Part III

I

LITMUS

It was on an afternoon in May, and the window of Dorothy's flat overlooking the pond was wide open. Ruffles of wind chased one another from moment to moment across the water, and the swans, guarding their cygnets, policed the farther bank, where dogs ran barking. The two elder Bits played in the narrow strip of garden below; again the frieze of the room was a soft net of rippling light; and the brightness of the sun--or so Ruth Mossop declared--had put the fire out.

Ruth was alone in the flat. As she passed between the pond-room and the kitchen, re-lighting the fire, "sweeping in," and preparing tea, she sang cheerfully to herself "_A few more years shall roll, a few more sorrows come_." Ruth considered that the sorrows would probably come by means of the youngest Bit. He ought (she said) to have been a little girl. Then, in after years, he might have been a bit of comfort to his mother. Boys, in Ruth's experience, were rarely that.

As she put the cakes for tea into the oven of the stove there came a milk-call from below. Ruth leaned out of the lift-window, and there ensued a conversation with the white-jacketed milk-boy.

"Saw your guv'nor last night," the boy grinned.

"Where's that cream I ordered, and that quart of nursery milk? You can't mind your business for thinking of picture palaces."

"Keep your 'air on; coming up now.--I say, they put 'is 'ead under a steam-'ammer. I said it was a dummy, but Gwen said it wasn't. _Was_ it 'im?"

"You mind your own interference, young man, and leave others to mind theirs; you ought to have something better to do with your threepences than collecting cigarette cards and taking girls to the pictures."

"It was in '_Bullseye Bill: A Drarmer of Love an' 'Ate_'--'Scoundrel, 'ow dare you speak those words to a pure wife an' mother on the very threshold of the 'Ouse of----'"

"That's enough, young man--we don't want language Taken in Vain here--and you can tell 'em at your place we're leaving soon."

"But _was_ that 'im in the long whiskers at the end, when the powder magazine blew up?"

But Ruth, taking her cans, shut down the window and returned to the kitchen.

"'Then O, my Lord, prepare----'" she crooned as she gave a peep into the oven and then clanged the door to again, "'My soul for that blest day----'"

They were leaving soon. Already the sub-letting of the flat was in an agent's hands, and soon Stan would be braving the perils of his career no longer. Dorothy had unfolded her idea to her aunt, and Lady Tasker had raised no objection, provided Dorothy could raise the money by bringing Aunt Eliza into line.

"It's as good as Maypoles and Village Players anyway," she had said, "and I'm getting too old to run about as I have done.--By the way, is it true that Cosimo Pratt's gone to India?"

Dorothy had replied that it was true.

"Hm! What for? To dance round another Maypole?"

"I don't know, auntie. I've seen very little of them."

"Has she gone?"

"No."

"No more babies yet, I suppose?"

"No."

"Well ... you'd better see your Aunt Eliza. She's got all the money that's left.--But I don't see how you're going to get any very much out of Tony and Tim."

"Oh, I'll see they don't impose on me as they've been imposing on you!... So I may move that billiard-table, and alter the gun-room?"

"Yes, if you pay for it."

"Thanks--you are a dear!..."

By what arts Dorothy had contrived to lay Aunt Eliza under contribution doesn't matter very much here. Among themselves the Lennards and Taskers might quarrel, but they presented an unbroken front to the world--and Dorothy, for Aunt Eliza's special benefit, managed to make the world in some degree a party to her project. That is to say, that a paragraph had appeared in certain newspapers, announcing that an experiment of considerable interest, etc., the expenses of which were already guaranteed, and so forth, was about to be tried in the County of Shropshire, where "The Brear," the residence of the late Sir Noel Tasker, was already in course of alteration. And so on, in Dorothy's opinion, neither too much nor too little for her design.... It had been a public committance of the family, and it had worked the oracle with Aunt Eliza. Rather than have a public squabble about it, she had come in with her thousand, the work was now well advanced, and the venerable sinner who had recited the poems printed by Cosimo Pratt's Village Press was in charge of the job. Dorothy, hurriedly weaning the youngest Bit, had run down to Ludlow for the express purpose of announcing to him that it was a job, and not an aesthetic jollification.

Moreover, at that time she had half a hundred other matters to attend to; for Stan, escaping from powder-magazines as the last inch of fuse sputtered, and fervently hoping that the man had made no mistake about the length of stroke of the Nasmyth hammer under which he put his devoted head, could give her little help. Besides her own approaching _déménagement_, she had much of the care of that of her aunt. As Stan's earnings were barely sufficient for the current expenses of the household, she still had to turn to odds and ends of her old advertisement work. She had--Quis custodiet?--the nurse to look after, and the tradesmen, and letters, and callers, and Ruth. In short, a simple inversion of her aunt's dictum about the Pratts--"Too much money and not enough to do"--would have fitted Dorothy's case to a nicety.

Therefore, as another burden more or less would make little difference to one already so burdened, Dorothy had added still further to her cares. Ever since that day when Lady Tasker had come bareheaded out of her house and had spoken to Amory Pratt outside the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dorothy had had her sometime friend constantly on her mind. She had spoken of her to her aunt, who had again shown herself deplorably illiberal and incisive.

"I don't pretend to understand the modern young woman," she had remarked carelessly. "Half of 'em seem to upset their bodies with too much study, and the other half to play hockey till they're little better than fools. I suppose it's all right, and that somebody knows what they're about.... I often wonder what they'd have done, though, if it hadn't been for Sappho and Madame Curie.... By the way," she had gone irrelevantly on without a break, "does she _want_ any more children besides those twins?"...

Nevertheless, Dorothy had had Amory so much on her mind that twice since Cosimo's departure for India she had been up to The Witan in search of her. After all, if anybody was to blame for anything it was Cosimo. But on neither occasion had Amory been at home. Dorothy had left messages, to which she had received no reply; and so she had gone a third time--had gone, as it happened, on that very afternoon when Ruth sang "A few more years shall roll" as she made the hot cakes for tea. This time she had persuaded Katie Deedes to come with her--for Katie had left the Eden, was out of a job, and for the time being had afternoon hours to spare.

But again they had failed to find Amory, and Dorothy and Katie took a turn round the Heath before returning to the flat for tea. As they walked along the hawthorn hedge that runs towards Parliament Hill and South Hill Park they talked. Kites were flying on the Hill; the Highgate Woods and the white spire showed like a pale pastel in the Spring sunshine; and from the prows of a score of prams growing babies leaned out like the figureheads of ships.

"That's where Billie was born," said Dorothy, nodding towards the backs of the houses that make the loop of South Hill Park.

Katie only said "Oh?" She too had caught the uneasiness about Amory. And what Katie thought was very soon communicated.

"You see, Dot," she broke suddenly out, "you've no idea of what a--what a funny lot they are really.... No, I haven't told you--I haven't told you _half_! It's everything they do. Why, the nurse practised for months and months at a school where they washed a celluloid baby--I'm not joking--she did--a life-sized one--they did it in class, and dressed it, and put it to sleep--as if _that_ would be any good at all with a real one!... And really--I'm not prudish, as you know, Dot--but the way they used to sit about, in a dressing-gown or a nightgown or anything--I don't mean when there was a _big_ crowd there, of course, but just a few of them--Walter, and Mr. Brimby, and Edgar Strong--and all of them going quite red in the face with puremindedness! At any rate, I never did think _that_ was quite the thing!"

She spoke with great satisfaction of the point of the New Law she had not broken. It seemed to make up for those she had.

"And those casts and paintings and things about--it's all right being an artist, of course, but if I ever got married, _I_ shouldn't like casts and paintings of me about for everybody to see like that!----"

"Oh, just look at that hawthorn!" Dorothy interrupted.

"Yes, lovely.--And Walter talking about Dionysus, and what Lycurgus thought would be a very good way of preventing jealousy, and a lot more about Greeks and Romans and Patagonians and Esquimaux! Do you know, Dot, I don't believe they know anything at all about it--not _really_ know, I mean! I don't see how they can! One man might know a little bit about a part of it, and another man a little bit about another part--and that would be rather a lot, seeing how long ago it all is--but Walter knows it _all_! At any rate nobody can contradict him. But what does it matter to us to-day, Dorothy? What _does_ it matter?... Of course I don't mean they're wicked. But--but--in some ways I can't help thinking it would be better to _be_ wicked as long as you didn't say anything about it----!"

"Oh, I don't think they're wicked," said Dorothy placidly. But the 'vert went eagerly on.

"That's just it!" she expounded. "Walter says 'wicked's' only a relative term. If you face the truth boldly, all the time, lots of things wouldn't be wicked at all, he says. And I believe he's really awfully devoted to Laura--in his way--though he does talk about these things with Britomart Belchamber sitting there in her nightgown. But it's always the _same bit_ of truth they face boldly. They never think of going in for astronomy--or crystal-what-is-it--crystallography--or something chilly--and face that boldly----"

Dorothy laughed.--"You absurd girl!"

"--but no. It's always whether people wear clothes because they're modest or whether they're modest because they wear clothes, or something like that.--And Walter begins it--and then Laura chimes in, and then Cosimo, and then Amory, and then Dickie--and when they've said it all on Monday they say it again on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and every day--and I don't know what they've decided even yet----"

"Well, here we are," Dorothy said as she reached her own door. "Let's have some tea.... Mr. Miller hasn't been in yet, has he, Ruth?"

"No, m'm."

"Well, we'll have tea now, and you can make some fresh when he comes. And keep some cakes hot."

Mr. Miller's visit that afternoon had to do with a care so trifling that Dorothy merely took it in her stride. She had not found--she knew that she would never find--the "Idee" that Mr. Miller wanted; but if no Idees except real ones were ever called Idees we should be in a very bad way in this world. She knew that there is always a middling chance that if you state a pseudo-Idee solemnly enough, and trick it out with circumstance enough, and set people talking enough about it, it will prove just as serviceable as the genuine article; and she was equally familiar, as we have seen, with that beautiful and compensating Law by which quick and original minds are refused money when they are producing of their best but overwhelmed with it when their brains have become as dry as baked sponges. She had given Mr. Miller quite good Idees in the past; she had no objection to being paid over again for them now; and if they really had been new ones they would have been of no use to Mr. Miller for at least ten years to come. That is why the art of advertisement is so comparatively advanced. Any other art would have taken twenty years.

Therefore, as she remembered the exceeding flimsiness of the one poor Idee she had, she had resolved that Mr. Miller's eyes should be diverted as much as possible from the central lack, and kept to the bright irrelevancies with which she would adorn it. The Idee was that of the Litmus Layette ... but here we may as well skip a few of Katie's artless betrayals of her former friends, and come to the moment when Mr. Miller, with his Edward the Sixth shoulders, appeared, bowed, was introduced to Katie, bowed again, sat down, and was regaled with hot cakes and conversation. He had risen and bowed again, by the way, when Dorothy, for certain reasons of policy, had mentioned Katie's relationship to the great Sir Joseph Deedes, and Katie had told of a stand-up fight she had had with her uncle's Marshal about admittance to his lordship's private room.

"Well, now, that's something I've learned to-day," Mr. Miller magnanimously admitted, sitting down again. "So your English Judges have Marshals! I was under the impression that that was a military title, like Marshal Macmann and Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. Well now.... And how might Judge Deedes' Marshal be dressed, Miss Deedes?"

"Not 'Judge' Deedes," said Katie smiling. "That's a County Court Judge." And she explained. Mr. Miller opened his eyes wide.

"Is that so-o-o? Well now, if that isn't interesting! That's noos. He's a Honourable with a 'u' in it, and a Sir, and you call him his Lordship, and he's Mister Justice Deedes! Ain't that English!... Now let me see if I'm on the track of it. 'Your Worship'--that's a Magistrate. 'Your Honour'--that's the other sort of Judge. And 'My Lord'--that's Miss Deedes' uncle. And an English Judge has a Marshal.... Do you recollect our Marshals, Mrs. Stan?----"

Building (as it now appeared) even better than he knew, Mr. Miller had, in the past, granted the rank of Marshal to Messrs. Hallowell and Smiths' shopwalkers.

Dorothy's reason for thus flagrantly introducing Sir Joseph's name was this:--

Katie had left the Eden, and she herself was presently off to Ludlow. Thus there was the possible reversion of a job of sorts going a-begging. Katie might as well have it as anybody else. Dorothy had strictly enjoined upon her impulsive friend that on no account was she to contradict or disclaim anything she, Dorothy, might choose to say on her behalf to Mr. Miller; and she intended that the credit, such as it was, of the last Idee she even intended to propose to Mr. Miller--the Litmus Layette--should be Katie's start. Once started she would have to look after herself.

So when Mr. Miller passed from the subject of Hallowell and Smiths' Marshals to that of his long-hoped-for Idee, Dorothy was ready for him. Avoiding the weak spot, she enlarged on the tradition--very different from a mere superstition--that, in Layettes, blue stood always for a boy and pink for a girl.

"You see," she said, "this is England when all's said, and we're _fright_fully conservative. Don't condemn it just because it wouldn't go in New York.... You've heard of the Willyhams, of course?" she broke off suddenly to ask.

