PART II

I

Between the end of March, when these things happened, and the end of April, when Catherine married Christopher, all taxi-drivers, bus-conductors and railway-porters called her Miss.

Such was the effect Christopher had on her. Except for him, she reflected, they probably would have addressed her as Mother, for except for him she would have been profoundly miserable at this time, in the deep disgrace and pain of being cut off from Virginia, from whom her letters came back unopened, re-addressed by Stephen; and there was nothing like inward misery, she knew, for turning women into apparent mothers, old mothers, just as there was nothing like inward happiness for turning them into apparent misses, young misses. She had this inward happiness, for she had Christopher to love her, to comfort her, to feed her with sweet names; and she flowered in his warmth into a beauty she had never possessed in the tepid days of George. Obviously what the world needed was love. She couldn’t help thinking this when she caught sight of her own changed face in the glass.

Her friends, seeing her, marvelled at the wonderful effect the visit to Chickover had had. They had feared this visit for her, feared its inevitable painful awkwardness; and here she was back again, looking so much younger and happier that they could scarcely believe their eyes.

Headed by the Fanshawes, they decided that so attractive a little thing, whose only child was now married and out of the way, should no longer be allowed to waste in widowhood, and that a suitable husband with plenty of money must be found for her as quickly as possible. A series of dinners, beginning at the Fanshawes, was arranged, at each of which Catherine was to meet, one after the other, some good fellow with plenty of money. But these plans were all frustrated; first by the fact that most good fellows with plenty of money had wives already, and if they hadn’t they had something just as bad, such as extreme old age, broken-down health, or confirmed ferocious bachelorhood; and secondly, by the fact that Catherine wouldn’t come.

She wouldn’t come. She wouldn’t at last come to anything, not even to the telephone, and was never to be found at home. In those days, in the middle of April, her friends sought her in vain, for she was absorbed altogether in Christopher and the arrangements for their marrying. The arrangements were simple enough, seeing that Christopher would merely leave his rooms and come and live in her flat. Mrs. Mitcham would sleep out, and her room be his dressing-room. Between them, Catherine and Christopher would have fourteen hundred a year and no rent to pay. It was enough. He would, of course, earn more later on, and end, he assured her, by making her quite rich; at which she smiled, for she cared nothing for that. The arrangements were in themselves quite simple, but she had to hide them from her friends. She was terribly afraid they might find out, and add their surprise to her own surprise at what fate seemed to be hurling her into.

For no one could be more surprised than Catherine. She had tried, she had kept on trying, to keep only to an affectionate friendship with Christopher, but wasn’t able at last to stand up against him. He was so young and strong and determined. He never got tired. Her arguments were as nothing compared to his. He brushed her counsels of prudence, of wisdom aside. He merely was very angry when she gave their ages as a reason, the reason, why they shouldn’t marry; and when she gave Stephen’s command that they should as a reason why they simply couldn’t, not for very pride they couldn’t, he looked at her with the calm pity of one who watches a child hurting itself to spite its elders.

At night she lay awake and told herself she couldn’t possibly do this thing, harm him so profoundly, handicap his whole future. Seeing that he was so reckless, it behoved her to be wise and sane for them both. What would she look like in ten years, and what would he look like coming into a room with her? How plainly she saw at night that whatever she did she ought not to marry Christopher, and how what she saw vanished like shadows fleeing before the morning light when he came back to her next day. He had all the fearless hopefulness, the fresh resolves of morning. He swept her away with him into a region where nobody cared for prudence, and wisdom was thrown to the winds. Not so had George loved her; not so had any one, she began to believe, ever been loved before. Christopher loved her with the passion of youth, of imagination, of poetry, of all the fresh beginnings of wonder and worship that have been since Love first lit his torch and made in the darkness a great light.

What was age if one didn’t feel it? Why should she mind it if he didn’t? No stranger seeing them would suppose there was a difference that mattered. He made her young; and she would stay young for ever in his love. La chair de femme se nourrit de caresses ... she had read that somewhere, in the old days of George, and thought what stuff. Now she began to believe it. Look at her in the glass--quite young, really quite young. Love. Miraculous love, that could do all things. And suppose after a while she did begin to grow old, he would have got used to her by then, and perhaps not notice it.

So one day, tired of fighting, and in a sudden reckless mood, she said she would marry him; and as soon as possible after that they were married at the registrar’s in Princes Row, the witnesses being Mrs. Mitcham, as usual hoping for the best and in new bonnet-strings, and Lewes, who was so much upset that he could hardly sign the certificate, from which stared out at him in plain words the disastrous facts--widow, forty-seven, bachelor, twenty-five--and together went straight into what Christopher knew was heaven but Catherine spoke of placidly as the Isle of Wight.

Up to this point Catherine had loved Christopher, but not been in love with him. It was a happy state. It had a kind of agreeable, warm security. He was in love, and she only loved. He poured out his heart, and she took it and was comforted. He made her forget Chickover, and Stephen and Virginia, and he woo’d and woo’d till her face was all lit up with the reassurance of his sweet flatteries. Her vanity was fed to the point of beatitude. She smiled even in her sleep. But she remained fundamentally untouched, and would have said, if obliged to think it out, that her love for him didn’t differ much in degree from the love she had had for Virginia. That was a great love, this was a great love. They were different in kind, of course, but not in degree. One couldn’t do more, she thought, than just love.

After she was married, however, she found that one could: one could not only love but fall in love--two entirely distinct things, as she at once and rather uneasily became aware. He had said, in the early days when she used to be angry with him, that being in love was catching. She hadn’t caught it from him during the whole of his wooing, but she did on their honeymoon, and fell in love with a helpless completeness that amazed and frightened her. So this was what it was like. This was that thing they called passion, that had lurked in music and made her cry, and had flashed out of poetry and made her quiver--at long intervals, at long, long intervals in the sunny, empty years that had been her life. Now it had got her; and was it pain or joy? Why, it was joy. But joy so acute, so excessive, that the least touch would turn it into agony, a heaven so perfect that the least flaw, the least shadow, would ruin it into hell. How would she bear it, she thought, staring aghast at these violent new emotions, if he were ever to love her less? There were no half measures left now, she felt, no half tones, no neutral zones. It was either all light, or would be, and how terrifyingly, all black.

They had taken a furnished cottage on the pleasant road that runs along near the sea between St. Lawrence and Blackgang. The little house faced the sea, which lay at the end of a meadow full of buttercups, for it was the time of buttercups, on the other side of the road. A woman from St. Lawrence came and looked after them by day, and at night they had the house and the tiny garden and the quiet road and the whispering pine trees and the murmuring sea to themselves. These were the days of her poetry, and she said to herself--and she said it too to him, her lips against his ear--that he had made the difference in her life between an unlit room and the same room when the lamp is brought in; a beautiful lamp, she whispered, with a silver stem, and its flame the colour of the heart of a rose.

And Christopher’s answer was the answer of all young lovers not two days married, and it did seem to them both that they were actually in heaven.

Such happiness had not appeared to either of them possible, such a sudden revelation of what life could be, what life really was, when filled to the brim with only love. She loved him passionately, she no longer thought of anything or any one in the world but him. Now that it had come upon her at last, late in her life, it seemed to catch her up into an agonising bliss. Who was she, what had she done, to have this extraordinary young love flung at her feet? And Christopher told himself that he had always known it, he had always known that if he could only wake her up, rouse her out of her sleep, she would be the most wonderful of lovers.

They never laughed. They were dead serious. They talked mostly in whispers, because passion always whispers; and for three days in that happy, empty island, from whence the Easter tourists had departed and to which the summer tourists had not yet come, down by the sea, up in the woods, along through the buttercups, the sun shone on them by day and the stars by night, and there was no smallest falling off in ecstasy.

Three days. The third day is usually the crucial one of a honeymoon, but never having been on honeymoons before--the sweet word could not, she felt, be applied to George’s wedding tour, and anyhow she had forgotten that--they neither of them knew it, and Christopher was so young that they passed through this day too at the highest pitch of happiness.

Then, on the fourth morning, Christopher breakfasted alone, for Catherine was asleep when the bell rang and he had told the woman not to disturb her, and after breakfast, going into the little garden with his pipe and leaning on the gate staring across the bright and glorious carpet of brisk buttercups at the sea, he suddenly felt overwhelmingly disposed to meditation. Private meditation. By himself for a couple of hours. Or, failing that, he felt he would like a game of golf. Exercise. Out of doors. With a man.

He wondered where the golf links were; he wondered whether, if he went to them, he might by some lucky chance find a man he knew. Catherine didn’t play golf, and he didn’t want her to. He wanted for a bit to be with a man, to stalk about with a man, and not say anything, except, if it were necessary, swear, and know all the while that he was going back to her, going back, amazingly, to his own wife. Or he would like to run down to the sea and swim a long way, and then dry himself in the sun, and then go off for a quick, striding walk up the cliffs behind the house, out into the open where the wind blew fresh, and jolly little larks sang. Catherine didn’t swim, and couldn’t walk like that, and he didn’t want her to; he wanted to go off alone, so as to have the joy of coming back, amazingly, to his own wife.

He went indoors and upstairs to look in at her and see if she were awake, so that he might tell her he thought of going for a quick run somewhere. But when he softly opened the door and crept into the room and found her still asleep, he couldn’t resist kneeling down by the bed and kissing her; whereupon she opened her eyes, and smiled so incredibly sweetly at him that he slid his arm round her, and they began, his face on the pillow beside hers, whispering again.

He went nowhere that day. In the afternoon they lay about together in the field and read poetry. She asked him to. The desire for silent meditation was stronger upon him by this time than ever, and he didn’t want just then to read poetry.

She instantly noticed that he was reading it differently from the way he had read it on the other days, reading it--but how could this be when he was so fond of it?--almost reluctantly.

‘Is anything the matter, Chris?’ she asked, bending her face anxiously over him.

He took it in his two hands. ‘I love you,’ he said.

How tired she looked. He was struck by it, out there in the afternoon light, as he held her face in his hands.

He became attentive and anxious. ‘Aren’t you well, my darling?’ he asked, still holding her face.

‘Yes. Quite. Why?’ she answered, wondering. Then added rather quickly, drawing back, ‘Do I look tired?’

‘You’re so pale.’

‘I don’t feel pale,’ she said, turning her head away so that he could only see her profile.

She tried to laugh, but she discovered she found it unpleasant to be asked by Christopher if she didn’t feel well. It meant she must be looking worn; and passionately she didn’t want to look worn,--not now, not on her honeymoon, not married to Christopher, not ever. A most undesirable thing to look, and to be avoided by every means in her power.

‘I don’t feel pale at all,’ she said again, trying to laugh and keeping her face turned away from him and the bright sunlight. ‘Inside, anyhow, I feel all rosy.’

She jumped up. ‘Let’s go for a walk, Chris darling,’ she said, shaking the buttercups he had stuck about her out of her dress. ‘We haven’t been for a real good long walk since we got here.’

‘Are you sure you’re not too tired?’ he asked, getting up too.

‘Tired!’

And to show him what she could do, she started off at a great pace and climbed over the five-barred gate into the road before he could reach her to help.

But she was tired; and though the quick walk and climb made her hot and hid her paleness, when she was in her room getting ready for the evening meal and the heat had faded out of her cheeks, she was startled by her face. Why, she looked ghastly. Her face seemed to be drooping with fatigue. The corners of her mouth were pitiful with it, her eyes appeared sunk in black shadows. And how white she was. She stared at herself aghast; and a recollection of those pleasant bus-conductors and taxi-men came into her mind, all smiling at her and calling her Miss as lately as a week ago, and of her own image in the glass at that time when, radiant with the cool happiness of not being in love, with the peace of gratified vanity at having somebody extraordinarily in love with her, while she herself loved him quite enough but not too much, she might have been and was so easily taken for really young.

Really young ... ah, what a lovely thing to be ... married to Christopher and really young....

The lamp in the cottage was like all lamps in cottages, and unpleasantly glared. There was only one, and that one was now in the living-room, and at meals stood on the table; and it had a white glass shade, and who older than twenty-five could expect to stand light from a lamp with a white glass shade after a long, hot, hilly walk? Even in her bedroom, lit up only by two hesitating candle-flames, she looked worn out, so what would she look like down there, faced by Christopher’s searching eyes and that intolerable lamp?

It was as she had feared, and he did stare at her--at first with open concern and questioning, and afterwards furtively, for she couldn’t help showing she shrank from having her fatigue noticed. At the beginning of their acquaintance she used to laugh when he told her she looked tired, and say she wasn’t tired a bit, and it was merely age made her seem so; she was perfectly frank and natural about it; she didn’t in the least care. Now she couldn’t laugh, she found--she couldn’t bring herself to say, with the gay indifference, the take-me-as-I-am-or-leave-me attitude that was hers at the beginning, a word about age.

She hurried through the meal, and got up before he had finished, and went and stood at the open window, looking at the stars.

‘What is it, my darling?’ asked Christopher anxiously, pushing away his plate and coming after her.

‘It’s such a lovely night. Let’s put out that stupid lamp, and then we can see the stars.’

‘But then we shan’t see each other.’

‘Do we want to?’

That was true; why see, when you can feel?

They put out the lamp, and sat at the open window smelling the sweet night air, full of scents of damp grass and the sea, and he forgot his fears, for in the dark she seemed quite well again, and he talked sweetly to her, his arms round her, her head upon his breast, of their happiness, and their love, and the perfect life they were going to have together for the rest of their days; and she listened, pressing close to him, painfully adoring him, shutting her mind against the remembrance of that face in the glass, of that frightening face, of that face as it would be every day soon when she was a little older, as it would be now already each time she was overtired, or nervy, or the least thing happened to worry her. Only she wouldn’t be overtired or nervy; and as for things happening to worry her, what could do that in this haven of safety she had got into with Christopher? And she would take the utmost care of herself, now that she was so precious to somebody so dear, and see to it that she kept well and strong; and nerves after all had never in her life yet afflicted her,--the utmost sunny tranquillity of mind and body had been hers always; why should she even think of such things? The idea must have got into her head because of the funny feeling she had had that day, the fourth of her happiness, of being on wires. She had been jumpy. The smallest noise or sudden movement made her start. And her body had a queer kind of tingling sensation in it, an uncomfortable sensation of being exposed, raw at the surface; and her skin felt sensitive, as though it were all rubbed the wrong way; and besides, quite without any reason that she could discover, she had wanted several times that afternoon to cry.

She shook herself. Silly thoughts. All imagination. Here was Christopher, so real, dear, and close....

She put her arm round his neck and pulled herself up a little higher, and laid her cheek against his. ‘I didn’t know one could be so happy,’ she said, clinging to him.

‘My darling love,’ he said, holding her tight.

They began to whisper.

II

But though night is good, and stars are good, and sweet communion is very good, with one’s beloved lying soft and warm in one’s arms, day also is good, and the stir and zest of it, and men’s voices, and the wind along the heath.

Such were Christopher’s conclusions when he had been married a week. He leant on the gate after breakfast on the first weekly anniversary of his wedding day, smoking and gazing at the field of buttercups that so gorgeously embroidered the edges of the sea, and reflected that you have to have both--the blissful night, the active day, so as completely to appreciate either. That is, if your life is to be as near perfect as possible. And why shouldn’t his life be as near perfect as possible? It had all the necessary ingredients--youth, health, and Catherine. Only, for a day to be happy it must not be too much like the night; there must be a contrast, and there must be a complete contrast. In the days and nights of the last week there had been hardly any contrast, and wasn’t contrast in life as indispensable as salt in cooking? Bliss there had been, bliss in quantities, wonderful quantities; wild bliss, then quiet bliss, then wild bliss again, then quiet bliss, but always bliss. He adored Catherine. Life was marvellous. On that fine May morning he was certain he was the happiest human being in the island, for nobody could possibly be happier, nor could anybody be as happy, for nobody else had Catherine; but he wished that that day----

Well, what did he wish that day? It wasn’t possible that he wanted to be away from Catherine, yet he did want to,--for a few hours, for a little while; why, if only to have the joy of coming back to her. He was conscious, and the consciousness surprised him, that he didn’t want to kiss her for a bit. No, he didn’t. And fancy not wanting to, when a month ago he would have sold everything he had, including his soul, to be allowed to! That came, thought Christopher, narrowing his eyes to watch a white sail out at sea bending in the wind--Jove, how jolly it looked, scudding along like that--of not having contrast. There had to be interruption, pause, the mind switched off on to something else. How could one ever know the joy of coming back if one didn’t first go?

He wanted to go that day, to go by himself, to do things she couldn’t do, and then come back all new to her again. He wanted to tramp miles in the wind he knew was blowing gloriously beyond their sheltering cliff--look how that yacht cut through the sea--up out into the open country where the larks were singing; miles and miles he wanted to tramp in the sun, and stretch all his slack muscles, and get into an almighty sweat, and drink great draughts of beer, and rid himself of the sort of sticky languor that was laying hold of him. He couldn’t spend another day just sitting about or strolling gently round; he must be up and doing.

Catherine wasn’t able to come with him, and he didn’t want her to. She said the spring always made her lazy at first, till she got used to it. She certainly wasn’t able to walk as she had walked with him before her marriage, and was very evidently soon tired, and sometimes looked so extraordinarily tired that it frightened him. She ought to rest, these first spring days, then, just as he ought to take violent exercise. She slept now very late into the morning, and he was glad she did, his tired little love; but even that didn’t seem to make her be able to be active for the rest of the day. He was glad she did sleep late, only it did break up the day a bit, not knowing when she was coming down. It kept one hanging about, unable to plan anything. If he could be certain she wouldn’t wake up, say, till lunch time, he could do a lot in the morning, but as it was he couldn’t do anything but just wait. And he always forgot at night to tell her that if she found he wasn’t there next day when she came down it would be because he had gone for a tramp, but he would be back to lunch. He always forgot at night, because at night the thing called next morning seemed so completely unimportant and uninteresting. He forgot everything at night, except Catherine and love. And then, in its turn, came morning; and it was important, and it was interesting.

He opened the gate and went out into the road. The baker’s cart from Ventnor was swinging round the corner on its two high wheels, the boy cracking his whip and whistling. Enough to make any one whistle, a day like that. The boy grinned at him as he passed, and he grinned back. He would have liked to be driving that fast little mare himself, and shouting out triumphant epithalamiums as he drove. What was the plural of epithalamium? He must ask Lewes. Dash it all, why couldn’t one have one’s friends about one more? They were always somewhere else. If Lewes were there now they could join the golf club and have a gorgeous time. Lewes was very good at golf. Lewes was good at everything, really; and it wasn’t his fault if he was so damned clever into the bargain and nosed away most of his life in books. Besides, one could swear at Lewes, be absolutely natural, say any old thing that came into one’s head. With a woman, with the dearest of women, with her whom one worshipped body, soul and mind, there was a being-in-the-drawing-room flavour about things; and after a bout of drawing-room one wanted a bout of public-house,--putting it roughly, that is, putting it very roughly. Catherine, his beloved, to whom he whispered things he could never tell another human being, to whom he told every thought he had of beauty and romance, was more or less the drawing-room, and Lewes, who drank only water, and who, though he listened unmoved to any oath on any subject, was himself in his language most choice, was more or less the public-house.

He strolled aimlessly about the road, kicking stones out of his path. He wished old Lewes would appear round the bend from St. Lawrence, and see for himself what happiness was like. He had been a fool from the start about Catherine, Lewes had. All wrong. The poor chap hadn’t a notion what love was. But if he didn’t know about love he knew about most other things, and it would be jolly to have a yarn with him, and listen to him being clever.

Christopher looked up the road, and down the road, almost as if, in answer to his wish, Lewes must appear. The young leaves were bursting out in the woods on either side, making delicate shadows on the dust. The sky was intensely blue, and a warm wind full of the scent of hawthorns tossed the small fat white clouds across it. God, what a day, what a day to do something tremendous in!

He turned quickly, and went back to the cottage, and looking up at Catherine’s window whistled softly. If she were awake she would come to the window, and he would tell her he was going for a quick walk; if she wasn’t awake he would leave a note for her and be off.

The bedroom window was open, but the curtains were drawn.

He whistled again, and watched for a movement behind them.

Nothing stirred.

He went indoors, scribbled a note saying he would be back to lunch, left it on the table of the sitting-room, seized a stick, and started down the path and up the road with great energetic strides in the direction of Blackgang. It was eleven o’clock, and he would walk as hard as he knew how for two hours. That ought to do him good; that ought to take the slackness out of him. Oh, jolly, jolly to be walking again, really walking....

But hardly had he got a few yards from the cottage when he heard Catherine calling. He heard her little voice through all the scrunchings of his footsteps on the road and the rustlings of spring in the trees, as he would hear it, he was sure, if she should call him from the sleep of death.

He stopped, and went back slowly.

She was at the bedroom window, holding the curtains a tiny strip apart, for she shrank from showing herself to him at the window in the morning light before she had had time to do what she could for her silly face, which was being so tiresome these days and looking so persistently haggard.

‘Chris--Chris--where are you going?’ she called.

‘I left you a note, darling.’

‘A note? Why?’

‘I didn’t want to wake you. I’m going for a walk.’

‘Oh I’d love to come too--wait five minutes----’

‘But I want to go very quick, and as far as I can before lunch.’

‘Don’t let’s come back to lunch, then we needn’t hurry. I’ll be down in five seconds.’

And he heard sounds of hasty moving about the room.

He sat down on the verandah-step and lit his pipe. Well, it couldn’t be helped; he must wait till to-morrow for his exercise.

She wasn’t five seconds but twenty-five minutes, but when she did come down in a broad-brimmed hat that shaded her face, and smiled her sweet smile at him and slipped her hand through his arm, he cheerfully gave up the idea of fierce solitary exercise and was glad she was there. His darling. His Catherine. His dream of happiness come true. His astonishing angel-wife.

‘Let’s stay out all day,’ she said, as they walked up the road, again in the direction of Blackgang but at a moderate pace that would never, he knew, however long it went on, get a drop of the sweat he craved for out of him.

‘But we haven’t brought food.’

‘We’ll get the hotel at Blackgang to cut us some sandwiches and take them with us. Oh Chris, isn’t it a gorgeous day! Did you ever know anything like it? Oh, I’m so happy. By the way--good morning.’

She stopped and held up her face. He laughed and kissed it.

‘Darling,’ he said, kissing her again. Yes; it would have been beastly of him to go off and leave her, to go off and let her wake up and find herself alone.

At the hotel they asked, as Catherine had suggested, for lunch to take with them, and while it was being got ready went out through the heat and hot-house flowers of the glass verandah to the fresh garden glowing and blowing with the blossoms of May. It was a sight, that garden on the cliffs above the sea, jewelled with tulips, frothed with fruit-blossom, and just beyond it, splendidly holding it in with a golden circlet, gorse.

‘It’s much more beautiful here than at our cottage,’ said Catherine, looking about her.

‘How could anything ever be more beautiful than our cottage?’ he answered; and she smiled at him, love in her eyes, and softly slid her hand along his sleeve.

In the garden, reading The Times , was Mr. Jerrold, the eminent editor of the Saturday Judge , who with his daughter Sybil to keep him company had come down from London for a fortnight’s rest and quiet. He had rested now for a whole week, and was beginning to feel that quiet can be overdone. His daughter Sybil had long been aware of it. The hotel was empty--he had hoped it would be when he engaged his rooms, but now thought that perhaps some one else in it might not be wholly disagreeable--and when, on raising his eyes from The Times he saw two visitors emerging from the glass verandah in which he spent his solitary evenings reading among pots of cinerarias, he was glad.

So was his daughter Sybil, who had been down the cliff and up again three times already since breakfast, and was wondering what she could do with the rest of the morning till lunch-time.

Mr. Jerrold watched the new arrivals with deep interest. They would be a great addition to the party, if he and his daughter could properly be described as a party. The young man was a good type of clean, nice-looking young Englishman, public school and university, and would do admirably to play about with poor Billy, thwarted in her desire for prolonged and violent exercise by his inability to take it with her, while he would find the lady, who seemed just about that agreeable age when conversation is preferred to activity, a pleasant companion meanwhile.

He awaited their passing where he and Billy were sitting in basket-chairs under some hawthorns; when they did, he would ask them if they had seen that morning’s Times , and thus open up channels of friendship.

But the new arrivals edged away across the grass, not yet realising, no doubt, how rare was intercourse in that lonely spot and accordingly how precious. So he got up and strolled after them--(‘Poor father,’ thought his daughter, who only knew him as reserved, ‘I had no idea he has been as bored as all that’)--and overtook them at the edge of the garden, where they were gazing at the sea, brilliant blue between the great orange-coloured branches of the gorse.

‘Wonderful colour, isn’t it,’ said Mr. Jerrold pleasantly, waving his Times at the gorse and the sea.

‘Marvellous,’ said the young man heartily.

‘Too wonderful,’ cooed the lady.

In a few minutes they were talking as friends, the young man in particular, who on closer view was even more what Mr. Jerrold felt sure would amuse poor Billy, being very friendly.

Mr. Jerrold called to his daughter, who had stayed in her basket-chair.

‘Come and be introduced, Billy,’ he called; and when she had come he presented her to the lady.

‘My daughter Sybil,’ said Mr. Jerrold, expecting in return to be told the names of the attractive new arrivals.

