letter I felt that to keep silence was impossible--might appear to you

as a lack of confidence. And I knew--I knew, my darling, I could trust you through life and death. Then, with that brief statement, there was a much longer letter--my second love-letter to you, Blaettchen--in which I tried to say a little of the thousand things that were in my heart. I enclosed them together, and gave the letter safely into your friend's possession when I found that you had gone out of town, and that there was no possibility of my seeing you. But what other letter do you speak of? My dear one, have you had a fever? Are you mixing this up with some grief?'

'Betrayed! betrayed! betrayed!' she moaned with ashy lips. She had drawn away from him, and leant against the back of the couch, white as death, slowly grasping the treachery that had been put on them.

'Stella, dearest, speak to me; tell me all that causes your anguish. Do you repent coming? Do you love me less than you did?'

'Oh no, no--my only love! God help us!' At the sound of the agony in her voice, something of panic seized him.

'Is it that you did not get my letter--that a false one was given to you?'

'I got a letter addressed in your hand, posted in Melbourne.'

'Posted? But I delivered it by hand when I found that you were away on the twenty-second of September--the day I called.'

'I was not away. I did not go out of Melbourne for half a day during the whole of my visit.'

'Great heavens! what made that woman lie so infamously? Tell me, my darling, what was in the letter you got? You spoke of an unfinished one from some woman. Do you remember the words?'

Stella, roused by the shock of discovering this undreamt-of treachery, repeated, word for word, first, the unfinished letter in some woman's handwriting--then Anselm's, telling of its abrupt beginning and close, with its many erasures, one of them--that at the close--blotted, but not illegible.

'Oh, Stella, could you believe that I would write like that, and enclose such a letter, even if it had come? I would at least have seen you--but, then, you could not imagine that such a diabolical imposition was possible. But why did this woman, whom you visited as an equal, behave worse than a common thief?' he asked with gathering wrath as he thought of the misery Stella must have endured.

'She had her reasons, and she succeeded--she succeeded,' murmured Stella; and then she slowly rose up. The moment had come when he must know all.

Her gloves fell to the ground, and as he lifted them up a ring fell out of one and rolled under the table.

'Ah, careless little Liebchen, is this the way you let our ring slip off, with its tender old Italian motto? ... But this is not the ring I gave you, darling child?'

He smiled, but there was a growing fear in his face.

'No, Anselm--I wear that ring next my heart.'

The biting tragedy of their story--fooled and betrayed as they had been on every side--made her marriage appear to her each successive moment more and more in the light of a mocking farce.

'Why, Stella--this is a wedding-ring!'

He looked at her, but she neither spoke nor met his

'Whose wedding-ring is it?'

He waited for her answer in sickening suspense. To their dying hour they must both remember the awful stillness--broken only by the sullen ticking of a clock, and then the strains of a military band that suddenly broke out into 'Die Wacht am Rhein.'

'For God's sake, Stella, tell me how this ring came to be in your glove? Whose is it?'

The agony in his voice made the words beat upon her heart with unendurable pain.

'It is mine,' came the answer at last, with a low, wailing sound.

When he heard that, he stood looking at her, his lips parted in breathless, incredulous horror.

Again there was a deep silence. This time it was broken by the miserable sobbing of a woman whose head was bent in bitter shame.

And yet so strong and deep was the man's faith, he had not yet grasped the worst. The wedding-ring was hers. She was, then, on the eve of marrying some man in whose interest, or through whom, all these foul treacheries had been practised. She had carried the ring with her. She was on the eve of marrying, misled by the unscrupulous plotting of this abandoned woman. It must have been with her she had come. Ah, now matters grew clearer. He recalled Miss Morton's story of Stella's supposed engagement--her own admission of having been engaged for a week. It was to the brother of this woman with whom Stella stayed. It was to renew that engagement, then, that this incredible fraud had been practised. And it had almost succeeded. Thank God it was not too late to defeat this wicked, cruel scheme!

These thoughts flashed through his brain like wild-fire. No wonder she was wan with misery. What had she not endured during the nine weeks that had passed since they parted! Oh, to think that through their devilish stratagem she should be made to believe he could have written such words after giving him her entire love and confidence!

'Stella--Stella darling, do not be so broken-hearted. It kills me to see you like this. All will yet be well. We have found each other once more. That makes up for all.'

She struggled for composure, seeking to frame words that would extinguish the last spark of his hope. But she could not--she could not utter them. The exhausting struggle, the determination not to be overborne by grief, the constantly recurring effort to treat the part that Langdale had played in her life as obliterated, had been but a feeble subterfuge. Like a torrent long pent up, the passion of her love rose and took possession of her. What law of God or man could justify the semblance of a marriage compassed by the vilest imposition? She saw that in some way Langdale had not yet comprehended the full extent of the intolerable falsehood. Yes, that was the history of her marriage from beginning to end--an impossible lie.

'Anselm, take me away,' she said, going up to him and placing her hands in his.

'My dear one, do not be afraid. No contract entered upon through such gross imposition can bind you.'

'No--but let us go away.'

'Where would you like to go, beloved?'

'Oh, away to the East--far away from everyone. I do not want anyone in the whole world but you. You do not love me any less? You are my own only love, are you not? Oh, Anselm, do not leave me, whatever happens.'

'Never again, Stella. We shall be married this very day. I shall see these people and return this ring.'

She tried to smile, but broke instead into wild, hysterical laughter. The blood had surged to her head. Her lips and cheeks were crimson--glowing like coals; and there was a glittering light in her eyes.

'Take me away, Anselm. Do not believe them if they say I do not belong to you. It was all a horrible fraud, Anselm. Do you understand me?'

'Yes, my beloved, I understand. I understand how this misery has worked on your mind,' he answered in a low, soothing voice, his lips quivering as he looked at her. His practised eyes read too well the symptoms of the fever that possessed her. It had lain latent in her blood for many days, and had been fanned by this hour of strange, wild misery into fierce life.

'Ah, but I must tell before we go. There must be perfect truth between us. They wove such a frightful mesh of deceit round me. The air is full of it--it chokes me. You and I, Anselm, must be free people under an open sky. No concealment, no duplicity, no seeming. Do you not see how that little rift at the beginning has wrecked us? You wished me to tell Hector and Madonna--but I would not. Ah, dear Madonna, she would not have let their poison fasten on me.--Anselm, for God's sake do not look away! There are tears in your eyes. I may cry, because I am a weak, foolish, faulty woman. But you must not; you must be strong for us both.'

'Yes, my darling, I will be strong,' he replied, in a broken voice. 'And you, my dear one--will you not make me happy by sitting beside me and resting?'

'No, oh no, I must not rest. I must tell you. You must understand how it is. Do you know, Anselm, that treachery is the worst poison of all? I will confess to you that since we have stood face to face to-day I have formed two plans of deceiving you. The first was I would kiss you good-bye as though I would see you again to-morrow, and then write you a letter, and never look into your face again. Was not that a wild infidelity to enter into my heart? Oh, what a wicked, wicked thought--not to see you again, belovedest! And all that has grown out of their duping me. And the other plan--I forget the other plan----'

'Your head pains you terribly, my darling--I know it does.'

'Yes, it beats all over it; and sometimes when your lips move I can hardly hear what you are saying. But I must tell you before you take me away. Do you know, beloved, how I now loathe the smallest speck of concealment? It grows and grows till it makes a horrible stifling atmosphere all round, heavy and thick with poison. It must be like clear, fine crystal all round us. Oh, how they smothered my whole life with lies...

'They destroyed your long letter--your beautiful letter, that I would have kissed and put close against my heart, and thanked God for on my knees day and night--that I would have stolen away to read over and over to myself till I knew every word of it by heart. It would have flooded my life with fresh love and hope. But instead of it they gave me one that was turned into a tissue of awful lies--short, and hard and cruel, but with your name at the end, clear as the sun at noon-day.... And with your letter they put a woman's lying message.... I saw you day and night--night and day sailing away to another woman--to your _wife_, to the one who had been misrepresented, who still loved you. I followed you on and on, till you reached her--till I saw you in her arms, and my blood was on fire. I dared not go back to the old, quiet, harmonious days, to my mother's peaceful home, where fierce jealousy and the stain of unlawful love were only things hidden away within the covers of old tragedies.... Don't you understand, Anselm, how I loathed myself--madly, furiously jealous, because a husband was hastening back to the wife he had unwittingly wronged! I tried to take comfort in the belief she would win you back to happiness; but there was insanity in the thought, and I flung it from me. I seemed to look into black depths yawning in my soul. I could not deceive myself. I told myself if you had come trampling on the bond that held you, I would have left all and followed you to the ends of the earth. You were my highest good--my conscience. What you asked me to do I would have done, glorying in the thought of making some real sacrifice for your sake----'

'Oh, my darling, I know all the depth of your great love. Your eyes are dim with pain. Let me soothe you into calmness!'

He came to her where she stood, leaning against the back of the pedestal-table; but when he put his arms round her she drew back.

'No, Anselm; let me tell you all, then I will be calm, and you shall decide. All these things have been feeding on me, shrivelling all that was good in me till I began to reconcile myself--to look forward to a mere blunted, soulless existence as something to live for.'

'Ah, my dear one, you wrong yourself; that you never could do!'

'Anselm, you do not know all. For twenty-three years I have been slumbering through existence, looking on amused at the play, untouched by passion, till I knew you. And when the forces that had thrilled me through and through were turned aside--when all the better purpose of life was defeated--I consciously made choice of the lower part, because I knew myself too well to fancy that anything of the old magic could return. It was so in religion. When the old vivid faith left me, it never returned; and now do I not know what fond delusions we put upon ourselves when we speak of the goodness and fatherhood of God?'

'Hush, my darling; do not speak like that! You know what beautiful holy thoughts came to you.'

'Yes, when you once more woke the deeper, more spiritual, side of my nature. But what became of me when I lost you? The only purpose that made bare existence tolerable was to get away from all that reminded me of the past. No family affection, no love of books, no thought of God, could give me the smallest consolation; all--all was submerged in the fever of passion. Only to forget; and do you not understand, Anselm, that marriage without love was no more forbidding than the whole of existence without love? And then I had known him from childhood----'

'But all that is changed now, Stella. Do not dwell on it, I implore you,' he said. But the fear that had lodged so icily in his breast had deepened, though not an inkling of the dreadful truth had yet come to him.

'And he was rich. Yes, that counts, if you are thrown back on the lees of life. And yet at the last, when it was too late, as I listened to my mother that evening, a conviction came over me, if I had only waited--if I had not been so insanely impatient, bent on drowning my sorrow and humiliation. "In your patience ye shall win your souls." That was one of the things my mother said to me the day before my unhappy marriage.'

'Your "unhappy marriage," Stella! What are you saying?' he cried, drawing close to her, his lips parted in stony horror.

'Yes; is not that what it is called when lifelong vows are made in blind ignorance, though they are found to be impossible lies? though----'

She stopped abruptly. No, not even in that hour, when she was borne by the flood of misery which burst upon her far from the calm reserves of ordinary life, could she reveal the double duplicity of her miserable marriage. Langdale at once interpreted her words and sudden silence to mean that the man to whom she was married was accessory to the criminal imposition practised on her.

'Great God, Stella!--what are you saying?' he cried in a faint voice, his face deadly white.

Strong man though he was, with a training which inures the mind to sudden catastrophes in life, he was forced to lean heavily against an armchair, by which he stood, as the full force of the ruin that had overtaken her life dawned on him.

'Yes, Anselm. Now you know why, after the first joy of seeing you, I was silent and afraid.... You know how that ring is part of the mockery.... Ah, Anselm, how strangely you look at me! ... You despise me! Oh, I cannot bear that!'