"I cann't say I have, Mrs. Stan. But I'm sitting here. Tell me. They're a Fam'ly, I presoom?"

"Yes. Upshire's their title. Now that title's descended in the female line ever since Charles the First. Ever since then the Willyham Layettes have been pink as a matter of course. And now, not a month ago, there was a boy, and they had to rush off and get blue at the very last moment.... Let me see, your children are little girls, aren't they?" she again interrupted herself to say.

"Three little goils, Mrs. Stan, with black-and-white check frocks and large black bows in their hair."

"Well, and mine are boys. Blue for me and pink for you. But we'll come to that in a moment.--The thing that really strikes me as extraordinary is that in all these ages, with all the countless babies that have been born, we don't know _yet_ which it's going to be!... And I don't think we ever shall. Now just think what that means--not just to a Royal House, with a whole succession depending on it, and crowns and dynasties and things--but to _every_ woman! You see the _tremendous_ interest they take in it at once!--But I don't know whether a man can ever understand that----"

She paused.

"Go on, Mrs. Stan--I want the feminine point of voo," said Mr. Miller.--"The man ain't broken Post Toasties yet that has more reverence for motherhood than what I have----"

"I know," said Dorothy bashfully. "But it isn't the same--being a father. It's--it's different. It's not the same. I doubt whether _any_ man knows what it means to us as we wait and wonder--and wait and wonder--day after day--day after day----"

Here she dropped her eyes. Here also Mr. Miller dropped his head.

"It isn't the same--being a father--it's different," Dorothy was heard to murmur.

Mr. Miller breathed something about the holiest spot on oith.

"So you see," Dorothy resumed presently, hoping that Mr. Miller did not see. "It's the nearest subject of all to us. The very first question we ask one another is, 'Do you hope it's a little boy or a little girl?' And as it's impossible to tell, it's impossible for us to make our preparations. Lady Upshire doesn't know one bit more about it than the poorest woman in the streets. And this in an age that boasts of its Science!"

"Well," said Mr. Miller, giving it consideration, "that's ver-ry true. I ain't a knocker; I don't want to get knocking our men of science; but it's a fact they cann't tell. I recollect Mrs. Miller saying to me----"

"Yes--look at it from Mrs. Miller's point of view----"

"I remember Mrs. Miller using the ver-ry woids you've just used, Mrs. Stan. (I hope this don't jolt Miss Deedes too much; it's ver-ry interessting). And that's one sure thing, that it ain't a cinch for Mrs. Bradley Martin any more than what it is for any poor lady stenographer at so many dallars per. But--if you'll pardon me putting the question in that form--where's the _point_, Mrs. Stan? What's the reel prapasition?"

This being precisely what Dorothy was rather carefully avoiding, again she smiled bashfully and dropped her head, as if once more calling on those profound reserves of Mr. Miller's veneration for motherhood. These even profounder reserves, of Mr. Miller's veneration for dallars, were too much to the point altogether.

"I was afraid you wouldn't understand," she sighed.

"But," said Mr. Miller earnestly, "give me something to get a hold of, Mrs. Stan. I ain't calling the psychological prapasition down any; a business man has to be psychologist all the time; but he wants it straight. Straight psychology. The feminine point of voo, but practical. It ain't for Harvard. It's for Hallowell and Smith's."

"Well," said Dorothy, "it's Miss Deedes' idea really--and it would never have occurred to her if it hadn't been for Lady Upshire--would it Katie?"

"No," said Katie.

"Very well. Suppose Lady Upshire had had the Litmus Layette. All she would have had to do would have been to take the ribbons out--the work of a moment--the pink ribbons--dip them in the preparation--and there they'd have been, ready for immediate use. And blue ones would be dipped in the other solution and of course they'd have turned pink.... You see, you can't alter the baby, but you can alter the ribbons. And it isn't only ribbons. A woolly jacket--or a pram-rug--or socks--or anything--I think it's an exceedingly clever Idea of Miss Deedes!----"

Mr. Miller gave it attention. Then he looked up.

"Would it woik?" he asked.

"Well," said Dorothy ... "it works in chemistry. But that's not the principal thing. It's its value as an advertisement that's the real thing. Think of the window-dressing!--Blue and pink, changing before people's very eyes!--Just think how--I mean, it interests _every_ woman! They'd stand in front of the window, and think--but you're a man. Mrs. Miller would understand.... Anyhow, you would get crowds of people, and that's what you want--crowds of people--that's its advertisement-value.--And then when you got them inside it would be like having the hooks at one end of the shop and the eyes at the other--a hook's no good without an eye, so they have to walk past half a mile of counters, and you sell them all sort of things on the way. _I_ think there's a great deal in it!"

"It's a Stunt," Mr. Miller conceded, as if in spite of himself he must admit thus much. "It's soitainly a Stunt. But I'm not sure it's a reel Idee."

"That," said Dorothy with conviction, "would depend entirely in your own belief in it. If you did it as thoroughly as you've done lots of other things----"

"It's soitainly a Stunt, Miss Deedes," Mr. Miller mused....

He was frowningly meditating on the mystic differences between a Stunt and an Idee, and was perhaps wondering how the former would demean itself if he took the risk of promoting it to the dignity of the latter, when the bell was heard to ring. A moment later Ruth opened the door.

"Lady Tasker," she said.

Lady Tasker entered a little agitatedly, with an early edition of the "Globe" crumpled in her hand.

II

BY THE WAY

Lady Tasker never missed the "Globe's" _By the Way_ column, and there was a curious, mocking, unpleasant By-the-Way-ishness about the announcement she made as she entered. There is a special psychological effect, in the Harvard and not in the Hallowell and Smith's sense, when you come unexpectedly in print upon news that affects yourself. The multiplicity of newspapers notwithstanding, revelation still hits the ear less harshly than it does the eye; telling is still private and intimate, type a trumpeting to all the world at once. Dorothy looked at the pink page Lady Tasker had thrust into her hand as if it also, like the Litmus Layette, had turned blue before her eyes.

"_Not_ Sir Benjamin who used to come and see father!" she said, dazed.

Lady Tasker had had time, on her way to the flat, to recover a little.

"There's only one Sir Benjamin Collins that I know of," she answered curtly.

"But--but--it _can't_ be!----"

Of course there was no reason in the world why it couldn't. Quite on the contrary, there was that best of all reasons why it could--it had happened. Three bullet-wounds are three undeniable reasons. It was the third, the brief account said, that had proved fatal.

"They say the finest view in Asia's Bombay from the stern of a steamer," said Lady Tasker, with no expression whatever. "I think your friend Mr. Cosimo Pratt will be seeing it before very long."

But Dorothy was white. _Their_ Sir Benjamin!... Why, as a little girl she had called him "Uncle Ben!" He had not been an uncle really, of course, but she had called him that. She could remember the smell of his cigars, and the long silences as he had played chess with her father, and his hands with the coppery hair on them, and his laugh, and the way the markhor at the Zoo had sniffed at his old patoo-coat, just as cats now sniffed at her own set of civet furs. And she had married him one day in the nursery, when she had been about ten, and he had taken her to the Pantomime that afternoon for a Honeymoon--and then, when she had really married Stan, he had given her the very rugs that were on her bedroom floor at this moment.

And, if this pink paper was to be believed, an Invisible Man had shot at him three times, and at the third shot had killed him.

She had not heard her aunt's words about Cosimo. She had been standing with her hand in Mr. Miller's, having put it there when he had risen to take himself off and forgotten to withdraw it again. Then Mr. Miller had gone, and Dorothy had stood looking stupidly at her aunt.

"What did you say?" she said. "You said something about Cosimo Pratt."

"Don't you go, Katie; I want to talk to you presently.--Sit down, Dot.--Get her a drink of water."

Dorothy sat heavily down and put out one hand for the paper again.--"What did you say?" she asked once more.

"Never mind just now. Put your head back and close your eyes for a minute."...

* * * * *

That was the rather unpleasant, By-the-Way part of it. For of course it was altogether By-the-Way when you looked at the matter broadly. Amory could have explained this with pellucid clearness. The murder of a Governor?... Of course, if you happened to have known that Governor, and to have married him in a child's game when you were ten and he forty, and to have gone on writing letters to him telling him all the news about your babies, and to have had letters back from him signed "Uncle Ben"--well, nobody would think it unnatural of you to be a little shocked at the news of his assassination; but Amory could easily have shown that that shock, when you grew a little calmer and came to think clearly about it, would be only a sort of extension of your own egotism. Governors didn't really matter one bit more because you were fond of them. Everybody had somebody fond of them. Why, then, make a disproportionate fuss about a single (and probably corrupt) official, when thousands suffered gigantic wrongs? The desirable thing was to look at these things broad-mindedly, and not selfishly. It was selfish, selfish and egotistical, to expect the whole March of Progress to stop because you happened to be fond of somebody (who probably hadn't been one bit better than he ought to have been). These pompous people of the official classes were always bragging about their readiness to lay down their lives for their country; very well; they had no right to grumble when they were taken at their word. Ruskin had expressed much the same thought rather finely when he had said that a soldier wasn't paid for killing, but for being killed. Some people seemed to want it both ways--to go on drawing their money while they were alive, and then to have an outcry raised when they got shot. In strict justice they ought to have been, not merely shot, but blown from the mouths of guns; but of course neither Amory nor anybody else wanted to go quite so far as that.... Nevertheless, perspective was needed--perspective, and vision of such scope that you had a clear mental picture, not of misguided individuals, who must die some time or other and might as well do so in the discharge of what it pleased them to call their "duty," but of millions of our gentle and dark-skinned brothers, waiting in rows with baskets on their heads (and making simply ripping friezes) while the Banks paid in pennies, and then holding lots of righteous and picturesque Meetings, all about Tyrant England and throwing off the Yoke. Amory would have conceded that she had never had an Uncle Ben; but if she had had fifty Uncle Bens she would still have hoped to keep some small sense of proportion about these things.

But that again only showed anybody who was anybody how hopelessly behind the noble movements of her time Dorothy was. The sense of proportion never entered her head. She gave a little shiver, even though the day was warm, and then that insufferable old aunt of hers, who might be a "Lady" but had no more tact than to interfere with people's liberty in the street, praised her gently when she came round a bit, and said she was taking it very bravely, when the truth was that she really ought to have condemned her for her absurd weakness and lack of the sense of relative values. No, there would have been no doubt at all about it in Amory's mind: that it was these people, who talked so egregiously about "firm rule," who were the real sentimentalists, and the others of the New Imperialism, with their real grasp of the true and humane principles of government, who were the downright practical folk....

All this fuss about a single Governor, of whom Mr. Prang himself had said (and there was no gentler soul living than Mr. Prang) that his extortions had been a byword and his obstinacy proof positive of his innate weakness!----

But Amory was not in the pond-room that day, and so Dorothy's sickly display of emotion went unchecked. The nurse herded the Bits together, but they were not admitted for their usual tea-time romp. Indeed, Dorothy said presently, "Do you mind if I leave you for a few minutes with Katie, auntie?" She went into her bedroom and did not return. Of all his "nieces" she had been his favourite; her foot caught in one of his Kabuli mats as she entered the bedroom. She lay down on her bed. She longed for Stan to come and put his arms about her.

He came in before Lady Tasker had finished her prolonged questioning of Katie. Aunt Grace told him where Dorothy was. Then she and Katie left together.

The newspapers showed an excellent sense of proportion about the incident. In the earlier evening editions the death of Sir Benjamin was nicely balanced by the 4.30 winners; and then a popular actor's amusing replies in the witness-box naturally overshadowed everything else. And, to anticipate a little, on the following day the "Times" showed itself to be, as usual, hopelessly in the wrong. Indeed there were those who considered that this journal made a deplorable exhibition of itself. For it had no more modesty nor restraint than to use the harsh word "murder," without any "alleged" about it, which was, of course, a flagrant pre-judging of the case. Nobody denied that at a first glance appearances _were_ a little against the gentle and dusky brother, who had been seized with the revolver still in his hand; but that was no reason why a bloated capitalist rag should thus undermine the principles of elementary justice. It ought to have made it all the more circumspect.... But anybody who was anybody knew exactly what was at the bottom of it all. The "Times" was seeking a weapon against the Government. The staff was no doubt secretly glad that it had happened, and was gloating, and already calculating its effect on an impending by-election.... Besides, there was the whole ethical question of capital punishment. It would not bring Sir Benjamin back to life to try this man, find him guilty, and do him barbarously to death in the name of the Law. That would only be two dead instead of one. The proper way would be to hold an inquiry, with the dusky instrument of justice (whose faith in his mission must have been very great since he had taken such risks for it) not presiding, perhaps, but certainly called as an important witness to testify to the Wrongness of the Conditions.... Besides, an assassination is a sort of half-negligible outbreak, regrettable certainly, for which excuse can sometimes be found: but this other would be deliberate, calculated, measured, and in flat violation of the most cardinal of all the principles on which a great Empire should be based--the principle of Mercy stiffened with exactly the right modicum of Justice....

And besides....

And besides....

And besides....