He was told. ‘Our name is Monckton,’ said the young man, laughing and turning redder than ever,--why should he laugh and turn red? wondered Mr. Jerrold, unaware that this was the very first time Christopher had spoken of himself and Catherine collectively as Monckton.

‘Ours is Jerrold,’ said Mr. Jerrold; and proceeded pleasantly to assure the lady that she would find the hotel comfortable.

It was a real disappointment, so much did he like the look of both of them, so admirably did their ages fit in with his and Billy’s, to be told they were not going to stay there but had only come over from St. Lawrence, where they had a cottage, to get some food to take with them on a walk.

Both the Jerrolds’ faces fell at this. Billy’s broad smile seemed to contract by about half a yard. She had two long rows of very white teeth, endless rows they seemed, so wide was her smile, and they looked even whiter than they were because the sea wind had tanned her face. Her eyes, too, looked bluer than they were for the same reason, and the sunshine of a week spent hatless had bleached her hair the colour of flax. She was a sturdy creature, firm on solid ankles, and not particularly pretty, but as she stood there bareheaded, and the wind blew her fair hair across her forehead, and she smiled immensely at everybody, she fitted in with complete harmony to the young jollity of the morning and the month.

Christopher thought she looked like a good-natured young shark.

‘What an awful pity,’ she said. ‘We might have gone for excursions together.’

And she said it with such a heartiness of chagrin that they all laughed.

The end of it was that when the sandwiches came and the Moncktons went, the Jerrolds, still talking, went with them, first to the entrance of the hotel garden, then into the road, then, still talking, along the road.

The Jerrolds not having talked for a week were unable now to leave off. Mr. Jerrold found himself wishing to tell the small agreeable lady who he was, and why, and how, and did so with a completeness that surprised himself. His daughter, striding on ahead with the young man--they seemed naturally to shoot ahead together, the two young ones, the minute they got on to the road--explained just as completely to her companion, who appeared at once to tumble to it, the dreadful feeling of being about to burst after a week’s flopping round with somebody who couldn’t be left while one rushed all over the island, and couldn’t, owing to age and infirmity and being a father and all that, rush too.

‘Just look at those youngsters forging along,’ said Mr. Jerrold, smiling complacently at the two figures in front, at their four worsted-stockinged legs moving so quickly in step, at their swinging arms, and their bare heads turned to each other while they talked and laughed.

His companion looked, but said nothing. He wondered what relation she was to the young man that she too should be a Monckton, and decided that she must be either his father’s second wife or his aunt by marriage. Not a blood relation, clearly; they were too much unlike.

‘Is there anything more delightful in the world,’ said Mr. Jerrold, gazing benevolently at the pair ahead, ‘than a wholesome English boy and girl?’

At this his companion murmured something that he understood meant that the two would soon be out of sight, which they certainly would be if they went on at that pace, and he said, ‘Yes--quite. Hi, there,’ he called, ‘you youngsters! Steady--we can’t keep up!’

But the wind was against him, and they strode on unheeding.

‘Not that,’ said Mr. Jerrold, turning gallantly to the lady, ‘it would be anything but my gain if they did go on. Why not let them? And you and I sit down somewhere and talk.’

‘But Christopher has got the sandwiches,’ said his new friend.

‘So he has. Christopher. Delightful name. Attractive youth. Well, let Christopher eat them, sharing them with Billy somewhere at the end of their first twenty miles or so, and allow me the pleasure of offering you lunch in the hotel.’

‘How very kind of you. But Christopher----’

‘Well, you see he doesn’t hear,’ said Mr. Jerrold. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll even notice that we’re not following. When young people get together.... I assure you it would give me the greatest pleasure to entertain you, and we can sit afterwards in that nice garden in comfortable chairs till they come back.’

Mr. Jerrold paused persuasively in the road. After a week of not speaking to a soul but his daughter he ached to entertain. The two on in front turned a corner and disappeared. Mr. Jerrold, whose wife had been dead some years, felt the situation unfolding romantically. This was a dear little lady, and she looked as though she needed taking care of. He had a strong wish to give her lunch.

‘But----’ she began.

‘We will consider no buts,’ said Mr. Jerrold, even more gallantly. ‘Your nephew--is he your nephew?--won’t notice----’

‘He’s my husband,’ said the little lady, flushing a very bright scarlet.

Well; what a surprise. Mr. Jerrold was really most surprised. Not that the lady wasn’t, he was sure, a most agreeable wife for any man to have, but that the young man seemed so very young to have one at all; and if at all she ought, to match him, be a mere slip of a girl,--somebody about Billy’s age.

Yes; it was a surprise. Mr. Jerrold didn’t quite know what to say.

‘In that case----’ he began.

But really he hadn’t an idea what to say, and stood in the middle of the road staring down at the little lady through his monocle--he wore a monocle--and she stared back at him, while the flush slowly ebbed away out of her face.

III

Her nephew. So that was what Christopher seemed to be to this impartial stranger. It gave Catherine more than a shock, it made her heart feel as if it stood still. And his surprise, his humiliating surprise, when she said Christopher was her husband, and her own discomfort when she told him....

Was it so much marked, then, the difference between them? It hadn’t been in London. Why, in London before they married they had often stood arm in arm in front of a glass and laughed to see how no one would guess, really no one could possibly guess, that they were not very nearly of an age. Besides what about all those bus-conductors and people calling her Miss? One of them had even called her Missie--‘Take care, now, Missie,’ he had said, catching her by the arm, ‘don’t you go jumping off before we’re stopped and breaking your neck and getting us into trouble with your young man’--but he, she was afraid, had been drinking. It must be because she was so tired now always that she looked older. To-day she was tired, yesterday she had been tired--oh, but so tired, so tired .

She stared up at Mr. Jerrold, while the flush faded out of her face, and thought how dreadful it was going to be if every time she was tired people took her for Christopher’s aunt. What a humiliation. And inevitably sooner or later he would notice it himself, and hear it too from strangers, just as she was hearing it from this stranger.

‘Let us sit down,’ said Mr. Jerrold sensibly, ‘and wait for them to come back.’

And a day or two afterwards, when Christopher, impelled by his desire for movement, by a terrific longing to do something, anything, that wasn’t lying in grass reading poetry to Catherine--if he didn’t read poetry to her she was surprised and asked him why, because at the beginning he had wanted to do nothing else--hired a two-seater and drove her round the island, stopping for the night at a little place on the west side where there was a small hotel they liked the look of, on their going in and asking if they could be put up for the night the young lady in the office, glancing at them, said she was very sorry but she had only one room vacant.

‘But we only want one,’ said Christopher, surprised at this answer. ‘We want a double room, that’s all.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry----’ said the young lady, turning red and bending over her ledger to hide her confusion. ‘Yes----’ she said, running her finger down the page, ‘I can give you No. 7.’

‘Do you think she thought we weren’t married?’ said Christopher, amused, when they were in No. 7 undoing their suit-cases. ‘Or do you think she thought we were so grand that we couldn’t do without a sitting-room?’

Catherine, very busy it seemed with her suit-case, said nothing. She couldn’t have. She felt sick, as if some one had hit her head. Again she had been taken for Christopher’s aunt. Or even for his--no, her mind swerved aside from that word; it simply refused to look at it.

They saw no more of the Jerrolds, though Christopher had talked of long and violent scrambles with the eagerly acquiescent Billy while they sprinted on ahead that morning before he realised that Catherine had been left behind out of sight. When he did discover this he had turned back at once. ‘Come on,’ he had said to the surprised Billy, seizing her wrist, ‘we must run.’

And he had run; and she had run, thinking it great fun but wondering why they should be running; and after that, when they all joined up again, her father had taken her back to the hotel and the Moncktons had gone for their picnic by themselves, and she had never set eyes on them again nor heard anything more of the promised scrambles.

But one thing she had heard, and with astonishment, from her father, and that was that Mr. Monckton was Mrs. Monckton’s husband.

‘No!’ cried Billy, her eyes very round; adding, after a silence, ‘Good Lord.’

‘Quite,’ said her father.

A few days more and the honeymoon was at an end. Christopher had not attempted again to leave Catherine, for she didn’t seem well, though she assured him she was,--assured him eagerly, almost painfully eagerly, and that it was only the spring. He wasn’t quite able to believe this, and stayed with her and petted her. She loved to lie quite quiet in his arms, out of doors or anywhere, while he read to her or they both snoozed. He suppressed his fidgetings, because he knew if he said he wanted to walk she would want to walk with him, and then she would be tired out and he after all not exercised. It struck him once as odd how little they talked. They used to talk and talk before they were married. Now they hardly said anything, except when they began to whisper, and then it wasn’t talk, but emotion clothing itself scantily in words. Still, it had been a heavenly, heavenly time; something to remember joyfully all one’s days.

‘When we’re old,’ he said, the last evening, ‘how we shall think of this.’

Just as if, she thought, pressing close to him so as to hide from the thought, when he had got to the stage of being old she wouldn’t, far ahead of him, be long past thinking at all.

He had to be back at his office the end of the second week, and the last night in their abode of bliss they hardly slept at all, so loth were they to lose any minutes of what was left of their honeymoon in unconsciousness; and the effect of this was that in the morning, while Christopher was as blithe as a lark and breakfasted cheerfully and packed up with zeal, Catherine could hardly move for fatigue, and was really shocked by her leaden face when she saw it in the glass.

Luckily he noticed nothing that time; he was too busy packing up, too much pleased in the fresh morning to be doing something different, to be starting on a journey. Besides, wasn’t he going to work like a navvy now? Hadn’t he got something to work for,--responsibilities, the sweetest, most wonderful in the world? He itched to be at it, to do well, make her proud of him, earn money for her as that old George had earned money for her.

With gusto he swept his scattered things into his suit-case, whistling the love music out of The Immortal Hour as he packed, with gusto he settled the bills and tipped the woman, with gusto he walked, his arm through Catherine’s, down the path to the gate for the last time, and waved to the buttercup-field in which he would not again have to lie. He was in high spirits. It was jolly getting back to work, beginning it again in these new delicious conditions, with Catherine to speed him in the morning and welcome him back at night. Now he would have variety; now he would have work and love, absence and presence, in their right proportion.

He was very happy. It seemed incredible to him, as he fondly looked down at her when they were in the bright warm sunshine on the ferry, that he had actually attained his heart’s desire and got Catherine. Life was splendid,--packed with possibilities, a thing of the utmost magnificence. The waters of the Solent danced and sparkled; white wings flashed out of the deep blue of the sky; the sun lay hot across the back of his neck; the wind was fresh and salt in his face; the world looked as it must have looked on the morning of its first day. Old Lewes--he would go and dig out old Lewes to-morrow, and make him come and lunch in one of those jolly little restaurants where the food was good and ladies didn’t go, and yarn his head off. And on Saturday he would take Catherine down and introduce her to his uncle, who would certainly adore her, and she would wander about the garden and enjoy her darling little self while he gave the old boy the round of golf he knew he was thirsting for. So was he thirsting for it. His honeymoon had been wonderful, but a fortnight is enough. It wouldn’t of course be enough, and one would never then want it to end, if one were going to be torn from one’s beloved when it was over. But here they were, he and she, entering into the joys, the varied joys of married life, with him, the male, girding up his loins in the morning and going forth to labour until the evening, as men from time immemorial had girded themselves and gone forth, and coming back at night to his nest and his mate. And this after all was better in the long run than a honeymoon, just as real good bread and butter was better than everlasting cake.

‘I’m so happy,’ he said, slipping his arm round her and giving her a quick hug when no one was looking. He couldn’t see her face; she was sitting too close to him, besides having put on a gauze motor-veil.

‘Darling Chris,’ she murmured, smiling through her veil.

But she would have liked it better if he hadn’t been quite so exuberantly happy on that particular morning. After all, it was the finish of their honeymoon, and they would never have one again. Yet perhaps it was as well it was finished. Once at home and he at work, she would be able to sleep at least all day....

In London Mrs. Mitcham, anxious to do the right thing, had filled George’s different bits of china with white flowers, and the drawing-room with its heavy black furniture looked more like a carefully kept-up memorial than ever. She herself was very clean and spruce in her best apron, and her face was wreathed in the proper welcoming smiles, though she was in fact excessively nervous and embarrassed. She had always liked Christopher, with the indulgent liking of the elderly female servant for the irrepressible young gentleman, and she was thoroughly aware that marriage was marriage, yet she couldn’t help turning a little red when he marched into her mistress’s bedroom as if it were his. So it was his; but for years and years it hadn’t been his, and for years and years before that it not only hadn’t been his but had been poor Mr. Cumfrit’s. It was her vivid recollection of poor Mr. Cumfrit--the times she had taken him and Mrs. Cumfrit their morning tea into that very room, and they always so pleasant and content together in their double bed--that gave her this feeling of shock when she saw Christopher walking in.

Mrs. Mitcham, who was so well trained that her very thoughts were respectful, wouldn’t have dreamed of comparing Christopher to a cuckoo, but she had heard of the bird’s habits in regard to nests not originally its own, and deep down in the vast dark regions of her subconsciousness, where no training had ever set its foot and simple candour prevailed, was the recognition of the fact that her mistress was the natural prey of cuckoos,--first Stephen, turning her out of her original nest, now Christopher, taking possession of this one.

She could only hope that all would be well. What wasn’t well, plain enough for any one to see, was her mistress. Mrs. Mitcham couldn’t have believed such a change possible in that short time. ‘It’s them honeymoons,’ she said to herself, shaking her head over her saucepans. They did no good to a woman, she thought, not after a certain age. You had to be very strong to put up with them at any time. No rest. No regular hours. Never knew where you were. He looked all right, the young gentleman did, and it wasn’t for not being happy that her mistress didn’t, for already, in the quarter of an hour since they had arrived, Mrs. Mitcham had seen more love about in the flat than she could remember during the whole of poor Mr. Cumfrit’s time in it. She couldn’t help wondering what that poor gentleman would say if he could see what was happening in his flat. He wouldn’t much like it, she was afraid; but perhaps hardly anybody who was dead would much like what they would see, supposing they were able to come back and look. Even Mitcham wouldn’t. What Mitcham wouldn’t like seeing, if there was nothing else for him to grumble about, would be how well she had got on without him.

She carried the asparagus into the dining-room. Once again, as she opened the door, she felt uncomfortable. How should she have thought of knocking first? She had never had to knock at any except bedroom doors since she had been in service. Whenever she happened to go into a room everything would be just as nice and what you’d expect as possible: Mr. Cumfrit at the head of the table, taking a sip of claret, Mrs. Cumfrit on his right hand, quietly eating her toast. ‘I’ve done a good stroke of business to-day,’ Mr. Cumfrit would be saying. ‘I’m so glad, George dear,’ Mrs. Cumfrit would be answering. Things like that would be going on in the room, things you’d expect. Or, in the drawing-room, Mr. Cumfrit would be one side of the fire, Mrs. Cumfrit the other, reading out bits of the evening paper to each other. ‘Seems to me this wretched Government doesn’t know what it wants,’ Mr. Cumfrit would be saying. ‘It does seem so, doesn’t it, George dear,’ Mrs. Cumfrit would be answering, quiet and ladylike.

But this....

Impossible for Mrs. Mitcham not to start and draw back when she opened the door. She all but scattered the lovely asparagus over the carpet. She wasn’t used--and her mistress, too--she couldn’t have believed----

‘Come in, come in, Mrs. Mitcham,’ the young gentleman called out gaily, picking up his napkin which had fallen on to the floor. ‘We’re married, you know. It’s all right. You signed the certificate yourself.’

Mrs. Mitcham smiled nervously. The sauce-boat rattled in its dish as she handed it to her mistress. She wasn’t used to this sort of thing.

IV

That evening, sentimentally, they went to The Immortal Hour . In this very place, only two months back, they had been sitting apart hardly aware of each other, hardly more than looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes.

‘Do you remember the night I first moved up next to you?’ Christopher whispered.

‘Don’t I,’ she murmured.

‘Oh, Catherine--isn’t it wonderful to think we’re married!’ he whispered.

‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the audience, still sparse and still ferocious.

She was in bliss again. He loved her so. He had been so utterly charming in Hertford Street, boyishly delighted with everything, filling the dull little flat with youth, and all that youth trails with it of clouds of glory--laughter, happiness, radiant confidence. Amazing to have this there after George, after the quiet years since George.

By the evening she was tired, horribly tired, and knew she looked like a ghost; but she didn’t mind as long as it was dark and he couldn’t see her silly white face and smudged, haggard eyes. There was only one interval, and her hat would hide her then. The Immortal Hour was such a nice dark opera: pitch dark for ages in the first act,--so restful, so soothing.

She went sound asleep, her head against his arm. He didn’t know she was asleep, and was thinking all the time of how they were both thinking and feeling the same things exactly, he and she who owed each other to the for-ever-to-be-adored Immortal Hour .

‘Darling, darling,’ he murmured, stooping and trying to kiss her at the darkest moment. This bliss of unity with the perfect love, this end of loneliness, this enveloping joy....

She slept profoundly.

However, she woke when the curtain went down before the second part of the act, and those of the audience who were new to it clapped in spite of the music going on, and those who weren’t new indignantly hissed at them, and sat up and pulled her hat straight. It was the same funny little extinguishing hat she used to wear at the beginning; he had specially asked her to put it on.

‘Yes, we must be proper now,’ said Christopher, smiling at her.

‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the outraged audience.

How familiar it all was; how happy they were. She was glad he didn’t know she had been asleep. It was awful to have gone to sleep on such an occasion, but then she was so appallingly tired. Never in her life had she been tired like this. Ah, here was the love scene beginning ... she wouldn’t go to sleep now....

Her hand slid into his; his shut tight over it; they sat close, close, thrilled by memories, by all that the music meant to them; and in the most beautiful part Catherine felt her thrills grow fainter and fade away and go out, and again her head drooped against his shoulder and again she went sound asleep.

‘Oh, I love you, love you,’ whispered Christopher, putting his arm round her, sure her drooping head was the gesture of abandonment to irresistible emotion.

‘Sh-sh-,’ hissed the audience.

Afterwards he wanted to take her somewhere to supper.

‘Supper?’ echoed Catherine faintly, who was dying with fatigue.

‘Yes. We must celebrate--drink the health of our home-coming,’ said Christopher, drawing her hand through his arm and proudly walking her off to a taxi. His wife. Marvellous. No more slipping away in the crowd and escaping him now, thank you. ‘Let’s go somewhere where we can dance. I shall blow up if I don’t let off steam somehow.’

‘Dance?’ echoed Catherine again, still more faintly, as she was swept up into the taxi.

‘Do you realise we’ve never danced together once yet?’

‘But we can’t go anywhere like that in these clothes.’

That was true. He hadn’t thought of that. Well then, they would dress properly the next night and go and dance and dance.

Catherine sat back in the seat. Dance? She hadn’t danced for years, not since before her marriage with George--never since.

She told Christopher this, and he only laughed and said it was high time she did dance; he adored dancing; he longed to dance with her; they would often go.

‘Oh, Christopher,’ said Catherine, sliding close up to him, ‘the best thing of all will be being alone together at home, you and I, in your precious evenings. Won’t we go there now? Do we really want supper?’

‘Tired, darling?’ he asked, instantly anxious, stooping to look under her hat.

‘Oh no--not a bit. Not in the least. Really not,’ said Catherine quickly. ‘But--our first evening--it’s so lovely at home----’

He hung out of the window and redirected the driver. ‘Yes. Of course,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘That’s far and away the best of all----’

And they began to whisper.

Next day he went back to work. When he left at ten o’clock Catherine was still in bed.

‘Do you mind my not being at breakfast?’ she had asked him when Mrs. Mitcham very gingerly beat, or, more accurately, delicately patted the gong.

Mrs. Mitcham had had some moments of painful indecision before doing anything with the gong. It was altogether a most awkward morning for her. She had never yet been placed in such a position. Husband and wife, of course, and all that--she knew all that; but still it did feel awkward, and she had a queer reluctance to rousing them--almost as if they were dangerous, as well as embarrassing, to have loose about the flat. Yet it was breakfast time. Orders were for nine sharp. She did finally get herself to the gong and timidly tapped it, divided between duty and her odd reluctance to see her mistress and the young gentleman come out of that room, to have to face them....

‘Stay there, my darling love,’ said Christopher, smoothing the pillows and tucking Catherine up as tenderly as if she were a baby. ‘I’ll bring you your breakfast.’

‘I--never do get up to breakfast,’ she said, after a moment’s hesitation, smiling at him as he bent over her--she, who had not once during the whole of George’s time missed being down on the stroke of half-past eight to pour out his coffee for him and kiss him good-bye on the door-mat. ‘Good-bye, little woman,’ George used to say, waving to her before the lift engulfed him. In those days good husbands of good wives frequently called them little women.

Here now was her chance. She would establish a custom that might save her. And if she never had got up to breakfast it wouldn’t worry Christopher that she never did, and he wouldn’t, frowning with concerned perplexity, ask her searching questions as to being not well. So, by sleeping on into the mornings after he had gone to work, she might catch up with rest and dodge those horrid furrows exhaustion was dragging down her face.

So the habit was started, and Mrs. Mitcham learnt not to expect to see her till lunch-time. Sometimes she even slept later, and once or twice stayed in bed all day, not getting up till just in time to dress for dinner. This, however, only happened during the first two or three weeks. As time went on Mrs. Mitcham began to be able to count on her mistress’s having her bath at twelve o’clock and being ready by one.

Mrs. Mitcham was all for her resting and taking care of herself, for she was much attached to Catherine, but she couldn’t help feeling--she didn’t permit herself to think it, but she couldn’t help feeling--that there was something unbecoming in this turning of day into night. There was plenty of night, Mrs. Mitcham thought, for those who chose to take it, but of course if----

Mrs. Mitcham, folding up her mistress’s garments, shook her head. And the garments too--she shook her head at them. Such things had not hitherto been part of Mrs. Cumfrit’s outfit. Good things she had had, as good of their kind as one would wish to see,--lawn, silk, fine embroideries,--but never what Mrs. Mitcham called flimsies. These were flimsy, and not only flimsy but transparent. Every time Mrs. Mitcham saw them she was shocked afresh. She couldn’t get used to them. Mrs. Cumfrit--she corrected herself, and said Mrs. Monckton--had gone out and bought them the first afternoon of her return from the Isle of Wight; and she so careful about coals, and turning the electric light out. There were six nightgowns that you could pull through a wedding-ring, they went so into nothing. Chiffon nightgowns. Different colours. Pink, lemon-colour, and so on; and all of them you could see through as plain as daylight. It was a mercy, thought Mrs. Mitcham, that it was dark at night. She, who prided herself on Catherine and had always thought her the ideal of what a lady should be, was much perturbed by these nightgowns. And the bathroom too--such a litter there now of scented dusting powder, and scented crystals, and flagons of coloured liquid that smelt good but improper, thought Mrs. Mitcham, furtively sniffing; what would poor Mr. Cumfrit say to his bathroom now, he who had never had a thing in it but a big sponge and a piece of Pears’ soap?

It was after the visit of the Fanshawes that Mrs. Mitcham first found a lip-stick on Catherine’s dressing-table. She was immensely upset. No lady she had had to do with had ever had such a thing on her dressing-table. Powder was different, because one needed powder sometimes for other things besides one’s face, and also one powdered babies, and they, poor lambs, couldn’t be suspected of wanting to appear different from what God had made them. But a lip-stick! Red stuff. What actresses put on, and those who were no better than they should be. Her mistress and a lip-stick--what would Miss Virginia say?

The Fanshawes, who were the immediate cause of the buying of the lip-stick, came to tea the second Sunday after the end of the honeymoon,--Ned, his mother and sister. They had been extraordinarily taken aback by Catherine’s appearance. The flat rang with their exclamations and laments. Catherine, who had been looking sixteen when they last saw her, Catherine the bright-eyed, the quick of movement, Catherine with her lovely skin and unruffled brow--they couldn’t get over it.

Christopher had gone for a walk in the Park after lunch, straining at his leash, angry at being kept in London this beautiful afternoon because the Fanshawes insisted on coming and thrusting their inquisitive noses where they weren’t wanted, and he hadn’t got back when they arrived, so that Catherine had them to herself at first.

‘Damn those women,’ he had remarked when, after persistent telephoning and letters and impassioned inquiries as to what had happened to her and when they might come and see her, Catherine had felt she had better face it and wrote and told them she was married and asked them to tea that Sunday to meet her husband. And when he heard that it wasn’t only women but Ned too, he damned him particularly, on the ground that he had a silly nose and wore a fur rug up to his chin; and, expressing extreme disgust at being kept in on his and Catherine’s only real afternoon by a blighter like that, he went off for a quick turn in the Park, promising faithfully to be back in time.

He wasn’t; and the Fanshawes got there first, and the flat was echoing with exclamations when he opened the door.

Catherine was sitting on the sofa, wedged between the two female Fanshawes, whose arms encircled her and whose free hands stroked her, and that worm Ned was looking on from his, Christopher’s, special chair.

‘I’ve had influenza--that’s why,’ Catherine was lying as he came in.

‘But fancy not telling us you were married! Fancy not telling us a word!’

‘Of course it’s what we’ve been dying to have happen for ages--isn’t it, Ned?’

‘You sweet little thing, we’re so delighted--aren’t we, Ned?’