She gave a low cry, and covered her face with her hands. It was an old, half-childish habit. Often had he seen her indulge in it when telling tales to the Lullaboolagana children in the twilight, or expressing mock contrition for letting fly some shaft of raillery that had too keen an edge. The action, with its old mirthful associations, stung him in that hour of almost unreal misery with intolerable pain. And yet there was a shadow of anger on his face. The revulsion of bitter disappointment, the cruel thought that a little patience, a little waiting would have saved their lives from this dark shipwreck, rendered him for the moment almost blind to her anguish.

'How could you dare to marry any man when you loved another?' he said, looking at her sternly.

'Ah, you are going to leave me,' she said, in a low, broken voice. 'Forgive me before we part, Anselm--forgive me, beloved, for old love's sake! It is getting dark--tell me what to do. I have been piecing my life together, somehow believing those letters; but now--where shall I go? What is to become of me?' She looked into his face in helpless misery, and a sudden desperate resolve formed itself in his mind.

'Stella, we have been criminally, treacherously duped and deceived. But you are mine, and I am yours; and this miserable mockery of a marriage--are our whole lives to be sacrificed to this duplicity?'

'What do you want me to do, Anselm?' she said, drawing nearer to him. 'You must decide quickly. I cannot think, my head swims so strangely. Do not take me away to-day; I must wait.'

He took her hands in his, and they almost scorched him. The delirium of fever was in her face and voice. He fought with the whirl of feelings that threatened to reduce him to the weakness of a woman, and then answered in a low, emotionless voice:

'No, Stella, I will not take you away till you have calmly faced the question in all its bearings. You have been ill for some time. You are in a high fever now. You must rest, Stella; you must regain composure for my sake and your own.'

Even as he looked at her, he saw that a certain vacancy had come into her face.

'You must give me those letters, Stella, that you thought I sent you. They furnish proof of the wicked imposition that misled you. Ah, my darling, my darling, how you have suffered night and day! You must get well and strong. Do not despair; all is not lost.'

His quiet, deep voice penetrated her with an involuntary sense of confidence--of being directed and absolved from the necessity of action. At this time the burning sensation in her temples had increased to an overpowering vehemence.

'I am not as ill as you imagine,' she said, her voice sinking to a whisper. But even as she spoke a dimness fell on her eyes, and she swayed as though she would have fallen. He led her to the chair by which he stood, and knelt at her feet, raising her hands reverently to his lips.

'Stella, you know that there is nothing in the whole world I care for but to help you--to protect you from all evil, do you not?'

'Yes--yes, I do; yes, I do,' she whispered, repeating the words over and over as if they were the refrain of a song. Her face had blanched somewhat, and a great exhaustion was creeping over her.

He released her hands, and she raised them tremblingly, kissing them one by one where his lips had touched them. He saw the action, and he turned away quickly, gazing for a few moments out through the window, but seeing naught.

She leant back with closed eyes as if asleep, but opened them presently, looking round with a perplexed expression.

'I do not know this place, do I? How quiet it is, with the busts of people dead and all the grief hidden away in books. How very, very far away everything seems! But you are here, Anselm? ... You have not left me?'

'Yes, Stella, I am here.'

Then there was silence again. Presently there was a ring, and the hall-door was opened. Langdale went out and met his stepfather in the hall.

'Well, Anselm, have you seen my Australian friend, Mrs. Ritchie?' he asked in a cheery voice, as he put down one or two books and a bundle of proofs damp from the printer's, end drew off his fur-lined gloves. 'Does she not speak German with wonderful verve? She is still here? Ah, that is good--that is good. I thought she would find Kleinsauber's "Comparative Ethnology" a fascinating work. You see, with all her vivacity, she has an unusual love of knowledge. In that she is like your sister Amalie--a combination which is, above all others, calculated to make a woman happy.'

'Very true,' answered Langdale gravely. And then he told the Professor that the Australian lady seemed suddenly indisposed--that he feared she was far from well.

'Ah, now that you speak of it, I have thought each time I saw her that she was greatly paler and thinner. Oh, she is staying only a few houses away. Her husband is in London. She must come and stay with us as soon as your mother returns.'

The good Professor hurried into the study. 'My dear young lady, you are not well. Perhaps you have been reading Kleinsauber's book too closely. You saw it the moment you came in, of course--here on the table? It is wonderful! wonderful!' etc.

The kind, benevolent old face, bending over her with anxious solicitude, helped Stella a little to recall her straying faculties.

When she spoke of going, the Professor proposed to get a hackney carriage, but Stella said the little walk through the fresh air would revive her. The Professor and Langdale walked with her to the pension, and she bade them good-bye at the door, saying that she would be better on the morrow. Early next day Langdale received the two fatal letters, which Stella enclosed with the words: 'To-day I cannot see very well, nor think. Things are going away from me. I only know I will do whatever you wish.'

That night she was prostrated with acute fever. She lay for weeks hovering between life and death. Time after time the crisis seemed to have passed; but a disastrous wave of recollection would sweep over her; and then the fever re-asserted itself once more. But in the end her youth and hitherto unbroken physique triumphed. She struggled back to life shaken and wasted. Day by day she gained a little strength. But mentally a strange change had been wrought. She remembered all that had passed, but the sources of emotion seemed atrophied. It was like a moral aphasia. She had forgotten how to feel; and she shrank from the possibility of mental suffering with a certain morbid horror. All the passion and ardour and power of vivid emotion had left her. If she could be glad for anything, she would have been glad that now at last she knew what it was to have a sluggish nature--a heart equally steeled against hope and memory.

*CHAPTER L.*

It was mid-day in Berlin on the last day of February. After a succession of stormy days of unusual severity a hard frost set in, which had lasted now nearly a week. The Thiergarten, all save the footpaths, was deep in snow, crisp, glittering, and frozen over. The trees, to the tips of the slenderest twigs, were thickly frosted, and gleaming in their coating of unspotted purity. But the keen, clear sky, which had lent such brilliancy to the frost for some days, was now completely overcast. Another storm was evidently gathering. The heavens wondrously low down were unbroken in their heavy sombreness--a sullen background piled up with heavy banks of purplish-black clouds and vapoury masses of dun-coloured smoke. There was not a break nor a rift--not even a tone of paler gray or lead colour--to show where behind all the sun must somewhere be shining.

The contrast between the lowering sky and the trees in their gleaming delicate white splendour made up a wonderful scene for eyes that had never before seen any of the moods of a northern winter. Stella, who had by this time passed the first stage of convalescence, sat by one of the large double windows of their sitting-room in the Eisengau pension looking at the scene with an impassive gaze. A book lay open on a table near her--some needlework had fallen to her feet, where Dustiefoot lay, alternately dozing off into a light slumber, and looking up at his mistress as if longing for some sign of recognition.

Ritchie sat near the open fireplace, the only one in the house, and constructed for an English invalid who had stayed there for a couple of years some time previously. There was a glowing coal fire whose lambent flames were joyously thrown back by blue-and-white tiles that lined the fireplace, each with figures more or less classic or symbolical. Ritchie looked up from the sporting newspaper he was reading and stared into the fire for some time with knitted brows. Then his eyes rested on some of these figures with a look of marked disapproval.

'I say, Stella.'

She turned round with a start.

'I wish you would come and tell me what some of these old hags are doing, or what they mean. Just look at this one with a stick something like a stock-whip handle, and a shock of wool on it.'

He placed a chair for Stella, and she looked at the figure he pointed out with a slow smile breaking on her face.

'Why, that is Clotho, one of the Parcae--the inexorable sisters, the daughters of night and darkness----'

'Well, that is all Greek to me. Why do people put three sulky-looking females round a fireplace--one with a rum sort of stick, the other with a ball of twine, and this savage-looking old party with a pair of shears, as if she were going to cut a fellow's jugular vein?'

'That is her _metier_--her trade. You must know the old Greeks had many tales and symbols of man's life. These are the three Fates--mysterious women who preside over our destinies. Clotho with her spindle spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos with the abhorred shears cuts it short.'

'Then, according to that, this is the old vixen who nearly did for you, Stella. Look at the squint of the old banshee.... Thank God she didn't have a snip at you with her shears this time, Stella.'

'But it would have been so much easier to die than come back bit by bit so weak and shaken. I remember I had an old doll once I was very fond of. Its hair fell off, and the blue came out of its eyes, and its complexion disappeared altogether. Last of all, a kangaroo pup of Tom's ran away with it, and took its head off, and I never found it again. But I got the head of another defunct doll, and I got Tom to fasten it on to Sheba somehow. I feel just as she must have felt. Ted, are you sure that Dr. Seemann did not screw someone else's head on me?'

'When you talk to me a little I am quite sure he didn't. But, by Jove! Stella, it was an awful close shave. I had just got hack from the old man's funeral, and was going into the dining-room to hear the will read when I got the telegram Maisie' sent, and for a bit I thought to myself, "It's all U P, old man." For though I didn't say much, I could see you were awfully ill all the time. Once on board ship a fellow who was very ill--he hadn't come out of his cabin the first two weeks--was with me on the deck the first day he came up. We had got pretty chummy, for his cabin was next to mine, and I often did little things for him--roused up the doctor once when poor old Lakemann seemed to be choking. Well, we were walking up and down, and he spied you sitting back and looking away over the sea--one of the Miss O'Briens near you. "Who is that lady?" says he, and I saw he was looking at you. "That is my wife," said I. "No," said he, "I don't mean that lively-looking young lady. I could almost tell without being told she is your wife. I mean that one leaning back, looking exactly like a sleep-walker. She must have seen a ghost some time." He would hardly believe I wasn't putting a hoax on him when I said you were my wife, and not Miss Harry O'Brien. Many a time after that I thought you did just look as if you were awake in your sleep--no, sleeping awake. Oh bother, you know what I mean.'

'Yes; but you must think of something more lively to tell me. I am very tired of myself, Ted.'

'Oh, but I want to talk a little about yourself, Stella. Always when I want to talk to you, since you got well enough to speak, someone is in the way, or you are not up, or you have gone to bed, or there is a silent fit on you--and old Seemann said to me: "Don't make her talk when she doesn't want to till she is built up"--as if you were a wall or a chimney.'

'Has it been very dull for you in Berlin all these weeks, Ted?'

'Well, it didn't matter to me a straw where I was while you were so ill, Stella. But since you've been out of danger I've been toddling round. You see, I know several fellows now. The Avenells came across in the same boat with me. Dick, the eldest of them, is in the British embassy--an attache they call it. He speaks of his duties, but as far as I can make out, his work is to always wear a neat suit and a flower in his buttonhole, and play scat and billiards. Of course he has to go to dinner-parties and balls, and the worst of it is he often has to dance attendance on a fat old frump half the night, instead of looking after some pretty girl. That's the very worst aspect of diplomacy, he says. And then Farningham here is very good company--at any rate, he's the sort I get on with. And you like Mrs. Farningham?'

'Yes, very much,' returned Stella, but her voice all the time was perfectly level and emotionless.

'Is it Farningham or his wife that is related to the old Professor you met at Dr. Stein's?'

'It is Mrs. Farningham. Her mother is married to the Professor.'

'And there was a Dr. Langdale--who came from the Professor's every day, sometimes twice, to ask for you, till you were out of danger--isn't he another relation of Mrs. Farningham's?'

'Her brother.' She shivered a little as if she were cold, and Ted heaped more coal on the fire.