And when all is said, India is a long way off.

The publication of the news produced a curious sort of atmosphere at The Witan that afternoon. Everybody seemed desirous of showing everybody else that they were unconcerned, and yet an observer might have fancied that they overdid it ever such a little. At about the time when Lady Tasker left Dorothy with Stan, Mr. Wilkinson drove up in a cab to the green door in the privet hedge and asked for Amory. He was told that she had given word that she did not want to see anybody. But in the studio he found Mr. Brimby and Dickie Lemesurier, and the three were presently joined by Laura and Walter Wyron. A quorum of five callers never hesitated to make themselves at home at The Witan. They lighted the asbestos log, Walter found Cosimo's cigarettes, and Dickie said she was sure Amory wouldn't mind if she rang for tea. When they had made themselves quite comfortable, they began to chat about a number of things, not the murder.

"Seen Strong?" Mr. Brimby asked Mr. Wilkinson.

Mr. Wilkinson was at his most morose and truculent.

"No," he said. "I called at the office, but he was out. Doesn't put in very much time there, it seems to me. Perhaps he's at the Party's Meeting."

"How is it you aren't there, by the way?"

Mr. Wilkinson made a little sound of contempt.

"Bah! All talk. Day in and day out, talk, talk, talk. I want action. The leadership's all wrong. Want a man. I keep my seat because if I cleared out they'd be no better than a lot of tame Liberal cats, but I've no use for 'em----"

It was whispered that the members of the Party had no use for Mr. Wilkinson, and very little for one another; but it doesn't do to give ear to everything that is whispered.

Then Mr. Brimby appeared suddenly to recollect something.

"Ah yes!... Action. Speaking of action, I suppose you've seen this Indian affair in to-night's papers?"

Mr. Wilkinson was still fuming.

"That Governor? Yes, I saw it.... But it's too far away. Thousands of miles too far away. We want something nearer home. A paper that calls a spade a spade for one thing.... Anybody heard from Pratt this week?"

They discussed Cosimo's latest letter, and then Mr. Brimby said, "By the way--how will this affect him?"

"How will what affect him?"

"This news, to-night. Collins."

"Oh!... Why should it affect him at all? Don't see why it should. The 'Pall Mall' has a filthy article on it to-night. That paper's getting as bad as the 'Times.'"

Here Walter Wyron intervened.--"By the way, who _is_ this man Collins? Just pass me 'Who's Who,' Laura."

They looked Sir Benjamin up in "Who's Who," and then somebody suggested that their party wasn't complete without Edgar Strong. "I'll telephone him," said Walter; "perhaps he'll be back by this."--The telephone was in the hall, and Walter went out. Dickie told Laura how well Walter was looking. Laura replied, Yes, he was very well indeed; except for a slight cold, which anybody was lucky to escape in May, he had never been better; which was wonderful, considering the work he got through.--Then Walter returned. Strong had not yet come in, but his typist had said he'd be back soon.--"Didn't know it ran to a typist," Walter remarked, helping himself to more tea.

"It doesn't," Mr. Wilkinson grunted.

"Girl's voice, anyway.... I say, I wonder how old Prang's getting on!"

"I wonder!"

"He's gone back, hasn't he?" Dickie asked.

"Oh, a couple of months ago. Didn't Strong give him the push, Wilkie?"

"Don't suppose Strong ever did anything so vigorous," Mr. Wilkinson growled. "The only strong thing about Strong's his name. He's simply ruined that paper."

"I agree that it was at its best when Prang was doing the Indian notes."

"Oh, Prang knew what he wanted. Prang's all right in his way. But I tell you India's too far away. We want something at our own doors, and somebody made an example of that somebody knows. Now if Pratt had only been guided by me----"

"Hallo, here's Britomart Belchamber.--Why doesn't Amory come down, Brit? She's in, isn't she?"

"What?" said Miss Belchamber.

"Isn't Amory coming down?"

"She's gone out," said Miss Belchamber, adjusting her hair. "A min-ute ago," she added.

Walter Wyron said something about "Cool--with guests----," but Amory's going out was no reason why they should not finish tea in comfort. No doubt Amory would be back presently. Laura confided to Britomart that she hoped so, for the truth was that her kitchen range had gone wrong, and a man had said he was coming to look at it, but he hadn't turned up--these people never turned up when they said they would--and so she had thought it would be nice if they came and kept Amory company at supper....

"We've got some new cheese-bis-cuits," said Miss Belchamber ruminatively. "I like them. They make bone. I like to have bone made. The muscles can't act unless you have bone. That's why these bis-cuits are so good. Good-bye."

And Miss Belchamber, with a friendly general smile, went off to open her sweat-ducts by means of a hot bath and to close them again afterwards with a cold sponge.

* * * * *

Amory had not gone out this time to press amidst strange people and to look into strange and frightening eyes, various in colour as the pebbles of a beach, and tipped with arrow-heads of white as they turned. Almost for the first time in her life she wanted to be alone--quite alone, with her eyes on nobody and nobody's eyes on her. She did not reflect on this. She did not reflect on anything. She only knew that The Witan seemed to stifle her, and that when she had seen Mr. Wilkinson alight from his cab--and Mr. Brimby and Dickie come--and the Wyrons--with all the others no doubt following presently--it had come sharply upon her that these wearisomely familiar people used up all the air. The Witan without them was bad enough; The Witan with them had become insupportable.

It was not the assassination of Sir Benjamin that had disturbed her. Since Cosimo's departure she had glanced at Indian news only a shade less perfunctorily than before, and she had turned from this particular announcement to the account of New Greek Society's production with hardly a change of boredom. No: it was everything in her life--everything. She felt used up. She thought that if anybody had spoken to her just then she could only have given the incoherent and petulant "Don't!" of a child who is interrupted at a game that none but he understands. She hated herself, yet hated more to be dragged out of herself; and as she made for the loneliest part of the Heath she wished that night would fall.

She had to all intents and purposes packed Cosimo off to India in order to have him out of the way. His presence had become as wearisome as that of the Wyrons and the rest of them. And that was as much as she had hitherto told herself. She had taken no resolution about Edgar Strong. But drifting is accelerated when an obstacle is removed, and her heart had frequently beaten rapidly at the thought that, merely by removing Cosimo, she had started a process that would presently bring her up against Edgar Strong. She had pleased and teased and frightened herself with the thought of what was to happen then. So many courses would be open to her. She might actually take the mad plunge from which she had hitherto shrunk. She might do the very opposite--stare at him, should he propose it, and inform him that, some thousands of miles notwithstanding, she was still Cosimo's wife. She might pathetically urge on him that, now more than ever, she needed a friend and not a lover--or else that, now more than ever, she needed a lover and not a friend. She might say that nothing could be done until Cosimo came back--or that when Cosimo came back would be too late to do anything. Or she might....

Or she might....

Or she might....

Yet when all was said, Edgar and the "Novum's" offices were perilously near....

For it was not what she might do, but what he might do, that set her heart beating most rapidly of all. Her dangerous dreaming always ended in that. Here was no question of that trumpery subterfuge of the Wyrons. It struck her with extraordinary force and newness that she was what was called "a married woman." It was a familiar phrase; it was as familiar as those other phrases, "No, just living together," "Well, as long as there are no children," "Love _is_ Law"--familiar as the air. Left to herself, the phrases might have remained both her dissipation and her safeguard.... But he? Would phrases content him? After she had tempted him as she knew she had tempted him? After that stern repression of himself in favour of his duty? Or would he ask her again what she thought he was made off?... It was always the man who was expected to take the decisive step. The woman simply--offered--and, if she was clever, did it in such a way that she could always deny it after the fact. If Edgar should _not_ stretch out his hand--well, in that case there would be no more to be said. But if he should?...

A little sound came from her closed lips.

Cosimo had been away for nearly three months, and had not yet said anything about returning; and Amory had smiled when, after many eager protestings that there was no reason (Love being Law) why he should go alone, he had after all funked taking his splendid turnip of a Britomart with him. Of course: when it had come to the point, he had lacked the courage. Amory could not help thinking that that lack was just a shade more contemptible than his philanderings. Courage!... Images of Cleopatra and the carpet rose in her mind again.... But the images were faint now. She had evoked them too often. Her available mental material had become stale. She needed a fresh impulse--a new experience----

But--she always got back to the same point--suppose Edgar should take her, not at her word, nor against her word, but with words, for once, left suddenly and entirely out of the question?...

Again the thumping heart----

It was almost worth the misery and loneliness for the sake of that painful and delicious thrill.

She was sitting on a bench under the palings of Ken Wood, watching a saffron sunset. A Prince Eadmond's girl in a little green Florentine cap passed. She reminded Amory of Britomart Belchamber, and Amory rose and took the root-grown path to the Spaniards Road and the West Heath. She intended to take a walk as far as Golders Green Park; but, as it happened, she did not get so far. A newsboy, without any sense of proportion whatever, was crying cheerfully, "Murder of a Guv'nor--Special!" This struck Amory. She thought she had read it once before that afternoon, but she bought another paper and turned to the paragraph. Yes, it was the same--and yet it was somehow different. It seemed--she could not tell why--a shade more important than it had done. Perhaps the newsboy's voice had made it sound more important: things did seem to come more personally home when they were spoken than when they were merely read. She hoped it was not very important; it might be well to make sure. She was not very far from home; her Timon-guests would still be there; somebody would be able to tell her all about it....

She walked back to The Witan again, and, still hatted and dressed, pushed at the studio door.

Nobody had left. Indeed, two more had come--young Mr. Raffinger of the McGrath, and a friend of his, a young woman from the Lambeth School of Art, who had Russianized her painting-blouse by putting a leather belt round it, and who told Amory she had wanted to meet her for such a long time, because she had done some designs for Suffrage Christmas Cards, and hoped Amory wouldn't mind her fearful cheek, but hoped she would look at them, and say exactly what she thought about them, and perhaps give her a tip or two, and, if it wasn't asking too much, introduce her to the Manumission League, or to anybody else who might buy them.... Young Raffinger interrupted the flow of gush and apologetics.

"Oh, don't bother her just yet, Eileen. Let her read her cable first."

Amory turned quickly.--"What do you say? What cable?" she asked.

"There's a cable for you."

It lay on the uncleared tea-table, and everybody seemed to know all about the outside of it at all events. As it was not in the usual place for letters, perhaps it had been passed from hand to hand. Quite unaffectedly, they stood round in a ring while Amory opened it, with all their eyes on her. They most frightfully wanted to know what was in it, but of course it would have been rude to ask outright. So they merely watched, expectantly.

Then, as Amory stood looking at the piece of paper, Walter was almost rude. But in the circumstances everybody forgave him.

"Well?" he said; and then with ready tact he retrieved the solecism. "Hope it's good news, Amory?"

For all that there was just that touch of _schadenfreude_ in his tone that promised that he for one would do his best to bear up if it wasn't.

Amory was a little pale. It was the best of news, and yet she was a little pale. Perhaps she was faint because she had not had any tea.

"Cosimo's coming home," she said.

There was a moment's silence, and then the congratulations broke out.

"Oh, good!"

"Shall be glad to see the old boy!"

"Finished his work, I suppose?"

"Or perhaps it's something to do with this Collins business?"

It was Mr. Brimby who had made this last remark. Amory turned to him slowly.

"What is this Collins business?" she asked.

Mr. Brimby dropped his sorrowing head.

"Ah, poor fellow," he murmured. "I'm afraid he went to work on the wrong principles. A _little_ more conciliation ... but it's difficult to blame anybody in these cases. The System's at fault. Let us not be harsh. I quite agree with Wilkinson that the 'Pall Mall' to-night is very harsh."

"Cowardly," said Mr. Wilkinson grimly. "Rubbing it in because they have some sort of a show of a case. They're always mum enough on the other side."

Amory lifted her head.

"But you say this might have something to do with Cosimo's coming back. Tell me at once what's happened.--And put that telegram down, Walter. It's mine."

They had never heard Amory speak like this before. It was rather cool of her, in her own house, and quite contrary to the beautiful Chinese rule of politeness. And somehow her tone seemed, all at once, to dissipate a certain number of pretences that for the last hour or more they had been laboriously seeking to keep up. That, at any rate, was a relief. For a minute nobody seemed to want to answer Amory; then Mr. Wilkinson took it upon himself to do so--characteristically.

"Nothing's happened," he said, "--nothing that we haven't all been talking about for a year and more. What the devil--let's be plain for once. To look at you, anybody'd think you hadn't meant it! By God, if _I'd_ had that paper of yours!... I told you at the beginning what Strong was--neither wanted to do things nor let 'em alone; but _I'd_ have shown you! I'd have had a dozen Prangs! But he didn't want one--and he didn't want to sack him--afraid all the time something 'ld happen, but daren't stop--doing too well out of it for that ... and now that it's happened, what's all the to-do about? You're always calling it War, aren't you? And it _is_ War, isn't it? Or only Brimby's sort of War--like everything else about Brimby?----"

Here somebody tried to interpose, but Mr. Wilkinson raised his voice almost to a shout.