‘Do tell us all about it. Isn’t he off his head with happiness? How pleased Virginia must be----’

‘So nice for her to have a father again----’

‘Are they devoted to each other?’

‘Have you been down to Chickover with him yet?’

‘We’re simply aching to see him----’

And there in the doorway he stood.

‘Here is Christopher,’ said Catherine, flushing and half getting up.

They all turned their heads. For a moment nobody spoke. He advanced on them with outstretched hand, doing his best to smile broadly, to be the welcoming host.

That young man. That boy . The boy they had found with Catherine one day, who had rushed out the minute they came in, and Catherine had laughed when they asked who on earth he was, and said all she knew about him was that he was certainly mad. That fellow. The youth who had glared through the window of the car and almost shook his fist....

The Fanshawes couldn’t speak. They couldn’t move either. They were stunned.

V

At Chickover there had been the most painful consultations between Stephen and Mrs. Colquhoun as to the best thing to do under the deplorable circumstances. Should they or should they not tell Virginia? Could they, indeed, help telling her? Not all, of course; she must never be told all. The night spent somewhere between Chickover and London--they both felt that the entire stretch of country between those two points was from henceforth polluted--the night that made the scandalous marriage a necessity, must be kept from Virginia for ever. But it became clear after a week that she must be told something, if only to account for her not hearing from her mother.

Stephen couldn’t bring himself to let her have the letters. They came at first, as he had expected, one after the other and all very thick. He wondered, turning them over in his hand, whether it wasn’t his duty to open them, but he resisted the strong leaning towards his duty that lifelong practice in doing it had induced in him, and took the more dignified course of sending them back unopened. Much more punitive too, he felt,--leaving the wretched woman completely in the dark as to what was happening at Chickover and what Virginia was feeling.

Then, when the letters at last left off coming, he watched for telegrams; he rather expected telegrams.

None came.

Then he was on the look-out for an unannounced arrival; he quite thought there would be one.

Nothing happened. Just silence.

At the end of the week Virginia said, ‘I can’t think why mother doesn’t write’--and began to look worried, and write letters herself.

Stephen took them out of the box in the hall and burnt them. ‘Painful, painful necessities,’ he said to Mrs. Colquhoun; for this letter business went against the grain--the gentleman grain, he told his mother, who hardly left him, comforting and advising him as best she could.

At the end of another week Virginia sent a telegram, or rather was going to send it but was stopped by Stephen. Clearly she must be told something. She had said, while writing it: ‘If I don’t get an answer to this I shall go up to London myself and see if anything is wrong.’

‘Poor child, poor child,’ murmured Mrs. Colquhoun, the moment for enlightenment having manifestly come. ‘Would you like me to be with you?’ she whispered in Stephen’s ear.

‘Better not, I think,’ he whispered back.

Alone with Virginia he took her on his knee. She was holding the telegram she had just written, and was in a hurry to go and send it off.

‘Yes, Stephen--what is it?’ she asked, fretted at being held back, and worried by this strange silence of her mother’s to the point of being unlike herself.

‘I am but a clumsy creature,’ he began, overwhelmed by the thought of the blow about to be delivered--and delivered by his hand, too, his own loving hand.

He laid his head on her breast, his arms round her, as she sat on his knee.

This beginning made Virginia still more uneasy; Stephen had never called himself a clumsy creature before. ‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, very anxious.

‘What is it not,’ groaned Stephen, holding her tight. To think it was he, he who so deeply loved her....

‘Oh, Stephen’--Virginia was thoroughly frightened--‘mother?’

‘Yes. Yes. Yours. And Virginia, my loved wife,’ he said, raising his head and looking at her, ‘believe me I had rather, to spare you, it were mine.’

Virginia sat like a stone. Her face was stiff and set. The worst had happened, then. Her little mother, her own sweet little mother, to whom she had been unkind, unloving, and who had never once failed in kindness and love to her, was dead.

‘She is dead,’ said Virginia, in a voice so toneless that it sounded indifferent.

‘How much better,’ thought Stephen, ‘for everybody as well as herself if she were.’

Aloud he said, his face buried in Virginia’s bosom. ‘No. She is not dead. Quite the contrary. She is remarrying.’

And as Virginia said nothing, for her breath was taken away by these blows and counter-blows, he went on: ‘Darling, I would have spared you if I could. I have tried to spare you. I have tried all these days to find some way of keeping it from you. Indeed, indeed I have tried----’

‘But, Stephen--why? Why shouldn’t mother marry again?’ asked Virginia, with the irritability natural to people who have been frightened without cause, but so unusual in her that Stephen could only account for it by her physical condition. ‘I think it very strange of her not to tell me, but why shouldn’t she remarry? Now there’ll be somebody to take care of her. I’m glad.’

‘Darling----’

He pressed his face still closer to her bosom. He wished he could hide it there for ever.

‘But I do think,’ said Virginia, reaction against her mother setting in now she knew she wasn’t dead, as it had set in the day she saw her trotting safe and sound up the avenue when she had been torn by fears of an accident, ‘I do think she might have told me. I do think that.’

Her voice had tears in it. She strangled them, and held herself up very straight, offering no real hospitality to Stephen’s head. She was deeply wounded.

‘Ah, but there are some things one doesn’t tell,’ said Stephen.

He was miserable. He would have given at least half Chickover to be able to spare her.

‘Remarrying isn’t one of them,’ she said; and for the first time he caught a glimpse of another Virginia, a Virginia who perhaps, ten years ahead, might argue.

He raised his head from her bosom and looked at her again.

‘I know what I am talking about, my child,’ he said. ‘This remarrying is. She is marrying the young man with whom she motored up to London. You saw him yourself. Perhaps you will now agree that there are some things one does not willingly tell one’s daughter.’

Virginia stared at him a moment, her eyes very wide open. Then, without speaking a word, she got up off his knee and walked over to a window and stood at it with her back to him.

How strange of her, he thought. What a strange way of meeting trouble--to go away from him like that, to turn from the love that longed to help her.

He didn’t know what to do or say next. He sat watching her in the utmost perplexity. His Virginia, getting up off his knee, withdrawing herself from his loving arms----

‘Yes,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I can imagine there may be such things. But I don’t think’--she turned and faced him--‘this is one of them.’

He got on to his feet and went towards her, his arms outstretched.

‘My darling, my wounded darling,’ he cried, all understanding and pitifulness, ‘you are generous and young----’

‘So is Mr. Monckton,’ was her unexpected answer.

Really it was like a blow in the face. It stopped him short. It must be her condition. But all that day the attitude continued, the strange, almost defiant attitude, and Stephen could only go into his study and pray that her heart might be softened, and her eyes opened to see things as they truly were.

Such a grave misfortune--she did not of course know how grave, how terrible it was--the first in their married life, and to take it this way, hardening her heart against the sympathy and understanding he and his mother offered her in such boundless measure, and persisting, with an obstinacy he wouldn’t have dreamed her capable of, in upholding what her mother had done! True she said very little, but that little was all obstinate. She was quite unlike her usual self to his mother, too, whose one thought was to comfort, and would not admit that there was anything to be comforted about. And when that night he got into bed, and drew her to his heart in the exquisite contact of the body that had always till then soothed every trouble of the spirit, and she came apparently willingly, and clung to him, and was his own dear wife as he thought, and, happily sure of this, he whispered that he hoped she had remembered to pray for her poor mother, it was a grievous shock to feel her shrink away from him and hear her say she hadn’t--not more than usual, not more than her childhood’s ‘God bless my mummy,’ and most grievous to have her ask him, just as if they weren’t in bed but downstairs conversing in their clothes, just as if they weren’t in the sacred place and at the sacred moment never yet profaned by talk of anything but love, why he really thought it so dreadful for her mother to marry again.

‘Do you not see it is terrible to marry some one young enough to be your son?’ he had asked sternly--he couldn’t have believed he would ever have to be stern with his own love in such a place, at such an hour.

And she had answered: ‘But is it any more terrible than marrying some one young enough to be your daughter?’

Virginia had answered that. His Virginia. In bed. In his very arms.

VI

Stephen was completely crushed by this. It was like the things children say, unanswerable in its simple rightness, and yet, the grown-up world being what it is, all wrong.

Virginia was nearer the fount of truth than he was. Where he stood, thirty years further from it, its waters naturally were muddier; but there they were, and had to be dealt with including their mud, and not as if they remained for ever, as she so near the source supposed, crystal clear.

On the other hand he couldn’t do without his wife. He owed her everything, and above all he owed her his return to youth. She had come and released him from the darkening prison of deepening middle age. He worshipped her more than he knew. For instance, up to this he hadn’t known he was wax in her hands, he had imagined he led, guided, was in absolute authority; now suddenly he knew he was wax. When his mother-in-law had dared compare his marriage with hers, the thing had been the deadliest outrage. Virginia pointed her finger at it, and instead of being outraged he was crushed--crushed by the truth as she saw it, crushed by the knowledge that in her clear young eyes he hadn’t, in his condemnation of her mother’s action, a leg to stand on.

Yet how many legs did Stephen not know he really had to stand on. Everybody, except children like Virginia, inexperienced and new, would agree that the difference between the two cases was such that one was accepted as natural and the other with derision. But Virginia said there was no difference--he had an uneasy feeling that Christ might have said so too--and declared that if her mother’s marrying some one so much younger was terrible, then her marrying Stephen was terrible; more terrible, because there were actually eight years greater difference in their case.

All this she said that first tragic night in bed, and inquired, when she had finished, what was to be done about it.

He was wax. Not immediately; not for some black weeks of agonising separation, of days spent avoiding each other, of nights spent with their backs turned; but inevitably, before her stubbornness, he melted. She had too many of the necessities of his life in her hands. To be out of harmony with Virginia was worse, far worse--he shuddered as he admitted it, but there it was--than being out of harmony with God.

And Virginia, though she kept up her stout exterior and went doggedly through these painful days of April and May--the estrangement lasted all that time--was most wretchedly unhappy. What was she to make of all this? In her heart she was as much shocked as Stephen. But how could she not stand up for and defend her mother? How could she deny her own blood? Deeply she resented having to defend her mother; it shattered the foundations of the whole of her childhood’s faith. Was there ever anything more miserable, she thought, than to love some one and be horrified at them at the same time? She who ought to have been putting up her feet and resting more diligently than ever--‘The fifth month, dear child,’ Mrs. Colquhoun anxiously reminded her, ‘we are in the fifth month now, you know, and have to be most careful’--walked ceaselessly instead in the garden, up and down, up and down, in all those paths where she was least likely to be found by her mother-in-law, trying her hardest to see clear, to think right, groping round for some way to get back to Stephen while at the same time not deserting her mother, to get back to his arms, to his heart, to the unclouded love without which she felt she couldn’t live.

‘You know, Virginia dearest,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun at last, whose only wish was to console and be confided in, and who was much upset by this marked and morbid avoidance, ‘ you have nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘Has anybody?’ Virginia asked, stopping short in the middle of the path she had been waylaid in, and looking her mother-in-law squarely in the eyes.

‘That wretched, wretched mother of hers,’ groaned Mrs. Colquhoun to Stephen, describing this little scene to him and how uncomfortable and hurt she had been by the poor child’s want of frankness. ‘What misery she has brought on us all.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Stephen, looking up wearily from the sermon he was trying to write--his head, his heart, every part of him seemed to ache--‘we must countenance her.’

‘Countenance? Countenance her? Do you mean behave as if we approved of her?’

‘I do, mother. I have been thinking it over very seriously. Virginia’s health, and with her health her child’s health, is at stake. She----’ his voice faltered, for he was most miserable--‘she weeps at night. She--she weeps when she thinks I am asleep. If I try to console her it--it becomes heartbreaking.’

He turned his face away and bent over the manuscript. Tears had come out of his own eyes, and were wetting his face. Impossible for any one to conceive the torments of his nights in bed with his beloved one and estranged from her. That turning of backs, that cold space between their two unhappy bodies....

‘Wretched, wretched woman,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun again, more bitterly than ever, for she saw her son’s tears.

‘Yes. But we must think of Virginia.’

‘Has she been writing to her mother?’

‘I am sure she has not. She would do nothing without my knowledge.’

He dug the nib of his pen into the blotting-paper.

‘My wife is the soul of loyalty and straightness----’ he began, but his voice quivering uncontrollably at the mention of her dear qualities, he broke off.

‘Yes indeed, Stephen. Indeed I know it. She is the dearest child. Only at these times a woman isn’t quite herself, and Virginia, I can see, has got into a curious morbid state----’

‘I should leave her alone, mother,’ interrupted Stephen, his head bent so that she couldn’t see his face.

Mrs. Colquhoun was hurt. All her affection and sympathy being thrown back, as it were, at her,--told straight by her son, to whose welfare she had devoted the whole of her life, that she was taking the wrong line with Virginia. As though she didn’t know better than he could what was the right line to take with some one in Virginia’s condition!

‘I think I was wrong about those letters,’ he said, continuing to jab his pen into the blotting-paper. ‘I ought to have let her have them.’

‘I don’t at all agree with you. We did what we thought right, and more than that no mortal can be expected to do.’

‘No doubt. But we were mistaken, perhaps, as to what was right.’

‘Nonsense, Stephen. The child is only nineteen. She has to be protected from the influence of that woman. You caught the woman out yourself in the most scandalous, the most disgraceful immorality, and now you propose to countenance her and her--well, really there is only one word for him--her paramour.’

‘They are married. They have expiated their sin.’

‘Her late paramour, then.’

‘For Virginia’s sake they must be countenanced.’

‘How?’ asked Mrs. Colquhoun, greatly exasperated. Here was her son every bit as morbid as her daughter-in-law, and with no excuse of being in any particular month.

‘I am going to ask Virginia to write and invite them to pay us a visit.’

‘Here?’

‘Where else?’

‘I shall go away.’

‘As you please.’

‘Stephen----’

‘Yes, mother?’

But without waiting to hear what she was going to say he went on: ‘I have mismanaged this whole business. I have adopted a line with Virginia which cannot be continued, for it makes her unhappy and ill. Except for that night they spent together, which has now been expiated, what is there after all in their marriage different from Virginia’s and mine?’

‘Stephen!’

‘The sexes are reversed; the ages are the same--or rather the balance is on her side. She is eight years nearer his age than I am to Virginia’s.’

‘Stephen!’

‘It’s a mere prejudice, in any case.’

‘Stephen!’

‘My darling Virginia, so much closer to simple truth than I am,--so much closer, indeed, to God--sees no difference.’

‘She says so to you, does she? I wager she does see a difference in her heart, then. She is only standing up for that woman from some warped idea of duty--standing up for her against her own husband, against the father of her child.’

He made a gesture of weariness. He had suffered much. None but himself knew what his nights had been.

‘I love Virginia,’ he said, as if to himself.

Mrs. Colquhoun stood staring at him. He did not look at her, but sat at his table with bowed head. She had never before seen him like this, broken down, his standards gone, giving in, winking at sin, prepared, as he himself put it, to countenance it.

‘Stephen----’ she began.

He got up. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll go to Virginia now and put things straight.’

‘You really intend to have those shocking people here and whitewash them?’

He looked at her a moment in silence, bringing his attention back to what she was saying.

‘You talk as if they were outbuildings, mother,’ he said, with a faint, wretched smile.

‘Outbuildings! Sepulchres,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun. ‘Abodes of corruption. And nothing you can do in the way of whitening them will hide--will hide----’

She was becoming hysterical; in her life she had never been that. Words were failing her; in her life they had never done that. She must grip on to herself, she must shut her mouth tight. It frightened her, the behaviour of her hitherto absolutely reliable body.

Her son went out of the room and left her standing there.

VII

It was the very morning after this that Stephen was late for breakfast for the first time for years, and Virginia got down before him and found a postcard in her mother’s handwriting among the letters, with a picture on it of some place in the Isle of Wight and these words: You have helped me to happiness. Catherine Monckton.

She stared at it puzzled. She was still more puzzled when, turning it over again and looking at the address, she saw it was for Stephen, not for her.

Stephen had helped her mother to happiness? It would be just like him, of course--their reconciliation the night before had been utter and wonderful--but how? What had he had to do with it? He who only now, only yesterday, had come round to not disapproving any longer of the marriage?

She was still holding the postcard in her hand, vainly trying to make head or tail of it, when he came in.

‘It seems,’ she said, going to meet him with the quick steps and the radiant smile of love that is very proud, ‘that I still don’t know all your goodness, dear husband.’

‘What is it, my own wife?’ he asked, gazing at her upturned face with the glad content of the readmitted into paradise.

‘Why, look----’ And she gave him the postcard.

He turned a deep red. She took that for modesty, and laughed with pride in him. What he could have done and why he had done it she didn’t know, but she loved him with a positively burning faith.

Stephen, reading the words on the postcard, deduced that the marriage, which he had supposed had taken place a month or six weeks before, had in fact only just done so, for he believed no lasting happiness could be the lot of the ex-Mrs. Cumfrit, and gave her and her unfortunate victim two or three days of it at most before remorse and disillusionment set in. They were evidently at the very beginning of their two or three days when the card was written. He had had no wish at all, he knew, to help his mother-in-law to happiness. Expiation only was what he had had in mind. That expiation should be a happiness-giving process had not occurred to him as possible. And here was Virginia, praising and blessing him; here was this young unsullied spirit once more making him, by her belief and pride in his goodness, feel ashamed of himself. Also, how awkward it was. Why could not Mrs. Cumfrit have announced she was now Monckton in an ordinary manner, without dragging him into it?

‘Let us, my darling,’ he said, not knowing what to say and fervently wishing he really had done something to deserve the look of proud adoration on Virginia’s face, ‘have breakfast. Otherwise it will be cold. And I am as hungry as a----’ he was going to say hunter, but it sounded too unclerical, so he said rector instead; and they both laughed, being in the mood, that happy morning, when one laughs at anything.

She brought his coffee round to him, and stood behind his chair laying her cheek on his head. ‘You’ve got to confess, you know,’ she said, ‘however much you want to hide your light under a bushel. What did you do, Stephen darling, and why have we been so miserable all this time about mother’s marrying, when it was really you who----?’

‘I’ll confess to you, my love, that I did enjoin marriage.’

‘You did? Then why----?’

‘Virginia, love, you trust your husband?’

‘Oh, Stephen--so absolutely !’ she cried, putting her arms round his neck.

‘Then if I ask you not to question me further on this matter?’ he said, stroking the hand round his neck and looking up at the face so near his own.

‘Oh Stephen--ask me something harder than that. I do so long to show what I would do for you. I do so long to be more like you----’

‘My darling, God forbid,’ said Stephen very earnestly.

‘Oh Stephen----’ was all Virginia could say to a modesty, a humility so profound. She had married not only a lover but a saint.

Her cup was full. To be asked by Stephen not to question him ... she went about as dumb as a mouse. To be asked by Stephen to believe in him ... she went about bursting with belief. And she was so happy, restored to her husband after the black separation, that she didn’t even any longer mind the idea of Christopher as a stepfather; and her happiness spilt over into the letter she wrote her mother asking them both to Chickover; and it was such a warm letter that Catherine, accustomed in her relations with Virginia to provide all the warmth, was as much puzzled as Virginia had been on reading the postcard to Stephen.

That Virginia, who rarely showed warmth, should show it now was really very puzzling. But, being at the moment in the first astonishment at the joy of falling in love, Catherine had no time for anything or any one but Christopher, and didn’t think about Virginia’s letter for long. She scribbled a little note--‘ Thank you, darling, for your letter. We shall love to come some day ’--and forgot her. Nor did she remember her again, or think of Chickover and Stephen and all that strange dim life, till the Fanshawes’ visit.

On that visit almost everything the Fanshawes said seemed to produce a climax. Their innocent questions were all, except one, very difficult to answer, and their comments could mostly only be met by silence. The one question that wasn’t difficult was, ‘Have you been to Chickover with him yet?’--for the warm, forgotten invitation came back to Catherine’s mind at these words; and though at the moment the Fanshawes hadn’t given her time to answer, afterwards, before they left, when all the naturalness and glow had gone out of their visit and everybody was elaborately making conversation, she announced that Virginia had written urging them to go down as soon as possible and stay a long while, and that they thought of soon going.

At this Christopher had made a face at her, indicative of his amazement, for it was the first he had heard of any such invitation or visit; and Mrs. Fanshawe asked, ‘Have Virginia and Mr. Monckton already met?’--a little timidly, for by this time she too felt that any question was likely to turn out to be a bombshell.

‘Oh yes,’ said Catherine, reddening again, a vision of that meeting flashing before her eyes--the Chickover drawing-room, herself coming in ready to start for London and finding three figures in it, figures stiff and silent as three hostile pokers.

Upon which the Fanshawes decided that there were things and people in life they couldn’t understand, and gave up trying to. But their bosoms were benevolent, and the only criticism they permitted themselves was that Virginia, whom they didn’t know, must be a little unusual.

VIII

But what was to be done about Chickover?

When she saw herself in the glass in the mornings before dressing, Catherine felt she had better not go. The exclamations of the Fanshawes had confirmed her worst fears, and she knew for certain she was looking worn out. How could she go down there with Christopher, looking worn out? Virginia would notice it at once, and think she wasn’t happy and blame Christopher. Stephen would notice it too, and be sure she wasn’t happy, and triumph. While as for Mrs. Colquhoun----

She put Chickover out of her thoughts, and went and bought a lip-stick. The Fanshawes were giving a dance that night, and had invited them, and Christopher insisted on going. Useless for her to say she couldn’t dance; he said she wouldn’t be able to help herself with him. It appeared that he loved dancing, and only hadn’t danced much before his marriage because, as he explained, he couldn’t stick the fool-girls one met at dances. After all, it wasn’t possible to dance in absolutely stony silence, and what to say to these girls positively beat him. If one could have made love to them, now--Catherine winced--but one couldn’t even do that, because then one would have got tangled up and have to marry them. Marry them! Good God.

Now came this invitation, and he jumped at it, and all she could do was to make the best of herself. So, as a first step, she went out and bought a lip-stick; and such had been the innocence of her life in these matters that she blushed when she asked for one. But she wasn’t pleased with the effect, and, anxiously examining herself before Christopher came in to dinner, was inclined to think it only made her look older and certainly made her look less good.

He, however, noticed nothing, for by this time George’s electric lights had been heavily shaded, and he kissed her with his usual delight at getting back to her, and the stuff all came off, and she wondered what other women did to keep it on, or whether one either had a lip-stick or a lover, but never both.

She didn’t enjoy the dance. He couldn’t make her dance, however much he tried and she tried; and after struggling round the room with her and treading lamentably on each other’s toes, he gave up and let her sit down. But it wasn’t possible for him, hearing that throbbing music, not to dance, and Catherine, looking on at him going round with one girl after the other, all of whom seemed miracles of youth and prettiness, didn’t enjoy herself.

The girls appeared to languish at him. No wonder. He was far the most attractive young man there, she thought with an ache both of pride and pain. She didn’t enjoy herself at all.

The Fanshawes were very kind--almost too kind, as though they were eager to hide the facts of her own situation from her--and kept on bringing up elderly men who weren’t dancing and introducing them. But the elderly men thought the small lady with the wandering eyes and inattentive ears and reddened mouth rather tiresome, and soon melted away; besides, they preferred girls. So that whenever the Fanshawes looked her way they saw her, in spite of their efforts, sitting alone.

At last, after Ned Fanshawe had sat with her a long time, his mother came up with an elderly woman instead of an elderly man, and introduced her, and she did stick. Like Catherine, she appeared to know nobody there. They sat together the rest of the evening.

‘That’s my daughter,’ said the elderly woman, pointing out a very pretty girl dancing at that moment with Christopher. ‘Which is yours?’

No, Catherine didn’t enjoy herself.

For the life of her she couldn’t help being rather quiet in the taxi going home. Christopher had seemed to enjoy himself so much. All those girls....

‘I loved that,’ he said, lighting a cigarette, and then drawing her to him.

‘I thought you said you were bored by girls.’

‘Not if you’re there too. It makes all the difference.’

‘But I wasn’t much good to you.’

‘Why, just to know you were there, with me, in the room, made me happy.’

‘Do I make a good background?’ she asked, trying to sound amused.

He threw away his cigarette and took her in his arms. ‘Darling, were you horribly fed up, sitting there? I tell you what--we’ll get a gramophone, and I’ll teach you to dance. You’ll learn in no time, and then we’ll dance together at these shows every night.’

‘Wouldn’t I be tired ,’ said Catherine, making an effort to laugh; and, instead of laughing, crying.

Crying. The worst thing possible for her eyes. She would be a real, unmistakable hag in the morning.

‘Why, what is it, my precious little thing?’ exclaimed Christopher, feeling her face suddenly wet, and greatly surprised and distressed.

‘It’s nothing--I’m just tired,’ she said, hurriedly wiping her eyes and determined no more tears should screw themselves out.

‘I was a selfish idiot not to think how bored you must be,’ he said, anxiously kissing and loving her. ‘I saw you talking to Fanshawe, and thought you looked quite happy----’

‘Oh yes--so I was.’

‘Catherine--little thing----’

He kissed her again and again, and she kissed him back, and managed to laugh.

‘Darling Chris,’ she said, nestling close, ‘I don’t believe I’m any good at dances.’

