did not want to believe in it; it would have been a relief to him to know that the strange bird's wings were clipped.

"It was her mother's; what the poor lady traveled on, I suppose. Frida might have been enjoying it all the time, only, you see, there was the Colonel. That's why she wants him to marry Mrs. Fazakerly, though she'd rather die than own it."

"Why shouldn't she own it?"

"Because she can't trust her motives, trust herself. I never saw a woman fight so shy of herself."

"Then that's what she was thinking of when she said she was afraid of her own feelings."

"Oh! So she did say it, did she?"

"She said that or something very like it. You think that's what she must have meant?" He appealed to her humbly, as to one who had mastered the difficult subject of Frida Tancred.

"Why, whatever else could she have meant, stupid?"

There was an awkward silence, broken, or rather mended, by Miss Chatterton saying, as she stood with her hand on the door:

"Look here, you're not going to back out of it. You've promised to stand by and see us through with it, honor bright."

"I promised nothing of the sort, but I'll stand by all right."

"You may have a bad time. The Colonel will kick up an awful fuss; but remember, you're not in the least responsible. I'm the criminal."

It was as if she had said, "Don't exaggerate your importance. I, not you, am Miss Tancred's savior and deliverer."

He stiffened visibly. "I shall not quarrel with you for the role."

XII

Monday was the day of the great deliverance, the day that was fixed for Frida Tancred's flight. And, as if it meant to mark an era and a hegira and the beginning of revolution, it distinguished itself from other days by suitable signs and portents. It dawned through a brooding haze that threatened heat, then changed its mind, thickened and massed itself for storm. While he was dressing, Durant was made aware of the meteorological disturbance by an incessant tap-tap on the barometer as the Colonel consulted his oracle in the hall. The official announcement was made at breakfast.

"There is a change in the glass," said the Colonel. "Mr. Durant brought the fine weather with him and Miss Chatterton is taking it away."

"I'm taking something else away beside the weather," said she.

But the spirit of prophecy was upon him.

"To judge by to-day's forecast, I think we shall see Frida back again before the fine weather."

Whereupon Durant smiled and Miss Chatterton laughed, which gave him an agreeable sense of being witty as well as prophetic.

By ten o'clock the hand of the barometer had crept far past "Change"; by noon it had swung violently to "Stormy, with much rain"; by lunchtime a constrained and awkward dialogue was broken by the rude voice of the thunder. The Colonel took out his watch, timed the thunder and lightning, and calculated the approaches of the storm. "Seven miles away from us at present," said he.

It hung so low that the growling and groaning seemed to come from the woods round Coton Manor; the landscape darkened to a metallic purplish green, then paled to the livid color of jade under a sallow sky. There was a swift succession of transformation scenes, when, between the bursts of thunder, the park, swathed in sheet lightning, shot up behind the windows, now blue, now amethyst, now rose, now green. Then the storm suddenly shifted its quarters and broke through a rampart of solid darkness piled high in the southwest.

"Fifteen seconds," said the Colonel, "between that flash and the thunder."

Among these phenomena the Colonel moved like a little gentleman enchanted; he darted to and fro, and in and out, as if the elements were his natural home; his hurried notes in the little memorandum book outsped the lightning. For the last thirty years there had not been such weather in the meteorological history of Wickshire.

But the storm was only in its playful infancy; the forked lightning and the rain were yet to come. The last train up, timed to meet the express at the junction, left Whithorn-in-Arden at 3.10, and it was a good hour's drive to the station. As they toyed with the lightning on their plates Durant and Miss Chatterton looked at Frida. Fate, the weather, and the Colonel, a trinity of hostile powers, were arrayed against her, and the three were one.

At the stroke of two the Colonel remarked blandly, "There will be no driving to the station to-day, so I have countermanded the brougham."

They were dressed ready for the journey, and, as the Colonel spoke Frida got up, drew down her veil and put on her gloves.

"That was a pity," she said quietly, "seeing that we've got to go."

The Colonel was blander than ever; he waved his hand. "Go, by all means," said he, "but not in my brougham. There I put my foot down."

("Not there, not there, oh, gallant Colonel," said Durant to himself, "but where you have always put it, on Frida's lovely neck.")

She started, looked steadily at her father, then, to Durant's surprise, she shrugged her shoulders; not as an Englishwoman shrugs them, but in the graceful Continental manner. The movement suggested that the foreign strain in her was dominant at the moment; it further implied that she was shaking her neck free from the Colonel's foot. She walked to the window and looked out upon the storm. With the neck strained slightly forward, her nostrils quivering, her whole figure eager and lean and tense, she looked like some fine and nervous animal, say a deerhound ready to slip from the leash.

As she looked there was a sound as if heaven were ripped asunder, and the forked lightning hurled itself from that dark rampart in the southwest and went zig-zagging against the pane. "Only ten seconds," said the Colonel; "the storm is bursting right over our heads."

Frida too had consulted her watch; she turned suddenly, rang the bell, and gave orders to a trembling footman. "Tell Randall to put Polly in the dogcart. He must drive to the station at once."

The answer came back from the stables that Randall had shut himself into the loose box and covered himself with straw, "to keep the lightning off of him. He dursn't go near a steel bit, not if it was to save his life, m'm, and as for driving to the station——"