"Isn't it? Isn't it?... Lookee here! A little fellow came here one Sunday, a little collier, and he said 'Wilkie knows!' And by Jimminy, Wilkie does know! I tell you it's everybody for himself in this world, and I'm out for anything that's going! (Yes, let's have a bit o' straight talk for a change!) War? Of course it's War! What do we all mean about street barricades and rifles if it isn't War? It's War when they fetch the soldiers out, isn't it? Or is that a bit more Brimby? And you can't have War without killing somebody, can you? I tell you we want it at home, not in India! I've stood at the dock gates waiting to be taken on, and I know--no fear! To hell with your shillyshallying! If Collins gets in the way, Collins must get out o' the way. We can't stop for Collins. I wish it had been here! I can just see myself jumping off a bridge with a director in my arms--the fat hogs! If I'd had that paper! There'd have been police round this house long ago, and then the fun would have started!... Me and Prang's the only two of all the bunch that _does_ know what we want! And Prang's got his all right--my turn next--and I shan't ask Brimby to help me----"

Through a sort of singing in her ears Amory heard the rising cries of dissent that interrupted Mr. Wilkinson--"Oh no--hang it--Wilkinson's going too far!" But the noise conveyed little to her. Stupidly she was staring at the blue and yellow jets of the asbestos log, and weakly thinking what a silly imitation the thing was. She couldn't imagine however Cosimo had come to buy it. And then she heard Mr. Wilkinson repeating some phrase he had used before: "There'd have been police round this house and then the fun would have begun!" Police round The Witan, she thought? Why? It seemed very absurd to talk like that. Mr. Brimby was telling Mr. Wilkinson how absurd it was. But Mr. Brimby himself was rather absurd when you came to think of it....

Then there came another shouted outburst.--"Another Mutiny? Well, what about it? It _is_ War, isn't it? Or is it only Brimby's sort of War?----"

Then Amory felt herself grow suddenly cold and resolved. Cosimo was coming back. Whether he had made India too hot to hold him, as now appeared just possible, she no longer cared, for at last she knew what she intended to do. Her guests were wrangling once more; let them wrangle; she was going to leave this house that Mr. Wilkinson apparently wanted to surround with police as a preliminary to the "fun." Edgar might still be at the office; if he was not, she would sleep at some hotel and find him in the morning. Then she would take her leap. She had hesitated far too long. She would not go and look at the twins for fear lest she should hesitate again....

Just such a sense of rest came over her as a swimmer feels who, having long struggled against a choppy stream, suddenly abandons himself to it and lets it bear him whither it will.

Unnoticed in the heat of the dispute, she crossed to the studio door. She thought she heard Laura call, "Can I come and help, Amory?" No doubt Laura thought she was going to see about supper. But she no longer intended to stay even for supper in this house of wrangles and envy and crowds and whispering and crookedness.

Her cheque-book and some gold were in her dressing-table drawer upstairs. She got them. Then she descended again, opened the front door, closed it softly behind her again, passed through the door in the privet hedge, and walked out on to the dark Heath.

III

_DE TROP_

Those who knew Edgar Strong the best knew that the problem of how to make the best of both worlds pressed with a peculiar hardship on him. The smaller rebel must have the whole of infinity for his soul to range in--and, for all the practical concern that man has with it, infinity may be defined as the condition in which the word of the weakest is as good as that of the wisest. Give him scope enough and Mr. Brimby cannot be challenged. There is no knowledge of which he says that it is too wonderful for him, that it is high and he cannot attain unto it.

But Edgar Strong knew a little more than Mr. Brimby. He bore his share of just such a common responsibility as is not too great for you or for me to understand. Between himself and Mr. Prang had been a long and slow and grim struggle, without a word about it having been said on either side; and it had not been altogether Edgar Strong's fault that in the end Mr. Prang had been one too many for him.

For, consistently with his keeping his three hundred a year (more than two-thirds of which by one means and another he had contrived to save), he did not see that he could have done much more than he had done. Things would have been far worse had he allowed Mr. Wilkinson to oust him. And now he knew that this was the "Novum's" finish. Whispers had reached him that behind important walls important questions were being asked, and a ponderous and slow-moving Department had approached another Body about certain finportations (Sir Joseph Deedes, Katie's uncle, knew all about these things). And this and that and the other were going on behind the scenes; and these deep mutterings meant, if they meant anything at all, that it was time Edgar Strong was packing up.

Fruit-farming was the line he fancied; oranges in Florida; and it would not take long to book passages--passages for two----

He had heard the news in the early afternoon, and had straightway sent off an express messenger to the person for whom the second passage was destined. Within an hour this person had run up the stairs, without having met anybody on a landing whom it had been necessary to ask whether Mr. So-and-So, the poster artist, had a studio in the building. Edgar Strong's occupation as she had entered had made words superfluous. He had been carrying armfuls of papers into the little room behind the office and thrusting them without examination on the fire. The girl had exchanged a few rapid sentences with him, had bolted out again, hailed a taxi, sought a Bank, done some business there on the stroke of four, and had driven thence to a shipping office. Edgar Strong, in Charing Cross Road, had continued to feed his fire. The whole place smelt of burning paper. A mountain of ashes choked the grate and spread out as far as the bed and the iron washstand in the corner.

The girl returned. From under the bed she pulled out a couple of bags. Into these she began to thrust her companion's clothes. Into a third and smaller bag she crammed her own dressing-gown and slippers, a comb and a couple of whalebone brushes, and other things. She had brought word that the boat sailed the day after to-morrow....

"There's the telephone--just answer it, will you?" Strong said, casting another bundle on the fire....

"Wyron," said the girl, returning.

"Never mind those boots; they're done; and you might get me a safety-razor; shall want it on the ship.... By the way--I think we'd better get married."

The girl laughed.--"All right," she said as she crammed a nightdress-case into the little bag....

* * * * *

Amory walked quickly down the East Heath. As she walked she could not help wondering what there had been to make such a fuss about. Indeed she had been making quite a bugbear of the thing she was now doing quite easily. What, after all, would it matter? Would a single one of the people she passed so hurriedly think her case in the least degree special? Had they not, each one of them, their own private and probably very similar affairs? Was there one of them of whom it could be said with certainty that he or she was not, at that very moment, bound on the same errand? She looked at the women. There was nothing to betray them, but it was quite as likely as not. Nor could they tell by looking at her. For that matter, the most resolute would hide it the most. And a person's life was his own. Nobody would give him another one when he had starved and denied the one he had. There might not be another one. Some people said that there was, and some that there wasn't. Meetings were held about that too, but so far they hadn't seemed to advance matters very much....

Nor was it the urge of passion that was now driving her forward at such a rate. She could not help thinking that she had been rather silly in her dreams about carpets and Nubians and those things. If Edgar was passionate, very well--she would deny him nothing; but in that case she would feel ever so slightly superior to Edgar. She rather wished that that was not so; she hoped that after all it might not be so; on the whole she would have preferred to be a little his inferior. She had not been inferior to Cosimo. They, she and Cosimo, had talked a good deal about equality, of course, but, after all, equality was a balance too nice for the present stressful stage of the struggle between man and woman; a theoretical equality if you liked, but in practice the thing became a slight temporary feminine preponderance, which would, no doubt, settle down in time. Virtually she had been Cosimo's master. She did not want to be Edgar's. Rather than be that he might--her tired sensibilities gave a brief flutter--he might even be a little cruel to her if he wished....

A Tottenham Court Road bus was just starting from the bottom of Pond Street. She ran to catch it. It moved forward again, with Amory sitting inside it, between a man in a white muffler and opera-hat and a flower-woman returning home with her empty baskets.

Many, many times Amory Pratt, abusing her fancy, had rehearsed the scene to which she was now so smoothly and rapidly approaching; but she rehearsed nothing now. It would suffice for her just to appear before Edgar; no words would be necessary; he would instantly understand. Of course (she reflected) he might have left the office when she got there; it was even reasonably probable that he would have left; it was not a press-night; twenty to one he would have left. But her thoughts went forward again exactly as if she had not just told herself this.... He would be there. She would go up to him and stand before him. As likely as not not a word would pass between them. She felt that she had used too many words in her life. She and her set had discussed subjects simply out of existence. Often, by the time they had finished talking, not one of them had known what they had been talking about. It had been sheer dissipation. Men, she had heard, took drinks like that, and by and by were unable to stand, and then made hideous exhibitions of themselves. Nobody could say exactly at what point they, the men, became incapable, nor the point at which the others, Amory and her set, became word-sodden; in the one case the police (she had heard) made them walk a chalk-line; but there was no chalk-line for the others. Their paths were crooked as scribble....

But she was going straight at last--as straight as a pair of tram-lines could take her--and so far was she from wishing that the tram would go more slowly, that she would have hastened it had she been able.

The "Mother Shipton"--the Cobden Statue--Hampstead Road--the "Adam and Eve." At this last stopping-place she descended, crossed the road, and boarded a bus. She remembered that once before, when she had visited the office in a taxi, the cab had seemed to go at a terrifying speed; now the bus seemed to crawl. A fear took her that every stop might cause her to miss him by just a minute. She tapped with her foot. She looked almost angrily at those who got in or out. That flower-woman: why couldn't she have got out at the proper stopping-place, instead of upsetting everything with her baskets hardly a hundred yards further on?... Off again; she hoped to goodness that was the last delay. She had been stupid not to take a taxi after all.

She descended opposite the "Horse Shoe," not three minutes' walk from the "Novum's" offices. Then again she called herself stupid for not having sat where she was, since the bus would go straight past the door. But she could be there as soon as the bus if she walked quickly.----

The bus overtook her and beat her by twenty yards.

The bookseller's shutters were down, and in the window of the electric-fittings shop could be dimly seen a ventilating fan, a desk-lamp, and a switchboard or two. Amory turned in under the arch that led to the yard behind. Her eyes had gone up to the third floor almost before she had issued from the narrow alley----

Ah!... So she was not too late. There was a light.

Through the ground-floor cavern in which the sandwich-boards were stacked she had for the first time to slacken her pace; the floor was uneven, and the place was crowded with dim shadows. A man smoking a pipe over an evening paper turned as she entered, but, seeing her make straight for the stairs, he did not ask her her business. The winding wooden staircase was black as a flue. On the first landing she paused for a moment; the man with the pipe had, after all, challenged her, "Who is it you want, Miss?" he called from below.... But he did not follow her. A vague light from the landing window showed her the second flight of wedge-shaped wooden steps. She mounted them, and gained the corridor hung with the specimens of the poster-artist's work. Ahead along the passage a narrow shaft of light crossed the floor. She gave one more look behind, for fear the man below had, after all, followed her; she was determined, but that did not mean that she necessarily wished to be seen....

Her life was her own, to do what she liked with. Nobody would give her another one....

And Edgar might be cruel if he wished....

For one instant longer she hesitated. Then she pushed softly at the door from which the beam of light came.

The quietness of her approach was wasted after all. There was nobody in the office. The floor was untidy with scattered leaves of paper, and Edgar had carelessly left every drawer of his desk open; but that only meant that he could not be very far away. Probably he was in the waiting-room. She approached the door of it.

But, as she did so, some slight unfamiliarity about the place struck her. The first room of the three, or waiting-room, she knew, from having once or twice pushed at the first door of the passage and having had to pass through that ante-room. Of the third room she knew nothing save that it was used as a sort of general lumber-room. But the rooms seemed somehow to have got changed about. It was from this third room, and not from the waiting-room, that a bright light came, and the smell of charred paper. The door was partly open. Amory advanced to it.

As she did so somebody spoke.

For so slight a cause, the start that Amory gave was rather heartrending. She stopped dead. Her face had turned so chalky a white that the freckles upon it, which ordinarily scarcely showed, looked almost unwholesome.

In her mind she had given Edgar Strong leave to be cruel to her, but not with this cruelty. The cruelty we choose is always another cruelty. Once a man, who miraculously survived a flogging, said that by comparison with the anguish of the second stroke that of the first was almost a sweetness; and after the third, and fourth, men, they say, have laughed. It happened so to Amory. The voices she heard were not loud; so much the worse, when a few ordinary, grunted, half expressions could so pierce her.

"----months ago, but I wasn't ready. I stayed on here for nobody's convenience but my own, I can tell you." It was Edgar who said this.

Then a woman's voice--

"I don't think this waistcoat's worth taking; I've patched and patched it----"

"Oh, chuck it under the bed. And I say--we've had nothing to eat. Make the cocoa, will you?"

"Just a minute till I finish this bag.--What'll Pratt say when he comes back?"

"As I shan't be here to hear him, it's hardly worth while guessing."

"Will Wilkinson take it over?"

"The 'Novum'?... I don't think there'll be any more 'Novum.' I suppose these London Indians will be holding a meeting. I don't like 'em, but let's be fair to them: most of 'em are all right. They've got to dissociate themselves from this Collins business somehow. But I expect some lunatic will go and move an amendment.... Well, it won't matter to us. We shall be well down the Channel by that time."

Then the girl gave a low laugh.--"I _do_ think you might buy me a trousseau, Ned--the way it's turned out----"

The man's voice grunted.