‘You will be when I’ve taught you. You’ll dance like a little angel. We’ll get a gramophone to-morrow.’

‘Oh no--don’t get a gramophone. Please, Chris darling. I can’t learn to dance. I don’t want to. I’m sure I never could. You must go to dances without me.’

‘Without you! I like that. As though I’d ever go to anything, or budge an inch, without you.’

At this time they had been married five weeks.

There came another letter from Virginia; not quite so warm, because nobody can keep at the same temperature uninterruptedly for weeks, but still continuing to invite.

‘ We hope you and Mr. Monckton are soon coming here, dearest mother ,’ she wrote in her round, childish handwriting. ‘ I have to lie up most of the time now, because I’ve begun the seventh month, and mother says that that is the one to be most careful in, so that if you were to come now we could have some nice quiet talks. Stephen is visiting in the parish, but I think if he were here he would ask me to give you his love. ’

How far away it sounded. Another life, dim and misty. Stephen had evidently told her nothing of his monstrous suspicions. Virginia was prepared, dutifully as always, to accept her mother’s new husband. She had disliked him very obviously that day at Chickover, but now she was going to do her duty by him, just as she did her duty by everybody who had a claim on it.

Catherine sighed, holding the letter in her hand. It seemed like the splashing of cool water, a distant, quiet freshness, compared to her fevered, strange, rapturous--but was it really rapturous?--life now.

An ache of longing to see Virginia stole into her heart. One’s children and new husbands--how difficult they were to mix comfortably. Mothers, to be completely satisfactory, must be ready for sacrifice, and more sacrifice, and nothing but sacrifice. They mustn’t want any happiness but happiness through, by, and with their children. They must make no attempt to be individuals, to be separate human beings, but only mothers.

She sat staring at herself in the glass, thinking. When the letter arrived she was at her dressing-table, going through the now long and difficult process of doing her face. Mrs. Mitcham had brought the post in on tiptoe--she always now approached Catherine on tiptoe--laid it on the table, and stolen out again quickly, neither looking to the right hand nor the left, for by this time experience had taught her that if she did look what she saw was likely to be upsetting.

Catherine paused in what she was doing to open the letter, and then sat idly twisting it round her finger. She had been told of a woman in Sackville Street by Kitty Fanshawe who ‘did’ faces, and had gone at once and had hers done, and had been enchanted by the result. No more elementary lip-sticks and powder for her. In this elegant retreat, at the back of the building away from all noise, soothing to the nerves merely to go into, she had lain back in a deep delicious chair, and an exquisite young woman, whose own face was a convincing proof of the excellence of the treatment, did things with creams and oils and soft finger-tips; and when at the end--it was so soothing that Catherine went to sleep--a hand-glass was given her and she was told to look, she couldn’t help an exclamation of pleasure.

Well; this was a miracle. She not only looked ten, fifteen years younger and really, really pretty, but she looked so very fashionable. A little adventurous, perhaps, the last vestiges of the quiet country lady that still had survived the rubbings-off of Christopher all gone, but how--well, how pretty .

The only thing left to do was to go at once and buy a hat worthy of so distinguished a complexion. She went straight to Bond Street, and on the short walk discovered that people looked at her, saw her, instead of her being, as she had lately been, so completely uninteresting that it made her practically invisible.

Both the hat and the treatment were expensive,--the treatment more so, because it didn’t last, and the hat at least for a little while did. Impossible to have the treatment more often than very occasionally, as it cost so much, and she accordingly bought a box containing everything belonging to it except the young woman’s finger-tips, and tried to give it to herself at home.

The results were rather unfortunate. She didn’t look like anybody in the very least good. Mrs. Mitcham was secretly much worried. But she persisted, hoping by practice to become clever at it; and it was while she was in the middle of her daily struggles one morning, that Virginia’s second letter arrived.

What was to be done about Chickover? How could she go there with Christopher? Though he swore he would never go near the accursèd spot again, she knew he would if she asked him to. But how painful, how impossible it would be. Stephen was holding out olive-branches, for of course Virginia would never have invited them without his approval; but Stephen’s olive-branches were unpleasant things, she thought, remembering him as she had seen him last, on the day of his horrible accusations. To have met him last like that, and then find him on the doorstep being the pleasant host to Christopher! And Virginia, kept ignorant of everything except the fact of the marriage, bravely trying to do her duty all round, and Mrs. Colquhoun profoundly hostile and disapproving--why should her beloved Chris be exposed to such ordeals?

No, he shouldn’t be. But how could she go without him? Such were her feelings for Christopher that the thought of being separated from him even for the shortest possible visit was unbearable to her. Yet how not go? Enmeshed though she was in her obsession, the natural longing of her blood to see Virginia again yet tugged at her heart. If she could see Virginia without the others! But that, she knew, was impossible.

Presently, when she had finished dressing, she went into the drawing-room and looked up trains. Suppose she went on a Monday, and came back on the Wednesday in time for dinner? No; she couldn’t endure being away so long from Christopher. One night would be quite enough for Chickover; there would be the whole afternoon and evening to talk in. No; she couldn’t endure that either. What mightn’t happen to him while she was away? The whole time her heart would be in her mouth. Why not do it in a day? Go the first thing, and come back the last thing?

She looked up trains again. Chickover was so very far away; it took hours to get there. But by leaving Waterloo soon after eight in the morning she could be there by twelve, and the last train from there at seven-twenty would get her back by midnight.

Yes; she would do that. No, she wouldn’t. There was another train at eleven something, getting down at three. It was most important she should look well and happy, and show those doubters and disapprovers what a success her marriage was. She who was so well and happy--surely there couldn’t be anybody in the world more well and happy, except for sometimes being rather tired, which was nothing at all--must look it; and if she had lines and hollows in her face the three would at once jump to every sort of conclusion. The eleven o’clock train would give her time to go to Maria Rome, the Sackville Street lady, for face treatment first. There would still be four solid hours at Chickover. It made the whole thing very expensive, of course, but it was well worth it; for when they saw her so fresh and smooth they couldn’t but feel that it was merely silly to think her marriage had been a mistake, or to insist on measuring age and behaviour by years instead of by appearance. How intensely she wanted to prove her happiness, to triumph in Christopher!

She wrote to Virginia and told her she was coming down alone for the afternoon the following Monday, just to be with her a little by herself; Virginia wouldn’t want to see anybody she didn’t yet know very well in her present state, and she and Christopher--she wrote of him as Christopher, for all other ways of describing him were, she felt, absurd--would come down together later on, after the baby was born and Virginia was up and about again.

Then, at dinner, she told Christopher what she was going to do.

He didn’t like it. He hated the idea of her not being back till so late. She was far too precious and tiny to go racketing off alone. What mightn’t happen to her? He wouldn’t be able to do a stroke of work all Monday for thinking of her. In fact, he took the news exactly in the way Catherine would have wished him to, and she loved him, if possible, more than ever. Naturally at the same time he made some extremely disrespectful comments on Stephen’s personal appearance and general character, though, as the old boy had been the means of making Catherine marry him, he couldn’t help, he pointed out, liking him in spite of his various and glaring defects; and as for Virginia, his opinion of that girl was what it had always been, but he admitted that a mother might probably see something in her, and that if Catherine felt herself irresistibly impelled to go down and visit her, he supposed she had better go and get it over.

‘She’s going to have a----’ began Catherine, but stopped. Really, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She would have to sometime, but why before it was absolutely necessary? Virginia’s baby would make her a grandmother. Christopher would be married to a grandmother. If he hadn’t up to now felt the difference in their ages this must inevitably wake him up to it. To think of it made her feel raw, as if her skin had been pulled off, and she left exposed, shrinking in an agonised apprehension and sensitiveness.... Love, love--if only she didn’t love him so much....

‘What is she going to have?’ he asked, as she stopped short, looking up from the strawberries he was eating.

‘A happy afternoon, I hope,’ said Catherine quickly, turning red and smiling nervously.

‘I should think so indeed--with you there,’ said Christopher. And added under his breath, so that Catherine couldn’t hear and have her darling little maternal affections hurt, ‘Young blighter.’

IX

On the Monday, then, a pretty little lady of about thirty to thirty-five, whose prettiness was of the kind that is mostly disapproved of in country places, got out of the train at Chickover, and was met by an embarrassed clergyman.

The corners of her mouth were turned up in pleased smiles--it was so exciting and delightful to know one was looking really nice again--as she trotted along the platform to where he stood hesitating. She was, besides being very glad she looked nice, very glad to be going to see Virginia and very glad to be going back to Christopher that evening. Also, upheld by the knowledge of her attractiveness, the journey hadn’t tired her; on the contrary, it had been amusing, with an eagerly friendly strange man in the carriage, concerned in every way for her comfort. Added to which, the day being hot, she was flushed through the fainter flush bestowed on her by Sackville Street, and this was always becoming to her. And, finally, her eyes were bright with the gaiety that takes hold of a woman after even a small success. So that, altogether, it was natural she should smile.

Stephen had been prepared for anything rather than this. He had nerved himself to a quite different encounter,--certainly not to smiles. Bygones were to be bygones; his recent sacred experiences with Virginia had made him ardently determined to strive after the goodness she believed was his already, and his mother-in-law was to be received back with as much of the old respect for her as could possibly be scraped together. He would keep her before his mind as she used to be, and not dwell on that which she had since become. Besides, though she might have been happy when she wrote the postcard that had so unexpectedly intensified his own happiness, she couldn’t, he opined, be happy now. It was eight weeks ago that she wrote the card. Much, in marriage, may happen in eight weeks. Eight days was sometimes enough, so he understood, to open the eyes of the married. And here she was smiling.

‘How do you do,’ he said, grabbing at his soft hat with one hand and nervelessly shaking her hand with the other.

‘How very nice of you to come and meet me,’ she said gaily. Funny old Stephen. One couldn’t really be angry with him. And he was really very good. He looked extremely old, though, after having had Christopher before one’s eyes.

‘Not at all,’ said Stephen.

‘How is Virginia?’

‘Well.’

‘I’m so glad. I’m longing to see her. Oh, how do you do, Smithers. How are the children? I’m so glad----’

People were staring at her. It had not yet been his lot to be in the company of a lady people stared at. He hurried her into the car. He tried hard to respect her.

There wasn’t much time between the station and the house for respect, but he did try. He had thought to clear the ground for it by reassuring her during the brief drive as to Virginia’s ignorance of the reasons that had led to her marriage. ‘Led to’ was how he had intended to put it, rejecting the harsher and more exact word necessitated, for he was anxious to be as forgiving and delicate as possible, now that everybody concerned had turned the lamentable page. Besides, who was he to judge? Christ hadn’t judged the other woman taken in adultery.

Delicacy, however, was as difficult as respect. She herself seemed totally without it. Also it was difficult to feel she was his mother-in-law at all. She was curiously altered. He couldn’t make out in what the alteration consisted. Manifestly she was aping youth, but she was aping it, he admitted, so cleverly that if he hadn’t known her he might certainly, at a casual glance, have taken her for a daughter rather than a mother, though not the sort of daughter one would wish to have.

The moment they were seated in the car she herself threw delicacy to the winds. ‘You know, Stephen,’ she said taking his hand--he didn’t know whether to withdraw it or behave as if he hadn’t noticed--‘good does come in the strangest way out of evil.’

‘I am not prepared to admit that,’ Stephen felt bound to reply.

‘Oh do let’s be real friends, won’t we?’ she said, still smiling at him and looking like somebody’s slightly undesirable daughter. ‘Then we can really talk. I wanted to thank you for my great happiness----’

He tried to withdraw his hand. ‘I think perhaps----’ he began.

‘No, no--listen,’ she went on, holding it tighter. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I never would have married Christopher and never would have had an idea of what happiness is really like. So you see, your thinking those wicked things of us was what brought it all about. Just like roses, coming up and flowering divinely out of mud.’

He had made the most serious resolutions to let bygones be bygones, and he shut his mouth in a thin tight line lest he should be unable not to say something Virginia would be sorry for. That his mother-in-law, who was once so dovelike, so becoming of speech and discreet of behaviour, should suddenly slough the decencies and allude in highly distasteful images to occurrences he was doing his utmost to forget and forgive, that she should use, herself having been wicked, the word wicked in connection with any thoughts of his was surely outrageous.

Yet even while he locked his mouth he remembered that it was his mother-in-law’s postcard that had renewed and made more radiant his Virginia’s belief in him. The service this regrettable mother-in-law had done him was great and undeniable. She had in the past, and consciously, done him very great service, and he had been grateful. She had eight weeks ago done him another. Should he, because the last service had been accidental and unconscious, not repay her? Twice over now she had helped him to his wife. The side of him that judged, disapproved, suspected, that was his early training and all the long years before Virginia, made him not able to unlock his mouth; the side of him that didn’t and wasn’t, that longed to justify Virginia’s belief in him, made him try extraordinarily hard to unlock it. He did earnestly now desire to let mercy prevail over justice; but, when he looked at Catherine, how hard it was. This blooming gaiety--he used the adjective correctly, not as Christopher would have used it--upset his plans. He had not been prepared for it. She was not like the same person.

He sat silent, struggling within himself, and they arrived at the house holding each other’s hands for the simple reason that he couldn’t get his away.

There on the steps stood Virginia, as if she had never stood anywhere else since Catherine left her on them the day she departed in Christopher’s side-car on the momentous journey that had changed her life; only this time Mrs. Colquhoun wasn’t standing there with her, and Virginia had grown considerably rounder.

‘Sweet of you to come, mother,’ she said, shy and flushed, when Catherine had run up to her and was folding as much of her as she could in her arms.

It had not escaped Virginia that her mother and Stephen had arrived hand in hand. She gave him a look of deep and tender gratitude when he, too, came up the steps. He wiped his forehead. He seemed to be in a constant condition of rousing Virginia’s gratitude for things he hadn’t done. Really, he thought, following the two into the house, he was a worm; a worm decked, by his darling wife’s belief, in the bright adornments of a saint.

Virginia was much struck by her mother’s appearance. She didn’t remember her as so pretty. She felt oddly elderly, with her awkward heavy body, and certainly she felt completely plain beside her. Her mother looked a little fashionable perhaps, for quiet Chickover, yet why she should Virginia didn’t know, for she had on the same country clothes she was wearing on her last visit and the visit before that. Her complexion was beautiful. Virginia was quite glad Mrs. Colquhoun had had to go away for the day on business and wouldn’t be there to see it. She felt--she didn’t know, for Mrs. Colquhoun had never mentioned such things, but she felt--that her mother-in-law thought women oughtn’t to have complexions once they were--well, older.

Lunch passed off well; the talk afterwards, which included Stephen who, anxious to be good and kind, remained with them and conversed to the very best of his ability, passed off well; tea passed off well; and after tea he purposely withdrew from the terrace, where they were sitting, so as to allow mother and daughter freedom to touch on matters of intimate feminine interest.

Then Virginia, after making her mother lie down on a long cane seat near hers, so as to rest before the journey home, screwed herself up to mentioning the marriage--it hadn’t yet been in any way alluded to--and said shyly, turning red as she spoke, ‘You know, mother, I’m really very glad about Mr.--Mr.----’

‘No, not Mr. anything, darling. Call him Christopher.’

‘Sweet of you, mother,’ said Virginia, looking so much relieved that Catherine said, ‘What is, dearest?’

Virginia turned yet redder. ‘I was afraid,’ she said, ‘you might want me to call him father.’

‘Oh no , darling,’ said Catherine, laughing nervously. ‘You couldn’t possibly.’

And taking Virginia’s hand and stroking it, looking down at it as she stroked, she said, ‘You don’t--you don’t think him too--too young, do you dearest?’

‘No,’ said Virginia stoutly.

‘Darling!’ exclaimed Catherine, raising the hand she was stroking and swiftly kissing it.

‘How can I, when Stephen and I----’

Dear, dear little Virginia. Catherine was so much pleased and touched that she kissed Virginia’s hand over and over again. ‘My darling little daughter,’ she said, ‘my own darling little daughter----’ and added, and really at the moment believed it, forgetting how completely she had been absorbed only in Christopher, ‘I have missed you so.’

Virginia at once retreated into her shell. Instinctively she felt the lapse from truth. ‘Sweet of you, mother,’ she said in her usual awkward little way.

She drew her hand back. It was strange, and not quite right somehow, for her mother to be kissing it like that. It made her feel uncomfortable.

‘Wouldn’t you,’ she suggested, so as to turn the talk to practical matters, ‘like to wash your face, mother?’

‘Wash my face?’ echoed Catherine, startled and staring at her. ‘Why?’

‘I always find cold water such a help,’ said Virginia, ‘if one is rather tired.’

Catherine dropped back again on to her cushions. ‘Darling child,’ she murmured, closing her eyes a minute. Cold water--on the top of the delicate structure of Sackville Street----

No, she wouldn’t wash her face; she was quite comfortable, and not a bit tired, and was so very, very happy to be with her little Virginia.

Virginia got further into her shell. There was a something about her mother that she wasn’t accustomed to. She had always been a loving mother, but not quite--not exuberant like this. Something had gone. Was it--Virginia searched laboriously round in her scrupulous mind--dignity?

‘I mustn’t miss my train,’ said Catherine, when the church clock struck half-past six.

‘There’s half an hour still,’ said Virginia. ‘If you leave at seven it will be quite soon enough.’

‘It’s the last train,’ said Catherine. ‘Hadn’t the car better come round a little before seven?’

‘If you missed it, mother, it wouldn’t matter. I could lend you everything, and Stephen and I would be very glad.’

‘Darling,’ murmured Catherine again, concealing a shudder. She pictured herself after the unavoidable washing, coming down next morning to breakfast....

At a quarter to seven Stephen thought it proper to appear once more and converse during the few remaining moments of his mother-in-law’s visit. He had decided he would pick and offer her a bunch of roses to take home with her; if he wasn’t able to respond to hand-holding, if he wasn’t able, after all, to respect her, he could at least offer her roses. Virginia would be pleased, and his own conscience slightly soothed.

Catherine began putting on her gloves.

‘Plenty of time,’ said Stephen, seeing this. ‘It has occurred to me,’ he continued, ‘that you might like a few roses.’

‘How very nice of you, Stephen,’ said Catherine, who had planted every one of the roses with her own hands,--‘but isn’t it too late?’

‘Plenty of time. Smithers is most trustworthy about trains. I will gather them myself.’

And he went indoors to get a knife and a basket.

‘I’m sure I ought to go,’ said Catherine nervously to Virginia.

‘The car isn’t round yet, mother. Smithers is never late.’

‘I believe,’ said Stephen, coming out again, knife and basket in hand, pausing on the terrace and considering the sky, ‘you will have a comparatively cool journey back. I rather fancy there has been a thunderstorm over towards Salisbury, and it will have cleared the air when you arrive there.’

He went down the steps on to the lawn, and began choosing roses with care and deliberation.

‘Virginia darling, oughtn’t I to go?’ Catherine asked, fidgeting.

‘It isn’t seven yet, mother,’ said Virginia patiently, a little hurt by this extreme anxiety not to be obliged to spend the night with them. Stephen on the lawn was carefully removing the thorns from the roses he had cut.

The church clock began to strike seven. Catherine started. ‘There,’ she exclaimed, getting up quickly, ‘I must go. Good-bye, darling. Never mind the roses, Stephen,’ she called.

‘You have at least another five minutes before you need leave,’ he called back in his sonorous, carrying voice, still going on selecting the biggest blooms.

Kate appeared and said the car was waiting.

Catherine hurriedly bent down and kissed Virginia. ‘Good-bye, darling--I’ll go at once. I’m sure I ought to. Don’t get up--you look so comfy. It has been such a joy seeing you again. Stephen, I’m going--I shall miss the train----’

‘Of course I’ll get up, mother, and see you off,’ said Virginia, disengaging herself with difficulty from the rugs and cushions everybody was always now burying her in. ‘Stephen,’ she called, ‘mother won’t wait.’

Stephen hastily cut one more rose, a particularly fine one, and hurried, infected by Catherine’s hurry, towards the terrace, stripping off the thorns as he came. His eyes being fixed on the thorns he was stripping off he didn’t see he had reached the steps of the terrace, and he stumbled and fell up them, scattering the roses at Virginia’s feet.

He wasn’t in the least hurt, and indeed was on his legs immediately again; but Virginia, who had stared at his prostrate form a moment in silence, her hand pressed to her heart, made a queer little sound and fainted.

Both Catherine and Stephen rushed to her. By the time help had been called, and they had lifted her and carried her indoors and laid her on a sofa, Catherine had missed her train.

X

In this way it happened that she stayed the night after all, and came down next morning looking quite different. She had breakfasted in her room, had lingered in it till the last moment, but finally was obliged to face her relations; and they were startled.

There was neither bloom nor gaiety now. The one had vanished with the other. Virginia thought her mother must have had far more of a shock the evening before than had been supposed. The fainting had been nothing,--when one was going to have a baby one did things like that, and they were of no consequence. She had soon recovered, and they had all three spent, Virginia thought, a very nice quiet evening afterwards, Stephen himself going to give the orders for her mother’s room to be got ready, and expressing the most hospitable satisfaction at her further stay. Her mother had been a little silent, that was all; and it hadn’t occurred to Virginia, who so soon was herself again, that she really had had a shock.

‘Why, mother----’ she exclaimed, when Catherine came down into the hall, ready to start.

‘I didn’t sleep,’ said Catherine, turning away her face and pretending to search for an umbrella she hadn’t brought.

They stared at her. What a difference. Virginia was concerned. Her poor little mother must really have been thoroughly frightened by her fainting.

‘But mother----’ she began, taking a step towards her, wanting to say something to reassure and comfort.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Catherine, bending over the umbrella-stand.

She was a bundle of nerves and acute sensitiveness. She felt she couldn’t bear to be touched. And why didn’t they see that to stand there staring....

She pulled the umbrellas in the stand about with shaking fingers, putting off the moment of turning round to say good-bye.

It wasn’t only that she had had to wash off Maria Rome and hadn’t slept--and indeed she hadn’t slept a wink--it was also that in the watches of the night, of this her first night alone since her marriage, once more in that house of long calm memories, she had seen, as she stared into the darkness and thought of the inevitable next morning and its humiliations, that she was on the high road to becoming a fool. Yes, a fool; a silly fool; the sort of fool she had herself smiled at when she was younger, the worst sort of fool, the elderly fool.

But how could she stop? Sitting up in bed she asked herself this question. She must keep up somehow with Christopher’s youth. She couldn’t let herself crumble into age before his eyes. If only he hadn’t begun by admiring her physically so much! If only his love hadn’t been based on what, adoring her, he called her exquisiteness. How difficult it is, thought Catherine, wide awake hour after hour, to go on being exquisite when one doesn’t sleep enough, and is tormented by fear of one’s lover, on whom one’s entire happiness depends, suddenly seeing one isn’t exquisite at all, but old, old. It was like being forced to run a race that was quite beyond one’s strength, and from the beginning being out of breath. And next morning--she knew that separated from Sackville Street and out of reach of Maria Rome’s box she not only looked her age but much, much more now than her age, and Stephen and Virginia would be convinced the marriage was a bitter failure and punishment, and that Christopher was unkind to her. Christopher unkind to her! Christopher....

She spent an extremely unpleasant night. The house, its memories, the prospect of next morning, forced her to think. Oh, it was unfair, unfair and most cruel, that at last she should have been given love only when she was too old. She ought of course never to have listened to him, to have turned the sternest, deafest ear. But--one is vain; vanity had been the beginning of it, the irresistibleness of the delicious flattery of being mistaken for young, and before she knew what she was doing she had fallen in love,--fallen flop in love, like any idiot schoolgirl. And Christopher who didn’t realise, who hadn’t noticed yet, who loved her as if she were a girl, and by the very excess of his love burnt up what still had been left to her of youth.... Yes, she was a fool; but how stop, how stop? It was horrible to be ashamed, and yet to have to go on repeating the conduct that made one ashamed. Love--if only, only she didn’t love!

She spent an extremely unpleasant night. No wonder she came down looking different. It wasn’t just having had to wash away Maria Rome.

And then, while she was fumbling among the umbrellas, and Virginia was watching her in puzzled concern, and Stephen was endeavouring to identify the mother-in-law who had gone upstairs with the mother-in-law who had come down again, Mrs. Colquhoun came in through the drawing-room windows, arrived thus early across the park and garden to inquire how Virginia was after her mother’s visit of the day before, and to gather from Stephen what she could of his state of mind after so searching an experience.

The situation was as awkward as it was unexpected. Stephen and Virginia hadn’t thought she would come so early, or they would have sent round and warned. They could only look on and hope for the best. His mother, Stephen was aware, had decided that she, anyhow, was not obliged to continue to know the late Mrs. Cumfrit. If and when Mrs. Cumfrit came down to Chickover, his mother had informed him, she herself would always have urgent business somewhere else. Morals were, without any doubt whatever, morals, she had said, and if Stephen could reconcile his principles with leniency in regard to them, she herself neither could nor would.

It was therefore most unpleasant for every one that she should walk straight into Catherine’s presence. Virginia and Stephen held their breath. Mrs. Colquhoun gave a visible start when she saw the figure bending over the umbrella-stand, and made as if she would go back at once into the drawing-room from whence she had emerged. But when on Catherine’s turning round she saw her face, she was instantly placated. What a change. Judgment had indeed been swift. Here was nothing but a wreck. ‘He beats her,’ was Mrs. Colquhoun’s immediate mental comment. After all, she thought, one could leave these matters quite safely in the hands of God.