'Ah, now I begin to get things a little straight. I've sometimes been most awfully mixed up. "My wife's father-in-law," Farningham says, "my stepchildren," "my wife's stepfather," "my mother-in-law," "my wife's mother-in-law," "my brother-in-law," "my wife's brother-in-law," just like one of those affairs like a little telescope you turn round, and see different snaps of things spluttering at you every blessed shake. You see Mrs. Farningham's first husband's people are here from America in shoals. It's a jolly good thing there wasn't room for many of them in this pension.'

'Why--don't you like them?'

'Oh, I'd like them well enough, if there weren't so many women among them, with not a blessed turn to do but ask a fellow questions--clatter-clatter all the time, like a bell on a runaway steer. There's one of them a tall, thin woman, with eyes like knitting-pins. She's got about twenty hairs on her scalp, and twenty skewers to keep them in a tiny bob on top of her head, leaving her long, lean neck perfectly bare. I'm not what you'd call a prude, you know, but, by George, the nakedness of that neck gives me a sort of a turn! She writes for two newspapers, and she has a red morocco sort of book, with an indelible pencil, and sometimes she stops in the middle of eating her soup to put something down in this. "I dare not trust my memory, it's so treacherous," she says. "By the Lord," thinks I to myself, "I wish it were so treacherous you'd forget to ask me questions!" Yes, I sit next to her at the table-d'hote, and there she goes at me hammer and tongs. And the less I know about the things she's interested in, the more I catch her using the indelible pencil on the sly. "Now, Mr. Ritchie, you are laughing at me, when you say you _never_ heard of Raphael or Michael Angelo," she'll say, screwing her long neck round above my head, like a native companion in a fit. Ah, she's yards taller than I am. Wait till you see her. And there Farningham sits on the opposite side of the table, grinning at me like a negro minstrel. Let me see, she's his wife's first husband's first cousin's aunt once removed. Now what relation would you say she is to Farningham?'

'I really haven't the faintest conception,' returned Stella, with a little smile.

'No more has he. But she calls him Charles, and speaks to him solemnly about the privileged classes in England. You know he is to be Sir Charles F. when his governor dies. And then she reminds him of things that happened to his wife's first husband, as if he were the one, you know. Now, I call that deuced awkward; at any rate, it might be in many cases. I dare say it would be more damaging to the other fellow though, if Farningham had been the first husband. They say Mrs. Farningham's eldest boy by her first husband will be a millionaire when he is twenty-one; but he is a delicate little chap. Am I talking too much, Stella?'

'Oh no; it's rather amusing. I thought by something Mrs. Farningham let fall that some of her American connections were a little trying. But she did not say much; she's very loyal to them.'

'She's a regular trump. She says the right thing to everybody; and she's like you, Stella, she never gets the least ruffled--never sticks her back up, but takes everything as if it were rather fun. She had a bad illness in Dresden, but she has got over it so well--she's better than she was before. I wish you were like that. What does old Seemann mean by some mischief before the fever came on? Was it--was it that shock, Stella? You know what I mean.'

She put up her hands to her head wearily. 'I know what you mean, Ted. But there was something besides that: and the day I was taken ill it came all over again, but worse; only nothing seems very bad now. I do not think I should talk about things that used to hurt me. It cannot be helped any more; nothing can that has gone really wrong.' She gave a long, low sigh, and lay back with closed eyes.

'Don't say that, Stella, please,' said Ted gently. 'It was awfully steep to think I was the cause of all when your life hung on a thread. I used to go to the opera and places; but often I didn't know whether I was standing on my head or my heels.'

'You are not to blame for my illness, Ted. If anyone is to blame, it is Laurette; but I myself most of all. Oh, I don't mean what she concealed about you.'

Ted looked perplexed, but he would ask no questions; and, indeed, he attributed Stella's words to some confusion left by the fever. It may be noted in passing, that Stella did not once suspect him of any complicity in the imposition that had wrecked her life. Only at this period she would have rejected the word 'wrecked' as being too strong. Everything had shrunk so inconceivably. It was as though nothing mattered very much, if only one were left in perfect quiet.

'Dr. Seemann is to come only every second day now, he told me,' said Ted, in a cheerful voice. 'What a stunning old chap he is! The best fever doctor in Berlin, they say; and you can't easily beat that. It was the Professor who saw to his attending you.'

There was silence for a few moments, and then Stella said very slowly:

'Do you know when Dr. Langdale came to Berlin?' She named him without the least tremor.

'No; but I remember the first time I noticed him particularly. It was two weeks after I came back. I was at the opera-house, with Dick Avenell. We went out into the wide passage behind the boxes, and there Dick met a couple of very lively little French ladies. I don't think they were any better than they ought to be, you know--nothing but a couple of roses and a dagger with diamonds in the handle by way of a bodice. Dick swore I had just come from New Caledonia, and had brought a message from some of their friends there. After a little time, he dodged round a pillar all at once, and left me talking to them alone; at least, they were jabbering away, half in French; and I put in a word edgeways, now and then, in English, but I'm blessed if I could tell what any of us were saying. In the middle of it, who should come round but this Dr. Langdale, with his mother! I had seen him once or twice when he came to inquire after you for the Kellwitzes, and he stared hard at me, I can tell you. I didn't know his name till Farningham told me. It seems he's been in Australia for a little time; and he has been a good deal off colour, too, in Berlin. He went to Vienna last week, to see a chum of his who is making a great noise with some operations on eyes, so Farningham told me. It was lucky the Farninghams came here, a few days after I got back from London. I've gone about with him a good deal, and with Dick and his brother Minimus--comical name, isn't it? Comes of three brothers being at a public school together. Now, why do you suppose Dick left me in the lurch like that? He told me plump it was because he saw an old dowager-aunt of a girl he's sweet on, coming our way, and he couldn't afford to be seen with the little Frenchies. A married man, said he, with no end of tin, can stand any racket; but a penniless attache has to be deuced proper when on parade. Wasn't that a friendly trick to play a fellow? But he and Minimus are awful fun sometimes. Minimus is supposed to be studying Oriental languages for a "diplomatic career" in India. "People teach languages so much better in Germany," he says; and he goes once a month, perhaps, to an old chap, who swears at him because he is an idle young dog, and makes an appointment with him to come next week to learn some alphabet; but Min. doesn't, as a rule, turn up. He says I'd better give him a billet on my run; he thinks it would be much jollier than spoiling his eyes over rubbishy Eastern pot-hooks. I've often been more miserable than a tuckerless dingo; but still I went to theatres and things. I couldn't nurse you, Stella, you see!'

'Of course not. It was much better you should go about.'

'But now I can look after you a bit, Stella; and that little Maisie--by George, she's worth her weight in gold!'

There was a knock at the door; and in response to Ritchie's robust invitation to come in, a fair, youthful-looking man entered, slight, and rather under the middle height.

'Are you allowed to see people so early in the day, Mrs. Ritchie? Why, this is quite the Darby-and-Joan business--and an open fireplace, I declare!'

'Yes; and the three inexorable sisters--daughters of Night and Darkness--with the spindle-and-shears business, Farningham!' said Ted, with a dignified wave of his hand towards the tiles.

'Why, Ritchie, old fellow, you're coming it strong with the classics. Do tell that to Miss Caroline Sendler. You must know, Mrs. Ritchie, that your husband is carrying on a barefaced flirtation with an elderly lady from America--one related to me in some mystical way!'

'I remember. She's your wife's first----'

'Don't--don't, my dear fellow. Let it remain with the dark riddles of a world not realized. You are really making progress now, Mrs. Ritchie?'

'Oh yes, thank you. To-day, I quite know the people from the trees.'

'And do you eat anything? Because I have heard dreadful tales on that score.'

'Now, Stella, tell the truth. Yesterday, you looked at the thigh of a pigeon, and said, "Oh, take it away--it looks so dreadfully pathetic!" And that was your dinner. Yes, upon my honour, Farningham, I had to take it away; and a little while afterwards, when Fraeulein--what's her name, the nurse you know?--came in with a little soup, Signora here said, without blinking, "But I've had dinner, you know!"'

'Ah, but that sort of thing will never do. My wife declares she ate all day when she was getting well. And that reminds me why I came!'

'Now you really wound me. I thought it was to find out whether I ate anything,' said Stella, with a little of her old sprightliness.

'So it was; but merely to knock at the door and inquire, and then ask if my wife might come. But this young man was too lazy to open the door, as Fraeulein Hennig does. And you look so jolly and cosy, one can't tear one's self away. Now I know why Amalie and I have given up being domesticated. It's the absence of an open fireplace!'

At this juncture another knock was heard at the door, which was speedily opened.

'May I come in?' said a flute-like woman's voice.

It was Mrs. Farningbam: a tall, graceful woman, with dark eyes and hair, a clear pale skin, a delicately aquiline nose, and an exquisitely chiselled mouth. In feature there was a strong resemblance between her and Langdale, and also at times in expression.

'Ah, you are really better this morning!' she said, taking Stella's hand, and giving Ted a friendly nod.

'I was on the eve of coming to tell you,' said her husband. 'But I suppose I'd better stay a little longer, and then our family circle will be completed by the babies and--collateral branches! You'd better send me away, Mrs. Ritchie; for I assure you there is absolutely no end to us! And will you forgive me if I carry your husband off? I am always hiring or buying or exchanging horses; and I always get "choused," he says, if I am alone!'

'Hadn't I better take Dustiefoot for a run, Stella? ... Lose him? That's more than my place is worth. You may be sure I won't come back without him. Out, boy, out!'

But though Dustiefoot rose up with alacrity at the sound, he got no farther than the door, till he ran back, and put his head on his mistress's lap, looking up fondly into her face.

'Out, Dustiefoot--out!' said Stella; and on this the dog trotted away.

When the two men were gone, Mrs. Farningham drew her chair nearer Stella's, saying;

'How did you sleep last night, dear?'

'Tolerably well, thank you, for two or three hours.'

'And after that?'

'Oh, then it was the old stupid story. Endless processions of people filing by, as if I were a mummy holding a levee.'

'And that chamber into which you dare not peep--does it still remain?'

'Yes; and myriads of voices high and low telling me to pass in--but they get fainter night by night. Now, when I waken up in the soft light and see Fraeulein Hennig's quiet face, I do not any longer feel like a terrified child that covers its head and trembles because of ghost stories it has heard.'

'Ah, that is a great stage. This is your first serious illness. For the first time you know something of the terror of demoralized nerves. But now that you begin to regain tranquillity the worst is over.'

'Do you think so? I am glad to feel so unmoved; but sometimes--I hardly know why--it frightens me a little that all which used to be so much to me seems so incredibly remote.'

'Oh, that is merely brain exhaustion. As you get stronger--as you are "built up," to use Dr. Seemann'a words--the old interests will revive.'

*CHAPTER LI.*

Mrs. Farningham's prediction was, unfortunately, not verified. Stella's strength slowly returned, but her mental condition remained much the same. As the weeks went on she became, if anything, more silent, more apathetic. The first event that roused her had also the effect of bringing on a feverish attack. It was a great concert given in the Philharmonic Hall in Bernburger Strasse. The conductor and violin soloist were the first of Germany, supported by the full strength of the Philharmonic orchestra. But what made this concert especially interesting was that a 'Sinfonische Dichtung,' the composition of an Italian musician, was to be rendered for the first time--the music being, in fact, still unpublished.

The theme is taken from the 'Divine Comedy.' It is the love-tragedy of Francesca Polenta, named da Rimini, and of Paolo Malatesta. It begins in the second circle of hell, guarded by Minos, who, at the entrance, weighs each transgression, and fixes the grade to which the ill-fated spirit shall be thrust. Deep, slow, mysterious waves of music thrilled the mind with a sudden apprehension of the gloom unpenetrated by the faintest ray of light. Then very slowly there rose, as if in the far distance, the howling of that terrible storm of hell--growing fierce and wild and discordant, as if the sea were riven into mountains and abysmal depths by two opposing tempests, and high above all the cries of lost souls.