"I thought that would be the next. Give you something and you all want something else immediately.... Can't afford it, my dear. I've only pulled between three and four hundred out of this show, living here, paying myself space-rates and all the lot; and we shall want all that."

Again the low voice--very soft and low.

"But you'll be a little sorry to leave here, won't you--m'mmm?----" (This was the second stroke, by comparison with which the first had been sweet.)

Strong spoke brusquely.--"Look here, old girl--we've heaps of things to do to-night--lots of time before us--don't let's have any nonsense----"

"No-o-o?"----

Amory, besides hearing, might have seen; but she did not. Something had brought into her head her own words to Walter Wyron of an hour or two before, when Walter had picked up the cable announcing Cosimo's return: "Put that down, Walter; it's mine." This other, that was taking place in that inner room, was theirs. It would have been perfectly easy to strike them dumb by appearing, just for one moment, in the doorway of this--lumber-room; but she preferred not to do it. If she had, she felt that it would have been the remains of a woman they would have seen. There is not much catch in striking anybody dumb when the process involves their seeing--that. Much better to steal out quietly....

Noiselessly she turned her back to the half-open door. She tiptoed out into the corridor again. For a dozen yards she continued to tiptoe--in order to spare them; and then she found herself at the head of the steep stairs. She descended. She had not made a single sound. Down below the man was still reading the paper, and again he looked round. At another time Amory might have questioned him; but again she did not. There was nothing to learn. She knew.

It was the first thing she had ever really known.

Bowed with the strangeness of knowledge, she walked slowly out into Charing Cross Road.

IV

GREY YOUTH

She continued to walk slowly; the slowness was as remarkable as her haste had been. She had intended, had she missed Edgar, to go to an hotel; but home was hotel enough, hotel home. Home--home to a house without privacy--home to children of whom she was not much more than technically the mother--home to an asbestos log and to the absence of a husband that was at least as desirable as his presence: nothing else remained.

For her lack seemed total--so total as hardly to be a lack. She desired no one thing, and a desire for everything is an abuse of the term "desire." So she walked slowly, stopping now and then to look at a flagstone as if it had been a remarkable object. And as she walked she wondered how she had come to be as she was.

She could not see where her life had gone wrong. She did not remember any one point at which she had taken a false and crucial step. For example, she did not think this grey and harmonious totality of despondency had come of her marrying Cosimo. They were neither outstandingly suited nor unsuited to one another, and a thousand marriages precisely similar were made every day and turned out well enough. No; it could not be that she had expected too much of marriage. She had not courted disappointment that way.... (But stay: had the trouble come of her not expecting largely enough? Of her not having assumed enough? Of her not having said to Life, "Such and such I intend to have, and you shall provide it?" Would she have fared better then?)... And if Cosimo had brought her no wonder, neither had her babes. People were in the habit of saying astonishing things about the miracle of the babe at the breast, but Amory could only say that she had never experienced these things. She had wondered that she should not, when so many others apparently did, but the fact remained, that bearing had been an anguish and nursing an inconvenience. And so at the twins she had stopped.

Would it have been better had she not stopped? Would she have been happier with many children? Without children at all? Or unmarried? Or ought her painting to have been husband, home and children to her?...

It was a little late in the day to ask these questions now----

And yet there had been no reason for asking them earlier----

It had needed that, her first point of knowledge, to bring it home into her heart....

But do not suppose that she was in any pain. As a spinally-anaesthetized subject may have a quite poignant interest in the lopping off of one of his own limbs, and may even wonder that he feels no local pain, so she assisted at her own dismemberment. Home, husband, babes, her art--one after another she now seemed to see them go--or rather, seemed to see that they had long since gone. She saw this going, in retrospect. It was as if, though only degree by degree had the pleasant things of life ticked away from her, the escapement was now removed from her memory, allowing all with a buzz to run down to a dead stop. She could almost hear that buzz, almost see that soft rim of whizzing teeth....

Now all was stillness--stillness without pain. She knew now what Edgar Strong had been doing. She knew that he had been making use of her, pocketing Cosimo's money, using the "Novum's" office as his lodging, had had his bed there, his slippers in the fender, his kettle, his cocoa, his plates, his cups, his.... And she knew now that Edgar Strong was only one of those who had clustered like leeches about Cosimo.... She forgot how much Cosimo had said that from first to last it had all cost. She thought twenty thousand pounds. Twenty thousand pounds, all vanished between that first Ludlow experiment and that last piece of amateur sociology, three revolver shots in a man's back! As a price it was stiffish. She did not quite know what the provider of the money had had out of it all. At any rate she herself had this curious stilly state of painless but rather sickening knowledge. And knowledge, they say, is above rubies. So perhaps it was cheap after all....

But where had she gone wrong? Had she simply been born wrong? Would it have made any difference whatever she had done? Or had all this been appointed for her or ever her mother had conceived her?

She asked herself this as she passed Whitefield's Tabernacle; still walking slowly, she was well up Hampstead Road and still no answer had occurred to her. But somewhere near the gold-beater's arm on the right-hand side of the road a thought did strike her. She thought that she would not go home after all. This was not because to go home now would be inglorious; it was no attempt to keep up appearances; it was merely that she would have preferred anything to this horrible numbness. Pain would be better. It is at any rate a condition of pain that you must be alive to feel it, and she did not feel quite alive. This might be a dream from which she would presently wake, or a waking from which she would by and by drop off to sleep again. In either case it was more than she could bear for much longer, and, did she go home, she would have to bear it throughout the night--for days--until Cosimo came back--after that----

But where else to go, if not to The Witan? To Laura's? To Dickie's? That would be the same thing as going home: little enough change from spinal anaesthesia in that! They could not help. Of all her old associates, there was hardly one but might--that was to say if anything extraordinary ever happened to them, like suddenly getting to know something--there was hardly one of them but might experience precisely this same hopeless perfection of wrongness, and fail to discover any one point at which it had all begun. It was rather to be hoped (Amory thought) that they never would get to know anything. They were happier as they were, in a self-contained and harmonious ignorance. Knowledge attained too late was rather dreadful; people ought to begin to get it fairly early or not at all. They ought to begin at about the age of Corin and Bonniebell....

A month ago the last person she would have gone to with a trouble would have been Dorothy Tasker. They had not a single view in common. Moreover, it would have been humiliating. But now that actually became, in a curious, reflex sort of way, a reason for going. She did not know that she actually wished to be humiliated; she did not think about it; but she had been looking at herself, and at people exactly like herself, for a long, long, long time, and, when you have looked at yourself too much you can sometimes actually find out something new about yourself by looking for a change at somebody else as little like you as can possibly be found. Amory had tried a good many things, but she had never tried this. It might be worth trying. She hesitated for one moment longer. This was when she feared that Dorothy might offer her, not the change from numbness to pain, but a sympathy and consolation that, something deep down within her told her, would not help her.... A little more quickly, but not much, she walked up Maiden Road. She turned into Fleet Road, and reached the tram-terminus below Hampstead Heath Station. Thence to Dorothy's was a bare five minutes. What she should say when she got to Dorothy's she did not trouble to think.

And at first it looked as if she would not be allowed to say anything at all to her, for when she rang the bell of the hall-floor flat Stan himself opened the door, looked at her with no great favour, and told her that Dorothy was not to be seen. From that Amory gathered that Dorothy was at least within.

Now when your need of a thing is very great, you are not to be put off by a young man who admits that his wife is at home, but tells you that she has some trifling affair--is in her dressing-gown perhaps, or has not made her hair tidy--that makes your call slightly inconvenient. Therefore Amory, in her need, did what the young man would no doubt have called "an infernally cheeky thing." She repeated her request once more, and then, seeing another refusal coming, waited for no further reply, but pushed past Stan and made direct for Dorothy's bedroom. Why she should have supposed that Dorothy would be in her bedroom she could not have told. She might equally well have been in the dining-room, or in the pond-room. But along the passage to the bedroom Amory walked, while Stan stared in stupefaction after her.

Dorothy was there. She had not gone to bed, but, early as it was, appeared to have been preparing to do so. Amory knew that because, though in Britomart Belchamber's case a dressing-gown and plaited hair might merely have meant that she wanted to listen to Walter Wyron's talk in looseness and comfort, or else that a plaster cast was to be taken, they certainly did not mean that in Dorothy's. And she supposed that differences of that kind were more or less what she had come to see.

Dorothy was gazing into the fire before which the youngest Bit had had his bath. Close to her own chair was drawn the chair that had evidently been lately occupied by Stan. The infant Bit's cot was in a corner of the room. At first Dorothy did not look up from the fire. Probably she supposed the person who was looking at her from the doorway to be Stan.

But as that person neither spoke nor advanced, she turned her head. The next moment a curious little sound had come from her lips. You see, in the first place, she had expected nobody less, and in the second place, she wholeheartedly shared many of her worldly old aunt's prejudices, among which was the monstrous one that established a connexion between recently-bibbed politicians in this country and revolver shots in another. And there was no doubt whatever that her presentable but brainless young husband had fostered this fallacious conviction. He might even have gone so far as to say that Amory herself was not altogether unresponsible....

And that, too, in a sense, was what Amory had come for.

The eyes of the two women met, Amory's at the door, Dorothy's startled ones looking over her shoulder; blue ones and shallow brook-brown ones; and then Dorothy half rose.

But whatever the first expression of her face had been, it hardly lasted for a quarter of an instant. Alarm instantly took its place. She had begun to get up as a person gets up who would ask another person what he is doing there. Now it was as if, though she did not yet know what it was, there was something to be done, something practical and with the hands, without a moment's delay.

"What's the matter?" she cried. "Cried" is written, but her exclamation actually gained in emphasis from the fact that, not to wake the Bit, she voiced it in a whisper.

For a moment Amory wondered why she should speak like that. Then it occurred to her that the face of a person under spinal anaesthesia might in itself be a reason. She had forgotten her face.

"May I come in?" she asked.

She took Dorothy's "Shut the door--and speak low, please--what do you want?" as an intimation that she might. Amory entered. But she was not asked to sit down. The man who runs with a fire-call, or fetches a doctor in the night, is not asked to sit down, and some urgency of that kind appeared to be Dorothy's conception of Amory's visit.

"What do you want?" she demanded again.

Amory herself felt foolish at her own reply. It was so futile, so piteous, so true. She stood as helpless as a Bit before Dorothy.

"I--I don't know," she said.

"What's the matter? What are you looking like that for? Has anything happened to Cosimo?"

"No. No. No. He's coming home. No. Nothing's happened."

"Can I be of use to you?" She was prepared to be that.

"No--yes--I don't know----"

Dorothy's eyes had hardened a little.--"_Do_ you want something--and if you don't--_had_ you to come--to-night?"

Amory spoke quite quickly and eagerly.

"Oh yes--to-night--it had to be to-night--I had to come to-night----"

Dorothy's eyes grew harder still.

"Then I think I know what you mean.... I don't think we'll talk about it. There's really nothing to be said.--So----"

Amory was vaguely puzzled. Of Dorothy's relation to Sir Benjamin she knew nothing. Dorothy appeared to be waiting for her to go. That would mean back to The Witan. But she had come here expressly to avoid going back to The Witan. Again she spoke foolishly.

"Cosimo's coming back," she said.

"My aunt thought he might be," said Dorothy in an even voice.

"And I was going away--but I'm not now----"

"Oh?"

"May I sit down?"

She did so, with her doubled fists thrust between her knees and her head a little bowed. Then her eyes wandered sideways slowly round the room. Dorothy's blouse was thrown on the wide bed; from under the bed the baby Bit's bath peeped; and on the blouse lay Dorothy's hairbrushes.

Amory was thinking of another bed, a bed she had never seen, with portmanteaus on it, and a patched old waistcoat cast underneath it, and a girl busily packing at it, a girl whose voice she had heard pouting "You might buy me a trousseau--"

Dorothy also had sat down, but only on the edge of her chair. And she thought it would be best to speak a little more plainly.

"If you'll come to-morrow I shall know better what to say to you," she said. "You see, you've taken me by surprise. I didn't think you'd come, and I don't know now what you've come for. It isn't a thing to talk about, certainly not to-day. I should have liked to-day to myself. But if you feel that you must--will you come in again to-morrow?"

But Amory hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes were noting the appointments of the bedroom again. The time had been when she would at once have denounced the room as overcrowded and unhygienic. A cot, and a bed with two pillows ... in some respects her own plan was to be preferred. But this again was the kind of thing she had come to see, and she admitted that these things were more or less governed by what people could afford. From the kicked and scratched condition of the front of the chest of drawers she imagined that Dorothy's children must romp all over the flat. A parti-coloured ball lay under the cot where the baby slept. There was a rubber bath-doll near it. The two older boys would be sleeping in the next room.

She spoke again.--"I was going away," she said, dully, "with somebody."

Once more Dorothy merely said "Oh?"

Then it occurred to Amory that perhaps Dorothy did not quite understand.

"I mean with--with somebody not my husband."