It had not been her intention ever to speak to Catherine again, but a wreck is different; one could not but feel benevolent towards a wreck. If only people would be and stay wrecks Mrs. Colquhoun would always have been benevolent. She put out her hand. She said quite politely, ‘How do you do.’ Stephen thought, ‘My mother is a good woman’; Virginia gave a sigh of relief; and all Catherine had to do was to reply with equal politeness, ‘How do you do.’

But she was in a highly abnormal condition. She was a mass of nerves and quivering intuitions. Caught, unprotected in the morning light, there she was standing exposed before these staring relations, unable to hide, obliged to show herself; and, with a feeling that nothing now mattered, she was overtaken by the reckless simplicity of the cornered. Through Mrs. Colquhoun’s greeting she felt the truth: Mrs. Colquhoun was being amiable because she thought Catherine was down and out, and Mrs. Colquhoun was what she was, hard, severe, critical, grudging of happiness, kind to failure so long as it remained failure, simply because there wasn’t a soul in the whole world who really loved her. A devoted husband would have done much to bring out her original goodness; a very devoted husband would have done everything.

And so, to her own astonishment, and to the frozen amazement of the others, instead of in her turn nicely murmuring, ‘How do you do,’ and smiling and going out to the car, she was impelled by what she saw in Mrs. Colquhoun’s eyes as she took her extended hand, to say, ‘You need love.’

What made her? It was the last thing she would really ever have said out loud to Mrs. Colquhoun if she had been in her senses, so that she couldn’t have been in her senses. Nobody in the least knew what she meant. It sounded improper; it was most startling.

Mrs. Colquhoun withdrew the hand she ought never to have given, and Stephen said in a strained voice, ‘We all need that,’ and added with emphasis that it was high time to start unless the train was to be missed again.

Virginia could only kiss her mother a worried and bewildered good-bye. Fancy saying that to her mother-in-law. What could her mother have meant? Of course it was true of everybody that they needed love, but one didn’t say so.

Mrs. Colquhoun took it, she considered, very well. Turning away out of the hall she waited in the drawing-room till the car had gone, and then when Virginia came in begged her not to give it another thought.

‘Give what another thought?’ Virginia asked, at once bristling, as she had lately so often bristled when with Mrs. Colquhoun, at the merest insinuation that her mother needed either explaining or excusing.

Well, well. Poor little Virginia. One had to be very patient with her just now.

XI

Christopher dined with Lewes the evening Catherine was at Chickover, and stayed with him till it was time to go to Waterloo to meet her train. He thoroughly enjoyed being with old Lucy again, and listening to his yarns about the imminent economic collapse of Europe. He had forgotten how interesting economics and Europe were. There were other important things in the world besides love, and it was a refreshment to get among them again for a bit.

They dined at the restaurant they used most often to go to when they lived together, and afterwards went back to Lewes’s rooms and sat in great contentment with the two windows wide open to the summer night, each in his own comfortable old chair, each with his feet on the sill of a window, smoking and talking, while the pleasant London summer evening street sounds floated up into the room, and the dusk deepened in the corners.

Next door was the room Christopher used to rage up and down. He laughed to think how calm and happy he now was. No more ragings up and down for him. Marriage set one free from all that sort of torment. Old Lucy ought to marry. Not that he seemed tormented in any way, but Christopher would have liked him to know for himself what a delight life could be. The poor chap hadn’t the beginning of the foggiest suspicion of it.

Lewes was very glad to see his friend looking so well and happy. Evidently the marriage was still a success. He found it impossible to believe that it would be lastingly successful. True, the lady on her wedding-day had seemed much younger than her years; but there were the years,--he had himself seen them in black and white on the certificate, and they were bound sooner or later to gallop on faster and faster ahead of Christopher’s. However, few marriages, he understood, were lasting successes, so that perhaps after all it didn’t much matter.

The two therefore were in great harmony, each much pleased to be once more with the other.

‘She’s gone down for the day to her daughter,’ Christopher said, when Lewes, observing the laws of politeness, inquired after Catherine.

‘She has a daughter?’ asked Lewes surprised, for he had never heard of her.

‘Certainly,’ said Christopher, as who should say, ‘Hasn’t everybody?’

Lewes made no comment. He silently considered this further drawback to the marriage. And Christopher, happy and expansive, continued: ‘She has married a man years older than herself.’

‘Who has?’ inquired Lewes, not quite following.

‘Well, Catherine hasn’t, has she.’

‘No. I’m obtuse. Forgive me. I think I was surprised your wife should have a daughter grown up enough to marry.’

‘It is absurd, isn’t it,’ said Christopher, liking Lewes for this. ‘She’s much too young, isn’t she. He’s a parson, and old enough to be her father.’

‘Whose father?’ asked Lewes, again not quite following.

‘His wife’s, of course. The girl’s only a girl, and he’s a horny-beaked old rooster.’

‘Is he?’ said Lewes, and thought things. Not that he, or, he admitted, anybody, could possibly have applied such epithets to Chris’s wife, but still.... And had his friend considered that he was now the stepfather-in-law of a person he described as a horny-beaked old rooster?

‘Why, he’s old enough to be Catherine’s father too,’ said Christopher.

‘Is he?’ said Lewes, reflecting how that could be. Wouldn’t that make him old enough, then, to be his wife’s grandfather? Well, best let it alone. It was a perplexing mix-up.

‘I call it disgusting,’ said Christopher.

Lewes was silent. Long ago he had observed how people are most critical in others of that which they do and are themselves. When he spoke again it was to return to the exposition and illustration of the doctrines of Mr. Keynes, from which he had so injudiciously wandered.

‘Come with me to the station,’ said Christopher, getting up at half-past eleven and preparing to go and meet Catherine at Waterloo.

‘I think not,’ said Lewes.

‘Come on. It’ll do you good. You’ll see Catherine again. It’s time you did. And we’ll arrange with her when you’re to come to dinner.’

Lewes didn’t want in the least to see Catherine again, or be done good to, or go to dinner, but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went; which was just as well, for when everybody had got out of the train and the platform was empty and it was clear she hadn’t come, at least he was able to reason with Christopher and restrain him from fetching out his motor-bicycle and tearing off through the night to Chickover.

‘It’s that blasted son-in-law of hers,’ Christopher kept on repeating,--showing, Lewes considered, a lamentable want of balance. ‘ He’s at the bottom of this----’

Lewes, applying his mind to probabilities, soon hit on the truth, and pointed out that the telegram that had certainly been sent was too late in arriving to be delivered in London that night, and he would get it the first thing in the morning.

‘But suppose she’s ill? Suppose----’

‘Oh my dear Chris, try and not be a fool. She has simply missed the last train. You’ll know all about it in the morning.’ And he took him by the arm and walked him home to Hertford Street.

When they got there Christopher insisted on his going up and having a drink. Lewes did his best not to, for he had no wish to behold his friend’s married milieu ; but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went.

He felt a faint distaste at seeing his friend opening a door, his only by marriage, with a latch-key belonging really to a woman, but suppressed this as foolish. Fortunately the flat was not the thing of fal-lals he had imagined, and he was quite relieved on being taken into the drawing-room to find it so solid and so sombre.

‘George,’ explained Christopher, seeing his friend looking round.

‘George?’ repeated Lewes, who had never heard of him.

‘All this black stuff.’

Lewes said nothing.

‘Catherine’s first husband,’ said Christopher. ‘He was old enough to be her father too.’

‘Was he?’ said Lewes, groping about among these different persons old enough to be people’s fathers.

He sank into a chair. He drank whisky. At intervals he tried to go, but Christopher wouldn’t let him. For two hours he had to listen to talk that made him feel dimmer and dimmer of mind, more and more as if his roots were wilting; for Christopher was jerked back by Catherine’s unexpected failure to come home, and his unhappiness at the prospect of the first night alone in their room, and his efforts not to be anxious and worried, into thinking and talking only of her.

‘My dear chap--yes ...,’ ‘Old man, I’m sure of it ...,’ Lewes, as sympathetically as he could, from time to time interjected. But his head drooped; his spirit failed him. Women. What didn’t they do to a sensible, intelligent man? Made him go all slushy and rotten; turned him into nothing better than a jabbering ass. Much of it was whisky, Lewes allowed, as Christopher drowned his disappointment and secret fear in more and more of the stuff, but most of it was woman.

‘Look here, I must be off,’ he said, getting up firmly on Christopher’s showing a tendency, after quite a lot of whisky, to become too intimate in his talk for comfort. ‘This room’s pure George,’ he had been saying, ‘but Catherine’s bedroom--you should see Catherine’s bedroom----‘--was he going to offer to show it to him?

Lewes hurriedly got up and said he must be off.

‘You’re not crawling back into your shell already?’ cried Christopher, much flushed, and his hair, from his frequent passing his hand through it while he talked, much ruffled. ‘I’ll tell you what you are, Lucy--you’re nothing but a miserable whelk.’ And he laughed immoderately.

‘I’ve some work I must get finished to-night,’ said Lewes, taking no notice of this.

‘At two in the morning?’ exclaimed Christopher, laughing louder than ever. ‘That’s just the sort of thing you would do at two in the morning. Get married, old whelk--get married----’ He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You jolly well wouldn’t----’

‘Good night,’ interrupted Lewes abruptly.

But after he had gone Christopher soon recovered from the exuberance of whisky, and went very sadly to bed. He missed Catherine terribly. The flat was the loneliest place without her. And what if something had happened to her after all, in spite of Lewes’s cold-blooded assurances that nearly always nothing happens to anybody? He didn’t sleep much. He hated being alone in that dear room of happiness; and when at breakfast he got the telegram, as Lewes had foretold, saying she was coming by the first train, he determined to chuck the office and go and meet her.

Catherine, however, anxiously turning over every possibility, had thought that he might do this, and at Chickover station, eluding Stephen who was talking to a parishioner, sent a second telegram saying she wouldn’t be back till dinner. Her one desire was to keep out of Christopher’s sight till she had been to Maria Rome. Impossible to let him see her in the state she was in. Well did she know that this was being a slave, a silly slave, and that it was cruel to leave him all day wondering what was happening, but she was a slave, and this cruelty was nothing to the cruelty to them both of letting him meet her and see what she now looked like really. So she sent the second telegram.

Naturally, Christopher was excessively perturbed when he got in. What in damnation had happened in that beastly Chickover? Never again should she go there without him. Never again should she go a step without him. And she hadn’t taken any luggage with her, and she would be worn out. Blast Stephen. Blast that girl. And probably the bird-faced mother-in-law had had a hand in all this too. If so, let her be specially and thoroughly blasted.

He looked up the trains, and found that one arrived at 5.30, and there was no other till after ten. The 5.30 must be the one, then. He told Mrs. Mitcham, who had shown every symptom of astonishment and uneasiness on getting to the flat that morning and finding her mistress hadn’t returned, to have dinner ready earlier than usual, because Mrs. Monckton would be badly needing food, and then he went to his office after all, intending to go to Waterloo to meet the 5.30.

What a day it was. He couldn’t do a stroke of work. He felt like nothing on earth after the whisky. His chief was sarcastic. Everything went wrong. At five he was starting for Waterloo when Mrs. Mitcham rang him up to say her mistress was safely back and resting.

Safely back? How had she managed that, with no train that he knew of?

He flew home. Catherine, her face beautifully rearranged, was lying in the shaded drawing-room.

‘Why, darling--how? When----?’ he cried, rushing across to her.

He didn’t wait for an answer. There was no time for one before he had picked her up and locked her in his arms.

Oh, how blessed this was--oh, oh how blessed this was, sighed Catherine, her cheek against his, her eyes shut, safe in heaven again.

The great feature of Maria Rome’s treatment was that it was husband-proof. Nothing came off.

XII

Catherine made much of Virginia’s fainting.

‘What she want to faint for?’ asked Christopher sceptically. ‘A great girl like that.’

‘Well, she did . So of course I couldn’t leave her sooner.’

But when she was saying this sort of thing she felt uncomfortable. Such tiresome almost lying, such petty almost truth. She seemed now to walk continually in small deceits. It was as though her feet couldn’t move a step without getting into a tangle of repulsive little cobwebs. Nothing much really; nothing more than she supposed most women, whom she began to think of as creatures necessarily on the defensive, had to wade through; but so different from the clean-swept path along which she had all her life till then proceeded. All her life? All her death. That hadn’t been life. Up to her marriage with Christopher she had merely been dead. Now she was alive; and mustn’t she take the stings and the pains and even the pettiness of life gladly, in return for its beatitudes?

But they worried her, the stings and the pains and the pettiness. Also, beatitudes were expensive. They forced her to go oftener to Maria Rome, and the oftener she went the more she needed her. It was like drug-taking. And suppose there should come a point--in her heart she knew it must come--when Maria’s ministrations would merely accentuate what they were intended to hide? Once or twice lately she had fancied they had been less successful; or was it that there was more to do to her the deeper she sank in this business of being young and happy? She led a racked life, an uneasy mixture of fears and blisses. And the grey in her hair seemed to multiply, and it too had to be treated by Maria Rome, and she began to look more and more like somebody adventurous,--she who was really the most unadventurous of perch-clinging doves.

The thought of Virginia’s life,--Virginia, so young, so needing to do nothing to herself, so completely at ease with her elderly husband--made her sigh as the overheated and overtired sigh at the thought of cool shadows and clear waters. There was a difference, and it was simply all the difference in the world, between their two cases. She had been horribly right when at the beginning she snubbed Christopher for declaring there wasn’t. Stephen didn’t need to watch Virginia as she watched Christopher, anxiously on the alert for the least sign of change in her, in what she did, what she said, in the very tone in which she said it. Stephen was safe, was at rest; Virginia would never, never do anything but love him. He was the father of her child, the authority she looked up to, the intelligence she adored. But Catherine--she wasn’t going to be the mother of any child of Christopher’s, she hadn’t got any intelligence for him to adore, and wouldn’t have wished to have authority, even if she could have, for him to look up to. For her there was nothing but strain and effort, with the tormenting knowledge that her very strain and effort were bound to bring about what she dreaded.

It was a terrible business, this business of bliss. She clung to him, clung to him, tighter and tighter, as if his youth must somehow get through and make her young to match.

Now nobody can be clung to tightly for any length of time without presently feeling that they would like a little air; and soon after the return from Chickover, when he had got over his anxiety at her absence and his joy at her return, Christopher began to have this feeling. It was gorgeous to love and be loved as he and Catherine loved, but it was a patent and acknowledged fact, and he gradually now began to want to talk about something else. Catherine apparently never wanted to. She loved, he couldn’t but notice, anxiously. She seemed to have very little of the repose of real faith, and she needed an incredible amount of reassuring. And when he had reassured her, and got her quiet and placid as he supposed, there she was needing it all over again.

Marriage being mainly repetition, and Christopher now being a husband, he presently began to make fewer rapturous speeches. It was quite unconscious, but as the weeks passed it became natural to love with fewer preliminary cooings--to bill, as it were, without remembering first to coo.

He wouldn’t have noticed it if Catherine hadn’t noticed it and said something about it. Whereupon he began to meditate on this, as he recognised, undoubted fact, and came to the following conclusions:

A husband cannot go on cooing after he has ceased to thrill, but he can go on very happily billing. Only mystery thrills, and only the unknown is mysterious. It wasn’t reasonable for the dear explored one to want still to be mysterious, for the so felicitously known to want still to be unknown. Catherine was the darlingest love of a wife, and every night when he went to sleep with his arms round her he thanked God he had got her, but she was no longer mysterious; his heart would never give great choking bumps again when he came near her. Yet that, it seemed, was what she wanted and expected. And she had a really remarkable love-memory, and never forgot a single love-look or love-word or love-vow or love-action of his, and had taken to comparing him with himself,--which was rather awkward, for unconsciously at the beginning, it appeared, he had been creating precedents and setting a standard; and the standard, it appeared, was a very high one, and the precedents were difficult to follow in calmer blood.

What he now wanted, thought Christopher, reflecting on these things, was to lead a happy, healthy, lovemaking life, in which all the speeches were taken for granted. Was that out of the way at all? Didn’t married people inevitably get into this condition after a bit? He supposed that the difference between himself and Catherine--he hated to admit there could be such a thing--was their several attitude towards billing and cooing. He wanted--and he imagined most husbands at last wanted--to bill without cooing, and she wasn’t happy in any billing that hadn’t been preceded by coos. Loud coos, too; loud and long ones.

Well, no man can coo for ever. Christopher was convinced of that. Not with spontaneity, anyhow. He tried to once or twice just to please her, but she instantly found him out and was tremendously upset. He then tried to laugh about it and tease her; but she wouldn’t laugh and be teased. She took everything that had to do with love very seriously. Her view was that love was like God, and couldn’t be joked about without profanity.

She told him this used to be his view too. Was it? He couldn’t remember, but didn’t tell her he couldn’t, for a certain amount of caution, highly unnatural to him, began to creep into what he said. The expression ‘used to be’ seemed to recur rather a lot, he thought. He had heard tell of one’s evil past dogging one’s footsteps, but fancy being dogged by one’s alleged satisfactory past, and having it shake its fists at one!

He told her this one morning, waking up in the jolly, careless mood when he would have tickled a tiger; but she only looked thoroughly alarmed, and said he never used to talk like that.

What a frightened, nervy little thing she was. What was she frightened of? He couldn’t imagine; but he only had to look at her eyes to see she was frightened. She was happiest and most content when they didn’t go anywhere, and didn’t do anything but just sit in the flat together, she curled up close to him on the sofa, and he reading aloud. They spent evening after evening this way. About every third evening or so she would suddenly get into a panic lest he found it boring, and would start making eager plans about things they would do next week: they would go to the play, and have supper afterwards, or motor down into the country and drift round on the river and come home by moonlight.

When the time came she would cling to him and beg him to let her off. Let her off! What a funny way of putting it, he would tell her, laughing and kissing her. Was she going to have a baby, he began to wonder? And he asked her so one evening, when she was wriggling out of a plan they had made that involved exertion.

She seemed thunderstruck. ‘Chris!’ she cried, staring at him.

Well, why not? he asked. People did. Especially women, he said, trying to make her laugh, because her face had gone so very tragic. They had babies much more often than they had husbands, anyhow. She must have noticed that.

‘But not if--not if----’ she stammered, her eyes full of tears.

Oh Lord--he had forgotten that age-complex of hers. He never thought of her age. She was as old to him as she looked, and she looked the same age as himself. He never could remember that she was convinced she was a little Methuselah.

‘After all,’ he said cheerfully, still trying to make her laugh, ‘there was Sarah. I don’t see why you----’

‘Sarah!’

She stood looking at him a moment, and then ran out of the room.

Horrified, he ran after her; but she had locked herself into the bedroom, their bedroom--locked herself in, and him out.

This was their first scene. And it was peculiarly distressing, because nobody was angry, only sorry.

XIII

Soon after this the Fanshawes gave a dinner, and invited the Moncktons. It was, in fact, a dinner for Catherine, who hadn’t enjoyed their dance very much, they felt. Dinners were perhaps pleasanter for her now, they decided. It couldn’t be much fun, Ned had remarked, to sit looking on at that great red-headed lout of hers dancing with a pack of girls, just as if she were chaperoning her débutant s----

‘Oh hush , Ned!’ cried Kitty Fanshawe, stamping her foot.

For some reason, impossible Catherine considered to account for, except as one of the many off-shoots of their warmly benevolent dispositions, the Fanshawe family as one man loved her. They had known her slightly in the days of George, and with growing intimacy ever since. In those days they had deplored that she should be tied to one so old; they were now engaged in deploring that she should be tied to one so young. Fanshawe-like they wouldn’t even to themselves judge any one they loved, but tacitly making the best of a bad job, set about seeing what they could do to amuse and entertain her.

They came to the conclusion that a little dinner at a restaurant would be more amusing than a dinner at home, and chose the Berkeley; and they reserved one of those tables in the window-recesses which have sofas fitted round three sides of them.

The party was eight: themselves, the Moncktons, Sir Musgrove and Lady Merriman--great friends of theirs, and both delightful, which made them conspicuous among married couples, who sometimes were, the Fanshawes were forced regretfully to admit, unequal in attractiveness, so that while one of them would make a party go the other would prevent its budging--and Duncan Amory, a rising barrister. But at the last moment Kitty Fanshawe caught a cold and couldn’t come, and Mrs. Fanshawe invited Emily Wickford, an agreeable spinster, to take her place.

Five sat on the sofa, and three on chairs on the outer side of the table. Mrs. Fanshawe put Catherine in the middle of the sofa facing the room, between Ned and Sir Musgrove--Ned had invented a birthday for her, so that she should be the guest of honour and he could give her flowers, for Ned was good but tactless, and it hadn’t occurred to him that birthdays were the last things Catherine wished attention drawn to--and on Ned’s left sat Lady Merriman, and on her left sat Christopher, and on his left sat Miss Wickford, and on her left sat Duncan Amory, with Mrs. Fanshawe next to him on his other side, between him and Sir Musgrove.

All would have been well if it hadn’t been for Miss Wickford. That exquisite spinster, who had refused so many offers that she could hardly be called a spinster at all, was still only twenty-eight, and had the most beautiful eyes in London. She had been invited merely to fill Kitty’s place, and the Fanshawes had thought of her only because she was a great friend of Duncan Amory’s, and he at any rate would enjoy himself if she came.

Unfortunately, Sir Musgrove and Christopher enjoyed themselves too because she came--at least, Sir Musgrove did at the beginning. Taking advantage of the table being round, he leaned over whenever he could to talk to Miss Wickford, and while he was doing that he naturally wasn’t talking to Catherine, for whose entertainment he had been specially invited; and Christopher, whose duty it was to begin by talking to Lady Merriman, at once upset the balance of the party by talking to Miss Wickford instead.

This left Ned to amuse two neglected ladies, and as he wasn’t amusing he didn’t amuse them. It also cut off Duncan Amory from his dear Emily, for Emily liked beginnings rather than endings, and therefore preferred Christopher, whom she hadn’t seen before, to Duncan whom she had seen almost too much; and, regarding him as years younger than herself, probably still at Oxford, or the other place, proceeded to give the boy a good time and see that he thoroughly enjoyed his evening.

She succeeded. Christopher did enjoy himself. Here was a girl who was clever as well as pretty, delightful to talk to as well as delightful to look at. In ten minutes he felt as if they were old friends. She asked him if he had any Scandinavian blood in him, because that was what he looked like,--rather her idea of a sun-kissed young Norse god; and he retorted by asking her if she had any Greek blood in her, because that was what she looked like,--rather his idea of a sun-kissed young Greek goddess; and they laughed, and were pleased with each other. Aphrodite for choice, said Christopher warming to his work, and glancing first at Emily’s hair and then at her justly celebrated eyes; Aphrodite was fair too, and had eyes like the sea too, he said; all the most beautiful women were fair and had eyes like the sea, he said.

Emily was much pleased.

Sir Musgrove, catching the word Aphrodite, tried to chime in, for he was not only a well-known Greek scholar, engaged at that very moment in writing an inquiry into the mythologies, but he would have been interested to discuss the delicious goddess with Miss Wickford. Duncan Amory also tried to chime in, with a story about an American lady who by some mix-up at her baptism got christened Aphrodite, and the effect it had on her afterwards. It wasn’t a bad story, and anyhow it was apt, and he felt aggrieved that nobody listened to it except the Fanshawes. The others were absorbed in watching Emily. Emily wasn’t at all a good person to have at a party, thought Amory. She absorbed attention. Her proper place was a tête-à-tête . That was how he himself chiefly cultivated her. He shrugged his shoulders, and turned resolutely to Mrs. Fanshawe.

Lady Merriman was bored. Able and willing to talk about anything,--book, play, picture or politician--she found herself, because of Miss Wickford, left with only half a man; half of Ned Fanshawe, too, who even when he was whole had more of good nature than of conversation. And she wished very much to talk to this young Mr. Monckton and find out for herself what could have induced that middle-aged woman to be so reckless as to marry him. However, he was engrossed. Natural, she supposed, at his age. What wasn’t so natural was that Musgrove was engrossed too. He would talk to neither of his neighbours, and had eyes and ears only for Miss Wickford.

Lady Merriman, who was fond of Musgrove, and had been faithfully and patiently through the thick and the thin of him for twenty-five years, was a little put out; not on her own account, for nothing, she knew, could alter his complete private dependence on her, but on his. She didn’t like her man, who was anything but silly, to look it. Also, she did wish he would amuse poor Mrs. Monckton, and distract her attention from what that boy of hers was saying to Miss Wickford. Marriage, thought Lady Merriman, observing the expression on Musgrove’s face and observing the expression on Catherine’s, was rich in humiliations. If one allowed it to be, that is; if one didn’t keep them out by the only real defence--laughter.

The band began to play a fox-trot. One or two active young people got up from neighbouring tables and danced.

‘Will you dance?’ Christopher asked Miss Wickford.

‘I’d adore to,’ she answered, getting up just as the waiter put a nice hot quail on her plate. ‘May we?’ she asked, smiling at Mrs. Fanshawe, and floating off without waiting for an answer.