After the storm of the elements and of tortured souls falls shudderingly into silence, the compassionate voice of the poet arises as he asks the two who clung together even in hell itself, 'O anime affannate, venite a noi parlar, s'altri vol niega'--'O ye tired souls, come speak to us, if no one doth forbid it.' Then came the low, anguished, wailing sound of a woman's voice telling her sinful love-story in eternal torment. No sound in life or Nature can surely ever reproduce the piercing pathos of a human voice in hopeless misery like the violin under the touch of a great master.

'There is no deeper sorrow than to recall in misery a happy time.' There were many eyes dimmed among the audience when the heart-broken confession was translated into passionate, shuddering music. The symphony from beginning to end made a strange impression upon Stella. And as in the leading theme the musician had cunningly woven the story of Lancelot, whose love, too skilfully told by the old romancer, had been such dangerous reading, so, through all the storm of darkness and despair, through the inexorable remembrance of an hour when overmastering passion trampled duty under foot, Stella was conscious of piercing recollections rising in her brain, which since her illness had no more power to move her than if they were idle spiders' strings. But now they were aflame with vivid terrible life. That woman's voice, pleading, broken, despairing, arose in fitful tones, making the blood start vehemently in her veins--making her shrink and tremble like a creature upon whom suddenly a great burden has been laid.

'It has been too much for you,' whispered Mrs. Farningham. 'Let me take you home now....'

'Yes, I really want to leave before anything else drives away the memory of this.'

That night Stella woke, weeping bitterly. In her dreams by night she had been listening over again to the hopeless wailing story told by Francesca to Dante. For days afterwards the fever burned in her veins; and when this passed away she began to avoid people--to shrink from meeting them. She began to walk out a little; but she preferred to go alone to the Thiergarten, with only Dustiefoot as a companion. Even Maisie's presence seemed a trouble to her. When she was with others she had the air of one trying unsuccessfully to understand what was going on around her. She sometimes fell asleep in the daytime, and seemed to wander for years in a strange dark land beset with vague shapes of dread, and then woke up with a start to find her momentary slumbers had not been noticed. She began to confound events with visions of the night. Things that had been said or done in the morning would seem at nightfall to be separated from her by vast tracts of time. She began to have a dread that she could not grasp what people said to her.

One forenoon, as she was alone in the Thiergarten, near the great monument of the nation's victory over France, she suddenly met Professor and Mrs. Kellwitz. She looked so timid and startled--almost so confused--on seeing them, that Mrs. Kellwitz's motherly heart was wrung with a sudden dread. She knew that Farningham, her son-in-law, and Ritchie had gone to Homburg together for a week. Yet no one who knew the position of affairs could charge Ted with neglect. He was simply like one who looked on helpless and perplexed. He was always ready at Stella's command; but she had none to give. He was anxious to take her anywhere and everywhere; but she had no wishes except to be left alone. Even a man more gifted with insight and with resources in himself than Ted had ever been, might be excused for taking refuge in the companionship and recreations that were open to him. He was in a foreign land with no occupation beyond amusing himself. And though this is a position that tests the calibre of minds more strongly fortified against the baser temptations of life, yet to one who observed Ritchie closely at this time it would become apparent that the excesses into which he had earlier fallen were due less to inherent weakness than to that Nemesis power which nature often puts forth when but a small part of man's faculties are touched by his daily life.

At this time, also, Mrs. Farningham was much engaged among the poor. She had endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to lead Stella to resume her interest in those she had befriended. But though she gave money lavishly, herself she would not give. She had become conscious of some imminent danger that threatened to engulf her. She avoided contact with all that might arouse her. The chief aim that swayed her at this time was to spare herself morally--to shirk those stormy depths in her nature which threatened ever and anon to surge up and bear her she knew not whither. But on this day Mrs. Kellwitz, struck with a sudden fear, would listen to no excuses. 'You must come home with me,' she said decisively. And then, when they reached the house, she sent a messenger for Maisie, and to tell the Baroness that Mrs. Ritchie was to be her guest for a few days to come.

During the day she talked to Stella of many things--of books and pictures and music. Once only the girl showed a dawning interest, a little tremor of emotion, and that was when the Italian composer's 'Sinfonische Dichtung' was named. Towards evening Mrs. Kellwitz made her lie down to rest in her own cosy sitting-room. After a little she fell fast asleep, and the wide dark circles round the eyes, the noble sweep of the brow, the thin outlines of the cheeks, and the lines round the mouth, all bore the stamp of mental languor, of pain temporarily at bay, but not vanquished. Mrs. Kellwitz softly closed the door behind her, and a few minutes afterwards her son Anselm came home.

He, also, was much changed. His face had, in the last few months, grown grave and sad--almost stern in repose. Through his stepfather's intimacy with Dr. Seemann, Anselm knew the various phases of Stella's dangerous illness. He knew that latterly the physician was puzzled at the mental rigidity which had fallen on her. He had often seen her at a little distance when she walked in the Thiergarten, and had kept aloof for fear of causing her pain while she was still weak, and also because of the cruel perplexity which entangled their further meeting. Once, indeed, Dustiefoot nearly betrayed him as he sat at a little distance from the bench on which Stella rested--a book in her hand, but not reading. The dog recognised Anselm, and rushed up to him with signs of delight which he would never have bestowed on a stranger. He even rushed backwards and forwards between the two in a joyous way, as if anxious to tell his mistress that an old Lullaboolagana friend was near. But she did not heed Dustiefoot's movements. She sat pale and motionless, with downcast eyes, oblivious to all around her. The sight was more than Langdale could bear. He would have laid down his life to serve her, and yet he dared not speak to her, being in fear lest his face and the sound of his voice would do her harm, and not good. He suffered horribly. Yet he knew that hers was the more intolerable burden. For through all he had work to do, and he was in constant intercourse with people whose knowledge in some one direction exceeded his own--circumstances which serve to make life coherent to the lover of knowledge, even when it has lost its best savour.

To-day, when he came in, his mother observed with concern that the fagged, strained look with which she had been struck on first seeing him when she returned with her daughter from Dresden had deepened rather than become less.

'You are working too hard, Anselm,' she said, looking at him keenly. 'You are as greedy as ever after knowledge. Those lectures of Virchow at the University, and the honorary work at the hospital, and your writing, and all the rest of it, do not make much of a holiday.'

'You forget, mother, that I had a long one----'

'Oh, in Australia! I hope you don't think of going back there. I think there must be something insidious in the climate--something that undermines the constitution. There is that young lady the Professor met there and found so charming. You met her here, did you not?--Mrs. Ritchie, you know----'

'Yes--what of her?'

'Well, I should very much like to have your opinion of her. I have made her come here for a few days. She is sleeping just now. I am exceedingly afraid that there is something very much amiss.'

Langdale felt a terror of what fresh catastrophe might be in store. The fixed look in Stella's face the last time he saw her at a little distance had haunted him night and day.

There is always a shock in hearing our worst fears put into bald, uncompromising words. This Langdale experienced when his mother went on:

'It is not her body now, it is her mind. I am sure of that. Perhaps she would have more confidence in an English doctor. If you would see her here in an informal way--she and your stepfather were so friendly, and Amalie, too, is very fond of her. I hardly know what to think of her husband. Amalie says he is devoted to her--but, if that is the case, she cannot be devoted to him. There must be something very much amiss when two young people drift so far apart at a time like this.'

Poor Langdale! Few situations could have been more ironical in a quiet, unaggressive way than to sit listening to his mother while she calmly discussed the situation which was the very core of the keenest sorrows and interests in his life. So far nothing could have been gained by taking his mother or sister into his confidence as to the relations which had at one time existed between himself and Stella, and the treachery that had come between them. But he was prepared at any moment to tell them all, and to seek their help in somehow averting that darkest of all misfortunes which seemed stealthily creeping nearer. In the meantime he kept silence. He absented himself from home that evening. Next morning he saw Stella alone in the library which had witnessed their first strange meeting in the Old World.

*CHAPTER LII.*

She knew he had returned from Vienna some weeks previously, and she was in a manner prepared to see him in his mother's house. Yet, when they stood face to face, something akin to fear was visible in her manner. Otherwise, he was more agitated than she was. They touched each other's hands, and then they sat facing each other in a silence full of ghost-like memories. Stella was the first to speak.

'You have been away, I think,' she said, without looking at him.

He told her something of his journey, of his old friend Max, and his rising renown as an oculist. He noticed that her attention wandered, and that she kept nervously playing with her wedding-ring, which hung looser than ever on her finger. There was a pause.

'Yes, it must have been very interesting,' she said, looking up--a remark that had no direct relation to what he had last said.

Something clutched at his throat and gave him a horrible, choking sensation.

She looked into his face fixedly.

'Don't, Anselm--don't say anything. I cannot bear it. You do not know. I can bear to speak to you now, because everything is all over and done with. But there are times: you do not know----'

She spoke in a low, imploring voice, and then suddenly broke off.

'What do I not know, Stella?' he said, mastering himself with a violent effort, and speaking in a calm, unmoved tone.

'Oh, it would be stupid to tell you. Let us talk of something else--the weather, for instance.'

This little attempt at recovering something of her old gaiety smote him to the heart.

'No, I cannot talk of anything else, Stella. I want you to speak to me of yourself. You know, in the old days, we agreed to be friends. We can at least be friends.'

'Yes, yes; we can be friends,' she said, and then she suddenly began to sob.

He kept perfectly silent. When she had recovered composure, he went on in the same calm voice as before.

'You know, Stella, friends should help one another. I think there is something you dread. Tell me what it is. I may be able to help you.'

'Are you afraid, too?' she said quickly. He did not reply immediately. He felt like one groping in the dark, afraid to move too quickly lest harm should be done. Then she added hesitatingly: 'I have been afraid for some time. The voices and the faces have gone away. But there is a silence coming round me, and every day I am more alone--an abyss between me and everyone that none can cross.'

'No, no, Stella; not so. How many care for you!'

'But I cannot care for them--not in the old way. There is a strange vacancy, an apathy; it comes creeping, creeping. It is like the tide rising round a ship that has been stranded. O my God, it is horrible--it is horrible!' She covered her face with her hands, and as he looked at her in tearless agony, he trembled as if in an ague fit. 'Do you know what I keep thinking of sometimes?' she said, suddenly looking up. 'Of some old story in Ovid, where one says: "Give me your hand before I am a serpent all over." Those old stories where people were turned into birds, and trees, and reptiles, they are not so terrible as--as some other things.'

'No, they are not. Only when we see a great danger, the very fact that we see it shows we may try to avoid it.' His voice almost failed him once or twice, for there was something in her tone and manner, even more than in her words, which confirmed his worst fears.

'You still keep up your old habit of taking a book with you when you go out,' he said presently, in a lighter tone.

'Yes, but I cannot read; is it not strange?' she said, looking at him with wide-opened eyes.

'Ah, these times come to one,' he answered. 'Now I am going to tell you something about myself--may I?'

'Oh, of course,' she said, with more animation than she had yet shown.

'Well, I have finished that treatise I was writing at Minjah--about the conditions of factory labour. There is some other work I want to do; and, besides, I have gone quite blunt over the thing. The facts, and I believe their inferences, are correct; but the style I am sure is odious. Now, will you go over the MS. for me?'