She had half expected that Dorothy would be shocked, or at least surprised; but she seemed to take it quite coolly. Dorothy, as a matter of fact, was not surprised in the very least. She too guessed at the futility of looking for a starting-point of things that grow by inevitable and infinitesimal degrees. It was rather sad, but not at all astonishing. On Amory's own premises, there was simply no reason why she shouldn't. So again she merely said "Oh?" and added after a moment, "But you're not?"

"No."

"How's that? Has what we've heard to-day made you change your mind?"

Again Amory was slightly puzzled; and at Dorothy's question she had, moreover, a sudden little hesitation. _Was_ it after all necessary that Dorothy should know everything? Would it not be sufficient, without going into details, to let Dorothy suppose she had changed her mind? It came to the same thing in the end.... Besides, Edgar Strong had not refused her that night. He had not even known of her presence in the office. Of the rest she would make a clean breast, but it was no good bothering Dorothy with that other.... She was still plunged into a sort of stupor, but these reflections stirred ever so slightly under the surface of it....

Then "what we've heard to-day" struck her. She repeated the words.

"What we've heard to-day?"

"Oh, if you haven't heard.... I only mean about the murder of my uncle," said Dorothy coldly.

This was far more than Amory could take in. She reflected for a moment. Then, "What do you say, Dorothy?" she asked slowly.

"At least he wasn't my uncle really. I liked him better than any of my uncles."

"Do you mean Sir Benjamin Collins?"

It was as if Amory had not imagined that Sir Benjamin could by any possibility have been anybody's uncle.

"I called him uncle," said Dorothy, in a voice that she tried to keep steady. "Before I could say the word--I called him----." But she decided not to risk the baby-word she had used--"Unnoo"----

It seemed to Amory a remarkable little coincidence.

"I--I didn't know," she said stupidly.

"No."

"You--you mean you--knew him?----"

"Oh ... oh yes."

Amory said again that she hadn't known....

"Then why," Dorothy would have liked to cry aloud, "_have_ you come, if it isn't to make matters worse by talking about it? That wouldn't have surprised me very much! I should have been quite prepared for you to apologize! It's the kind of thing you would do. I don't think very much of you, you see"... But again that worse than frightened look on her visitor's face struck her sharply, and again a remark of her aunt's returned to her: "They puzzle their brains till their bodies suffer, and overwork their bodies till they're little better than fools." Suddenly she gave her sometime friend more careful attention.

"Amory--," she said all at once.

Amory had her fists between her knees again.--"What?" she said without looking up.

"You just said something about--going away. I want to ask you something. You haven't ...?"

The meaning was quite plain.

As if she had been galvanized, Amory looked sharply up.--"How dare----", she began.

But it was only a flash in the pan. Dorothy was looking into her eyes.

"You're telling me the truth?" She hated to ask the question.

"Yes," Amory mumbled, dropping her head again.

"Has Cosimo been unkind to you?"

"No."

"Nor neglected you?"

"No."

"Has--has anybody been unkind to you?" She could not speak of "somebody" by name.

Here Amory hesitated, and finally lied. It was rather a good sign that she did so. It meant returning animation....

"No," she said.

"Then what _has_ happened?"

"Nothing. That's what I asked myself. That's just it. Nothing. Nothing at all's happened."

Dorothy spoke in a low voice, as if to herself.--"I know," she murmured....

And, on the chance that she really did know, Amory clutched at the sleeve of Dorothy's dressing-gown almost excitedly.

"Yes, that's what I mean ... you do know?" she asked in a quick whisper.

"Yes--no--I'm not sure----"

"But you _do_ know that--nothing happening, nothing at all, and everything happening--everything? That's what I mean--that's what I want to know--that's why I came----"

"Don't speak so loudly. Put your hands to the fire; they're like ice. Wait; I'll get you a shawl; you're shivering.... Now I want you to tell me some things...."

And, first wrapping her up and putting Stan's pillow behind her back, she began to question her.

* * * * *

What, again, was the purport of her questions? What of those of her aunt? What of those of a good many others in an age that is producing, and for some mysterious reason or other counts it a sign of progress to produce, innumerable Amorys--so many that, stretch out your hand where you will, and you will touch one?

All is guessing: but it will pass on the time if we hold a Meeting about it now. Everybody is agreed that the way to arrive at the best conclusions is to hold a Meeting, and this will be only one more Meeting added to the cloud of Meetings in which the "Novum" went up and out--the Meeting which, as Edgar Strong had prophesied, the loyal London Indians held (in the Imperial Institute) in order to dissociate themselves from the Collins affair (as Edgar Strong had also prophesied, Mr. Wilkinson moved an amendment, "That this Meeting declines to dissociate itself, etc. etc.")--the numerous secondary Meetings that arose out of that Meeting--the Meetings of the "Novum's" creditors (for Edgar Strong in his haste to be off had omitted to pay all the bills)--the Meetings at which (Cosimo Pratt having withdrawn his support) the Eden and the Suffrage Shop had to be reconstructed--the Meetings convened to talk about this, that and the other--as many of them as you like.

Let us too, then, hold a nice, jolly Meeting, in order to find out what was the matter with Amory--a Meeting with Mr. Brimby in the Chair, to tell us that there is a great deal to be said on both sides, and that no party has a monopoly of Truth, and that the words that ought always to be on our lips as we hurl ourselves into the thickest and hottest of the fray, whatever it may be, are "To know all is to forgive all."

But let us keep our Meeting as quiet as we can, for we shall have no end of a crowd of Meeting-lovers there if we don't. The Wyrons will of course have to be admitted, and Mr. Wilkinson, and Dickie Lemesurier, and a few of the older students of the McGrath; but we do not particularly want the others--those who feel that in a better and brighter world they would have been students of the McGrath, but, as matters stand, are merely young clerks who can draw a little, young salesmen who can write a little, young auctioneers with an instinct for the best in sculpture, young foremen who yearn to express themselves in music, young governesses (or a few of them) who have heard of the enormous sums of money to be made by playwriting, New Imperialists, amateur regenerators, social prophets after working-hours, and, in a word, all the people who have just heard that it is not true that Satan is yet bound up for his promised stretch of a thousand years. A terrible number of them will get in whether we wish it or not; but let the rest be our own little party; and you shall sit next to Britomart Belchamber, and I will stand by to open the windows in case we feel the need of a little fresh air.

So Mr. Brimby will open the proceedings. He will say the things above-mentioned, and presently, with emotion and his sense of the world's sorrow gaining on him, will come to the case of their dear friend Amory Pratt. Here, he will say, is a young woman, one of themselves, who does not know what is the matter with her--who does not know what has become of her joy--who cannot understand (if Mr. Brimby may be allowed to express himself a little poetically) why the bloom of her life has turned to an early rime. And so (Mr. Brimby will continue), knowing that if two heads are better than one, two hundred heads must be just one hundred times better still, their friend has submitted her case to the Meeting. He will beg them to approach that case sympathetically. Let the extremists of the one part (if there be any) balance the extremists of the other, leaving as an ideal and beautiful middle nullity those words he had used before, but did not apologize for using again--to know all is to forgive all. And with these few remarks (if we are lucky), Mr. Brimby will say no more, but will call upon their friend Mr. Walter Wyron to state his view of their friend's case.

Then Walter will get up, with his hands in the pockets of his knickers, and it will not be his fault if he does not get off an epigram or two of the "Love is Law" kind. But you will not fail to notice that Walter is not his ordinary jaunty self. The withdrawal of Cosimo's support is going to hit him rather hard, and glances will be exchanged, and one or two will whisper behind their hands, "Isn't Walter beginning to live a little on his reputation?" Still, Walter will contribute his quotum. We shall hear that, in his opinion, the Cause of Synthetic Protoplasm is making such vast strides to-day that we must revise every one of our estimates in the light of the most recent knowledge, having done which we shall probably find that what is really the matter with Amory is that, by comparison with the mechanical appliances of Loeb and Delage--appliances which he will take leave to call the Womb of the Workshop--their friend Amory is over-vitalized.

Then Mr. Wilkinson will spring to his feet. And Mr. Wilkinson also will be more than a little sore about Cosimo's cowardly backsliding. He will say first of all that their Chairman, as usual, is talking out of his hat, and that anybody with a grain of sense knew that to know all was to have a contempt for all; and then he will point out that all the trouble had come of shillyshallying with the wrong policy. Under Strong's direction of the "Novum," he will say, Amory had been hitting the air to no purpose; whereas had he, Mr. Wilkinson, been allowed a chance, they would have had the proletariat armed with rifles by this, and Pratt's wife would have been a _tricoteuse_, doing a bit of knitting conspiratoriably and domestically useful at one and the same time--would have worn a Phrygian cap, and carried a pike, and sung "A la Lanterne," and put a bit of fire into the men! That's what she ought to have done, and have had a bit of a run for her money, instead of shillyshallying about with that idiot Strong----

And then a maiden speech will be given us. Mr. Raffinger, of the McGrath, will get timidly but resolutely up, and we shall all applaud him when he says that the bad old _régime_ at the McGrath was at the bottom of all the mischief. The stupid old Professors of the past had tried to drill instruction into the students instead of allowing each one to do exactly as he pleased and so to find his own soul. Amory had been crushed under the cruel old Juggernaut of discipline. But that, happily, was a thing of the past at the McGrath. Now they went on the more enlightened principles laid down by Séguin, who cured a child of destructiveness by giving it a piece of priceless Venetian glass to play with, and when he broke it gave it another unique piece, and then another, and another after that, and another, until by degrees the child learned, _and would never have to unlearn_ (that was the important thing!) that it was very naughty to break valuable Venetian glass. (A "Hear hear" from Mr. Brimby, which will probably prove so disconcerting to young Mr. Raffinger that he will sit down as suddenly as if Mr. Wilkinson had discharged two bullets at him).

And then Laura Wyron will speak, saying tremulously that she can't understand why Amory isn't happy when she has those two lovely babies; but she is not happy, and never will be again, because she has turned her back on her art; and Britomart Belchamber (who will be hoisted to her feet because she has lived in the same house with Amory, and may have something interesting and intimate to say) will doubt whether Amory has always quite closed the sweat-ducts with a cold sponge; and then the crowd will rush in--the governess playwrights will say what they think, the clerk sculptors what they think, and everybody else what he or she thinks--and presently they will have strayed a little from the business in hand, and will be discussing Cubism, or Matriarchy, or Toe-posts, or the Revival of the Ballad, or Rufty Tufty, quite beyond Mr. Brimby's power to hale them back to the proper subject. And so the Meeting will have to be adjourned, and we shall all go again to-morrow night, when Mr. Wilkinson will be in the Chair, and there ought to be some fun----

But Edgar Strong will not be there, because he will be on the water, and Cosimo will not be there, because he will be anxiously counting what money remains to him, and Mr. Prang will not be there, because he will be under arrest in Bombay. But, except for these absences, it will be a perfectly ripping Meeting----

* * * * *

But none of these things were Dorothy's business. Instead, by the time she had finished her questioning of Amory, there was no thought at all in her breast, save only the pitiful desire to help. She saw before her an old young woman, more drained and disillusioned and with less to look forward to at thirty-odd than her aunt had at seventy. Her very presence in Dorothy's house that night was a confession of it. It was the last house she would willingly have gone to, and yet there she was, begging Dorothy to tell her what had happened to her. And there was nothing for Dorothy to say in reply....

She knew that Stan, in the dining-room, was waiting to come to bed, but he must wait; Dorothy had the fire to mend, and Amory's cold hands to chafe, and to get her something hot to drink, and a dozen other things to do that had never had a beginning either, yet there they were, mere helpful habit and nothing more. Presently she set a cup of hot soup to Amory's lips.

"Drink this," she said, "and when you're rested my husband will take you home."

But that did not happen either. Amory spoke very tiredly.

"I should like--I don't want to trouble you--anywhere would do--but I don't want to go home to-night----"

Dorothy made a swift and doubting mental calculation. Where could she put her?----

"I'm simply done up," muttered Amory closing her eyes.

"I'm afraid we could only give you a shakedown in the dining-room----"

"Yes--that would do----"

Dorothy went out to give Stan his orders. Stan swore. "Rather cool, one of _that_ crew coming here, to-night of all nights!" But Dorothy was peremptory.

"It isn't cool at all. You don't know anything about it. You'll find blankets in the chest in your dressing-room, and mind you don't wake Noel. Then get some cushions--I'll air a pillowcase--and then you must go up there and tell them where she is--they'll be anxious----"

"Shall I bring those twins of hers back with me while I'm about it?" Stan asked satirically. "May as well put the lot up."

When he heard Dorothy's reply he thought that his wife really had gone mad.

"I've arranged that," she said. "We shall be putting the twins up for a time at Ludlow by and by while she and her husband go away somewhere for a change. It's the least we can do. Don't stand gaping there, Stan----"

"Hm! May I ask what's up?"

"You may if you like, but I shan't tell you."

"Hm!... Well--it's a dog's life--but I suppose it's no good my saying anything----"

"Not a bit."