‘Ah, youth, youth,’ said Sir Musgrove, shaking his head indulgently. ‘And we greybeards console ourselves with quails.’

This was tactless of Musgrove, Mrs. Fanshawe considered, and she protested.

‘There are no greybeards here,’ protested Mrs. Fanshawe with great vigour.

‘Ah well--I speak allegorically,’ said Sir Musgrove, following Miss Wickford’s movements as she exquisitely gyrated in Christopher’s arms.

‘I should eat your quail before it gets cold, Musgrove,’ said his wife,--it was all Martha’s fault for not having put such effervescent guests on the sofa, safe behind the table where they couldn’t have got out. But some one ought to tell Mrs. Monckton not to look quite so....

‘Personally, I think it foolish to interrupt a good dinner and let it get cold,’ said Duncan Amory, who didn’t at all like the way Emily was behaving.

‘My dear friend, they are at the golden age when dinner is of no consequence,’ said Sir Musgrove. ‘A good-looking couple--a very good-looking couple,’ he added dreamily, his eye on Emily.

Well, really--hadn’t Musgrove grasped the fact that the young man was Mrs. Monckton’s husband? thought Lady Merriman, trying to catch the eye that was fixed so persistently on Miss Wickford.

The Fanshawes saw their mistake, and were repenting bitterly. Of course Emily Wickford should have been put on the sofa. Better still, not asked at all. She was ruining the party for every one except Catherine’s husband. Duncan Amory, usually such good company, was sulking; Musgrove--they couldn’t have believed it of him; Lydia Merriman--naturally she was vexed; Catherine--well, they hardly liked to look at her.

The band left off playing, and the couples all came back except Christopher and Miss Wickford. They disappeared through the arch into the next room, Emily smiling back over her shoulder at her hosts, and Christopher holding up an explanatory cigarette case.

It was Emily who proposed this. She said she didn’t want any more dinner, and thought it much more fun not to sit cooped up at that table, with which Christopher heartily agreed.

‘They all seem so old,’ said Emily, bending forward for him to light her cigarette. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Fossils,’ said Christopher, forgetting in his admiration of the face being lit up by the match he was holding, that Catherine was one of them, but he did ask, after a minute, whether she didn’t think the Fanshawes would mind their not going back.

‘Oh, they never mind anything,’ said Emily easily. ‘They’re darlings.’

The Fanshawes, however, did mind this. They fumed. It was a stricken party that remained at the table. Mrs. Fanshawe was casting her mind back to whether Emily knew Christopher was Catherine’s husband, and couldn’t remember that she had made this clear when she introduced them. But how, after all, could one make a thing like that clear, short of taking the other person aside and explaining in a whisper? Just to say, ‘And this is Mr. Monckton,’ after having introduced somebody to Mrs. Monckton wasn’t in this case, she was afraid, enough. On the other hand one couldn’t introduce him as Mrs. Monckton’s husband. Still, instinct ought to have told Emily. Mrs. Fanshawe, who never was unfair, was unfair now. She was angry. She was the last person in the world to grudge young people having a good time, and was of an easy-goingness that verged on laxity; but this deeply annoyed her, this carrying off of Christopher. Also, she considered that Christopher oughtn’t to have let himself be carried off. He, at any rate, knew he was Catherine’s husband.

It was a stricken party. Ned was furious, Sir Musgrove fidgeted, Duncan Amory sulked, and Catherine seemed to be shrivelling smaller before their very eyes. Only Lady Merriman and Mrs. Fanshawe talked,--across the table to each other, gallantly, after the manner of women, trying to cover things up.

The music began again, and everybody watched the arch. It was some time before the two appeared, and when they did they were talking and laughing as happily as ever.

‘Come here--you are very unkind, you two, deserting us like this,’ Mrs. Fanshawe called out to them as they danced past; but they didn’t hear, and danced on.

At the end, when the party was breaking up, Miss Wickford, who had enjoyed her evening immensely, said to Christopher, ‘Come and see me on Sunday.’

‘No--you come to us,’ he answered.

She looked at him surprised. ‘But wouldn’t that bore your mother dreadfully?’ she asked.

‘Bore my mother?’ echoed Christopher, staring. ‘What mother?’

‘Why, isn’t----’

Miss Wickford broke off, instinctively feeling she was somehow getting into trouble. That little made-up Mrs. Monckton on the sofa--wasn’t she the boy’s mother?

‘My mother died when I was three,’ said Christopher.

‘Poor you,’ murmured Miss Wickford non-commitally: something warned her to be cautious.

‘But my wife will be delighted if you’ll come.’

There was the briefest silence. Then Emily managed to say, without, she trusted, showing her astonishment, ‘How perfectly sweet of her. I’ll ring up and ask.’

XIV

She never did. And it was just as well, thought Christopher, for Catherine had, most astoundingly, taken it into her head to be jealous of her. She wouldn’t admit she was, and professed immense admiration for Miss Wickford’s beauty, but if the emotion she showed after that dinner wasn’t jealousy he was blest if he knew what jealousy was.

It amazed him. She might have heard every word he said. Miss Wickford was extremely pretty and quite clever, and why shouldn’t he like talking to her? But he was very sorry to have made Catherine unhappy, and did all he knew to make her forget it; only it was suffocating sort of work in hot weather, and he felt as if he were tied up in something very sweet and sticky, with no end to it. Rather like treacle. It was rather like being swathed round with bands of treacle.

He came to the conclusion Catherine loved him too much. Yes, she did. If she loved him more reasonably she would be much happier, and so would he. It was bad for them both. The flat seemed thick with love. One waded. He caught himself putting up his hand to unbutton his collar. Perhaps the stuffy weather had something to do with it. July was getting near its end, and there was no air at all in Hertford Street. London was a rotten place in July. He always walked to his office and back so as to get what exercise he could, and every Saturday they went down to his uncle for golf; but what was that? He ached to be properly stretched, to stride about, to hit things for days on end, and his talk became almost exclusively of holidays, and where they should go in August when his were due.

Lewes was going to Scotland to play golf. He had gone with Lewes last year, and had had a glorious time. What exercise! What talk! What freedom! He longed to go again, and asked Catherine whether she wouldn’t like to; and she said, with that hiding look of hers--there was a certain look, very frequent on her face, he called to himself her hiding look--that it was too far from Virginia.

Virginia? Christopher was much surprised. What did she want with Virginia? Short of actually being at Chickover, she wouldn’t see Virginia anyhow, he said; and she, with her arms round his neck, said that was true, but she didn’t want to be out of reach of her.

This unexpected reappearance of Virginia on the scene, this sudden cropping up of her after a long spell of no mention of the girl, puzzled and irritated him. They would, apparently, have gone to Scotland if it hadn’t been for Virginia. Must he then too--of course he must, seeing that he couldn’t and wouldn’t go away without Catherine--be kept hanging round within reach of Virginia? She was the last object he wished to be within reach of.

He was annoyed, and showed it. ‘Why this recrudescence,’ he asked, ‘of maternal love?’

‘It isn’t a recrudescence--it’s always, Chris darling,’ she said, looking rather shamefacedly at him, he thought--anyhow queerly. ‘You don’t suppose one ever leaves off loving somebody one really loves?’

No, he didn’t suppose it. He was sure she wouldn’t. But he wasn’t going into that now; he wasn’t going, at ten in the morning, to begin talking about love.

‘It’s time I was off,’ he said, bending down and kissing her quickly. ‘I’m late as it is.’

He hurried out, though he wasn’t late. He knew he wasn’t late, only he did want to get into what air there was,--into, anyhow, sunlight, out of that darkened bedroom.

She too knew he wasn’t late, but she too wanted him for once to go, because she had a secret appointment for half-past ten, and it was ten already; a most important, a vital appointment, the bare thought of which thrilled her with both fear and hope.

She didn’t know if anything would come of it, but she was going to try. She had written to the great man and told him her age and asked if he thought he could do anything for her, and he had sent a card back briefly indicating 10.30 on this day. Nothing more: just 10.30. How discreet. How exciting.

She had read about him in the papers. He was a Spanish doctor, come over to London for a few weeks, and he undertook to restore youth. Marvellous, blissful, if he really could! A slight operation, said the papers, and there you were. The results were most satisfactory, they affirmed, and in some cases miraculous. Suppose her case were to be one of the miraculous ones? She hadn’t the least idea how she would be able to have an operation without Christopher knowing, but all that could be thought out afterwards. The first thing to do was to see the doctor and hear what he had to say. Who wouldn’t do anything, take any pains, have any operation, to be helped back to youth? She, certainly, would shrink from nothing. And it sounded so genuine, so scientific, what the doctor, according to the papers, did.

The minute Christopher had gone she hurried into her clothes, refused breakfast, hadn’t time to do her face--better she shouldn’t that day, better she should be seen exactly as she really was--and twenty minutes after he left she was in a taxi on the way to the great man’s temporary consulting rooms in Portland Place.

With what a beating heart she rang the bell. Such hopes, such fears, such determination, such shrinking, all mixed up together, as well as being ashamed, made her hardly able to speak when the nurse--she looked like a nurse--opened the door. And suppose somebody should hear her when she said who she was? And suppose somebody she knew should see her going in? If ever there was a discreet and private occasion it was this one; so that the moment the door was opened she was in such a hurry to get in out of sight of the street that she almost tumbled into the arms of the nurse.

It gave her an unpleasant shock to find herself put into a room with several other people. She hadn’t thought she would have to face other seekers after youth. There ought to have been cubicles--places with screens. It didn’t seem decent to expose the seekers to one another like that; and she shrank down into a chair with her back to the light, and buried her head in a newspaper.

The others were all burying their heads too in newspapers, but they saw each other nevertheless. All men, she noticed, and all so old that surely they must be past any hopes and wishes? What could they want with youth? It was a sad sight, thought Catherine, peeping round her newspaper, and she felt shocked. When presently two women came in, and after a furtive glance round dropped as she had done into chairs with their backs to the light, she considered them sad sights too and felt shocked; while for their part they were thinking just the same of her, and all the men behind their newspapers were saying to themselves, ‘What fools women are.’

The nurse--she looked exactly like a nurse--came in after a long while and beckoned to her, not calling out her name, for which she was thankful, and she was shown into the consulting room, and found herself confronted by two men instead of one, because Dr. Sanguesa, the specialist, could only say three words in English--‘We will see’ were his words--so that there was another man there, dark and foreign-looking too, but voluble in English, to interpret.

He did the business part as well. ‘It will cost fifty pounds,’ he said almost immediately.

In a whole year Catherine had only ten of these for everything, but if the treatment had been going to cost all ten she would have agreed, and lived somehow in an attic, on a crust--with Christopher and youth. Indeed, she thought it very cheap. Surely fifty pounds was cheap for youth?

‘Twenty-five pounds down,’ said the partner--she decided he was more a partner than an interpreter--‘and twenty-five pounds in the middle of the treatment.’

‘Certainly,’ she murmured.

Dr. Sanguesa was observing her while the partner talked. Every now and then he said something in Spanish, and the other asked her a question. The questions were intimate and embarrassing,--the kind it is more comfortable to reply to to one person rather than two. However, she was in for it; she mustn’t mind; she was determined not to mind anything.

In her turn she asked some questions, forcing herself to be courageous, for she was frightened in spite of her determination and hopes. Would it hurt, she asked timidly; would it take long; when would the results begin?

‘We will see,’ said Dr. Sanguesa, who hadn’t understood a word, nodding his head gravely.

It would not hurt, said the partner, because in the case of women it was dangerous to operate, and the treatment was purely external; it would take six weeks, with two treatments a week; she would begin to see a marked difference in her appearance after the fourth treatment.

The fourth treatment? That would be in a fortnight. And no operation? How wonderful. She caught her breath with excitement. In a fortnight she would be beginning to look younger. After that, every day younger and younger. No more Maria Rome, no more painful care over her dressing, no more fear of getting tired because of how ghastly it made her look, but the real thing, the real glorious thing itself.

‘Shall I feel young?’ she asked, eagerly now.

‘Of course. Everything goes together. You understand--a woman’s youth, and accordingly her looks, depends entirely on----’

The partner launched into a rapid explanation which was only saved from being excessively improper by its technical language. Dr. Sanguesa sat silent, his elbows on the arms of his revolving chair, his finger-tips together. He looked a remote, unfriended, melancholy man, rather like the pictures she had seen of Napoleon III., with dark shadows under his heavy eyes and a waxen skin. Every now and then his sad mouth opened, and he said quite automatically, ‘We will see,’ and shut it again.

She wanted to begin at once. It appeared she must be examined first, to find out if she could stand the treatment. This rather frightened her again. Why? How? Was the treatment so severe? What was it?

‘We will see,’ said Dr. Sanguesa, nodding.

The partner became voluble, waving his hands about. Not at all--not at all severe; a matter of X-rays merely; but sometimes, if a woman’s heart was weak----

Catherine said she was sure her heart wasn’t weak.

‘We will see,’ said Dr. Sanguesa, mechanically nodding.

‘The examination is three guineas,’ said the partner.

‘Three more, or three of the same ones?’ asked Catherine, rather stupidly.

‘We will s----’

The partner interrupted him this time with a quickly lifted hand. He seemed to think Catherine’s question was below the level of both his and her dignities and intelligences, for he looked as if he were a little ashamed of her as he said stiffly, ‘Three more.’

She bowed her head. She would have bowed her head to anything, if these men in exchange would give her youth.

The examination could be made at once, the partner said, if she was ready.

Yes, she was quite ready.

She got up instantly. They were used to eagerness, especially in the women patients, but this was a greater eagerness than usual. Dr. Sanguesa’s sombre, sunken eyes observed her thoughtfully. He said something in Spanish to his partner, who shook his head. Catherine had the impression it was something he wished interpreted, and she looked inquiringly at the partner, but he said nothing, and went to the door and opened it for her.

She was taken upstairs into a sort of Rose du Barri boudoir, arranged with a dressing-table and looking-glasses, and another nurse--at least, she too looked like one--helped her to undress. Then she was wrapped in a dressing-gown--she didn’t like this public dressing-gown against her skin--and led into a room fitted up with many strange machines and an operating table. What will not a woman do, she thought, eyeing these objects with misgiving, and her heart well down somewhere near her feet, for the man she loves?

Dr. Sanguesa came in, all covered up in white like an angel. The partner, she was thankful to notice, didn’t appear. She was examined with great care, the nurse smiling encouragingly. It was a relief to be told by the nurse, who interpreted, that her heart was sound and her lungs perfect, even though she had never supposed they weren’t. At the end the nurse told her the doctor was satisfied she could stand the treatment, and asked when she would like to begin.

Catherine said she would begin at once.

Impossible. The next day?

Oh yes, yes--the next day. And would she really--she was going to say look nice again, but said instead feel less tired?

‘It’s wonderful how different people feel,’ the nurse assured her; and Dr. Sanguesa nodded gravely, without having understood a word, and said, ‘We will see.’

‘He hasn’t tried it on himself, has he?’ remarked Catherine, when she was in the Rose du Barri room again, dressing.

The nurse laughed. She was a jolly-looking young woman,--but perhaps she was really an old woman, who had had the treatment.

‘Have you been done?’ asked Catherine.

The nurse laughed again. ‘I shall be if I see I’m getting old,’ she said.

‘It really is wonderful?’ asked Catherine, whose hands as she fastened her hooks were trembling with excitement.

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ said the nurse earnestly. ‘I’ve seen men of seventy looking and behaving not a day more than forty.’

‘That’s thirty years off,’ said Catherine. ‘And supposing they were forty to begin with, would they have looked and behaved like ten?’

‘Ah well, that’s a little much to expect, isn’t it,’ said the nurse, laughing again.

‘I’m forty-seven. I wouldn’t at all like to end by being seven.’

‘Your husband would pack you off to a kindergarten, wouldn’t he,’ said the nurse, laughing more than ever.

Catherine laughed too. She was so full of hope that she already felt younger. But when she put on her hat before the glass she saw she didn’t anyhow look it.

‘Don’t I look too awful,’ she said, turning round frankly to the friendly nurse, who, after all, was going to be the witness of her triumphant progress backwards through the years.

‘We’ll soon get rid of all that,’ said the nurse gaily.

Catherine quite loved the nurse.

XV

It was an exciting life during the next week,--so much to plan, so much to arrange, and she herself buoyant with hope and delight. She couldn’t, of course, leave London during her treatment, so to Christopher’s astonishment she urged him to go to Scotland without her.

‘But Catherine----’

He couldn’t believe his own ears.

‘Go and have a good time, Chris darling.’

‘Without you?’

‘I must stay in London.’

‘In London ?’

‘Yes. Virginia may want me.’

‘Now what in God’s name, Catherine, is all this about Virginia. The other day----’

Then she told him, secure in the knowledge that she was so soon going to be young again--she didn’t in the least mind being a grandmother if she wasn’t going to look like one; on the contrary, to look like a girl and yet be a grandmother struck her as to the last degree chic--that Virginia was expecting a baby in September, and as babies sometimes appeared before they ought she must be within reach.

Well, that was all right; he understood that. What he didn’t understand was Catherine’s detachment. Why, she seemed not to mind his leaving her. He couldn’t believe it. And when it became finally evident that such was her real attitude and no pretence at all about it, he was deeply hurt. Incredibly, she genuinely wanted him to go.

‘You love Virginia more than me,’ he said, his heart suddenly hot with jealousy.

‘Oh Chris, don’t be silly,’ said Catherine impatiently.

She had never since their marriage told him not to be silly in that sensible, matter-of-fact way. What had come over her? He, who had been feeling he couldn’t breathe for all the love there was about, now found himself gasping for want of it. The atmosphere had suddenly gone clear and rarefied. Catherine seemed to be thinking of something that wasn’t him, and once or twice forgot to kiss him. Forgot to kiss him! He was deeply wounded. And she was so unaccountably cheerful too. She not only seemed to be thinking of something else but seemed amused by it, hugging whatever it was with delight. She was excited. What was she excited about? Surely not because she was going to be a grandmother? Surely that would make her brood more than ever on the difference in their ages?

‘She wants me to go to Scotland with you,’ he said, bursting in one day on Lewes. ‘She wants me to go away without her. Doesn’t care a hang. Four solid weeks. The whole of August.’

‘How sensible,’ said Lewes, not looking up from his work.

‘It’s that beastly baby.’

‘Baby?’ Lewes did look up.

‘Due in September.’

‘What? But surely----’

‘Oh, don’t be a fool. Virginia’s. She won’t leave London. Why she can’t go somewhere round near Chickover, where I could go too and be with her and get some golf as well--Lewes, old man, I believe she’s fed up with me.’

And he stared at Lewes with hot eyes.

In his turn Lewes told him not to be a fool; but the mere thought of Catherine, his Catherine, being fed up with him as he put it, sent him rushing back to her to see if it could possibly be true.

She was so airy, so much detached.

‘Now Chris, don’t be absurd. Of course you must have a good holiday and get out of London. It’s lucky that you have your friend to go with----’

That was the sort of thing.

‘But Catherine, how can you want me to? Don’t you love me any more?’

‘Of course I love you. Which is why I want you to go to Scotland.’

This was true. The treatment was being gone through for love of him, and he must go to Scotland because of the treatment. She was to have as much quiet as possible during it--‘No husbands,’ said Dr. Sanguesa--‘You’ve got to be a grass widow for a little while,’ interpreted the nurse--‘You must go to Scotland,’ still further interpreted Catherine.

But he couldn’t go at once. It was still only July. The first two treatments took place while Christopher was still in London, and as it was impossible without rousing his suspicions to keep him entirely at arm’s length, she wasn’t surprised when the effect of them was to make her feel more tired than ever.

‘It’s often like that to begin with,’ encouraged the nurse. ‘Especially if you’re not having complete rest from worries at home.’

Did she mean husbands by worries, Catherine wondered? There certainly wasn’t complete rest from that sort of worry, then, for Christopher, as Catherine apparently cooled, became more and more as he used to be, and possessed by the fear that he was somehow losing her rediscovered how much he loved her.

He had, of course, always intensely loved her, but he had felt the need of pauses. In her love there had been no pauses, and gradually the idea of suffocation had got hold of him. Now, so suddenly, so unaccountably, she seemed to be all pause. She tried to avoid him; she even suggested, on the plea that the nights were hot, that he should sleep in the dressing-room.

Whatever else he had tired of he hadn’t yet tired of the sweetness, the curious comfort and reassurance, of going to sleep with his arms round her. Since their marriage there had been no interruption in his wish to cling at night; what he hadn’t wanted was to be clung to in the morning. One felt so different in the morning; at least, he did. Catherine didn’t; and it was this that had given him the impression of stifling in treacle. Now she not only showed no wish at all to cling in the morning, but she tried--he wouldn’t and couldn’t believe it, but had to--to wriggle out of being clung to at night.

‘Catherine, what is it? What has come between us?’ he asked, his eyes hurt and indignant,--when Catherine had asked this sort of question, as she had on first noticing a different quality in his love-making, he had been impatient and bored, and thought in his heart ‘How like all women,’ but of course he didn’t remember this.

‘Oh Chris, why are you so silly?’ she answered, laughing and pushing him away. ‘Don’t you feel how hot it is, and how much nicer not to be too close together? Let us be sanitary.’

Sanitary? That was a pleasant way of putting it. She was going back to what she used to be at first, when he had such difficulty in getting hold of her at all,--going back into just being an intelligent little stand-offish thing, independent, and determined to have nothing to do with him. How he had worshipped her in those days of her unattainableness. Her relapse now into what threatened to become unattainableness all over again didn’t make him worship her, because that had been the kind of worship that never returns, but it lit his love up again, while at the same time filling him with a fury of possessiveness. A thwarted possessiveness, however; she evaded him more and more.

‘I can’t go to Scotland and leave you. Damn golf. I simply can’t,’ he said at last.

And she, as cool as a little cucumber and as bright as a gay little button--the comparisons were his--told him he simply had to, and that when he came back he would find they were going to be happier than ever.

‘You’ll love me more than ever,’ she said laughing, for though the treatment was extraordinarily exhausting her spirits those days were bright with faith.

‘Rot. Nobody could love you more than I do now, so what’s the good of talking like that? Catherine, what has happened to you? Tell me.’

And there he was, just as he used to be, on the floor at her feet, his arms clasping her knees, his head on her lap.

All this made Catherine very happy. She began to see benefits in the treatment other than the ones Dr. Sanguesa had guaranteed.

XVI

He went to Scotland, and she stayed in London. She was inexorable. It was as if his soft, enveloping pillow had turned into a rock. She lied at last--how avoid lying, sooner or later, when one was married?--so as to get rid of him, for he was insisting on taking rooms for them both at the sea near Chickover, where she could be within reach of Virginia and yet not away from him. Driven into this corner what could she do but lie? It is what one does in corners, she thought, excusing herself. She told him Virginia was probably coming up to London to have her baby in a nursing home, and that was why she couldn’t go away.

He went off puzzled and unhappy, and his unhappiness filled her with secret joy. What balm to her spirit, which had lately been so anxious, to see all these unmistakable symptoms of devoted love in him. And she pictured his return in September, and herself at the station to meet him, changed, young, able to do everything with him, a fit mate for him at last.

‘You’ll never, never know how much I love you,’ she said, her arms round his neck when she said good-bye.

‘It looks like it, doesn’t it,’ he said gloomily.

‘Exactly like it,’ she laughed. She was always laughing now, just as she used always to be laughing at their very first meetings.

‘I can’t make it out,’ he said, looking down at her upturned face. ‘You’re sending me away. Suppose I meet that girl up there--Miss Wickford, or that other one who looked like a shark--I should comfort myself.’

Even that only made her laugh. ‘Do, Chris darling,’ she said, patting his face. ‘And then come back and tell me all about it.’

She was changed. He went away extremely miserable, and Lewes’s talk--that talk he had thirsted for when he thought he wasn’t going to get it--seemed like just so much gritty drivel.

Left alone in London Catherine gave herself up entirely to the treatment. Twice a week she went to Portland Place and suffered,--for it hurt, though Dr. Sanguesa told her through the nurse that it didn’t. They laid her on a table, and a great machine was lowered to within a hair’s breadth of her bare skin, her eyes were bandaged, and crackling things--she couldn’t see what, but they sounded like sparks and felt like little bright stabbing knives--were let loose on her for half an hour at a stretch, first on one side of her and then on the other. When this was over she was injected with some mysterious fluid, and then went home completely exhausted.

All day afterwards she lay on her sofa, and Mrs. Mitcham brought her trays of nourishing food. She read and slept. She went to bed at nine o’clock. She did nothing to her face after Christopher had gone, and Mrs. Mitcham, looking at her and seeing her so persistently yellow, asked her with growing concern if she felt quite well.

After the fourth treatment she was to begin and see a difference. How anxiously she scanned herself in the glass. Nothing. And her body felt exactly as her face looked,--amazingly weary.

‘It takes longer with some people,’ said the nurse, when Catherine commented on this on her fifth visit. ‘There was one lady came here who noticed nothing at all till just before the end, and then you should have seen her. Why, she skipped out of that door. And sixty, if a day.’

‘Perhaps I’m not old enough,’ said Catherine. ‘All the people you tell me about are sixty or seventy.’