It was some little time before she spoke, and then it was in a hesitating, broken way, which was quite foreign to her old, quick, spontaneous manner.

'I would be so glad to do it, but I lose things so dreadfully--things I have been thinking of. It is as though--I hardly know how to explain it--as if I came on blank spaces in my mind. Words and thoughts drop away out of reach quite suddenly. I am almost afraid to speak to people, lest I might not know what they say. I was afraid even of you. And yet how kind you have always been--except that one letter. But it was because it was wickedly--hurt--and the other one I never got. No, I never got it--never.'

'But about this work I want you to do for me, Stella?' he answered. The clear, harmonious intonations of his voice were lost in a constrained huskiness; but though his heart was throbbing wildly with fierce and contending emotions, his self-possession was outwardly unbroken. 'It is very important I should get the help of some friend; and there is no one whose aid I care to ask but yours. It does not in the least matter about your taking a long while over it. Do only a page or two at a time.'

'I will try to do it: but I will not let anyone see it, for fear it may be wrong. I will try not to make mistakes; but I do not know. It is what you were writing at Lullaboolagana?'

'Yes; and there is one thing more I am going to ask you. There is a convalescent home for little children on the northern outskirts of the town. My mother knows it. Will you let her take you there?'

'Oh, Anselm--no! They will be pale and miserable. They will hurt me; and when things hurt me.... Ah, you do not know how dreadful it is!' and a look of helpless fear came into her face, which pierced him like a sword.

Before he could trust himself to answer this objection, she went on, sometimes speaking in a low, hurried voice, at others very slowly, with a curious hesitation, as if the words she sought eluded her, while often she used terms that but approximately expressed what she meant.

'Sometimes at night I keep thinking of a poor half-crazy Welshwoman who used to wander about, some years ago. She had a great dislike to staying in houses. She always said there were adders in them. She was not so--so badly hurt in her mind, you know, that she ought to be locked up. You know, Anselm, it is true, when people lose everything--when they forget the meaning of all around them--they are locked away like the dead; only they are not quite like the dead. Johanna, that was her name.... Sometimes she came to Fairacre, and mother and Kirsty were very kind to her.'

She broke off abruptly, and gave a long shuddering sigh.

'Ah, after all, you have never been at Fairacre!' she said, fixing her great mournful eyes on his face, after a pause. 'It was near the vine-arcade the scarlet fairy roses grew I was to wear the day you came, when the _Paquerette_ reached port. You always liked me to wear roses; and when I flew up to meet you, a bird began to sing as if it were wild with joy.... Have I hurt you?' she said falteringly, as he rose and turned away abruptly, his lips trembling and ashy pale. He could not speak.

She stole up to him with a frightened air, and, looking into his face, she saw that his eyes were wet. She gave a little low moan, and put her hand on his arm.

'Anselm, what can I say to make you glad? You were always so serene end hopeful.... Do you remember what I said when I sent you those dreadful letters that have been burnt into my brain?--or did I dream it? I shall do what you think is right.... I am not dreaming now!'

He turned quickly, raising his hands to draw her to him; but with a strong effort he resisted the impulse. He noticed that, since she began to speak to him, something of the tension in her face had relaxed.

'Tell me about this poor woman, Stella, who used to come to Fairacre,' he said, in as calm a voice as was possible to him.

'About Johanna? The last time she came, she was very strange. She said that when she stayed inside speckled adders crawled round her at night, saying, "'Drown yourself--drown yourself!' There are three under the table now!" That was what she said, and then mother tried to soothe her. She said if they were there, we would see them. But Johanna laughed: it was such a sharp--no, a shrill laugh. I laughed like her the other night, and it sounded horrible in the silence. Poor Dustiefoot was frightened; he began to growl at my door. He lies on the mat outside.... You are not angry with me, are you?' She looked in his face with confused timidity.

'Ah, no, Stella; why should I be?' he said in a choked voice.

She passed her hand wearily over her eyes.

'Well, I have not finished. There is some reason why I began to tell you. Ah, it was about poor Johanna. Yes, she laughed and said the adders wouldn't let anyone like mother see them. They were no fools. "Does it not say in the Word of God, 'Be ye wise as serpents'?" That was what she said. "The way they all came staring at me!" she said. "You see, adders have a great advantage over us in that way, ma'am, having no eyelashes. If I prayed at all, I think I would pray that these beasties might be kept from me." Then mother held her hand, and said, "But you do still pray, I hope?" "Well, no, ma'am," she said, "not lately. You see, there's some that the Lord lets off His hands altogether. If they pray, He turns a deaf ear to them; if they are in want or sickness, He gives them no wine or mead out of a crystal cup." ... She did drown herself at last,' she ended, in an awe-stricken tone, looking into Anselm's face with startled, wide-opened eyes.

'Yes, but about the convalescent children?' he said gently.

'Oh, I know now why I told you about this poor woman,' she answered quickly. 'I am terrified of being hurt, because when I am, as I was so badly with the music at the Philharmonic Hall, I--I think it would be better--oh, so much better--to be quite at rest. Some days ago I walked by the canal----' She suddenly stopped, a half-guilty look in her face.

'You have been awake very much of late, Stella,' he said, betraying no sign of anguish, save in the constrained accents of his voice.

'Yes; but that is better than to be made to sleep. Often when I am asleep, everything I touch falls in atoms--everything crumbles away. Then I dream something dreadful has happened, and I am glad to wake. But when I am wide awake, it is worse--oh, much worse--than any dream!'

'But, Stella, these children are not miserable and wretched. It is not a great hospital; there are never more than fourteen. It is a private place, founded by seven ladies--my mother is one of them--for children who have all but recovered from illness. The greatest joy you could give them would be to tell them a little Australian story, or take them out for a drive in the country two or three at a time. My mother and I took four of them up to Treptow the other day. It is on the river, and there is a large coffee-room quite close to the Spree. They sat by the window eating cakes and seeing the boats and barges sail by, and then we went out into the wood behind Treptow, and every little weed they saw gave them joy. You have plenty of time.'

'Plenty of time,' she repeated vacantly, and then a little afterwards, as if the meaning of the words had gradually dawned on her, 'There is endless time--and it is all empty and terrible, and full of crumbling things. I like to go outside because I feel as if I were then away from the corridor--the dreadful corridor. You do not know what I mean by that.'

'No; but you can explain it to me, Stella.'

His calm, even voice seemed to allay her rising agitation. She passed her hand slowly over her brow before answering.

'You know, for weeks back when I try to read, or write, or even sew--whatever it is I try to do slips away from me; even when people talk round me their voices go a long way off. And then I am in a wide, great, empty corridor, where my footsteps make a strange sound. But I do not mind that. It is the long, dark passages that wind out of it. I feel as if I were dragged along them against my will, and at the end there are great cages with iron bars in front, strong iron bars, for there are wild creatures behind them.'

She looked up into his face with a terror in her eyes that made the perspiration stand out in cold drops on his forehead.

'Dear Stella, do not think of them,' he said in a low, imploring voice.

'Ah, but you do not know--they are not savage creatures out of the woods. They are human beings--they are women, some of them; but they beat at the bars and shriek to get out. When I hear them I feel as if I must shriek too. They are mad--they must be kept there because they are more dangerous than wild beasts. Ah, my God! how they terrify me! I keep silent. I say nothing of all this, because people would be afraid of me as I am of these cages, and--and those that are in them.'

'No, no, Stella. That is only how people feel after they have had a terrible illness like yours. To-morrow you must come to see these children----'

'Ah, the children. They have been ill. You are nursing them back to life again--how cruel that is often! They might have died while the world seemed still beautiful, and they could pray to God, "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name." Think what it is, Anselm, to outlive all that--to know that there is no Father in heaven--that there are people who must be put into iron cages--that you see it coming nearer every day--a terror you cannot name!'

'Stella, Stella, think how wrong it would be to let ourselves sink under one idea--one aspect of life in that way! It is only because your illness still hangs about you that you can have such strange thoughts. If these children were neglected now, when their parents are unable to care for them properly, their constitutions might be injured--impaired for life. It is not that they would die--for most creatures, having once gained a footing in the world, make up their minds to stay if possible. It is that the seeds would be laid for lingering maladies--perhaps for madness itself. That is what you can do, Stella--help to save some people from the wretchedness of lives hopelessly mutilated by disease. I know there are some forms of misery we can do nothing to lessen. It is all the more shame to us if we do not help in things within our reach.'

There was a little touch of sternness in his voice. It hurt him to assume it, but the tone seemed to bring his words home to her more directly.

'You wish me to go to see them? Ah, you think I can speak to them--that they will love me as the children used to----'

'I do not think it--I know it. Once you told me that you were wilful. I did not quite believe it then, but now you are, a little--only you will not persist. Now let me tell you about some of these little ones.'

He made her sit in a large armchair, and placed a cushion under her head, and then sat on a low chair facing her, and told her one or two of those commonplace, everyday incidents in the annals of the poor which come within the ken of all who visit or work among them.

Only he did not let his narrations drop into monologues. He put them in a way that made her ask questions, that roused and interested her. The last child he spoke of was a little one named Gretchen. She had been run over in the streets, taken into one of the hospitals, and discharged while still very weak. At home she was inadequately fed, and when his mother found out about her a tumour had formed under one knee, which threatened to cripple her for life. This had been removed, and she was now in the Home--a plump, merry little thing, who gave names of her own to everyone.

'What do you suppose she calls me, Stella?' he asked.

She smiled. 'One who knows how to scold sometimes?'

'No; something with more unconscious irony than that. "The doctor who has no medicine." Of course a doctor of that sort is all the more welcome to Greta; but, still, the title has its own little stroke of malice when one knows how applicable it often is. And then my mother has a distinctive name, too. One of the other little ones said one day enthusiastically: "Oh, she is an angel!" "Yes, she is," answered Greta; "an angel with a basket." The matron overheard them and told my mother, who is very proud of the definition, for, after all, as she says, how much better it is to have a basket in this world, if you are an angel, than a pair of wings! Yes, she is a child, take her all in all, out of a thousand. So tender, and bright, and unselfish. She has the gift of a sunny nature, and yet she has so much imagination, and she can do so many things--and, by this time, if no one had helped her, she would be either dead or a cripple for life.'

'How old is the dear little thing?'

'Nine last month. My mother has insisted on her staying a few more weeks, so that she may be quite strong. She is knitting a pair of long stockings for Karl, a younger brother. "He is so good and strong, and already he can do many more things than a girl," she told me quite lately. I asked her if she would like to be a boy, and after meditating a little, she said: "No." "Why?" I said. "Because the dear God made me a girl," she answered; and then she added: "And I would wear out my boots so much faster."'

'I must go to see Greta,' said Stella, smiling. 'Yes, it would have been dreadful if her health had been spoiled,' she said reflectively, after a little pause.

Presently Mrs. Kellwitz came in, knitting; and when Stella found that some of the convalescent children were badly in need of clothing, she began to make some garments which Mrs. Kellwitz cut out for her. That evening, when she bade Langdale good-night, she said softly:

'I am not going to be wilful. I will do what you wish.'

He stood for some moments motionless, while the quick flush that had risen in his face died away. And then he recalled her face and tones during their early interview that day. It was one of those terrible hours which all through a lifetime remain in the memory as if stamped on it by a process apart from ordinary recollection.