So Amory was put to bed, most unhygienically, in Dorothy's dining-room; but in the middle of the night she woke, quite unable to remember where she was. There was a narrow opening between the drawn curtains; through it a glimmer of light shone on the Venetian blinds from the street-lamp outside; and without any other light Amory got out of her improvised couch. She felt her way along the wall to a switch, and then suddenly flooded the room with light.

Blinking, she looked around. She herself wore one of Dorothy's nightgowns. On Stan's armchair, near his pipe-rack, was her hat, and her clothing lay in a heap where she had stepped out of it. Dorothy's slippers lay by the fender, and Dorothy had been too occupied to remember to remove the photograph of Uncle Ben from the mantelpiece. It seemed to be watching Amory as she stood, only half awake, in her borrowed nightgown.

It was odd, the way things came about----

If you had asked Amory at six o'clock the evening before where she intended to spend the night, she would not have replied "In Dorothy Tasker's flat----"

But she felt frightfully listless, and the improvised bed was very warm----

She switched off the light and crept back.

TAILPIECE

Along the terrace of the late Sir Noel Tasker's house--"The Brear," Ludlow--there rushed a troop of ten or twelve urchins. They were dressed anyhow, in variously-coloured jerseys, shirts, jackets and blazers, and the legs of half of them were bare, and brown as sand. Their ages varied from five to fifteen, and it is hardly necessary to say that as they ran they shouted. A retriever, two Irish terriers, an Airedale and a Sealyham tore barking after them. It was a July evening, amber and windless, and the shouting and barking diminished as the horde turned the corner of the long low white house and disappeared into the beech plantation. Their tutor was enjoying a well-earned pipe in the coach-house.

From the tall drawing-room window there stepped on to the terrace a group of older people. The sound of wheels slowly ascending the drive could be heard. Lady Tasker came out first; she was followed by Cosimo and Amory and Dorothy and Stan. A little pile of labelled bags stood under the rose-grown verandah; the larger boxes had already gone on to the station by cart.

Stan took a whistle from his pocket and blew two shrill blasts; then he drew out his watch. The sounds of shouting drew near again.

"I give 'em thirty seconds," Stan remarked.... "Twenty-five, twenty-six--leg it, Corin!--ah; twenty-eight!... Company--fall in!"

The young Tims and the young Tonys, Corin and Bonniebell and the terriers, stood (dogs and all, save for their tails) stiff as ramrods. Stan replaced his watch. He had been fishing, and still wore his tweed peaked cap, with a spare cast or two wound round it.

"Company--'Shun! Stand a-a-at--ease! 'S you were! Stand a-a-at--ease! Stand easy.... Tony, fall out and see to the bags. Tim, hold the horse. Corin--Corin!--What do you keep in the trenches?"

"Silence," piped up Corin. He had a rag round one brown knee, his head was half buried in an old field-service cap, and he refused to be parted, day nor night, from the wooden gun he carried.

"Not so much noise then.--Who hauls down the flag to-night?"

"Billie."

"Billie stand by. The rest of you dismiss, but don't go far--'Evening, Richards----"

The trap drew up in front of the house. Tim held the horse's head, Tony stood among the bags. The leavetaking began.

Amory and Cosimo were going to Cumberland for the rest of the summer. They would have liked to go to Norway, but the money would no longer run to it. They seemed a little shy of one another. They had been at the Brear a fortnight, and had had the little room over the porch. The twins were remaining behind for the present. Dorothy had said they would be no trouble. This was entirely untrue. They were more trouble than all the rest put together. Corin, near the schoolroom window, was wrangling with an eight years old Woodgate now.

"They do, there! On Hampstead Heath! I've seen them, an' they've hats, an' waterbottles, an' broomsticks!"

"Pooh, broomsticks! My father has a big elephant-gun!"

"Well ... mine goes to great big Meetings, an' says 'Hear hear!'"

"My father's in India!"

"Well, so was mine!"

"_I've_ seen them troop the Colour at the Horse Guards' Parade!"

"So've I!" Corin mendaciously averred.

The other boy opened his eyes wide and protruded his mouth. It is rarely that one boy does not know when another boy is lying.

"Oh, what a big one! _You'd_ catch it if Uncle Stan heard you!"

"Well," Corin pouted, "--I will--or else I'll cry all night--hard--and I'll make Bonnie cry too!--"

"Well, an' so shall I, again, an' then I'll have seen it twice, an' you'll only have seen it once, an' if I see it every time you do you'll _never_ have seen it as often as me!"

Then Stan's voice was heard.

"Corin, come here."

It was an atmosphere of insensate militarism, but the Pratts were content to leave their offspring to breathe it for the present. They had another matter to attend to--their own marital relations. It had at last occurred to them that you cannot rule others until you can govern yourself, and they were going to see what could be done about it. They had secured a cottage miles away from anywhere, at the head of a narrow-gauge railway, and it remained to be seen whether quiet and privacy and the resources they might find within themselves would avail them better than the opposites of these things had done. There was just the chance that they might--their only chance. The twins, if all went well, would join them by and by. In the meantime they must see red, and learn to do things with once telling.

So Amory took the struggling Corin into her arms--he wanted to go to the armoury of wooden guns--and kissed him. Then he ran unconcernedly off. Dorothy saw the sad little lift of Amory's bosom, guessed the cause, and laughed.

"Shocking little ingrates!" she said. "Noel's joy when I go away is sometimes indecent.--But don't be afraid they'll be any trouble to us here. You see the rabble we have in any case."

"It's very good of you," Amory murmured awkwardly.

"Nothing of the sort. Stan loves to manage them--it keeps his hand in for managing me, he says.... Now, I don't want to hurry you, but you'd better be off if you're going to get as far as Liverpool to-night. Good-bye, dear----"

"Good-bye, Dorothy----"

"So long, Pratt--up with those bags, Tim----"

"Good-bye, Bonnie----"

"Corin! Corin!--(Hm! See if I don't have you in hand in another week or two, my boy!)--Come and say good-bye to your father."

"Good-bye, Lady Tasker----"

"All right?"

The wheels crunched; hands were waved; the rabble gave a shockingly undisciplined cheer; and young Arthur Woodgate, who had run along the terrace and stood holding the gate at the end open, saluted. Stan took out his watch again.

"Four minutes to sunset," he announced.

But there was no need to tell Billie to stand by to strike the flag that hung motionless above the gable where the old billiard-room and gun-room had been thrown together to make the schoolroom. The halyards were already in his hands.

"Here, Corin," Stan called, "you shall fire the gun to-night."

Corin gave a wild yell of joy. Well out of reach, there was an electric button on one of the rose-grown verandah posts. Stan lifted his newest recruit to it, who put a finger-tip on it and shut his eyes----

"BANG!" went the little brass carronade in the locked enclosure behind the woodshed----

And hand over hand Billie hauled the flag down.

But it would be run up again in the morning.

_Printed by_ BUTLER & TANNER, _Frome and London_.

_SPRING 1914_ METHUEN'S POPULAR NOVELS

Crown 8vo, 6s. each

IT HAPPENED IN EGYPT

By C. N. and A. M. WILLIAMSON, Authors of 'The Heather Moon,' 'The Lightning Conductor,' etc.

This book tells, in the charming manner of the authors, a story of entrancing interest for travellers in Egypt and for home-dwellers too. A young English diplomatist finds himself compelled by an unusual combination of circumstances to become the temporary conductor of a party of tourists cruising on the Mediterranean and seeing Egypt. His strange new duties plunge him into the midst of adventures both comic and serious. He composes quarrels, intervenes in love affairs, baffles the agents of a secret society, conducts his charges successfully up the Nile to Khartoum, and in the end finds love and treasure both for himself and a faithful friend.

CHANCE

By JOSEPH CONRAD, Author of 'The Nigger of the "Narcissus."'

In this new romance, which Mr. Conrad unfolds in his fascinating and curious way, partly by monologue, partly by narrative, we find the author of _Lord Jim_ again revealing one of those strange cases of human passion and disaster which he alone, of living writers, can present. The sea is in the book, but it is not entirely a book of the sea.

WHOM GOD HATH JOINED

By ARNOLD BENNETT, Author of 'Clayhanger.'

This is a re-issue of one of Mr. Bennett's most famous novels.

THE WAY HOME

By BASIL KING, Author of 'The Wild Olive.'

This is the story, minutely and understandingly told, of a sinner, his life and death. He is an ordinary man and no hero, and the final issue raised concerns the right of one who has persistently disregarded religion during his strength, in accepting its consolations when his end is near: a question of interest to every one. The book, however, is not a tract, but a very real novel.

OLD ANDY

By DOROTHEA CONYERS, Author of 'Sandy Married,' etc.

No one knows rural Ireland and its humours better than Mrs. Conyers, whose intensely Hibernian stories are becoming so well known, and throw such amusing light on that eternal and delightful Ireland which never gets into the papers or politics. In _Old Andy_ there is a very charming vein of sentiment as well as much fun and farce.

THE GOLDEN BARRIER

By AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE, Authors of 'If Youth but Knew.'

The main theme of this romance is the situation created by the marriage--a marriage of love--of a comparatively poor man, proud, chivalrous, and tender, to a wealthy heiress: a girl of refined and generous instincts, but something of a wayward 'spoilt child,' loving to use the power which her fortune gives her to play the Lady Mæcenas to a crowd of impecunious flatterers, fortune hunters, and unrecognized geniuses. On a critical occasion, thwarted in one of her mad schemes of patronage by her husband, who tries to clear her society of these sycophants and parasites, she petulantly taunts him with having been a poor man himself, who happily married money. Outraged in his love and pride, he offers her the choice of coming to share his poverty or of living on, alone, amid her luxuries. There begins a conflict of wills between these two, who remain in love with each other--prolonged naturally, and embittered, by the efforts of the interested hangers-on to keep the inconvenient husband out of Lady Mæcenas' house--but ending in a happy surrender on both sides.

THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUND

By ALICE PERRIN, Author of 'The Anglo-Indians.'

A lively and entertaining story of Anglo-Indian life dealing with the matrimonial adventures of a young lady whose forbears have all been connected with the Indian services, and who is sent out to India to find a husband in her own class of life, but marries an official of humble origin ignorant of the circumstances of his birth. Troubles and disappointments, which come near to real tragedy, end in the triumph of grit and sincerity over social barriers.

THE FLYING INN

By G. K. CHESTERTON.

This story is partly a farcical romance of the adventures of the last English Inn-keeper, when all Western Europe had been conquered by the Moslem Empire and its dogma of abstinence from wine. It might well be called 'What Might Have Been,' for it was sketched out before the legend of the Invincible Turk was broken. It involves a narrative development which is also something of a challenge in ethics. The lyrics called 'Songs of the Simple Life,' which appeared in _The New Witness_, are sung between the Inn-keeper and his friend, the Irish Captain, who are the principal characters in the romance.

THE WAY OF THESE WOMEN

By E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM, Author of 'The Missing Delora.'

In this story Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, who is never content to remain in the same rut for long, has boldly deserted the somewhat complicated mechanism which goes to the making of the modern romance. He has contented himself with weaving a tensely written story around one Event, and concentrating the whole love interest of the book upon two people. The Event in itself is one simple enough, its use in fiction almost hackneyed, yet the circumstances surrounding it are so tragical and surprising, its hidden history so unexpected, that it easily serves as the pivot of an interest arresting from the first, startling in its latter stages, almost breathless in its last development.

A CROOKED MILE

By OLIVER ONIONS, Author of 'The Two Kisses.'

This is a story of a very modern marriage following the author's previous story, _The Two Kisses_, of a very modern courtship. In it two _ménages_ are contrasted, the one run on new and liberal and enlightened lines, the other still dominated by the ideas of the benighted past. What the difference between them comes to in the end depends entirely on the interpretation put upon the story, but the comedy 'note' speaks for itself. It may be remembered that _The Two Kisses_ touches on the foibles of certain artists. _A Crooked Mile_ deals with the vagaries of a certain airy amateurism in Imperial Politics.

THE SEA CAPTAIN

By H. C. BAILEY, Author of 'The Lonely Queen.'

One of the great company of Elizabethan seamen is the hero of this novel. There is, however, no attempt at glorifying him or his comrades. Mr. Bailey has endeavoured to mingle realism with the romance of the time. Captain Rymingtowne is presented as no crusader but something of a merchant, something of an adventurer and a little of a pirate. He has nothing to do with the familiar tales of the Spanish Main and the Indies. His voyages were to the Mediterranean when the Moorish corsairs were at the height of their power, and of them and their great leaders, Kheyr-éd-din Barbarossa and Dragut Reis, the story has much to tell. Captain Rymingtowne was concerned in the famous Moorish raid to capture the most beautiful woman in Europe and in the amazing affair of the Christian prisoners at Alexandria.

FIREMEN HOT

By C. J. CUTCLIFFE HYNE, Author of 'The Adventures of Captain Kettle.'

In _Firemen Hot_, Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne has added three clearly etched portraits to a gallery which already contains those marine 'musketeers,' Thompson, McTodd, and Captain Kettle. The marine fireman is probably at about the bottom of the social scale, but, in Mr. Hyne's pages, he is very much the human being. In each chapter the redoubtable trio play before a different background, but whether they are in New Orleans or Hull, in Vera Cruz or Marseilles, one can tell in a paragraph that the author is writing of his ground from first-hand knowledge, and his characters from intimate and joyous study of them. A few Captain Kettle stories have been added.