She was sitting on the sofa of the Rose du Barri boudoir being dressed. She was too tired to stand up. Those crackles, going on for half an hour, were a great strain on her endurance. They didn’t hurt enough to make her cry out, but enough to make her need all her determination not to.

The nurse laughed. ‘Well, we are depressed to-day, aren’t we,’ she said brightly. ‘People do get like that about half-way through--the slow ones, I mean, who don’t react at once as some do. You’ll see. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

The next time she came the nurse flung up both hands on seeing her. ‘Why, aren’t you looking well this morning!’ she cried.

Catherine hurried to the glass. ‘Am I?’ she said, staring at herself.

‘ Such a change,’ said the nurse with every sign of pleasure. ‘I was sure it would begin soon. Now you’ll see it going on more and more quickly every day.’

‘Shall I?’ said Catherine, scrutinising the face in the glass.

For the life of her she could see no difference. She said so. The nurse laughed at her.

‘Oh, you doubting Thomas,’ said the nurse, whose friendliness had flowered into a robust familiarity. ‘Just look at yourself now. Don’t you see?’ And she took her by the shoulders and twisted her round to the glass again.

No, Catherine didn’t see. She saw the nurse’s laughing, rosy face close to hers, and hers yellow and pale-lipped,--just as it always was now when nothing out of Maria Rome’s box had been put on it. Maria Rome had had a terrible effect on her. Her hair was startlingly more grey, now that the dye had had time to wear off, than it used to be before any was put on.

‘It’s the trained eye that can tell,’ said the nurse brightly. ‘I notice a great change.’

‘Do you?’ was all Catherine could say.

That day she seemed so much more quiet and tired than usual, lying on her sofa in the flat and not even reading, that Mrs. Mitcham, who hadn’t been at all happy about her since Christopher’s departure, asked her if it wouldn’t be a good plan to see a doctor.

Catherine couldn’t help smiling at this. Why, that was what was the matter with her, that she was seeing a doctor.

‘I shall be all right soon,’ she assured Mrs. Mitcham; for she still hoped.

It wasn’t till after the ninth treatment that her hopes began to grow definitely pale. Nothing had happened. She was just as old as ever; older, if anything, for those stabbing sparks made her brace herself to an endurance that left her utterly exhausted. The nurse, it is true, continued stoutly to express delighted surprise each time she saw her, but this merely caused Catherine to distrust either her sincerity or her eyesight. She became more silent and less interested in the tales about other old ladies. Their alleged skipping began to leave her cold. It was possible, of course, that they had skipped, but she wasn’t able to bring herself to believe in it really.

‘Those other old ladies----’ she said, on her eleventh visit.

The nurse interrupted her with a gay burst of laughter. ‘You’re never going to class yourself with old ladies?’ she cried. ‘Now, Mrs. Monckton, that’s really naughty of you. I won’t allow it. I shall have to scold you soon, you know.’

‘Well, but this is my eleventh time, and you said they were all skipping by their eleventh time----’

‘Not all. Come, come now. It takes people differently, you know.’

Not that I want to skip,’ said Catherine, wearily pinning up a strand of hair the eye-bandage had loosened. ‘It’s that I don’t feel the least shred of the remotest desire to.’

‘That’ll come. It’ll all come in time.’

‘In what time?’ asked Catherine. ‘I’ve only got one treatment more.’

‘It often happens that people feel the benefit afterwards. Weeks, perhaps, afterwards. They wake up one morning, and find themselves suddenly quite young.’

Catherine said nothing to this. Her hopes had flickered very small by now.

The nurse, as jolly as ever, rallied her and laughed at her for being so ungrateful, when she only had to look at herself to see----

‘I’m always looking at myself, and I never see,’ said Catherine.

‘Oh, aren’t you a naughty little thing!’ cried the nurse. ‘I don’t know what would become of poor Dr. Sanguesa if all his patients were as obstinately blind as you. Well, there’s still Thursday. Sometimes the last treatment of all convinces the patient, and we shall have you writing us wonderful testimonials----’

There was no response to this gaiety. Catherine went away heavy-footed. She was poorer by fifty pounds, Christopher was coming home in a week, and that bright dream of meeting him at the station seemed to the last degree unlikely to be realised. Useless for the nurse to pretend there was a difference in her; there was none. Perhaps if she hadn’t pretended Catherine would have been more able to believe. But the nurse treating her like a fool--well, but wasn’t that precisely what she was? Wasn’t any woman a fool who could suppose that she could be stirred up to youth again by showers of stabbing crackles?

She went home heavy-footed and ashamed. Trouble, expense, disappointment, an intolerable long separation from Christopher,--that was all she had got out of this. Oh yes--she had got the useful knowledge that she was a fool; but she had had that before.

Still, she wouldn’t quite give up hope yet. There was one more treatment, and it might well be that she would suddenly take a turn....

But she never had the final treatment, and never saw either Dr. Sanguesa or the nurse again; for when she got home that day, she found a telegram from Mrs. Colquhoun, asking her to come to Chickover at once.

XVII

There was a note of urgency in the telegram that made Catherine afraid. Going down in the slow afternoon train, the first she could catch, which stopped so often and so long, she had much time to think, and it seemed to her that all this she had been doing since her marriage was curiously shabby and disgraceful. What waste of emotions, what mean fears. Now came real fear, and at its touch those others shrivelled up. Virginia down there at grips with danger, being tortured--oh, she knew what torture--just this stark fact shocked her back to vision.

She sat looking out of the window at the fields monotonously passing, and many sharp-edged thoughts cut through her mind, and one of them was of the last time she had gone down to Chickover, and of her gaiety because some strange man, taken in by the cleverness with which Maria Rome had disguised her, had obviously considered her younger than she was. How pitiful, how pitiful; what a sign one was indeed old when a thing like that could excite one and make one feel pleased.

She stared at this memory a moment, before it was hustled off by other thoughts, in wonder. The stuff one filled life with! And at the faintest stirring of Death’s wings, the smallest movement forward of that great figure from the dark furthermost corner of the little room called life, how instantly one’s eyes were smitten open. One became real. Was one ever real till then? Had there to be that forward movement, that reminder, ‘I am here, you know,’ before one could wake from one’s strange, small dreams?

She had to wait an hour at the junction. This comforted her, for if things had been serious the car would have been sent for her there.

It was past nine when she reached Chickover. The chauffeur who met her looked unhappy, but could tell her nothing except that his mistress had been ill since the morning. The avenue was dark, the great trees in solemn row shutting out what still was left of twilight, and the house at the end was dark too and very silent. The place seemed to be holding its breath, as if aware of the battle being fought on the other side in the rooms towards the garden.

Silence everywhere, complete and strange; except----

Yes--what was that?

She caught her breath and stopped; for as she was crossing the hall, past the pale maid, a slow moaning crept down the stairs like a trickle of blood,--a curious slow moaning, not human at all, more like some poor animal, dying hopelessly by inches in a trap.

Virginia....

Catherine stood struck with horror. That noise? Virginia? Just like an animal?

She looked round at Kate. Their white faces stared at each other. Kate’s lips moved. ‘Since this morning,’ came out of them. ‘Since early this morning. The master----’

She broke off, her pale lips remaining open.

Catherine turned and ran upstairs. She ran as one demented towards the moaning. It must be stopped, it must be stopped. Virginia must be saved, she couldn’t, she mustn’t be allowed to suffer like that, nobody should be allowed to suffer like that, hours and hours....

She ran along the passage to Virginia’s room, the same room where nineteen years ago Virginia herself had been born, but instead of getting nearer the moaning she seemed to be going away from it.

Where was Virginia, then? Where had they put her?

She stood still to listen, and her heart beat so loud that she could hardly hear. There--to the left, where the spare-rooms were. But why? Why had they taken her there?

She ran down the passage to the left. Yes; here it was; behind this shut door....

Catherine’s knees seemed to be going to give way. The sound was terribly close,--so hopeless, so unceasing. What were they doing in there to her child? What was God doing to let them?

Her shaking hand fumbled at the handle. She laid the other over it to steady it. She mustn’t be like this, she knew; she mustn’t go in there only to add to the terror that was there already.

With both hands gripping the handle she slowly turned it and went in.

Stephen.

Stephen half sitting, half lying on the floor up against a sofa. His mother standing looking at him. No one else. The room shrouded in dust-sheets, the bed piled high with spare blankets and pillows. Stephen moaning.

‘Stephen!’ Catherine exclaimed, so much shocked that she could only stare. Stephen--Stephen of all people--in such a state....

His mother turned and came towards her.

‘But--Virginia?’ said Catherine, her lips trembling, for if Stephen could be reduced to this, what dreadful thing was happening to Virginia?

Mrs. Colquhoun took her face in both hands and kissed her,--really kissed her. Her eyes were very bright, with red rims. She had evidently been crying, and she had the look of those who have reached the end of their tether.

‘All is going well I believe now with Virginia,’ she said. ‘I tell him so, and he won’t listen. Do you think you could make him listen? There was a terrible time before the second doctor came and put her under an anæsthetic, and it upset him so that he--well, you see.’

And she made a gesture, half shame, half anger, and wholly unhappy, towards the figure leaning against the sofa.

Then she added, her bright, tear-stained eyes on Catherine’s, ‘To think that my son and God’s priest should go to pieces like this--should be unable in a crisis to do his duty--should lose--should lose----’

She broke off, continuing to stare at Catherine with those bright, incredulous eyes.

Catherine could only gaze at Stephen in dismay. No wonder Kate downstairs hadn’t succeeded in saying what she was trying to say about the master. Stephen, the firm-lipped, the strong denouncer of weakness, the exhorting calm Christian--what a dreadful thing to happen. She didn’t know husbands ever collapsed like that. George hadn’t. He had been anxious and distressed, but he hadn’t moaned. The moaning had been done, she remembered, exclusively by her. George had been her comfort, her rock. What comfort could Virginia have got that day out of Stephen? And it was after all Virginia who was having the baby.

‘Couldn’t the doctors give him something?’ she asked, feeling that poor Stephen ought certainly too to be given a little chloroform to help him through his hours of misery,--anything rather than that he should be left lying there suffering like that.

‘I asked them to give him a soothing draught,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, ‘and they only told me to take him away. Of course I took him away, for he was killing Virginia, and here I’ve been shut up with him ever since. Catherine----‘it was the first time she had called her that--‘I don’t remember in our day----? I don’t remember that my husband----?’ And she broke off, and stared at her with her bright, exhausted eyes.

‘George didn’t,’ said Catherine hesitatingly, ‘but I think--I think Stephen loves Virginia more than perhaps----’

‘A nice way of loving,’ remarked Mrs. Colquhoun, who had had a terrible day shut up with Stephen, and whose distress for him was by now shot with indignation.

‘Oh, but he can’t help it. Dear Mrs. Colquhoun----’

‘Call me Milly.’

Milly? These barriers tumbling down all round before the blast of a crisis bewildered Catherine. Stephen, who had been so firmly entrenched behind example and precept, lying exposed there, so helplessly and completely exposed that she hardly liked to look at him, hardly liked either him or his mother to know she was there, because of later on when he should be normal again and they both might be humiliated by the recollection, and Mrs. Colquhoun, not only turning on her adored son but flinging away her insincerities and kissing her with almost eager affection and demanding to be called Milly. Strange by-products of Virginia’s suffering, thought Catherine. ‘I must go to her,’ she said, going towards the door.

‘Dear Catherine,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun holding her back, ‘they won’t let you in. It will soon be over now. And what will she say,’ she added, turning to Stephen and raising her voice, ‘what will she say when she asks for her husband and he is incapable of coming to her side?’

But Stephen was far beyond reacting to any twittings.

‘Oh, but he will be--won’t you, Stephen,’ said Catherine. ‘You’re going to be so happy, you and Virginia--so, so happy, and forget all about this----’

And she ran over to him, and stooped down and kissed him.

But Stephen only moaned.

‘He ought to go to bed and have a doctor,’ Catherine said, looking round at Mrs. Colquhoun.

‘ He isn’t having the baby,’ was Mrs. Colquhoun’s reply.

‘No--but mental agony is worse than physical,’ said Catherine.

‘Not if it’s babies,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun firmly.

What a strange night that was. What a night of mixed emotions,--great fear, deep pity immense surprise; and what a clearing up in Catherine’s mind of nonsense, of her own private follies. None of the three in that room had yet in their lives been up against this kind of reality, this stark, ruthless reality, before. There were hours and hours to think in, hours and hours to feel in. A few yards away lay Virginia, hanging between life and death. From her room came no moans. An august silence enveloped it, as of issues too great and solemn being settled within for any crying out. It was the slowest, most difficult of births. She herself was far away, profoundly unconcerned, wrapped in the mercifulness of unconsciousness; but how long could even the youngest, strongest body stand this awful strain on it?

The two women away in that spare-room on the other side of the house didn’t dare let themselves even look at this question. It lay cold and heavy on the heart of each, and they turned away their mind’s eyes and busied themselves as best they could,--Catherine with stroking Stephen and murmuring words of comfort in his ear, of which he took no notice, and Mrs. Colquhoun with making tea.

All night long poor Mrs. Colquhoun, herself within an ace of collapse, made fresh tea at short intervals, finding in the rattle of the cups and saucers a way of drowning some at least of her unhappy son’s nerve-racking moans and her own thoughts. She couldn’t and wouldn’t contemplate the possibility of anything happening to Virginia; she insisted to herself that in that quarter all was well. Two doctors and a skilled nurse, two doctors and a skilled nurse, she kept on repeating in her mind, her shaking hands upsetting the cups. A difficult birth, of course, and a long one, but that was nothing unusual with the first child. Nonsense, nonsense, to let even the edge of an imagining of possible disaster slide into one’s mind. One had quite enough to think of without that, with Stephen lying there disgracing himself and her, denying in effect his God, and certainly abandoning his manhood,--for Virginia’s screams before the anæsthetist arrived, those awful, awful screams coming from his gentle wife, had sent the unhappy Stephen, after two hours of having to listen to them, out of his mind. He had killed her, he was her murderer, he had killed her, killed her with his love....

‘Nonsense,’ his mother had said in her most matter-of-fact way, on his shouting out things like this for every one to hear,--really excessively shocking things when one remembered all the young maids in the house; and then with trembling hands she had led him into this distant room, and he had thrown himself down where he had ever since been lying, and had said no word more, but only ceaselessly moaned.

And Mrs. Colquhoun, who had never in her life overwhelmingly loved, and never till that day known she possessed any nerves, looked on at first helplessly, and then indignantly, and the whole time uncomprehendingly. It was all very well, and of course a husband was anxious on such occasions, and should and was expected to show feeling, but within decent limits. These limits were not decent. Anything but. What would the parish say if it saw him? What did the servants say, who could hear him?

She put aspirin into his heedless mouth, and asked him severely if he had forgotten God. She tried to twit him into manliness and priestliness. She actually shook him once, believing that counter-shocks were good for the nerves. Useless, all useless; and by the time Catherine arrived she herself was very nearly done for.

But tea, the domesticities,--natural, reassuring little activities,--were, she found, the only real props. Not prayer. Strange, not once did she wish to pray. If Stephen had prayed it would have been a good thing, but it wouldn’t have been a good thing for her to pray. No emotions, if you please, she admonished herself several times aloud--it froze Catherine’s blood to hear her--duty, duty, duty; the making of tea to sustain the body, to compose the nerves by the routine of it,--this was the real anchor. She would gladly have gone round with a duster, dusting the ornaments that collect in spare-rooms, but to dust at night seemed too highly unnatural to offer a hope of forgetfulness.

So she kept on ringing the bell for fresh hot water and more cups, and just the sight of the housemaid in her cap and apron at the door--she wasn’t allowed inside, because of Stephen--seemed to hold Mrs. Colquhoun down to sanity. There were other things in the world besides suffering; there were next mornings, and the precious routine of life with its baths and breakfasts and orders to the cook,--how she longed for that, how she longed to be back in her safe shell again, with everything normal about her, and Stephen in his senses, and the sickening load of fear on her heart lifted away and forgotten.

A cup was chipped. She held it to the light. Kate, of course, who really was most careless with china. At that rate Virginia would soon have none left.

She rang the bell and sent the housemaid for Kate, and when she came, her cap a little crooked and her hair a little wispy, Mrs. Colquhoun took the cup out into the passage to her and scolded her soundly, and it did them both good, and Kate was so much restored by this breath of normality that she was able to ask in a whisper how the master was, and Mrs. Colquhoun, dropping unconsciously into the very language of the occasion, replied that he was doing nicely.

And indeed Stephen’s moans seemed less since Catherine had taken his head on her lap and was stroking and patting him. She stroked and patted without stopping, and every now and then bent down and murmured words of encouragement in his ear, or else, when she found no words because her own heart was so full of fear, simply bent down and kissed him. Did he hear? Did he feel? She couldn’t tell; but she thought his moans grew quieter, and that he seemed dimly conscious of comfort when her hand passed softly down his sunken face.

‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, pursing her lips to keep them from quivering.

‘It comforts me,’ said Catherine.

‘You’d much better have another cup of tea.’

‘How passionately he loves her. I didn’t quite realise----’

‘Loving passionately seems to get people into nice messes,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun grimly.

‘I suppose one really oughtn’t to love too much,’ said Catherine.

‘I consider Stephen preached himself into it. That course of sermons last Lent--you remember? I thought at the time that he was almost too eloquent. It sometimes very nearly wasn’t quite what one wishes a parish to hear. The love he talked about--well, he started with St. John’s ideas, but soon got away from them into something else. People, especially the servants, listened open-mouthed. They wouldn’t have done that if there hadn’t been something else in it besides the Bible. And you know, Catherine, one can talk oneself into anything, and in my opinion that is what Stephen did. And he came to think so much and so often of that side of life that he forgot moderation, and here he is. This is his punishment, and my disgrace.’

‘No, no,’ said Catherine soothingly.

‘It is--it is.’ And Mrs. Colquhoun, who had kept up so courageously till then, bowed her head over the teatray and wept.

It would be useless, Catherine felt, to argue with poor Mrs. Colquhoun about love, so gently laying Stephen’s head on a cushion she went over to her and sat down beside her and put her arm round her and began to stroke her too, and murmur soothing words.

How strange it was, this night of fear spent stroking the Colquhouns. That queer imp that sits in a detached corner of one’s mind refusing to be serious just when it most should be, actually forced her at this moment, when hope was at its faintest, to laugh inside herself at the odd turn her relationship with Stephen and his mother had taken. The collapsed Colquhouns; the towers of strength laid low; and she, the disapproved of, the sinner as Stephen thought, and perhaps he had told his mother and she thought it too, being their only support and comforter. The collapsed Colquhouns. It really was funny--very funny--very fun....

Why, what was this? She too crying?

Horrified she jumped up, and hurried across to the window and flung it open as far as it would go, and stood at it with her face to the damp night air and struggled with herself, squeezing back those ill-timed tears; and as she stood there the sluggish air suddenly became a draught, and turning quickly she found the door had been opened, and a strange man was framed in it, with Kate in the background ushering him in.

One of the doctors. She flew to him. He was very red, with drops of sweat on his forehead.

‘Where’s that husband?’ he asked, looking round the room and speaking cheerfully, though his eyes were serious. ‘Oh--I see. Still no good to us. I never saw such a fellow. He might be having the baby himself. Well, his mother, then. Oh dear--what’s this? Tears? Come, come,’ he said, laying his hand on Mrs. Colquhoun’s shoulder very kindly, and looking at Catherine. ‘Are you the other grandmother?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Grandmother?’

‘A whacking boy. The biggest I’ve brought into the world for a long time.’

XVIII

When Virginia recovered consciousness she lay for some time with her eyes shut, frowning. She seemed to have come back from somewhere very far away, and it had been difficult, so difficult to come back at all, and she was tired out with the effort. Where had she been? She lay trying to remember, her arms straight down by her side, the palms of her hands upturned as if some one had flung them there like that and she had been too indifferent to move them. Her hair, in two thick plaits, was neatly arranged, a plait drawn down over each shoulder, and her bed was spotless and tidy.

She opened her heavy eyes presently, and saw her mother sitting by the pillow.

Her mother. She shut her eyes again and thought this over; but it tired her to think, and she didn’t bother much with it. Her mother was sitting quite still, holding a plait of some one’s dark hair against her lips and kissing it. There was another person in the room, moving about without any noise, dressed in white. Who?

A glimmer of recollection stole into Virginia’s mind. Without bothering to open her eyes--the exertion of doing that was so enormous--she managed to murmur, ‘Have I--had my baby?’ And her mother took her hand and kissed it and told her she had, and that it was a boy. A beautiful boy, her mother said.

She thought this over too, frowning with the effort. A beautiful boy. That was the opposite of a beautiful girl. And the nurse--of course, that white thing was the nurse--came and held a cup to her mouth and made her drink something.

Then she lay quiet again, with her eyes shut. She had had her baby. A beautiful boy. The news in no way stirred her; it tired her.

Presently there came another flicker of recollection. Stephen. That was her husband. Where was he?

With an effort she opened her eyes and looked languidly at her mother. How hard it was to pronounce that St. Such an exertion. But she managed it, and got out, ‘Stephen----?’

Her mother, kissing her hand again, said he had a little cold, and was staying in bed.

Stephen had a little cold, and was staying in bed. This news in no way stirred her either. She lay quite apathetic, her arms straight by her side, her hands palm upwards on the counterpane. Stephen; the baby; her mother; a profound indifference to them all filled her mind, still dark with the shadows of that great dim place she had clambered out of, clambered and clambered till her body was bruised and sore from head to foot, and so dead tired--so dead, dead tired.

Some one else came into the room. A man. Perhaps a doctor, for he took up her hand and held it in his for a while, and then said something to the nurse, who came and raised her head and gave her another drink,--rather like what she remembered brandy used to be.

Brandy in bed. Wasn’t that--what was the word?--yes, queer. Wasn’t that queer, to drink brandy in bed.

But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was nice when nothing mattered. So peaceful and quiet; so, so peaceful and quiet. Like floating on one’s back in calm water on a summer afternoon, looking up at the blue sky, and every now and then letting one’s head sink a little,--just a little, so that the cool water rippled over one’s ears; or letting it sink a little more,--just a little more, so that the cool water rippled over one’s face; and one sank and sank; gently deeper; gently deeper; till at last there was nothing but sleep.

XIX

When Christopher arrived in Hertford Street from Scotland a week later, Mrs. Mitcham met him in the hall of the flat. He knew nothing of what had happened at Chickover. Catherine had written him a brief scribble the day she left, telling him she was going to Virginia, and as he hadn’t had a word since, and found his holiday, which he anyhow hated, completely intolerable directly she cut him off from her by silence, he decided it was no longer to be endured; and flinging his things together, and remarking to Lewes that he was fed up, he started for London, getting there hard on the heels of a telegram he had sent Mrs. Mitcham.

She came into the hall when she heard his latchkey in the door. Her face looked longer than ever, and her clothes seemed blacker.

‘Oh, sir,’ she began at once, taking his coat from him, ‘isn’t it dreadful.’

‘What is?’ asked Christopher, twisting round and looking at her, quick fear in his heart.

‘Miss Virginia----’

He breathed again. For a terrible moment he had thought----

‘What has she been doing?’ he asked, suddenly indifferent, for the having of babies hadn’t entered his consciousness as anything dangerous; if it were, the whole place wouldn’t be littered with them.

Mrs. Mitcham stared at him out of red-rimmed eyes.

‘Doing, sir?’ she repeated, stung by the careless way he spoke; and for the first and last time in her life sarcastic, she said with dignified rebuke, ‘Only dying, sir.’

It was his turn to stare, his eyes very wide open, while dismay, as all that this dying meant became clear to him, stole into them. ‘Dying? That girl? Do you mean----’

‘Dead, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, her head well up, her gaze, full of rebuke and dignity, on his.

Too late to go down that night. No trains any more that night. But there was the motor-bicycle. Catherine--Catherine in grief--he must get to her somehow....

And once again Christopher rushed westwards to Catherine. Through the night he rushed in what seemed great jerks of speed interrupted by things going wrong, every conceivable thing going wrong, as if all hell and all its devils were in league to trip him up and force him each few miles to stand aside and look on impotently while the hours, not he, flew past.

She hadn’t sent for him. She was suffering and away, and hadn’t sent for him. But he knew why. It was because she couldn’t bear, after all the things he had said about Virginia, to smite him with the fact of her death. Or else she herself was so violently hit that she had been stunned into that strange state people got into when death was about, and thought no longer of what was left, of all the warmth and happiness life still went on being full of, but only of what was gone.

But whatever she was feeling or not able to feel, she was his, his wife, to help and comfort; and if she was so much numbed that help and comfort couldn’t reach her, he would wait by her side till she woke up again. What could it be like down there, he asked himself as the black trees and hedges streamed past him, what could it possibly be like for Catherine, shut up in that unhappy house, with young Virginia dead? That girl dead. Younger by years than himself. And her husband.... ‘Oh, Lord--my Catherine,’ he thought, tearing along faster and faster, ‘I must get her out of it--get her home--love her back to life----’

Pictures of her flashed vivid in his mind, lovely little pictures, such as had haunted him with increasing frequency the longer his holiday without her dragged on; and he saw her in them with the eye of starved passion, a most lovely little Catherine, far, far prettier than she had ever been in her prettiest days,--so sweet with her soft white skin, so sweet with her soft dark hair, so sweet with her soft grey eyes, and her face lit up with love,--love all and only for him. And he who had thought, those last days before Scotland, that there was too much love about! He all but swerved into a ditch when he remembered this piece of incredible folly. Well, he knew now what life was like for him away from her: it was like being lost in the frozen dark.