He took a letter out of his pocket-book that he had received on the preceding day from Mrs. Tareling. He had written to her through a lawyer, stating that he had possession of one of the letters he had left in her hands for Miss Stella Courtland--naming the day and even the hour. One had been mutilated, the other stolen, and a fraudulent document had been put with the falsified one she had delivered. He awaited any explanation she might have to offer before putting the matter into the hands of an eminent firm of Melbourne lawyers for prosecution. The reply was an abject confession. Of course, it was quite false--as abject confessions extorted by fear are apt to be. It was her overwhelming love for her only brother--the adjective 'only' twice underlined. He had loved Stella Courtland passionately from boyhood. She had at one time favoured his suit. (N.B.--It is curious to notice how naturally people slip into this kind of English when they are telling lies.) Then she had at a moment's caprice rejected him. The effect on the only brother was terrible. But still he had ample grounds for hope. Then came Miss Courtland's visit to Lullaboolagana, her return to Monico Lodge. In picturesque English came a graphic description of the terrible temptation to remove a rival from her brother's path. Laurette rose to the occasion. She spoke in such exaggerated accents of remorse, one might imagine she had used a poisoned bowl. Yes, she had been weak--desperately weak and erring, as only a poor foolish woman can be when blinded by affection, etc., etc. But, after all, the past was irrevocable. What but harm could come of stirring up strife?

Langdale asked himself the same question with a sinking heart. Here were full and clear proofs of the treachery by which they had been betrayed. But what could any exposure of this base crime avail? It meant vengeance--nothing more. Publicity could not save them a single pang, nor make the future more hopeful, nor help to divert the doom, worse than death, with which he saw Stella threatened. He paced up and down the room, his sight dimmed, a dull throbbing in his temples, as he recalled her looks and tones in the earlier part of their interview. 'I will do what you wish.' His heart gave a leap as he recalled the words. What action should he take to save her from the wild, dark morass into which her life had been turned?

He had written, sending his letter through an eminent English lawyer, on the morning that Stella forwarded him those fatal documents--one unsigned, cunningly devised to support the lies that were conveyed by the fragments, diabolically falsified, of his own letter, with the purpose of extorting an admission of guilt. But since then all other thoughts had been lost in agonizing anxiety as to the issue of Stella's illness. That had passed, but a worse calamity threatened her. Could he not save her? Could he not stem the bitter waters that had swept away all the joy and pleasantness of her life, and now menaced reason itself? He had resolved to urge no claim--to make no appeal to the love which he knew was still the strongest emotion that swayed her--while any weakness of shattered health clouded or warped her judgment. But now it seemed as if every day, in which she was left at the mercy of the grief and dark fear that had lodged in her mind, rendered ultimate recovery more doubtful. And what prospect did the future hold for her? Was not the slow, dull contagion of this union, so fraudulently compassed, a greater evil than any alternative that lay open to her? And yet, to a proud, sensitive man whose own experience of life had been early dashed with a woman's infidelity, how unendurable was the thought of any stigma cast on the girl whose honour was more sacred to him than aught else in the world! But, then, there are passages in life of so vital a nature that they must be judged wholly apart from the common ineffectual criticism of common minds. It was one of those subtle and cruel complications in human lives in which no action seems possible that is not charged with evil. At last, in despair, he told himself that he would do what he could, and live from hand to mouth; for the present make no plans beyond the passing day--only, as far as lay in his power, he would watch over and shield Stella from harm--seek to guard her from the stealthy foe that had already sapped some of the outworks of the citadel of reason.

Next morning when he went into his mother's sitting-room he found the two in cheerful converse.

'Stella is coming with me to our convalescent children this afternoon,' his mother said briskly. She was one of those generous-minded, whole-hearted, actively kind women whose mere presence throws discredit on the darker evils of the world. 'See how rapidly the child sews!' she said, holding up a small garment which Stella had already completed. 'My dear, it is fatal when I find that people can work like this. I am always turning up with a little bundle of second-hand flannel or calico to be made into small petticoats and knickerbockers.'

'An angel with a basket, in fact, mother,' said her son. And at this they all laughed a little. Langdale noted, with a thrill of gladness, that something of the old look of vivid life had come back into Stella's face.

To do some work, and for his sake, because he wished it--this was the chord that had been struck, and gave a quick response. The mere fact of giving expression to the dread that had so long passed 'in smother,' and begun habitually to haunt her, served to lessen her fears. After this, Stella went almost daily to the convalescent children. And daily she went over some of Langdale's MS., altering a word here and there, now and then putting in a different phrase. She feared at first to trust her own judgment, when she felt inclined to make changes, but she gained confidence as she went on. And then something of the fascination of brain-work, of that preoccupation with ideas which takes the mind out of itself, laid hold of her.

To think too exclusively of ourselves or our own concerns, even under our best aspects, is, as a rule, to become sad, weary, and discouraged. But to be immured in such thoughts, when the thrill and joy of life are gone, when its best promises are mildewed with disillusion and disappointment, is to poison the very source of sane existence and healthy endeavour. It had been so with Stella, and in the lowest deep of her unhappiness there yet opened the lower deep, that the misery which had overtaken her like a flood was so largely her own doing.

Yes; gradually she crept back from the gulf that had threatened to close over her. The little ones that gathered round her, their faces lighting up with pleasure, drew her to them from day to day, and then they would shyly ask for stories of Australia--that strange, far-away land with strange birds and beasts, and unknown trees that never lost their leaves. Sometimes she would write out beforehand one of the little twilight stories she had told at Lullaboolagana, so that she might not hesitate and be at a loss for words when her little audience clustered breathlessly around her. 'The dear lady'--that was the name by which they learned to call her.

And then it began to be spring once more--the spring of a northern climate, when Nature gradually wakens from her rigid sleep, when the first early blossoms and the first returning birds--those timid evangels of quickening life--thrill the air with messages, which the heart understands but does not put into words.

It was one day early in April. The air had lost its barbarous keenness. The sun shone as if it was getting warm. There were dun-coloured clouds over part of the sky, but between them a wistful azure showed itself, and on the tall, slender birch in the Thiergarten that was opposite Stella's sitting-room a swallow and some linnets were carolling as if they were bent on being marked as the first choristers of the season. Stella had returned from a visit to one of the museums with Professor Kellwitz, and sat by the window as she had entered, in her sealskin coat and toque. As they returned they met Langdale, and he accompanied them as far as the Pension Eisengau. The incident had brought back the first day they met in Berlin with startling distinctness. They had exchanged few words beyond the ordinary salutations. Mrs. Kellwitz and Stella were often together, but she and Langdale met seldomer, and but for a few minutes. Yet these accidental brief meetings surrounded the day on which they took place with an aureole. Stella now sat with lips slightly parted, her hands folded in her lap, looking fixedly before her with a half-startled, dawning sort of expression. Ritchie entered at that moment, and was struck with the air of vividness in her face.

'Why, Stella, you will soon be quite yourself again,' he said, leaning against the mantelpiece near where she sat.

The colour slowly deepened in her cheeks, and she took off her toque.

He suddenly stooped over her, and touched her forehead with his lips. She started as if she were stung. 'You must not do that,' she said, in a peremptory tone.

He was deeply wounded, and drew back, looking at her with a startled expression. 'Perhaps I had better not come into the same sitting-room you are in,' he said, in a rougher voice than he had ever used to her before. A look of cold displeasure settled on her face, but she said nothing.

'While you were so ill,' he went on in a gentler tone, 'and seemed more miserable if I were about, I kept out of the way. Then, as you got better you were kinder to me; you sometimes drove out with me, and let me do things for you. But now again you hardly speak to me once in two days; and as for laughing or joking----' He noticed a look almost akin to terror creeping into her face, and stopped abruptly. 'Forgive me, Stella, if I have been rough,' he said after a little.

Stella had rung the bell, and when Maisie came in she gave her her toque and coat to put away, and asked for her writing-desk. Before she returned an answer to Ted's apology there was a tap at the door, and Mrs. Farningham came in.

'Now this is fortunate! I wanted to find you both in,' she said. 'You know, Stella, that my mother and step-father are going to the East about the beginning of May. Anselm tells me that Johnny's lungs need special care. Well, I mean only to stay in England till the beginning of June; I will then join my mother in Egypt. Now, had you not better come with me? You know how these two men will haunt the racecourses from Dan to Beersheba--from May to October.'

It had been for some time arranged that the Farninghams and Ritchies would leave Berlin together. The two men were anxious to be in England through the racing season; and their wives, who were neither of them supremely interested in the turf, would thus bear each other company.

Stella became very pale and grave.

'Well, I think that would be far the best arrangement,' said Ritchie.

But Stella did not at once reply.

'You see, they could join us in Palestine or Egypt as soon as the St. Leger or whatever the last races they wanted to see were over,' went on Mrs. Farningham. She watched Stella a little curiously, and seeing the anxious, perplexed look in her face, she added, lightly turning to Ted, 'You see, Mr. Ritchie, your wife is not disposed to lose sight of you for so long--but you think the matter over.'

And with that she left the two alone once more.

'You had better go, Stella,' said Ritchie after a pause.

'I do not know,' she answered slowly. She was like one roughly aroused out of a gentle morning dream. A flood of conjectures, of questions, poured in on her; and the old tormenting habit of finding the train of thought suddenly swamped reasserted itself. But one conviction was clear and steady: if she and Ritchie parted, she would never come back to him again.

He, poor fellow! was touched, thinking her hesitation was due to concern at the prospect of leaving him to his own devices for so long a period.

'Don't be afraid about me, Stella,' he said. 'I made a promise that I would never forget myself in drink again; and I don't mean to put a knife in the contract. I don't take much credit to myself for that; for the more you see of the world, the more there is to open your eyes. We get into a beastly habit of drinking spirits in Australia; but a bottle of good Chateau Lafite beats such stuff hollow. You sip glass after glass, and, instead of getting stupider, you are more alive.... And then, Stella, while matters are as they are between us, it's easier for me to be out of your sight. You see, if Farningham and I are in England till the end of September, why the year would be up by the time I came to--Palestine, is it? Isn't that the place where the Jews used to play up so before they discovered the Christians? By Jove, you should hear Minimus Avenell talk about the Hebrews!' and Ted laughed at sundry reminiscences.

Somehow the sight of Stella so perplexed and silent at the prospect of parting from him for four or five months raised his spirits.

*CHAPTER LIII.*

During the time that intervened between this and the week before they left Berlin for London, Stella remained undecided as to her future movements. Letters came from Adelaide and Lullaboolagana full of tender anxiety regarding her health. Ted had written faithfully, week by week, while she was unable to do so. He had always put the best face on the matter; and when finally out of danger, he had cabled the news. Now letters came in answer to the first short notes she had written, about the middle of February. There was so much rejoicing over her recovery--such loving, thankful congratulations. They were so secure in their confidence that return to health meant love and happiness and safety from all evil. The entire ignorance as to her real life of all who were dear to her in her home and native land separated Stella from them far more than the long weeks of sailing which lay between. Is there anything in human experience more strange, more piercing, than the isolation that surrounds most of us during the darker storms that rend the soul?

'How unaccountable, how incredible, how strange beyond all reckoning!' we say, when some event wholly unanticipated happens in the history of others. We so often forget that the inner lives of even those who are most closely linked to ours are implacably veiled from our gaze. It is with individual as with national life. Outwardly, things may be going on in the old smooth, apparently prosperous fashion. We do not see the inner cone, in which a little speck has appeared that slowly spreads and spreads. We do not hear the tread on the loom where the shuttle at every throw is weaving the inscrutable web of circumstance. At last the catastrophe falls heavily, brutally, without comment or warning; and then, being powerless to do any good, we draw a moral. Its ineptitude, as a rule, is equalled only by our ignorance of the real forces that have been at work.