SIMPSON

By ELINOR MORDAUNT, Author of 'The Cost of It.'

Simpson is a retired business man in the prime of life, who, beneath a rugged exterior, possesses a sympathetic heart. Yet, finding no woman to fill it, he organizes a bachelor's club of congenial spirits and leases a fine old English country estate, there to live in _dolce far niente_ untroubled by feminism in any form. How first one member of the club and then another drops away for sentimental reasons until only Simpson is left, and then his final capitulation to the only woman--all this makes a delightful bit of comedy. The book, however, is more than a comedy. Running through it is a sound knowledge of human life and character, and the writing is always brilliant. It is a book out of the ordinary in every way.

TWO WOMEN

By MAX PEMBERTON, Author of 'The Mystery of the Green Heart.'

DAVID AND JONATHAN IN THE RIVIERA

By L. B. WALFORD, Author of 'Mr. Smith.'

Two simple, unsophisticated bachelors, respectively minister and elder of a Scotch country parish, go to the Riviera for health's sake, and the rich and jovial 'Jonathan,' older by fifteen years than his friend, means to have a merry time, and to force the reluctant, shy, and sensitive 'David' into having a merry time too. He 'opines' that David needs waking up. Jonathan Buckie reminds us of Mrs. Walford's earlier hero 'Mr. Smith,' but unluckily his heart of gold is not united to the latter's personal charms, and he continually jars upon his companion, especially when making new acquaintances. His habit of doing this in and out of season eventually leads to disaster, and both men pass through a never-to-be-forgotten experience of the sirens of the South before they return home. An old Scotch serving-man, who attends Mr. Buckie as valet, plays no small part in the story, and his sardonic comments, grim humour, and the way in which he handles his master, whose measure he has taken to a nicety, make many amusing episodes.

THE ORLEY TRADITION

By RALPH STRAUS.

The Orleys are an old noble family, once powerful, but now living quietly in a corner of England (Kent). They do nothing at all, in spite of people's endeavours to make them reach to the older heights. But they are happy in their retirement, and the real reason for this is that they have few brains. John Orley, the hero, has all the family characteristics, and is preparing himself for a humdrum country life, when he meets with an accident which prevents him from playing games, etc. He becomes ambitious, goes out into the world, and--fails at everything. He recovers his strength, and sees the mistake he has made, and the book ends as it began, the Orley Tradition holding true.

ON THE STAIRCASE

By FRANK SWINNERTON.

The scene of Mr. Frank Swinnerton's new novel is set in the heart of London, in the parish of Holborn. The reproduction of manners, and the revelation by this means of the spirit underlying those manners, forms the framework of a story of passion. In the main, therefore, _On the Staircase_ is a romance with a clearly defined setting of commonplace happenings, in which the loves of Barbara Gretton and Adrian Velancourt are shown in conflict with the action of circumstance. The book is in no sense photographic, but it has value as a social picture, being based upon genuine observation.

MAN AND WOMAN

By L. G. MOBERLY, Author of 'Joy.'

This story, which is based on Tennyson's lines--'The woman's cause is man's, they rise or sink together'--has for its chief character a woman who takes the feminist view that man is the enemy; a view from which she is ultimately converted. Another prominent character is one whose love is given to a weak man, her axiom being that love takes no heed of the worthiness or unworthiness of its object. The scene is laid partly in London, partly in a country cottage, and partly in India during the Durbar of the King-Emperor.

MAX CARRADOS

By ERNEST BRAMAH, Author of 'The Wallet of Kai Lung.'

Max Carrados is blind, but in his case blindness is more than counter-balanced by an enormously enhanced perception of the other senses. How these serve their purpose in the various difficulties and emergencies that confront the wealthy amateur when, through the instigation of his friend Louis Carlyle, a private inquiry agent, he devotes himself to the elucidation of mysteries, is the basis of Mr. Ernest Bramah's new book. The adventures that ensue range from sensational tragedy to romantic comedy as the occasions rise.

THE MAN UPSTAIRS

By P. G. WODEHOUSE, Author of 'The Little Nugget.'

Under this title Mr. Wodehouse has collected nineteen of the short stories written by him in the past four years. Mr. Wodehouse is one of the few English short-story writers with an equally large public on both sides of the Atlantic: but only two of these stories have an American setting. All except one of this collection are humorous, and some idea of the variety of incident of the remainder may be gathered from the fact that their heroes include a barber, a gardener, an artist, a playwriter, a tramp, a waiter, an hotel clerk, a golfer, a stockbroker, a butler, a bank clerk, an assistant master at a private school, an insurance clerk, a peer's son who is also a leading member of a First League Association football team, and a Knight of King Arthur's Round Table who is neither brave nor handsome.

SQUARE PEGS

By CHARLES INGE, Author of 'The Unknown Quantity.'

This novel raises again the absorbing question as to what is failure and what success. It tells how a big man from South Africa sets out to conquer London--the London of the Lobby and the Clubs--with a threepenny weekly paper and sympathy for the unemployed; how he fails, but in failure wins his woman; how she too suffers in the London of women workers. There is, on the other side, the little solicitor who calculates for and succeeds by the other's failure; but in succeeding loses. The background includes the life drama of an enthusiast for Labour reform.

MESSENGERS

By MARGARET HOPE, Author of 'Christina Holbrook.'

A story of the sudden yielding to temptation of a woman of good position. She suffers for her fault in prison, but her sufferings on release are ten times greater. She tries her utmost to keep the knowledge of her guilt from her daughter, a girl just left school, but in vain. The girl, in a painful scene, demands to be told the truth, and the mother, unable to bear the sight of her child's misery, flies from home, hoping still in some way to retrieve the past. But the net of circumstance is too strongly woven.

ENTER AN AMERICAN

By E. CROSBY-HEATH, Author of 'Henrietta taking Notes.'

The hero of Miss Crosby-Heath's new novel is a self-made American, who comes to London and enters a Home for Paying Guests. He is an optimistic philanthropist, and he contrives to help all the English friends he makes. His own crudity is modified by his London experiences, and the dull minds of his middle-class English friends are broadened by contact with his untrammelled personality. A humorous love interest runs through the book.

THE FRUITS OF THE MORROW

By AGNES JACOMB, Author of 'The Faith of his Fathers.'

_The Fruits of the Morrow_ is a novel showing the consequences of a man's and a woman's conduct in the past and how it affects the lives of their two sons. The other characters of the story are in different degrees involved in the results of the old romance, but not irredeemably. There is no hero in the ordinary sense of the word, the four male characters being of almost equal importance. The action takes place mainly in East Anglia and during the months of one summer.

A GIRL FROM MEXICO

By R. B. TOWNSHEND, Author of 'Lone Pine.'

Adventures are to the adventurous, and a very young Oxford man who strikes out for himself in the wild and woolly West is apt to come in for some lively developments. He gets an exciting start by going partners with a Mormon-eating American desperado, and when the unsophisticated youth falls in love with a velvet-eyed Mexican senorita, and then finds himself called upon in honour to play the part of Don Quixote, things begin to get tangled up. Finally he becomes involved in a struggle, not only with Mormons but with Mexican self-torturers in a great scene on the Calvary of the Penitentes which forms the climax of the story.

SARAH MIDGET

By LINCOLN GREY.

In the sedate atmosphere of a quiet country town there develop the later phases of a man's sin, when he has become rich and powerful, and the woman whom he thrust aside in his early manhood learns, all unconsciously, to love the son of her successful rival. How Sarah Midget rises, in the shock of a great tragedy, to supreme heights of self-sacrifice, is shown in poignant and moving scenes.

AN ASTOUNDING GOLF MATCH

By 'STANCLIFFE,' Author of 'Fun on the Billiard Table' and 'Golf Do's and Dont's.'

The narrative of the adventures of two golfers of equal handicaps, but different styles, who being dissatisfied with the result of two home and home matches, decide that golf across country from links to links, would be more scientific and interesting than golf where all the hazards are known. The troubles that befell them, and how the match came to an abrupt termination, to the discomfort of one and the joy of the other, are told in this book.

BLACKLAW

By Sir GEORGE MAKGILL.

This is a study in temperaments--a contrast between the old and the new views of the relations between parent and child. Lord Blacklaw throws up rank and fortune, takes his children to the Colonies to live 'the Patriarchal Life,' and sacrifices their future to his own impulses. John Westray, on the other hand, gives up happiness, even life itself, for what he deems his son's welfare. Each from his own point of view fails, yet neither life is wholly wasted. The scenes are laid in Scotland, New Zealand, and in a Cornish Art Colony.

POTTER AND CLAY

By Mrs. STANLEY WRENCH, Author of 'Love's Fool,' 'Pillars of Smoke,' 'The Court of the Gentiles,' etc.

In this story the author returns to the peasant folk of the Midlands whom she knows so well, and of whom she has written with sympathetic frankness in several books already. Just now, when the land question is so much discussed, this novel, dealing in the main with tillers of the soil, should receive careful attention.

A ROMAN PICTURE

By PAUL WAINEMAN, Author of 'A Heroine from Finland.'

Mr. Paul Waineman, the Finnish novelist who has so far allowed his pen only to describe his native land Finland, has in his latest work essayed a new and also very old hunting ground for those in search of romance. _A Roman Picture_ is a romantic love story, set in the Mother City of the world, Rome. The author, from personal experience, shows up in a daring manner the hatred that still exists between the old and the new Rome. The heavy shadows and many memories within the vast decaying Roman palace, haunted by the living presence of the young and beautiful Donna Bianca Savelli, the last representative of an ancient line, form a pen-picture which will appeal to the many lovers of Rome.

THE GIRL ON THE GREEN

By MARK ALLERTON, Author of 'Such and Such Things.'

The atmosphere of the links pervades Mark Allerton's new novel. The wind from the sea blows fresh through its pages. The heroine is a charming, high-spirited girl who on her way from college to Bury St. Dunstan's, has an unexpected excursion into Militancy. The author has no views to present on the Suffrage Movement; nor, indeed, has his heroine, whose not-to-be-explained week-end in a police cell gives ample scope for a highly amusing and exciting story. While _The Girl on the Green_ makes a bid for general popularity, golfers will find it of particular interest. Mark Allerton is well known as a writer on the game, and his description of the great golf match between the hero and heroine will be found full of sly allusions to topics in the knowledge of all golfers, as well as an uncommonly racy and exciting finish to a breezy story.

DICKIE DEVON

By JOHN OVERTON, Author of 'Lynette.'

Mr. John Overton's second novel is laid in Worcestershire in the summer of 1644, and is the story of a young Cavalier, forced by adverse circumstances to become a spy among the Roundheads. His position is a difficult and dangerous one, and matters are made worse by the advent of a spoilt Court beauty, who--mistaking him for another man--imagines herself to be his wife. Readers of _Lynette_ will welcome the reappearance of the happy-go-lucky Irishman, Michael Fleming, who plays a leading part in this romance of love and war.

THE STORY OF A CIRCLE

By M. A. CURTOIS, Author of 'A Summer in Cornwall.'

A story of an experiment in the Occult, in which some ladies who began by being idly interested in psychical research, find themselves in dangerous contact with the material necessities of mediums. Much light is cast upon that strange population of charlatans who grow fat on the credulity of the foolish in London.

LOTTERIES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

By R. C. LYNEGROVE.

This story is laid in Germany, and describes the matrimonial adventures of two sisters belonging to the impoverished German aristocracy. The elder, gentle and unselfish, marries into the vulgar domineering family of Gubbenmeyer. The other, flirtatious and attractive, saves herself and her family from penury by securing a rich officer, only to jeopardize everything through her undisciplined and sensuous temperament.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Notes: | | | | Words surrounded by _ are italicized. | | | | Obvious punctuation errors repaired. | | | | Printer's errors repaired, including: | | - Page 128, "interestng" corrected to be "interesting" (really | | interesting detail) | | - Page 129, "advertisments" corrected to be "advertisements" | | (advertisements had not) | | - Page 217, "necesarily" corrected to be "necessarily" (did not | | necessarily) | | - Page 219, "relasped" corrected to be "relapsed" (relapsed | | into silence) | | - Page 227, "if" corrected to be "it" (take it for) | | - Page 233, "ideals" corrected to be "ideas" (ideas seem | | original) | | - Page 295, "premisses" corrected to be "premises" (own | | premises) | | - Page 296, "what "what" corrected to be "what" ("what we've | | heard) | | - Page 302, "consspiratoriably" corrected to be | | "conspiratoriably" (knitting conspiratoriably) | | | | Other variable spellings within the text retained, including: | | - The same word with and without apostrophe, for example: | | "Golder's Green" and "Golders Green" | | - The same word with and without accent, for example: | | "régime" and "regime" | | - The same word with and without hyphen, for example: | | "off-handedly" and "offhandedly" | | - Inconsistent spelling, for example: "by and by" and "by and | | bye" | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+