He got to Chickover about five in the morning, just as the grey light was beginning to creep among the trees. He couldn’t go and rouse that sad house so early, so he stopped in the village and managed, after much difficulty, to induce the inn to open and let him in, and give him water and a towel and promise him tea when the hour should have become more decent; and then he lay down on the horsehair sofa in the parlour and tried to sleep.

But how sleep, when he was at last so near Catherine? Just the thought of seeing her again, of looking into her eyes after their four weeks’ separation, was enough to banish sleep; and then there was the anxiety about her, the knowledge that she must be crushed with sorrow, the effort to imagine life there with that poor devil of a husband....

At half-past seven he began to urge on breakfast, ringing the bell and going out into the beer-smelling passage and calling. With all his efforts, however, he couldn’t get anything even started till after eight, when a sleepy girl came downstairs and put a dirty cloth on the table and a knife or two.

He went out into the road and walked up and down while the table was being laid. He wouldn’t question any one there, though they all of course could have told him about Virginia’s death and what was happening at the house. And they, supposing he was a stranger,--as indeed he was and hoped for ever to be in regard to Chickover--did not of themselves begin to talk.

He knew nothing; neither when she died, nor when she was buried. Perhaps she hadn’t been buried yet, and in that case he wouldn’t be able to get Catherine away, as he had hoped, that very day. He found himself trying not to think of Virginia,--he owed her so many apologies! But only because she was dead. Who could have supposed she would die, and put him, by doing that, in the wrong? One had to talk as one felt at the moment, and it wasn’t possible to shape one’s remarks with an eye to the possibility of their subject dying. Yet Christopher was very sorry, and also sore. He felt he had been a brute, but he also felt she had taken an unfair advantage of him.

He switched his thoughts off her as much as he could. Poor little thing. And such fine weather, too,--such a good day to be alive on; for by this time the September sun was flooding Virginia’s village, and the dew-drenched asters in the cottage gardens were glittering in the light. Poor little thing. And poor devil of a husband. How well he could understand his misery. God, if anything were to happen to Catherine!

He drank some tepid tea and ate some unpleasant bread and butter--Stephen evidently hadn’t succeeded in making the village innkeeper good, anyhow--and then, feeling extraordinarily agitated, a mixture of palpitating love and excitement and reluctance and fear, and all of it shot with distress because of Virginia, he started off through the park, cutting across the grass, going round along the back of the kitchen-garden wall to the lodge gates, and walking up the avenue like any other respectful sympathetic early caller; and when he turned the bend and got to the point where one first saw the house he gave a great sigh of thankfulness, for the blinds were up. The poor little thing’s funeral was over, then, and at least he wasn’t going to tumble, as he had secretly feared, into the middle of that.

But if it was over, why hadn’t Catherine sent for him? Or come home? Or at least written? He remembered, however, that she supposed he was in Scotland, and of course she would have written to him there; and, consoled, he went on up the avenue whose very trees seemed sad, with their yellowing leaves slowly fluttering to the ground at every little puff of wind.

The front door was open, and the drawing-room door on the other side of the hall was open too, so that while he stood waiting after ringing the bell he could see right through to the sunny terrace and garden. The house was very silent. He could hear no sounds at all, except somewhere, away round behind the stables, the quacking of a distant duck. Wasn’t anybody having breakfast? Were they still asleep? If Catherine were still asleep he could go up to her,--not like the last time when he came to this place to fetch her, and had to wait in the drawing-room, a stranger still, a suppliant without any rights.

Kate the parlour-maid appeared. She knew of course, directly she saw him, that this was the young gentleman Mrs. Cumfrit had married--there had been talk enough about that at the time in the servants’ hall--and the ghost of a smile lifted the solemnity of her face, for an ordinary, healthy young gentleman was refreshing to eyes that for the last week had witnessed only woe.

‘The ladies are not down yet, sir,’ she said in a subdued voice, showing him, or rather trying to show him, for he wouldn’t go, into the drawing-room.

‘The ladies?’ repeated Christopher, not subduing his voice, and the house, for so many days hushed, quivered into life again at the vigour of it.

‘Mr. Colquhoun’s mother is staying here, sir,’ said Kate, dropping her voice to a whisper so as to damp him down to the proper key of quiet. ‘Mr. Colquhoun is still very ill, but the doctor thinks he’ll be quite himself again when he is able to notice the baby. If you’ll wait in here, sir,’ she continued, making another attempt to get him into the drawing-room, ‘I’ll go and tell the ladies.’

‘I’m not going to wait anywhere,’ said Christopher. ‘I’m going up to my wife. Show me the way.’

Yes, it was refreshing to see an alive gentleman again, and a nice change from the poor master; though the master, of course, was behaving in quite the proper way, taking his loss as a true widower should, and taking it so hard that he had to have a doctor and be kept in bed. The whole village was proud of him; yet for all that it was pleasant to hear a healthy gentleman’s voice again, talking loud and masterfully, and Kate, pleased to have to obey, went up the stairs almost with her ordinary brisk tread, instead of the tiptoes she had got into the habit of.

Christopher followed, his heart beating loud. She led him down a broad passage to what appeared to be the furthermost end of the house, and as they proceeded along it a noise he had begun to hear when he turned the corner from the landing got bigger and bigger, seeming to swell at him till at last it was prodigious.

The baby. Crying. He hoped repenting of the damage it had already found time to do in its brief existence. But he had no thoughts to spare for babies at that moment, and when Kate stopped at the very door the cries were coming out of, he waved her on impatiently.

‘Good God,’ he said, ‘you don’t suppose I want to see the baby?’

She only smiled at him and knocked at the door. ‘It’s a beautiful baby,’ she said, with that odd look of satisfied pride and satisfied hunger that women, he had noticed, when they get near very small babies seem to have.

‘Hang the baby--take me to my wife,’ he commanded.

‘She’s here, sir,’ Kate answered, opening the door on some one’s calling out, above the noise, that she was to come in.

It was Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice. He recognised it, and drew back quickly.

No--he’d be hanged if he’d go in there and meet Catherine in a nursery, with the nurse and the baby and Mrs. Colquhoun all looking on. But he didn’t draw back so quickly that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the room, and seen a bath on two chairs in front of a bright fire, and three women bending over it, one in white and two in black, and all of them talking at once to that which was in the bath, while its cries rose ever louder and more piercing.

Absorbed, the women were; absorbed to the exclusion of every wish, grief, longing, or other love, he thought, swift hot jealousy flashing into his heart. He felt Catherine ought somehow to have known he was there, been at once conscious of him the minute he set foot in the house. He would have been conscious of her all right the very instant she got under the same roof; of that he was absolutely certain. Instead of that, there was that absorbed back, just as though she had never married, never passionately loved--every bit as absorbed as the other one’s, as Mrs. Colquhoun’s, who was an old woman with no love left in her life except what she could wring out of some baby. And whether it was because they were both in the same attitude and clothes he couldn’t tell, but his impression had been the same of them both--a quick impression, before he had time to think, of a black cluster of grizzled women.

Grizzled? What an extraordinarily horrid word, he thought, to come into his mind. How had it got there?

‘Shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice above the baby’s cries. ‘Don’t you see you are making a draught?’

Kate looked round hesitatingly at Christopher.

‘Come in and shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun still louder.

Kate went in, shutting it behind her, and Christopher waited, standing up stiff against the wall.

He hadn’t expected this. No, it was the last thing he had expected. And now when Catherine came to him Kate would be there too, following on her heels; and was it to be a handshake, then, or a perfunctory marital kiss in the presence of a servant, their sacred, blessed moment of reunion?

But it was not to be quite like that, for though somebody came out and Kate came with her, somebody small who exclaimed, ‘Oh Chris----!’ and who seemed to think she was Catherine, she wasn’t Catherine, no, no--she wasn’t and couldn’t be. What came out was a ghost, a pale little grizzled ghost, which held out its hands and made as if to lift up its face to be kissed; and when he didn’t kiss it, when he only drew back and stared at it, drew back at once itself and stood looking at him without a word.

XX

They stood looking at each other. Kate went away down the passage. Emptiness was round them, pierced by the baby’s cries through the shut door of the nursery. Catherine didn’t shrink at all, and let Christopher look at her as much as he liked, for she had done with everything now except truth.

‘Catherine----’ he began, in the afraid and bewildered voice of a child fumbling in the dark.

‘Yes, Chris?’

She made no attempt to go close to him, he made no attempt to go close to her; and it was strange to Catherine, who couldn’t continually as yet remember the difference in herself, to be alone with Christopher after separation, and not instantly be gathered to his heart.

But his face made her remember; in it she could see her own as clearly as if she were in front of a glass.

‘I had no idea--no idea----’ he stammered.

‘That I could look like this?’

‘That you’ve suffered so horribly, that you loved her so terribly----’

And he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and he couldn’t, because this simply wasn’t Catherine.

‘But it isn’t that only,’ she said,--and hesitated for an instant.

For an instant her heart failed her. Why tell him? After all, all she had done was for love of him; for a greedy, clutching love it was true, made up chiefly of vanity and possessiveness and fear, but still love. Why not forget the whole thing, and let him think she had grown old in a week from grief?

Creditable and touching explanation. And so nearly true, too, for if passion had begun the ruin, grief had completed it, and the night and day of that birth and death, of the agony of Stephen and her own long-drawn-out torment, had put the finishing touches of age beyond her age on a face and hair left defenceless to lines and greyness without Maria Rome’s massage and careful dyes, and anyhow twice as worn and grey as they had been before she began the exhausting processes of Dr. Sanguesa.

But she put this aside. She had had enough of nearly truth and the wretched business of taking him in. How could she go on doing him such wrongs? She had done him the greatest of wrongs marrying him, of that she was certain, but at least she would leave off making fools of them both. Rotten, rotten way of living. Let him see her as she was; and if his love--how natural that would be at his age, how inevitable--came to an end, she would set him free.

For in those remarkable hours that followed Virginia’s death, when it seemed to Catherine as if she had suddenly opened the door out of a dark passage and gone into a great light room, she saw for the first time quite plainly; and what she saw in that strange new clearness, that merciless, yet somehow curiously comforting, clearness, was that love has to learn to let go, that love if it is real always does let go, makes no claims, sets free, is content to love without being loved--and that nothing was worth while, nothing at all in the tiny moment called life except being good. Simply being good. And though people might argue as to what precisely being good meant, they knew in their hearts just as she knew in her heart; and though the young might laugh at this conviction as so much sodden sentiment, they would, each one of them who was worth anything, end by thinking exactly that. Impossible to live as she had lived the last week close up to death and not see this. For four extraordinary days she had sat in its very presence, watching by the side of its peace. She knew now. Life was a flicker; the briefest thing, blown out before one was able to turn round. There was no time in it, no time in the infinitely precious instant, for anything except just goodness.

So she said, intent on simple truth, ‘I did deeply love Virginia, and I have suffered, but I looked very nearly like this before.’

And Christopher, who hadn’t lived these days close up to death, and hadn’t seen and recognised what she so clearly did, and wasn’t feeling any of this, was shocked out of his bewilderment by such blasphemy, and took a quick, almost menacing step forward, as if to silence the ghost daring to profane his lovely memory.

‘You didn’t look like it--you didn’t!’ he cried. ‘You were my Catherine. You weren’t this--this----’

He stopped, and stared close into her face. ‘What has become of you?’ he asked, bewildered again, a dreadful sense of loss cold on his heart. ‘Oh, Catherine--what have you done to yourself?’

‘Why, that’s just it,’ she said, the faintest shadow of a smile trembling a moment in her eyes. ‘I haven’t done anything to myself.’

‘But your hair--your lovely hair----’

He made agonised motions with his hands.

‘It’s all gone grey because of--of what you’ve been through, you poor, poor little thing----’

And again he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and again he couldn’t.

‘No, it wasn’t that made it go grey,’ she said. ‘It was grey before, only I used to have it dyed.’

He stared at her, entirely bewildered. Catherine looking like this, and saying these things. Why did she say them? Why was she so anxious to make out that all this had nothing to do with Virginia’s death? Was it some strange idea of sparing him the pain of being sorry for her? Or was she so terribly smitten that she was no longer accountable for what she said? If this was it, then all the more closely should he fold her to his heart and shield and comfort her, and what a damned scoundrel he was not to. But he couldn’t. Not yet. Not that minute. Perhaps presently, when he had got more used....

‘You dyed it?’ he repeated stupidly.

‘Yes. Or rather Maria Rome did.’

‘Maria Rome?’

‘Oh, what does it matter. It makes me sick to think of that old nonsense. She’s a place in London where they do up women who’ve begun not to keep. She did me up wonderfully, and at first it very nearly looked real. But it was such a business, and I was so frightened always, living like that on the brink of its not being a success, and you suddenly seeing me. I’m sick, sick just remembering it--now.’

And she laid her hand on his arm, looking up at him with Catherine’s eyes, Catherine’s beautiful, fatigued eyes.

They were the same,--beautiful as he had always known them, and fatigued as he had always known them; but how strange to see them in that little yellow face. Her eyes; all that was left of his Catherine. Yes, and the voice, the same gentle voice, except that it had a new note of--was it sensibleness? Sensibleness! Catherine sensible? She had been everything in the world but that,--obstinate, weak, unaccountable, irrelevant, determined, impulsive, clinging, passionate, adorable, his own sweet love, but never sensible.

‘Doesn’t it seem too incredibly little and mean, that sort of lying, any sort of lying, when this has happened,’ she said, her hand still on his arm, her eyes very earnestly looking up into his. ‘So extraordinarily not worth while. And you mustn’t think I’m out of my mind from shock, Chris,’ she went on, for it was plain from his expression that that was what he did think, ‘because I’m not. On the contrary--for the first time I’m in it.’

And as he stared at her, and thought that if this was what she was like when she was in her mind then how much better and happier for them both if she had stayed out of it, the baby on the other side of the door was taken out of its bath, and that which had been cries became yells.

‘For God’s sake let’s go somewhere where there isn’t this infernal squalling,’ exclaimed Christopher, with a movement so sudden and exasperated that it shook her hand off his arm.

‘Yes, let us,’ she said, moving away down the passage ahead of him; and more plainly than ever, when they got to the big windows on the stairs and she turned the bend of them before him, he could see how yellow she was, and what a quantity of grey, giving it that terrible grizzled look, there was in her hair.

Yellow; grizzled; what had she done, what had they done to her, to ruin her like this, to take his Catherine from him and give him this instead? It was awful. He was robbed. His world of happiness was smashing to bits. And he felt such a brute, the lowest of low brutes, not to be able to love her the same as before, now when she so much must need love, when she had been having what he could well imagine was a simply hellish time.

Virginia again, he thought, with a bitterness that shocked him himself. That girl, even in death spoiling things. For even if it was true what Catherine insisted on telling him about dyes and doings-up, she never would have thought it necessary to tell him, to make a clean breast, if it hadn’t been for Virginia’s death. No; if it hadn’t been for that she would have gone on as before, doing whatever it was she did to herself, the results of which anyhow were that he and she were happy. God, how he hated clean breasts, and the turning over of some imaginary new leaf. Whenever anything happened out of the ordinary, anything that pulled women up short and made them do what they called think, they started wrecking--wrecking everything for themselves and for the people who had been loving them happily and contentedly, by their urge for the two arch-destroyers of love, those damned clean breasts and those even more damned new leaves.

He followed her like an angry, frightened child. How could he know what she knew? How could he see what she saw? He was where he had always been, while she had gone on definitely into something else. And there were no words she could have explained in. If she had tried, all she could have found to say, with perplexed brows, would have been, ‘But I know .’

She took him into the garden. They passed her bedroom door on the way, and he knew it was hers for it was half open, and the room hadn’t been done yet, and the little slippers he had kissed a hundred times were lying kicked off on the carpet, the slippers that had belonged to the real Catherine--or rather, as this one was now insisting, to the artificial Catherine, but anyhow to his Catherine.

For a moment he was afraid she would take him in there. Ice seemed to slide down his spine at the thought. But she walked past it as if it had nothing to do with either of them, and then he was offended.

Out in the garden it was easier to breathe. He couldn’t, in that public place, with the chance of a gardener appearing at any moment, take her in his arms, so he didn’t feel quite such a scoundrel for not doing it; and walking by her side and not looking at her, but just listening to her voice, he felt less lost; for the voice was the voice of Catherine, and as long as he didn’t look at her he could believe she was still there. It was like, in the night, hearing the blessed reassurance of one’s mother talking, when one was little, and frightened, and alone.

She took him through the garden and out by the wicket-gate into the park, where rabbits were scuttling across the dewy grass, leaving dark ribbons along its silver, and the bracken, webbed with morning gossamer, was already turning brown. And all the way she talked, and all the way he listened in silence, his eyes fixed straight in front of him.

She told him everything, from that moment of their honeymoon when, from loving, she had fallen in love, and instantly began to be terrified of looking old, and her desperate, grotesque efforts to stay young for him, and his heart, as he heard her voice talking of that time, went to wax within him, and he had to gaze very steadily at the view ahead lest, turning to throw his arms round Catherine, his sweetheart, his angel love, he should see she wasn’t there, but only a ghost was there with her voice and eyes, and then he mightn’t be able to help bursting out crying.

‘Is this far enough away from the poor baby?’ she asked, stopping at an oak-tree, whose huge exposed roots were worn with the numbers of times she had sat on them in past years during the long, undisturbed summer afternoons of her placid first marriage. ‘You know,’ she added, sitting down on the gnarled roots, ‘he’s the most beautiful little baby, and is going to comfort all poor Stephen’s despair.’

‘But he isn’t going to comfort mine,’ said Christopher, standing with his eyes fixed on the distant view.

She was silent. Then she said, ‘Is it as bad as that, Chris?’

‘No, no,’ he said quickly, his back to her, ‘I didn’t mean that. You’ll get well again, and then we’ll----’

‘I don’t see how I can get well if I’m not ill,’ she said gently.

‘Why do you want to take hope from me?’ he answered.

‘I only don’t want any more lies. I shan’t look different again from what I do now. I shan’t go back, I mean, to what I was. But perhaps presently--when you’ve had time to get over----’

She hesitated, and then went on humbly,--for she was vividly conscious of the wrong she had done him, vividly aware that she ought to have saved him from himself whatever the pressure had been that was brought to bear on her, however great his misery was at the moment,--‘Presently I thought perhaps I might somehow make up for what I’ve done. I thought perhaps I might somehow comfort you----’

She hesitated again. ‘I don’t quite know how, though,’ she said, her voice more and more humble, ‘but I’d try.’ And then she said, almost in a whisper, ‘That is, if you will let me.’

‘Let you!’ he exclaimed, stabbed by her humbleness.

‘Yes. And if it’s no good, Chris, and you’d rather not, then of course I’ll--let you go.’

He turned round quickly. ‘What, in God’s name, do you mean by that?’ he asked.

‘Set you free,’ said Catherine, doing her best to look up at him unflinchingly.

He stared at her. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand. In what way, set me free?’

‘Well, there’s only one way, isn’t there--one way really. I meant, divorce you.’

He stood staring down at her. Catherine talking of divorcing him. Catherine.

‘How can you at your age be tied up, go on being married, to some one like me?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t even decent. And besides--in that flat together--you might think I--I expected----’

She broke off with a gesture of helplessness, while he still stared at her.

‘I haven’t an idea how we could manage all the--the details,’ she said, bowing her head, for she felt she couldn’t endure his stare. ‘It would hurt so,’ she finished in a whisper.

‘And so you think the solution is to divorce me,’ said Christopher.

‘What else is there to do? You’ve only got to look at me----’

‘Divorce me,’ he said, ‘when we have loved each other so?’

And suddenly he began to shout at her, stamping his foot, while hot tears rushed into his eyes. ‘Oh you little fool , you little fool !’ he shouted. ‘You’ve always been such a little fool ----’

‘But look at me,’ she said desperately, throwing back her head and flinging out her arms.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t go on like this!’ he cried, dropping on the ground beside her and burying his face in her lap. Divorce him ... condemn him again to that awful loneliness ... where he couldn’t hear her voice....

‘Why couldn’t you go on letting me believe?’ he said, his arms tightly clutching her knees while he kept his face buried. ‘Why couldn’t you? As though I cared what you did before! It made us happy, anyhow, and I wish to God you’d go on doing it. But you’ve only got to get away from this infernal place to be as you used to be, and you didn’t always go to that woman, and I fell in love with you just as you were, and why shouldn’t I love you just as you are?’

‘Because I’m old, and you’re not. Because I’ve grown old since we married. Because I was too old to be married to some one so young. And you know I’m old. You see it now. You see it so plainly that you can’t bear to look at me.’

‘Oh, my God--the stuff, the stuff. I’m your husband, and I’m going to take care of you. Yes, I am, Catherine--for ever and ever. Useless to argue. I can’t live without the sound of your voice. I can’t. And how can you live without me? You couldn’t. You’re the most pitiful little thing----’

‘I’m not. I’m quite sensible. I haven’t been, but I am now.’

‘Oh, damn being sensible! Be what you were before. Good God, Catherine,’ he went on, hiding his face, clutching her knees, ‘do you think a man wants his wife to scrub herself with yellow soap as if she were the kitchen table, and then come all shiny to him and say, “See, I’m the Truth”? And she isn’t the truth. She’s no more the truth shiny than powdered--she’s only appearance, anyway, she’s only a symbol--the symbol of the spirit in her which is what one is really loving the whole time----’

‘What has happened is much more than that,’ she interrupted.

‘Oh yes, yes--I know. Death. You’re going to tell me that all this sort of thing seems rot to you now that you’ve been with death----’

‘So it does. And I’ve finished with it.’

‘Oh Lord--women,’ he groaned, burying his face deeper, as if he could hide from his unhappiness. ‘Do you suppose I haven’t been with death too, and seen it dozens of times? What do you think I was doing in the War? But women can’t take the simplest things naturally--and they can’t take the natural things simply, either. What can be more simple and natural than death? I didn’t throw away my silk handkerchiefs and leave off shaving because my friends died----’

‘Chris,’ she interrupted again, ‘you simply don’t understand. You don’t--know.’

‘I do--I know and understand everything. Why should the ones who didn’t die behave as though they had? Why should you send our happy life together to blazes because Virginia is dead? Isn’t that all the more reason for us who’re still alive to stick firmer than ever to each other? And instead you talk of divorce. Divorce? Because there’s been one tragedy there’s to be another? Catherine, don’t you, won’t you, can’t you see?’

And he lifted his head from her lap and looked at her, tears of anger, and fear, and love driven back on itself burning in his eyes; and he caught her crying.

How long had she been crying? Her face was pitiful, all wet with tears, in its frame of grizzled hair. How long had she been crying quietly up there, while he was raving, and she at intervals said sensible calm things?

At the sight of her wet face the anger and the fear died out of him, and only love was left. She couldn’t do without him. She was a poor, broken-up little thing, for all her big words about divorce and setting free. She was his wife, who couldn’t do without him--a poor, broken-up little thing....

‘I’ve cried so much,’ she said, quickly wiping her eyes, ‘that I believe I’ve got into the habit of it. I’m ashamed. I hate whimpering. But--Virginia----’

He got up on to his knees, and at last put his arms round her. ‘Oh my Catherine,’ he murmured, drawing her head on to his breast and holding it there. ‘Oh my Catherine----’

An immense desire for self-sacrifice, to fling his life at her feet, rushed upon Christopher, a passion of longing to give, give everything and ask nothing in return, to protect, to keep all that could hurt her away from her for ever.

‘Don’t cry,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t cry. It’s going to be all right. We’re going to be happy. And if you can’t see that we are, I’ll see for you till your own eyes are opened again----’

‘But I do see--every time I look in the glass,’ she answered, instinctively understanding the feeling that was sweeping over him, and shrinking away from exploiting this that was being thrust upon her of the quick, uncounting generosity of youth. How would she be able to make it up to him? She couldn’t, except by loving him with utter selflessness, and then, when he found out for himself how impossible the situation was, setting him free. It was the only thing she could do. Some day he would see himself that it was the only thing.

‘Obstinate, aren’t you,’ he murmured, holding her face close against his breast, for when he was doing that it was hidden, and it hurt him too desperately as yet to look at it, it made him too desperately want to cry himself. Of course presently ... when he had got more used....

‘You’ll have to grow out of that,’ he went on, ‘because we can’t both be obstinate, and have deadlocks.’

‘No, no--we won’t have deadlocks,’ said Catherine. ‘We’ll just----’

She was going to say, ‘love each other very much,’ but thought that might sound like making a claim, and stopped.

They were silent for a while, and so motionless that the rabbits began to think they weren’t there after all, and came lolloping up quite close.

Then he said very gently, ‘I’m going to take care of you, Catherine.’

And she said, her voice trembling a little, ‘Are you, Chris? I was thinking that that’s what I’m going to do to you.’

‘All right. We’ll do it to each other, then.’

And they both tried to laugh, but it was a shaky, uncertain laughter, for they were both afraid.

THE END

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