But lost, undecided, and unhappy as Stella had again become, the old vacant apathy did not return. She worked daily; and those daily hours in which so much of her own personality was lost in thoughts for others, and in matters apart from the groove of her own life, saved her. The day on which she had corrected the last of Langdale's manuscript she met him in Mrs. Farningham's sitting-room in the pension. They talked chiefly of Socialism, which was then a prominent topic among those who were inimical or favourable to the movement. Mrs. Farningham was gradually becoming a zealous convert.

'After all,' she said, at the close of a spirited, half-jesting controversy between herself and Langdale, 'justice is never done to the poor until those who are in power begin to be terrified. These bungling attempts at State Socialism are valuable as a tribute to the power that lies behind our kinsman Schiedlich and men like him.'

'Dear old Gottfried, I wish he had not joined the extreme party,' returned Langdale. 'It seems to me he was doing such good work when he was writing calmly and dispassionately.'

'Anselm, you are too provokingly amenable to reason,' said his sister, interrupting him. 'Still, you can persuade Gottfried when no one else can move him. I wish you would take him with you to the East when he is released. You know mother is never so happy as when there is an invalid to care for. And he must be rather broken down, by what you say of him.'

'That is a happy thought,' returned Langdale. 'I shall see if I cannot get him away. He will be at large in a few days hence.'

This was the first time Stella heard of Langdale's intention to go to the East; and as she listened, her face was suddenly suffused with colour.

The rest of the afternoon passed as if enveloped in a mist. Mrs. Farningham made Stella lie down, and placed a screen round the couch, trusting she might fall asleep. But she could not rest. She went into her bedroom. Dustiefoot followed her and tried to win her attention. But she did not notice him. She stood before a wide, full-length mirror that was in the room, and looked at her own face in it steadily, till she caught a frightened, cowering look in the eyes which made her shrink and draw back. The unsteady, fiery light in them made her turn deathly pale.... She threw herself into an arm-chair and covered her face with her hands. Then the silence became intolerable to her, and she said something aloud--she hardly knew what. The tone must have been strange, for the dog shrank away, looking at her timidly.

'Oh, Dustiefoot, Dustiefoot!--do not be afraid! .... O my God! why is he afraid of me? .... I must go to Anselm--I must see him .... he will know what I should do--he will speak to me....'

Then she broke into bitter weeping--leaning her head on a table near her--with low long sobs like a child who is too spent to weep aloud.

On this Dustiefoot came up and put his head on her lap; then he licked her hands; and this somehow comforted her a little.

'Good dog, good dog!' she said, patting him on the head.

The tears relieved her. After a little she returned to her friends.

'Have you two decided how long you are to be in England?' asked Farningham, after some desultory chit-chat.

'I fear Mrs. Ritchie has not yet made up her mind to come with me,' answered Mrs. Farningham.

'You had better go, Stella,' said Ted.

'Yes; I shall go,' she answered, her face suddenly flushing.

This decision was greeted by the rest with warm approval.

*CHAPTER LIV.*

Two weeks after the friends went to London, Mrs. Farningham's delicate boy had an attack of hemorrhage. This kept her indoors very much, and altered their plans. It was arranged that she and Stella should leave for Alexandria as soon as the boy was well enough to travel. They were staying in the Westham Hotel, close to Grosvenor Square. One morning, a week before they purposed leaving, Stella went to make some purchases for herself and Mrs. Farningham. Not once after the evening on which she announced her intention of going to the East had Stella wavered in her decision. She had improved rapidly in health and spirits. The dark shadow that had for a time hovered over her had disappeared. At times something of feverish restlessness took possession of her. But there was no relapse into moody melancholy or apathy. The steady, unimpaired health, which naturally belonged to her, was once more re-established.

Though it was past the middle of May, the morning was dark and lowering. But Stella was oblivious of all external influences. Ritchie had been anxious to hire a brougham for her daily use; but she prevented his doing so. She said she saw so much more when she was on foot, and all her old love of walking had returned. She had an abounding sense of vigorous life that made physical exertion a necessity. A few paces away from the hotel she met Langdale on his way there.

'Will you please take Dustiefoot back?' she said, her face glowing, her eyes softly lustrous as in the old days. 'When I am looking at things he puts his paws on the counter, and insists on looking too.'

'May I walk a little way with you?' he asked as she gave him her hand. 'I am going into the country for a few days this afternoon.'

'I think Amalie is waiting for you,' she answered. 'Her boy has had rather a restless night again.'

Then he took Dustiefoot back as she wished. No plans nor designs had been formed between them. They met casually now and then, and talked a little of merely impersonal matters; nothing more. But each was conscious that the one step which was to shape their future was taken when Stella decided to go to the East.

In those days she struggled no longer against the rising joy that used to well up in her heart at the prospect of cutting herself finally adrift from the future that had been woven for her by treachery and deceit. The sweet fascination of life had come back to her with redoubled force. On this morning, as she went on her way, she recalled the existence she had led for the past few months with horror--with something of wondering contempt. She had been terrified at the past, oblivious of the present, quailing at the days to come, till she had been on the very brink of madness. And all the time the world was full of interest and movement and joy.

Was there no lurking consciousness of the possibility of remorse swallowing up this intoxicating recaptured happiness? If so, she spurned the thought--cast it aside like one of those malformed little insects that sometimes crawl on the petals of blood-red roses. She was glad that a kind of pagan recklessness, of indifference to far-off consequences, mingled with the tide of her courage and reviving happiness. Once for all she had decided that the problem of her life must be looked at as it was in itself--must be solved apart from authority and tradition. She had been too long cowering like a slave, afraid of others--afraid of herself--afraid most of all of Nature, which in its subtle way had all the time cherished and nursed back into being the one love of her life, compared to which all other bonds were but as flax touched with flame. The chalice of life's most precious benediction was once more at her lips.

She recalled something that Langdale had once said of the stimulating aura of London--the indefinable demand on one's best powers to polish the rude rocks of capacity into blocks fit for building. But apart from any subtle appeal to the mind, there was a kind of implied union, in the silent fellowship of being successfully alive, which she shared with the crowd around. To be young and well clad, and walk upright with well-moulded limbs, with eyes undimmed with fears, with a capacity for happiness, was a form of responsive loyalty to the life that surged around. Everything appeared to her so unworn and fresh, she was alive in every faculty, and stirred as with the tender novelty in which objects present themselves to us in early childhood. Fancy, imagination, and memory, all were buoyant as young birds that had newly learned to cleave the air.

The feeling now and then was uppermost that she had in some way gone back to an earlier stage of experience--that some indefinable weight had slipped off her. It was as though Nature had taken her by the hand and led her back smilingly from the sophistry of long-accumulated tradition--led her back to the primal instincts of life, blotting out the officious 'thou shalt' and 'shalt not' of defunct generations as impertinent intermeddling with a joy all her own. Perhaps there are forces slumbering in the mind which waken into activity but for one brief hour of the years which are given to us here. It may be that on this morning, if never again, Stella was subtly influenced by the bare, untrammelled aspects of her native land--by the vast unpeopled spaces which hold no claim from the past, and lay no ghostly charges on human beings to postpone their lives for the sake of those who have been and those who are to come. And yet it was vagrant recollections of one of the wildernesses of her country that first quelled the glad ardour of her mood. In the midst of her content at being among crowds of unknown men and women, she recalled how often people spoke of the solitude of a strange city being more absolute than that of a desert. Instantaneously she saw before her an austere stretch of Mallee Scrub. What moody melancholy the reality would evoke--what troops of questions! ... Questions of what? A quick, inexplicable pang shot through her mind--a dread like that which comes in a dream of the night, when one who has long ago passed beyond reach and recall stands in the masking appearance of life, and the sleeper shrinks from the blank of awakening. But it was a momentary feeling.

She made her purchases, and then passed out of Oxford Street by way of Audley Street, purposely taking a circuitous route to the Westham Hotel. She wanted to walk alone--to give herself up to the full sway of this swift, strong return of mental and physical well-being. But like the refrain of a song which once heard long ago comes back to haunt us one day, we know not why, the thought of the great Mallee desert kept rising up before her: the days she had wandered there--the books she had read--the thoughts that had come to her of the people who had fled from the world and lived in desolate places for the salvation of their soul. What strange delusions men had put upon themselves from age to age, sacrificing the only life they were sure of to vague chimeras of unknown modes of existence! Then her mother's grave, sweet voice came to her, and she suddenly found the tears rising in her eyes. She wiped them half angrily.

'I must write and tell mother all--all!' she thought.

But the resolve did not quiet the throng of thoughts which began to rise. 'My beloved child, how I long to see you once more! Give me fuller details of your daily life. Why do you say so little of Edward? He wrote with such faithful regularity when you were ill; but since your recovery he writes no longer.' These and other extracts from the home letters, from her mother's especially, rose before her. Nay, it seemed as though one strode beside her to read them to her whether she would or no. She went over the past few months again in self-vindication, as if she were pleading her case before an unseen tribunal.

'See,' she seemed to say, as if addressing a judge, 'how hopelessly all my future would have been wrecked if Anselm had not saved me from myself. It was not one misfortune that overwhelmed me. Had it been only that vile plot of an unscrupulous woman--cheating me out of the one great happiness of life--I would have somehow borne the misery, perhaps overcome it. At least the union would be binding. That I am sure of. But there was a worse betrayal--the moral failure of the man who married me, concealing his subjection to drink. Yes, one may overcome this for a time, but there is always the possibility of a relapse. A year of probation--of what value is that when in one hour all the forces of habit may resume full sway?'

It seemed as though her invisible audience looked at her with stern, searching eyes. The very air became heavy with doubt and suspicion.

'We have made no plans,' she went on, unconsciously entering on the defence that implies accusation. 'We have in common the power of sympathy with wide aims--with impersonal endeavours. We are capable of a great disinterested friendship that time and intimacy can only render more perfect....'

What a strange power of the mind this is--in the hour of keenest elation to become conscious of a cloud of unseen witnesses who are satisfied with no version of our motives short of absolute veracity. After all that she could urge, Stella was in the end shaken, dissatisfied, restless. 'It is part of the morbid phase through which I have been passing,' she thought. And she mechanically hurried on, as if to escape her self-appointed tribunal, her explanations, the doubts that were incipient fears.

She had followed Audley Street much further than she intended, and now struck out of it eastward, going into a narrow street where, in the distance, she saw one or two cabs. She had got tired, and wished to drive back to the Westham. Before she reached them she was startled by a sudden downpour of rain. At the same moment she found herself opposite the open porch of a church, into which she went for shelter. There were some women who had evidently come out. Two of them were talking together.

'Which cardinal?' said one.

'Why, Cardinal Newman,' answered the other.

The name reached Stella, awakening many slumbering memories--awakening, too, that deep chord of reverent affection which the soul never loses for those who have at one time illuminated and guided it, even though we may have lost the light, though we may have strayed far from the pastures in which still waters flow.

'Is the Cardinal here?' she asked eagerly.

'Yes--the service is almost over,' answered the woman she addressed; 'but if you go in, and go up near the altar, you can see him very well,' she added kindly.

Acting on the impulse of the moment, Stella went in. But even as she entered some curious intuition crossed her mind--a misgiving, rather, that this simple action might break the purpose round which her happiness, her late triumphant sense of restored well-being, had centred. She passed noiselessly up the left aisle and took a seat not far from the high altar, where she was partly concealed by a pillar.

Yes, the service was almost over; but she saw him clearly--the man whose words so many years ago, in her careless, untroubled girlhood, had so deeply stirred the depths of her inner life; whose voice had been as a voice from heaven to guide her into close communion with God. But the voice had died into silence, and all the glow of dawning intercourse with a kingdom not of this world--all the glad fervour of faith--had left her. And often it had seemed good to her that she had been so early emancipated from the dogmatic finalities, the uncertain certainties, full of contradictions, that men are asked to receive as revelations of the Divine Will. But now that the first spring of youth was barely over, how hard and cruel life had become! and what was the bourne to which she had turned?

Alas! had she so soon again fallen into the clutches of Care and Fear--those haggard visitants, never far off when the conscience is not at peace, but soothed with anodynes? From the moment that she knelt within the church, all that had blinded her was swept ruthlessly away. It was like the letting in of waters, whose rising tide obliterates the paltry landmarks hastily thrown up by invading scouts who had no legal claim to the country. She heard nothing--saw nothing but that pale, spiritual presence; the high, noble brow--the austere, ascetic countenance, furrowed with years and sorrows--a face keenly symbolical of a life consecrated to the service of God and man.

She saw his hands joined and held up in benediction--saw him turn to the people and make the sign of the cross on them; and she bent her head in bitter weeping, like a reed shaken by a great storm. As smoke vanisheth away and is seen no more, so was she forsaken of the happiness--the passionate elation--that had so lately thrilled her through and through with an exalted sense of vitality.

Low and lower yet her head was bent, while she was rent with piercing sorrow, and the tears drenched her face like rain. The last note of the organ died away, the last footfalls of the congregation retreated, and she was alone in the house of prayer--alone with the still, small voice at whose sound our dearest travesties of righteousness shrivel into filthy rags. She had wandered so long and so far, and near her was the image of the crucified One--whom she had betrayed like Peter of old. 'And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.... And Peter went out and wept bitterly.'

All the unsatisfied yearning for belief, which had so long been stilled and left a waste place in her heart, rose into new life. And with this the anguish of a penitent convicted of innumerable treasons pierced her like a sword.

There are experiences of the soul that cannot be fathomed. They are beyond the reach of any plummet that is within our grasp--being part of the inscrutable mystery of the union of matter and spirit. There are moments in which the bruised, shaken, sorrowful human creature sees as by lightning-flashes the wild devious ways by which the spirit is lured away from the only possession that is everlasting! In the revulsion of feeling that overwhelmed her, Stella could for a time frame neither words nor purpose. But from the first she knew that she dared not follow the path which so short a time before had been to her as the only one that led into the citadel of life and hope. Gradually the first bitterness and tumult ebbed away. Some lines that &he had once read to her father came back to her:

'But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild, At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord!'

Yes, out of the abysses of exceeding darkness which first fell on her when she knew that the only purpose which seemed to make life possible must be abandoned, there gradually emerged a faint dawn of hope. After all her weary wanderings--after her blindness and hardness of heart--after her long conviction that God could only be darkly groped after, never securely hoped in--she knew once more that the chastisement of our peace was upon Him.

'And I replied, My Lord!'

She whispered the words through her blinding tears, and even her great unhappiness was an earnest to her that, notwithstanding her desertion and denial, and callous forgetfulness and unbelief, she had not been cast off utterly.

More and more piercingly she realized how her own pride and vanity and impatience of suffering had been at the root of the evil that had overtaken her. A scorching sense of shame at her infidelity to the higher loyalties of justice, self-sacrifice, and generosity overcame her. Waves of cutting remorse swept over her as she reviewed her conduct in her relationship with her husband. How indifferent and hard she had been all these months--shirking all companionship with him, never seeking to win him to any interest or pursuit beyond the narrow groove in which his life had always run! She was, perhaps, a little unfair to herself as she reviewed her conduct in this respect, as we are apt to be in our self-condemnations as well as in our self-enthusiasms--both in reality being often grounded on ignorance. There are periods in people's lives when everything is against them--when the currents that might have floated them into a quiet haven conspire only to dash them against the rocks. But yet the truth was clear--that on the first evidence of the power of evil habit over her husband she had stood coldly aloof, as if wrong-doing on his part absolved her from all lot or concern in his fate. She recalled how, in speaking of him, she had even inferred that he could not help himself--assuming that the spirit of man, no more than his body, can have any source of impulse or action apart from the inexorable links of material causes. Could the spirit of evil itself help to wreck men with a darker atheism than this? ... 'He had so keen an appreciation of what was good in people--quick to perceive how men's failings and vices are often a forced rather than a wilful product. Always he expected them to live down the evil--to hold to and cultivate the better side of their nature.'

Where had she read or heard the words? Was not this, indeed, the very core of moral influence? And then came back to her the words of one of the Fathers to one who had tried to take his life: 'Thy crime has made thee mine. See that henceforth thou walkest worthily of me and of God, to whom thou belongest.' The belief that evil may be overcome--this spring of moral hopefulness--how basely she had denied it by word and action! What had become of the early Church when so much of its endeavours lay among those enslaved, and the descendants of those enslaved by the darkest forms of sensuality, if the half-understood dicta of pseudo-science regarding heredity, and the insignificance of man's will, had prevailed rather than the Divine rule, 'Believe, and thou shalt be saved'? Oh, how cruelly she had failed in that care for the better nature of the man to whom she had promised her whole life! how completely she had fallen away from that lofty devotion to duty which is the truest, clearest note of womanhood!

And looking steadily into the depths of her unacknowledged thoughts, into the dark recesses of her mind, she convicted herself of having relied on Ritchie's inability to overcome his besetting sin--of having rested on this as a justification of her own future actions.

When the soul is penetrated with a deep sense of guilt, and is prostrated in utter humiliation, no thought overcomes it with such bleeding penitence as this--that it has failed another in the day of need.... She was consumed with shame and sorrow, and yet she was quickened by the thought that here her downward course had been arrested by the presence of that priest of the Most High whose words had so early fastened on her heart. Once more she had been drawn as with irresistible cords to the foot of the Cross.

*CHAPTER LV.*

After Stella had fought down the first amazed opposition to her changed plans, a sort of wonder came over her that she should thus throw aside all that seemed like the substance of living for an impalpable shadow--nay, for dark possibilities that began to lower more darkly at her the more she strove to face the future with deliberate calmness. But she did not falter in her purpose, and gradually the powers which man in all ages has found in work and prayer came to her aid. After she had seen Langdale and bidden him farewell, the worst was over. He returned to London three days before Mrs. Farningham sailed. When Stella saw him in his sister's sitting-room, he had already learned of the change of plans.

'You must come with me, Anselm, now that Mrs. Ritchie has decided to remain. She seems to lose her interest in things mysteriously. She does nothing now but visit rookeries at the East-End. I mean, you must sail in the same boat with me.'

Presently Stella came in.

'You are not so well again,' he said quickly, noticing at once the entire change in her aspect since he had last seen her.

'Oh, I am only a little tired,' she answered, but her face had grown still paler. An old friend of her mother's called, and Mrs. Farningham went with her into the nursery.

'Amalie tells me you are not going with her to the East,' Langdale said when they were alone.

'No--and I wanted to tell you personally, and to say farewell.'

'Farewell?' he repeated. He walked hastily to one of the windows; then he came back, and stood by the mantel-piece a little way from where she sat. 'Stella, do not be afraid,' he said, in an agitated voice. 'I shall never say a word, nor urge a claim to your attention, beyond what you judge would be right. You have been so much better; but even in this short time you have lost ground.'

'In my weakness, my selfishness, my forgetfulness of duty, you have been so good to me. You must let me say this before we part,' she said hurriedly, and as if she had not heard what he said.

'So good to you?' he echoed, as if the words hurt him, and then he checked himself. 'Stella, do not try your nature beyond what it can bear. Go with my sister as you purposed doing. I will not see you, nor even write to you. Gain complete strength of mind and body, and then decide what you ought to do. Stella, you may trust me. And if you do not go to the East, let me write to Madonna. It is not fit that you should be left so much alone; you are not as strong as you think. I have written a long letter to Hector, which I delayed sending till you were well enough to read it.'

'We must not send it. We have so far overlived our sorrow without paining others.... And now the worst is over.'

There was a little break in her voice as she said the last words. She was outwardly calm, but the anguish at her heart made the words seem unreal even to herself. Langdale looked at her fixedly, and was about to speak, but he checked himself, and again leant against the mantelpiece, shading his eyes with one hand. There was a long pause, and then Stella spoke again:

'Do not fear for me, Anselm. Hitherto I have been thinking chiefly of myself--blaming others for the unhappiness that has overtaken us; brooding over mistakes instead of seeking to set them right. I will no longer think of myself--it is a melancholy subject.'

Her smile was sad, but her face had in it more of the old alertness, the being alive to the curiously unadjusted qualities and defects of life, than she had shown since their first painful meeting in the Old World.

Then she told him what had led to her sudden change of plans. As she did so, something of her old vigour and ardour of expression came back. But in all mental conflicts there are so many forces at work which we but dimly apprehend. We can but say that we have been defeated, or gained a victory, which leaves us more humiliated, more mistrustful of our hearts than ever before. The process we cannot fully explain to ourselves, much less to others.

'You feel just now,' he said slowly, when she had ceased speaking, 'that you should sacrifice all your individuality, all your life, in reparation for a fancied wrong. But can you endure the punishment? Do you realize the peril----'

'No; not punishment!' she said, eagerly interrupting him. 'It is punishment when we are allowed to follow our own devices; when we are dead to endeavour, to patience, to hope--hope, the beautiful spirit that leads us on, white and serene and gentle as the angel of the dew, and bids us never despair of overcoming our own follies, of helping others to better effort and aspiration. I have been so long the unresisting victim of despair; but once more God has called me. Do not pity me, Anselm! Be sorry for me only in the time when I was insensible to duty--deafened with the noise of the chain of mortality so that I could hear none of the voices by which God calls us. Oh! it is true; He does call us, and when we hear Him the poison is drawn out of our darkest sorrows. Dear friend, how can I explain myself? To-day all the sharpest pangs that I have suffered, all that I must endure, seem to me a proof of the love of God. I see that if I had been happy in the way I had chosen, it would mean that He had utterly forgotten me--left me to myself; and when that happens, it is not only ourselves we hurt; we spoil the lives of others.'

'Do not let us deceive ourselves,' he answered, in a voice which, despite his self-control, vibrated with keen anguish. 'We have been robbed and cheated! In our final separation we lose the best possibilities that life can offer. I can only submit. But I cannot pretend to see in this chaos of duplicity any glimmering of Divine guidance. At last it is brought home to me that life may become so poor and maimed a thing that it is not greatly worth having.'

'Oh, do not say that,' she cried, looking into his face imploringly. 'I know that in all the years to come there will be moments of anguished recollection. Twilight or the rose of dawn, a strain of music, a chance picture, the glow of sunset, a bud opening in spring, the song of a bird, any sight or sound that searches the depths of our nature--we know not why--all the things that touch us most may be charged with a burden of sadness--a sense of loss, a pain whose edge can never be entirely blunted. But the pain, and the loss, and the unconquerable yearning, let us take them by the hand, and make them the companions of our wiser hours. In seeking after the best that we can reach, each cup of suffering, every pang of sorrow, may breathe into our lives that finer spirit of all knowledge.'

'Ah, Stella, Stella! must I lose you? hear your voice no more? What can comfort me for this?' he said, looking at her with dimmed eyes. He turned away abruptly, and paced up and down the room. Then he came back to where she stood and resumed in a calmer voice: 'And to make the loss more intolerable there is the fact that our happiness was wrecked by the miserable intrigue of that wretched woman.... There are creatures so low down in the scale of nature that the whole nervous system consists of a slender cord, that has a little bulge by way of a brain near the mouth. That is about the type, morally, of a being who could act as she